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Originally Posted by David Bailey  There is also, presumably the possibility of an effect similar to that discussed in the presentiment experiment - that the dog becomes more and more likely to go to the window as time goes by (surely they are coming soon...)
The devil of all this, is that whatever you do, someone will condemn you loudly for having got it all wrong! However, if you offer to make the raw data tapes available to any interested sceptic (maybe on line) maybe you can avoid that. |
I don't think any amount of data sharing can overcome an experiment that was poorly designed in the first place.
Again, I think that going to the window more and more is a genuine problem here. In short, the problem is that each time period is not independent. With each passing minute, the dog is gaining information (through non-paranormal means) about when the owner is coming home, because they are constantly eliminating past time periods as possibilities. A rational but non-psychic dog can "predict" with 100% accuracy if their owner is coming home at 5:00 if they know that the owner comes at a randomly chosen time between 1:00 and 5:00, and they haven't shown up at 4:59.
I worked this out a bit for myself on OpenSourceScience:
Talk:Can Dogs Anticipate:Statistical Considerations/GTTWMAM Hypothesis - OpenSourceScience
If this isn't controlled for, either methodologically or statistically, the researcher deserves to be condemned for having done it all wrong. That doesn't mean that the conclusion is wrong (unlike what critics of Sheldrake and other parapsychologists may say), just that it wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And with extraordinary claims, that doubt needs to be eliminated to an extraordinary degree.