Peterson, Priestcraft, Profits and the Paranormal

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Here is the CIA’s own summary of the Stargate programme. TL:Dr

The single conclusion that can be drawn from an evaluation of the 40 operational tasks is that the value and utility to the Intelligence Community of the information provided by the process cannot be readily discerned.

If remote viewing was a thing, that gave a return on investment, would the CIA have dumped the programme, or would it have deployed the programme? Come on Dan, stump up the $3,000 and sit the basic course, then tell us just how convinced you are.

You have to wonder if the Afore is getting a kickback for advertising his friend's $12,000 courses.

[malkie]

Peterson:

Roughly a year ago, I read an interesting book by Paul H. Smith entitled The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing:The Secret Military Remote Perception Skill Anyone Can Learn (Intentional Press, 2015). It’s a basic tutorial on, well, remote viewing — which is the alleged ability to perceive information about a distant or unseen target without relying on conventional sensory input but using only the mind. Thus, if it really exists, it’s literally a kind of extrasensory perception. The study of remote viewing is one of the areas of focus within the controversial field of parapsychology. …

I certainly found it interesting. He not only believes in remote viewing but says, quite matter-of-factly, that he has done it many times and that — precisely as he indicates in the subtitle of his book — just about anybody can do it. …

Belief in remote viewing — via what seems, if it’s real at all, to be a natural human ability rather than a spiritual gift — is not essential to my theology. Religiously, I can easily do without it, just as I can do without Nessie..[sic] If it is real, however, it strongly suggests that naïve materialism is likely false. Which I think would be important to know.

It’s been a year since Dr. Peterson read Dr. Smith’s tutorial on remote viewing. Dr. Smith says just about anybody can do it. Has Dr. Peterson attempted remote viewing? I invite him to share his experiences. Just think: Dr. Peterson could be the one to falsify naïve materialism. Funds donated to the Interpreter Foundation to create eighty episodes of Bowdlerizing Brigham should be diverted to make it happen.

Perhaps he could follow up his "pure" remote viewing attempts with experiments to determine if remote viewing while dowsing is more or less successful. Can you imagine the degree to which the scientific world would be rocked by a finding of synergy between these two abilities?

[Marcus]

Someone uses wikipedia to point out the unreliability of a podcast. Peterson's response:

That's certainly the critical view. And maybe it's right. And maybe settling disputed issues by appeals to Wikipedia really is the way to go. (What does Wikipedia say about it?)

This was hilarious to read given how many times Peterson has plagiarized Wikipedia for his blog. Even his most recent travelogue/blog entry about Alaska stands almost no chance of being original. My remote viewing skills tell me he cut and pasted from wiki or typed in a passage from a brochure he got handed. Honestly, though, I used zero remote viewing skills to ascertain that. Just common sense and the predictability of Peterson's proven penchant for plagiarism.

Also, why are so many of Peterson's commenters so gullible--Oh. Never mind.

...I don't dismiss mainstream scientific skepticism, of course...

Can you guess who wrote this? I can't stop laughing.

[I Have Questions]

Someone uses wikipedia to point out the unreliability of a podcast. Peterson's response:

That's certainly the critical view. And maybe it's right. And maybe settling disputed issues by appeals to Wikipedia really is the way to go. (What does Wikipedia say about it?)

This was hilarious to read given how many times Peterson has plagiarized Wikipedia for his blog. Even his most recent travelogue/blog entry about Alaska stands almost no chance of being original. My remote viewing skills tell me he cut and pasted from wiki or typed in a passage from a brochure he got handed. Honestly, though, I used zero remote viewing skills to ascertain that. Just common sense and the predictability of Peterson's proven penchant for plagiarism.

Also, why are so many of Peterson's commenters so gullible--Oh. Never mind.

Mocking the use of Wikipedia whilst being caught red-handed plagiarising Wikipedia content in what was supposed to be a scholarly article is Peterson at his Trump-like best.

[Physics Guy]

There is no evidence for remote viewing or other kinds of ESP.
Didn’t the CIA find that remote viewing was of no use?
Remote viewing (and ESP in general) is impossible because it would violate the laws of physics.
Positive ESP results are due to fraud.
Positive ESP findings are the result of poor research design or methods.
Confirmation bias explains ESP effects that aren’t the result of fraud or flaws.

That’s a good list of skeptical conclusions. There may be others, but if Smith can really rebut these, it would certainly be a good start. If.

The fact that Smith can concisely and accurately summarize the principal skeptical arguments shows in his favor. That’s how people who understand something talk. It’s the kind of thing I’d expect from someone with a doctorate from UT Austin in philosophy, in fact. So this is promising.

On the other hand, the fact that Smith advertises the list of opposing views in advance, and offers to address each item at separate length in the future, is discouraging. He gives no indication what his rebuttals will be, and that’s a bad sign.

Someone who really had good rebuttals to briefly summarized arguments would also summarize the rebuttals immediately, knowing that even just on brief summary they would be clearly plausible. It might well still be worth fleshing out the points in detail later, but if you really have superior firepower, you don’t open battle by dropping leaflets about your plan for a long series of grinding engagements. You start with shock and awe, if you can.

Teasing a list of objections and promising to answer them at length in the future just doesn’t seem like what anyone does if they actually do have good answers. It seems more like what someone does if they like posing as someone with answers. The longer the build-up and delay, the longer they get to enjoy the pose of knowledge serenely, before the ugly business of laying out long-winded runaround tangles of fallacies, getting holes picked in them, indignantly blustering around the holes with more obfuscation, and finally retiring under covering fire about closed-minded prejudice. You can emerge from that mud wrestling without admitting defeat, but you’re never going to seem as legitimately confident, not even to yourself, as you did when you were just promising arguments, before giving them.

Unfortunately, getting good at that kind of obfuscating fight to a self-declared draw, and even convincing yourself that it is all rigorous intellectual discourse, is also something that doctoral training can give you. With a bit of luck, you can slip through to a PhD with only a haphazard ability to grasp important points, as long as you acquire a convincing facility in talking the talk. The BS, as they say, gets Piled Higher and Deeper.

So we’ll see. Perhaps Smith will surprise.

[Gadianton]

Can you guess who wrote this? I can't stop laughing.

Nice to have deniability. What I wonder is how he would feel if one of his followers who isn't in a good financial situation paid all that money for that course?

[I Have Questions]

I think Peterson needs to give full disclosure on this one. He is promoting to his small but clearly easily influenced audience something that costs thousands of dollars. He’s endorsing it. So has he spent his own money on some remote viewing courses with Paul H. Smith, yes or no? Or is he just pushing an affinity fraud scam at no financial risk to himself? Is Paul H. Smith paying for his endorsement?

So Peterson, have you put your money where your mouth is on this one?

I wrote this^ nearly a year ago. Peterson still hasn’t clarified.

[drumdude]

My sense with some other ESP research that I've seen is that success rates are low but statistically significant. Whether that's enough to be profitable (the issue that you raise in your second paragraph), I don't know.

I've known people who used water dowsing in landscape design and the drilling of water wells and similar practical areas who had full confidence in it, for whatever that may be worth.

I hate to be the one to explain this to a former BYU professor, but here we are.

P-value hacking (also known as p-hacking, data dredging, or data snooping) is the misuse of data analysis to manipulate statistical results until they appear politically or scientifically significant. It occurs when researchers run multiple statistical tests on a dataset but only report the specific configurations that yield a favorable outcome—typically a p-value below the traditional threshold of p < 0.05. This practice creates a false illusion of a real effect or pattern where none actually exists, dramatically increasing the rate of false positives.

Common P-Hacking Methods

P-hacking rarely involves outright fabricating data. Instead, it exploits "researcher degrees of freedom"—the flexible decisions made during data analysis:

Early Stopping: Peeking at the data during collection and stopping early as soon as the results cross into statistical significance.

Selective Reporting: Measuring dozens of different outcomes or variables but only writing about the ones that yielded p < 0.05.

Arbitrary Outlier Removal: Deleting specific data points under the guise of "cleaning data" solely because removing them improves the p-value.

Subgroup Over-analysis: Slicing the data into smaller and smaller demographic or geographic combinations until a random correlation pops up.

Post-hoc Covariate Tweaking: Adding or removing control variables (covariates) in a statistical model until the desired significance level is met.

This is why Daniel won’t put his dowsing abilities to the test. Early stopping ensures he can’t have his little personal experience diminished.

[Gadianton]

It's not purely a "profit" thing, although I get why an apologist might think it is. If you can remote view you can do things like, remote view that hospital and tell us if Mitch is alive or dead.

[Physics Guy]

Even without any hacking, the 95% confidence threshold just isn’t very high. This poses a basic problem.

If there are twenty studies, on average one will show something that would only occur by chance one time in twenty. The other 19 are likely not published, because they find nothing significant, and so the only published research on the topic has shown a significant effect, even though there isn’t really anything there at all.

This may sound like such a basic and trivial problem that it couldn’t possibly really be that simple, because that would make much of medical and sociological research completely unreliable. Alas, though, this simple problem is indeed all too real, and it really does make a lot of empirical science unreliable.

People try to deal with the problem. In the so-called hard sciences, the standard is much higher than 95%. The only case I know in physics where any specific confidence level is even mentioned is for the detection of a new kind of particle, where the threshold is about 99.99994% (5 standard deviations). Otherwise the standard is basically, “If you need to ask about this, you need more data.” The hard sciences should really be called the easy sciences, though. You can’t do medical trials with a billion subjects, but a billion atoms are almost nothing. So in practice we’re stuck with much lower standards, in order at least to make educated guesses about important questions.

One important practice is to publish every attempt to examine a question, even if its results are negative. This means publishing a lot of boring papers that don’t surprise anyone or seem to deserve much attention, but efforts are made to have lower-tier repositories for registering negative results, just to give a more realistic picture. It’s still kind of tough, because often the negative studies really are boring, and their results seem obvious in advance; that lucky twentieth study only seemed noteworthy because of its surprisingly unusual finding. Publishing negative results is still coming to be seen as best practice, though.

The main solution is just to try to replicate anything that seems surprising. If it was actually just a fluke of chance, then the next dozen attempts to reproduce it won’t show anything, and the result will get dismissed, as it should be, as a fluke.

The fact that exactly that happens a lot is the “replication crisis”. It isn’t really a crisis. It’s how things should work. Everyone just has to realize that one 95%-confident finding does not equal a solid discovery, and chill out about individual papers, until enough replications have followed to confirm the result.

Needless to say, parapsychology is full of legitimately published papers that might not have been cooked or hacked to reach their 95% confidence threshold, but that have never been replicated.