Talk:Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab

Adding a Controversy and Criticism Section

The introduction states that PEAR was controversial, but the section on parapsychological experiments offers no more than the following elaboration:

"PEAR's results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility. In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results.[25] An attempt by York University's Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR's results.[9]"

The CSICOP article cited reads:

If the claims are credible, it should be possible for other groups to replicate them. To their credit, the PEAR group did enlist two other groups, both based at German universities (Jahn et al. 2000) to engage in a triple effort at replication. These attempts failed to reproduce the claimed effects. Even the PEAR group was unable to reproduce a credible effect.

The conclusion paragraph:

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.

It needs to be noted that although this article was written in 2006, it barely even touches on the mass of PEAR's research. Margins of Reality was published way back in 1987, and PEAR had 19 years with which to work on other REG devices (during which it founded the Global Consciousness Project), yet neither of these key facts are made at all clear by the article. And some of the things Jeffers writes are simply just incorrect.

This is the paper on PortREG replication referenced by the CSICOP article and the current Wikipedia page as evidence against PEAR (from the year 2000): http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2000-mmi-consortium-portreg-replication.pdf

The article abstract:

The primary result of this replication effort was that whereas the overall HI–LO mean separations proceeded in the intended direction at all three laboratories, the overall sizes of these deviations failed by an order of magnitude to attain that of the prior experiments, or to achieve any persuasive level of statistical significance. However, various portions of the data displayed a substantial number of interior structural anomalies in such features as a reduction in trial-level standard deviations; irregular series-position patterns; and differential dependencies on various secondary parameters, such as feedback type or experimental run length, to a composite extent well beyond chance expectation. The change from the systematic, intention-correlated mean shifts found in the prior studies, to this polyglot pattern of structural distortions, testifies to inadequate understanding of the basic phenomena involved and suggests a need for more sophisticated experiments and theoretical models for their further elucidation.

Who in this study has "criticized PEAR for deficient reproducibility"? And if this isn't the study that does criticize PEAR for deficient reproducibility, where is such a study?

Consider the following 1997 PEAR paper that Jeffers conveniently never mentions (from the abstract):

Although the absolute effect sizes are quite small, of the order of 10^(–4) bits deviation per bit processed, over the huge databases accumulated the composite effect exceeds 7 sigma (p ~ 3.5*10^(-13)). These data display significant disparities between female and male operator performances, and consistent serial position effects in individual and collective results. Data generated by operators far removed from the machines and exerting their efforts at times other than those of machine operation show similar effect sizes and structural details to those of the local, on-time experiments.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1997-correlations-random-binary-sequences-12-year-review.pdf

This 12 year program, which ran for a large portion of the intervening time between the publication of Margins of Reality and Jeffers writing in 2006, surely ought to be mentioned as another critical aspect of PEAR's research. But he never does.

Similarly, he mentions once of PEAR's papers published in the Proceedings of the IEEE, "The persistent paradox of psychic phenomena: An engineering perspective" (1982); but he never bothers to bring up "On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomena" (1986), published in the Foundations of Physics. Or what about "Evidence for Consciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems" (1989), also in the Foundations of Physics?

Jeffers never even mentions PEAR's papers on FieldREG--and certainly not the Global Consciousness Project.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1996-fieldreg-anomalies-group-situations.pdf

But if PEAR has two papers in a well-established physics journal laying out its broad theoretical framework, and if research into the noosphere and global consciousness has had positive experimental results since long after Margins of Reality was published and remains ongoing at Princeton U, what does it mean for Jeffers to write: "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"?

The source isn't all bad--it certainly clarifies a few things and Jeffers ought to be mentioned as a relevant skeptic--but it isn't comprehensive enough to substantiate the claims that it's being used as source material for.

Since my "History and Influence" section beefed up the physical size of the PEAR article considerably, I think it might be worth adding a third section entitled "Controversy", which can objectively document whatever controversy surrounded the PEAR laboratory: their inability to publish in mainstream journals, supposed issues with replication and statistical analysis, the "outraged Nobel Prize winners" (a quote from the NY Times article), the sympathetic Nobel Prize winners (namely, Brian Josephson and Wolfgang Pauli), as well as tensions with both Princeton University and academia.

And it really isn't fair to promote a pseudo-skeptic like Robert Park (quoted in the intro) as the spokesperson for all physicists--or all respectable physicists. Certainly there is a generation of individuals, particularly on the West Coast and related to various circles at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, that doesn't give two damns about Robert Park or his materialist dogma. Schrodinger talked about the "inadvisability of locating a man's thoughts within his head," and Pauli wrote of the need for experimental work in the area of ESP to determine whether such effects are physically real because gut instinct alone cannot tell us. I can promise you Robert Park has never read the relevant passages in his Schrodinger or his Pauli because he simply does not care--but a Wikipedia article ought to.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 07:08, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

If after 25 years, all PEAR managed was to sneak 2 papers into publication - two papers that then went into radio silence with no effect- there is no need to address them. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 18:58, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

The extent of PEAR's experimentation with RNGs and REGs was enormous and the article ought to explain what their experiments were all about. Jahn published most of PEAR's papers in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, managed by the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group he helped found and of which he was formerly Vice President.

http://www.scientificexploration.org/about_sse.html

PEAR's online list of 62 publications (their full discography includes hundreds of technical notes and other gems--not to mention Jahn's three books on parapsychology)

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html

Selected Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications on Psi Research (Institute of Noetic Sciences, compiled by Dean Radin--former PEAR researcher)

http://noetic.org/research/psi-research/

Essays on Science and Other Topics, Related Research by Others (by Rupert Sheldrake--has collaborated with Dr. Radin)

http://sheldrake.org/research/essays-on-science-and-other-topics

http://sheldrake.org/research/related-research-by-others

What is that radio silence of which you speak? From by perspective, parapsychology as a science is flourishing more than it ever has. To argue otherwise is to simply be blinded by your own hubris preconceptions about science.

This is a sensitive topic and we need to tread carefully--the Wikipedia article needs to fairly acknowledge all educated viewpoints surrounding PEAR. To do otherwise is disingenuous and does a disservice to all readers (and isn't in line with editorial standards regarding a NPOV!)

From NPOV:

All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

According to Dr. Sheldrake,

The Guerrilla Skeptics are well trained, highly motivated, have an ideological agenda, and operate in teams, contrary to Wikipedia rules. The mastermind behind this organization is Susan Gerbik. She explains how her teams work in a training video. She now has over 90 guerrillas operating in 17 different languages. The teams are coordinated through secret Facebook pages. They check the credentials of new recruits to avoid infiltration. Their aim is to "control information", and Ms Gerbik glories in the power that she and her warriors wield. They have already seized control of many Wikipedia pages, deleted entries on subjects they disapprove of, and boosted the biographies of atheists.

As the Guerrilla Skeptics have demonstrated, Wikipedia can easily be subverted by determined groups of activists, despite its well-intentioned policies and mediation procedures. Perhaps one solution would be for experienced editors to visit the talk pages of sites where editing wars are taking place, rather like UN Peacekeeping Forces, and try to re-establish a neutral point of view. But this would not help in cases where there are no editors to oppose the Guerrilla Skeptics, or where they have been silenced.

If nothing is done, Wikipedia will lose its credibility, and its financial backers will withdraw their support. I hope the noble aims of Wikipedia will prevail.

http://sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/blog/wikipedia-under-threat

http://sheldrake.org/reactions/wikipedia

Neglecting to mention PEAR's research is as bad as lying about it. It does not make any sense to call PEAR controversial if the controversy goes unexplored and unexplained.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 03:48, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

CSICOP, the primary "skeptical" source cited, is an ideologically motivated group of crackpots

I found the following passage discussing the foundation of CSICOP in Prof. David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics (pp. 98-100), discussing the parapsychology research at SRI done in the mid 1970s--namely by Dr. Hal Puthoff and Dr. Russell Targ:

More than just organize, critics such as Randi, Gardner, and Wheeler began to organize. They formed groups like CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal) and ASTOP (the Austin Society to Oppose Pseudoscience; Wheeler having moved from Princeton to the University of Texas at Austin.) Labeled a "scientific vigilante organization" by some sociologists at the time, CSICOP attack what its members considered New Age excesses. They conducted replication studies, founded a journal (the Skeptical Inquirer), and issued their own press releases, at times blurring the line between seemingly objective scientific body knowledge and self-interested lobbying group.

And yet, as we now know, the joke was ultimately on the debunkers. Despite the thoroughgoing criticism and the overheated rhetoric, reesearch on remote viewing continued unabated for more than twenty years, paid for with more than $20 million of taxpayer money (in 2010 dollars). The initial grant of $50,000 from the CIA, back in October 1972, snowballed over the years, with frquent inputs from the Defense Intelligence Agency and other branches of the Pentagon. While Wheeler pleaded with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to bar research like Puthoff and Targ's, the budget for their psi lab at Stanford Research Institute swelled to nearly $1 million per year [emphasis Kaiser's] (about $3 million per year in 2010 dollars). Top-secret spin-offs sprang up around the country, usually established with Puthoff's help. No number of failed replications seemed to quell their backer's interests. When researchers at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland conducted their own pilot study in 1978-1979--having dished out $100,000 in consulting fees to Puthoff's SRI lab to get them going--they found no statistically significant results. But just like Rauscher and the Fundamental Fysiks Group members, the investigators at Aberdeen (including Evan Harris Walker, of consciousness-hidden-variables frame) had found enough surprising gems in the transcripts to keep at it. "The evaluation process is truly an art," concluded the secret Aberdeen report. "Our replication of the [SRI] protocool did not result in statistical significance," the report concluded, but "we learned a great deal about ourselves." And the cash kept flowing.

Since PEAR was founded in part (on Dunne's behalf) as an attempt to replicate Puthoff's research, it's strange and unprofessional and unencyopedic to use as a source a group that was incepted for the very purpose of discrediting Puthoff and Targ--an ideologically motivated group rather than a scientifically motivated one, in other words.

You need to tread carefully when you're citing an opposing scientist to make sure they've thoroughly reviewed PEAR's work and have useful commentary and aren't just talking out of their ass about something they couldn't possibly understand.

Relevant quotation from Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli from Robert Jahn's post-PEAR publication, Quirks of the Quantum Mind (2012):

I still want to consider briefly the controversial theme of "extrasensory perception" (ESP), which constitutes a frontier of both physics and psychology and which can as reasonably be called "parapsychology" as "biophysics." By now there are available some quantitative experiments which are carried out with scientific methodology and which apply modern mathematical statistics. Usually these concern themselves with guessing numbers or pictures on cards. This border field has elicited much interest among physicists, but also much rejection. Some speak of experimental or mathematical mistakes, other say carefully that they "don't feel comfortable with it." To the former point it can be said that as far as my knowledge extends, in the carefully conducted experiments there has been no evidence of mistakes. To be sure, the phenomena are always relatively rare, and partly associated with a special gift of the subject.

Concerning the latter point I would like to indicate that epistemological a priori grounds are not sufficient to reject the existence of ESP from the outset. In fact, as outspokenly critical a philosopher as Schopenhauer considered parapsychological effects, even beyond the empirically established, not only possible, but considered them as supports for his own philosophy. The question of ESP must therefore be decided through critical empiricism. The recent investigations of such phenomena return to importance the old question of how the psychological condition of the subjects fits into external occurrences. Can the ESP phenomena be artificially induced positively or negatively? The results to date agree on a so-called "decline effect" which points to the importance of the emotional factors in the subject.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 21:31, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

that a group organized to present and represent the mainstream views is not problematic in the least. WP:FRINGE - and certainly FAR LESS problematic than the wholesale unquestioned regurgitation of highly questionable quackery by quacks that is so often found in the parapsychology field. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 14:24, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

"that is so often found"

You're making hasty generalizations here. I think we need to clearly define what Wikipedia's attitude toward Robert Jahn and Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research is and ought to be, in part based on the way other parapsychology articles present the oddball scientists who engage in these sorts of far-out exercises.

Attitude 1: There is evidence in favor of psi that ought to be considered, though criticism of this type of research is acknowledged

Attitude 2: Psi may or may not exist, but it cannot be rejected from the outset--parapsychologists are presented in an open minded setting

Attitude 3: Psi cannot be true a priori and anybody claiming to successfully conduct parapsychological exercises is either not following proper scientific controls or lying

Attitude 4: Because most physicists and psychologists find psi to be distasteful, parapsychologists are pseudo-scientists and quacks by default.

"a group organized to present and represent the mainstream views"

What meaningful definition can "mainstream view" have when it comes to science or scientific research? Are Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm and Brian Josephson and Robert Jahn not mainstream physicists? Are Carl Jung and Dean Radin and Timothy Leary not mainstream psychologists? They were educated at the same institutions as the rest of us, they taught at the same institutions, and yet they personally advocate views far outside the norm. Are you claiming that this by default means they are improperly educated or that their science is therefore by default not a proper science?

You sound like you're advocating groupthink, not objective science.

Anyway, your argument is beyond me, and I simply do not understand what about Jahn or Nelson's research with random numbers and physical noise is so upsetting.

I'm not sure to which of the above attitudes you precisely subscribe--I suspect somewhere between Attitude 3 and Attitude 4--but unless you can produce a source that establishes this as the appropriate attitude for Wikipedia to take toward PEAR, I think your efforts are misguided. Robert Jahn is a well-respected academic physicist with sponsorship from the Air Force and NASA who devoted a significant portion of his professional work to investigating the kind of anomalies that Puthoff and Pauli and others before him found so interesting and worthwhile.

Some other articles on parapsychological topics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Radin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Targ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI

If you'll notice, the pseudoscience accusation and associated nastiness is only thrown against the four men--the parapsychological projects Puthoff ran (at SRI and Stargate) are saved from this criticism because of their reputable associations and big-name funders--namely the Central Intelligence Agency and SRI International, formerly associated with Stanford University.

PEAR was similarly funded by the big-name James S. McDonnell Foundation by aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell and several other wealthy Princeton benefactors. PEAR was run out of the Engineering School of Princeton U, the top-ranked school in the nation, and the parapsychology accusation is NOT repeated against Robert G. Jahn on his own Wikipedia, Jahn having served as Dean of Engineering for many years (including during the time period in which he founded PEAR).

Because

(1) Jahn is a well-regarded scientist--i.e., not a pseudoscientist, and

(2) PEAR was essentially his personal research project, and

(3) Their team was tiny and Jahn was personally friends with all of those involved (see: http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/staff.html), and

(4) The entire thing was personally founded by Jahn to replicate an earlier project that he had personally done with an undergraduate, and

(5) Wikipedia finds PEAR notable enough for inclusion, and

(6) PEAR's notability is an almost direct consequence of the controversial nature of its research

I don't think it's unreasonable to include a more holistic discussion of what PEAR was as a research group, who its researchers were as academics and as people, and what its influence on others has been.

PEAR was an Ivy League parapsychology project that employed students from Princeton U as interns (some of whose discussions you can find in the blogosphere) whose research was funded by private philanthropist and innovator Jim McDonnell and whose project director Robert Jahn was the Dean of Engineering, just about the best position you could be in to run a parapsychology project.

Former Princeton student Herb Mertz, co-founder of Psyleron, inspired by his professor's--Robert Jahn's--research.

http://www.trentonian.com/article/TT/20101114/FINANCE01/311149998

Like I've said before, the PEARtree (the name for the Princeton students, professors, alums, and others who either secretly or publicly support PEAR, Jahn, and Dunne) ought to be mentioned (Jahn's 2012 book Quirks of the Quantum Mind is dedicated "For the PEARtree" and the PEARtree is similarly mentioned in one of the NY Times articles), and I still don't understand why you keep saying no academics are interested in this stuff. Certainly if not at Princeton then on the West Coast at Stanford and Berkeley there is an actual academic following for this sort of thing. Are you disputing this as a fact?

Anyway, I think you need to make clear your beliefs about the proper attitude for Wikipedia to take regarding the validity of PEAR as a scientific organization--unless you can clearly articulate your beliefs, the reasons for them, produce sources to back up such assertions in the article, and prove beyond all reasonable doubt that nothing PEAR did could be legitimate science, I think Wikipedia needs to acknowledge the possibility that Jahn actually did something special. Not necessarily define what that something was, but acknowledge that PEAR was a unique institution in the history of science, much like the Fundamental Fysiks Group.

It was the lab that asked the wrong questions, after all.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 16:44, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Concerns/Comments regarding the History section

As it currently stands, the PEAR History section I wrote has been removed from the article, the result of a "lack of consensus".

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab&diff=659204295&oldid=659201627

Given the odd nature of the topic, I thought I made a pretty well put together exposition of the historical framework behind PEAR's research along with Jahn and Dunne's personal background.

Additional information on PEAR's origins is absolutely needed to supplement the article as it presently stands, so I would be much obliged if people could step forward with whatever concerns they may have about the current construction of the History section.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 00:53, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Gosh, I'm getting boggle-eyed with all these walls of text! I think that the consensus we had back in September - here - was that a brief History section might be appropriate. Specifically, one which just outlines the private philanthropic support, the lack of government funding, summarizes Jahn's prior academic background, etc. Let's start with two or three well-cited sentences that we all agree on, and then proceed carefully, with consideration and consensus. jxm (talk) 01:05, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Nature ought to be one of the primary sources used by the article

Given the problems I pointed out with using CSICOP as an objective source for a PEAR article, I think we should try to reincorporate the Nature article, "The lab that asked the wrong questions" back into at least the article's introductory section, which earlier versions of the page did. Currently, it is commented out of the page's source in the list of references text, and my attempt to incorporate it back the intro was removed by the IP 76.107.171.90.

The issue with parapsychology as a science generally is that the process of statistical analysis is more of an art than a science (which is not to say that useful and scientific conclusions don't come from statistical data: this is exactly the point on which the totality of PEAR's work rests)--and unless you've ever done actual statistical work with real data sets as in SPSS or R, this is a difficult point to appreciate.

From Nature:

In the end, the decision whether to pursue a tiny apparent effect or put it down to statistical flaws is a subjective one. “It raises the issue of where you draw the line,” says sceptic Chris French, an ‘anomalistic psychologist’ at Goldsmiths, University of London, who tries to explain what seem to be paranormal experiences in straightforward psychological terms. French thinks that even though the chances of a real effect being discovered are low, the implications of a positive result would be so interesting that work such as Jahn’s is worth pursuing.

Many scientists disagree. Besides being a waste of time, such work is unscientific, they argue, because no attempt is ever made to offer a physical explanation for the effect. Park says the PEAR lab “threatened the reputation” of both Princeton and the wider community. He sees the persistence of such labs as an unfortunate side effect of science’s openness to new questions. “The surprising thing is that it doesn’t happen more often,” he says.

And again:

But parapsychologists are still limited to publishing in a small number of niche journals. French thinks the field is treated unfairly. “I’m convinced that parapsychologists have a hard time trying to publish in mainstream journals,” he says, adding that he even has difficulty publishing his ‘straight’ papers on why people believe in paranormal events: “Simply because the paper mentions the word telepathy or psychokinesis, it isn’t sent out to referees. People think the whole thing is a waste of time.”

I feel like all this is worthy of inclusion somewhere...perhaps in a controversy section, if not the introduction?

Another relevant description of the process of data analysis, this one from David Kaiser in How the Hippies Saved Physics. The larger context of his discussion is given in one of the sections above--Kaiser is discussing Hal Puthoff at SRI, whose work inspired PEAR lab manager Brenda Dunne, originally a grad student in psychology and Human Development at U Chicago, who met Bob Jahn at a parapsychology conference in the mid to late 70s.

As an important historical aside that ought to be mentioned somewhere in the PEAR article, we ought to recall that Dr. Puthoff and Dr. Targ published their book Mind-Reach in 1977, which was favorably reviewed by Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), itself praised by physicist David Bohm, of hidden variable fame, successor to Einstein, and author of Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), which discussed the importance of consciousness to the so-called "New Physics" (and which some members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, a major collaborator with Puthoff and SRI, would go on to take as a mechanism for distant information transfer between minds--i.e., parapsychology), as:

Recommended highly for those who want to understand the essential significance of the modern physics, and for whose who are concerned with its implications for the possible transformation of human consciousness. (from the first page of the book)

Here is what The Dancing Wu Li Masters writes about Puthoff and his book Mind Reach (1977)--Puthoff is undoubtedly known to Jahn just as well as Jahn is undoubtedly known to Puthoff, and I'm fairly certain Puthoff has at least published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which Jahn formerly managed as Vice President, and in which most of PEAR's papers are published. The both of them are perhaps the two most notorious parapsychologist-quantum physicists (after Wolfgang Pauli) of the last 100 years, educated at Stanford U and Princeton U respectively, and each sponsored in some of their academic research (though not necessarily exactly in parapsychology) by NASA as well as the Air Force--and Puthoff is additionally sponsored by the Navy and the CIA:

Superluminal quantum connectedness seems to be, on the surface at last, a possible explanation for some types os psychic phenomena. Telepathy, for example, often appears to happen instantaneously, if not faster [i.e., precognitive remote viewing, what initially got Brenda Dunne interested in parapsychology]. Psychic phenomena have been held in distain by physicists since the days of Newton. In fact, most physicists do not even believe that they exist*

(footnote section)

• There are some notable exceptions, chief among which are Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, whose experiments in remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute are presented in their book, Mind Reach, New York, Delacorte, 1977.

From Kaiser:

No number of failed replications seemed to quell their backer's interests. When researchers at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland conducted their own pilot study in 1978-1979--having dished out $100,000 in consulting fees to Puthoff's SRI lab to get them going--they found no statistically significant results. But just like Rauscher and the Fundamental Fysiks Group members, the investigators at Aberdeen (including Evan Harris Walker, of consciousness-hidden-variables frame) had found enough surprising gems in the transcripts to keep at it. "The evaluation process is truly an art," concluded the secret Aberdeen report. "Our replication of the [SRI] protocool did not result in statistical significance," the report concluded, but "we learned a great deal about ourselves." And the cash kept flowing.

And from Parapsychology research at SRI:

From 1972 till about 1991, research was carried out at the SRI research centre (or Stanford Research Institute as it was called at the beginning) on various aspects of parapsychology. Early claims of success were published in several mainstream scientific journals, including Proceedings of the IEEE and Nature. Later work was sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency; it continued till 1995 as the Star Gate Project at the Science Applications International Corporation.

Since the SRI article mentions the successful publications that Puthoff and his associates got into mainstream academic journals, I think it's also fair that this PEAR article mention the couple of successful papers that Jahn and his associates have managed to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

(1) The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective (1982). Proceedings IEEE

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1982-persistant-paradox-psychic-phenomena.pdf

(2) Consciousness, Information, and Living Systems (2005). Cellular & Molecular Biology

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2005-consciousness-information-living-systems.pdf

(3) Radin, D. I., and Nelson, R. D. (1989). Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems. Foundations of Physics, Vol.19, No.12, pp.1499-1514.

(4) On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomena (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No.8, pp.721-772.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1986-quantum-mechanics-consciousness.pdf

(5) Physical Aspects of Psychic Phenomena (1988). Physics Bulletin, 39, pp.235-236.

(6) Deviations from Physical Randomness Due to Human Agent Intention? (1999). Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 10, No. 6, pp. 935-952.

(7) The Case for Inertia as a Vacuum Effect: A Reply to Woodward and Mahood (2000). Foundations of Physics, 30, No. 1,pp. 59-80.

(8) Inertial Mass and the Quantum Vacuum Fields (2001). Ann. Physics, 10, 5, pp.393-414.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2001-inertial-mass-quantum-vacuum-fields.pdf

Neuroscience325 (talk) 17:38, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

The Intellectual Influence of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung on PEAR

The following is excerpted from the prologue of Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (published in paperback as 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession) by Professor Arthur I. Miller, recommended by Walter Isaacson: "Miller is a master of capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence":

Pauli told very few colleagues about his discussions with Jung. He feared their derision. Nevertheless his sessions with Jung convinced him that intuition rather than logical thought held the key to understanding the world around us...Scientists who have not examined Pauli's vast correspondence and writings still place him in the old Newtonian straightjacket. But Pauli was alive to the alchemical roots of science. Modern science, he believed, had come to a dead end. Perhaps the means to break through and to develop new insights was to take a radically different approach and return to science's alchemical roots.

Although a twentieth-century scientist, Pauli felt an affinity with the seventeenth century--perfectly natural to anyone who, as he did, accepted that there was, as Jung postulated, a collective unconscious.

Today, a vocal minority of scientists believe in paranormal phenomena. For twenty eight years a laboratory at Princeton University tried to establish evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP)--using card-guessing methods--as well as evidence for telekinesis, the ability of the mind to move objects. It had been privately funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and closed down in 2007. Its founder, Robert G. Jahn, a pioneer in jet propulsion systems said, "it is time." He claimed to have demonstrated that test subjects "thinking high" and "thinking low" could alter a sequence of numbers flashed from a random number generator--very slight, however, two or three flips out of ten thousand. Pauli and Jung discussed experiments of this sort. They, too, believed un the power of the mind inexplicable by the logic of physics.

The two men also discussed at great length the notion of consciousness, considered by most scientists at that time to be sheer nonsense--"off-limits." Today it is a burgeoning field of research using concepts from quantum mechanics, some of which Pauli speculated on.

A lot of PEAR's and the GCP's scholarly work--particularly as it relates to the humanities and psychology--has to do with these more cryptic parts of quantum mechanics. PEAR's original book, Margins of Reality, is literally filled with marginalia of quotations from Pauli, Bohr, Heisenberg, Jeans, Schrodinger, etc. that it does an honest attempt to explicate. Can we try to incorporate the intellectual history--early in the history of QM, long before Jahn--that gave rise to PEAR somewhere in the article?

Neuroscience325 (talk) 18:40, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

that PEAR tried to cloak its mumbo jumbo under the labcoat of science is covered in the general dismissal as pseudoscience. that some people want to add a layer of quantum mysticism over the labcoat is hardly groundbreaking nor particularly informative. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 00:08, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Problems with "The Skeptic's Dictionary" as a source

So this is the list of a good number of PEAR's publications. I count 62...

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html

The source in dispute: "Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR)"

http://skepdic.com/pear.html

Now when I first ran across this source, I thought it had a fairly convincing argument too. This was several months ago. But after any further investigation than a mere cursory glance, you realize they've basically just ignored all the data collected and the history of the field and are just saying things that either make no sense or completely distort the facts of the situation.

For example:

Physicist Bob Park reports, for example, that he suggested to Jahn two types of experiments that would have bypassed the main criticisms aimed at PEAR. Why not do a double-blind experiment? asked Park. Have a second RNG determine the task of the operator and do not let this determination be known to the one recording the results. This could have eliminated the charge of experimenter bias. Another experiment, however, could have eliminated most criticism. Park suggested that PEAR have operators try to use their minds to move a "state-of-the-art microbalance" (Park 2008, 138-139). A microbalance can make precise measurements on the order of a millionth of a gram. One doesn't need to be clairvoyant to figure out why this suggestion was never heeded.

PEAR closed in 2007. And to dispute its results--which were conducted on a variety of REG devices, all of which had proper controls...note that they cite absolutely zero evidence for the supposed charge of "experimenter bias," which is completely unfounded once you read up on how the experiments were actually done...all the data was automatically added into a massive database, so no researcher or operator had the opportunity to manipulate it--they reprimand Dr. Jahn for not performing a procedure...first outlined in 2008!!! "Park suggested that PEAR have operators try to use their minds to move a state-of-the-art microbalance (Park 2008, 138-139)."

WOW. It's like the person writing the article was actually retarded.

But this is supposedly cited as evidence that:

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about PEAR is the fact that suggestions by critics that should have been considered were routinely ignored.

PEAR literally had to beg academic journals to let them publish their studies because parapsychology is such a taboo. Note the two NY Times articles cited as well as the Nature one:

the lab’s results have been studiously ignored by the wider community. Apart from a couple of early reviews (R. G. Jahn Proc. IEEE 70, 136–170; 1982 and R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne Found. Phys. 16, 721–772; 1986), Jahn’s papers were rejected from mainstream journals. Jahn believes he was unfairly judged because of the questions he asked, not because of methodological flaws.

http://www.boundarylab.org/bi/articles/Nature_PEAR_closing.pdf

That the article does not elaborate on this key fact in understanding what PEAR actually did basically constitutes lying.

Now, the article goes on to basically accuse these respected scientific researchers of academic fraud without evidence and contrary to 50 years of historical data--it's inexcusable:

Furthermore, Stanley Jeffers, a physicist at York University, Ontario, has repeated the Jahn experiments but with chance results (Alcock 2003: 135-152). (See "Physics and Claims for Anomalous Effects Related to Consciousness" in Alcock et al. 2003. Abstract.) And Jahn et al. failed to replicate the PEAR results in experiments done in Germany (See "Mind/Machine Interaction Consortium: PortREG Replication Experiments," Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 499–555, 2000).

TWO STUDIES. They cite TWO STUDIES to "debunk" 60+ studies published online on PEAR's website--which including the one they cite by Jahn et. al!!!--and this says nothing at all of the Parapsychology research at SRI that PEAR was only trying to replicate.

We should expect to get studies with both positive and negative results, regardless of what's actually going on!!! That's simply how the research works--if there was something wrong with PEAR's data, they need to explain what that something was and give an alternative hypothesis to the ESP hypothesis advocated by PEAR. But they don't even pretend to do this.

They try to justify themselves:

According to Ray Hyman, "the percentage of hits in the intended direction was only 50.02%" in the PEAR studies (Hyman 1989: 152). And one "operator" (the term used to describe the subjects in these studies) was responsible for 23% of the total data base. Her hit rate was 50.05%. Take out this operator and the hit rate becomes 50.01%. According to John McCrone, "Operator 10," believed to be a PEAR staff member, "has been involved in 15% of the 14 million trials, yet contributed to a full half of the total excess hits" (McCrone 1994). According to Dean Radin, the criticism that there "was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment...was tested and found to be groundless" (Radin 1997: 221). His source for this claim is a 1991 article by Jahn et al. in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, "Count population profiles in engineering anomalies experiments" (5:205-32). However, Jahn gives the data for his experiments in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 352-353). McCrone has done the calculations and found that 'If [operator 10's] figures are taken out of the data pool, scoring in the "low intention" condition falls to chance while "high intention" scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results."

This doesn't make any sense. First of all, PEAR conducted REG experiments on a variety of different varying mediums, so these disparate experiments ought to be considered individually for an effect, and then looked at together to see the net effect. The way the article masks this point makes it sound like PEAR only conducted a single type of REG experiment, which is not at all true. They're basically misrepresenting the nature of the actual research done.

And Margins of Reality was only ever intended to be a book for a popular audience--it was never meant as some end-all-be-all of PEAR's research. That they're citing a guy from the 1980s to "debunk" research that was ongoing into the 2000s should be very telling. (This claim is specifically cited in the Wikipedia article as some of the only evidence that PEAR exhibited any bias or methodological flaws.)

But the nonsense goes on

If [operator 10's] figures are taken out of the data pool, scoring in the "low intention" condition falls to chance while "high intention" scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results.

It's well established in psychic research that some individuals are simply extraordinary performers--they have more well-developed PK abilities that the population mean, in other words. Suggesting we arbitrarily remove the highest performer from the data just for shits and giggles because it would make PK less likely isn't a scientific argument. But even so: "high intention scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results." Even doing what they imagine, we still find an above chance correlation for "high intention"...but they don't even attempt to explain this, even after arbitrarily playing with the data for no real reason at all. And again, this is ONLY speaking of the research published in Margins of Reality in 1987!!! This is not an overarching criticism of PEAR--it is a comment dealing only with the first 10 or so years of their research.

PEAR got started after an undergraduate came to Jahn in the 1970s and the two of them first decided to study PK...which they found evidence for. This research is simply never mentioned. The lab manager of PEAR, Brenda Dunne, was a graduate student at U Chicago who had conducted her own independent research to replicate the remote viewing experiments at SRI in the early 1970s. This is also never mentioned. In 1998, PEAR spawned the Global Consciousness Project, which continues on today, claiming too to find above chance results. This research is also ignored.

In 1987, Dean Radin and Nelson did a meta-analysis of all RNG experiments done between 1959 and 1987 and found that they produced odds against chance beyond a trillion to one (Radin 1997: 140). This sounds impressive, but as Radin says “in terms of a 50% hit rate, the overall experimental effect, calculated per study, was about 51 percent, where 50 percent would be expected by chance” [emphasis added] (141). A couple of sentences later, Radin gives a more precise rendering of "about 51 percent" by noting that the overall effect was "just under 51 percent." Similar results were found with experiments where people tried to use their minds to affect the outcome of rolls of the dice, according to Radin. And, when Nelson did his own analysis of all the PEAR data (1,262 experiments involving 108 people), he found similar results to the earlier RNG studies but "with odds against chance of four thousand to one" (Radin 1997: 143). Nelson also claimed that there were no "star" performers.

"This sounds impressive"?! I think it is impressive. Oh, it's only a bit less than 51%...so what? If it's a scientifically and empirically verified result, it merits SOME fucking explanation. If that explanation is simply experimenter bias, EXPLAIN HOW THAT HAPPENED. They offer no causal account of how the data collection process became tainted--it's just a bunch of idle speculation that actually runs counter to what we know the facts of the situation are.

That the entire article is based on emotional appeals rather than well-researched scientific studies is what really did it for me. PEAR attacks its critics by throwing DATA at them: THIS IS WHAT WE DID. This article is an embarrassment and ought to either be removed as a source or the relevant portions of the article ought to be significantly reworked since it grossly misrepresents Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. Citing TWO studies as "evidence" against 60+ studies--when what is actually needed is a statistical meta-analysis...all of which come out in PEAR's favor--is not science. It's theology.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 11:53, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

The "Daily Free Press" student article does not establish PEAR as a "pseudoscience" laboratory

So this Daily Free Press article was written by a bunch of college students at Boston University who by all accounts just didn't know what the fuck they were talking about.

According to the article:

But critics said experiments like [these] one do not prove much.

That's an interesting assertion. Why should we think this is true.

“This is just one of many examples where I think wishful thinking causes too much cognitive distortion in research,” said science author and historian Michael Shermer. “I find most of their research to be below the standards of rigorous science,” he said. “[Those who practice ‘pseudoscience’] make claims to scientific credibility that, in fact, lack evidence or fail to employ the methods of science,” Shermer said.

Great. Now why the fuck should any of us scientists give even half a shit about what Michael Shermer BELIEVES IN HIS HEART about PEAR? Is there any evidence that Shermer even has half a clue about anything PEAR did? I want to see a well-fucking-reasoned argument about why PEAR was flawed--citing a single college professor is not that at all. Shermer is a smart guy. He's an outspoken atheist. He's clearly spent a lot of time

I'm an outspoken evil-fucking-atheist too.

The article says:

“That does not stop people from publishing about it for an uncritical or uneducated audience,” Allchin said in an email.

What the fuck? Jahn and PEAR published plenty of their studies in the IEEE--the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, "The world's largest association for the advancement of technology." This is an "uncritical or uneducated audience"!?

They go on:

Allchin said, however, some types of research fall into a gray area between credible and non-credible, which he defined as marginal science. Although the mainstream science community at first dismisses these areas of study because they seem far-fetched, he said they often eventually present scientifically provable results.

These types of research, he said, do not strictly follow the scientific method, but are still worthy of note.

“[Marginal science] is a genuine effort to clarify the fringes of our experience,” he said.

PEAR absolutely DID follow the scientific method, but as the article itself admits "they often eventually present scientifically provable results."

That a couple student journalists mistakenly refer to PEAR as pseudoscience is not evidence of anything other than that college students have still much to learn about life.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 12:19, 30 May 2015 (UTC)