Talk:Precognition

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Bem affair

Another researcher finds some minor effect sizes and screws up statistical tests. Yawn. There's a Skeptical Inquirer article on it that could be worked in, though. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 18:15, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Did I just read the phrase "Precognitive Detection of Erotic Stimuli"??!? ADK^{...I'll zap your belt!} 18:18, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm not a mathmatician. are stats really that hard? There are two papers that I just found which both bash the statistical analys used by Bem. Call me stupid, but isn't it as simple as "% of words written that were not later selected" then "% that were selected". One of the math / stats papers goes on and on about (clearly very important) things you have to add if you are looking at this kind of stud. "

The quantity HitFrac is the number of hits divided by the number of trials. Pure random choices would converge to HitFrac = 0.500. The quantity GausProb is the two sided probability of a deviation from 50% that is larger than the current HitFrac. Purely random choices would give GausProb ~ 0.5, with very unusual statistical runs (good or bad!) would give low values to this quantity. The quantity phi is defined by Bem (page 18) and is an unbiased estimate of the correlation between user choices and random number choices. Unbiased random choices should converge towards small numbers. Unusually high correlations between user and machine choice lead to positive phi values, with a maximum of 1.00"

There is a reason math makes no sense to me. ;-) Godot Warning, chocolate will make your clothes shrink 18:36, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

PS - sorry, ADK that i readded it. I didn't see your comment and thought i had just not saved. me bad. Godot Warning, chocolate will make your clothes shrink 18:36, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Are you referring to his failure to use two-tailed tests? Para-"psychologists" love to use this sleight-of-hand trick where they count deviation from chance below chance (e.g., some subject getting 33% correct instead of 50%) the same as above chance (e.g., 66% correct). Some people's psychic powers work in reverse, apparently. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 18:44, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Sighs. see, i didn't even get your question, much less have any way to answer. :-) I just thought math was math, and that if more people predicted words, than didn't it was all good. but clearly, "studies" have special math and I should go back to linguistics where Cow means Cow, and not Cow with a deviance if applied in this situation means cat. Godot Warning, chocolate will make your clothes shrink 18:53, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

It's hard to tell from the small quote, but one of the problems with the original paper, and a lot of "research" in parapsychology is the use of one-tailed tests. Here is a graph of a probability distribution that should help. On the left side are more wrong answers than chance (50%), on the right side are more correct answers. So if a subject gets zero answers right, he is at the far left end of the graph. 100% correct is the far right end. A one-tailed test often used by these "researchers" would count these as the same result, because they are both significantly different than chance. That's why I said apparently some people's psychic powers work in reverse. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 19:06, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Why

Who the hell keeps putting my username on articles.^{— Unsigned, by: Delphinidea / talk / contribs}

Don't know about that, but it would be a good idea if you put your username on talk page comments! --Weirdstuff (talk) 11:52, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Precognition, RationalWiki style. Neonchameleon (talk) 01:37, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Not to pop anyone's bubble, Anonymous user, but try logging out, and looking at the page again. If you see "Anonymous user" then you know it is some wiki wizardry afoot, and we all see ourselves in that mirror. I've already said too much. Sprocket J Cogswell 02:09, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Its like watching penn and teller do a good trick though, you know its bullshit but its still kinda funGhostOfJoshJoad (talk) 11:59, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Part of the paragraph on "Science and Precognition" seems to contradict the rest of the article, so I deleted it.

David Icke

The letters 'ot' were removed from the subject line. (Godwin's Law by #not# mentioning the name.) 31.51.113.88 (talk) 21:39, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Comment

A distinction should be made between 'precognition' and similar chance activities, where validity is only realised/comparisons are made after the event (eg 'The Wreck of the Titan'); those cases where 'someone somewhere' comes across a fictional object or sequence of events and thinks 'that is a good idea' (and creates it); and someone so familiar with a topic or locality etc that they can make logical extrapolations. 31.51.113.88 (talk) 21:49, 5 August 2017 (UTC)