Claim: Remote Viewing is a Scientifically Proven Technique that Utilizes a Natural Human Ability to Enable Access to Hidden Information

[SkepticSteve]

I have been considering for quite some time to create a thread to start debunking Remote Viewing but didn't knew where to begin. So I finally think it is time to give it a try. Claims on the legitimacy of "Remote Viewing" have been floating around increasingly in communities adjacent to ufology podcasts and outlets within the recent years. The main premise of "Remote Viewing" is well summarized within the title of this thread:

• Humans possess latent psychich enabilities which enable us to engage in extrasensory perception (clairvoyance, telepathy and pre-cognition)
• These abilities can be amplified using special techniques such that to enable the practitioner to "access hidden information"
• The technique of "Remote Viewing" developed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the 1970s is claimed to have been scientifically proven to be effective

"Remote Viewing" was primarily developed by Ingo Swann who was also claimed to be one of the most talented remote viewers back in the days. It typically involves a controlled, structured process where a trained individual, known as the remote viewer, uses their innate psychic abilities to gather information about a target at a pre-specified location without being physically present at it. The claims about remote viewing go as far as to even state that it works independently of the distance the target has in space and time to the viewer. The process often begins with the viewer entering a meditative or altered state of consciousness to access their subconscious mind. They then employ various techniques, such as mental imagery, sketching, or describing sensations, to document the perceived information. The data collected during the remote viewing session is often vague, symbolic, or fragmented and is later analyzed and interpreted by an experienced analysts to extract meaningful insights about the target.

Some of the achievements that are claimed to have been achieved through the use of "Remote Viewing":

1. The prediction of the state of health and extradiction of an American representative being taken hostage during the 1972 student protests in Iran by Keith Harary:

• Source: https://youtu.be/-2kwiNw--nI?t=871

2. The prediction of the existence of the rings of Jupiter by Ingo Swann before their actual discovery in 1971 by the Voyager 1 probe:

• Source: https://youtu.be/-2kwiNw--nI?t=1022

3. The prediction of changes in the silver commodity market by Keith Harary in 1982 (correct predictions for 9 weeks in a row, 7 investments were made with earnings of $120,000):

• Source: https://youtu.be/-2kwiNw--nI?t=1335,
  Source: https://youtu.be/wLXqTTeWWfA?t=1690

5. The correct description of various landmarks (most prominently San Andrés Airport in Colombia) encountered by Hal Puthoff during a South American travel remotely by Russel Targ:
View attachment 60626

• Source: https://youtu.be/-2kwiNw--nI?t=1636

6. The accurate description of the Sugar Grove NSA Listening Facility close to the original target of a log cabin, together with names of various programs (Cue Ball, Eight Ball, Rack Up) it was involved in by Ingo Swann and Pat Price. Alledgly leading to a resposne of shock by NSA:

• Source: https://youtu.be/-2kwiNw--nI?t=2209

7. The accurate description of the view of a pedestrian overpass Hal Puthoff was walking on by amateur remote viewer Hella Hammid:

• Source: https://youtu.be/-2kwiNw--nI?t=2797

8. The accurate description of elements of the layout and a photograph of the Berkeley Bevatron by amateur remote viewer Hella Hammid:

• Source: https://youtu.be/wLXqTTeWWfA?t=1378

9. The prediction of Donald DeFreeze as head of the Symbionese Liberation Army being involved in the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst in 1974 as well as the car used in the kidnapping and its location:

• Source: https://youtu.be/wLXqTTeWWfA?t=492

10. The description of the Rinconada Swimming Pool Complex visited by Hal Puthoff as well as a former closeby water purification plant by Pat Price:

• Source: https://youtu.be/wLXqTTeWWfA?t=618

11. The description of a Soviet weapons factory at Semipalatinsk and the contents manufactured within it by Pat Price:

• Source: https://youtu.be/wLXqTTeWWfA?t=784

Further frequently claimed achievements of remote viewing are:

• The finding of a crashed Soviet airplane in North Africa
• The prediction of the failing of a nuclear test in the People's Republic of China
• Location of a kidnapped American general in Northern Italy

Dr. Jessica Utts, a Professor of Statistics at the University of California Irvine (UCI), claims to have been involved in statistical analysis of Remote Viewing experiments in the mid-90s. She further claims that she was able to validate the statistical significance of controlled experiments not just conducted at SRI but also across different external laboratories:




According to her, research by the USG into remote viewing was abandoned in the mid-90s due the ending of the cold war and the technique being made redundant by more sophisticated technological ways of intelligence collection that demonstrated to be more effective in face of new national security threats the US encountered at this time.

• Source: https://youtu.be/YrwAiU2g5RU?t=313

 

[Eburacum]

Just taking one example; Ingo Swann's remote viewing of Jupiter.

Here is the CIA file about Swann's view of this giant planet;
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/NSA-RDP96X00790R000100040010-3.pdf

Then I came through the cloud layer; the surface it looks like sand dunes. They're made of very large grade crystals so they slide.
...and off in... (obscured)... to the East was a very high mountain range 30,000 feet (high) so quite large mountains.

#

Swann's idea of Jupiter is very much at odds with reality; he just seems to have imagined a sandy, mountainous planet with tornados and crystals, and added a ring as an extra fancy flourish. Jupiter is essentially nothing like what he described.

One chance hit out of a waterfall of imagined details; not a very successful viewing, and much less reliable than informed ideas of Jupiter's composition from the time (compare Arthur C Clarke's description of Jupiter in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968)

 

[Ann K]

You have a whole list of numbered claims, and they vary quite a bit in type and experimental design. If we dive into this it seems likely that we would have to verify or debunk them one at a time. In the brief look I've had about the Stanford experiments and about Ingo Swann, it would appear that there are a lot of contradictions in the descriptions of both the experiments and the results, and a lot of them seemed to require needlessly elaborate methods.

I know, we are debunkers here, or I'd simply say to them "prove it". So far they have not, and the program folded after spending a lot of taxpayer dollars for no reproducible results:

The idea of remote viewing received renewed attention in the 1990s upon the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. government that attempted to determine potential military applications of psychic phenomena. The program ran from 1975 to 1995, and ended after evaluators reached the conclusion that remote viewers consistently failed to produce any actionable intelligence information.[n 1][12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing

I'd be more interested in any postulated mechanism they might have presented, because absent that it sounds a lot like calling it "magic".

 

[John J.]

Coincidentally, I'd only heard about Ingo Swann very recently, so I looked at his Wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann

He was certainly an interesting guy, whether his accounts were particularly reliable must be debatable:

In his 1998 autobiography Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, Swann described his work with individuals in an unknown agency who study extraterrestrials (E.T.), his remote viewing of a secret E.T. base on the hidden side of the Moon and his "shocking" experience with a sexy scantily dressed female E.T. in a Los Angeles supermarket.

(Some guys get all the luck- when the aliens come for me I bet I get the grey blighters with the 1950's urology kits).

I concur with Ann K. about postulated mechanisms. Inverse square law and all that.
I can't help but wonder, could a "remote viewer" navigate, for example, city streets while blindfolded? If they are short-sighted, can they see their remote targets clearly? If so, why don't they use this ability in day-to-day life instead of buying glasses?

An ability to "see" things in your immediate environment which would normally be out of sight would be a tremendous asset.
I think it would spread through the gene pool like wildfire.

 

[beakflip]

An ability to "see" things in your immediate environment which would normally be out of sight would be a tremendous asset.
I think it would spread through the gene pool like wildfire.

Having seen the description of ganzfeld experiments, I don't think ping pong balls have been around for long enough to have any evolutionary effect, so I would give them that much.

 

[deirdre]

I think it would spread through the gene pool like wildfire.

maybe it has. but we haven't trained ourselves to use it.

So far they have not, and the program folded after spending a lot of taxpayer dollars for no reproducible results:

failed to produce any actionable intelligence information

failed to produce any actionable intelligence = "no reproducible results" ?

i don't think that's what "actionable intelligence" means.

 

[Ravi]

Very simple: if it would exist (remote viewing), we would see/know examples of it. None to be found..
The examples as mentioned in OP, are in my view too vague and open to interpretation.

 

[MapperGuy]

The fundamental problem with claims of Remote Viewing and Precognition is that they are based on deliberate experiments, as listed in the first post.

In reality "NATURAL" experiments are going on all of the time, and for each deliberate experiment there are millions of "natural" experiments going on every day.

Take the stock market for example. How many individuals and groups are buying selling or not buying and selling every day? Where is the person with a precognitive ability who is a trillionaire through buying and selling and always being right? Or perhaps an imperfect precognitive ability who is merely a billionaire? If the normal ebb and flow of the stock market is based on vast numbers of people with no precognitive ability then anybody with such an ability would stand out brightly, and be filthy rich just through buying and selling.

Sci-Fi author Larry Niven has created what he calls "Niven's Rules", true-isms based on his life experiences.
The one that applies here is:

"Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.
Over the lifetime of the human species we would otherwise have done something with them."

Well, where are the people who have done something with them??? And I mean really done something that everyone can acknowledge?

And for each deliberate experiment that "got results" how many others did they try that got no results at all? We never hear about those do we.

 

[NorCal Dave]

This came up the other day when talking about Hal Puthoff, as he and Russel Targ are big proponents of it owing to their work at the Stanford Research Institute. many of the claims in the OP are from this.

Puthoff and Targ made a number of claims, often inflating what had happened or attaching significance to normal outcomes, for example claiming that psychokinesis is a real phenomenon based on normal fluctuations and dubious cause and effect:

New York artist Ingo Swann met with Puthoff and Targ in 1972 and participated in their remote viewing experiments.[10] In June of that same year, Puthoff and Targ took Swann to a large magnetometer to see what changes Swann could make in the readouts of the machine. While the readouts did show some fluctuations, there was no evidence that this was due to any efforts on the part of Swann.[11] Nevertheless, Puthoff and Targ announced to a gathering in Geneva, Switzerland that they had indeed definitively established psychokinesis as a real phenomenon.[12] The builder of the machine, who had been present during Swann's visit, would later report that while there had been fluctuations these were in no way unexpected or outside the normal parameters.[13]

Puthoff and Targ also worked with Uri Geller, whom the Amazing Randi would later embarrass on the Tonight Show by showing that his tricks didn't work when proper controls were used:

Uri Geller began work with SRI in the early 1970s and was the primary focus of Puthoff and Targ's 1974 article in the journal Nature. This article described numerous remote viewing trials undertaken by Geller and the extraordinary results they had gotten during the six weeks he spent at the laboratories.[14][15]

Puthoff and Targ went on to publish in Nature with a number of problems:

Published in 1974 in the journal Nature, the article "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding"[15] had been circulating among scientific journals since 1972.[20]

..."Publishing in a scientific journal is not a process of receiving a seal of approval from the establishment".[21][22] The editor then enumerated the objections against publication voiced by the referees. These objections included references to the lack of substantive evidence, problematic data collection, weak statistical calculations and relationships, and many others.[21][22]

Two of there collegaes had their names removed form the paper:

The paper was problematic even among Puthoff and Targ's colleagues at SRI. Two other scientists also worked on tests that involved Geller and other remote viewing subjects. Charles Rebert, an expert on electroencephalography (EEG), and Leon Otis, a psychologist, held much more strictly to rigid scientific methods during the tests with which they were associated. Rebert and Otis went so far as to document their objections to what they termed as "fraudulent and slipshod" work and to demand that any experiments they had been involved in be stricken from the paper before publication.[23][24]

Ultimately, it seemed Puthoff and Targ used sloppy methodology and/or poor experimental controls, criticisms they never seemed to respond to:

Numerous problems in the overall design of the remote viewing studies were identified, with problems noted in all three of the remote viewing steps (target selection, target viewing, and results judging). A particular problem was the failure to follow the standard procedures that are used in experimental psychology.[33]

Several external researchers expressed concerns about the reliability of the judging process. Independent examination of some of the sketches and transcripts from the viewing process revealed flaws in the original procedures and analyses. In particular, the presence of sensory cues being available to the judges was noted.[34]

Also, sloppy procedures in the conduct of the EEG study were reported by a visiting observer during another series of exchanges in the scientific literature.[38]

A lengthy exchange ensued, with the external researchers finally concluding that the failure of Puthoff and Targ to address their concerns meant that the claim of remote viewing "can no longer be regarded as falling within the scientific domain".[35][36]

But because of the sheer number of supposed studies, Puthoff continues to be the go to guy for remote viewing:

Proponents of Puthoff and Targ claim 28 published papers, 15 of which showed positive results. An in-depth review of these papers showed that only 13 of the 28 total papers were published under commonly accepted standards of peer review. Of these 13, nine showed positive results. Three of these nine, however, were "retrospective experiments"; meaning that they were "experiments not specifically planned in advance, but apparently reconstructed from separate trials".[41] These retrospective experiments appeared to suffer from the sharpshooter fallacy—the creation of the target after the answers have been given. Of the remaining six studies, only two were found to show actual statistical significance due to the use of inappropriate statistical analyses. Those remaining two studies have yet to be fully replicated.[42]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI

As recently as 10-12 years ago Puthoff was conducting remote viewing experiments at Skinwalker Ranch for BAASS, again with government money as part of ASWWAP:

It was very fortunate that BAASS counted among its ranks of senior advisors none other than Hal Puthoff, the father of the CIA's Remote Viewing Program and arguably the world's authority on the development of Remote Viewing methodology. Puthoff's enormous experience in the STAR GATE and other remote viewing programs, together with an international cadre of collaborators, meant that BAASS could "jump start" a remote viewing program with only minimal set up time.

Puthoff again brought out John McMoneagle, whom had been tested alongside Swann and Geller in the '70s.

In March 2010, Joseph McMoneagle, one of the premier remote viewers in the U.S., was asked to observe a target designated as "22610" using traditional blind targeting protocols. "22610" was actually Skinwalker Ranch.

(page 119-120) Kelleher, Colm A.. Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders' Account of the Secret Government UFO Program. RTMA, LLC. Kindle Edition.

The book gives little information on the controls and photocalls used for this experiment, but note how the target was Skinwalker Ranch, the whole point of BAASS and ASWWAP, so not a very hard guess for Mr. McMoneagle.

Some fun facts about McMoneagle and his talents:

His services included that "he can help a wildcatter find an oil well or a quarry operator know where to mine".[11]

According to author Paul H. Smith, McMoneagle predicted "several months" into the future,[15] and McMoneagle's own accounts provide differing claims of the accuracy of his remote viewing, varying from 5 to 95 percent[16] to between 65 and 75 percent.

McMoneagle's predictions included the passing of a teenager's "Right to Work" Bill,[18] a new religion without the emphasis of Christianity, a science of the soul,[19] a vaccine for AIDS,[20] a movement to eliminate television,[19] and a 'temporary tattoo' craze that would replace the wearing of clothing,[21] all of which were supposed to take place between 2002 and 2006.

And my personal favorite:

According to McMoneagle, humans came from creatures somewhat like sea otters rather than primates and were created in a laboratory by creators who "seeded" the earth and then departed.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McMoneagle

Maybe that's why we all like going to the beach, we're just doing what we otter.

 

[John J.]

The prediction of the existence of the rings of Jupiter by Ingo Swann before their actual discovery in 1971 by the Voyager 1 probe:

The following are Swann's own version of his statements from 1995, 22 years later than the 1973 experiments took place:[39]

[6:06:20] Very high in the atmosphere there are crystals ... they glitter. Maybe the stripes are like bands of crystals, maybe like rings of Saturn, though not far out like that. Very close within the atmosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann, my emphasis added,
referencing Swann's 1995 account, here 1973 Jupiter RV Probe (via Wayback Machine)

I don't think Swann's account of rings within Jupiter's atmosphere are a "hit" at all. In fairness to Swann, he doesn't appear to have altered what appears to be his original account to make it a more convincing "discovery" of Jupiter's rings.

The sketches don't appear to have much relation to what Swann actually described:

In his 1995 account of the Jupiter remote viewing, Mr Swann does a bit of cherry-picking with information we now have about Jupiter to support his claims that the remote viewing was successful.
Regarding his 1973 "viewing" of mountain ranges on Jupiter, he says

--The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impacts on Jupiter.-- Not long ago, a series of twenty or so comets impacted Jupiter one after another.
The largest of them left --impact craters-- so huge and so high that their circular contours can easily be seen emerging from the cloud cover which is several miles thick.
Since the impacts, the mountainous craters can still be seen when that side of Jupiter is turned toward Earth.

(1973 Jupiter RV Probe, link as above, my emphasis added).

Of course, no "mountainous craters" are visible on Jupiter. Jupiter's day is roughly 10 hours, so its "cratered" side is very frequently turned towards Earth. Describing Jupiter's cloud cover as "several miles thick" implies less than thousands of miles.
It's reasonably clear that Mr Swann's understanding of Jupiter in 1995- including its appearance- was not great.

 

[Amathia]

I'd be more interested in any postulated mechanism they might have presented, because absent that it sounds a lot like calling it "magic".

This thread is probably going to balloon out of control because there's so much ground to cover. I just wanted to answer this question:

Edwin May is a staunch materialist and proponent of ESP and has written a lot on this topic. A good interview with him regarding it is here:


Source: https://youtu.be/dyxPiRk1XDE


I think it's always wise to be vigilant for a tactic that skeptics sometimes use (not saying that you're doing it, just that it reminded me of it) which is to demand an explanation for the underlying mechanism behind some phenomena (say like ESP) that is consistent with naturalistic science. If the proponent of that phenomenon can't come up with a plausible mechanism of how this all works or how it can be reconciled with naturalism, the phenomenon itself is tossed aside, ignored, or claimed to be impossible. But we have to remember that there are many things in science for which a mechanism of action is yet to be understood (many psychiatric drugs for instance) but which are nevertheless accepted because they've been shown to be useful and have actual tangible effects that can be measured. It's perfectly legitimate to accept some phenomenon as real without being able to provide a full mechanistic account of how it works.

Edwin May is a materialist who believes in ESP because of the empirical data he's published on the phenomenon. He also doesn't know what the mechanisms by which information is being transmitted are, but if there is a phenomenon here (as he believes there is) then an explanation for the underlying mechanisms may turn out to invoke as of yet discovered physical laws that are themselves still consistent with naturalism. There's no reason to think if ESP is real then it's evidence of some supernatural force. If there's something to this phenomenon then it can just as easily be pointing us toward some yet to be discovered forces in nature that will themselves ultimately be consistent with our best scientific understanding of the universe.

 

[Ann K]

If there's something to this phenomenon then it can just as easily be pointing us toward some yet to be discovered forces in nature that will themselves ultimately be consistent with our best scientific understanding of the universe.

Our best scientific understanding of the universe, especially the principle in physics known as the inverse square law, does not contain any way in which things can act at a distance of, say, Stanford CT to an airport in South America through the use of the mind alone. This is not in any way comparable to our incomplete understanding of the use of real medicines on real human bodies.

From an article on May, the results of the whole project came in for some severe criticism, as well as May himself.

The CIA project director described the NSA-visualization results as "mixed" because the psychic nailed the code name for the site and its physical layout but botched the names of people working at the site. Nonetheless, interest from the U.S. intelligence community spiked. And when that same remote viewer—provided with only map coordinates and an atlas—described new buildings and a massive construction crane hidden at a secret Soviet nuclear weapons facility (but got most other details wrong), multiple U.S. agencies began signing up for ESP studies.

A few years later, two psychologists at a New Zealand university had a premonition about Puthoff: They called him a bit of a rube. Writing in the journal Nature, the psychologists revealed that they had obtained transcripts of the original CIA experiments. The psychic who had seen deep inside the NSA outpost and the Soviet nuclear site had been fed "a large number of cues" from the judges over the years, they reported, and it was impossible to duplicate the uncanny results of his ESP testing.
.....
The old Star Gate psychics recently completed 72 trials, with May's assistant pouring liquid nitrogen 36 times. In his final report to Bial, May declared victory, finding "a significant effect supporting the study hypothesis (zdiff = 1.80, p = .036, ES = 0.425 ± 0.236)."
.....
Chances are, Ray Hyman won't see it that way. A professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, Hyman is one of the nation's leading skeptics about the paranormal. Along with his friend James Randi, aka the Amazing Randi, he's a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, whose mission is to promote "the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims." As a scientist and former magician and mentalist, he's a living embodiment of the "You can't bullshit a bullshitter" maxim.
.....
But when May began running the ESP program, Hyman says, he also created protocol problems. May became the only arbiter of whether a psychic had accurately described a target. "The only judge who could make it work was Ed May," Hyman says. "That's a no-no."

https://www.newsweek.com/2015/11/20...-psychics-can-help-american-spies-393004.html

The entire article is interesting.

 

[deirdre]

A few years later, two psychologists at a New Zealand university had a premonition

hee hee.

 

[Amathia]

Our best scientific understanding of the universe, especially the principle in physics known as the inverse square law, does not contain any way in which things can act at a distance of, say, Stanford CT to an airport in South America through the use of the mind alone. This is not in any way comparable to our incomplete understanding of the use of real medicines on real human bodies.

The comparison was only with regards to the fact that in order to accept that an effect exists (ESP, curative properties of certain medicines), we don't always have to understand the underlying mechanisms of action. That understanding often comes much later. The means by which bats could navigate in the dark was fully mysterious for centuries and often attributed to supernatural powers, but eventually echolocation was discovered to be the mechanism they use to navigate in the world.

The point is if there's an actual effect here (obviously that's contentious) that is being measured and replicable it cannot (or shouldn't) be dismissed on the basis that it doesn't fit our current best understanding of the world. You could assume the effect is impossible because it doesn't fit our physical models, or you could instead infer that the existence of the effect gives us good reason to believe our physical models are incomplete (which they are, and which just about everyone accepts until some phenomenon is presented which doesn't fit those models, at which time we tend to revert back to a position that the models are true and anything that doesn't fit them must be false).

Now, I'm guessing you and most of the folks here don't grant that there is even an effect being measured in the first place, so it's a lot easier to dismiss ESP on the grounds of a) not enough empirical evidence for the effect being real, and b) lack of a plausible mechanism by which the effect could be real.

I'm not going to contest a) because I'm honestly not sure where I fall on that question. But I would definitely not dismiss the possibility of ESP on the basis of b. If we capture effects in nature that don't fit our best models then it could be that there's something wrong with our measurements, our instruments, or with the methodology by which we've collected our data, or it can sometimes mean that we're picking up anomalous data because there's something wrong with our models or the models are incomplete. The scientific method itself doesn't tell us what to do in such cases but what Thomas Kuhn showed is that the history of science is full of such cases, which end up being historical periods when paradigm shifts tend to occur.

I tend to dislike Eric Weinstein, but he correctly pointed out in his conversation with Mick that faster than light travel is only impossible inside of Einstein's construct (relativity). We often take for granted that said construct is "true" despite knowing it cannot be the full picture of reality because of its inability to be reconciled with quantum mechanics. Relativity is the map, not the territory, and we know a better, deeper, map is out there somewhere. So Mick arguing that alien visitation of earth is highly improbable (or impossible) on the basis that faster than light travel is impossible simply assumes Einstein's construct is true and nothing better can or will come along to replace it. But it's just as legitimate to point out that if we ever finally found good evidence that aliens are visiting us and they're not from this solar system, then that's evidence for faster than light travel being possible and that there's an entire new physics out there to be discovered.

Tl;dr, I don't like invoking the lack of a known mechanism of action as evidence (or conclusive "proof") that certain claims like ESP are or must be false. That depends on having too high a degree of confidence in the completeness of our best scientific theories even though we fully know science is provisional and that our best models of the world today are very unlikely to be true representations of the world and they'll almost certainly all be surpassed by better models even within our own lifetimes.

If there's a real effect being measured here, we should probably all be curious about what physical principles can explain it and look for new principles if current ones can't.

Anyway. Sorry for the massive, long-winded sidebar issue. I do think the main focus should be on whether there's an actual effect being measured here in the first place.

 

[John J.]

...in order to accept that an effect exists (ESP, curative properties of certain medicines), we don't always have to understand the underlying mechanisms of action.

I think that's a pretty good point. We can accept observed phenomena as real without understanding why they work.
When Jocelyn Bell Burnell first detected a pulsar, it was clearly something real- the radio bursts could be consistently detected, it was an extraterrestrial source, and (later) its existence could be confirmed by others, even though (initially) the nature of the object was uncertain. The existence of similar objects elsewhere was soon confirmed.

However, where claims are made for any effect that would violate (for example) tested laws of physics, the onus is very much on the claimant to provide good evidence.
As you point out (AR318307) the actions of many medicines are not fully understood- but their effects are demonstrable, are open to repeated testing, they have real-world validity (e.g. an analgesic can help with toothache outside of the laboratory)
and they don't subvert the foundations of biology, chemistry or physics. As and when they are understood, they are more likely to add to our knowledge of (e.g.) biology and chemistry than they are to overturn existing paradigms.

If an extraordinary claim is made that contradicts much-tested, long established knowledge (such as, you need to be looking at something with functioning eyes to see it) it's not unreasonable for the claimant to be expected to share all their data, and to be open about their methodology. Where claimants fail to do this- or other researchers consistently fail to get similar results- pointing out the reasons why a claimed effect is unlikely to happen isn't unreasonable.

 

[NoParty]

I think it's always wise to be vigilant for a tactic that skeptics sometimes use (not saying that you're doing it, just that it reminded me of it) which is to demand an explanation for the underlying mechanism behind some phenomena (say like ESP) that is consistent with naturalistic science. If the proponent of that phenomenon can't come up with a plausible mechanism of how this all works or how it can be reconciled with naturalism, the phenomenon itself is tossed aside, ignored, or claimed to be impossible. But we have to remember that there are many things in science for which a mechanism of action is yet to be understood (many psychiatric drugs for instance) but which are nevertheless accepted because they've been shown to be useful and have actual tangible effects that can be measured. It's perfectly legitimate to accept some phenomenon as real without being able to provide a full mechanistic account of how it works.

First, I appreciate your followup (#14) to this big post...I think it tempers it nicely.

When I first read the passage above, the first thing that popped into my mind was the
One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge by the James Randi people. I've shared it with
many folks--who were finding a sketchy "psychic/mentalist", etc. very believable--over the years,
because no one has trouble understanding the allure money of a huge pile of money.

At the end of the day, no one , ever "...could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability
under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria" and cash in on a million dollars. Now, in the remarkable
hypothetical event that someone did display remarkably accurate results (whether remote viewing,
mind reading, dowsing, or whatever) I would be delighted and deeply intrigued. I would not
say that--merely because my modest brain doesn't understand it--it must be "impossible."
I suspect that that's probably true of most regulars on Metabunk.

Of course, since no psychic, mentalist, etc. ever performed very well under the Challenge conditions,
I haven't had a chance to test that assumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_Challenge

 

[deirdre]

Where claimants fail to do this- or other researchers consistently fail to get similar results- pointing out the reasons why a claimed effect is unlikely to happen isn't unreasonable.

I dont like that argument for ESP either. "other researchers consistently fail to get similar results". The testing pools are way, way too small. And there is nothing (in our known Universe) that would suggest everyone has the same skill level, if any skill level at all. Yogis allegedly train for years and decades to reach their alleged skill levels.

ex of similar thing that cant be tested in labs:

Article:

Riveting as these accounts are, scientists have only a tentative understanding of what exactly might be behind hysterical strength. After all, the spontaneous, life-and-death situations that apparently unleash it do not lend themselves to rigorous study.

"You can't really design an experiment to do this in a lab and make people think they're going to die," says E Paul Zehr, a professor of neuroscience and kinesiology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. "Something has to happen by fluke."

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160501-how-its-possible-for-an-ordinary-person-to-lift-a-car

Ex: the placebo effect, (which doesn't work on all participants, btw but big wig medical universities seem to believe it is real)...has huge testing pools.

Don't get me wrong the topic is the "claims of evidence" in the OP, and none of those examples of alleged evidence pass the smell test (for different reasons). Basically the OP is a gish gallop of alleged evidence, and im not willing to spend the time to go study each one to give a proper debunk. Especially since most the links are YOUTUBE VIDEOS that break the Posting Guidelines. @Landru The OP is asking us to do too much work, he should have done before.

 

[SkepticSteve]

Don't get me wrong the topic is the "claims of evidence" in the OP, and none of those examples of alleged evidence pass the smell test (for different reasons). Basically the OP is a gish gallop of alleged evidence, and im not willing to spend the time to go study each one to give a proper debunk. Especially since most the links are YOUTUBE VIDEOS that break the Posting Guidelines. @Landru The OP is asking us to do too much work, he should have done before.

The way to debunk remote viewing is to show that its proponents are systematically inflating evidence, cherry pick data or are being upfront disingenuous about how "their achievement came to be". That's why I posted their self-proclaimed list of "trophies" into the OP, as its otherwise difficult to find a good start. There are of course also folks in the RV community who are being quite obviously fraudsters. But debunking RV through debunking them would merely come across as a kind of straw man fallacy, when the folks at SRI were the original culprits who put this myth into existence.

The point @Eburacum made that the alleged "remote viewing of Jupiter" was not as "successful" as it was claimed to be in retroperspective is already a very good one.

 

[Mendel]

When I first read the passage above, the first thing that popped into my mind was the
One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge by the James Randi people. I've shared it with
many folks--who were finding a sketchy "psychic/mentalist", etc. very believable--over the years,
because no one has trouble understanding the allure money of a huge pile of money.

At the end of the day, no one , ever "...could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability
under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria" and cash in on a million dollars.

That's the shortcut to the answer.

All of the claims in the OP suffer from the problem that the experimental conditions were not under the control of an expert in mind reading and misdirection (i.e., a magician), which means that the data must be considered compromised.

The psychic who had seen deep inside the NSA outpost and the Soviet nuclear site had been fed "a large number of cues" from the judges over the years, they reported, and it was impossible to duplicate the uncanny results of his ESP testing.

What this means is that if the judges know what the correct result is, the remote viewer then becomes a "psychic" doing a cold reading, i.e. narrowing down their output towards the truth by reading the reactions of the people who do know. It does not mean actual supernatural psychic powers are involved.

 

[Amathia]

Here's a slightly more focused paper that might be worth discussing:

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf

Research on psychic functioning, conducted over a two decade period, is examined to
determine whether or not the phenomenon has been scientifically established. A secondary
question is whether or not it is useful for government purposes. The primary work examined in this report was government sponsored research conducted at Stanford Research Institute,later known as SRI International, and at Science Applications International Corporation, known as SAIC.

Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic
functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to
methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world.

Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud. The magnitude of psychic functioning exhibited appears to be in the range between what social scientists call a small and medium effect. That means that it is reliable enough to be replicated in properly conducted experiments, with sufficient trials to achieve the long-run statistical results needed for replicability.

A number of other patterns have been found, suggestive of how to conduct more productive experiments and applied psychic functioning. For instance, it doesn't appear that a sender is
needed. Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to
work quite well. Recent experiments suggest that if there is a psychic sense then it works
much like our other five senses, by detecting change. Given that physicists are currently
grappling with an understanding of time, it may be that a psychic sense exists that scans the
future for major change, much as our eyes scan the environment for visual change or our ears allow us to respond to sudden changes in sound.

It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon
works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing
experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who
does not accept the current collection of data.

 

[Eburacum]

Here's a rebuttal to Utt's paper, by Ray Hyman, who also examined the same data set at the same time;
https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1996/03/22165045/p24.pdf

Utts and I were hired as the evaluation panel to assess the results of 20 years of previously classified research on remote viewing and related ESP phenomena. In the time available to us, it was impossible to scrutinize carefully all the of documents generated by this program. Instead, we focused our efforts on evaluating the ten studies done at Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) during the early 1990s.
These were selected, in consultation with the principal investigator, as representing the best experiments in the set. These ten experiments included two that examined physiological correlates of ESP. The results were negative. Another study found a correlation between when a subject was being observed (via remote camera) and galvanic skin reactions. The remaining studies, in one way or another, dealt with various target and
other factors that might influence remote viewing ability. In these studies the same set of viewers produced descriptions that were successfully matched against the correct target consistently better than chance (with some striking exceptions).
Neither Utts nor I had the time or resources to fully scrutinize the laboratory procedures or data from these experiments.
Instead, we relied on what we could glean from reading the technical reports. Two of the experiments had recently been published in the Journal of Parapsychology. The difficulty here is that these newly declassified experiments have not been in the public arena for a sufficient time to have been carefully and critically scrutinized.

As with the original ganzfeld data base and the autoganzfeld experiments, it takes careful scrutiny and a period of a few years to find the problems of newly published or revealed parapsychological experiments. One obvious problem with the SAIC experiments is that the remote viewing results were all judged by one person—the director of the program. I believe that Utts agrees with me that we have to withhold judgments on these experiments until it can be shown that independent judges can produce the same results.

When we examine the basis of Utts's strong claim for the existence of psi, we find that it relies on a handful of experiments that have been shown to have serious weaknesses after undergoing careful scrutiny, and another handful of experiments that have yet to undergo scrutiny or be successfully replicated. What seems clear is that the scientific community is not going to abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles on the basis of a handful of experiments whose findings have yet to be shown to be replicable and lawful.
Utts does assert that the findings from parapsychological experiments can be replicated with well-controlled experiments given adequate resources. But this is a hope or promise.

In the 28 years since Utts' paper, this promise has not been fulfilled; instead the field of remote viewing has been abandoned as a dead end, except by a few eccentrics like Puthoff, because of its entirely subjective nature.

 

[Ann K]

Here's a slightly more focused paper that might be worth discussing:

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf

The problem with that is, once again, the interdependence of the writer and the project, calling into question the objectivity of her findings.

A report by Utts[8] claimed the results were evidence of psychic functioning, however Hyman in his report argued Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, especially precognition, was premature and the findings had not been independently replicated.[9] According to Hyman "the overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating."[10] Funding for the project was stopped after these reports were issued. Jessica Utts also co-authored papers with the parapsychologist Edwin May, who took over Stargate in 1985.[2] The psychologist David Marks noted that because Utts had published papers with May "she was not independent of the research team. Her appointment to the review panel is puzzling; an evaluation is likely to be less than partial when an evaluator is not independent of the program under investigation."[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Utts

 

[Mendel]

"the overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating."

Compare:

7. The accurate description of the view of a pedestrian overpass Hal Puthoff was walking on by amateur remote viewer Hella Hammid:

 

[Amathia]

Here's a rebuttal to Utt's paper, by Ray Hyman, who also examined the same data set at the same time;
https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1996/03/22165045/p24.pdf




In the 28 years since Utts' paper, this promise has not been fulfilled; instead the field of remote viewing has been abandoned as a dead end, except by a few eccentrics like Puthoff, because of its entirely subjective nature.

The problem is this isn't even close to being true. Here's just one recent meta analysis:

In 2011, one of the authors (DJB) published a report of nine experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology purporting to demonstrate that an individual's cognitive and affective responses can be influenced by randomly selected stimulus events that do not occur until after his or her responses have already been made and recorded, a generalized variant of the phenomenon traditionally denoted by the term precognition. To encourage replications, all materials needed to conduct them were made available on request. We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect greater than 6 sigma, z = 6.40, p = 1.2 × 10-10 with an effect size (Hedges' g) of 0.09. A Bayesian analysis yielded a Bayes Factor of 5.1 × 109, greatly exceeding the criterion value of 100 for "decisive evidence" in support of the experimental hypothesis. When DJB's original experiments are excluded, the combined effect size for replications by independent investigators is 0.06, z = 4.16, p = 1.1 × 10-5, and the BF value is 3,853, again exceeding the criterion for "decisive evidence." The number of potentially unretrieved experiments required to reduce the overall effect size of the complete database to a trivial value of 0.01 is 544, and seven of eight additional statistical tests support the conclusion that the database is not significantly compromised by either selection bias or by intense "p-hacking"—the selective suppression of findings or analyses that failed to yield statistical significance. P-curve analysis, a recently introduced statistical technique, estimates the true effect size of the experiments to be 0.20 for the complete database and 0.24 for the independent replications, virtually identical to the effect size of DJB's original experiments (0.22) and the closely related "presentiment" experiments (0.21). We discuss the controversial status of precognition and other anomalous effects collectively known as psi.

Work in this area has never stopped and you can clearly track the development of this field from early forced choice experimental protocols to the present day. This is just an obvious example of skeptics claiming this stuff was all abandoned long ago. It clearly wasn't. All that happened is that skeptics stopped paying attention and pretended like this was all settled. It's a case of if we don't bother to read any of the journals this stuff is published in, we can just ignore and pretend it doesn't exist. I'm sorry, but that doesn't cut it. This is a serious blindspot for skeptics and it's driven more by ideology and our own biases than an impartial analysis of the state of the field. I'm a skeptic myself and am not sure what to make of the research given how voluminous it is, but I'm not going to pretend like it was an academic dead end. Intellectual dead ends are extremely easy to recognize, just look at any journals dealing with *actual* dead ends such as Graphology or Memetics. The trajectory of those fields along with their research outputs are extremely easy to plot, with an extremely obvious sharp drop in publications until they stopped altogether. This isn't that, nor is the fact that we can quibble with the studies suggestive of anything other than, well, that there's still disagreement about what the studies mean. Richard Wiseman continues to publish meta analyses in the field, which are in turn themselves criticized and followed up with counter meta analyses. This is really one place where we've dropped the ball and allowed ideology and talking points shape our attitude and thinking about the subject.

 

[LilWabbit]

The process often begins with the viewer entering a meditative or altered state of consciousness to access their subconscious mind. They then employ various techniques, such as mental imagery, sketching, or describing sensations, to document the perceived information. The data collected during the remote viewing session is often vague, symbolic, or fragmented and is later analyzed and interpreted by an experienced analysts to extract meaningful insights about the target.

The problem with vague and fragmented predictions is the same as the problem with vague and fragmented text. Their excessively wide interpretability. Any observation can be made to fit the model.

Having said that, sometimes we witness things that are hard to explain, and even harder to reproduce in a controlled setting. I was 12 and playing Rolemaster (a role-plaing game) with my friends when the game master who rolled two ten-sided dice behind a screen rolled the number 39. Travis (not Taylor ), a friend of mine sitting next to me, also aged 12, told the gamemaster "please don't reveal the number yet, it's 39, right?" The gamemaster confirmed and I also peeped behind the screen to confirm. We were all flabbergasted. Travis told he gets these little 'feelings' once in a while. But inconsistently. Previously he had told his dad while driving on a highway "3 double countainer trucks are incoming soon" which then transpired.

There's a lot that we don't know. Unfortunately the 'science' conducted by those with strong prior ideas about the paranormal doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The motivated reasoning and methodological flaws are both often blatantly evident. Rigorous and objective science on these topics may yet prove or disprove any manner of ESP involved in such situations. Till then, claims of remote viewing proven by science are bunk.

 

[Amathia]

Compare:

There's an app I use called RV Tournament that lets you try to RV a new target every day. There are two ways to score your results. Either self-scoring, or having your submissions be scored by judges who are blind to what the actual target image is and are asked to determine which of two potential images the target is based on the sketches and words of the person you're scoring.

I stopped trying to RV myself since my results were even worse than what you'd expect to find by random chance , but the judging process is pretty fun.

 

[deirdre]

That's why I posted their self-proclaimed list of "trophies" into the OP,

you posted a bunch of youtube videos (which break posting guidelines) you claim are their trophies.

The way to debunk remote viewing is to show that its proponents are systematically inflating evidence, cherry pick data or are being upfront disingenuous

kinda feels like many "debunkers" in this thread are cherry picking data and are being upfront disingenuous too. But if you think you are actually debunking remote viewing here, by NOT showing anything on your list there (systematically inflating evidence, cherry picking data, being disingenuous), so be it.

 

[Eburacum]

From AR318307's link

In 2011, one of the authors (DJB) published a report of nine experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology purporting to demonstrate that an individual's cognitive and affective responses can be influenced by randomly selected stimulus events that do not occur until after his or her responses have already been made and recorded, a generalized variant of the phenomenon traditionally denoted by the term precognition.

Daryl J Bem (DJB) is one of the 'eccentrics' I mentioned in my post. His 'precognition' paper has been widely criticised, for methodology and content, and has some aspects that make it somewhat curious (among other things, it involved showing erotic pictures to the subject to get an apparent precognitive response). I imagine that this sort of experiment might involve a number of potential procedural mistakes. This experiment has repeatedly failed replication.

Bem himself said "I'm all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it's fun for some people—but I don't have the patience for it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Bem

 

[deirdre]

Bern himself said "I'm all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it's fun for some people—but I don't have the patience for it."

sounds like the philosophy of the new Metabunk.

 

[Amathia]

From AR318307's link


Daryl J Bern (DJB) is one of the 'eccentrics' I mentioned in my post. His 'precognition' paper has been widely criticised, for methodology and content, and has some aspects that make it somewhat curious (among other things, it involved showing erotic pictures to the subject to get an apparent precognitive response). I imagine that this sort of experiment might involve a number of potential procedural mistakes. This experiment has repeatedly failed replication.

Bern himself said "I'm all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it's fun for some people—but I don't have the patience for it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Bem

Multiple instances of failure to replicate an experiment is fair criticism, though one that has affected all of psychology, specifically social psychology, and not quite a mistake that ESP research can be singled out for. But such failure to replicate is only a criticism of the specific study that's failing to replicate. We can't generalize from that specific criticism of a specific kind of study to somehow also invalidate or call into question the meta-analysis I linked to. Experiments that fail to replicate seem to be the norm in every day social science and can be attributed to a million possible different things. We should at least be careful not to hold ESP researchers to a different standard than we do researchers in other, more "boring" areas of study. If a social psychologist published a study that failed to replicate, and they then authored a meta-analysis with co-authors on the same topic, the mere fact that their individual experiment failed to replicate wouldn't make me question the merits of their meta-analysis. I'm not saying *you're* doing that with your post, but it's always worth at least mentioning that we should be on the look-out for double standards we may implicitly hold people to when the area of research involves contentious topics.

 

[Amathia]

sounds like the philosophy of the new Metabunk.

I don't blame him. Most scientists don't like doing replication studies and prefer flashier research involving novel discoveries instead. Partially for curiosity reasons, and because of the academic environment incentivizing novel research over replications.

 

[Eburacum]

I remember when Bem's experiment was first announced. He used a series of images intended to provoke 'arousal' in a subject, before that subject actually saw them. I saw some of those images online - erotic images or images intended to provoke disgust. I would be rather concerned about the ability of the experimenter to remain neutral when presenting such images to the subject - in other words there may have been unconscious cues available for the subject to pick up on. However this particular experiment has been repeated without replicating Bem's results; maybe the other experimenters were more conscientious.

Some of the results that influenced the metadata presented by Utts were produced by a small select group of experimenters; one way to reduce the statistical significance of these surveys is to eliminate the experiments performed by those individuals. Either certain individuals are capable of psychically influencing experimental subjects, either consciously or unconsciously, or they have other ways of causing experimental error simply by their presence.

 

[SkepticSteve]

you posted a bunch of youtube videos (which break posting guidelines) you claim are their trophies.


kinda feels like many "debunkers" in this thread are cherry picking data and are being upfront disingenuous too. But if you think you are actually debunking remote viewing here, by NOT showing anything on your list there (systematically inflating evidence, cherry picking data, being disingenuous), so be it.

The weird thing about metabunk is that anytime I start a thread here I frequently get initially a few harrassing posts with some ad hominem attacks claiming under the guise of some lazy pseudo-scientific lingo that I am some kind of advocate for pseudo-science and conspiracy theories. I get it, a few threads I started were a bit unfocussed and the evidence was a couple of times not going beyond "Look, X claims wonderous story Y is true". This is especially true for the remote viewing topic which is more difficult to get a hold on because anything is quite vague in it in comparison to for instance wax hands or granite carvings. I also have my difficulties debunking them on my own due to time constraints and this may give the wrong impression that I am advocating for them (due to lack of critical commentary from myself).

But geesh folks... don't shoot the messenger.

 

[Landru]

The weird thing about metabunk is that anytime I start a thread here I frequently get initially a few harrassing posts with some ad hominem attacks claiming under the guise of some lazy pseudo-scientific lingo that I am some kind of advocate for pseudo-science and conspiracy theories. I get it, a few threads I started were a bit unfocussed and the evidence was a couple of times not going beyond "Look, X claims wonderous story Y is true". This is especially true for the remote viewing topic which is more difficult to get a hold on because anything is quite vague in it in comparison to for instance wax hands or granite carvings. I also have my difficulties debunking them on my own due to time constraints and this may give the wrong impression that I am advocating for them (due to lack of critical commentary from myself).

But geesh folks... don't shoot the messenger.

Try following the Posting Guidelines next time.

 

[Eburacum]

Well, I'm glad you posted the links you did, @SkepticSteve, since they introduced me to Ingo Swann and his appallingly bad remote vision of the planet Jupiter.

Hopefully, that one at least has been thoroughly disproven. If that is cherry-picking then I apologise; it does suggest to me that the other examples are also spurious data, but since I'm not familiar with Soviet weapons factories or swimming pools in Rinconada, I can't address them thoroughly.

 

[deirdre]

and this may give the wrong impression that I am advocating for them

i wasn't suggesting that.

Hopefully, that one at least has been thoroughly disproven. If that is cherry-picking then I apologise;

no you aren't cherry picking, you are doing what needs to be done. you are examining a specific claim of evidence. so big thumbs up on that!

although... instead of just saying "that's nothing like Jupiter is", it would be helpful to outside readers looking up info on remote viewing -ie the REAL target audience- if you posted proof of what Jupiter looks like or else i just have to take your word for it. So do i trust you or do i trust the guy who made a fancy youtube video? Anyone cans ay anything, doesnt make it true.

 

[Ann K]

Considering the close relationship of many of "the usual suspects" in paranormal subjects, I think it is fair to examine the authors in a way that most of us are not able to examine the papers themselves. Few of us have either the expertise or the time to chase down details of all the many claims made about studies from various people (and in various countries) about ESP, or the methodology and validity of the separate studies themselves. Nor is it always possible to make the distinction between people who simply study phenomena and those who promote them from a "true believer's" mindset, but we recognize that the latter deserve an additional measure of scrutiny.

So here is more from the wikipedia article on Darryl Bem, whose name alone conjures up a lot of suspicion:

Psychologist Susan Blackmore also criticized Bem's review of the Ganzfeld literature, noting that of the nine studies that were used for the review, five came from one laboratory (Chuck Honorton's). Blackmore also noted that Bem included experiments from Carl Sargent in the review, and Blackmore had previously found that Sargent had "deliberately violated his own protocols and in one trial had almost certainly cheated." According to Blackmore, psychologists reading Bem's review in Psychological Bulletin would "not have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved". Blackmore recounts having a discussion with Bem at a consciousness conference where she challenged him on his support of Sargent and Honorton's research; he replied "it did not matter". Writing for Skeptical Inquirer Blackmore states "But it does matter. ... It matters because Bem's continued claims mislead a willing public into believing that there is reputable scientific evidence for ESP in the Ganzfeld when there is not".[22][1]

 

[Amathia]

More from the wikipedia article on Darryl Bem:

Psychologist Susan Blackmore also criticized Bem's review of the Ganzfeld literature, noting that of the nine studies that were used for the review, five came from one laboratory (Chuck Honorton's). Blackmore also noted that Bem included experiments from Carl Sargent in the review, and Blackmore had previously found that Sargent had "deliberately violated his own protocols and in one trial had almost certainly cheated." According to Blackmore, psychologists reading Bem's review in Psychological Bulletin would "not have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved". Blackmore recounts having a discussion with Bem at a consciousness conference where she challenged him on his support of Sargent and Honorton's research; he replied "it did not matter". Writing for Skeptical Inquirer Blackmore states "But it does matter. ... It matters because Bem's continued claims mislead a willing public into believing that there is reputable scientific evidence for ESP in the Ganzfeld when there is not".[22][1]

Okay, I am not calling you or anyone else out here, I just want to make an observation. Something I'm noticing in this thread particularly is that the main method of debunking involves looking up the name of a study's author, looking at the Wikipedia page (or a different site) for said author, scrolling down to the "criticisms" part of the page, and pasting those criticisms of the author here. Now, no one here is explicitly claiming that because such and such a person has expressed criticism of the author that therefore the author's work can be considered to be officially debunked, but at the very least that's the initial impression this approach gives off. That a study has been criticized by another academic is not interesting because that's par for the course in all of science. We critique each other's work, even the best studies published in nature are routinely critiqued. Any serious engagement with the topic wouldn't stop at citing critiques of these papers from skeptics but would instead dive into the claims and counterclaims being made and actually get into the details of the arguments.

If Bern's work has been called into question, that's fine, we can find plenty of other papers to look at by other authors:

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the results of all meta-analyses on anomalous cognition conducted between 1989 and 2021 in order to find moderators associated with greater effect sizes. Method: We included all meta-analyses of studies related to anomalous cognition published up to 2021. Results: Our dataset, accumulated over more than 80 years of investigation, refers to 11 meta-analyses related to six different states of consciousness. The evidence clearly shows that anomalous cognition seems possible and its effects can be enhanced by using a combination of some non-ordinary or altered states of consciousness (e.g., dreaming, ganzfeld, etc.), coupled with free-response procedures, or neurophysiological dependent variables. These conditions facilitate an alternative form of cognition seemingly unconstrained by the known biological characteristics of the sense organs and the brain. Conclusion: The accumulated evidence expands our understanding of the mind-brain relation and the nature of the human mind.

Maybe what I'm describing would be better suited to a reading group than a thread here, but I've found the best way to sharpen my ability to think about a specific topic is to dive into the papers myself and talk about the perceived flaws of the study with other folks without assuming from the get-go that it's all bunk and that the purpose of reading said study is to explicitly debunk it. Since this subject is so massive maybe the best way to do this would be to pick an individual study that is generally considered to be of high quality in this specific domain and pick it apart line by line.

 

[deirdre]

Now, no one here is explicitly claiming that because such and such a person has expressed criticism of the author that therefore the author's work can be considered to be officially debunked,

well esp. since Anne's quote says only slightly more than 1/4th the studies are allegedly "bad". whats slightly more than 1/4th of 9? it cant be 3 because that would be 1/3rd of papers..so.. 2.3? 2.5?

 

[deirdre]

There's an app I use called RV Tournament that lets you try to RV a new target every day. There are two ways to score your results. Either self-scoring, or having your submissions be scored by judges who are blind to what the actual target image is and are asked to determine which of two potential images the target is based on the sketches and words of the person you're scoring.

I stopped trying to RV myself since my results were even worse than what you'd expect to find by random chance , but the judging process is pretty fun.

ah. the business is in Las Vegas. No wonder you can't concentrate properly! The advertisement video is a pic of lightbulbs, you know how many lightbulbs there are in Las Vegas?. jeez louise, talk about stacking the deck against you