

Is this evidence we can see into the future? - Umalu
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future-to-be-published.html

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Eliezer
_The effects he recorded were small but statistically significant._

And this, ladies and gentlebeings, is why you should be very wary of ever
believing studies with small but statistically significant effects.

Psi is the control group for modern science: they use the same methods in a
case where no actual phenomena exists, and yet it looks like a regular field
of scientific study, dealing with "small but statistically significant
effects", and the larger the sample size, the smaller the effect, but it
remains "statistically significant".

And not only that, if a psi study finds that someone can guess which cards
someone else has drawn from a deck, using telepathy, you will next find that
someone can predict cards _before_ they are taken from the deck, using
precognition, and then that subjects can _influence_ which cards are taken
from the deck, using telekinesis, and _then_ you will discover that they can
influence which cards are taken from the deck, _two weeks later going backward
in time_.

With small effect sizes that are statistically significant, of course.

Not because people can actually control which cards are taken from the deck
two weeks after the fact.

But because _bad statistics are symmetrical in the directions of time and
causation_ , and it makes no difference to _bad statistics_ whether the
temporal distance is two seconds or two weeks.

~~~
carbocation
Also see the enlightening, entertaining discussion previously on HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878160>

Patio11's comment there is particularly trenchant.

------
barendt
My vote is probably not. The plausibility of these things is pretty important.
With the aspirin heart attack prevention example mentioned in the text, we
have a plausible biological mechanism to give us reason to expect an effect,
so we can be satisfied with more equivocal data. I'm not aware of a plausible
mechanism for precognition - in fact, it seems like precognition would
probably require a bunch of other things we think true to be false to work -
so I'll need much stronger evidence than this to accept it.

Also, a thought - if precognition is possible, why don't we see more of it?
Being able to improve recall of words is nifty and all, but it seems like it'd
give you a huge advantage catching prey or evading predators so I'd expect to
see evidence of it all over the place.

~~~
gregable
The easiest argument against your second point is precisely because we don't
expect to find it. Frequently if findings disagree very strongly with our
preconceptions (as one like this would), we are likely to dismiss them, not
notice them, and/or chalk it up to some kind of error.

Not to say that I believe these results will hold up, I'm pretty sure they
won't.

