Okay, I’ll rephrase my coarsely-worded reply that was (fairly) moderated.
This kind of content is actively making the world a worse place. It’s pseudoscience, which is not harmless. It is taking on the language and imprimatur of science to gain credibility to promote nonsense. This is the worst kind of misinformation because people who are not well versed in statistics or the history of these kinds of scam “research” papers have no defence against it.
We live in a time when misinformation and a lack of critical thinking are literally destroying democracy. Pieces like this are not harmless. They contribute to the noise floor of misinformation, make it harder for regular folks to know what is real, and encourage people to indulge in nonsense at a time when we need to be extra vigilant about truth.
This stuff has been debunked over and over and over and over and over again. There is no value, and in fact active harm to, society by continuing to regurgitate it.
I’m not in these fields but the experiment seems poorly designed to me.
How about this: Administer a difficult multiple choice test to study participants. Then hand out the answer key afterwards. Is performance better if the answers are reviewed after the test?
Sometimes I’ve had a powerful, undeniable feeling of deja vu. I know what’s around the corner, and it’s inevitable. It might be just some kind of a brain glitch. Whatever causes that, it leaves my mind open to the possibility that there’s something out there.
I don’t know. She’s not on my regular playlist, so I thought I was inventing it, but brains are beautiful, wonderful glitch monsters and I could have heard it in passing in one of her songs. Wouldn’t surprise me. I find 99% of my best ideas have already been created by someone else.
I think @Tamsin_Bailey was making an inside-baseball pun on what the musician and many Lady Gaga fans call themselves, Little Monsters. I know Lady Gaga isn’t everyone’s jam, but she is a ground breaking musician.
Ah, ok! She’s not not my jam, I really do enjoy a lot of her work. Just not someone whose music I purchase or keep on hand for random afternoon listening sessions.
EDIT: And this remains one of the best forums I’ve ever been part of. Good dialogue, good moderation. Appreciate all of you, and thank you for helping me be a better person. I’ve learned a ton just from interacting with folks here.
But unlike Mark’s product posts, we won’t be oddly taken back in time to revisit it. Still, Mark’s repeated product posts prove time is linear, because the comments are never open when they are re-published.
I read through the authors post to see the comment on meta analysis.
Simply looking at the number of studies that are significant isn’t a method I have ever learned for a meta analysis. In fact it’s a method I have explicitly learned not to do!
I would like to see the forest plot for these studies…
The author also “bends” the fact that weak signals are hard to prove as supportive evidence for these works. There are many researchers who work on statistics with rare events (me included), something being hard doesn’t mean we reduce our stringency. I’ll save everyone a long rant but simple frequentist stats (p values) might be the wrong tool for a question, I don’t see that here.
For those who don’t work in statistics heavy fields:
It’s very possible for several independent studies to see a weak effect if they are not well constructed. Publication bias (and Scientists abandoning failed projects) , tends to keep weak refuting studies out of the literature more than weak supporting studies. Thus the total number of studies with a p-value past an arbitrary threshold (0.05) is very likely not measuring what the author beleives it is.
A proper meta analysis is complex and must consider the size and methods for each study. Often building weights for each so that you can properly combine the data. Essentially you are building one big study that is hopefully powerfull enough (statiscial power) to determine if an effect is detectable.
The entire premise of the article is that that time dilation (ie. the slowing of time at speeds approaching that of light) proves that time isn’t necessarily linear. Sheesh! This is logically and scientifically false! It may be slower in those cases but time is still moving in one direction.
Since someone doesn’t like hearing my personal feelings about other pseudointellectuals, even if I’m using them as a comparison to the author of the post I’m commenting on, I suppose I will have to confine my comments to the latter: I find Horowitz’s writing facile and boring, and I don’t understand why anyone still gives his evidence-free woo a platform. He clearly doesn’t understand statistical analysis, or the scientific process, or much of anything, really, outside his chosen field of "things I think are cool, that I can’t prove, but that make me a ton of money selling books’.
Years of knowing people who proudly claim the title “Skeptic” has taught me one thing: Skeptics are not sceptical. They have a preconceived notion of what is right and what is not, and seek to ‘debunk’ anything that falls into the ‘not right’ category, not ‘investigate’ but ‘debunk’. They aren’t really interested in scientific rigour, the willingness to discard a priori anything that doesn’t fit their belief systems is primary evidence of this. There are some who pursue Skepticism with what can only be described as religious zeal.
Pointing this out to them produces the same kind of explosive reaction as pointing out to atheists that atheism is taking a faith-based position, not an evidence based one. (An agnostic writes.)
I’m sceptical (small s) about the apparent results of these studies, but unlike some commentators I’d like to read and analyze them properly before even daring to offer a preliminary opinion. Anyone who condemned it without at least reading the papers first because they know a priori that it’s “woo woo” should feel ashamed and probably do penance by putting flowers on the grave of one of the great scientists of the past who were condemned as heretics by the orthodoxy of their day.
]
