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Will_Newsome comments on [post redacted] - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: Will_Newsome 26 January 2012 01:30AM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 05 March 2012 06:39:48AM 0 points [-]

Also our discussion caused me to update somewhat away from thinking that parapsychology is positive rather than neutral or negative evidence for psi; that wasn't a belief I held strongly in the first place. I think it's unfortunate that the focus was on Bem rather than on, say, PEAR, and would like to discuss the PEAR studies specifically at some point, those being the studies that I am most familiar with. Anyway thanks for putting so much effort into looking into the question; I think it'd be cool if you made a post specifically about lessons learned from psi and how they apply to other fields, especially the heuristics and biases parts of social psychology. The last paragraph of your most recent post was I think the most important.

Comment author: CarlShulman 05 March 2012 07:14:15AM 0 points [-]

lessons learned from psi and how they apply to other fields

One lesson is that it's possible to waste the valuable time and money of many people by not checking claims before throwing them out. Bogus papers and other nonsense can create negative externalities quite a bit larger than their cost of production. Applying local checks (confirmatory experiments, active search for disconfirmation) is worth doing before fouling the common pool.

If you want to talk about PEAR you should present your arguments and references, and make a prediction about how much of the important stuff (as judged later) you have found. I don't want to play whack-a-mole.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 05 March 2012 07:29:41AM 0 points [-]

If you want to talk about PEAR you should present your arguments and references, and make a prediction about how much of the important stuff (as judged later) you have found. I don't want to play whack-a-mole.

I get the impression that the opportunity cost of your time is high and that I could never be confident enough that my presentation of the arguments was at a sufficiently high level that it'd be worth taking the risk of imposing even a minor moral obligation on you to respond, so that'll probably never happen.

Comment author: CarlShulman 05 March 2012 08:49:58AM *  3 points [-]

Your continued posting on this is more trouble to me than efficiently responding. A few quick points:

  • The PEAR people are now selling supposed psi-controlled-meditation-lamps for $189 each as well as DVDs and other junk; the PEAR research was donation supported, and positive results meant more donations
  • In Damien Broderick's pro-psi book (in agreement with the PEAR docs) he notes that "PK" effects show up in the literature even if they're already set in advance (e.g. digits of pi). Broderick's account is that the psi reaches across time and space; bad statistics are time-symmetrical, PK takes a big probability penalty (even aside from time, the people don't get to see or be present at the setting of the numbers.
  • PK experiments "worked" with macroscopic objects like dice, and were said to so work by psi-proponents like Radin (they also have positive meta-analyses, declining with better controls, dealing with cheating and misrecording, etc), but can't be delivered for tasks like moving very light (stationary) objects, affecting ultra-sensitive scales, etc; bad statistics work regardless of scale, but for psi that's a wacky combo
  • Failure of replication
  • Failure of registration, lack of blinding, specified confirmatory studies with large fixed samples (this could have been done by using a random number generator in the hands of a third party, with electronic communication, leaving an unambigous trail)
  • Effect sizes so small (a few per ten thousand according to PEAR) that the combination of biased errors in data entry (found in audits of other studies), tiny amounts of fraud (there were many staff over time), some publication bias, etc, could easily generate the results
  • Broken up into many individualized experiments: combined with optional stopping and other effects, enabling concentration of "hits" in the published component (larger studies, smaller effects)
  • Multiple long-term and rotating employees with the opportunity for some fraud, it's not a question of one person
Comment author: Will_Newsome 05 March 2012 08:59:13AM 2 points [-]

Your continued posting on this is more trouble to me than efficiently responding.

Aight, then I won't post about parapsychology.

Thanks for the quick points, I disagree on a few points but I think it's essentially certain that you're taking into account the significance of failure of registration and replication in ways that I don't have enough knowledge to have done, which almost certainly overrides any superior knowledge I might have on the points where I disagree.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 05 March 2012 09:03:04AM *  1 point [-]

Also I really would like an example of a case where I stuck my head out about decision theory and it was chopped off; I think there's a serious risk that you're overgeneralizing, especially as I never had much confidence in (my appraisal of) the worth of the parapsychology literature in the first place.

ETA: My interest in parapsychology was explicitly the result of rationalization; I started out by thinking that psi was real, then looked at the literature to see which parts seemed like legitimate support of that known fact. Unsurprisingly the rationalized findings weren't as good as they seemed. This style of model-building has very little to do with the style of model-building I use when actually thinking, e.g. thinking about decision theory or moral philosophy generally.

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