Showing posts with label Daryl Bem. Show all posts

Monday, February 18, 2013

History of Scientific Skepticism through Pictures

Friend of the blog, Robert Sheaffer has been gracious enough to begin the tiring process of scanning old photos taken back when the world was only in Black and White (At least this is what I thought when I was a kid) and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. Robert has been a active member of the scientific skepticism world since the beginning and he has the photos to prove it. Those of us trying to preserve our history really appreciate that.

When James Randi and Ray Hyman met up at a Alice Cooper concert, they discussed forming a club to combat Uri Geller. They didn't realize then that we would be interested in knowing the history of that time. They wanted to get things done, not record the moment. So now 30+ years later we have to find all these old documents and photos and get them in places where we can show our history. And I can't think of a better place than Wikipedia.

For your viewing pleasure, enjoy these never before seen images...

James W. Moseley

CSICOP

Paul Kurtz

Banachek

James Randi

Ray Hyman

Daryl Bem

Philip Klass

Robert uploaded a lot more, we just don't have the Wikipedia pages written yet to put the photos on. We stll have a lot of work to do. Please consider helping out with the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project. We train and mentor. Contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com or friend me on Facebook or Twitter as Susan Gerbic

Friday, July 8, 2011

The Bem Experiments

Been wanting to get to this one for a couple weeks. I have only an hour flight from San Jose to LA so I settled down with James Alcock's article about Daryl Bem's "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect." Several IIG people had been talking about this excellent review by Alcock and I knew I would need some uninterrupted time to sit and understand what I was reading.

The IIG were right, it is an excellent critique by Alcock, and I understood almost all of it once I started underlining and taking notes in the margin of the magazine.

So here is is several weeks later and I have a few minutes before I leave for work and want to pop it into the Daryl Bem Wikipedia article. Guess what someone has beat me to it! Awesome. This person left it before it became published in SI but gave the SI citation (this will be published in the March/April 2011 issue)

So I cleaned that reference up (guess they forgot to go back and take it out) and then added what I wrote on the plane.

Who ever did the first blurb didn't quote Alcock, only just stated the facts. This is just a matter of editors style choice. I think it makes for an interesting comparison between styles. I'm a quoter. I want to bring as much of the original article writer's "personality" into my blurb as possible. Wikipedia is only about facts, but we don't want it so dry that someone reading the page will not want to follow up on reading the article that is on-line at SI (just click on the link cited). What I added is in Red.

"Feeling the Future" and the resulting controversy
In 2011, Bem published the article "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that offered statistical evidence for psi.^[12] If "Feeling the Future" is correct, it would provide evidence for psi, significantly altering the assumption of the linear nature of time, challenging the very core of modern scientific thought on the matter. Both the presentation of this article by a highly respected researcher, and the decision of an upper tier journal to publish it has engendered much controversy. Not only has the paper's publication led to a criticism of the paper itself^[13], but it also prompted a wider debate on the validity of peer review process for allowing such a paper to be published.^[14] Bem has appeared on MSNBC ^[15] and the Colbert Report ^[16] discussing the experiment.

The methods that Bem uses in his experimentation itself has been viewed as controversial as well. According to understood statistical methodology, Bem incorrectly provides one-sided p values when he should have used a two-sided p values.^[17] This could possibly account for the marginally significant results that he produced in his experiment.

Professor of Psychology, member of CSI and Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, James Alcock after evaluating Bem's 9 experiments finds metaphorically "dirty test tubes" Serious methodological flaws exist throughout including changing the procedures partway through the experiments. Combining results of all tests that had a 50% chance of significance with tests that had a 33% chance. The amount of actual tests done is unknown and no explanation of how it was determined that participants had "settled down" after seeing erotic images. Alcock concludes that almost everything that could go wrong with this 9 trial experiment did go wrong. "Parapsychology is not honored by having this paper accepted by a mainstream psychology journal."

One of the nine experiments in Bem's study ('Retroactive Facilitation of Recall') has since been replicated by scientists Stuart Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman who found no evidence of precognition. Wiseman has also set up a register to keep track of other replicating efforts. The meta-analysis on registered replication efforts will begin on Dec, 1st 2011.

So none of what is written is incorrect. Again how you write your blurb is entirely up to you. Styles differ between editors, and you will find your style as you do more editing and grow confident. You will also note that the original editor did not hyperlink to James Alcock, SI Magazine or CSI, its all about using each other as resources. I also added the hyperlink to psychology to give Alcock more creds (it is a psychology journal afterall).

It is pretty lengthy even before I added my blurb. But no one seems to be complaining (at least not yet) and if other editors want to change things that's fine with me. I have it on my watch list.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Robert Jahn ~ I should have known better!

It was brought to my attention that this blog mentions Robert Jahn as a skeptic. I had him on a list of people whose site needed a picture as well as a cleanup. I gathered the names for that list from the Rational Skeptic Wiki Project that had a mix of skeptics and non-skeptics on it. I went to Robert Jahn's Wikipedia page before he was brought to my attention and looked it over. Not knowing who he is I thought he looked okay. After I was told to look into his skeptical credentials further I looked at Google and really only found his academic webpage as well as the Wikipedia link. Nothing enlightening. Apparently there are several men named Robert Jahn so their pages were intermixed with the Jahn I am looking for.

So back to the Wikipedia page. The person who asked me to look closer is someone who should know, Barry Karr, Executive Director of CSI.

Hopefully you are looking at Jahn's page right now, what you see here is badly referenced (see the flag at the top of the page asking for citations and cautioning viewers that the page has been written from a single source). There is no picture, no personality, lots of red "dead links" this is what is called in Wiki language a "stub" page. But skeptics also have badly maintained stub pages, and we have a whole list of people who need a picture. So I'm learning nothing from just the quick glance.

Then I start reading his lead, the academics and prestigious schools just scream that this man is noteworthy.

Professor Robert G. Jahn is Dean Emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science of Princeton University. He founded in 1961 the first American laboratory dedicated to the study of Electric propulsion for spacecraft and satellites, the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton University, and directed it for more than three decades. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has been chairman of the AIAA Electric Propulsion Technical Committee, associate editor of the AIAA Journal, and a member of the NASA Space Science and Technology Advisory Committee. He is vice President of the Society for Scientific Exploration and Chairman of the Board of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories consortium. He has been a long-term member of the Board of Directors of Hercules, Inc. and chairman of its Technology Committee, and a member and chairman of the Board of Trustees of Associated Universities, Inc. He has received the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award of the American Society for Engineering Education and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Andrha University.

So if Mr and Mrs America sitting on their couch read what I read (just quickly) how can you sum this man up? Is he a scientist worthy of being someone we need to have his Wiki back? Or what? What I said to myself was "damn, this man sounds awesome".

So I ask Barry, "what are you talking about, nothing on Google is coming up on this guy other than solid academic links or the Wikipedia page where he looks like a good solid scientist". Barry's reply is "do a search for him on www.csi.org and see what you get.

Well that was an eye opener! There I find that this man was involved in the Bem paranormal experiments, and not on the skeptical side. I had just read Jame's Alcock's critique of Bem and friends, I had made a lot of notes of how I intend to post the write-up from SI into several Wikipedia pages. In fact the March/April issue is sitting next to my laptop where I can glance down next to the bowl of cherry pits and see the title "Proof of ESP? Not Quite." looking up at me.

Then taking a third look at Jahn's Wikipedia page, there is a lot of information that should have raised a flag, like the mention in the above paragraph that he is the Chairman of the Board of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories". Which I have never heard of (nor has Wikipedia as the link is a dead one) but that word Consciousness is just one of those "hum" kind of words.

Then later in the Wikipedia page we find this,

"With Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab in 1979 following an undergraduate project to study the low-level psychokinetic effects on electronic random event generators. Over the last 25 years and more, Jahn and Dunne claim to have created a wealth of small-physical-scale, statistically significant results that suggest direct causal relationships between subjects' intention and otherwise random results."

Brenda Dunn goes to a dead page as well. An eyebrow raiser to say the least. They claim to have found evidence that a subject can change a randomizing machine. Just the word "psychokinetic" should have set off an alarm, but I didn't notice it.

Then the clincher that I didn't notice until the third time reading the page.

"Experiments under Jahn's purview also came to deal with Remote Viewing (RV) and other parapsychological matters. More than 30 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals. Statistical flaws were proposed by others in the parapsychological community regarding some results in a few specific experiments."

Well oh well oh.

No hyperlinks to the paranormal words that might set off a light bulb and explain the terms. Only one slight criticism from this source that does not have a URL link associated with it, from a paranormal journal.

Critique of the Pear Remote-Viewing Experiments by George P. Hansen, Jessica Utts, and Betty Markwich, Journal of Parapsychology, Vol 56, No. 2, June 1992, pp 97-113.

What!

Here are the links to CSI articles I found once I checked on their site.

Back to the Future: Parapsychology and the Bem Affair - Jan 2011