Presentiment Paper Discussion

This thread is to discuss/criticize/hash out the details of presentiment studies in response to Arouet's request to do so in another thread. Perhaps this discussion will make us more confident or less confident in the conclusions of presentiment studies, or at the very least we will understand these studies well enough to debate them rather than appeal to their authority (or maybe lack thereof). It is my opinion based on casual reading of them that these studies reveal a real phenomenon that cannot be explained under the current paradigm and violates the principles of classical physics and naive realism known as locality and causality. Despite my current opinions, I am open to change them if valid criticisms appear when examined in close detail.

Arouet suggested I pick a study, so I googled "Presentiment Radin" and this was the first paper that came up:
Electrodermal Presentiments of Future Emotions by Dean Radin
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 253-273, 2004
http://deanradin.com/evidence/Radin2004Presentiment.pdf

We can discuss this one or if someone else has a different paper suggestion, please post it.

This thread is not the place for emotion or ad homenim attacks on other posters. This thread is not the place to discuss the nature of consciousness. This thread is only to discuss the details of the study and whether or not the results truly indicate a violation of the classical physical paradigm.
 
Thanks Hurmanetar. I'll go through the paper, and post my impressions (Pretty sure I've read it before but never took notes on it.) I'll post when I'm done. Feel free to post your thoughts as well!
 
Thanks Hurmanetar. I'll go through the paper, and post my impressions (Pretty sure I've read it before but never took notes on it.) I'll post when I'm done. Feel free to post your thoughts as well!

Well I read through it this afternoon and tried to have a semi-critical mindset while I did so. Nothing jumped out at me and screamed "flaw," but I admit my analysis was not terribly rigorous because (I was at work and supposed to be working) ...and I was hoping that those who had already determined these studies to be flawed would present the flaws for me. At this time I agree with the conclusions and don't know of a good reason to discount them.
 
You might be more technically adept than me. My first objective will be to go through the paper slowly, trying to understand exactly what was done, what precise methods were used, what the hypothesis was, and what the results were. Then look at what conclusions should or should not be drawn. I don't know if I'll be able to draw any on my first round, I took a quick look at it - I'll probably have some questions first.
 
A suggestion...look at the best evidence for presentiment.

The prediction studies are a stronger design than those of Radin's. Plus pre-registration helps address some of the biases (e.g. flexibility in outcomes) which plague Radin's work, as well as the expectation bias which is regarded as one of the more serious challenges to obtaining valid results. It may be more rewarding to discuss the work of Tressoldi and Mossbridge found here, (than to look at Radin's studies):

https://koestlerunit.wordpress.com/study-registry/registered-studies/

Linda
 
A suggestion...look at the best evidence for presentiment.

The prediction studies are a stronger design than those of Radin's. Plus pre-registration helps address some of the biases (e.g. flexibility in outcomes) which plague Radin's work, as well as the expectation bias which is regarded as one of the more serious challenges to obtaining valid results. It may be more rewarding to discuss the work of Tressoldi and Mossbridge found here, (than to look at Radin's studies):

https://koestlerunit.wordpress.com/study-registry/registered-studies/

Linda

Thank you for the suggestion, Linda. I would possibly like to look at more than one study here and I'll read the one you linked too when I have time.

But for now, can you explain how expectation bias could have worked its way into the results of Radin's 2004 study linked to in the OP? I don't see much opportunity for that to enter in the way the experiments were designed.

I understand the benefit of pre-registration, but in my opinion the fact that the studies in the paper in the OP were not pre-registered only marginally detracts from their weight.
 
Crap, I shouldn't have looked at this thread until I was done my analysis. You guys keep on discussing, I'm going to try and avoid spoilers. I definitely want to see what others have to say but I want to give it a shot myself first. So I'm going to hold off checking in on this thread until I'm done.
 
This thread is to discuss/criticize/hash out the details of presentiment studies in response to Arouet's request to do so in another thread. Perhaps this discussion will make us more confident or less confident in the conclusions of presentiment studies, or at the very least we will understand these studies well enough to debate them rather than appeal to their authority (or maybe lack thereof). It is my opinion based on casual reading of them that these studies reveal a real phenomenon that cannot be explained under the current paradigm and violates the principles of classical physics and naive realism known as locality and causality. Despite my current opinions, I am open to change them if valid criticisms appear when examined in close detail.

Arouet suggested I pick a study, so I googled "Presentiment Radin" and this was the first paper that came up:
Electrodermal Presentiments of Future Emotions by Dean Radin
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 253-273, 2004
http://deanradin.com/evidence/Radin2004Presentiment.pdf

We can discuss this one or if someone else has a different paper suggestion, please post it.

This thread is not the place for emotion or ad homenim attacks on other posters. This thread is not the place to discuss the nature of consciousness. This thread is only to discuss the details of the study and whether or not the results truly indicate a violation of the classical physical paradigm.

This is from '04. Bem's studies supersede this. They were also published in an extremely prestigious journal so flaws in the protocols can be presumed to be imaginary. I don't have the links at the moment, maybe sometime tomorrow. A larger meta analysis was supposed to be published as well, but I haven't heard about what happened. There's a whole bit of skullduggery by Wiseman involved as well.
 
This is from '04. Bem's studies supersede this. They were also published in an extremely prestigious journal so flaws in the protocols can be presumed to be imaginary. I don't have the links at the moment, maybe sometime tomorrow. A larger meta analysis was supposed to be published as well, but I haven't heard about what happened. There's a whole bit of skullduggery by Wiseman involved as well.

I'm fairly sure that Dean has been quoting a meta analysis for the last year or so...
 
I'm fairly sure that Dean has been quoting a meta analysis for the last year or so...

Are you talking about this meta-analysis by Mossbridge, Tressoldi and Utts?:

Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly
unpredictable stimuli: a meta-analysis (2012)
(HTML version)

In his book, Supernormal, Dean Radin said this about the study:

Is the presentiment effect repeatable? To find out, neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge of Northwestern University, psychologist Patrizio Tressoldi of the Università di Padova (in Italy), and statistician Jessica Utts of the University of California, Irvine, conducted a meta-analysis. The presentiment studies they considered were published between 1978 and 2010, and they were required to have (a) analyses that were preplanned, (b) human physiological measurements recorded before randomly selected stimuli, and (c) clearly directional outcomes for expected effects both before and after the stimuli.

They found forty-nine published and unpublished presentiment experiments, of which twenty-six reported by seven laboratories fit their criteria. Five other laboratories reported similar studies, many of them reporting significant outcomes as well, but they did not fit the criteria for this particular meta-analysis. The twenty-six studies that they reviewed showed combined odds against chance ranging from 17 million to 370 billion to 1.

The odds figure of 17 million to 1 assumed that the presentiment effect varied randomly from one experiment to the next, which is the most conservative assumption. The odds figure of 370 billion to 1 assumed that the presentiment effect was constant across experiments, which is a more liberal assumption. The effect size in both cases was 0.21, by now a familiar effect size that appears repeatedly, on average, across all sorts of experiments involving human performance, including psi.


Doug
 
Are you talking about this meta-analysis by Mossbridge, Tressoldi and Utts?:

Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly
unpredictable stimuli: a meta-analysis (2012)
(HTML version)

In his book, Supernormal, Dean Radin said this about the study:

Is the presentiment effect repeatable? To find out, neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge of Northwestern University, psychologist Patrizio Tressoldi of the Università di Padova (in Italy), and statistician Jessica Utts of the University of California, Irvine, conducted a meta-analysis. The presentiment studies they considered were published between 1978 and 2010, and they were required to have (a) analyses that were preplanned, (b) human physiological measurements recorded before randomly selected stimuli, and (c) clearly directional outcomes for expected effects both before and after the stimuli.

They found forty-nine published and unpublished presentiment experiments, of which twenty-six reported by seven laboratories fit their criteria. Five other laboratories reported similar studies, many of them reporting significant outcomes as well, but they did not fit the criteria for this particular meta-analysis. The twenty-six studies that they reviewed showed combined odds against chance ranging from 17 million to 370 billion to 1.

The odds figure of 17 million to 1 assumed that the presentiment effect varied randomly from one experiment to the next, which is the most conservative assumption. The odds figure of 370 billion to 1 assumed that the presentiment effect was constant across experiments, which is a more liberal assumption. The effect size in both cases was 0.21, by now a familiar effect size that appears repeatedly, on average, across all sorts of experiments involving human performance, including psi.


Doug

Hello, I believe it is this one:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/abstract
 
This is from '04. Bem's studies supersede this. They were also published in an extremely prestigious journal so flaws in the protocols can be presumed to be imaginary.
That quite presumptuous of you. I would assume flaws in the protocol or analysis before I'd go for true presentiment.

I agree, though, that Bem's studies have become the standard for this idiom. Replication attempts have both succeeded and failed.

~~ Paul
 
That quite presumptuous of you. I would assume flaws in the protocol or analysis before I'd go for true presentiment.

I agree, though, that Bem's studies have become the standard for this idiom. Replication attempts have both succeeded and failed.

~~ Paul
I'm not sure that Bem's studies are the standard. Looking at the registered studies at the KPU, none of the registered presentiment studies use Bem's protocols (1007 excluded).

This is a good thing, in my opinion, as Bem's tests were explicit, whereas the physiologic tests are more implicit. And psi seems to have the characteristics of an implicit task.

Linda
 
This is from '04. Bem's studies supersede this. They were also published in an extremely prestigious journal so flaws in the protocols can be presumed to be imaginary.

Please, please, please, I beg of you, please divorce yourself from the idea that studies can be presumed to be flawless if published, even if published in a prestigious journal. It is presumed that any study in any journal will undergo critical appraisal after publication. That is one of the main points of publication - to bring the research to the general attention of those within the field in order for its validity to be assessed. So peer-review isn't about making sure the research is flawless. Peer-review (among other things) tries to make sure that the flaws are transparent (so that the knowledgeable reader can assess the flaws). Publication is only the start of the process of evaluation, not the end.

Linda
 
Okay, so there's some other studies out there that are "less-flawed". Before I can understand why they are less flawed, I need to understand why this 2004 paper by Radin is flawed. I'm not a research scientist... Just an engineer, so I certainly don't claim to be an expert in the art of experimental science, but I am genuinely interested in learning.

If someone wants to post the "gold-standard" presentiment study and explain specifically what flaws it overcomes and specifically what flaws remain, that would be great. Really want to dig into details on this thread.
 
This is from '04. Bem's studies supersede this. They were also published in an extremely prestigious journal so flaws in the protocols can be presumed to be imaginary. I don't have the links at the moment, maybe sometime tomorrow. A larger meta analysis was supposed to be published as well, but I haven't heard about what happened. There's a whole bit of skullduggery by Wiseman involved as well.

I want to come at this from as critical an angle as possible. Let's assume there are flaws. What are they? Are they significant enough to detract from the conclusions?

Some people on this forum say these studies are flawed and I can't really argue with them except to appeal to the authority of the studies. But if the alleged flaws are exposed we can have a more productive debate and perhaps I can be more confident (or maybe less) when citing the presentiment studies. Heck maybe I'll decide presentiment studies are not worthy of mentioning again! Let's see...
 
Thank you for the suggestion, Linda. I would possibly like to look at more than one study here and I'll read the one you linked too when I have time.

But for now, can you explain how expectation bias could have worked its way into the results of Radin's 2004 study linked to in the OP? I don't see much opportunity for that to enter in the way the experiments were designed.

This is a well-recognized problem in the design of many of these studies. All the researchers in the field seem to make reference to it. One of the studies in the KPU registry (no. 1005) is a design which attempts to overcome this.

The review by Mossbridge linked above (in E.Flowers post) mentions this (under "Order effects and expectation bias") and references papers which explore it in greater detail (Dalkvist, Wackermann).

I understand the benefit of pre-registration, but in my opinion the fact that the studies in the paper in the OP were not pre-registered only marginally detracts from their weight.

Well, a lack of pre-registration puts the research at a high risk of bias (i.e. a high risk that the results produced are false). It's pretty hard not to give that problem considerable weight, let alone try to downgrade it to "marginal". Medicine has discovered that pre-registration makes a substantial difference to the production of false results. However, parapsychologists may share your opinion, since there are only 5 published studies listed in the KPU registry over 2-1/2 years. So the parapsychology journals seem to be filling their pages with unregistered studies.

Linda
 
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This is a well-recognized problem in the design of many of these studies. All the researchers in the field seem to make reference to it. One of the studies in the KPU registry (no. 1005) is a design which attempts to overcome this.

The review by Mossbridge linked above (in E.Flowers post) mentions this (under "Order effects and expectation bias") and references papers which explore it in greater detail (Dalkvist, Wackermann).



Well, a lack of pre-registration puts the research at a high risk of bias (i.e. a high risk that the results produced are false). It's pretty hard not to give that problem considerable weight, let alone try to downgrade it to "marginal". Medicine has discovered that pre-registration makes a substantial difference to the production of false results. However, parapsychologists may share your opinion, since there are only 5 published studies listed in the KPU registry over 2-1/2 years. So the parapsychology journals seem to be filling their pages with unregistered studies.

Linda

Pre-registration is only important if you have a lot of people doing studies and you don't know who they are. This is rare in the tiny field of psi research and it is very unlikely with complicated research such as these studies. Pre-registration isn't all that important here because there aren't going to be many unpublished studies. And those studies, when they're found have been demonstrated to have positive results as often as null, so it's not like people are trying to hide anything.

Also Linda, you consistently overstate the importance of flaws and understate the importance of everything else. I don't regard you as trustworthy on this subject. Your bias is extreme.
 
That quite presumptuous of you. I would assume flaws in the protocol or analysis before I'd go for true presentiment.

I agree, though, that Bem's studies have become the standard for this idiom. Replication attempts have both succeeded and failed.

~~ Paul

Since you're a materialist who does nothing but deny the reality of psi, well, thank you for your comments, but I'm going to blow you off.
 
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