Radin, D., Lund, N., Emoto, M., Kizu, T. (2008). Effects of distant intention on water crystal formation: A triple-blind replication. Journal of Scientific Exploration , 22(4), 481-493. An experiment tested the hypothesis that water exposed to distant intentions affects the aesthetic rating of ice crystals formed from that water. Over three days, 1,900 people in Austria and Germany focused their intentions towards water samples located inside an electromagnetically shielded room in California. Water samples located near the target water, but unknown to the people providing intentions, acted as "proximal" controls. Other samples located outside the shielded room acted as distant controls. Ice drops formed from samples of water in the different treatment conditions were photographed by a technician, each image was assessed for aesthetic beauty by over 2,500 independent judges, and the resulting data were analyzed, all by individuals blind with respect to the underlying treatme...
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Would you have a view on if the general approach to psi research varies between countries / cultures or if this should be seen purely as a personal view?
I am aware that France seems to have historically taken a rather more objective view on some other matters, not relevant here, than most of the English speaking world, but I'm not well up enough on this field yet to know if the same thing applies for psi research or if this is purely a personal view by the highly respected presenter.
So he mentioned Bayesian analysis - that's something which I have more fully understood recently. That's quite an achievement as my mathematical knowledge probably wouldn't pass a final year high school test. But anyway, I have not been able to see the values that various people have used to get their result. This includes experimenters as well as skeptics.
Some skeptics claim that despite being "very generous" with priors, their results have been negative. I call BS on that. But still, I suppose there is a legitimate problem. Here is how I see it:
Parapsychologists claim that psi is inherent in most persons, just as most persons can walk, see, touch, run, walk etc. If you asked me to pitch a baseball, I would perform well below the threshold of what makes a major league player. But I still can pitch. So this human ability really isn't new, it has always been there. (Just as the ability to pitch a baseball existed before baseball was invented.)
Skeptics, if I am understanding correctly, are seeing the problem as novel: like television, radioactivity, photography or space flight. So from this angle, of course the prior probability is going to be low. (This reminds me of an alleged report by British visitors to the West Indies, who told the locals about how water could get so hard that you could walk on it. The locals did not believe it at first.)
As for extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence (which Bayes' Theorem is built for), the extraordinary evidence is the experimental results themselves. Even though psi is not supposed to be extraordinary if it has always existed.
Let me repeat: I do not see psi as extraordinary. But even if it were, the evidence is extraordinary in proportion to the claim.
Some folks might think that you can't establish a prior value with confidence, because we can't apparently know whether psi is 'ordinary' until we've proven it, and we can't prove it until we determine whether or not it's 'ordinary'! I don't think such a circular argument is more than superficial, but I can sympathise with those who do think so.