Hard News by Russell Brown

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Hard News: Random

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  • Stephen Judd,

    On reflection, gullibility is perhaps a harsh term. Yeah, you're not gullible, Kyle's Dad isn't gullible. But we are all vulnerable to manipulation. Professional deceivers don't need you to be gullible, they just need you to be a typical thinker.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • Kyle Matthews,

    Kyle, I don't think it's a safe assumption that it's not a complete fraud. That is how psychics work.

    Well I said 'suspect', not 'assume'. It's possible that it is a fraud. Just that my second-hand experience with being on the show, is that it's not.

    I don't know how the show is made, but I presume it's made by a TV production company who brings in the psychics by themselves. So the producers, directors, sound people, camera people, researchers I would guess aren't psychic believers, but just people making a TV show. I'd be interested if anyone knew anything different - it could be very shonky.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    Put it this way: are "reality" shows real?

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • Kyle Matthews,

    "Unless it can be disproved it can't be discounted."

    That's a recipe for gullibility. I would rather discount things that can't be proved.

    Didn't Einstein have a couple of theories which weren't proven until decades later?

    Personally I'm happy to have an "I don't know" box. I'll put earth going around the sun in 'yes', God in 'no', and keep stuff in the middle until more light gets shed on them. I suspect Galileo would have wanted a few theologians to have an "I don't know" box too.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Kyle Matthews,

    Out of curiosity I went and found out a bit more about the show:

    http://sensingmurder.co.nz/index.html

    The investigators who follow up on it are from this place, which seems to be legit at a glance:

    http://www.totalpropertyservices.co.nz/risk_management.htm

    Some ex police officers and I presume some people who couldn't make the police (why the ex- ones are ex, I don't know).

    The programme is made by Ninox TV:

    http://www.ninoxtv.com/tv.htm

    They do a bunch of other 'reality' shows - cops ones, hospital ones, rescue helicopters and whatnot.

    If it was a TV show made by some sort of psychics collective, I'd be sitting over next to Stephen. On the basis on that 2 minutes of looking I'll keep it in the 'curious, I wonder how that works' file with a healthy dose of skepticism.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    I have an "almost certainly bullshit" box, and that's where this belongs.

    If this stuff were true, it would be a valuable and useful tool, which should be researched, investigated, codified, standardised, and generally exploited like any other technology.

    The fact that clairvoyancy never has been put to practical use strongly suggests that there's nothing to it.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • WH,

    A co-worker told me the following story.

    My co-worker's grandfather died a few years back. Her grandfather called her a pet name that only he used for her (which I have forgotten), but let's assume that the pet name was "carebear" for the purposes of telling the story.

    Anyway, shortly after her grandfather died, my co-worker had her cellphone taken in for repairs. While the phone was being repaired, her boyfriend received a text message from my coworker's phone telling him to look after carebear. The boyfriend, assuming my coworker was playing a not-particularly-funny joke on him, asked her what was up...

    A few weeks later the cellphone repair place rang to say that the physical repairs on her phone had been completed and that they needed the phone's pin number to unlock it and thus check that the repairs were succesful.

    There are only a couple of explanations for this: either my coworker is lying, or someone is playing a pretty interesting trick.

    Since Nov 2006 • 797 posts Report Reply

  • B Jones,

    Didn't Einstein have a couple of theories which weren't proven until decades later?

    That sounds like an argument from authority. When you're thinking about bold claims like psychic abilities, it's more important than ever to hang onto the rules of sound argument.

    Einstein and Newton are often invoked in support of pseudoscience - we all believed Newton for 300 years, but Einstein proved him wrong, therefore what we know today could be wrong. It could be. But. All of science is a big "don't know" box, but it's a box with lots of compartments - things we have lots of evidence for (sun will rise tomorrow - then again one day, it won't), graded through to things which are interesting ideas but the jury's still out. The contents of the box are constantly being sifted as things get proved, amended, kicked out again, and so on. It's the process for sorting that's important - what distinguishes science from other belief systems. Hence my pedanticism about logical fallacies.

    Outside of the box are things that can't be proved one way or the other - the proposition that the universe is nothing but a figment of my imagination is one of these. Could be true. But. There's no possible way to test it, therefore it's a useless hypothesis. The existence of a creator who chooses not to reveal himself in any testable way is another.

    Einstein was right about some spectacular things (hardcore maths here) and was less successful about others. One brilliant man's work in physics has little if any bearing on the plausibility of stage magicians, except to illustrate that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The discoveries of the last hundred years in physics have to a great extent provided that proof. Despite scientists since Newton exhaustively investigating the paranormal, anecdotes are still the best we can do when it comes to psychics, and that's not good enough.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 976 posts Report Reply

  • Kyle Matthews,

    That sounds like an argument from authority. When you're thinking about bold claims like psychic abilities, it's more important than ever to hang onto the rules of sound argument.

    I wasn't making an argument at all, just pulling up a vague memory which I wasn't sure was true, hence the question mark. You didn't really answer it either.

    I'm not saying that psychic abilities will be proven at some point in the future - I think that's rather unlikely. But if, as Stephen said, "I would rather discount things that can't be proved." then if my vague memory about Einstein is correct, then we'd have closed the box a little early.

    I've previously... not commented, but raised questions on PAS about the colonial nature of the term/box/brand 'science'. I haven't looked into it any further since, but I still think it's an interesting question.

    I'm not a scientist by trade, I'm a historian if anything. So I'm always interested in people standing on a particular moment in time and claiming the infallibility of a method like 'science', when as you point out, at various moments in human history, people have stood on moments in time and claimed infallibility of similar or other methods and have been proven wrong.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • WH,

    Could be true. But. There's no possible way to test it, therefore it's a useless hypothesis... Despite scientists since Newton exhaustively investigating the paranormal, anecdotes are still the best we can do when it comes to psychics

    It is too close to holidays to get all philosophy of science on ya'all.

    AUS: 185/3 (36 overs)

    Okay, back to work.

    Since Nov 2006 • 797 posts Report Reply

  • B Jones,

    Einstein had theories that could be proved, and eventually were. The lag between the two events is nothing exceptional. In the intervening time, lots of people said "that's interesting, dunno if it's right, let's go test it," and did, with variable results. The hardcore maths page I linked to describes the story.

    Things that can't be proved is a whole other story.

    There's no way that science is infallible. It's premised on error-checking, and you have to recognise the possibility of making errors in order to investigate them and weed them out. It's limited in scope (you can't run an experiment to test whether Bismarck had a grand plan or was an opportunist) and applied by fallible human beings, but I can't think of a better approach to sorting the wheat from the chaff in human knowledge. Colonial?

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 976 posts Report Reply

  • Julie Fairey,

    I went to a psychic years ago, when I was at a bit of a crossroads and trying to make a decision between two alternatives. At the time most things she said to me seemed imbued with great significance.

    Part of the fee was that she gave you a tape of the session, which I listened to again about a year later. Nothing at all really made much sense, and certainly there hadn't been any great things she mentioned that came true.

    So at the time, and shortly afterwards, I found the experience meaningful, but when reviewing it after time had passed clearly it was largely pointless. I wonder how it would have seemed a year later if the tape had been edited as per Sensing Murder ;-)

    Puketapapa Mt Roskill, AK… • Since Dec 2007 • 234 posts Report Reply

  • Kyle Matthews,

    AUS: 185/3 (36 overs)

    Dammit. Ever since PA stopped blogging specifically on sports, I've forgotten to keep up. 'Scuse me.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Kracklite,

    Didn't Einstein have a couple of theories which weren't proven until decades later?

    There's no way that science is infallible. It's premised on error-checking, and you have to recognise the possibility of making errors in order to investigate them and weed them out.

    I am not a scientist, nor do I play one on television, but I do work with some... so a bit of pedantry follows:

    The word to use is hypothesis, which denotes a description of how something in nature may work and which corresponds with observations. The hypothesis can predict results from further observations or experiments. Crucially, it must be falsifiable - that is, if it is wrong, it must be possible to prove it wrong. If subsequent experiments/observations (obviously astronomy is not an experimental science) reproduce (and reproducibility is also vital), then the hypothesis is then accepted as a theory.

    In scientific parlance, "theory" is about as strong a statement as you can get - about, say 99.9999...whatever% likelihood of being correct, or accurate in its predictions. When most people say "theory", they mean what most scientists would call a (very weak, unsystematic) hypothesis (hence the big-sky-fairy worshippers disingenuously claiming that evolution is "only" a theory).

    Anyway, that's more or less the version according to Popper, but lately, particularly in mathematics and quantum theory, proff or disproof is increasingly difficult due to the extreme difficulty in comprehending what the presumably accurate computer simulation has come up with and so there's likely to be a drift towards Bayesean probability as a measure of the worth of an hypothesis as a potential theory.

    Anyway, certainly science is contingent... but 99.999... versus bullshit is better, by a long count.

    And, obviously in light of the above, it's not scientists who stand on the absolute infalibility of science!

    The Library of Babel • Since Nov 2007 • 982 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown,

    Anyway, that's more or less the version according to Popper ...

    Oh great. Here's me trying to make PAS less intimidating and you waltz in and start quoting Karl bloody Popper ...

    Don't you have a cat or something?

    ;-)

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • InternationalObserver,

    julie's story above reveals, IMO, the truthiness of this issue. As for WH's story:

    A co-worker told me the following story.

    My co-worker's grandfather died a few years back. Her grandfather called her a pet name that only he used for her (which I have forgotten), but let's assume that the pet name was "carebear" for the purposes of telling the story.

    Anyway, shortly after her grandfather died, my co-worker had her cellphone taken in for repairs. While the phone was being repaired, her boyfriend received a text message from my coworker's phone telling him to look after carebear. The boyfriend, assuming my coworker was playing a not-particularly-funny joke on him, asked her what was up...

    A few weeks later the cellphone repair place rang to say that the physical repairs on her phone had been completed and that they needed the phone's pin number to unlock it and thus check that the repairs were succesful.

    There are only a couple of explanations for this: either my coworker is lying, or someone is playing a pretty interesting trick.

    Never underestimate people's ability to make up stories or embelish them for effect.

    Since Jun 2007 • 909 posts Report Reply

  • Neil Morrison,

    Don't you have a cat or something?

    Schrödinger had one. I think it was rather grumpy, being half alive and half dead. (That all makes psychics look a bit less weird).

    Since Nov 2006 • 932 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    Don't you have a cat or something?

    He keeps chasing the black swans.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • WH,

    Never underestimate people's ability to make up stories or embelish them for effect.

    And never doubt a sceptic's tendency to cast aspersions on people they have never met, and whose veracity they cannot know... :)

    Look I'm just grumpy about the cricket.

    Since Nov 2006 • 797 posts Report Reply

  • B Jones,

    Occam's Razor. People tell tall stories vs the souls of the dead exist independently of their neurons etc and can send text messages after they die.

    Schrodinger's lolcat: In ur quantum box. Maybe. Personally, I like "I can has Heisenburger?" but that's a level of geekery well beyond that which is socially acceptable.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 976 posts Report Reply

  • 81stcolumn,

    Two responses to this thread you can figure out which one to take seriously for yourselves…

    On the matter of cats in boxes…

    With the aid of Sox our backyard cat I have been able to get in touch with Schrödinger’s original cat (we used a cat modified Ouija board). In cat philosophical terms the cat claimed to belong to Schrödinger points out that ownership should be understood from the point of view of cat or cats owning Schrödinger and other parties involved. Sox went on to point out that this solves matters of uncertainty such as ownership implied by multiple viewers (when the image of the cat formerl;y known as Schrödinger’s appears in my head do I own the cat ?); because the cats as we know own us all…Thus when we see the cat in the box formerly known to be Schrödinger’s we instantly become the property of the cat we think we are viewing (of course allowing for the fact that the cat is there at all and that it is the same cat at all times –which has yet to be verified). Everyone clear on this ?

    For those of you still hung up on falsification and Popper it is worth looking at the Duhem–Quine Thesis. Personally I don’t think Bayes gets us out of this hole. I do think science and behaviour does in so far as supernatural events consistent with their denomination do not stand up well against criterion of confirmation, reliability and simplicity which are unavoidable hallmarks of useable applied science.

    Nawthshaw • Since Nov 2006 • 790 posts Report Reply

  • Kracklite,

    Don't you have a cat or something?

    Funnily enough, I use cats as an example explaining semiotics to students. You see, hairballs are an index wheras the written word "CAT" is a symbol.

    At least I haven't brought up Foucault. Quasi-semi-coulda been architect types love him with Bentham's Panopticon and all...

    Still, do you want to know what dark matter is? It's socks. You see, space at the Planck scale is "foamy" - minute transient wormholes can form and disappear constantly. What else is foamy? The inside of a washing machine! What's more, it's swirling about in a vortex, just like the accretion disc surrounding a black hole - and of course many scientists have suggested that black holes open up large, stable wormholes... so there you have it: ever since civilisations have arisen in the universe, they've been washing their socks (and very probably some millipede-like beings had LOTS of socks to wash), wormholes have been opening in their washing machines and transporting their socks out into space where, over billions and billions (copyright Carl Sagan) of years, they have accumulated in great dark intergalactic clouds affecting the rotation of galaxies and the expansion of the universe.

    Voila!

    (No doubt this can be falsified)

    Also, I note in a recent New Scientist, one correspondent has noted that socks are subject to quantum entanglement - the moment he puts a sock on his right foot, the other instantly becomes a left sock.

    Fascinating things, socks. And Sox is therefore a good name for a cat.

    The Library of Babel • Since Nov 2007 • 982 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown,

    Everyone clear on this ?

    Completely freaked out.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Neil Morrison,

    ...reliability and simplicity which are unavoidable hallmarks of useable applied science.

    no, that's a very weak argument against the existance of the paranormal. I might not want to have a psychic design bridges but on that view of science there's no reason why they might not be able to communicate with the dead.

    Since Nov 2006 • 932 posts Report Reply

  • John Farrell,

    Perhaps you could provide evidence FOR the existence of the paranormal, Neil. And then, you could visit James Randi's website, and claim US$1,000,000.

    Dunedin • Since Nov 2006 • 499 posts Report Reply

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