First Psi (Parapsychology) Experiment launched

Friday, March 2. 2007

I’m glad to announce that the first in the series of previously announced Psi Experiments to test the abilities of the human mind has been launched. This is a most basic parapsychology experiment with more interesting ones to follow.

Tell all your friends and encourage them to participate. Go to Psi Experiment #1 and do your best.

Discuss this and other posts in the mind-energy.net forum.

in ESP, Exercises, Jose Silva, Meditation, Parapsychology, Remote Viewing, Research, Telepathy, Universal Mind at 12:17 | 7 Comments

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Practice makes perfect.

#1 cathy on 2007-03-03 00:06 (Reply)

I blogged about this, and encouraged everybody to practice a little then try it out. I'll be trying it myself once I get back into town and rest a little.

-Hatter

#2 The Mad Hatter (Homepage) on 2007-03-03 10:26 (Reply)

The first experiment is flawed, in that people have natural biases to pick one number out of a selection more than chance would predict. If say, that particular number happened to be picked randonly to begin with, then you will end up with an artifactual ostensible psi effect, when in fact you are only detecting peoples biases.

#3 michael duggan on 2007-03-06 01:46 (Reply)

Michael Duggan is correct; the test is poor. Suppose you get a million guesses and half pick the same box. That's entirely possible just because one may be more appealing to people. If it happens to be the right box, you could legitimately claim nothing more than hitting 1-in-5 shot, which is not statistically significant.

Were you to generate a different random target for each guess, then the trials would be independent, and you could aggregate them with standard statistical distributions. With the current experiment you cannot do that.

If you want to show real evidence for a paranormal effect, you'll need better experimental design. You should also do the tests double-blind. You should state exactly what data you record and what are the statistics of record (and of course you should report all that you record, except where you have promised privacy). You should put your code under version control and make it available for review.

I've only seen just one on-line PSI test that does it really well: The RetroPsychoKinesis Project

http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/

They document their random number generators. They make the code available, so the conditions are known and repeatable. They fully report the results.

#4 Bryan Olson on 2007-03-06 08:42 (Reply)

Previous postings are correct. In the parlance of statistics, the guesses are not "independent". The only valid, practical way to evaluate this test is to combine all the individual guesses into a single guess. This is rather limited, though, because the best possible score would be .2. Furthermore, the strong "response biases" implicit in the task -- made worse by having a single trial so no balancing out of the response biases -- makes it likely to be a poor circumstance for eliciting psi.

#5 Topher Cooper on 2007-03-06 21:01 (Reply)

Beware the dreaded Theet-O-Vac

#6 Rhykan on 2007-03-07 08:01 (Reply)

Reminds me of the Psychic Olympics they had on the Internet back in something like '97. That disappeared down a black hole never to be seen again. In fact it could have been a scam to harvest email addresses. Oh well, good luck with it.

Box 4.

#7 Megaz on 2007-03-10 11:45 (Reply)

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First Psi (Parapsychology) Experiment launched

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