Hackademics I: The Control
Episode metadata
- Episode title:: Hackademics I The Control
- Show:: Hi-Phi Nation
- Owner / Host:: Slate Podcasts
- Episode link:: open in Snipd
- Episode publish date:: 2017-03-07
Show notes
> After years of unusual episodes dating back to her childhood, Anita went to the doctor and was told there was nothing medically wrong with her. "She had a gift," she was told, and she was sent down the street to an ESP lab. Parapsychology is the scientific study of telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, precognition, and spirits. Or is it? The field has been pushed to the fringes of science for decades now. In two episodes, I first follow the study of psychics, and then the mainstream sciences of human nature, to see if they differ enough to make one worthy of belief, and the other scorn. Guest voices include Anita Woodley, John Kruth and Sally Rhine Feather of the Rhine Research Center, and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci.>
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Episode AI notes
- Scientists and parapsychologists aim to maintain an agnostic approach in their work, avoiding preconceived opinions.
- Parapsychologists do not embrace debunking as a practice, believing lack of results in a lab does not disprove psychic abilities.
- Parapsychologists focus on highlighting successful outcomes in their experiments rather than purely debunking.
- Scientists adhere to Popper’s principle that theories should be falsifiable and withstand attempts at debunking.
- Parapsychologists find it challenging to apply Popper’s principle to ESP research where even failures in the lab are not definitive disproof.
Snips
[22:49] Debunking and Falsifying ESP in Science
🎧 Play snip - 2min️ (20:26 - 22:39)
✨ Summary
Confirmation bias may lead individuals to perceive successful premonitions as evidence supporting ESP, while attributing unsuccessful premonitions to imperfections in ESP rather than invalidating it. The focus on falsifiability in science, as proposed by Popper, questions the lack of efforts in debunking individuals claiming psychic abilities. However, the reluctance in debunking stems from concerns of muddying the waters, negative connotations associated with the term ‘debunker,’ and the importance of maintaining agnosticism during scientific investigations. Parapsychologists are cautious not to pre-judge outcomes in research as human biases can influence findings. They refrain from debunking and instead focus on promoting successful outcomes in laboratory experiments. Despite failures in experiments, ESP researchers tend to overlook evidence against ESP, deviating from the principles of falsifiability proposed by Popper.
📚 Transcript
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Speaker 1
It doesn't matter how much confirmation you think you have for your view. There are a lot of premonitions out there, and a lot of them come out true, so they all seem to confirm ESP. But do all the premonitions that don't come true show that there is an ESP? Or does that show that ESP isn't perfect, but it's still there? What would count as showing that ESP isn't real? If Popper is right and falsifiability and falsification is what science should be doing, why doesn't the Renn Research Center focus on debunking people who claim to be psychics?
Speaker 6
That was a policy that JB early on, he helped debunk a lot of people. You just don't go down that road for lots of reasons. We could start debunking people, and I don't know what good it would do in the long run. I think it would just muddy the waters.
Speaker 3
The term debunker has really bad connotations. It implies a worldview. It implies a presupposition that someone's a fake. Scientists and parapsychologists are scientists. We have to bag agnostic in our approach to our work. If we go in with a specific opinion before we start, you know, we're humans. We oftentimes find what we're looking for, whether it's there or not. And so the idea of debunking, not something that parapsychologists are interested in doing, if for example someone would come into our lab and try to do some work within our lab and we Get no results, that doesn't mean he's not psychic. It means on that day he did not perform well in the lab. We can make statements saying this person was in the lab and did not have success on this day. It's not a hundred percent of the time. At the same time, we are very interested in promoting people who do have successes within the lab if they're interested. So we do not work as debunkers for a specific reason because we're scientists.
Speaker 1
It might sound like for ESP researchers. Nothing really counts as falsifying ESP. Even failures in the lab. That's inconsistent with Popper.
[32:04] The Importance of Small Effects in Parapsychology
🎧 Play snip - 2min️ (30:30 - 32:08)
✨ Summary
Even small effects in parapsychology should not be dismissed as insignificant. Comparing it to baseball, where hitting the ball one out of three times is considered exceptional, small but consistent effects in parapsychology are meaningful. Just like a baseball player hitting 320 is significantly better than an average person, demonstrating ESP abilities, even in small ways, is important. The challenge in parapsychology lies in justifying conclusions based on subtle effects and discerning whether it is truly ESP or something else, which is a pivotal aspect of scientific inquiry.
📚 Transcript
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Speaker 1
How impressed should we be even if it were a small effect?
Speaker 3
I always consider it kind of like baseball and I think about the best players in baseball. If they hit the ball and get on base one out of three times they're considered superstars and yet people look at parapsychology as if well these psychics should be able to perform every Time but if it's a skill if it's an ability that you develop if it's something that's subtle and it's not a hundred percent accurate that doesn't mean it's not happening. That doesn't mean that it's not productive and useful.
Speaker 1
A 320 hitter in baseball isn't just a little better than the normal person. The normal person would be lucky to get one hit out of a thousand at bats against a Major League pitcher. Hitting 320 in baseball is a huge effect. On the worst day for a 320 hitter he would do massively better than the normal person. Showing that you have ESP in the lab is like finding someone who gets two hits out of a thousand rather than one. At that small in effect why are parapsychologists so sure it's ESP and not something else? This it turns out is the key problem in science. What justifies one conclusion rather than another given the data that you have?
[36:01] Untitled
🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (35:18 - 36:03)
📚 Transcript
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Speaker 1
What is this rule of statistical significance or p less than 0.05? I'm going to try to explain it to you but it's really hard to explain even for the professionals. Let me just psych myself out here. Okay here we go. Let's go back to my parapsychology experiment with the ESP cards. I got three out of ten right. By chance I should get two out of ten right. Should I conclude that I have ESP because I did a little better than chance? Well no one thinks so because ten rounds just isn't enough. You could really just be lucky and get three out of ten.
[37:29] Understanding Statistical Significance and the p Value
🎧 Play snip - 2min️ (35:37 - 37:36)
✨ Summary
The p value indicates the likelihood of achieving a result by chance. In the context of ESP experiments, a high p value suggests that the outcome could be due to luck rather than ESP. For results to be considered statistically significant, the p value must be low, indicating that the outcome is unlikely to have occurred by chance. Statistical significance serves as the threshold that determines whether a finding is valid and reliable in a study.
📚 Transcript
Click to expand
Speaker 1
Let's go back to my parapsychology experiment with the ESP cards. I got three out of ten right. By chance I should get two out of ten right. Should I conclude that I have ESP because I did a little better than chance? Well no one thinks so because ten rounds just isn't enough. You could really just be lucky and get three out of ten. Could I be lucky and get four out of ten? Five out of ten? How about nine out of ten? The p value in this context is an attempt at determining what percentage of people would get three out of ten just by luck or even ten out of ten just by luck. The p value tells you what percentage of people with no ESP at all will look like they have ESP when guessing shapes in a card game. In my own case I might have ESP but even if I didn't I'd get three out of ten about 40% of the time anyways. So my p value is 40%. It's so high that we don't want a scientist to draw the conclusion that Barry has ESP and so Barry's statistics here are not statistically significant. To be statistically significant you have to have a low percentage or low p value. If I got eight out of ten for instance less than one percent of people who didn't have ESP would be lucky enough to get eight out of ten or even better. Statistical significance is the cutoff point. Whenever people do a study and they crunch the numbers and the p value they get is below a certain number the whole field decides that's it.