Too many numbers
Upon witnessing Mozart's first Viennese opera, "Die Entführung aus dem Serail," Emperor Joseph II reportedly offered the famous criticism, "Too many notes, my dear Mozart." In a recent review of Entangled Minds on Amazon.com, I am admonished with a similar criticism. The reviewer writes, in part:
And so on, in a similar vein. What comes to mind is the Emperor's suggestion (from the movie Amadeus), that Mozart "just cut a few [notes] and it will be perfect." To this Mozart responds, "Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?" In the present case, the reviewer's complaint arises because she mistakes effect size for statistical significance. Without going into what that means, all I'll say is that Entangled Minds assumes that the reader has at least an elementary understanding of basic statistics, and at least an inkling of what scientific experimentation is all about. Without that knowledge, the book may well appear to have "too many notes."
When I bought this book, I was fully ready to accept every word of it. But, as I read, I found Radin's numbers, especially his quantitative statistics of probabilities, rather ridiculous. 35 trillion-to-one against chance?? Come on. Mr Radin says his experiments gave a 56% rate of success (with 50% being chance). Come on. Chance is not hardcore. Sometimes chance is 42%, sometimes it's 56%. 6% over chance is not scientific evidence of anything. Come on ...
And so on, in a similar vein. What comes to mind is the Emperor's suggestion (from the movie Amadeus), that Mozart "just cut a few [notes] and it will be perfect." To this Mozart responds, "Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?" In the present case, the reviewer's complaint arises because she mistakes effect size for statistical significance. Without going into what that means, all I'll say is that Entangled Minds assumes that the reader has at least an elementary understanding of basic statistics, and at least an inkling of what scientific experimentation is all about. Without that knowledge, the book may well appear to have "too many notes."
Comments
I am less concerned about Amazon.com than the Wikipedia because the former clearly consists of personal opinions but the latter is regarded by many as a reliable source of information. For mundane, well-established topics, some of the Wikipedia articles aren't all that bad. But for anything even mildly controversial, the articles are quite poor because they become battlegrounds between anonymous editors with different axes to grind. That's hardly an effective way to generate a reliable encyclopedia.
A recent poster on Randi's website forum tried to debunk the work done by Munich Physics Professor Hans-Dieter Betz on dowsing by declaring that he was not a Munich Physics professor at all but a Biblical Scholar, and even gave a link to a website to prove it.
It simply hadn't occurred to him that two people can have the same name!
If only he'd looked further down those Google rankings...
The debunkers went on to declare that the JSE is not a peer reviewed journal.
I've been trying to clean up some parapsychology articles on Wikipedia. They're not terrible, but could certainly use help of people who are actually familiar with the research. If a fact is cited properly, verifiable, and neutrally worded, it is difficult for bias to enter (though people still find a way).
I have recently attempted to improve things at the Dean Radin article by highlighting the biographical guidelines, but I feel it may need mediation to bring it up to standard.
Dean if you wanted to you could personally comment to Wikipedia through the biography project, which would be taken very seriously and may result in improvements to the article.
Requests that biographies be removed from Wikipedia are acknowledged, but those requests are not honored! I fear the only way this policy is going to change is when someone, like say a Presidential candidate who is falsely accused of something on the Wiki, sues them for libel.
If you look here you will find the information on what you can do with regards to articles about yourself. I am preparing some additions to the article when I get some spare-time so I hope to improve the present bias.