Another thought is that, when you’re sitting and staring at the back of someone’s head – say you’re in an airport or bus terminal – you’re sitting quite still. It might very well be that we are instinctively prepared to sense the stillness of another person nearby us.
A field-test would have to take this into account. (In fact, a test might be made of this hypothesis in the first place: do people naturally detect the stillness of people nearby them? I’d bet a pickle that we do!)
There have been many tests on the psychic staring effect, and most researchers found it to be another psychic dead end. I say “most”, because there is one “researcher” who claims success-Rupert Sheldrake. Of course, Sheldrake is infamous for his claims of success in a wide range of woo subjects.
This short essay on psychic research begins with “spiritualism” in 1848 and continues on through all the major studies done through the last century and a half.
Worth a small diversion to to give you a bit of insight into what you’ve stated here. Yours is a common misinterpretation of how the world works.
Coincidences have the potential to happen all the time. It very much* is* selection bias to report their success/failure or not.
Take a typical day, consider all the thousands of activities and actions and interactions and responses and thoughts that occur to you…just you. And consider the network of tens or hundreds or even thousands of family, friends and colleagues that you could possibly connect to.
e.g. two tiny, tiny examples.
1)How many people do you think about during your day? how many times might you receive a call in a day? what are the chances of any of those two things coinciding? Pretty small eh?..sure…but read on
Now consider the opportunity space , for just your own day, within which a coincidence or remarkable thing “could” happen. Now multiply that for the people you know, then multiply for the millions in your country, then multiply for the billions in the world.
This is simply the law of large numbers. get a billion people each rolling a billion sided die often enough and you’ll eventually get one of them rolling the number they first thought of. That is basically what happens every single day to all of us. Now those individual stories are the ones that get flagged up but absolutely nothing interesting is going on. We would be able to collect tens of thousands of such stories over our lifetimes…in fact we should expect to see lots and lots of them.
All coincidence, no supernatural or paranormal powers needed to explain it, nothing to see here.
We ignore all the times that coincidences could have happened but didn’t (thousands for each of us every day) and only ever remember the ones that* did*.
^ OMG. That was post #284! That’s amazing. My house address is 284!!
How’d you do that?
Even more amazing, 2842 8428 4284 2842 is my credit card number that expires 02/28 (CVV code 284)!
I can trust you guys not to do anything nefarious with this information, right?
Fuck me! :eek: My father was born close to '28 … and in an even-numbered month to boot! This defies explanation.
It seems that it is not only coincidences that contribution to the supposedly(and as of yet unconfirmed) high number of supposedly psychic occurrences. Psychic investigators have rigged the deck by coming up with “Psi Missing”, where a high number of misses in a psychic test is supposedly evidence that the testee has psychic abilities but is purposefully screwing up the test because she/he doesn’t like the tester, and then there’s “Psychic Drift”, where the testee isn’t making a wrong guess, but is receiving information from another source that interfering.
Come up with enough excuses like this, and anybody can be “psychic”.
You forget the classic: optional stopping and starting. Don’t start counting until the first “hit,” and stop counting after a certain number of “misses,” and you’ve heavily stacked the deck in favor of “finding” something.
That, and a few more ways the system has been rigged over the years, is mentioned in this entry on ESP. Other favorites are “Displacement”, where the claim is that the answer given isn’t wrong…it’s just a reading of a future card because of accidental clairvoyance, and “Analytical and Associative Overlay”, where the testee is not wrong…she/he is supposedly describing something associated with the target.
Of course, with enough imagination from a true-believing tester who wants good results, it’s not hard to find some connection if you think about it hard enough.
All very well, but it’s not as if the pseudo-sceptics don’t do the same thing. They perform tests, they don’t get the results they expect, then they “adjust” the results, or outright lie about them. look up Mars Effect for a famous example.
Are you prepared to give them equal criticism?
Wow. You haven’t used the phrase “pseudo-sceptic” in a long time. Are you using the first definition or the second on this page?
As far as giving “equal criticism” to something like the Mars Effect, I would consider it…in another thread about that subject. In THIS thread, talking about things that have nothing to do with ESP and the like just to give an artificial “balance” to the conversation might be considered a hijack.
I’m using the correct definition, of course. The “definition” you linked to is a hateful piece written *by *pseudosceptics.
Now, how about answering the question?
Sometimes “Skeptical” scientists performing ESP tests don’t get the results they were expectring, and adjust them aqccordingly.
Are you prepared to condemn them too?
If you have an example that pertains to the subject of this thread, I’ll take a good look at it. If all you want to do is rail at what you call “pseudo-sceptics”, we can do that in another thread, I suppose.
Okay, consider this investigationof the starer effect.
“Demonstration one” involved staring at random people, then asking them if they felt it.
Two people said they *were *aware of it.
The experimenter assessed the credibility of these two, decided not to believe them, and discarded the results. But the others, the ones who fitted his assumptions, he just accepted their word for it without assessing their credibility.
It’s a case of accepting the data that fit his beliefs, and adjusting the data that doesn’t. And that is the same thing you are complaining about in others.
So, are you going to complain about him too? Or will you say that it doesn’t matter when psuedo-skeptics do it?
Dismissing your pet term “pseudo-skeptic”(or “pseudo-sceptic”), I am going to quote directly from the link you just provided:
Sounds like a damn good reason to throw those two out of the group to me.
Actually, five people, not two, said they were aware of it. He discarded only those two, but accepted three others that didn’t “fit his assumptions.” But since he wasn’t doing any statistical tests, it hardly mattered whether 5 out of 40 or 3 out of 47 showed awareness of being stared at. Either way, under the conditions described, a large majority of people showed no evidence of being aware of being stared at.
That said, that “demonstration” was so uncontrolled I wouldn’t consider it much more than anecdotal myself.
The second test was much more controlled…and pretty much confirmed the same results.
Every one of your links all seem to lead to the same website; the skeptic’s dictionary. It pretty much goes without saying that any topic in this thread that anyone would want to discuss is already going to have its very own entry in skeptic’s dictionary.
The site and its founder, the author of several of these opinion pieces disguised as scientific challenges that you’ve linked to, and a person who made his living publishing them, have both been accused of pseudo-skepicism so that is a perfectly valid point to bring up to someone who uses it as their apparently sole source of information.
You maintain that someone like Radin is too biased to even be trusted to have a collection of links to psi research on his website, and that even mentioning it in this thread is some sort of advocacy for ESP, but your chosen source, a biased pseudo-skeptical money-making website can be taken as factual, unbiased evidence of anything? You don’t ever link to the rebuttals these researchers have made in answer to the challenges presented, you just link to the challenges and leave it as though that were the end of the story.
A true scientific skeptic doesn’t use previous failures or even a theory’s inability to fit into the currently known understanding of science as reasons to declare any new research invalid before it has even begun which is exactly what you are trying to do.
Here are some differences between skeptics and pseudo-skeptics taken from the wiki on the subject:
Pseudo skepticism:
Scientific skepticism:
Why do you consider it irrelevant for someone to point out the only source you’ve cited for any of your arguments is clearly involved in the former?
Right.
I also note in the discussion the author mentioned the two people who were certain they had been stared at in the first demonstration.