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Originally Posted by BobSaget  Sorry, I phrased that wrong. She considers the people who were "near death" to be clinically dead at the time, being that their bodies were not functioning. Being that she is a believer, she believes these people went to the "other side," thus she considers them dead while there. I would prefer if she didn't consider them dead because it leads to confusion such as this. |
Point taken. That would make me then think that the author is confusing "near death" for "dead," but that could be a problem of labels, not of methodology.
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The data is saying that 48% of these people were at the genius level. Are you suggesting that it is more likely that there were that many geniuses there by chance? There is a definite correlation, and while correlation is not causation, it is a rather funny coincidence.
Like I said earlier, if anything, I would be skeptical about the tests themselves. If the tests are legitimate, you'd be hard-pressed to say there isn't something going on, whether it be materialistic or not.
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I don't know if one becomes a genius "by chance." It feels like a whole lot of postdiction to me, and considering the typos, label problems, and statistical errors, it makes me doubt the rigor with which the author established the intelligence of the participants.
That said, you can certainly find 277 geniuses in the world, and depending on how closely you define "NDE" (as I said before, how can you tell the difference now between a traumatic event and an NDE if the person who went through it has decided it's an NDE? How do you verify that?), I can't imagine it would be hard to do it. At the beginning of the paper, there's this line:
"Of the 277 who qualified,"
By what criteria did someone qualify? I don't see it listed in the paper. Perhaps the qualification is that that they had an IQ of at least 120? You might say that's unlikely, and you could certainly be correct, but I'll go back to a reliance on bad statistics, a carelessness in phrasing, and a reliance on bogus recovered memory on this one. If you don't know how a person qualified, nor how many didn't, nor by what specific standard they were measured as genius, it's really more of a question than an answer, isn't it?
There's also this:
"I do not use the standard double-blind/control group method most professionals do in my research of near-death states because I don't trust it. "
That level of rigor doesn't inspire confidence in either conclusion OR observation. That said, I do agree with the final line of the paper, though for different reasons than I think the author intended:
"Although evidence of an afterlife seems irrefutable in the cases that have emerged; in truth, research on the near-death experience has actually revealed more about life than it has death. "