Parapsychology: the control group for science

http://www.nothinginbiology.com/para.html

by gort • 17 years ago

39 32 17 years ago

nothinginbiology.com

gort4• 17 years ago

The article behind this small webpage was a blog post by Eliezer, which I see has now been submitted to HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978124

carbocation• 17 years ago

Eliezer's post is a good one, and this page is also a nice framing of what I also thought was the best part of his post. It is a refreshing way of perceiving parapsychology, and for once I am glad that John Archibald Wheeler was unable to get parapsychology expelled from the AAAS.

At last, with this perspective, someone has turned the pile of steaming refuse that is parapsychology into a vein of gold, waiting to be mined.

bOR_6• 17 years ago

So.. how do we know for a fact that in parapsychology the null hypothesis should always be true?

We do not understand how it could work, but to therefore say that whenever we label some experiment as falling under the school of parapsychology, any significant results must be a fluke.. that is almost analogous to saying that any deviation from newtons' prediction of planet movements must be due to measurement errors.

In my opinion such a mindset is a sure way to hinder scientific progress: it heavily favors finding acceptable truths.

gort4• 17 years ago

"The problem is that the mechanical principles that govern each particle of our bodies (and of the things around us) already specify how each of us behaves as a whole. But in that case, there is no room for the ghostlike component to have any influence - if it did so, it would have to make some of the particles sometimes violate the principles that all particles are always observed to obey whenever we check carefully."

- Gary Drescher, Good and Real, chapter 2.1: The Case against Ghosts

At the very least it's highly likely that the positive results of parapsychology, or the vast bulk of them, are due to the sort of statistical problems that plague other sciences as well. I cannot, of course, say it's 100% certain.

bOR_6• 17 years ago

The mechanical principles that are referred to are our theories about those mechanical principles. They may be very accurate in describing them, but they are not 'fact'.

I think the new age / hippies / spiritual / mysticism explanation is that the moment you do an experiment in which consciousness is heavily involved, you are going to see violations of the principles that work soundly when there is noone exerting whatever the name of this consciousness-force is upon particles.

Anyway, to plead my case ;), there is this thing called the sheep-goat effect. People that belief they can exert an influence ("the sheep") tend to do better in parapsychological effects than people that do not belief. Worse even, people that do not belief in parapsychological effects ("the goats") tend to do worse than random. This effect has been reported and studied for over 60 years now (see first source)

I'm not sure how to explain the sheep-goat effect in terms of statistically slacking methods. From a 'the null hypothesis is always true in parapsychology' point of view, there should be no difference between believers and nonbelievers, so both groups should have an equal chance in performing better than the other group. The skeptics also have a problem explaining this one (see second source).

Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_1_68/ai_n1369... http://www.skepdic.com/sheep-goat.html

p.s. love the name sheep-goat effect ;).

pmichaud• 17 years ago

I just wrote an essay that supports what you said:

http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/dont-reject-your-experien...

We HAVE to assume "out there" stuff has some objective underpinning, or we commit the same sin as invoking God, but in mirror image.

bOR_6• 17 years ago

I agree to what you say :). Had pretty much the same line of thinking myself.

Coming from biology: I know our brains are complex machines, and highly skilled and skewed pattern recognizers, and that therefore many things can be explained in terms of subconsciously picking up signals, or just plain coincidence.

Still, some of my experiences (knowing where someone's attention is at, or feeling flow of energy between bodies) seem to suggest that we can experience more than just the input of our five physical sensory organs. And rather than ignoring these more esoteric senses, I try to use them in a practical sense - as a source of information. Maybe I'm making stuff up ;), but so far my life is more fun allowing for the possibility of these esoteric senses to exist, than going for a purely material world.

Confusion3• 17 years ago

Assuming there is an "out there" is unwarranted. As Nietzsche famously stated, "God is dead". He didn't mean the Christian god: he meant every objectivist philosophy. There is just the world with us immersed in it. It is not even wrong to attempt to describe the world in objective terms, separate from ourselves.

JulianMorrison3• 17 years ago

"Fact" doesn't mean p==1 (an unreachable goal) it means p approximates 1, less some insignificant minuscule slice of the pie within which live all the mad implausibilities you might think up - but which Occam's razor forbids.

bOR_6• 17 years ago

Occam's razor is frequently misused. It is not a law, and using it to forbid something that cannot easily be explained is counterproductive. Occams Razor works nicely when deciding whether to use a linear or a nonlinear function to describe some mathematical relationship, but beyond mathematics, what of two things is 'simpler' can be highly subjective.

P.S. I think the whole topic of this thread is sort of not within Hackers' News interest (just peeked at the guidelines). Calling it quits for now.

Alex39173• 17 years ago

If the findings of parapsychology are always false, then it's only because things cease to become parapsychology as soon as there is an established mechanism. Things go from being parapsychology to psychology all the time.

Synaesthasia, mirror neurons, and mystical experiences are three completely different parapsychological phenomena that have become accepted by mainstream science within the last ten years. I see no reason why science won't keep validating more paranormal theories in the future.

kurtosis• 17 years ago

What's a mystical experience? I find parapsych pretty interesting, but I've never heard of this, at least in the context of mainstream science.

a-priori• 17 years ago

Two examples I can think of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe_epilepsy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning (the "haunted houses" section)

joeyo2• 17 years ago

Suggesting that mirror neurons were ever somehow parapsychology seems like a bit of a stretch.

Alex39173• 17 years ago

Mirror neurons themselves were never parapsychology, but they explain phenomena that were considered paranormal before their discovery:

http://health.howstuffworks.com/synesthesia.htm/printable

JulianMorrison3• 17 years ago

No, those were just wrongly categorized to begin with.

"The physics-defying spooky fact of X" belongs to parapsych (and I'd casually bet my life on the null hypothesis under good enough testing).

"Experience of X" belongs to neuropsych (and it reflects poorly on them if they dump it over the fence on the parapsychologists because it just sounds so spooky and unprofessional. Bah humbug.)

psygnisfive2• 17 years ago

This position is incredibly difficult to actually maintain, given that when _non_ parapsychologists (that is, people who don't presuppose the telepathy exists) reproduce the experiments, they consistently get contradictory results. Infact, its only when the believers in psi phenomena do these experiments that they discover positive results. Is this a problem with science as a whole, or is this a problem with parapsychologists?

gort4• 17 years ago

its only when the believers in psi phenomena do these experiments that they discover positive results

Hmm? Isn't that what we expect if there are no psi phenomena?

[ETA: Ah, perhaps this was an argument against the premise that parapsychologists use exactly the same procedures as other scientists. But in other sciences, one suspects that researchers who believe in XYZ tend to find it more than those who don't...]

psygnisfive2• 17 years ago

Indeed, that's precisely the point. When findings are unreplicable _despite identical procedure_ it's usually considered a disconfirmation of the results of the initial experiment. Maybe not of the phenomena, but of the experiment. And since pretty much _all_ psi experiments have been disconfirmed, this effectively (tho not technically) disconfirms the phenomena.

Parapsychology: the control group for science

Related Stories