Talk:Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab/Archive 2

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"Pseudoscience"?

"PEAR's primary purpose was to engage in parapsychological exercises on topics such as psychokenesis (PK) and remote viewing. The program had a strained relationship with Princeton University, and was an embarrassment to Princeton and characterized as "an embarrassment to science" by Robert L. Park. PEAR's work has been rejected by the scientific community and is considered pseudoscience."

"Science and the taboo of psi" with Dean Radin at GoogleTechTalks (And if you have a problem with what Google considers worthwhile, you'll have to take that up with them, not me.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew

There is an enormous amount of statistical data from non-PEAR sources corroborating psychokenesis and remote viewing as real phenomena. The entire into of this article is misleading and misrepresents what science has historically demonstrated on these topics. "Considered psuedoscience" by whom exactly? Every article keeps repeating the same claim--"there is no evidence of psi"--when this is contrary to the factual evidence. Simply citing five "reputable" (journalistic--and where is the evidence that these journalists understand science?) sources that have not themselves produced contrary data does not count as an argument for independent verification or falsification: It's an appeal to authority.

"But most 'scientists' do not believe is psi." Most scientists are not educated about psi, so they are not experts, so their opinions on the subject are no more valid than those of the general populous.

"But 'I' don't personally know the mechanism behind the phenomena, therefore they most likely aren't real." Again, this is not a scientific argument. The fact that you can get a single or a couple "mainstream" sources to say this is no more evidence than that I can get a single or a couple "non-mainstream" sources to say the other thing. What is important is the meta-analyses, which show that something indeed seems to be going on in all of these cases (again, watch the video from Google, don't listen to me, and don't listen to Robert L. Park, who is himself practicing a brand of pseudo-skeptic, psudo-scientific religion).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

And before you say, WP:FRINGE, get out of here, this is nonsense, pseudo-science, etc., just hear me out.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories: "Wikipedia summarizes significant opinions, with representation in proportion to their prominence. A Wikipedia article should not make a fringe theory appear more notable or more widely accepted than it is. Claims must be based upon independent reliable sources."

When people at Google--some of the smartest people on the planet--are willing to say this sort of research is--or might be--worthwhile, it is more than some fringe conspiracy theory.

And quoting boatloads of academics engaging in groupthink is not basing claims on "independent reliable sources"--it is basing them on the personal fancies and religious opinions of a small minority of the population who have themselves never made a serious investigation of any of these claims. AKA, non-experts in the field. This is not in line with Wikipedia's editorial standards.

The Economist: "Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong" http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong

"The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested."

The people you're quoting in the article are the people who are failing to create an objective peer-review process and are dragging the whole of "objective science" down with them--which is why companies like Google are advancing these views, because their engineers are, quite frankly, a lot smarter and more well-educated and well-informed than the academics who have been hitherto quoted.

Again, read what the PEAR article currently says: "rejected by the scientific community and is considered pseudoscience."

Google is part of the scientific community, is it not? If it's not considered pseudo-science there, if other non-PEAR-involved professors at Princeton University were willing to defend Jahn's actions and research (and therefore did not consider it pseudoscience), who exactly is this imagined "scientific community" that considers it pseudoscience? A couple of editors at the New York Times and a student-run newspaper at Boston College? Come on. You know these sources regularly botch stories all the time and aren't reputable sources when it comes to science--and particularly when it comes to quantum theory.

How does quoting a student newspaper on possible quantum phenomena within the mind constitute an "independent reliable source"? No undergraduate even has a full understanding of quantum theory--especially not on the level of Jahn or Radin--so why quote them here? What makes their reporting "reliable science"?

I'm not saying to start shouting PEAR's praises from the rooftops, but don't you think the article misrepresents what SCIENCE SAYS for what a couple of ACADEMICS SAY in giving their NECESSARILY SUBJECTIVE OPINIONS? (And these academics aren't even educated on these subjects in the first place, so I'm not sure how or why their opinions are relevant. Robert L. Park is not emblematic of the scientific community; he is a human being with human problems and human cognitive biases in everything he does, the same as the rest of us.)

And the GoogleTechTalk begins at the outset by mentioning PEAR and its research, so don't tell me it isn't relevant or than Jahn isn't mentioned and it therefore doesn't matter.

2605:E000:6384:B800:A0:9282:9931:87CF (talk) 18:08, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments. Here are a couple of thoughts, which may help clarify the situation wrt PEAR.

• The Radin presentation at Google is a survey of the whole psi field. It's not about PEAR, which is mentioned in passing by the introducer; I don't think that Radin himself refers to it at all (I haven't had a chance to review the whole talk yet). Google Tech Talks cover a wide range of topics anyway, so such a passing reference cannot really be used within this WP entry as a useful form of 'endorsement' specifically of PEAR's work.
• The problem with much psi research - and pretty well all of PEAR's work - is that no potential theories are put forward, which would account for the phenomena apparently being measured. Experiments seem to have been carried out and data collection done without a clearly-articulated plan to test a postulated underlying theory. If we can locate some secondary RS to address this issue, that would be great.
• Research in quantum theory might perhaps lead eventually to some useful insights into psi. However, it was not an area of PEAR specialty or reputation - Jahn is an astrophysicist. That being said, I agree that some of the newspaper references at the end of the lead paragraph may be misused at present. I think that they are more appropriate as cites for the lab's history/closing rather than to characterize its work.
• Cognitive biases are exactly the reason why we have to identify solid citeable examples of these observations being repeated elsewhere, beyond PEAR's walls, and reported in reliable sources. Thus far, editors of this WP entry have failed to find them. jxm (talk) 22:23, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Dean Radin was one of the people who worked on the Global Consciousness Project, which was an offshoot of PEAR (although the PEAR article currently doesn't reference it; though a past version did), so it would seem to me that his survey of the field of parapsychology is directly relevant to their claims of "spooky action at a distance" (to quote Einstein).

From the Global Consciousness Project article:

"Comparing the GCP to PEAR, Nelson, referring to the "field" studies with REGs done by PEAR, said the GCP used "exactly the same procedure... applied on a broader scale."

As for the lack of theoretical models, I think Jahn's third book, Quirks of the Quantum Mind, would probably come the closest to what it is that you're asking for, although I have yet to read it (it's on my to-do list for the semester):

http://www.amazon.com/Quirks-Quantum-Mind-Robert-Jahn/dp/1936033062

And Jahn is not an astrophysicist, he is an aerospace engineer and plasma physicist with his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton. Plasmas are a directly quantum mechanical phenomena--it is the fourth state of matter which makes up fires and stars and is the most abundant type of matter in the Universe.

"Plasma: The 4th State of Matter"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkeSI_B5Ljc

If you want to see a short video on PEAR's history from Psyleron, the consciousness-technologies companies founded by the "friends and affiliates of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory" after PEAR concluded its nearly quarter century of research:

http://vimeo.com/4359545

http://www.psyleron.com/

2605:E000:6384:B800:8117:FD0A:B888:6F06 (talk) 05:10, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

We follow the reliable sources and the mainstream views and interpretations of the subject - and those are quite clear: this is hokum trying to disguise itself in a labcoat -> pseudoscience. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 05:22, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

You're just throwing big words--"hokum" and "pseudoscience"--without any factual sources. This is not how wikipedia or rational argumentation works.

"This kind of talk fascinated the public and attracted the curiosity of dozens of students, at Princeton and elsewhere. But it left most scientists cold. A physics Ph.D. and an electrical engineer joined Dr. Jahn’s project, but none of the university’s 700 or so professors did. Prominent research journals declined to accept papers from PEAR. One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper “if you can telepathically communicate it to me.”"

"The culture of science, at its purest, is one of freedom in which any idea can be tested regardless of how far-fetched it might seem.

“I don’t believe in anything Bob is doing, but I support his right to do it,” said Will Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/science/10princeton.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Again, I'll point you to the video from GoogleTechTalks. (Google hosts this on their YouTube channel. Princeton University hosts the PEAR and GCP pages on their academic website. Neither organization seems "embarrassed" by this research the way the article claims.) Calling people names isn't the way to get your scientific point across--or any point across, for that matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew

And read the article from Nature, a reliable scientific journal--they certainly don't call PEAR's research "pseudoscience" or "hokum," and these people do science for a living!: http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/bi/articles/Nature_PEAR_closing.pdf

Quantum field theory is explicitly nonlocal. For the basics of fields, I recommend this minutephysics video on youtube (5 minutes long):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMgcX8UNIGY&feature=youtu.be

You're thinking of the world in a classical, Newtonian, particulate sort of way. This is wrong.

"MAGNETS: How do they work?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFAOXdXZ5TM

"How special relativity makes magnets work"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TKSfAkWWN0

Everything in the Universe is made up of discrete (quantized), nonlocal fields--not particles. At least that's what every living physicist believes. Unified field theory

For a good book on the basics of quantum theory, I'd recommend The Quantum Universe by Brain Cox.

And look into quantum field theory, the first of which was created by Richard Feynman, probably one of the best physicists of the past century. Feynman had no problem with psi or spooky action at a distance at all--"Nobody understands quantum mechanics"--he took his kid to see Uri Geller (an obvious fraud) for the fun of it...although his demonstration in key bending mysteriously didn't work since Feynman gave him his own key. Ha.

Feynman on quantum mechanics--"This is the way nature works!":

"Now if I’m going to explain this theory, the question is: "Are you going to understand it? Will you understand the theory?" And I'll tell you first that the first time we really, thoroughly explain it to our own physics students is when they’re in third year graduate physics—and then you think the answer is going to be "No." And that’s correct, you will not understand it. But this business about not understanding is a very serious one that we have between the scientist and an audience, and I want to work with you because I want to tell you something: The students do not understand it either. And that’s because the professor doesn’t understand it, which is not a joke but a very interesting thing."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sAfUpGmnm4

And if you don't want to watch the whole GoogleTechTalk video, just watch the small segment on the evidence for telepathy (from 19:28). But don't start talking about subjects you don't know anything about and accusing respected academics of fraud when you clearly haven't researched these topics at all and don't know the first thing about nonlocality in QM. Your editing isn't reflecting science or modern academic research at all--your editing is based purely on your preconceptions of what science is and isn't. And you've clearly demonstrated that you don't know anything about this stuff from the way you've behaved in editing this article in the past.

This is unacceptable and has nothing to do what is mainstream or what is fringe--it's just you putting your own personal biases into a Wikipedia article, which ought not be tolerated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew&feature=youtu.be&t=19m28s

And I'm sorry if I sound a bit heated, but I grew up and Dawkins and Hitchens the same as I'm sure you did--and I respect the scientific method too much to allow good research like PEAR to be badmouthed by Wikipedia for no discernible reason despite its findings being in perfect harmony with all the rest of what science says--though not necessarily with what a couple, individual, academic scientists personally believe. (And with what science journalists write for a popular audience rather than an academic one--since everybody knows they don't understand science to begin with.) Personal belief and preconception ought not enter the equation. Google endorses it--to a point. Princeton University endorses it--to a point. Plenty of engineers endorse it--to a point. And Nature doesn't have a problem with it either.

You're letting your own cognitive biases get the better of you such that you're letting Robert Park do your thinking for you instead of weighing the evidence for yourself and seeing what it is that the science and the evidence actually say. "Think for yourself and question authority" (Timothy Leary)--as the whole of science tells you to do. There is nothing fringe about what is going on at Google or Princeton or any of the independent studies that have corroborated telekenesis as a real phenomena. And this is coming from a neuroscience major who studies computer science and quantum computing.

NASA and Google are currently working together on Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QuAIL)--so clearly some very smart people think there is absolutely something to quantum effects being relevant to the functioning of the brain. And all of QM is explicitly nonlocal--just like psi phenomena such as telekinesis. If there can be tunneling or superposition states (particles in more than one place at once) or entanglement within the brain, why can't there be tunneling between brains?--as an enormous amount of research including that done at PEAR now seems to suggest.

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/

Quantum mind hypothesis (Endorsed by Roger Penrose who has published papers with Stephen Hawking and developed his own quantum psychological model of OrchOR with biologist Stuart Hameroff--"Consciousness is More than Computation!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpUVot-4GPM)

The Economist on quantum psychology

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/07/quantum-psychology

The Economist on quantum biology

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21633782-how-quantum-theory-helping-explain-mysteries-life-science-nature

What you previously wrote on this talk page: "The article is "fixed" in that it appropriately represents the mainstream experts in the subject. If such a source as you describe was published by reputable publisher with respected author etc. we would probably include that as a dissenting opinion."

You don't consider a talk at Google of all places to be where experts converse about these sorts of subjects? You don't consider the repeated tests of academics--of electrical engineering majors such as Dean Radin, the whole of E+M being but a special case of QM and relativity (again, watch the minutephysics videos I linked)--involved in this field to be real science? You don't consider Princeton University's Dean of Applied Science and Engineering--a plasma physicist (that is, somebody who works with quantum phenomena for a living) and engineer--to be an expert on quantum theory? Who are you to criticize any of these people--what exactly are your qualifications?

2605:E000:6384:B800:8117:FD0A:B888:6F06 (talk) 05:41, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Agreed that several of the reliable citations at the end of the lede - eg the Nature article - do not actually support our pseudoscience statement, so we will certainly need to fix them. However, most of the rest of the material mentioned is not directly relevant to PEAR itself, and therefore can't be used as citations in this particular article. Similarly, Jahn's Quirks book is a primary source in this context, and is therefore a problem for us. Y've provided some very helpful links in the QM area, and we should certainly see how we can use them to improve other WP articles, but not specifically the PEAR entry unfortunately. Tnx! jxm (talk) 06:51, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

As long as PEAR isn't outright called psuedoscience, I'll be happy. Its research was and remains controversial--especially among scientists who have never investigated psi phenomena or its associated evidence in the first place--and the article should reflect that fact honestly--not pretend that our current science has ruled out the possibilities of their research: Because it hasn't, if anything, it's supported it.

And is the Global Consciousness Project, which grew out of PEAR, worthy of being linked in the PEAR article? PEAR is linked to in the GCP article so I find it strange that the inverse isn't done.

2605:E000:6384:B800:8117:FD0A:B888:6F06 (talk) 07:01, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Using better sources--and using the current sources correctly

“It has been noted that a single test subject (presumed to be a member of PEAR's staff) participated in 15% of PEAR's trials, and was responsible for half of the total observed effect.[15] PEAR's results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility. In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results.[18] An attempt by York University's Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR's results.[15]”

This entire paragraph is sourced from only two places—an article from the “Skeptic’s dictionary” and another article from the “Center for Skeptical Inquiry." I have a few problems with the way each of the articles presents its analysis of PEAR.

The Skeptic Dictionary article (http://skepdic.com/pear.html) opens: "Scientists have been unable to find any clear and decisive evidence for psychokinesis. Those who claimed to move objects with only the power of their mind use tricks such as blowing on objects, moving them with thin threads, and using static charges to move objects. Some parapsychologists have not given up the chase, however. They began searching for micro-psychokinesis (MPK), minds affecting machines in ways that can't be detected except by statistics."

If you believe PEAR’s results (or any of the talk I referenced at Google by Dean Radin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew), none of this is true…so they’re coming into this either having not done their research, or with a clear cognitive bias, or both. (Just something to keep in mind.)

"Radin thinks the PEAR group replicated Schmidt's work in 258 experimental studies and 127 control studies. C. E. M. Hansel examined the studies done after 1969 and before 1987 that attempted to replicate Schmidt’s work. He notes: “The main fact that emerges from this data is that 71 experiments gave a result supporting Schmidt’s findings and 261 experiments failed to do so” (Hansel 1989: 185). That is the beauty of meta-analysis: you can transform a failure rate of nearly 4 to 1 into a grand success."

Meta-analysis is a standard procedure within science and the peer review method…what exactly are they saying—we should throw all meta-analyses out the window? Or only those that produce results that they do not find personally pleasing? And I don’t have access to the book—not a study, not something published in a reputable journal; a book published by “Prometheus Books”—so I can’t address that actual claim, but if somebody wants to give an excerpt of the relevant part, I would more than happily look into it. And the article goes on to contradict what Hansel said in the very next paragraph: "In 1987, Dean Radin and Nelson did a meta-analysis of all RNG experiments done between 1959 and 1987 and found that they produced odds against chance beyond a trillion to one (Radin 1997: 140). This sounds impressive, but as Radin says “in terms of a 50% hit rate, the overall experimental effect, calculated per study, was about 51 percent, where 50 percent would be expected by chance” (141). A couple of sentences later, Radin gives a more precise rendering of "about 51 percent" by noting that the overall effect was "just under 51 percent." Similar results were found with experiments where people tried to use their minds to affect the outcome of rolls of the dice, according to Radin. And, when Nelson did his own analysis of all the PEAR data (1,262 experiments involving 108 people), he found similar results to the earlier RNG studies but "with odds against chance of four thousand to one" (Radin 1997: 143). Nelson also claimed that there were no "star" performers.”

Again, they are using absolute measures, not statistical facts. “It’s only about 50%, so it doesn’t mean anything." It’s statistically significant and has been replicated in literally millions of PEAR's trials—just because it’s a small effect doesn’t mean you can start pretending it isn’t there. That’s not how scientific analysis works. Imagine if medicine worked that way—"it’s a small effect, so we’ll just ignore it." People would be dropping dead in the middle of the street! This isn’t scientific criticism, it’s religious bigotry.

"However, according to Ray Hyman, “the percentage of hits in the intended direction was only 50.02%" in the PEAR studies (Hyman 1989: 152). And one ‘operator’ (the term used to describe the subjects in these studies) was responsible for 23% of the total data base. Her hit rate was 50.05%. Take out this operator and the hit rate becomes 50.01%. According to John McCrone, "Operator 10," believed to be a PEAR staff member, "has been involved in 15% of the 14 million trials, yet contributed to a full half of the total excess hits" (McCrone 1994). According to Dean Radin, the criticism that there "was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment...was tested and found to be groundless" (Radin 1997: 221). His source for this claim is a 1991 article by Jahn et al. in the Journal of Scientific Exploration,"Count population profiles in engineering anomalies experiments" (5:205-32). However, Jahn gives the data for his experiments in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 352-353). McCrone has done the calculations and found that 'If [operator 10's] figures are taken out of the data pool, scoring in the "low intention" condition falls to chance while "high intention" scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results.””

Again, this is a complete misuse of statistics. First of all, Margins of Reality was the ‘’’very first’ book published by PEAR and contains only a small subset of their data—indeed, what they’re talking about comes from only a single tabular record (small enough to be printed in the book’s appendix!), while PEAR has in aggregate created many, many, many times this amount of data (I don’t have the precise metric, but if somebody wants to look it up, it’s a lot). And secondly, if you can’t just arbitrarily exclude the highest performers because you feel like it, you might as well throw all of statistics out the window: The whole thing is based on the premise that you analyze the WHOLE data set in order to find MEANINGFUL correlations.

What are they saying—the highest performers were cheating? If that’s the case, then the whole of PEAR’s research was flawed and doesn’t mean a damn thing. But where is the evidence for this? There is none.

How is this any different than a fundamentalist quoting the Bible for a lesson on morality, and once somebody points out that the Bible also condones slavery, they turn around and say “Well we pretend that isn’t there.” This isn’t science, it isn’t statistics; it’s moving the goalposts, which is a logical fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

And this contradicts what the Wikipedia article currently reads: "It has been noted that a single test subject (presumed to be a member of PEAR's staff) participated in 15% of PEAR's trials, and was responsible for half of the total observed effect." Again, the article reads: " Nelson also claimed that there were no "star" performers." And again, "According to Dean Radin, the criticism that there "was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment...was tested and found to be groundless" (Radin 1997: 221)." What the article is talking about is the SMALL amount of data published in PEAR's third book Margins of Reality. It is not a criticism of PEAR's research as a whole, and if the Wikipedia article wants to take issue with the data from Margins, it needs to reference the actual book: not give the reader the misimpression that the book's statistics are equivalent to the totality of PEAR's results--they aren't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

"Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about PEAR is the fact that suggestions by critics that should have been considered were routinely ignored. Physicist Bob Park reports, for example, that he suggested to Jahn two types of experiments that would have bypassed the main criticisms aimed at PEAR. Why not do a double-blind experiment? asked Park. Have a second RNG determine the task of the operator and do not let this determination be known to the one recording the results. This could have eliminated the charge of experimenter bias. Another experiment, however, could have eliminated most criticism. Park suggested that PEAR have operators try to use their minds to move a "state-of-the-art microbalance" (Park 2008, 138-139). A microbalance can make precise measurements on the order of a millionth of a gram. One doesn't need to be clairvoyant to figure out why this suggestion was never heeded.”

Yes, PEAR should have done in the 1980s what Park suggested they do in 2008—after the lab had been closed for a year. Great idea—now just invent a time machine.

And I’m not sure that the first idea would have been any more methodologically sound than what PEAR did in numerous trials under numerous circumstances with numerous types of random event generators. If Park really wants to make this claim, he ought to publish it in a scientific journal, so other scientists can give their input as to what is a better approach…which he did not. He published it an inflammatory book completely outside the peer review process.

Again, I’m not saying we ignore his point—that would be stifling the opposition, which is what pseudo-scientists like these pseudo-skeptics do—only that a single scientists’s claim is not the same as a study made that backs up such a claim with actual evidence: which there is not.

And “routinely ignored”? It gives two examples from the same person, the first of which was published after PEAR had been running for over 20 years (and I’d bet Jahn knows more about analyzing his own data after this long haul of experimentation than some sideline critic, but that’s admittedly a personal belief), the second of which was published after PEAR had already closed down! And this is what passes for “skepticism”!

And again, this is moving the goalposts. “You have a quarter century of data?” Well, if you’d just do this one other experiment that I just though of off the fly and would take many more thousands—if not millions—of dollars to do…then I might believe you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

And now for the Skeptical Inquirer article (which is admittedly somewhat better): http://www.csicop.org/si/show/pear_proposition_fact_or_fallacy/

"I have conducted several experiments in collaboration with others in this field (Jeffers 2003). One characteristic of the methodology employed in experiments in which I have been involved is that for every experiment conducted in which a human has consciously tried to bias the outcome, another experiment has been conducted immediately following the first when the human participant is instructed to ignore the apparatus. Our criterion for significance is thus derived by comparing the two sets of experiments. This is not the methodology of the PEAR group, which chooses to only occasionally run a calibration test of the degree of randomness of their apparatus. We contend, although Dobyns (2000) has disputed our claim, that our methodology is scientifically more sound.”

The above “Skeptic Dictionary” article never mentioned this dissenting opinion about which methodology was more sound. I wonder why. Because it's unclear--at least to me--what methodology is actually better, but saying so honestly that wouldn't let them take a cheap shot at PEAR like they did.

"If the claims are credible, it should be possible for other groups to replicate them. To their credit, the PEAR group did enlist two other groups, both based at German universities (Jahn et al. 2000) to engage in a triple effort at replication. These attempts failed to reproduce the claimed effects. Even the PEAR group was unable to reproduce a credible effect.” This deserves to be mentioned in the article; however, these are but two attempts to replicate what PEAR has done in 60+ attempts. Basic statistics would tell us that some results should come back negative: This does nothing to invalidate the whole of PEAR's data, it's just more evidence that deserves to be looked at--as all evidence does. http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html

"When the data shown in figure 4 were first published, surprisingly there was no discussion about the behavior of the baseline data given the previous claims regarding “baseline bind.” The baseline data in figure 4 violate PEAR’s own criteria for significance (i.e., p<.05 terminal probability), and consequently-according to PEAR’s own standards-must be regarded as evidence for nonrandom behavior in the baseline data. This has to call into question the claimed statistical significance of the data labeled HI and LO in the same plot.” Again, I would agree—to a point. This slightly nonrandom behavior is interesting, but even if you had a truly random process, any finite set of "random data” can produce results that in the short term seem to be nonrandom…this is a part of any random process--in fact, it would be weird if this never happened. If you look hard enough in the digits of pi, you’ll find the complete works of Shakespeare somewhere. But having a small deviation from the mean still doesn’t account for large deviations (relatively speaking; much larger deviations than those observed in any baseline) when a conscious operator is present and mentally interacting with it. It’s an interesting criticism—it’s a point worth looking into—but that single data plot from PEAR’s first book, Margins of Reality, does nothing to address the 60+ other publications they created in their quarter century run. To throw the baby out with the bathwater like this is premature: If the Wikipedia article wants to reference this point, it has to make clear that it is only a criticism of a small part of PEAR's first book Margins of Reality and that this criticism isn’t of PEAR’s methodology as a whole. But the Wikipedia article doesn't mention Margins at all, so it leaves the reader with the false impression that the performance of this single device has something to do with the performance of every other device PEAR has ever made: which it does not. Again, for PEAR's actual publications (not including their books): http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html

And from another article from the Skeptical Inquirer about PEAR’s closing: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/pear_lab_closes_ending_decades_of_psychic_research/

"In his CBC interview, Professor Jahn stood fervently by his claims and said that he would repeat this long effort “in a heartbeat.” He remains convinced that his work reveals something profound about the nature of mind and matter. However, it is somewhat telling that, despite this long record of experimentation, very few in the academy have been convinced of the validity of the claims. Most of the work has been reported in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a periodical specializing in claims for all kinds of physical, biological, and parapsychological anomalous effects. Two papers have appeared in more mainstream journals, the IEEE (back in 1992) and Foundations of Physics. The attitude of most of the academy has either been immediate rejection without a close examination of the evidence or simple indifference. One notable exception is the support offered to the PEAR group by one Nobel Laureate in physics, Brian Josephson. One waggish editor did offer to publish a PEAR paper “if it could be transmitted telepathically.”” It’s a very telling paragraph.

Improving the article: As the body of the article currently stands, there is an enormous confusion between individual studies done by PEAR and the totality of PEAR’s results: This makes the entire thing sound garbled, and it’s not at all clear what any individual sentence in the Wikipedia article is referencing—an individual part of PEAR’s research of the totality of it.

Two of the books referenced in the article are by Prometheus Books:

"Prometheus Books is a publishing company founded in August 1969 by the philosopher Paul Kurtz, also the founder of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Prometheus Books publishes a range of books, focusing on topics such as science, freethought, secularism, humanism, and skepticism."

I’m not saying the sources be removed—but they certainly aren’t objective meta-analyses or scientific studies that came to differing conclusions; they themselves have a political point to make and there are much better sources to be used—including the two NY Times articles and the Nature article: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/nyregion/mind-over-matter.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/science/10princeton.html http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/bi/articles/Nature_PEAR_closing.pdf

Some other sources that might be better worth including:

Mental floss on parapsychology (including a short bit on PEAR): http://mentalfloss.com/article/54450/13-university-sanctioned-paranormal-research-projects

An article from Vice about PEAR (including an interview with lab manager Dunne): http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/this-ivy-league-physics-lab-believes-humans-have-mind-control-abilities-943

NPR on PEAR (also including an interview with Dunne): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7371765

The Guardian on PEAR: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/feb/12/highereducation.usa

Plan to create a PEAR museum: http://disinfo.com/2013/09/a-campaign-to-preserve-the-princeton-engineering-anomalies-research-lab-as-a-museum/

And I’m not sure what exactly this book is, but it seems to be about PEAR (its description is just ripped off of the Wikipedia article by Barnes and Noble), and I’ll leave it here in case anyone else wants to take a look: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/princeton-engineering-anomalies-research-lab-jesse-russell/1113147281?ean=9785512529423

"The baseline for chance behavior used did not vary as statistically appropriate (baseline bind). Two PEAR researchers attributed this baseline bind to the motivation of the operators to achieve a good baseline.” This is specifically referencing a small amount of data from Margins of Reality (in fact, a single graph from a single experiment, discussed above), and only the data from Margins of Reality. The way the article is written, it sounds like this is talking about all of PEAR's research!

"It has been noted that a single test subject (presumed to be a member of PEAR's staff) participated in 15% of PEAR's trials, and was responsible for half of the total observed effect." Again, this contradicts what the actual sources say.

"PEAR's results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility. In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results." Why aren't we allowed to reference PEAR's self-published research when it demonstrates a positive effect, but we are when it demonstrates a negative effect? The study being referenced: http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2000-mmi-consortium-portreg-replication.pdf

What the abstract actually says: "The primary result of this replication effort was that whereas the overall HI–LO mean separations proceeded in the intended direction at all three laboratories, the over- all sizes of these deviations failed by an order of magnitude to attain that of the prior experiments, or to achieve any persuasive level of statistical significance. However, various portions of the data displayed a substantial number of interior structural anomalies in such features as a reduction in trial-level standard deviations; irregular series-position patterns; and differential dependencies on various secondary parameters, such as feedback type or experimental run length, to a composite extent well beyond chance expectation. The change from the systematic, intention-correlated mean shifts found in the prior studies, to this polyglot pattern of structural distortions, testifies to inadequate understanding of the basic phenomena involved and suggests a need for more sophisticated experiments and theoretical models for their further elucidation."

"An attempt by York University's Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR's results." Again, Jeffers was the one who wrote the "PEAR Proposition: Fact or Fallacy?" article for csicop.org (http://www.csicop.org/si/show/pear_proposition_fact_or_fallacy/), and he doesn't say this so matter-of-factly as the Wikipedia article would have us believe (from the subsection, "Methodological Issues"):

"I have conducted several experiments in collaboration with others in this field...

"This is not the methodology of the PEAR group, which chooses to only occasionally run a calibration test of the degree of randomness of their apparatus. We contend, although Dobyns (2000) has disputed our claim, that our methodology is scientifically more sound.

"If the claims are credible, it should be possible for other groups to replicate them. To their credit, the PEAR group did enlist two other groups, both based at German universities (Jahn et al. 2000) to engage in a triple effort at replication. These attempts failed to reproduce the claimed effects. Even the PEAR group was unable to reproduce a credible effect."

Jeffers did not try to replicate PEAR's results--he used a different methodology which may or may not be better or worse. And even the "failed efforts" by Jahn et al. to reproduce the results in Germany tells us: "However, various portions of the data displayed a substantial number of interior structural anomalies in such features as a reduction in trial-level standard deviations; irregular series-position patterns; and differential dependencies on various secondary parameters, such as feedback type or experimental run length, to a composite extent well beyond chance expectation. The change from the systematic, intention-correlated mean shifts found in the prior studies, to this polyglot pattern of structural distortions, testifies to inadequate understanding of the basic phenomena involved and suggests a need for more sophisticated experiments and theoretical models for their further elucidation."

There is still something strange and mysterious going on in the deficient studies--but the Wikipedia article doesn't mention any of that.

2605:E000:6384:B800:C54C:A44B:EE84:CBA7 (talk) 17:26, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

rejected / pseudoscience in the lead

• "PEAR's work has been rejected by the scientific community and is considered pseudoscience."[1]

While sources may exist that fully support that sentence, I don't think the sources provided do. PEAR did parapsychology, and one could cite that parapsychology is pseudoscience, but combining those two ideas into "PEAR's work is pseudoscience" verges on WP:OR. We would need a source that directly states that. Manul ~ talk 22:27, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

These sources are now in the References section, commented out.[2] Manul ~ talk 23:04, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

• 76.107.171.90 did a blind revert, restoring the terrible prose and all. The only source that comes close to supporting the sentence is this article, but that always places "pseudoscience" in quotes and isn't making proclamations. I would feel more comfortable with a higher quality source (such as Nature) that doesn't attribute with quotes. The other sources don't even mention pseudoscience; I don't know why they are there, nor why they were blindly restored. Manul ~ talk 00:01, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Recent changes by 2605:E000:6384:B800:C54C:A44B:EE84:CBA7

Regarding these edits:

• "studied parapsychology" changed to "studied engineering anomalies, anomalistic psychology, and parapsychology". The source, Pigliucci, says that PEAR was "dedicated not to engineering, as the name somewhat misleadingly implies, but to research on paranormal phenomena". This is a blatant misrepresentation of the source. Please see WP:V and WP:FRIND.

• "was controversial" changed to "was and remains highly controversial". I didn't find support for this from the source. This is also a WP:WEIGHT problem, suggesting that parapsychology is more accepted than it is.

• the addition of "[[quantum indeterminacy|random]] physical systems". That doesn't even make sense in the context here, and naturally the sources say nothing of the sort.

• the addition of "Others disagree: 'I don't believe in anything Bob is doing, but I support his right to do it..." This is original research (WP:OR), and it doesn't even follow. That quoted statement is not mutually exclusive with the preceding text.

This is just the beginning of the problems with these changes. 2605:e000:6384:b800:c54c:a44b:ee84:cba7, please read up on Wikipedia policies, especially WP:NPOV. Also please avoid WP:WALLSOFTEXT. The best (and really the only) way to get things done around here is to propose concrete, bite-sized edits that are backed by sources and conform to Wikipedia policies. Manul ~ talk 21:59, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

The user behind the IP is back, this time as 2605:e000:6384:b800:20f8:ef6e:1f32:4000, now warring for the same changes, such as:

• addition of the sarcastic quote "if you can telepathically communicate it to me". This is WP:UNDUE weight in the lead, apparently intended to gain sympathy from the reader for perceived wrongs against PEAR. See WP:RGW.

• addition of "criticized by some". The statement is already sourced; there is no need for the "who?".

• addition of "overuse of statistics without a causal agent". It is unclear what this is supposed to mean. The source contains the phrase "causal agent", but this addition doesn't reflect the source.

• addition of "though anomalistic phenomena were still noted in the resultant data". The source, CSICOP, in no way concludes that "anomalistic phenomena" were found. This change is a blatant misrepresentation of the source.

As before, I have only listed a handful of the problems. To this IP: these edits are strongly POV-pushing against Wikipedia policies. Please stop edit warring; take a break from editing and carefully read over policies such as WP:NPOV and WP:FRINGE. Manul ~ talk 18:13, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

History of PEAR--Can a section be added?

Relevant articles:

• http://www.williamjames.com/Science/PK.htm
• http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2007/02/pear-lab.html
• http://www.randomcollection.info/mcf/hambone/pear.html
• http://poetsandengineers.com/blog/2015/02/14/engineering-and-consciousness-princeton-engineering-anomalies-research/
• https://philosophyandphysics.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/princeton-engineering-anomalies-research/
• http://mentalfloss.com/article/54450/13-university-sanctioned-paranormal-research-projects
• http://www.vice.com/en_ca/tag/Princeton+Engineering+Anomalies+Research+Lab
• http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.181.207.3 (talk) 10:10, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Interesting related groups:

• http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
• http://www.functionalresearch.org/conscious-intention.html

PEAR ran experiments for a quarter century, but there are hardly any references to PEAR's history, Jahn's background, Dunne's background, or what it was the lab actually did. The lab was a very inviting place to go, for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike, and its research has an intimate relation to the Fundamental Fysics Group at UC Berkeley and SRI/Stargate. At present, the article is very bland and completely distorts the image of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research.

Jahn wasn't some fool. He was very well educated in physics, and he created a laboratory with other smart, thinking, innovative people at one of the best universities mankind has yet to create on this humble planet of ours.

[Jahn’s] research focuses on the experimental and analytical study of high-power plasma discharges for space propulsion applications, anomalous human/machine interactions, and consciousness-correlated physical phenomena.

Professor Jahn is the author of Physics of Electric Propulsion and coauthor of Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. In 1979 he established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program to pursue rigorous scientific study of the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes common to contemporary engineering practice.

A fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Professor Jahn has received the Curtis McGraw Research Award of the American Society of Engineering Education. He has served as a member of the NASA Space Systems and Technology Advisory Committee, vice president of the Society for Scientific Exploration, and a board member of Hercules Inc. and the International Consciousness Research Laboratories Consortium.

http://www.princeton.edu/engineering/eqnews/summer03/feature4.html

PEAR's research into this new field of quantum psychology is not unprecedented.

Timothy Leary (Harvard psychedelic researcher, High Priest of the counterculture, and Clinical Psychology Ph.D. from UC Berkeley) discussed Quantum Psychology (which he equates with Exo-Psychology, the "psychology of post-terrestrial existence") at length in Info-Psychology and Exo-Psychology. Leary's Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness has a "quantum nonlocal circuit", which he equates with the psychoatomic Overmind.

More recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have come to think of a Bayesian Brain, ruled by primarily by probability, big data, and quantum (statistical) rules.

Why do people appear to follow quantum rules in their reasoning? Nobody knows. But it may be that those rules are a better match for the fuzzy and tentative way that people think than classical probability theory...

"Whether this means that the brain is some kind of quantum machine is far from clear. Neuroscience is still a long way from understanding how mental states such as reasoning, judgment and decision-making emerge from the brain’s neural architecture. Nobody knows whether or not quantum physics plays a role in this process. But what is clear is that the kind of judgments we make when responding to a survey are not simply read out of our memory, but are dependent on our cognitive state (which may be highly uncertain) and the context in which it is operating (which can be influenced by question ordering, among other factors). In other words, the cognitive equivalent of those puzzling phenomena that led physicists to develop quantum theory in the first place more than a century ago."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/07/quantum-psychology>

Pauli and Jung discussed experiments of this sort (PEAR’s random number generation). They, too, believed in the powers of the mind inexplicable by the logic of (classical) physics.

Miller, 2009, 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession http://www.amazon.com/137-Pauli-Pursuit-Scientific-Obsession/dp/0393338649/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1424078502&sr=8-1&keywords=137+scientific+obsession</blockquote>

Although PEAR studied anomalies, PEAR itself was not an anomaly. Jahn and Dunne's work is one step in an ever-expanding field: Quantum Psychology, to be supplemented by the expected future findings of Quantum Biology.

Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and neuroscientist and medical doctor Stuart Hameroff have similarly proposed their own orchestrated objective reduction model of human consciousness, which similarly includes elements of nonlocality. Bell's theorem ought to be at least mentioned in the PEAR article.

Also, the article contains several errors and misstatements at present:

"In further response to Alcock's critique, the Princeton team conducted further analyses of the data which show that the anomalous RNG effects were contributed by most of the subjects, and were not dependent upon the scores of Subject 10. Several other subjects, who participated in fewer experimental trials, actually had scores with greater chance deviations. By analyzing the data from only the first series of 7,500 trials (1,500,000 binary digits) from each subject, it was possible to level the influence that Subject 10 exerted on the database. In this analysis, with each subject carrying an equal weight, the results were significantly beyond chance. Another analysis was conducted which eliminated all of the data from Subject 10. This, too, was statistically significant.

"A comprehensive meta-analytic review of the RNG research literature encompassing all known RNG studies between 1959 and 1987 has been reported by Radin and Nelson, comprising over 800 experimental and control studies conducted by a total of 68 different investigators. The probability 597 experimental series was p < 10-35, whereas 235 control series yielded an overall score well within the range of chance fluctuation. In order to account for the observed experimental results on the basis of selective reporting (assuming no other methodological flaws), it would require "file drawers" full of more than 50,000 unreported studies averaging chance results.

"Some people seem to produce data in random number generator (RNG) experiments that display idiosyncratic patterning that appears to be consistent from one run to the next. To explore the idea of person-unique signatures, Dean Radin, working at Princeton University, used a powerful, new "neural network" computational technique that is proving to be adept at discovering weak patterns in noisy data. "

You can try to insert anything that is in keeping with WP:NPOV and is notable. However I'd caution you right off the top about using primary sources to try to establish the notability of the history of the lab or to try to shift the consensus view of the subject by inserting a history section claiming that it really was science rather than pseudoscience. Simonm223 (talk) 15:04, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm a neuroscience major in my undergrad years; I know, very roughly speaking, how we at present think the brain works, and I'm certainly not trying to infect Wikipedia with pseudoscience--that's the absolute last thing I intend. But ESP/clairvoyance (remote viewing) has been studied by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley (the Fundamental Fysiks Group), Stanford University (SRI International), the CIA (Project Stargate), Princeton University (PEAR and the GCP), and even Harvard University (Timothy Leary's group telepathy experiments during his time in prison; he began his consciousness-related research with the Harvard Psilocybin Project in the early 1960s).

"The Starseed Transmissions were a series of experiments in group telepathy that occurred during Leary’s time in prison. These experiments allegedly culminated in a communication with some kind of extra-terrestrial intelligence; that through a rather cryptic series of messages set forth the futurist programme that Leary would adhere to quite stringently for the latter part of his life. Whatever happened during that time, it certainly had a profound impact on the man and his ideas of future progress."

http://www.futureconscience.com/smi2le-the-futurism-of-timothy-leary/

And Timothy Leary was similarly no fool when it came to science, philosophy, and futurism. The Exo-Psychologist (Exo-Psychology is the "psychology of post-terrestrial existence", which Leary equates with "Quantum Psychology", "Human thought and behavior described in terms of the language of numbers, computers, icons") wrote letters to Astrobiologist Carl Sagan, who was more than happy to lend an ear to Leary's psychedelic message.

http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/carl-sagans-letters-to-timothy-leary-1974/

I'm not trying to rewrite history of change the academic consensus (which is very narrowly construed); PEAR was controversial, and PEAR is controversial, but that doesn't mean we can't deliver a well-written, historically informative, quality article to the viewing public about who Robert Jahn was and what PEAR actually did. I think this stuff is interesting, and many Princetonians thought it was plenty interesting too.

"What happens when you mix the foundations of quantum mechanics with hot tubs, ESP, saffron robes, and psychedelic drugs?…the perfect guide to this far-off and far-out era of scientific wackiness."

— Seth Lloyd, author of Programming the Universe, on How the Hippies Saved Physics by MIT Professor of the History of Science David Kaiser; discusses the Fundamental Fysiks Group, whose work at SRI and the CIA's Stargate project inspired Brenda Dunne (she met Jahn after reporting on her attempts to replicate SRI's initial successes) and helped start PEAR and the GCP off in the first place.

http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/

Multiple Nobel Prize winners in Physics support this sort of research. That doesn't make it true, but it does make it inter sting (and I think intellectually engaging/stimulating). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.181.207.57 (talk) 20:18, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

We agreed some time ago to add a History section - see discussion above under Sept 25th changes. However, I'd suggest sticking to the founding team, funding sources, and other solidly reliable material specifically related to PEAR. Yes, "a well-written, historically informative, quality article" is certainly a great goal, but every statement will need to be very well-sourced and carefully verified. Given the controversial nature of this topic, I don't think a grand treatise invoking all these various thought leaders as inspiration for PEAR will get us very far. jxm (talk) 06:36, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

I completely agree; I'm interested in PEAR because I understand it to exist within a specific frame of historical reference which yields it validity. I'm not trying to make any sort of grand treatise, and I don't want to make PEAR come off as more mainstream than they were. I simply want a well-written article which accurately reflects the facts.

68.181.206.16 (talk) 04:50, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

What does “frame of historical reference which yields it validity” mean? 76.107.171.90 (talk) 12:42, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Yet more on pseudoscience

I think our problem is that we're too distracted by the absence of a reliable secondary source that specifically defines PEAR's work as pseudoscience. As has been noted before, a student newspaper article using the term in quotes doesn't really cut it. However, the use of RNGs to examine psychokinesis and other topics in parapsychology is included in the WP List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience#Life_sciences. We have no evidence that PEAR's work should be excluded from this more general characterization. I'd like to think that a careful rewording of the sentence in our lead might put the matter to rest - finally. Thoughts? jxm (talk) 16:27, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Jahn himself indicates that their work is received with widespread and generalized disparagement . PEAR is directly attributed to be studying parapsychology and psychokinetics, both clearly pseudoscience, in this book about pseudoscience [3] . -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 17:32, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

and even more directly right here [4] nonsense on stilts indeed. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 17:37, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Note on reverting revision by 68.181.207.149

I've reverted the latest change by 68.181.207.149. Essentially, we can't simply incorporate broad assertions of fact that are based on commentaries or opinion pieces, such as the Open Sciences or the Poets and Engineers sources. Maybe they can be added elsewhere as part of a context discussion or reaction commentary; let's discuss that here in Talk before proceeding. Similarly, citing the Targ article from JSE is not applicable here, since it does not provide actual evidence that the SRI activity inspired PEAR's work. Tnx! jxm (talk) 07:04, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

In the video on the open sciences article, lab manager Dunne specifically mentions SRI in discussing how she and Jahn came together to found PEAR, as does the following article in greater detail:

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/34/burnett.php

What "broad assertions of fact" were unsourced and need of specific references?

This was the proposed article revision:

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program was established at Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. A subset of the Human Information Processing Group, PEAR was tasked with studying the "anomalous influence of the consciousness" of human operators on the "information processing systems" of "engineering devices". In practice, this meant studying parapsychology (through random event generators or REGs and remote viewing experiments) on a massive scale.

Inspired in part by the work on ESP and quantum mechanics done by the Fundamental Fysiks Group at UC Berkeley and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, PEAR collected databases related to the anomalous influence of human consciousness on mechanical systems for a quarter century. The PEAR laboratory closed in February 2007, though its successor, the Global Consciousness Project, which expanded PEAR's field study of group consciousness, global consciousness, and REGs on a global scale over the internet is continually active. The program was controversial, especially among scientists.

The PEAR program had a strained relationship with Princeton University and the alumni network and was considered embarrassing by some students and faculty. PEAR’s activities have been variously criticized for their methodology, use of statistical inference, or lack of rigor.

Physicist Robert Park stated of PEAR's closing "if you run any test often enough, it’s easy to get the “tiny statistical edges” the PEAR team seems to have picked up." and "if a coin is flipped enough times, for example, even a slight imperfection can produce more than 50% heads." According to skeptic Chris French at Goldsmiths, University of London, "It raises the issue of where you draw the line". According to Nature, "In the end, the decision whether to pursue a tiny apparent effect or put it down to statistical flaws is a subjective one."

68.181.206.16 (talk) 04:47, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for you response. Unfortunately, the Dunne video is inadmissable, since it's a primary source - see WP:PRIMARY. Also, the Burnett article doesn't document the SRI connection. jxm (talk) 06:10, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

What is this, a court of law? We're talking about the history of how PEAR got started--I'm pretty sure Dunne would be the person to ask since it was HER attempt to replicate SRI that led to her and Jahn coming together at a professional conference for the study of parapsychology.

Regardless, here's a primary source documenting the whole incident.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/34/burnett.php

Actually, don’t. In fact, forget about spoon bending. Forget New Age spirituality. Forget metaphysics altogether, along with what you think you know about the crystal-worshipping enthusiasts of matters paranormal. Go back instead to the world of Eisenhower-era military-industrial research, for that is the world out of which both these men came, and the world to which they still, in the mid-1970s, basically belonged: the world of right-stuff aviators and pocket protectors, the world of jets and the tow-headed warriors who made them fly. Men who hurtle through the air several miles above the earth at the speed of sound are more than ordinarily dependent on the smooth functioning of technology; it is a vulnerability that tends to encourage the fetishizing of the machines that bear them aloft, together with a kind of nervous, animistic intimacy not entirely characteristic of a mechanico-materialist worldview. Which is to say, airmen across the twentieth century—and airmen exposed to the white-knuckle exigencies of combat above all—have consistently talked to their aircraft, named them, reasoned with them, cajoled and cursed them, stroked and indulged them. And within these competitive and fatalistic fraternities, where being lucky was tacitly understood to be every bit as important as being skilled, systematic differences were readily observed between operators, some of whom could get their spooky machines to do the seemingly impossible again and again, while others, regardless of the assiduous labors of ground crews, appeared consistently to bring out the worst in their gremlin-prone equipment. Some pilots, it seemed, could sweet-talk their terrible birds; others were forever in the weeds.

All this was anecdotal, of course—the hangar chat of cocksure youths who made their living dealing and defying death. The empirical basis for such superstitious distinctions presumably lay in (subtle) operator errors, (subtle) operator capacities, and the (pervasive) vagaries of naked chance. But dismissing the widely held and deeply felt intuitions of communities of highly trained experts is always a dangerous game, and in the 1960s, a decade that saw the rise of cybernetics and new research emphasis on human-machine interfaces, there were those who began to ask whether the private and semi-private voodoo of the pilots might represent something more than merely the fetching folkways of a peculiar tribe. What if these men talked to their planes because their planes were listening? Could those staggeringly complex and jumpy supersonic jetfighters—in several respects the most sophisticated pieces of technology ever realized by human beings—conceivably “sense” their operators? Feel their terror or confidence? Did the machines somehow respond to their masters in ways that transcended the fly-by-wire link between the brain, the hand, and the ailerons? Today, perhaps, this seems mostly like a question for late-night television. Forty years ago, however, it was the sort of question that could interest a defense contractor.

Indeed, Jahn’s own interest in testing for evidence of such “anomalous” interactions between mind and machine stemmed from his efforts to replicate experimental work done in the late 1960s by a fellow plasma physicist, the German Helmut Schmidt, then employed as a research scientist at Boeing.2 Schmidt appeared to have demonstrated that a particular experimental subject had the capacity to guess numbers generated by a randomizing algorithm at a rate considerably outside the calculated margins of probability. Working with an interested undergraduate student in the mid-1970s, Jahn had successfully reproduced some similarly anomalous statistical results using a random number generator of his own devising, and by the time he found himself chatting with McDonnell in the summer of 1977, Jahn was already contemplating turning his research attentions fully to the sustained investigation of what he would call “the role of consciousness in the physical world.” He would give the next thirty years of his life to this work, building the controversial PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) laboratories in the basement of the engineering building at Princeton University (in the teeth of lively opposition), and generating, with his co-author and collaborator Brenda Dunne (whom he encountered for the first time at that same 1977 conference), a massive database of tens of millions of experimental trials in which human subjects sought to influence the workings of various devices merely by thinking, wishing, visualizing, or praying. Together, Jahn and Dunne (who closed the original PEAR lab in 2007, but continue to write and speak about their work) claim to have demonstrated that human cognition has a real and measurable, if small, influence on the perceivable dynamics of the material world. If they are correct, the implications for physics, religion, etc., are enormous. If they are not correct, their labor-intensive and largely sober efforts over three decades limn a zone of techno-scientific quixotism perhaps best thought of as a suburb of performance art. Let us go forward as if we have not decided.

The article should mention all of this background information with Jahn's initial replication attempts, Dunne's initial replication attempts, etc.

Another article, an interview, more specifically about Dunne's background:

http://suzannesnider.com/artistInfo/suzanne2/thumb/12.pdf

Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ had done these experiments at SRI [Stanford Research Institute] back in the ’70s, and they had one line in the paper that changed my life. It was an almost casual line, where they said, “In fact, this worked very well, and there were even some percipients who said that they were able to describe where the agent was going to be before the target was even identified.”

68.181.206.16 (talk) 08:44, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Please stop with the walls o text. And then bring yourself to this point of view:

• We are writing an encyclopedia article, that describes the subject as it is perceived by the mainstream of academia.

Within mainstream academia, PEAR is a fringe pseudoscience endeavor, that even with its focus and funding and work of several decades produced nothing that substantiates any view other parapsychology claims have no scientific validity. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 12:09, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Stop presuming to speak for "mainstream academia"--you are not the totality of the scientific community, you are a single individual editing a Wikipedia article on parapsychology--and you need to learn how to start sourcing your clams.

What sources call PEAR pseudoscience? Nature doesn't. Google doesn't. The Harvard article doesn't. Neither of the two NY times articles do. There are a dozen interviews with lab manager Dunne online, and none of those science journalists do either. You're creating straw men and blowing them down...well done. Except nobody knows what the hell your point was supposed to be.

Either read the sources, read PEAR's books, and start contributing meaningful text to this article to document the historical context within which PEAR operated, or stop editing this article altogether. Stepping in to vandalize the article every now and then with unsourced accusations of "pseudoscience" (essentially against Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, and Robert Jahn!) get us nowhere.

68.181.207.188 (talk) 07:32, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I will continue to speak for mainstream academia and their overwhelming belief that woo is woo until you are able to demonstrate otherwise. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 12:00, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

PEAR didn't study woo, PEAR studied engineering anomalies. You're committing the equivocation fallacy on a massive scale--one parapsychologist back in the day was probably less than professional...THEREFORE THEY ALL MUST BE PSEUDOSCIENTISTS.

Unless you start presenting clearly-quoted sources that unambiguously support your viewpoint, I will continue to refuse to recognize you as any sort of voice of the mainstream. You are a Michael Shermer or James Randi type; I get it. You don't take things on faith. I don't either--faith is fucking stupid. But neither of those people (Shermer or Randi) are actual scientists, have conducted actual scientific research, etc.; they are pseudo-skeptics and not representative of the methodology of science (which proceeds and has proceeded independently from the will of these "skeptics" since the time of the Socrates and the philosophers of ancient Greece).

"Woo is woo." Again, you're contradicting the viewpoint of Carl Jung (who invented a large part of modern psychology) and Wolfgang Pauli (who invented a large part of modern physics). You clearly have never made any sort of serious study about the role of consciousness in the physical world; why do you suppose yourself an expert? This is, after all, the human brain we're talking about, the darkest, most mysterious structure in the known universe.

68.181.206.200 (talk)

Dropping ping pong balls down pachinko slots is not "engineering" -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:15, 20 February 2015 (UTC)