8th
That random erotic pic, I knew you were going to post it!
Do you have any sense of what’s going to appear on your dashboard before you refresh? Could you have a stronger, more accurate premonition if the post you were about to see was erotic, violent or scarey?
There is “evidence” for this kind of phenomena and it’s about to cause a stir. Dozens of news sites including the New York Times and The Daily Telegraph are reporting that an article on extrasensory perception by Cornell researcher Daryl Bem is about to be published in the esteemed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Other notable researchers like Ray Hyman are quoted as saying “It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in…I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field”. Bem’s article addresses the fact that belief in ESP bothers many psychologists more than researchers in the other social sciences, the natural sciences or the humanities. Research into ESP (often termed “psi”) has long been controversial. Like an adolescent who vehemently criticizes her parents, the field of psychology has been eager to show its scorn of bogus parapsychology and Freud’s own belief in ESP and telepathy. In short, for many psychologists and particularly those interested in methodology, an article presenting statistically significant evidence for ESP is a red flag for calling bullshit. Hyman also adds that Bem’s “got a great sense of humor…I wouldn’t rule out that it’s an elaborate joke”.
A joke? It wouldn’t be the first time a hoax article slipped through the peer reviews of an esteemed social science journal with some references to quantum physics. Remember the Sokal affair? When Social Text published an article by Alan Sokal, the NYU physicist, only to read, on the day of publication that Sokal had deliberately written “a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense … structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics” in order to test the journal’s intellectual rigor. But the Bem article feels quite different and if it is a joke perhaps it’ll be the statisticians, not the physicists, who get the last laugh? In the rebuttal article published alongside Bem’s in JPSP the authors reanalyze Bem’s data (using a default Bayesian t-test rather than one sided p-values) and find weak to nonexistent evidence for ESP. They write:
Instead of revising our beliefs in psi, Bem’s research should instead cause us to revisit our beliefs on methodology: the field of psychology currently uses methodological and statistical strategies that are too weak, too malleable and offer far too many opportunities for researchers to befuddle themselves and their peers.
Bem, is standing by his stats and is quoted in the Daily Telegraph saying “the odds against the possibility that the combined results are merely chance coincidences or statistical flukes are about 74 billion to 1”.
A friend of mine who actually understands statistics and the issues involved with conflating exploratory research and confirmatory studies sent me the Bem article a few months ago, saying he “had a feeling [I] might appreciate this” and something about paging Peter Venkman. I got very hot, bothered and befuddled. I’m not smart, I’m not a researcher, I’m certainly not a statistician and I’m not a physicist. These are significant drawbacks to understanding this article especially because Bem, who is trained as a physicist and social psychologist suggests that quantum entanglement and recent interpretations of Bell’s Theorem could ultimately explain psi…Wha???
However, all the criticisms I could throw at this article will not defend me against a truth: the idea that ESP is real scares the shit out of me.
Now we’re tumblrs, probably writing in the hopes that people will read our thoughts and that we can read theirs. But not all our thoughts. And not our basest thoughts. The idea is that ESP developed as an evolutionary advantage for anticipating danger and sexual opportunities. So we are more likely to be able to predict or receive information about a future stimulus (like a pic we’re about to see) if it is a threat or erotic. Freud believed that extrasensory communication could have been the “original, archaic method of communication between individuals” before sensory communication developed (see Erwin pg 396 ). But I like sensory communication and conscious creativity, and I treasure the privacy that is an individual’s mind. I love the idea that we struggle to take our most primitive reactions and make something human and humane out of them before we share them with others.
I just read Mills’ thoughtful post on “internet stupidity” (and you should too). Mills discusses how the internet can be seen as the latest new media to dilute our attentions and distract us from what David Foster Wallace describes as “the really important kind of freedom [that] involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day”. That’s what I want to strive for! Not ESP! Can you imagine how lucrative telepathy would be as a new system of communication? The horror of TELEPATHIC SPAM…If someone hears that this Bem article was just a joke or is convinced the stats are skewy please tell me! :)
