It's easy to argue both sides with statistics. Remember the stats proving smoking was good for u from tobacco companies years ago. I wonder how Dean et-al will respond to Nick's challenge here? Remember Russ Targ's CIA SRI claims on precognitive remote viewing, e.g. Red Chinese nuke test 4 days in advance Of course that's not a good statistical sample.
I don't find Robin's hypothesis convincing, but I am not an expert in statistical design of psychological experiments with living subjects. Also there have been analogous objections to the drug tests and medical investigations that rely on statistics.
Sent from my iPhone in London, Mayfair near the American Embassy.
On Oct 18, 2012, at 6:34 PM, nick herbert <
I've looked over this paper meta-analyzing the "presentiment experiment" and am shocked that such a careful analysis completely ignores one very plausible explanation
for this seeming retrocausal effect--namely Robin's anticipatory expectation informally expressed at http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=123256 but as far as I can tell
never published. Radin claims to have excluded Robin's hypothesis for some of his experiments but I know of no formal replication of Radin's claim. Robin's Hypothesis is a
reasonable and entirely natural possible explanation for the presentiment effect and as such needs to be rigorously excluded before accepting presentiment as a fact.
The case for human presentiment is only as strong as the efforts made by its proponents to rigorously falsify it. The apparent failure to seriously test (or even consider--as in the MTU article) Robin's anticipatory expectation hypothesis greatly diminishes my faith in presentiment as a real physical effect.
Nick Herbert
http://quantumtantra.blogspot.com