Posted: Oct 21, 2010 3:40 am
jerome wrote:Yeah, but the whole psi concept strikes me as meaningless. I'm on recod for nearly twenty years now saying so. Psi is a wonderfully useless category, hard to define and philosophically difficult. I'm not sure it's useful. I prefer to deal with actual behaviours, actual claims, and specifics. I see no reason to assume an ability ot ay influence dice telekinetically would be linked to say success at card guessing tasks (PK versus ESP -- in fact some research suggest people good at one are poor at the other, and vice versa.)
Indeed.. it seems to me as if they're basing their conclusions of what this "psi" is on their own ideas of how it's presented in folklore or books, rather than coming to conclusions based on whatever data they can collect.
jerome wrote:Still let's run with an unknown naturalistic psi function as a concept...
Yes, that is exactly what they do - I mention it in my response to Wiseman's CSI article on my blog (http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/1187/) They try to find "star subjects" and work with them.
Thanks for the info
I figured they would but I don't understand why Bem didn't. It's a bit unfortunate really since his experiments do seem to be fairly decently designed, so it would have been interesting to see what kind of results his "stars" got. (Obviously by re-testing them - not by taking their data and pooling it together, as that would give you a false effect).
jerome wrote:However, let's pause for a moment and question the assumptions.
If psi exists, what is it? What purpose does it serve? Well it would have to be teleological, goal seeking activity, designed to bring about outcomes - probably survival and reproduction of the orgnaism. So we would expect people with high psi scores to be adaptively advantaged (there are loads of papers on psi andnatural selection as you can imagine). Richard Broughton back in 1993 or 94 posed the question, could psi just be what we see as luck? Richard Wiseman wrote an excellent book length examnation of that (and dids some seriously good papers on National Lotter winners as i recall too) -- http://www.amazon.co.uk/Luck-Factor-Sci ... skept01-21 - and he concluded "luck" is actually down to personality factors. I ought to re-read that book.
Hmm.. it could be a result of natural selection, but I think we'd be jumping the gun a bit by looking for a cause of a behavior before we conclusively demonstrate if it exists, understand what it exactly is and what conditions bring it about.
jerome wrote:(As an aside, Wiseman's new book looks interesting..)
"Richard Wiseman’s Supernormality, a book just sold to Macmillan in the UK in a “big” six-figure deal. Supernormality deals with the way that scientific research into the apparent fringes of psychology—mediums, lucid dreami...ng and telepathy—has led to serious breakthroughs which can be applied to everyday life...."
I can't find much information on it, sounds like it could be interesting though..
jerome wrote:So anyway, if psi does exist, then it may be that certain people ARE better at it than others - and those people might be more lucky, charismatic, or many other things - who knows? What si the case is that parapsychologists have experimented with screening for star subjects, a classic example being the Robertson-Roy "mediumship" (actually anomalous transfer of information - as the authors point out one need not invoke "spirits") experiments i spent so much time on on the Life after Death debate on the old RD.net forum. In those experiments only those ho passed a sort of intial screening process got to participate - the PRISM experiemts stands for Psychical Research Involving Selected mediums as i recall)
The Maimonides Dream Lab experiements also threw up "star subjects" - and so on. Most of the time however experiments are conducted with whoever we can get, usuallly studenst hoping for credits for participating in a research project or required to by the terms of some agreement in their psych classes!
Did the results of the star subjects differ from the non-stars?
jerome wrote:I am not sure whether psi would be evenly distributed - I don't even know what psi is. In folklore of course, the idea of star subject and psychicism in the Celtic/Romany/Seventh son/romanticised indigenous peoples etc, etc is very stong, but that is almost certainly pat leats partly social sterotyping nd the allure of the mysterious "other" if we can slip in to cultural studies mode a moment.
I'd imagine that if "psi" (or any of the individual abilities specifically) were simply normal behavioral effects, then we should expect them to fall along a bell curve, with some being better than others.