Still in print!

A revised edition of Chris Carter's excellent book Parapsychology and the Skeptics is now out. Chris asked me to point out that his book is still in print, even though Amazon mistakenly lists it as out of print, for some reason. It can be ordered online here.

One of the passages Chris added to the new edition concerns Richard Wiseman. It seems the British skeptic's meta-analysis of Ganzfeld test results uses an unorthodox and questionable statistical method. From the book:

The 30 studies that Milton and Wiseman considered ranged in size from 4 trials to 100, but they used a statistical method that simply ignored sample size (N). For instance, say we have 3 studies, two with N = 8, 2 hits (25%), and a third with N = 60, 21 hits (35%). If we ignore sample size, then the unweighted average percentage of hits is only 28%; but the combined average of all the hits is just under 33%. This, in simplest terms, is the mistake they made. Had they simply added up the hits and misses and then performed a simple one-tailed t-test, they would have found results significant at the 5% level. Had they performed the even more accurate binomial test, the results would have been significant at less than the 4% level, with odds against chance of 26 to 1. [footnote, p. 64]

Furthermore:

Not only that, but Milton and Wiseman did not include a large and highly successful study by Kathy Dalton due to an arbitrary cut-off date, even though it was published almost two years before Milton and Wiseman’s paper; had been widely discussed among parapsychologists; was part of a doctoral dissertation at Julie Milton’s university; and was presented at a conference chaired by Wiseman two years before Milton and Wiseman published their paper ... [pp. 64,65]

An interesting exchange between Chris and Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko can be read here. The interview can also be downloaded in MP3 form at the same link.

Comments

[william]

"Chris: Well, do you think we covered one of my central points – that these so-called skeptics are basically defending an outmoded philosophy of science that’s turned into an ideology for them? Because, it really is an ideological struggle for them."

This quote pretty well sums up the mindset of the ultra skeptics.

Science is as much about ideology as religion and politics.

Think about the mindset of an ultra skeptic if they even consider the possibility of one paranormal event occurring that they cannot explain with a material world explanation their whole ideology comes tumbling down. The human mind is very resistant to even challenging its cherished beliefs. I.e. religious and political beliefs and yes even scientific beliefs.

I suspect this resistance to change may be a necessary aspect of society to help societies remain somewhat stable. Constant change may have a destabilizing effect on any society. The end result of any change process in an organization there needs to be a period of stabilization to evaluate the results of that change.

[The Major]

Wow, Alex managed to get Christ onto his podcast?!! That is a scoop.

Only joking, MP. Keep up the good work.

[Zerdini]

Richard Wiseman Ph.D.is a fellow of CSICOP, a consultant editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, and an associate of Rationalist International. Having started his career as a conjuror, he took a degree in psychology (University College, London) and a PhD in parapsychology from Edinburgh University, and is now based in the Psychology Department at the University of Hertfordshire. His speciality is the psychology of lying and deception, and he is the author of "Deception and Self-Deception: Investigating Psychics." He is Britain’s most ambitious and ubiquitous media skeptic and has appeared in hundreds of TV and radio programmes. In 1995 he was awarded a Perrott-Warrick research fellowship for psychical research, and according to his website has received more than £400,000 sterling in grants. He has been at the centre of many controversies with researchers in parapsychology, and has often been accused of deliberately misrepresenting data.
In 1995, he replicated Rupert Sheldrake’s results with a dog that knows when its owner was coming home, and then claimed to have debunked the 'psychic pet' phenomenon ( www.sheldrake.org/controversies/ ).
He has been described by the President of the Parapsychology Association as motivated by "obvious self-interest", and by a desire "to support an a priori commitment to the notion that all positive psi results are spurious and all methods which seem to show the presence of psi are flawed" (see ganzfeld controversy ).
In December 2000 he carried out what he described as the 'world’s biggest ESP experiment' which, like many of his activities, was widely publicised in the media. A skeptical observer of the experiment claimed that he had designed the experiment to fail and interfered with the procedure in such a way as to gain the non-significant result he expected. (See O'Neill - Wiseman controversy).
In September 2004 he took part in a classic CSICOP debunking excercise, claiming that a young Russian girl who had seemingly psychic powers of diagnosis had failed a test he and his fellow skeptics designed. In fact the girl scored at a level well above chance. Prof Brian Josephson, FRS, a Nobel Laureate in physics, investigated Wiseman's claims about this test and found them to be seriously misleading: see www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/propaganda/
In an article on this website, Mary Rose Barrington takes Wiseman and his colleagues to task 'The Natasha Demkina Case'.
By the autumn of 2004, after a series of other very questionable claims, widely publicized in the media, many of his peers in the parapsychology research community concluded that his behaviour was not consistent with commonly-accepted standards of scientific integrity, and he was voted off the main research forum in parapsychology by a large majority. In addition, for similar reasons, some members of the Society for Psychical Resaerch called for him to be expelled from the Society. He resigned. Despite his strong skeptical beliefs, in 2004 he applied for the newly-established chair of Parapsychology in Lund, Sweden, which was endowed to promote research in this field. Web site: http://phoenix.herts.ac.uk/PWRU/RWhomepage.html

[Michael Prescott]

Wow, Alex managed to get Christ onto his podcast?!!

Oops - I fixed it.

[Roger Knights]

Here's an apropos comment on scoftical prrjudice, from A Writer’s Notebook by Anthony Powell:

"X sits watching this with the fixed unbelieving expression of a skeptic at a séance."

[ersby]

Chris is wrong about Wiseman and Milton's statistical analysis. While it's true that they didn't use a binomial distribution of each experiment and then a wieghted z-score, which would've made more sense and is what usually happens, they didn't do what Chris suggests - instead they to a weighted z-score of each experiment and then a weighted z-score of all experiments. This is an overly conservative measure.

As for the deadline of the meta-analysis (set at February 97), that all depends on when it was set. Oh, and Dalton's paper was never published, just presented at a parapsychological conference.

[Michael Prescott]

I forwarded ersby's comment to Chris Carter, who replied:

I will comment on the statistics in more detail when I have a chance. The point is that had Milton & Wiseman done their meta-analysis in the simple correct way (binomial test using a simple count of hits and misses) then they would have calculated a statistically-significant effect. Wiseman's error was pointed out by statistician Jessica Utts at another conference, at which Wiseman defended his mistake with the half-truth that others had also used the same flawed analysis (the only truth is that the three parapsychologists who responded to his paper did not discover his error and re-used his flawed statistical method, but by separating the Ganzfeld studies into "confirmatory" and "exploratory", with the former giving a significant result, even with the flawed method).

Second, Kathy Dalton's paper was most certainly published before the M & W 1999 paper. Here is the citation from my book: Dalton, Kathy 1997. “Exploring the links: Creativity and psi in the ganzfeld.” Proceedings of Presented Papers, The Parapsychological Association 40th Annual Convention, pages 119-134.

That was the conference Wiseman chaired, and he edited the publication cited above. So it was published, and he knew about it before it was published. He just chose to ignore it, by setting the deadline for published studies at February of the same year.

Incidentally, Dr Utts (UC at Davis) told me in personal communication that she spoke with Kathy Dalton and that "Kathy thinks that both Richard and Julie were well aware of her results when they chose their arbitrary cutoff."

[ersby]

Apologies - I mean Stouffer z, not weighted z.

And Dalton's paper has only been presented at a conference - not published in a peer-reviewed journal.