Here is an informative little video by a guy named Steve Mould who does a lot of “science” videos on youtube. Its all (ostensibly) about how simple little processes can make “meaningful” structures from stochastic processes-and he uses magnetic shaped little parts to show this. Its a popular channeled followed by millions, and is often referenced by other famous people in the science community-and his fans love it.
And hey, it does show how meaningful structures CAN form from random processes. Right? So you can learn from this. Wink, wink. Nod, nod. And all the skeptics will know exactly what he is really saying. Cause we are all part of the clique that knows this language-the language of the skeptic propagandist. I mean, he almost hides it, the real message, it is just under the surface, and the less skeptically aware, the casualist, might even miss it. The casualist might not learn as much about Steve Mould and what he is trying to say here-but the skeptic knows. “See, atheism is true! Spread the word!” Steve has given the wink. The same wink used by DeGrasse Tyson, and Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, Brian Greene, and on and on. You know the one.
And for 95% of his viewers, whether they know it or not, they got his message. I mean, look, its plain as day, right? He just showed you, that is certainly a meaningful structure that arose from random processes, isn’t it? Its defintely meaningful, its a, a, a , well, it’s shape that, we have a, a name for…that’s kind of…anyway, defintely random, I mean other than the magnets and the precut shapes, and the little ball with nothing else inside, and the shaking only until its just right then stopping kind of way…That’s random kind of right???
But there are 5% percent of his viewers that spotted his little wink and nod, and said, hold on a second. If you want us to believe that your little explanation about how simply life can form from nonsense without a plan, how blind exactly do you want us to be? 95%, they are hooked, you got them (Ryan StallardThere are so many creationist videos this obliterates. Especially 4:18.). But some likeGhryst VanGhod helpfully point out: “this is incorrect. the kinesin travels along fibres within the cell and takes the various molecules exactly where they need to be, they are not randomly “jumbling around in solution”. https://youtu.be/gbycQf1TbM0 ” and then you get to see a video that tells you just a few more of the things that are ACTUALLY happening which are even more amazing if you weren’t already skeptical (the real kind).
And if you go through some more of the comments you will notice a few more (real) skeptics, not the wink and nod kind, and you will start to notice why the wink nod propogandist skeptics everywhere you look in modern culture are a very puposefully designed cancer on knowledge and thought.
Right, like not saying there is free will, but giving you a brain anyeurism if you do some things Jock decides are evil but not a brain anyeurism for things perhaps his wife thinks are evil.
Plus ça change…
Unless you are saying it is illogically impossible for an omnipotent deity to limit the exercise of free will , not seeing your point. My Catechism also taught that the choice to intend to do evil was evil.Seems to me ,In Jock’s example , free choice to intend to do evil has exercised . If you hire an undercover cop to murder your wife , you go to jail.
Do you think the concepts of predestination and free will are compatible?
But you are happy to go along with paid definitions of good and evil? So why is that even a problem for you?
Someone has decided that they want to do something (put a particular ethnic group in concentration camps) and the world has labeled it as evil. You are supporting that person and so you obtain that label for yourself.
So it seems that evil is whatever you want it to be phoodoo. People fought wars against the likes of you.
How can you be so sure it isn’t the other way round?
Radin has answered their criticisms here and here
That depends on what experiment you are talking about and how it was analysed. As in probabilities in throwing dice, in the case of a long running experiment the actual results will converge more accurately on the predicted results with an increase in the number of sessions. If an experiment ran for two years what would be the reason for treating each year as a separate experiment?
Do you have a link to information about these sham replications?
I have a sufficient understanding of the math involved.
NO, Charlie! I did not ask you to link to Radin’s (misrepresentation or misunderstanding) of Walleczek and Stillfried, I asked you why you think they are wrong. If the answer is a meek “because I trust Radin” then just say it, and we can move on to some other topic of conversation.
When I first mentioned Radin on this thread, I noted that Radin does not appear to understand the difference between random and systematic error. Do you?
Well, if the effect is robust, one should be able to break the data set apart, and still retain a strong effect size in both sub-populations (at the loss of some power, obviously). The FDA often conducts such post-hoc subgroup analysis. It’s an absolute no-no for the drug sponsor to do, however. Do you understand why?
It’s right there in the links you provided, for heaven’s sake!
Of course, your second link includes the following classic from Radin:
This happens all the time.
But heigh-ho, and with sufficient post-hoc data massage, we can rescue an effect size that is small compared with the precision of our instruments. Strange, that.
I have read what I could find on the 2012-2013 experiment including criticism. I wasn’t looking specifically at the analysis of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but as you mentioned it I’ve had a look.. The Global Consciousness Project’s data on 9/11 looks fairly convincing to me. I’ve attached a graph from the website. I did read the independent analysis by May, Ph.D. and Spottiswoode and Bancel’s answer to their criticism.
I notice that May and Spottiswoode excluded data from random number generator data that they considered to have deviated so far from random that they assumed them to be faulty.
Sorry about that image size. I’ll try again
Oh, Charlie, you are doing it again. Instead of being willing to discuss the evidence (or alternatively admit that you lack the requisite skillset…) you link to the writings of others that you claim address these concerns.
To put it briefly, they do not.
The May and Spottiswoode article that you linked to is entitled “[GCP]: An Independent Analysis of the 11 September 2001 Events”.
The Bancel article that you linked to is entitled “Reply to May and Spottiswoode’s “The [GCP]: Identifying the Source of Psi”, so it is rather obviously NOT a response to the first article. Did you not notice this?
No matter, the Bancel article was illuminating, although not in a good way.
According to Bancel, the correct metric is NOT the variance in RNG output, but rather the correlation between pairs of RNG’s. Hoo boy! That’s an interesting post-hoc specification. With roughly 38 RNGs running, how many different ways could I pair them up, post-hoc?
Would you confirm something for me though, I want to make sure I have this correct: according to May and Spottiswoode,
PaulRoger Nelson had a look at the 9/11 data, and then made his “prediction” based off the 1998 bombing, which used a time window from 10 minutes before the event to three hours after the event.“In this case we will specify 10 minutes before the first crash to four hours after…”
which extension of the time frame was critical in hitting statistical significance.
I would like to get my facts straight in this regard.
All kvetching aside, this dataset is truly awesome, and importantly, is large enough that it could easily be split into an “exploratory” subset and a “confirmatory” subset. Then, with suitable blinding protocols in place, we could avoid all this unseemly bickering about post-hoc specifications and actually do a proper experiment or two.
Has nobody thought of this idea before?
E2 correct name
You claimed “We can in theory measure the effect of telepathy but the results are consistent in indicating there is no effect.”.
So before I answer your questions can you tell me which results are you referring to?
I’m sure in many other universes she does have. 🙂
Depends on who is doing the looking. Radin and those at IONS would most certainly say the evidence is incontrovertible.
And I could provide personal testimony but only I can accept that evidence as justifiable, I would not expect nor wish anyone else to take my word for it and accept it as evidence.
The evidence for what exactly?
In essence everything where the influence of the dishonest or deluded has been removed.
As soon as the claimants are put under proper scientific and slight of hand expert scrutiny their claims vanish.
phoodoo hates Randi with a passion.
There are many many accounts of “strong” PSI abilities failing unexpectedly under such scrutiny.
Who says there can’t be a a “polytrichum” archetype? No two plants of the genus polytrichum are alike, not even those of the same species. But they can all be recognized as such because they conform to the archetypal polytrichum.
You are close to understanding the archetype when you say it’s a completely imaginary concept. It is something that can be perceived by the mind but not by the senses. Does that make it less real? Of course not. It is through our active imagination that we can take what we get from our senses and combine these observations into the reality. We do not have sense perception of the growth and decay processes, the interaction of gametes, the photosynthesis and every other such attribute. These are all objective features which belong to the plant any yet we can only grasp within our minds.
As Daniel Christian Wahlput it:
Active imagination, as opposed to mind wandering, is our means of perceiving the higher reality hidden within the sense world. It is the same with these words I am writing. You can analyse the letters until the cows come home but that won’t reveal the meaning of the whole arrangement. The meaning is hidden within the arrangement of letters, not in the letters themselves. DNA is the alphabet of life which can be arranged in a creative way. It is the way in which an alphabet is used that provides the meaning of the script.
Here again is Kantian Naturalist’s list
That’s a fine list and well worth taking a good look at. Thanks for providing it.
Not sure on the point you are trying to make other than demonstrating the progression of humans from creatures to creators.
Gospel of John 10:34:
Genesis 1:26:
We have the power to create but do we have the wisdom to take extreme care in how we wield it? Apart from our actual misuse of power there are plenty of science fiction writers who have played with the consequences our shortfall in possessing this wisdom.
It is not “set up” in the embryo, it is the embryo. There is a reason why it is referred to as the subtle body. If we imagine the life of a person who lives a long life and dies of natural causes then i the beginning the etheric “body” is very active and the physical substance is proportionally very little. At the end of life the etheric “body” is the insignificant aspect and the physical substance dominates. We begin with the growing and development of form and end up with the loss of form. The DNA in each of our cells could have the same basic makeup throughout our lives, but the form building and dissolution tells its own story.
Imagine a creator that is all-powerful and all-loving. This being can give its love to all the other beings it has created without losing any of the love it has. Things stand in a different relationship with power. In order to cede power to these other beings it has to sacrifice its own power. It willingly gives up its omnipotence. The God has to make a sacrifice so that the products of Its creation may exist.
A few years ago now my wife suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm and against all the odds she survived. And apart from her memory being affected slightly, the occasional headache and some dents and bumps in her skull, she is fine.
And just as I write this my wife opened a Christmas card and read a note from one or our friends that her father has had a brain haemorrhage, but he is slowly recovering.
I am finding synchronicities like this happening all the time. We had arranged to meet up with my wife’s sister and her husband to exchange presents. We live two hundred plus miles apart. Something came up and my wife was sending her an e-mail to say we wouldn’t be able to make it. She was on the point of pressing “send” when a text came in to her phone. It was her sister saying that she would not be able to make it either.
So we parcelled up their presents and sent them instead. A couple of days later my wife said, “I wonder if they have got their presents yet? As soon as she had said it she got a text. It was from her sister saying the presents had arrived.
CharlieM,
I’m saying no controlled experiment has shown any non-physical cause for a physical effect. None. Maybe there has been an experiment that does imply a supernatural cause for some physical effect. Dean Radin? I think he’s, best case, deluded. But let’s look at the methods, results and discussion of a Radin paper or any other researcher and publication. Haven’t we already been over this? Bring forward your best evidence that supernatural causes can impinge on this physical universe or any subset.
So is the meaning of the sentence above:
a) That parsing the specific sequence of letters is key to understanding the message and that you saw a parallel with perceiving archetypes within the mind?
or
b) That giant pink smurfs live peacefully in the sugarcane meadows?
Now for the latter interpretation I used my active imagination, yet I strongly doubt it corresponds to some “higher reality”. It’s OK to use some imagination to reconstruct the reality behind sensory perceptions, but if it fails to deliver useful insights than we should let go of it.
So here is my answer, also arranged in a creative way;
nweurpe f ane’ma noe mgotratoYgeho tlfo g n.
Moral of the story: In the context of how heritable information is processed in organisms, the DNA sequence matters, and we know what physical processes influence the sequence of DNA.
The question I asked three times in a row was:
And now you conflate the signaling pattern with the organism it is part of. That’s not holism; that’s just incorrect. The bio-electric pattern is NOT the embryo. You explained nothing.
Why don’t you just admit that you don’t know?
Humans are not very good at understanding probability.
What is the probability that you would go on holiday to a destination you picked independently, and then see a work colleague on the sun lounger next to you, in a different country?
For that to happen is PSI required?
There are innumerable other things that have actually demonstrably happened of a similar nature. Nothing there indicates any supernatural abilities.
How many other people sent presents and wondered if they got them and did not get a SMS?
In essence you ‘notice’ when these things happen but don’t ‘notice’ when they don’t. This skews our perception of events and their probabilities.
This is why repeatable experiments rather than anecdote are the only way to see what’s actually happening here.
Seconded.
I don’t think there is much of a problem with the maths on either side. The problem lies with the selection of the data.
For instance, I’ve attached a graph using data obtained at the time of the 9/11 terror attack. The vertical axis is derived from the Stouffer Z-scores measuring the deviation from null. Can you explain what is wrong with this finding?
Because they have been highly selective in the data they chose to analyse. What Radin looks for is an overall trend using Fast Fourier Transform analysis. Walleczek and Stillfried reported Radin as obtaining results which were false positives because they (Walleczek and Stillfried) had not taken all the data into account.
Radin has been working with probabilities for 3 or 4 decades, I’m sure he understands the difference. He has taken every conceivable step to eliminate systematic error. What specific errors do you forsee?
They are not looking for strength of signal, they are looking for a consistent trend.
You mean the link where it is also written:
So further exploration of the data did show an effect.
This post-hoc analysis was carried out because the funder (Walleczek) had asked for information that the planned analysis did not provide and so further exploratory work was needed. As Radin wrote:
The strength of the arguments from Radin, Nelson, etc does not come from isolated experiments, but from gathering as much data as possible over an ongoing period of time.
Well, yes, I agree: the selection of the data and the selection of the analysis too. But I suspect you were complaining about Walleczek and Stillfried rather than Radin. The Mote and Beam Department is calling.
It’s the result of post-hoc data massage.
This is absolute rubbish.
His experience makes his failure all the more worrying. What specific errors do I “forsee”? That his effect size will be reproducible in a sham experiment, proving that he has failed to eliminate systematic error.
Huh? They are looking for a departure from random. A “consistent trend” is a wholly inadequate specification.
That’s right! In an “exploratory analysis” (did you miss that bit?) Would you care to defend the way that they report p-values for their ‘exploratory analysis’, or will you once more plead your blind faith in their competence and probity?
Again, utter rubbish. Every single analysis that Radin has reported a psychophysical effect for has been a post-hoc analysis, or replicatable in a sham experiment.
I’ll say. He rolls together the results of many flawed experiments in a so-called “meta-analysis” and multiplies the p-values together.
It evidently impresses the rubes, and keeps the funding flowing.
“Based on the planned analysis, no evidence for a psychophysical effect was found.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744610/
HARKing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HARKing
So there is controversy on the validity of Radin’s experiments purporting to show an observer-generated influence on quantum effects. Why doesn’t someone repeat the experiments? If the influence is real, the results would confirm it. The implications, human minds influencing matter, are huge. You’d think there’d be a scramble to learn more.
Many of those you are criticising have spent much of their careers working on these projects and to me they seem to have gained quite deep knowledge in this area.
I do have some experience of recording and monitoring data trending. I’ve witnessed first hand from the beginnings of aircraft health and usage monitoring systems on helicopters. This was pretty basic to start with in the ’90s but as the technology and computer power advanced this became a very important aspect of aircraft safety and pre-emptive action which has no doubt prevented many serious accidents.
So I may not have had any academic experience of this sort of thing but I do have practical experience.
I’m going to be pretty busy for a day or two so I’ll just post short responses when I can and continue my answers when I can,
I went to https://global-mind.org/extract.html and accessed the data for 9/11.
Unfortunately, some of the RNGs (“EGG”s) were glitching: if the count for an individual second is off by more than 6.36 sigma, then the GCP database will refuse to return a value for that RNG, since it is clearly malfunctioning.
When CharlieM wrote:
He was not criticizing May and Spottiswoode, he was complimenting them on following GCP-approved procedures.
Despite the glitching, I was able to find 13 pairs of RNGs with data throughout the relevant period. Following the instructions of Bancel, I looked at the degree of correlation between these pairs of RNGs.
Here I have plotted the departure from expectation of the cumulative variance of discrepancies between paired RNG’s.
Note that the GCP data is reported in Greenwich Mean Time, so the Eastern Daylight times of 08:46, 09:02, 09:30, 09:59, and 10:28 correspond to 12:46, 13:02, 13:30, 13:59, and 14:28 GMT on 9/11. (Plotted as Blue diamonds on graph)
Clearly there is a dramatic, robust and highly significant psychophysical effect beginning shortly before 09:00 EDT and continuing through the morning (EDT).
Happy New Year to everyone. Here’s hoping you are all safe and well despite Covid.
Where was I? Oh yes! 🙂
It’s all part of the global consciousness program (GCP). The GCP. This project is one ongoing experiment just as in Lenski’s long-term evolution experiment.
If the random event generator (REG) which gives two distinct outputs is truly random then as the number of events increases then the closer the probability for either occurring in equal numbers should approach 50%. The REGs being used in the project produce a couple of hundred events per second.
They observed that REGs were being affected in some way and this led to questions such as, “what effect will world wide events have?” or “does the spatial separation have an effect on REG outputs?”
Close to 1500. And an unexpected correlation between REGs was found. They found that the distance from events made a difference, this was unexpected as they had assumed that spatial distance should not affect the result.
There was structure where none should be present.
I think the statistically significant critical time frame depends on the precision of the data gathering and the overall effect on people’s emotions. May, Spottiswoode, and Nelson must have agreed on the time frame used for the formal experiment concerning 9/11.
The precise timing was for the sake of a formal analysis, but the fact is the data are there for the days and weeks surrounding the event. I think that the larger picture is significant. Data taken over a period of days gives a clearer picture of the overall effect.
Alan was asking about facts and figures, maybe he would like to take this further. My mind is open about their results but I’ll leave it to the experts to argue over. I don’t have the time available to spend on this.
Facts would be a prerequisite for taking “this” forward.
The people promoting it should take it further, no?
How convenient.
So, just so I understand, here we have prima facie evidence that PSI is real and that RNGs are affected by it.
And suddenly time is a factor? The greatest discovery of potentially all time and nobody who believes this to be true seems to have time to parse a bit of data?
Shows you how much the believers really actually believe….
CharlieM,
You really have no clue about the math involved here. Simply put, ANY post-hoc analysis, or “exploratory analysis” has no statistical import whatsoever. If you want to show that some behavior represents a significant departure from random, you need to define exactly how you are going to do the analysis before you peek at the data. Thus Nelson’s 9/11 “prediction” was no such thing.
The sad fact is, that the GCP dataset is large enough that researchers could split it into an “exploratory” subset and a (wholly separate) “confirmatory” subset. They could then poke around and study the effects of distance, or what the correct timeframe might be, to their hearts’ content, THEN formulate an explicit hypothesis to be tested on the “confirmatory” data set. This point has been made to them; in fact the May and Spottiswoode article that you linked to ends with this recommendation:
hence my rhetorical question. This is what a grown-up would do. Radin has never reported any such result. Strange, that.
I asked you
You replied,
[spit-take]
Oh, Charlie, that’s sweet. It’s “close to” 8 x 10^21, so your estimate is a million million million-fold off.
Which is what I took advantage of, in my demonstration:
I was able to demonstrate a “dramatic, robust and highly significant psychophysical effect beginning shortly before 09:00 EDT and continuing through the morning (EDT).” using the data from 9/11. My effect size was far, far larger than the one reported by GCP (my significance line is for Z = 20 !!)
Of course, I used the data from 9/11/2000, that is, a year before the Twin Towers were hit.
The freedom provided by post-hoc data massage is stupendous.
Reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/02/dembski-and-the.html
Dr Dr Dembski even fell for it, for a while at least.
Announcement: Jock declares all evolution science is bullshit. He has seen the light! He sincerely apologizes for any previous comments that may have suggested otherwise.
Please try to be respectful of his new position. Don’t start insulting him or make any ad hominem attacks. Remember the site rules. That includes you, Alan!
Is there any interpretation you could imagine, where this might NOT be the case? Otherwise, you would seem to be projecting your foregone conclusions onto others.
I am especially interested how intelligent design creationism escapes that version of post hoc analysis. Perhaps it was written down somewhere before creation week started?
phoodoo appears to not have an imagination.
But this is Jock’s theory, not mine. He is the one who believes you can’t do evolutionary science.
Isn’t it weird that you think its a problem for intelligent design?
I don’t think so. Rather I am guessing that you misunderstood what Jock meant by “post-hoc analysis”.
No, that’s an inference based on a faulty conclusion.
I’m surprised you did not put words in quotes to invent a quote as you are wont to do.
There is no data for analysis in intelligent design post hoc or otherwise. Unless you know better?
You mean its not a problem for intelligent design? And also not a problem for PSI research?
Yes, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for phoodoo’s bizarre claim here. In his defense, I will note that a lot of biology research is pretty much Bayesian, so it may appear to phoodoo that there’s a problem with post-hoc analysis, when there is not. I would also note that some biologists are a bit naff with their stats (assuming their data has a Normal d/n, for example), but the stuff that really upsets phoodoo, like phylogenetics, is done with the appropriate rigor.
In the field I work these days, regulatory agencies still require drug developers to be Frequentist, but they are also sticklers about the analysis being pre-specified.
[It occurred to me that the GCP’s problem could be limited to failing to pre-specify how the “imputation of missing values” would work. In any case they have no excuse for not splitting their dataset into exploratory and confirmatory subsets…]
What are you talking about, phylogenetics supports intelligent design.
You don’t know that?
Neither seem to be doing very well. So perhaps the problem lies elsewhere….
Trending to zero it seems.
Quite right it does! Casey says so so it must be true!
It’s all about ideology for the evolutionists! But for Casey and phoodoo, no! It’s all about the science.
Supporting evidence provided by his mates Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells and Stephen C. Meyer.
A cosy little gang all providing “support” for each others claims….
The only actual reference to the “alternative” is in the conclusion
OK let’s consider it? What evidence do you have? Quotes from other researchers about their “surprising” results but literally nothing else?
Oh….
And therefore Intelligent Design, apparently. It’s a bit sad really.
I don’t see why it should be, in principle.
I don’t think so: phylogenetics has no bearing whatsoever on whether life is Designed or not.
The statistical evidence of double slit results or random event generators showing a very small but significant deviation from the expected trend.
You are welcome to your opinion. Here is Dean Radin:
* That link is broken, but the study he is referring to is here
I admire your zeal. For me the whole idea of human (of course, human) emotions affecting the output of random number generators is just one big WTF?
I mean: free floating minds I can understand, but what does “structure in random systems” mean?