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691 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-03-Psychology researchers discuss ESP


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Introduction: Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. But I’ll forward it on to the rest of you. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true.


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1 Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. [sent-1, score-1.004]

2 Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. [sent-2, score-0.572]

3 I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . [sent-4, score-0.612]

4 ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true. [sent-5, score-0.458]


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same-blog 1 1.0 691 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-03-Psychology researchers discuss ESP

Introduction: Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. But I’ll forward it on to the rest of you. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true.

2 0.17088759 506 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-06-That silly ESP paper and some silliness in a rebuttal as well

Introduction: John Talbott points me to this , which I briefly mocked a couple months ago. I largely agree with the critics of this research, but I want to reiterate my point from earlier that all the statistical sophistication in the world won’t help you if you’re studying a null effect. This is not to say that the actual effect is zero—who am I to say?—just that the comments about the high-quality statistics in the article don’t say much to me. There’s lots of discussion of the lack of science underlying ESP claims. I can’t offer anything useful on that account (not being a psychologist, I could imagine all sorts of stories about brain waves or whatever), but I would like to point out something that usually doesn’t seem to get mentioned in these discussions, which is that lots of people want to believe in ESP. After all, it would be cool to read minds. (It wouldn’t be so cool, maybe, if other people could read your mind and you couldn’t read theirs, but I suspect most people don’t think

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Introduction: 15-2040 != 19-3010 (and, for that matter, 25-1022 != 25-1063).

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Introduction: Chris Masse points me to this response by Daryl Bem and two statisticians (Jessica Utts and Wesley Johnson) to criticisms by Wagenmakers et.al. of Bem’s recent ESP study. I have nothing to add but would like to repeat a couple bits of my discussions of last month, of here : Classical statistical methods that work reasonably well when studying moderate or large effects (see the work of Fisher, Snedecor, Cochran, etc.) fall apart in the presence of small effects. I think it’s naive when people implicitly assume that the study’s claims are correct, or the study’s statistical methods are weak. Generally, the smaller the effects you’re studying, the better the statistics you need. ESP is a field of small effects and so ESP researchers use high-quality statistics. To put it another way: whatever methodological errors happen to be in the paper in question, probably occur in lots of researcher papers in “legitimate” psychology research. The difference is that when you’re studying a

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Introduction: Jelte Wicherts writes: I thought you might be interested in reading this paper that is to appear this week in PLoS ONE. In it we [Wicherts, Marjan Bakker, and Dylan Molenaar] show that the willingness to share data from published psychological research is associated both with “the strength of the evidence” (against H0) and the prevalence of errors in the reporting of p-values. The issue of data archiving will likely be put on the agenda of granting bodies and the APA/APS because of what Diederik Stapel did . I hate hate hate hate hate when people don’t share their data. In fact, that’s the subject of my very first column on ethics for Chance magazine. I have a story from 22 years ago, when I contacted some scientists and showed them how I could reanalyze their data more efficiently (based on a preliminary analysis of their published summary statistics). They seemed to feel threatened by the suggestion and refused to send me their raw data. (It was an animal experiment

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Introduction: Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. But I’ll forward it on to the rest of you. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true.

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Introduction: The scientific consensus appears to be that, to the extent that acupuncture makes people feel better, it is through relaxing the patient, also the acupuncturist might help in other ways, encouraging the patient to focus on his or her lifestyle. A friend recommended an acupuncturist to me awhile ago and I told her the above line, to which she replied: No, I don’t feel at all relaxed when I go to the acupuncturist. Those needles really hurt! I don’t know anything about this, but one thing I do know is that whenever I discuss the topic with a Chinese friend, they assure me that acupuncture is real. Real real. Not “yeah, it works by calming people” real or “patients respond to a doctor who actually cares about them” real. Real real. The needles, the special places to put the needles, the whole thing. I haven’t had a long discussion on this, but my impression is that Chinese people think of acupuncture as working in the same way that we think of TV’s or cars or refrigerators:

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