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  1. Johann

    Forum Casualties, Deserters/AWOL & MIA

    Oh yeah, Skeptiko friends, don't let Iyace convince you that he's officially part of the cool club. We tolerate having him around because he tells funny jokes and carries a gun.
  2. Johann

    Everyone can breathe easy...

    The plot was a mess, though, and I'm not into Twilight Vader. He could freeze a laser blast in mid air but couldn't beat a trash collector and her sanitation clone? They had picked up light sabers for the first time like a day before fighting him.
  3. Johann

    Everyone can breathe easy...

    But, yeah, in terms of production quality, cast, dialogue, etc, it was alright.
  4. Johann

    Everyone can breathe easy...

    I don't get why people are ball-washing this movie; I didn't think I'd see the day when rotten tomatoes would give J.J. Abrams a 94% rating for remaking episode IV with less white dudes.
  5. Johann

    Forum Casualties, Deserters/AWOL & MIA

    I've had to moderate on those. A lot of people in Facebook groups find them pretty insufferable.
  6. Johann

    Forum Casualties, Deserters/AWOL & MIA

    That didn't really happen. What happened was that Jay had a rather subtle point about binomial tests that turned out to be correct, and we came to an agreement on that eventually (that is, it isn't technically valid to assume a hit rate different from the null in the ganzfeld paradigm just...
  7. Johann

    Forum Casualties, Deserters/AWOL & MIA

    Don't be like your mother.
  8. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    Hello again, I'm happy to say finals are over and I can begin the research necessary to complete that post. Until then!
  9. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    Hey everyone, Just checking in to say that I've not given up on writing that analysis I mentioned in post #826, but priorities are priorities (especially now that we're getting into finals period here at my university). It'll be my policy to keep making these little posts, intermittently, until...
  10. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    Just a minor correction: parapsychology did not invent randomized trials. What I've said in the past is that the controversy over paranormal phenomena has tended to generate innovation. An investigation by a French committee of scientists in the late 18th century, looking into claims of...
  11. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    http://www.deanradin.com/FOC2014/Storm2013reply.pdf This attachment contains the original article by Rouder et al as well as the rebuttal by Utts and co., which each show (IMO persuasively), that relevant trials were left out by both parties. It is common and unavoidable that erroneous...
  12. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    I guess it should also be mentioned that the "funnel plots" I showed aren't really expected to approximate a funnel; for the case where the ordinate axis is measured in standard errors, we're looking for a triangle instead. But it's not hard to plot against the inverse of the standard error. I...
  13. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    I did do this, owing to your previous discussion with Max on heterogeneity, who had been using chi^2. The I^2 values for the studies were at .35% for the unselected studies and 12.35% for the selected studies. It was 49.49% before the split. Of course, I wouldn't make the argument that studies...
  14. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    A personal perspective: One of the failures of the ganzfeld story, in my opinion, is that parapsychologists have not paid enough attention to the statistical details of meta-analysis, looking towards methodological rigor inside experiments rather than comprehensive statistical assessment (e.g...
  15. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    I'm well-aware that some of the issue about meta-analysis has to do not with the efficacy of the technique itself, but with the low power of the studies included in some MAs (although certain skeptics like Alcock and Hyman have a tendency to trash meta-analysis entirely). All meta-analyses are...
  16. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    On this forum, there seems to a pretty low opinion of meta-analysis; I conjecture that this is because so many critics of current psi research (I include Kennedy here) make a point of citing skeptics of meta-analysis, while parapsychologists never seem to counter with evidence in favor. As a...
  17. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    Really, this thread was intended to be a low level discussion about the validity of a particular class of psi experiments, and now it's derailed into a long, high-level debate about what we think psi should be like under assumptions a, b, and c; it would be good if a separate thread was created...
  18. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    I'm not continuing this discussion because I've been around the block with Kai on this issue before, and know enough to recognize it's a one-way ticket to the infinite hotel, but if you'd like to see more fine remarks from the producer who brought you "the midnight test", "data entities"...
  19. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    Just as diseases, indisputably evident, were not per se supportive of the existence of bacteria; shamanic practices, religious claims of mystical experiences, the proliferation of magical and occult beliefs in human cultures, seemingly inexplicable coincidences and forecasts, and a whole host of...
  20. Johann

    Ganzfeld Experiments: Suggestions please.

    You know, we have science largely because we realized that accepting only the obvious and indisputable kept us backward and ignorant.
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