Experiments with psychopornography may teach scientists something

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Parapsychology used to be a fool, now it’s a knight in shining armor.

let me explain. Parapsychology is the scientific study of paranormal forces. Parapsychologists – few in number, but they do exist – study alleged phenomena such as people’s ability to predict the future (precognition), their ability to see inside closed boxes (clairvoyance), their ability to read people’s minds (telepathy). ) and their ability to move objects (telekinesis), all due to psychic abilities that cannot be explained by our current scientific theories.

Parapsychological research is sometimes published in reputable scientific journals. They often claim that experiments show that one or more of the above phenomena are real. And they usually do this using the same standard experimental and statistical methods that are used in other fields of science.

This is why parapsychology is called the “fool of science”. It’s a bit like the jester in King Lear who uses absurdity to tell “serious” people the truth they don’t want to hear. In the case of parapsychology, this truth is: “The use of conventional scientific methods can lead to very bizarre results.”

When the methods that all scientists usually rely on give results that contradict the most basic laws of physics, there may be something wrong with the way we do science in general. Perhaps we urgently need to sharpen our statistical methods, or we risk finding more results that make absolutely no sense.

Parapsychologists will of course disagree with my characterization above: they often sincerely believe that what they show in their research is conclusive evidence for the existence of “abnormal”, inexplicable human abilities. Unlike King Lear’s Fool, they don’t do it on purpose.

Always a fool, never a king

In any case, we can learn a lot from parapsychologists. And with the release of a new study of the so-called “Transparent Psi Project” they have gone beyond characterizing it as a “stupid” and actively modeling how good science can be practiced.

In 2011, social psychologist Daryl Bem published an article on parapsychology that has had a big impact on how we think about science. It reported nine experiments, eight of which appeared to demonstrate the presence of psychic abilities, specifically premonitions. It was published in a regular scientific journal and, as I mentioned above, used traditional statistical methods to analyze the results.

Here is a description of one of the experiments:

• Participants (in Bem’s case, undergraduate students) look at a computer screen with two images of curtains;
• You have to guess which curtain is behind the other painting – the other one is empty;
• They can only guess at random – then they are shown whether they were right or not;
• If the photo is a bit boring, they make the right choice 50% of the time;
• If the photo is pornographic, they choose the correct photo 53% of the time, a statistically significant result that suggests they somehow “knew” which photo to choose before they even saw it.

Yes, it’s strange – Boehm claimed that people have developed a psychic ability to sense erotic material that they will see in the future. But when this experiment shows consistent results, it’s hard to argue that anything but extraordinary is happening.

The king tries to pretend to be a fool

Over the years, many researchers have tried to replicate the study – again in their own lab – to see if they can get results. Sometimes they sympathize with Boehm’s point of view, and sometimes they are deeply skeptical; sometimes they give a positive result, sometimes not.

If you’ve been reading my material for a while, you should know that it was me and my co-workers who were trying to replicate one of Bem’s experiments that led me to this whole “science has serious problems” thing in the first place. (The journals wouldn’t accept our boring study that said “no evidence for psychic ability” if they accepted the exact same study that said “evidence for psychic ability!”).

The efforts of skeptics and believers to reproduce back and forth are very good, but now we have something much better: a collaborative, collaborative effort to reproduce the “Submitting the Erotic Material of the Future” study, which brought together both sides of the debate and developed the study they conducted them everyone and who, whatever the results, will accept them all as hard evidence.

And they went even further. They did their best to make their experiment as transparent, reliable and indisputable as possible.

After agreeing on a process, they reviewed their plans and posted the project publicly on the Internet. Since this was a collaborative project undertaken by several universities, they created detailed checklists to make sure they all adhere to the same structure. They ran everything on a cloud server, so no research team could interfere with the experiment in any way.

They then added even more transparency using a technique known as “born open” data. It wasn’t a matter of collecting the data, putting it into a spreadsheet and posting it on the Internet (even that, of course, is unusual for standard scientific research). In this case, they created a public website where all data points were submitted and published as they were collected from participants. The world saw the data, as well as the “log” of each instance of the experiment, at exactly the same time as the scientists, to make sure nothing was hidden.

You might be wondering what if a mistake was made where the dates automatically posted on the web were wrong numbers? Well, before starting the experiment, independent scientists tested all the technical and computer code, and they did a little pilot study beforehand to make sure everything worked.

They even wrote an agreed conclusion, which they will publish if they find positive results, and write if they don’t. This should prevent skeptics from ranting when the study provides positive evidence for the existence of psi, and vice versa when the results are negative.

This – and I didn’t even have enough space to describe everything else they did to ensure the reliability of the experiment – shows a remarkable commitment to openness and transparency, far beyond the average exploratory study. If even some of the methods used here were accepted by “mainstream” researchers, studies published in scientific journals would immediately gain much more credibility.

Fool results

What did the results show? Well, I’ll quote the finished output they chose:

“The data were more consistent with a model suggesting that people’s guesses about the future of a target, a random location, have only one chance of success than with a model suggesting that they…

It’s a long-winded, confusing, academic way of saying, “We found no evidence of psychic ability in this study.” The participants showed no sense of the future—in fact, the overall score for choosing the “correct” curtain was 49.89 percent, even though we accidentally expected 50 percent.

Further they say:

“The failure to replicate previous positive results using this rigorous methodology suggests that the overall positive effect in the literature is more likely to be the result of accepted methodological biases than [psychic powers]”.

In other words, the reason previous studies – which weren’t as rigorous as this – found evidence of psychic abilities is because they went wrong somewhere.

They point out that this experiment does not completely rule out psychic abilities, which is of course true (perhaps this particular experiment simply does not prove their existence). But they should push us back to the “laws of physics” position when the original psychic research might have bothered us. I can’t help but wonder if this study has changed the minds of psychics.

So, by exploring some of the most unusual and niche aspects of science, the researchers here have confidently demonstrated how to create a solid, completely credible research paper. To use the most obvious joke in the book, who, even a psychic, could have foreseen this?

This is now the standard by which scientific research should be measured. All scientists when they plan their experiments and do not register them in advance, or when they conduct an experiment but do not share their data with the world, or when they do not use any other methods to increase transparency. used in this study should answer an important question: if parapsychologists can, why can’t you?

Other things I’ve written lately

Last week I wrote an article on hydrogen aircraft for IWeekend Edition – featuring pictures of all the sci-fi aircraft designs for your future hydrogen vacation (I hope there’s a healthy dose of skepticism in the idea).

You may also like my article on peanut allergy and how the scientific approach to what parents should do to prevent it is a paradigmatic example of “medical rejection”.

Science Link of the Week

Everyone should read this article from a biology journal. electronic lifehow they tried to fundamentally change the process of publishing scientific articles and how much backlash they received from the “old guard”.

Thanks for reading Science fiction.

This is a science fiction starring Stuart Ritchie, a newsletter for i. If you’d like to receive this straight to your inbox every week, sign up here.