Princeton ESP Lab to Close

Nico M writes " The New York Times reports on the imminent closure of one of the most controversial research units at an ivy league School. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory is due to close, but not because of pressure from the outside. Lab founder Robert G. Jahn has declared, in the article, that they've essentially collected all the data they're going to. The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university's engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling. Jahn points the finger at detractors as well: 'If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will.'"

Credibility

[Steve Furlong]

From the article: One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper "if you can telepathically communicate it to me."

Yah, that about covers it.

Only saving grace is, they relied on donations, so they weren't wasting money extorted from others, whether by taxes or by tuition.

Um.... we believe you...

[Markmarkmark]

After looking at all the data, we certainly believe in your results. Your data proves that there is no evidence for ESP (except in flawed non-reproducible experiments). So long and thanks for confirming the obvious.

Re:Um.... we believe you...

[Umuri]

Oh really? Now how about you stop trolling and produce evidence of how it was flawed? I will give a lot to skeptics, but flaws of methodology were not something this lab had. Many times they were under review board and many times they never got stopped because of unsound or unscientific methods. So start giving facts or start shushing. It's one thing to spread nonsense because you dislike someone, it's another to spread nonsense because you're ignorant and dislike what someone is studying.

Ahem

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Jahn points the finger at detractors as well: "If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."

Where can we, the readers, find all these results?

"We submitted our data for review to very good journals," Ms. Dunne said, "but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don't have peers?"

I dunno. You have this big global network of documents called the "World Wide Web". Certainly, you couldn't publish there.

Honestly, I want to see their "results" published to the web, so we can demolish their methodology and their conclusions. Webloggers can always use interesting material to write about.

Several expert panels examined PEAR's methods over the years, looking for irregularities, but did not find sufficient reasons to interrupt the work.

Which expert panels? What, exactly, were their comments? What constitutes reason to interrupt work? (If your methodology is flawed, then I'd expect that you don't want to interrupt your work, you want to continue it so you can do the experiments again, properly.)

Nobody would accept such vague arguments if this was a new cryptographic algorithm. Why should we be any less skeptical here?

Your results...do not impress

[Talgrath]

I'm a pretty open-minded guy, but when the best proof that somebody can come up with for ESP is that every 2 or 3 in 10,000 outcomes can be changed, I'm not impressed. Those are pretty basically standard statistical anomalies, and to say that they are definate proof of ESP is a very far stretch. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."; I can't recall who said it, but it's pretty much how science does (and should) examine things like this. When you can find someone who can levitate a car anytime, anywhere, I'll believe you.

Evolution and ESP

[AsciiNaut]

Speaking as a materialist, I propose that ESP (or telepathy) does not make evolutionary sense. If any person had truly been born with anything like such a gift in the distant past, even in quite a modest and partial form, the selective advantage would have ensured that the necessary genes would have spread throughout the population. Also, the faculty would have been improved by natural selection to become a standard sense. We wouldn't need to recognise the phenomenon by looking at billions of statistical datapoints, it would be obvious to all that it existed as it would be part of universal common experience.

But, hey, thanks for trying.

Good radiance to pseudoscience

[aepervius]

PEARS was defraught of bad method. Google around any good math blog or skeptic report and you will be able to read why. first link I found CSICOP [csicop.org]
Conclusion quoted:

In their book Margins of Reality Jahn and Dunne raise this question: "Is modern science, in the name of rigor and objectivity, arbitrarily excluding essential factors from its purview?" Although the question is couched in general terms, the intent is to raise the issue as to whether the claims of the parapsychological community are dismissed out of hand by mainstream science unjustifiably. This paper argues that in the light of the difficulties in replication (even by the PEAR group itself), the lack of anything approaching a theoretical basis for the claims made, and, perhaps most damaging, the published behavior of the baseline data of the PEAR group which by their own criteria indicate nonrandom behavior of the device that they claim is random, then the answer to the question raised has to be no. There are reasonable and rational grounds for questioning these claims. Despite the best efforts of the PEAR group over a twenty-five-year period, their impact on mainstream science has been negligible. The PEAR group might argue that this is due to the biased and blinkered mentality of mainstream scientists. I would argue that it is due to the lack of compelling evidence.

At best this was pseudo science. At worst they scammed private investor from money to study something inexistant (AFAIK this was not public found). They were fitting the data to the conclusion. They were begging for belief, but were quite empty handed on the falsification side. The quicker this shame can be closed, the better. Now if we could do the same for the other 999 pseudo science outfit outside here...

Did you bother to look first?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I agree with him, I don't believe them!

And have you looked at ALL at the details of his methods or any of his published results?

Dismissing evidence based on preconceived belief is called religion. To be scientific you must actually LOOK at the evidence and methods, and consider it using the same methods used to evaluate all other experimental evidence.

Belief vs reproducibility

[OriginalArlen]

Jahn points the finger at detractors as well: 'If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will.'"

That's rather the point. In science it doesn't really matter what results you can produce, if no-one else can reproduce them...

Re:The problems with PEAR

[flushingmemos]

You're wrong. It's not the analysis, the methodology is flawed. The more runs you do the less pronounced the effects of "streaks of luck" on the final data. But the more runs you do, the more whatever lingering bias in your methods will come out. So PEAR's huge sample sizes don't indicate manipulating data, they indicate collecting so much data you end up measuring the effects of the ventilation system causing a person's left eye to be shut a bit longer when they blink, skewing the results, or somesuch. That effect will come out when you have huge sample sizes, but random effects will disappear. That's the problem with PEAR: the things they purport to measure are so subtle as to be untestable. It's a methodology problem.

Still, I'm sad to see them go. A little openmimndedness can make the world much more fun. I mean, they were named after a fruit!

Re:Credibility

[poopdeville]

One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper "if you can telepathically communicate it to me."

That's not exactly ideal academic objectivity.

I don't have any particular reason to believe these guys. At the same time, I have little reason to doubt their methodology. If their paper made a point, it should have at least seriously considered for publication, and not been rejected out of hand.

I'm disappointed in science today.

Re:Evolution and ESP

[svanstrom]

Only if it happened long enough ago and it was strong enough to actually make a difference which made those individuals breed more and the advantage was inherited...

That's a lot of ifs.

Just think about all the people with a very high IQ which aren't even capable of dealing with everyday life and/or never get married and have kids, that could be everything from people with ADHD to professors that spend so much time within their own research that they hardly know what day of the week (or month) it is.

So being very smart, which should give them advantage, doesn't mean that they've actually got an advantage which will be spread using breeding; and it could be the same with people with (weak) ESP (if it exists), they could for instance have a greater chance of having a personality which makes them second guess their ESP to the extent that the positive side of it are negated, or maybe those are the nutcases we laugh about because they leave their citylife and move out into the country (as they have a closer connection to nature).

Some people are tempted to say that some, like very successfull businessmen, might be using (weak) ESP to optimize the work and deals they do; so within what's usually refered to as instinct there might be some ESP (if it exists).

So just because we don't have psi-cops running around reading peoples minds we don't have proof that ESP does or doesn't exist, we can't just say that evolution should have resulted in individuals with strong ESP today if it exists - that's just like arriving in a spaceship on earth milions of years ago and saying that there will be no smart humans there because if there would be smart humans there would already be smart humans there. (it's of course debatable if there are any smart humans here today...)

If ESP really exists today it might be different from what we expect it to be, ie not a single clear talent, and it might be so weak that it'll take 100's or 1000's of year before it's so obvious that no one can deny that it truly exists; and even if we knew that to be possible, we can't say for sure that those with the right genes will be around long enough to acctually produce those children with strong ESP.

So what do we really know? Nothing more than that we can't prove anything beyond any doubts... which today goes for both ESP and string theory and a whole lot more that we're currently researching...

Re:No peers, indeed

[iwein]

For as long as I can remember I've had a subtle effect on machines. I've heard similar things described here many times, in many discussions. When friends and relatives ask me to fix something, and I come over to help them out, the thing just starts working. Mostly it's with computers.

Interesting indeed, I've been working closely with people like you for decades. Our special skills have been accepted and admired by both our friends/relatives and by large companies willing to pay rediculous amounts of money to place us close to their machines (mostly computers). We call ourselves engineers, developers, programmers, geeks or nerds. The most intriguing is that in general we cannot explain exactly what we do to the users so that they don't need us anymore. In many cases we don't even know exacly how and why we have this subtle effect on the machines around us.

You see, the point is that you DONT have a subtle effect on machines. You push their buttons. In some rare cases you manipulate them in a non discrete way, maybe. You're probably just not a stupid user. When something starts working when you come near it and you're sure you haven't touched it yet you can bet your ass it's a Windows box that just had a power cycle before they showed it to you.

I sincerely hope your post was originally intended to be funny and got modded interesting by mistake.

Re:No peers, indeed

[modeless]

It's not magic, it's just the case that your presence causes people to pay more attention to what they are doing to their machines. The mere presence of a guru modifies their behavior even before you tell them to do anything, and in the case of mysterious computer problems even the slightest change of user behavior can have huge effects, possibly even resulting in a permanent fix to the problem (especially if the problem was simply a lack of attention in the first place, as is so often the case). It happens to me too and I'm guessing a significant percentage of the rest of the Slashdot population.

As for the alleged lack of peer review, that's the standard defense of wackos and nutjobs, and rarely true. I've heard of these guys before; it's not like they haven't gotten any exposure in the scientific community. They are just not very convincing. If they could demonstrate a mechanism, or harness their purported effect to actually *do* something, people would become interested.

Re:Did you bother to look first?

[dlthomas]

No, the foundation for most sensory experience cannot be *extra* sensory perception, for reasons which should be obvious in the expansion of the acronym.

Semantics aside, what did you mean here?

Re:Evolution and ESP

[SinVulture]

I've heard the argument your parent has made before-- it's more along the lines of early evolution rather than the witch-hunt era. If a creature develops the ability, however weak, to tell whether or not a predator, prey, or nothing at all hides behind a rock, they would have a significant advantage over every form of life without such abilities. Selection pressure would force this ability to become stronger, for prey to develop defenses against predator, and vice versa. Of course, there's a much simpler shit-test for ESP/telepathy. If it DID exist, I'm sure I'd have been slapped for some of the thoughts I've had about my server at hooters.

Re:Good radiance to pseudoscience

[Dunbal]

The PEAR group consistently obtained positive results for 30 years. How is that a difficulty of replication?

      No, you see, it doesn't count if you re-do the experiment yourself and get the same result, even if you do it for 30 years. It only counts if someone ELSE can re-do your experiment and get the same result - at least ONCE.

Problematic statistics

[Ambitwistor]

Part of the PEAR project's problem was their use of statistics. A classical p-test is guaranteed to eventually reject the null hypothesis (no ESP) if enough data is collected. This is related to the famous Lindley's paradox [wikipedia.org]. A criticism of a particular PEAR analysis on these grounds may be found here [bayesrules.org] from astrostatistician Bill Jefferys. There was a response from the study's author, which I don't have a link to, and a counterresponse here [bayesrules.org].

Jefferys advocates the Bayesian approach as an alternative to their p-value test (as do I), but even non-Bayesians admit such problems with p-values can happen (they just think the alternatives are worse); see here [colostate.edu] for some references, and here [dur.ac.uk] for some criticisms of and non-Bayesian alternatives to classical accept/reject significance testing. This paper [bmj.com] (PDF) is an opinion piece which reviews the issue from a medical research perspective.

Re:Extraordinary evidence is needed

[osgeek]

Evidence? You look for statistical evidence?

That's your mistake. ESP is a faith-based science. No real evidence is required.

Linux

[DogDude]

Yeah, and I'll believe that Linux works when it installs itself on my computers for me, and runs my business.

Obviously, that's a straw man.

Re:Extraordinary evidence is needed

[CommunistHamster]

There is no such thing as faith-based science. That is religion.

(mods, if I missed an obscure quote then have mercy

I found the same thing

[jfengel]

I read a bit of the JREF correspondence some time back, and I noticed the same thing. They rejected many tests which I would have considered highly indicative, if not absolute proof. If the subject had been able to pass those tests, it would have been worth it to spend some time and money verifying the claim. That absolute proof is worth a million bucks; it's an earth-shaking revolution.

They have to have an absolute prohibition on spending any time or money of their own, since they'd spend a fortune refuting tests. That sets a nearly impossible challenge for the subject, who has to fund the work himself and find his own volunteers. His own volunteers, however, would be suspect.

I remember one exchange (sadly, I did not bookmark it) in which the proposer was very open to reason, and kept modifying the experiment to suit their goals, but couldn't find something that would work. I wanted to contact him and say, "Look, I'll run this experiment with you, since it costs no money. If you succeed, I'll pay to have you run a real experiment for Randi."

Sadly, I didn't, partly because it just seemed incredibly unlikely. It involved predicting astronomical signs, and I can't imagine how that isn't garbage. Any real power seems like it would manifest itself in a way which was more easily verifiable. And that was probably the JREF's attitude: it's so wildly unlikely to succeed that it wasn't worth any effort on their part at all. But the seemed very snarky in the exchange, and the propose seemed very reasonable.

Re:The birth of a scientist's mind

[Gramie2]

...at 4, many thousands of years worth of wars are fought over essentially the same thing

I always wonder why people insist that religion is the root of most wars, when the evidence seems so obviously to indicate that it is a tool of warlike leaders.

How many wars can you name where the warriors and the religious were the same group? We seem to have this image of kind-of medieval times where armies followed a cross (or a crescent) to defeat the infidels because they are infidels.

Were the fighters in Northern Ireland the humble, faithful churchgoers, or thugs who found a pretext to exercise their brutality? Were the crusaders truly holy, humble men? Or were they bullies and adventurers who looted all around them, whether or not they were in "enemy" lands? Was the Holy Roman Empire built on a common worship of a saviour who allowed himself to be killed rather than to commit violence (as did his immediate followers), or on the use of superstition and ignorance to grab political power?

Looked at from another perspective, which 20th-century figures would you call holy? The King/Queen of England (in their roles as the heads of the C of E)? Jim Jones? Sun Myung Moon? Senator McCarthy?

Or Mother Theresa? Gandhi? The Dalai Lama? Jean Vanier? Albert Schweitzer?

Just because someone does something in the name of religion, it's not necessarily true. Obedience to religious authorities has always been used as a means of control by others.

Re:Evolution and ESP

[Bozdune]

Yes! You've outlined the basic problem with sociobiology. It's pure guesswork, and typically not very good guesswork at that.

Let me be the nay sayer here

[superwiz]

Here's a ridiculous sci fi scenario for you to consider. An electro-chemical device that can analize and synthesize tiny variations in electromagnetic spectrum to form a coherent view of objects it never comes in contact with. This is, of course, your visual system. If you can have a device sensitive to small variations in electromagnetic wave patterns, why not a device doing the same for small variations in magnetic wave patterns? And, of course, changes in electrical charge always produce magnetic fields... So your brain does produce a visible and signature on the real outside of it. If a device can be constructed that sees e.m. wave differences, why not magnetic wave differences? Extra sensory just means not detectable by senses we have right now. But there are other physical phenomena to detect. Sharks have an organ that can detect elctrical variations from a distance... But their sensitivity is to coarse. Sort of like the visual sensitivity of flies... only worse. But what is to say that Sharks' sensitivity cannot be refined? Why is this not a subject worth academic research?

Re:Extraordinary evidence is needed

[dubl-u]

That's an outright confession of fraud.

Not quite. Fraud is where you intentionally fool others. These guys are just unintentionally fooling themselves.

Re:No peers, indeed

[Garse Janacek]

Is it evidence for ESP if I'm able to discern your identity? ;)

More seriously, the experience you describe is fairly common. There are a number of normal factors that can cause this impression. It's related to the opposite phenomenon that an application that works perfectly whenever the developers use it can break within 30 seconds of a new user trying it. It's not that it worked, and now it doesn't -- it's that the standard use-paths and expectations of the program were heavily ingrained in the people who used it, so without even thinking about it they did what the program expected. As soon as a new user, who doesn't have all the expectations and officially-approved metaphors in his head uses it, it falls over.

Similarly, something that appears to be broken can start working as soon as someone who understands it well tries to use it. It's not supernatural, it's just a lot of little habits of understanding that people don't even really notice, but that develop automatically over years of experience.

Another contributing factor is that this common impression overrides occasional negative experiences (I can't count the number of hard drives that have died on me :-P but in common situation I still get a lot of "things just working," enough to make me forget the bad times). It's a sort of opposite to the "I'm always in the slow lane" experience in traffic jams.

A nice illustration is the following joke from the Hacker's Dictionary:

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

This joke is funny precisely because so many people have had exactly this experience. I've had similar things happen to me many times, where I just look at the computer and (theoretically) do exactly what the previous user has been doing, only when I do it, it works. I doubt there's really anything supernatural about it, but after so many years of working with computers I automatically avoid potential problems because I understand how computers "think" (one reason a lot of techies prefer UNIX -- despite some limitations, its "thinking process" is extremely clear and consistent, allowing the "just works" experience more often for people who really know the system... Windows, even when stable, can have very erratic thinking patterns).

Anyway. That's my take on it ;)

Re:The birth of a scientist's mind

[MobyTurbo]

Real scientists are atheists by design, atheists by rote testing, and agnostic in practice....

Is Sir Isaac Newton enough of a real scientist for you? Also, Einstein wasn't an atheist, though he wasn't of traditional theology. The discoverer of the universal background radiation (a proof of the big bang theory) was an Orthodox Jew, and a Nobel prize winner. I have the feeling that you're just as closed-minded against religion as the religions you claim to be incompatible with being a scientist.