Based on economics, and the fact that nobody is exploiting this for massive gains, I'd say that the prior expectation for this being anything but an error or a fraud is much lower than you seem to be implying.
Well how exactly would you exploit being able to see porn from the future 53% of the time? My understanding is that there is a ton of military research also indicating a weak psi effect, as seen in The Men Who Stare At Goats, but I don't think they've found any use for it. I'm not a true believer by any means, but I don't think it's especially unreasonable for there to be some sort of weak psi effect either. You should skim over a copy of Stan Grof's book When The Impossible Happens. Most of the chapters aren't at all convincing, but there are a few things that jump out as being kind of interesting. At the very least reading stuff like that helps one to develop a more noetic understanding of the history of thought.
From the perspective of information, the bits that you have decoded into pornography could be decoded differently into another coherent image. Therefore, the fact that the particular choice of decoder produced pornography should not much matter.
The military uses for this are obvious; the military abandoned it because it could not produce results.
And even if this only works for porn, that's fine. I could make a killing betting mathematicians and scientists that I could pick the porn > 50% of the time.
What do you propose to be the propagator of information? Photons? If so, what is the receptor? If not, then what? Also, how is this information propagated from the source? If propagated through time, how does this reconcile with the forward-propagation in time of everything else that has ever been observed?
"The military abandoned it because it could not produce results."
According to the movie, the military originally abandoned the research because of internal conflicts, and they have in fact since resumed research again. Not sure what the veracity of this is, but they stated it as being a true fact at the end of the film.
"What do you propose to be the propagator of information?"
Terence McKenna once said, "Not only is reality stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose." Betting on current scientific paradigms as accurately portraying reality is a suckers bet every time. I have no idea where the information would come from, though presumably it would come from the same place that consciousness comes from.
The reason HN is mostly logical positivists is because it's dominated by engineers and people with engineer-like personalities, and that's what most engineers think science advocates. (Even though most scientists themselves don't believe this, and post modern philosophy makes pretty short work of it.)
The records show that this was transferred to the CIA in 1995 and discontinued. If they secretly continued it, they sure did a great job in the run-up to 9/11.
If these guys are open with their data, it will be rather straightforward to identify the error that they committed that led to these results. If not, a few other people will try to replicate their results and fail. At least some things in their field of study are always consistent.
Also, I'm a scientist, not an engineer.
Oh, also, let's be clear here. If what these fellows propose is true, then they will have simultaneously discovered both of the following:
1) Reverse causality
2) Evidence for biological receptors for the mediator of reverse causality
It's basically hilarious, except for the fact that the money that funds this could be spent more productively on literally anything else. In general, parapsychology consists of the practice of accidentally or willfully misunderstanding the scientific method.
"If what these fellows propose is true, then they will have simultaneously discovered 1) Reverse causality 2) Evidence for biological receptors for the mediator of reverse causality"
If either is true, then history suggests that we'll later look back and realize that we already had a ton of evidence for both of these hypotheses, but that it was all being used instead as evidence that the old paradigm was correct.
"If these guys are open with their data, it will be rather straightforward to identify the error that they committed that led to these results."
Maybe. With a lot of these studies it hasn't been obvious if there has been an error or if so what it was, which is why the field keeps going.
"Parapsychology consists of the practice of accidentally or willfully misunderstanding the scientific method."
The hypotheses put forward by parapsychology might well be false, but that's no reason to trash talk the researchers. I don't think there's any reason to think they're less intelligent, competent, or ethical than any other researchers, and a lot of them are highly respected, e.g. Stan Grof.
Time and again, researchers in this field have shown that they cannot or choose not to conduct reproducible science. In its decades of existence, parapsychology has never had a reproducible finding that cannot be explained by common physics or psychology. J Archibald Wheeler was right to try to eject parapsychology from the AAAS.
Why do you say that Stan Grof is associated with parapsychology? I had only heard of him in connection to psychedelic research previously, which is something else entirely.
He co-founded the field of transpersonal psychology, which is very similar. His research in this area was highly regarded even by Carl Sagan, who was probably the most famous skeptic of his day. He was especially interested in birth memories, memories of past lives, and also syncronicities.
Interesting. I wasn't familiar with transpersonal psychology before, but the wikipedia article on the topic specifically cautions against conflating parapsychology with transpersonal psychology. Consequently, I don't think that what I've said could reasonably be interpreted as an attack on people who you say are reputable, like Stan Grof.
Transpersonal psychology sounds harmless: a soft science that makes soft claims. Unless they barge onto the scene and start claiming that spirituality has a physical basis that (only) they can perceive, I'm probably not going to have any concerns with what they do.
In contrast, parapsychology makes claims about the physical world that would have real impact if true, but in the end what they claim is never true. If they've simply been suffering from "bad luck" for the past several decades, I think that real scientists can be forgiven for having a hard time distinguishing that run of bad luck from from incompetence or fraud.
One thing is true: on HN, you and I always seem to get into very interesting discussions (from my perspective, at least). I hope that my stern words for the field of parapsychology don't cloud the fact that I wish you well.
Yeah good discussion, I wish you well also. Anyway time for bed, but definitely go check out some of Grof's work. He seems to be really interested in reincarnation, which to me seems a step beyond psi in terms of plausibility. You almost couldn't have reincarnation without psi, or at least whatever underlying mechanism was powering it.
