« PZ Myers gives Chopra a fisking | Main | Speak your homeopathic remedy »

August 24, 2005

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Sorry, totally OT but I thought this">http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1555164,00.html">this might be of interest. (I've been trying to find the actual paper, but can't find it - even on PubMed, though it was supposedly only published today and I don't know PubMed's speed in updating their database).

Looks like that link didn't work: http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1555164,00.html - headline 'Scientists show how sugar pill eases pain'.

I used my mystical power of Remote Viewing to have a look at the site without actually seeing it physically (gasp!) Load of crap, as one might expect.

For expanded coverage of military studies of Dangerous Mystical Knowledge, more sympathetic than the topic deserves, I would recommend "The Men Who Stare At Goats" by John Ronson. "This story is about what happened when a small group of men... began believing in very strange things".

I read Randi's rejoinder with some interest. He proposes a test with no judges - either you nail the correct target (1/50)or it's a miss. This seems fair, but the problem is the difficulty of coming up with 50 targets all sufficiently dissimilar to each other to disabmiguate. The RV folks will cry foul - another target was similar, and there is some "noise" in the RV signal.

So, a fairer approach would be to have judges who would judge a "near miss" and thus allow for a re-trial.

They can't take the test until both the tester and the psychic have agreed on all 50 targets. That prevents any subjectivity.

The comments to this entry are closed.

Search site