One for the skeptics?

[alextsakiris]

Originally Posted by mcromer

Alex,

Let me know what you need and I'll be glad to help out.

Thx... I'll email you.

If anyone else is interested in setting up or conducting interviews on this topic drop me an email.

[jacob]

Dr. Mishlove posted in his blog a review of the latest journal published by the Society for Psychical Research. In his review he also mentions about a report there of replication of presentiment experiment.

I've asked him on a comment on his blog for more info of this experiment. Waiting for his answer.

[Rudism]

Originally Posted by mcromer

Rudism,

Looking at their data analysis, the expectation effect simply cannot work.

That is because the timing of the stimulus is random. There is no way for anyone or anything to know when the next stimulus is going to occur, absent psi.

The timing of the stimuli used in the computer simulations in the paper I linked early on were random too. Intuitively, it seems like what you state here should be correct--but the simulations show this is wrong. While the effect diminishes as the trial sequences get longer, the fact remains that there are "strategies" that the human brain can apply to situations like this that can give the appearance of some kind of psi effect in the short run, even if there isn't one. You can run the numbers through all manner of statistical analysis after the fact to try to convince yourself that it's not a factor--but we already know that it IS a factor because we can replicate it using a computer simulation.

Until you can devise an experiment that rules out this now known effect at the design phase, it will always be a possible source of artifacts in the data that will render the experiment impotent in the scientific arena.

[mcromer]

Rudism,

If you look at the portion of the paper I quoted, they specifically test for some kind of expectation effect by looking at other epochs besides the epoch immediately before the stimulus.

The other epochs do not display an expectation effect (well the next-nearest shows a miniscule one, completely consistent with a presentiment effect, but the other epochs don't show one at all).

Since the timing is random, the expectation effect needs to show up in the other epochs in order for it to be an expectation effect (instead of a psi effect). If it only shows up in the immediate preceding epoch (and a smidgen in the one before that), it isn't expectation effect at all -- it is presentiment -- it is psi.

They also did a direct statistical test for an expectation effect, and found it was missing.

If you are building your case against presentiment on this foundation, Rudis, I'd suggest you bring along a life jacket. Like I said earlier, you are far better off arguing a fraud conspiracy at this point. . .

[Rudism]

Originally Posted by mcromer

They also did a direct statistical test for an expectation effect, and found it was missing.

If you are building your case against presentiment on this foundation, Rudis, I'd suggest you bring along a life jacket. Like I said earlier, you are far better off arguing a fraud conspiracy at this point. . .

I haven't been convinced that if you were to run the same statistical analysis on the results from one of the expectancy effect computer algorithms, that you wouldn't get the same results. Has anyone done this yet?