61. Medium Experiment (Part 3), Michael Tymn (Podcast)

[Open Mind]

Michael Tymn mentioned how J B Rhine was keen to distance ESP from medium claims.

Perhaps also a desire for a more democratic 'all men are created equal' view of psychic phenomena had emerged in the US ... up till then psychical research had looked for special people claiming special abilities and ignored testing ordinary people. Parapsychology from now on was to focus on testing ordinary people claiming no particular psi ability, with the belief that most people could learn it or produce it via feedback.... was this the right approach?

This is what makes the skeptiko experiments interesting .... mediums are being tested again ... not believers testing privately .... or debunkers trying to do a Houdini and make mediums look foolish ... but possibly the first time since the 1920s a mix of open minded skeptics, disbelievers and believers are about to investigate mediums claim together.

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

What do you think Alex meant by emphasizing in the above program 'follow the data' ? Do you take this to mean an unwillingness to admit being wrong?

Alex says follow the data, but he's stuck on a position of the data being right, so he's going to be a LOT less likely to consider new, contradictory data. This isn't unique to Alex, it's a facet of human nature.

My specific point was really that Alex is talking the talk of a skeptic, but he's walking the walk, now, of an ardent believer. You can hear it in every episode: he more and more speaks of conspiracies to keep The Truth down, he is closing his mind to dissenting views ... it's a pretty clear progression. Once you identify yourself in a group (as I say, this is a human trait, not specific to Alex), you fit yourself more and more to the identity of that group.

A quick thought about Tymn: how does his book bolster your case when he admits that the specific tests he's talking about are for a type of phenomena that nobody does anymore? And that said testing is the best ever? I'm a little confused by that.


Also, who the hell is shunning people who believe in sci? Sure, a very small segment of the population (scientists represent a minuscule portion of the population), but if you walk down the street and tell people you're psychic, a LOT will believe you. Media is littered with pseudo-scientific claims, so to suggest some level of oppression is going on is pretty ridiculous. Sure, the group who believes in FACTS will dismiss the beliefs, but most other people won't. Saying that believers in psi are the oppressed majority is like Christians in the USA bitching about unfair representation of their beliefs: it's patently ridiculous.

People seem to be thinking that psi is somehow new, as though it's an upstart compared to this monolithic old-boy's club called science. This is somewhat remarkable, considering that science in any modern form didn't exist more than a century or two ago. The history of humanity is that of a struggle of rational views against the irrational (but natural-to-make-as-a-first-guess) views of how the world worked. People have believed that spirits move the trees for a LOT longer than they've believed in science. Science has had to claw away at pseudo-science, and has done so not by being this monolithic thing -- how did it get that way if there's so little to it? -- but by being testable, repeatable, and by getting results. Science shows us a way to improve and extend the lives of every person in the world, to understand the shape of reality, to see billions of years into the past, and to see our myriad possible futures. Pseudo-science, psi in particular, offers bland, predictable platitudes to people too afraid of their own shadow to step into the light of day.

How does psi earn respect? By getting results. And certainly it's worthwhile to do research, but keep in mind that people have been trying to get to the heart of psi phenomena since we've existed, and science, the upstart, has well surpassed it, handily, in a fraction of the time.

[Miguel]

Concerning the experiment:

The skeptical part seems to serve 2 functions now: As a control group for establishing a baseline and as a source of information to eliminate cues.
Neither will work.
Attempts to eliminate cues by special candidate selection may in fact introduce further problems.

'Chance level': That's really problematic.
What Alex calls performance at 'chance level' is the performance one would expect from a perfect random number generator.
Human beings are not good at being random. Even if we have no way of making an informed decision we still tend one way or the other.
There's nothing wrong with the calculation to get a quick handle on the "difficulty" of the task but it is not a good model of what is actually going on.

Nevertheless, here's some suggestions:
Recruit sitters from non-english countries. Most cues are highly culture/language specific and should not work on a foreign sitter.

Have the mediums perform the task for both american and non-english sitters.
The "skeptical hypothesis" is that they will perform worse on the foreign sitters.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Miguel

Have the mediums perform the task for both american and non-english sitters.
The "skeptical hypothesis" is that they will perform worse on the foreign sitters.

I agree it is worth a try, but maybe there would be non-skeptical reasons why this might happen - I mean, we seem to be asking more and more of these mediums - maybe they have limits.

If the mediums can score near 100%, I don't think the sort of subtle effects you are talking about would be an explanation.

David

[Larry Boy]

One way of solving the problem of bias would perhaps be to group together discarnates with the same cause of death for matching. This way you wouldn't be able to distinguish between them by using logic.

I described another idea in an earlier thread:

One way of solving this problem would perhaps be to provide a picture of each sitter as a child instead of a recording, having made all pictures black and white and having removed all things that could give away clues, such as clothing, hairstyle etc. Furthermore, using a program like Photoshop one could run all pictures through a filter that gives all pictures the same quality when it comes to tone of color etc., so that no clues as to when the picture was taken is given away.

[Larry Boy]

Still another way of solving the bias problem could be to give no information about cause of death but only the names of the discarnates. In this case, the sitters themselves can't name who they're trying to connect with, of course. Ideally, they don't tell their own names either, in case statistical connections can be made between names of parents and children.

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

My specific point was really that Alex is talking the talk of a skeptic, but he's walking the walk, now, of an ardent believer.

When you listen to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe do you think 'ardent disbelievers'

Would you prefer Alex had the following attitude for the experiments.... ... Alex doesn't believe past research claims, feels irritated at having to hunt down mediums to test an experiment he believes must fail. He chooses anyone claiming to be a mediums no need to select carefully as he thinks none of it is real, tells mediums he will look scientifically for evidence. As a public skeptic he feels it is duty to show the claims are nonsense. If any experiments are oddly anomalous, various hypothetical controls are added until the correct null resuilt is obtained. Solved, the end of experiments.

' ... I ask you, which is the greater threat to science and mankind, accepting a claim that can have no possible benefit or rejecting a claim that can have great benefit? ... - Dr Edmund Storms

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

You can hear it in every episode: he more and more speaks of conspiracies to keep The Truth down, he is closing his mind to dissenting views ... it's a pretty clear progression.

Hoggworks, this is hogwash So many 'skeptics' revisions are claims of hoax / fraud...The debunkers are often offering conspiracy theories.

but keep in mind that people have been trying to get to the heart of psi phenomena since we've existed, and science, the upstart, has well surpassed it, handily, in a fraction of the time.

Scientific psi research was taken to the labs around the 1930s, yes it is true psi research has struggled to understand anomalous cognition effects for 70 years of research

Meanwhile in quantum physics, the observer/measurement problem has remained unsolved for over 70 years.

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Hoggworks, this is hogwash So many 'skeptics' revisions are claims of hoax / fraud...The debunkers are often offering conspiracy theories.

That's a nonsensical response to my statement, and it does nothing to disprove the validity of what I said. Alex speaks of conspiracies of "skeptics" -- who all think alike -- who all want to get rid of the oppressed majority of people who believe in psi -- and he is doing it more and more. That's not the position of a person with an open mind.

What conspiracies theories are debunkers offering?

Meanwhile in quantum physics, the observer/measurement problem has remained unsolved for over 70 years.

Ah, but quantum theory can at least make predictions. Effects predicted by QT have been later observed in the world. That's a HUGE difference.

What predictive value has psi? What can you postulate that can be later proved or disproved?

[craven]

Alex's personal bias won't make a lick of difference if the methodology is sloppy. Doesn't anyone else see the problem with giving the results of each reading to each participating medium before the experiment is over? What possible benefit, aside from stroking the participants' egos, could this possibly have? Why open yourself up to potential leakage?