Animal Communicator Research (Podcast)

[David Bailey]

Anonymous,

Actually, I have always thought how little violence there is in society. The news grossly exaggerates the violence because that is what is interesting. Soldiers need dehumanized (sorry, training) before they are willing to kill. How often have you personally witnessed anything violent? I don't think this is just because we have laws, people seem to recognise instinctively where to stop aggression. Aggression that (usually) stops short of violence is also commonplace in the animal world.

Regarding your long quote about talking to insects - I don't want to sound like a total sceptic, but I would really like to see some serious tests of such abilities before I would believe them.

David

[Rudism]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Whenever someone says something like this about work that Rupert Sheldrake has been involved with, I start to lose patience. He is a careful experimenter with a track record in conventional science, and he goes to great lengths on his site to present the various objections to his work and explain why they are not valid.

David

Designing and running experiments that rule out the criticism would be a thousand times more effective than any amount of apologetics.

For example, when Sheldrake was throwing out so many trials where the parrot didn't say any of their pre-defined keywords, he HAD to know that it would be ridiculed. I keep reading that parapsychologists are so much more rigorous in their design and controls because they know they'll be picked apart by the skeptics, but I just don't see it at all.

[Phronk]

Originally Posted by alextsakiris

Here's Sheldrake's reply: N'kisi: Robert Todd Carroll replies to Rupert Sheldrake

Also, I like how Carroll (philosophy teacher at Sacramento City Junior College) labels every mention of his name an ad hominem attack... laughable.

It's amazing that neither "side" here can keep from personal insults and childish tangents. I wish I could see a nice debate that talks only about the experiment's methods and data, leaving out any mention of the names of the researchers or their critics.

I wanted to believe that Sheldrake's study was deeply flawed, because hell, parrots reading my thoughts? That's scary. But Carroll really failed to poke any major holes in it. He seems obsessed with suggesting different studies to perform with the parrot. That's all well and good, but he fails to discredit the study that was actually done. Who cares if he threw out trials where the parrot didn't say any key words? The fact that, out of trials in which he did say key words, they lined up with what his owner was looking at in a different room, is incredible. That alone is evidence for telepathy, if the methodology was sound. You could include all the parrot's babbling, but that seems like a sloppier test of the hypothesis to me.

It's like if I claimed to be able to ring a bell whenever my mom is about to phone, and a skeptic said "well, what about all the times when you honked a horn?" We're not talking about horns here.

I also have to point out this quote that Carroll picked out:
"provide a forum where research on paranormal phenomena can be presented to other scientists without obstruction or derision."

He mentions it without comment, as if this discredits the journal it was published in. What? Does he want journals to obstruct and deride research? If we replaced "paranormal phenomenon" with "chemistry", would he still have a problem with it?

[alextsakiris]

Originally Posted by Phronk

It's amazing that neither "side" here can keep from personal insults and childish tangents. I wish I could see a nice debate that talks only about the experiment's methods and data, leaving out any mention of the names of the researchers or their critics.

I wanted to believe that Sheldrake's study was deeply flawed, because hell, parrots reading my thoughts? That's scary. But Carroll really failed to poke any major holes in it. He seems obsessed with suggesting different studies to perform with the parrot. That's all well and good, but he fails to discredit the study that was actually done. Who cares if he threw out trials where the parrot didn't say any key words? The fact that, out of trials in which he did say key words, they lined up with what his owner was looking at in a different room, is incredible. That alone is evidence for telepathy, if the methodology was sound. You could include all the parrot's babbling, but that seems like a sloppier test of the hypothesis to me.

It's like if I claimed to be able to ring a bell whenever my mom is about to phone, and a skeptic said "well, what about all the times when you honked a horn?" We're not talking about horns here.

I also have to point out this quote that Carroll picked out:
"provide a forum where research on paranormal phenomena can be presented to other scientists without obstruction or derision."

He mentions it without comment, as if this discredits the journal it was published in. What? Does he want journals to obstruct and deride research? If we replaced "paranormal phenomenon" with "chemistry", would he still have a problem with it?

Just stumbled across this:
(from Embrace The Unknown And Seek The Truth - Part 1)

"The January 2000 issue of Dog World magazine included an article on a possible sixth sense in dogs, which discussed some of my research. In this article Randi was quoted as saying that in relation to canine ESP, 'We at the JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation] have tested these claims. They fail.' No details were given of these tests.

"I emailed James Randi to ask for details of this JREF research. He did not reply. He ignored a second request for information too.

"I then asked members of the JREF Scientific Advisory Board to help me find out more about this claim. They did indeed help by advising Randi to reply. In an email sent on Februaury 6, 2000 he told me that the tests he referred to were not done at the JREF, but took place "years ago" and were "informal". They involved two dogs belonging to a friend of his that he observed over a two-week period. All records had been lost. He wrote: 'I overstated my case for doubting the reality of dog ESP based on the small amount of data I obtained. It was rash and improper of me to do so.'

"Randi also claimed to have debunked one of my experiments with the dog Jaytee, a part of which was shown on television. Jaytee went to the window to wait for his owner when she set off to come home, but did not do so before she set off. In Dog World, Randi stated: 'Viewing the entire tape, we see that the dog responded to every car that drove by, and to every person who walked by.' This is simply not true, and Randi now admits that he has never seen the tape."

[David Bailey]

Rudism,

You really need to consider what the null hypothesis would say in these situations. If the parrot can't do telepathy (which I take to be the null hypothesis), then that should be equally apparent when you rule out the times when he does not say anything! It is valid to take any steps to increase the signal to noise ratio provided you don't bias the data - just as in any other area of science.

Alex,

I don't think Randi realises that antics like that are helping to bias the debate in the other direction - just as in the past, blatantly fraudulent psychics have encouraged people to become sceptics. Obviously nobody will get his million dollar prize, but perhaps one day someone will get the money by suing him for libel!

David

[Rudism]

Originally Posted by Phronk

Who cares if he threw out trials where the parrot didn't say any key words? The fact that, out of trials in which he did say key words, they lined up with what his owner was looking at in a different room, is incredible. That alone is evidence for telepathy, if the methodology was sound.

Anyone who's interested in the outcome of the experiment should care. Why were they thrown out? Do we assume that the psychic connection was broken during these trials? That the message sending failed somehow? That the bird simply chose to ignore the message that was being sent? What is the basis for this assumption?

The included trials are also only interesting if we compare them to a baseline, so we know how prevalent these particular words are in the bird's speech to begin with. Just as a hypothetical example, if a common phrase for the bird to say is "flower ball bicycle house," and he is fairly likely to say this during any given 2 minute period where he is speaking intelligible words, then you are going to get a lot of hits if you are flashing pictures of flowers, balls, bicycles, and houses to the owner (any one of those would count as a hit if the bird spoke that sentence during the two minute period). This isn't proof of telepathy, it's just proof that you used images of stuff that the bird likes saying a lot. It's only interesting if there is a significant difference between how often the bird says "flower" when a flower message is being sent compared with how often the bird says "flower" when no flower message is being sent. Sheldrake's study didn't take this into account.

If someone can summarize to me why these criticisms are invalid, then I'd appreciate it.

[Rudism]

Originally Posted by Rudism

Anyone who's interested in the outcome of the experiment should care. Why were they thrown out? Do we assume that the psychic connection was broken during these trials? That the message sending failed somehow? That the bird simply chose to ignore the message that was being sent? What is the basis for this assumption?

To clarify, I guess another way to put this would be... in cases where you are testing (to use Sheldrake's example) autistic kids, and you throw out the trials where they don't respond to whatever stimulus you're exposing them to, you're doing that because you want to test their response to the stimulus. You're NOT testing whether or not the stimulus exists.

In this parrot case, you can't use the same excuse. You're not testing the parrot's reaction to psychic messages--you're testing whether or not the psychic messages exist at all! To throw out data that, for all intents and purposes, seems to indicate that the messages DO NOT exist (which is a direct measure of the very thing you are purporting to test) is clearly biased and will obviously skew the results.

[Venom]

Originally Posted by alextsakiris

It's nice to imagine one experiment might 'revolutionize' some part of science, but that's too much to expect. Sheldrake, Radin and Schwartz (among others) have shown how difficult it is to open a closed mind... closed institutionalized science.

Well, there is being open-minded, and there is having your brain falls out of it. (skeptical sayings).



Love that.

Anyway, all the advocates of pseudo-science use that can of argumentations: the science is not open-minded enough, blablablabla, there is an evil conspiration/cover-up by science for suppress/dismiss proofs of our claims, blablabla.

We're earing that from the pro-homeopathic people, from the ufologists, from the astrologists, Intelligent Design believers, the anti-vaccination lobby and so on. The list is endless...

In woo-woo land, the rule is: if you want to put up a pseudo-science claims, just claim also that science is close-minded and has a evil cover-up against it.

It's just laughable. Come on... Do you really understand what science is? I doubt it... I found your view of science kind of simplistic.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Venom

Come on... Do you really understand what science is? I doubt it... I found your view of science kind of simplistic.

Maybe you should e-mail Brian Josephson and ask him that - I believe his address is on his website:

Brian Josephson's home page

David

[Phronk]

If someone can summarize to me why these criticisms are invalid, then I'd appreciate it.

I'll give it a shot.

Originally Posted by Rudism

Why were they thrown out? Do we assume that the psychic connection was broken during these trials? That the message sending failed somehow? That the bird simply chose to ignore the message that was being sent? What is the basis for this assumption?

They were thrown out because the question being asked was "out of all the times when the bird said words from this preselected subset of his vocabulary, how many times did it line up with what his owner was seeing in another room? If chance alone were operating, how likely would it be to see it match up this many times?" To answer that question, it's irrelevant to look at the trials where he wasn't saying words from that set.

With humans, we can design the experiment so almost ALL the trials in the study are relevant, because we can ask the human to only guess from the subset of words. With animals (and children), we have to do a few more trials and then only pick the ones where they spontaneously choose from that subset, since we can't just ask them to stick to it.

Just as a hypothetical example, if a common phrase for the bird to say is "flower ball bicycle house," and he is fairly likely to say this during any given 2 minute period where he is speaking intelligible words, then you are going to get a lot of hits if you are flashing pictures of flowers, balls, bicycles, and houses to the owner (any one of those would count as a hit if the bird spoke that sentence during the two minute period).

This one stumped me a bit, but I'll try to work it out for myself.

I think that the crucial point here is that the pictures that the owner was looking at were picked randomly.

Let's simplify the study for illustration. Let's say there are only 3 pictures to choose from - a ball, a flower, and a bike. The bird has these three words in his vocabulary, but tends to say "ball" and "flower" way more than he says "bike."

We want to know if, when he says one of these 3 words, it tends to be the one his owner is looking at.

We do one hundred trials. The bird says one of the 3 words on 10 of those trials. We could look at all 100, but why? We're only interested in the trials where he said one of those 3 words.

To further illustrate why it is fair to throw out the other 90 trials, let's assume that only chance is operating. The bird is just babbling and is not influenced by the owner's thoughts at all.

On the first trial, the bird says "ball". What are the chances that he's right? Well, 1/3, because there's a 1/3 chance that the computer randomly selected the ball picture for the owner.

On the second trail, the bird says "ball" again. Still a 1/3 chance of being right.

He says "ball" yet again. Still only a 1/3 chance of being right.

He says "flower" for the next six trials. By chance, he should only be right on about 1/3 (i.e., 2) of them.

He finally says "bike". But the chances are STILL just 1/3 that he's right.

In other words, no matter what biases toward certain words the bird has, his chances of getting a hit remain constant if chance alone is operating, even if we are throwing out a lot of trials. Our goal is to see if something more than chance is operating. We can achieve this goal in the cleanest way by only looking at this subset of responses that are relevant. And if we find a proportion of correct responses far above 1/3 in this subset, and determine mathematically that this proportion would be extremely unlikely if chance alone were operating (i.e., calculate a p value), then we conclude that is was not chance alone. Something else was causing the bird to be right more than we would expect by chance. We can call that "something" telepathy, if telepathy is defined as communication without the normal senses, and all normal senses were blocked in the experiment.

Now, what I'm not sure about is multiple answers during one trial. If the bird said "ball flower" during a trial, his chances of being right (given chance alone) is now 2/3 instead of 1/3, changing the chance baseline we need to compare to. Perhaps I'll check the original report later to see if this was dealt with. I do remember seeing something about using a randomized permutation test, which was also highly significant and I believe would deal with this problem if it was one.

This isn't proof of telepathy, it's just proof that you used images of stuff that the bird likes saying a lot. It's only interesting if there is a significant difference between how often the bird says "flower" when a flower message is being sent compared with how often the bird says "flower" when no flower message is being sent. Sheldrake's study didn't take this into account.

Just to clarify the reasoning above: the "baseline" where no flower image is being sent is when another image is being sent (in my example, a bike or a ball). If the bird says "flower", there is a 2/3 chance that a flower image is not being sent.

To clarify, I guess another way to put this would be... in cases where you are testing (to use Sheldrake's example) autistic kids, and you throw out the trials where they don't respond to whatever stimulus you're exposing them to, you're doing that because you want to test their response to the stimulus. You're NOT testing whether or not the stimulus exists.

In this parrot case, you can't use the same excuse. You're not testing the parrot's reaction to psychic messages--you're testing whether or not the psychic messages exist at all! To throw out data that, for all intents and purposes, seems to indicate that the messages DO NOT exist (which is a direct measure of the very thing you are purporting to test) is clearly biased and will obviously skew the results.

But in this case, the response to the stimulus - i.e., responding with matching words to the owner's "psychic" signal - is the evidence that the stimulus exists. Any response at all to the stimulus is evidence that it exists.

Besides, if it skews results with parrots, it skews the results with children, and it's shoddy research in either case. Even if an effect is well-established, studying its properties with biased research isn't going to reveal anything. If there are genuine problems with Sheldrake's research - and there very well may be - then researchers working with autistic kids and other animals should take note and avoid the same problems so that the effects they purport to discover aren't really nonexistent like the psi effects may be.

I haven't found this flaw yet, though (unless the multiple-answers thing is really a problem). I do hope more people replicate the research and examine it carefully like we're doing, though. If nothing else, it could help kids with autism!