“participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%… .In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8%…This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%.”
Sure, sure, but how does that compare to the odds of getting 50 million pressing a green button?
Mod Note: just a reminder that there’s a difference between “I think this is woo” and taking issue with BB (or the author) for this post existing in the first place. If this isn’t your sort of content, that’s fine, nothing here (or anywhere) is required reading.
But BB doesn’t publish everything. The magic is in your curation, and your choices to bend things just a little bit toward better. Or at least more interesting.
You didn’t have to have precognition to know that this sort of twaddle would do none of that.
I don’t believe in any of this pseudoscience, but I do find the paranormal interesting from more of an anthropological standpoint. It’s fun to look at all of the bizarre explanations that humanity comes up with to, well to justify the phenomena that they experience. Things don’t have to be factual to be interesting.
Sure. But it’s one thing to say, so here’s an interesting story about the way people are and how our minds make us believe things. It’s another thing to present a defense of shitty research methodology framed as a defense of bad pseudoscience with such lazy credulity.
Yeah, how it is presented is important. I think that this demands a counterpoint (ETA: pushback might be a better word), and that is what we are seeing in the comments.
If you haven’t been disappointed in BB I guess you just haven’t been here long enough. Where any blog zine forum lives or dies is in the comments section and you beautiful mutants never let me down.
Yep. The 2015/2016/2020 meta-analysis is also reeeeeeeeeal bad (even worse IMO than is demonstrated by the critique that Horowitz cites.)
Cites, but… you don’t have to have statistical training to notice that Horowitz doesn’t respond to this critique; he quotes himself arguing with someone on Twitter who mentioned the critique. Like all charlatans, he’s using misdirection. I don’t know if this is because he understands Lakens’ arguments and cannot respond to them, or because he doesn’t understand them, or because he can’t be bothered to read them.
Horowitz has now pinned the Boing Boing article on his Twitter feed in an apparent attempt to launder his reputation and, I assume, drive book sales. I don’t know if I’m disappointed in Boing Boing qua Boing Boing, but I’m sure disappointed in the sequence of editorial decisions that led to this outcome!
Maybe if I think reeeeeal hard about it I can change the spin of enough electrons to get it taken down /s
Calling it woo is misleading. Woo makes it sound like it is mysterious, meaningless, or unquantifiable. The BB article published here is woo “linear time as we experience it is an illusion” and “greater understanding of inter-dimensionality through string theory” don’t mean anything, they are just fancy sounding words from other disciplines strung together without care and only meant to bamboozle the reader into not thinking. The implication is “I know these words and you don’t, so any problem you see with what I am about to say is not a problem with me, you are just too ignorant.” That is woo.
The original Bem paper from 2011 is not woo. It’s straight up fraud or at least the scientific equivalent of gross negligence which is just fraud pretending to be stupidity. After hundreds of years of abject failure of ESP, precognition, telepathy and others to stand up to scientific scrutiny and clearly established scientific protocols for demonstrating such effects, “I don’t know how to identify a hypothesis or do proper statistical analysis” is not an acceptable excuse.
This is especially galling because this is not that hard. It is true that a lot of medical, neuroscience and psychological experiments are extremely difficult to do “correctly” for ethical and practical reasons. There is cutting edge research just on how to design experiments to deal with non-ideal circumstances. But this stuff? It’s not exactly easy: science is hard and it’s easy to make mistakes, but everything you need to know to do these experiments was known 200 years ago.
The fact that it is still being promoted 11 years later after being further discredited both by more accurate analysis of their own data as well as well documented failures to replicate the results shows the harm in a supposedly well respected journal publishing something “to encourage discussion”
Due to the subject matter it is a lot less likely to get people directly killed than anti-vaccine conspiracies and homeopathy but it is equally fake, and the promoters exactly as big of pack of liars.
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Weird. Just today listened to a CBC “ideas” podcast from a few years ago about “p-hacking” that featured (and interviewed) Bem and his 2011 paper. Guess I saw this coming.
