It would be interesting if they did 3 or 4 iterations of the test with the same group of people, to see if the effect happens to the same people over and over again. Seems like they should try to identify people who consistently get the right answer, and do further studies on them. If those people can do it consistently time after time, then we aren't looking at small effect sizes any more.
I am assuming that if the ability is real, that the amount of psi ability varies a lot from individual to individual, like intelligence or conscientiousness or musical talent. If that is true it might mean that the only positive results would be from cases where both the sender and receiver have more than a certain level of psi ability. It's even possible that some people can send but not receive and vice versa. So if they found some people with known good sending or receiving ability they could retry all the other people in the study, who hadn't had better than average results, and find the people who did have the ability, but it had been undected because they had been paired with someone who had very low levels of ability to send or receive.
On the other hand, if they can't find anyone who consistently gets the right answer time after time, just random different people getting the right answer at better than chance levels, then whatever is going on is much stranger, harder to understand.
Oh, you made your way into *these* posts! Good for you, DLR!
An interesting quirk of the discussion is that - assuming as usual that the psi effect really really is a thing rather than being a huge conspiracy - psi researchers often suspect that they are the ones influencing the results. They're not cheating, because they're doing it with their minds, but the whole thing may be just a form of PK (psychokinesis) from the successful researchers:
Kennedy, J. E. (2001). Why is psi so elusive? A review and proposed model. Journal of Parapsychology, 65(3), 219-246. http://jeksite.org/psi/jp01.pdf
"Psi-conducive experimenters are psi practitioners. This is indicated by the evidence that most consistently successful psi experimenters have produced reliable results as participants (Kennedy & Taddonio, 1976; Palmer, 1997). The hypothesis that motivation, expectancy, and novelty enhance psi occurrence is probably true for psi practitioners."
This kind of thing also would explain the Wiseman & Schlitz experiment Scott Alexander described going into fits of nervous laughter over at https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ : Wiseman is a skeptic and gets null results from his subjects, and Schlitz is a believer and gets positive results from his subjects. They team up on a single experiment and the same thing happens.
Whatever is going on, your last comment sums up my entire attitude towards the universe: In a place where quantum mechanics and relativistic physics are both well established to be true, and nobody knows how to reconcile them, we most definitely know that whatever is going on is very strange, and hard to understand, and it's been like this for as long as you or I have been alive.
This is so interesting- thanks so much for such a thorough explanation! The world is definitely a crazy place, and it seems as though we are only in the beginning stages of figuring out just what we, as human beings, are really capable of. Reality is thought of in static terms by many, but embracing more possibilities is in the future- how exciting for us!
The drastic change of reality being so different (than how it's been portrayed to us) is going to be very scary for a lot of us, as it means a huge paradigm shift in how we view reality, but the benefits will eventually, very slowly, start to show.
"Kelley et al. (2009) examined the relationships between personality of patients with irritable bowel syndrome and response to placebo acupuncture, in different therapeutic settings: warm emphatic interaction, neutral interaction or waitlist control. Several personality dimensions were signifycantly associated with placebo response, but extraversion was the only independent predictor, and this was true for the warm emphatic therapeutic setting. The authors suggested that extraverted and agreeable patients responded in a better way to the efforts of emphatic clinicians, thus further facilitating the warm therapeutic relationship. At the psychological level, this caring interaction could have reduced anxiety and increased positive expectancies. Conversely, when placebo effects are a consequence of medication with a minimal or neutral patient-clinician interaction, then these personality traits will not have such a relevant moderating role."
I had this irritable bowel for a while. It began with Hare Krishna tofu dishes. Year or so later I got regular with morning coffees, but this is only available for one in three peeps or so. As the digestive system is the second largest nervous system I do not know if this is the best example. A pathology less affected by affection might be a better exploration for placebo effects. Hmmm, how to get a baseline?.. Where is it best not seen? But the patient still has to be conscious? Or, maybe use telepathy to inform them, not personalities or settings.
1. its interesting the woo community hasn't discovered notions of dark matter as the gap to throw psi into.
1b. consciousness is psi (the Janus thing)
2. psi defined in term of information is interesting ; vis-a-vis what do we know (logic is a hindsight)
3a. If telepathy (tele-anything) existed evolution would have selected for it (extended psi -- what para-psy seeks, forgetting consciousness is as much psi as we get to "know".
3.b. so where is tele-anything? bound to have selective advantages, or Doe sit cancel itself out?
4. scientism-ish processes should be likely to sort the parameters of 2 in regards of 3 (mind-body / agency/freewill-embodied)
Psi is just consciousness turned up to 11 with weird things thrown in.
Even if psi does exist, it may not mean telepathy - it's defined as an anomaly, not as telepathy. And the effect is pretty weak, so if it represents telepathy, it might be vestigial. Or it could be that there's some weird upper limit on its effectiveness. Or some research suggests people self-limit their psi; believers often do better than unbelievers. All that said, though, you aren't the first person to argue against psi on evolutionary grounds; see https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=b820b7fa283e7caeaeb5faa96eecafe0d80625e8 where they basically say what you do.
> 1. its interesting the woo community hasn't discovered notions of dark matter as the gap to throw psi into.
Oh, the woo community does do that. In Season 2 of Netflix' The Gift, the main character travels between worlds and tries to get another person to believe it by saying, literally, "Quantum mechanics," as though it's an argument. And if you like YouTube, here's a wiccan making a valiant effort to explain her magickal practice in terms modern physics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v2cuxMLm5c
Let me be clear that I most definitely do not believe modern physics supports paranormal phenomena by itself; it only undermines the rationalists' insistence that psi must be impossible by default.
So in that regard I want to thank you for engaging with the discussion like this. I don't mind people taking a skeptical standpoint at all; research is always questionable (on any subject I can think of). My objection is to people saying "But the research *must* be wrong because my view of reality *must* be true." I try to be indulgent, but it's difficult for me to avoid bursting into laughter when I see things like that.
Combining 2 + both 3s gives 3b.1 = if tele-anything is real and strongly selected for, then co-evolving with it in some sort of parasite race, might be a cancelling anti-psi, and as these evolutionary races/dances are never perfect, what is measured as "psi" merely shows what escapes that deep unknowable "self-cancelling" process. A tiny part of the reality we see as shadows flickering on a cave wall. What fools!
In this imagined framework, intention/belief/consciousness/worlding is of little to no importance. And so psi has no ability to explain placebo effects, unless it is some sort of information deficit warping the fabric of reality (the cave wall is our sense of self, and proprioceptively the shadows on it messages from beyond, we we are relaxed we can affect ourselves with less stress...).
Pyrrhonists call this objection "My objection is to people saying "But the research *must* be wrong because my view of reality *must* be true." I try to be indulgent, but it's difficult for me to avoid bursting into laughter when I see things like that."
as criticising a rashly formed [judgement], and is a form of dogmatism. To be avoided in soteriological frameworks as it breaks calmness or ataraxia. I am not very soteriologically inclined myself, for I instead enjoy the rush I get in reframing stuff (including rashly formed dogmas), so I will try to indulge any sort of such play as it is good worlding/practice. It actively seeks information disjuncture, not to then through x/psi/god-demons into the gap but to live.
It would be interesting if they did 3 or 4 iterations of the test with the same group of people, to see if the effect happens to the same people over and over again. Seems like they should try to identify people who consistently get the right answer, and do further studies on them. If those people can do it consistently time after time, then we aren't looking at small effect sizes any more.
I am assuming that if the ability is real, that the amount of psi ability varies a lot from individual to individual, like intelligence or conscientiousness or musical talent. If that is true it might mean that the only positive results would be from cases where both the sender and receiver have more than a certain level of psi ability. It's even possible that some people can send but not receive and vice versa. So if they found some people with known good sending or receiving ability they could retry all the other people in the study, who hadn't had better than average results, and find the people who did have the ability, but it had been undected because they had been paired with someone who had very low levels of ability to send or receive.
On the other hand, if they can't find anyone who consistently gets the right answer time after time, just random different people getting the right answer at better than chance levels, then whatever is going on is much stranger, harder to understand.
Oh, you made your way into *these* posts! Good for you, DLR!
An interesting quirk of the discussion is that - assuming as usual that the psi effect really really is a thing rather than being a huge conspiracy - psi researchers often suspect that they are the ones influencing the results. They're not cheating, because they're doing it with their minds, but the whole thing may be just a form of PK (psychokinesis) from the successful researchers:
Kennedy, J. E. (2001). Why is psi so elusive? A review and proposed model. Journal of Parapsychology, 65(3), 219-246. http://jeksite.org/psi/jp01.pdf
"Psi-conducive experimenters are psi practitioners. This is indicated by the evidence that most consistently successful psi experimenters have produced reliable results as participants (Kennedy & Taddonio, 1976; Palmer, 1997). The hypothesis that motivation, expectancy, and novelty enhance psi occurrence is probably true for psi practitioners."
This kind of thing also would explain the Wiseman & Schlitz experiment Scott Alexander described going into fits of nervous laughter over at https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ : Wiseman is a skeptic and gets null results from his subjects, and Schlitz is a believer and gets positive results from his subjects. They team up on a single experiment and the same thing happens.
Whatever is going on, your last comment sums up my entire attitude towards the universe: In a place where quantum mechanics and relativistic physics are both well established to be true, and nobody knows how to reconcile them, we most definitely know that whatever is going on is very strange, and hard to understand, and it's been like this for as long as you or I have been alive.
This podcast episode goes into the placebo effect and arguements against it: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-9-the-placebo-effect
They have one on psi too that I haven't listened to yet.
Actually that's very interesting! I'll see if I can find a way to convert it to text; if nit maybe I'll find something to do while I listen.
This is so interesting- thanks so much for such a thorough explanation! The world is definitely a crazy place, and it seems as though we are only in the beginning stages of figuring out just what we, as human beings, are really capable of. Reality is thought of in static terms by many, but embracing more possibilities is in the future- how exciting for us!
The drastic change of reality being so different (than how it's been portrayed to us) is going to be very scary for a lot of us, as it means a huge paradigm shift in how we view reality, but the benefits will eventually, very slowly, start to show.
a test for placebo should control for calmness/stress frameworks (e.g. white coat syndrome + & _-)
Yes, research into placebos often considers the interaction between setting and personality, e.g. https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/234664
"Kelley et al. (2009) examined the relationships between personality of patients with irritable bowel syndrome and response to placebo acupuncture, in different therapeutic settings: warm emphatic interaction, neutral interaction or waitlist control. Several personality dimensions were signifycantly associated with placebo response, but extraversion was the only independent predictor, and this was true for the warm emphatic therapeutic setting. The authors suggested that extraverted and agreeable patients responded in a better way to the efforts of emphatic clinicians, thus further facilitating the warm therapeutic relationship. At the psychological level, this caring interaction could have reduced anxiety and increased positive expectancies. Conversely, when placebo effects are a consequence of medication with a minimal or neutral patient-clinician interaction, then these personality traits will not have such a relevant moderating role."
I had this irritable bowel for a while. It began with Hare Krishna tofu dishes. Year or so later I got regular with morning coffees, but this is only available for one in three peeps or so. As the digestive system is the second largest nervous system I do not know if this is the best example. A pathology less affected by affection might be a better exploration for placebo effects. Hmmm, how to get a baseline?.. Where is it best not seen? But the patient still has to be conscious? Or, maybe use telepathy to inform them, not personalities or settings.
1. its interesting the woo community hasn't discovered notions of dark matter as the gap to throw psi into.
1b. consciousness is psi (the Janus thing)
2. psi defined in term of information is interesting ; vis-a-vis what do we know (logic is a hindsight)
3a. If telepathy (tele-anything) existed evolution would have selected for it (extended psi -- what para-psy seeks, forgetting consciousness is as much psi as we get to "know".
3.b. so where is tele-anything? bound to have selective advantages, or Doe sit cancel itself out?
4. scientism-ish processes should be likely to sort the parameters of 2 in regards of 3 (mind-body / agency/freewill-embodied)
Psi is just consciousness turned up to 11 with weird things thrown in.
I can write more eventually, but regarding 3a & 3b, if I read this paper correctly, attempts are made to explain the placebo effect evolutionarily via a sort of "time to relax and heal / not time to heal, time to run" switch: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=0a34a91363c554a0711599ba34657935ee3f9280
Even if psi does exist, it may not mean telepathy - it's defined as an anomaly, not as telepathy. And the effect is pretty weak, so if it represents telepathy, it might be vestigial. Or it could be that there's some weird upper limit on its effectiveness. Or some research suggests people self-limit their psi; believers often do better than unbelievers. All that said, though, you aren't the first person to argue against psi on evolutionary grounds; see https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=b820b7fa283e7caeaeb5faa96eecafe0d80625e8 where they basically say what you do.
"see https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=b820b7fa283e7caeaeb5faa96eecafe0d80625e8 where they basically say what you do."
Hooray, another thing I can scratch of my to do list!!!
So I have time for a more thorough response:
> 1. its interesting the woo community hasn't discovered notions of dark matter as the gap to throw psi into.
Oh, the woo community does do that. In Season 2 of Netflix' The Gift, the main character travels between worlds and tries to get another person to believe it by saying, literally, "Quantum mechanics," as though it's an argument. And if you like YouTube, here's a wiccan making a valiant effort to explain her magickal practice in terms modern physics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v2cuxMLm5c
Let me be clear that I most definitely do not believe modern physics supports paranormal phenomena by itself; it only undermines the rationalists' insistence that psi must be impossible by default.
So in that regard I want to thank you for engaging with the discussion like this. I don't mind people taking a skeptical standpoint at all; research is always questionable (on any subject I can think of). My objection is to people saying "But the research *must* be wrong because my view of reality *must* be true." I try to be indulgent, but it's difficult for me to avoid bursting into laughter when I see things like that.
Combining 2 + both 3s gives 3b.1 = if tele-anything is real and strongly selected for, then co-evolving with it in some sort of parasite race, might be a cancelling anti-psi, and as these evolutionary races/dances are never perfect, what is measured as "psi" merely shows what escapes that deep unknowable "self-cancelling" process. A tiny part of the reality we see as shadows flickering on a cave wall. What fools!
In this imagined framework, intention/belief/consciousness/worlding is of little to no importance. And so psi has no ability to explain placebo effects, unless it is some sort of information deficit warping the fabric of reality (the cave wall is our sense of self, and proprioceptively the shadows on it messages from beyond, we we are relaxed we can affect ourselves with less stress...).
Pyrrhonists call this objection "My objection is to people saying "But the research *must* be wrong because my view of reality *must* be true." I try to be indulgent, but it's difficult for me to avoid bursting into laughter when I see things like that."
as criticising a rashly formed [judgement], and is a form of dogmatism. To be avoided in soteriological frameworks as it breaks calmness or ataraxia. I am not very soteriologically inclined myself, for I instead enjoy the rush I get in reframing stuff (including rashly formed dogmas), so I will try to indulge any sort of such play as it is good worlding/practice. It actively seeks information disjuncture, not to then through x/psi/god-demons into the gap but to live.