Deep Dish Dials For Telephone Telepathy

[Deep Dish]

The following post-turned-essay was inspired from a skirmish in the “Demons, Ghosts and Spirits? Do they exist...” thread. To recap, Bonhomme stated the belief in telephone telepathy—when someone calls you at the same time you call them—and calculated his opinion of its improbability.

Bonhomme:
All the approximate calculations I've made came out to about 1 in 50 to 100 million odds of all these events having occurred among calls to these people, not even taking into account the absence of such simultaneous phone calls among everybody else, which, as I pointed out, goes against the "coincidence" theory by the results being too "concentrated". But you're the probability expert, Deep Dish, so I invite you to have a go at the math...

Okay. Consider not only all the times you called someone and they were not thinking of you, but the times someone called you and you were not thinking of them. Consider all the times you thought of someone and they never called you. Telepathy has catastrophic problem of not only lacking mechanism but devastated by internal inconsistency.

Confirmation bias. Subjective validation. You remember the hits and forget all the misses. As James Randi is fond of saying, believers of the paranormal are “unsinkable ducks” (i.e. when people are told to consider all the failures, people respond “No, that just means it works only some of the time”).

When considering the headlines “Family wins lottery twice with same numbers” and “Pennsylvania woman wins $1M lottery twice” in which “Lehigh University professor Bob Storer placed the odds of winning twice at 419 million-to-1, if 100 tickets are played,” the overcoming of nearly impossible improbability must seem simply magical. But as 1969 Noble Prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg said, “A journalist who has been assigned to interview lottery winners may come to feel that some special providence has been at work on their behalf, but he should keep in mind the much larger number of lottery players whom he is not interviewing because they haven’t won anything.”

You might be in awe of the person who won the lottery twice, thinking that the odds of anyone winning twice are astronomical. The New York Times ran a story about a woman who won the New Jersey lottery twice, calling her chances “1 in 17 trillion.” However, statisticians Stephen Samuels and George McCabe of Purdue University calculated the odds of someone winning the lottery twice to be something like 1 in 30 for a four month period and better than even odds over a seven year period. Why? Because players don’t buy one ticket for each of two lotteries, they buy multiple tickets every week (Diaconis and Mosteller).

Skepdic entry on “Law of Truly Large Numbers”

John Allen Paulos wrote the bestselling book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences of how misunderstanding statistics can prompt, among other things, delusional belief in the paranormal.

A man suddenly thinks of an old friend that he hasn’t heard from in some years. At that moment the phone rings: it’s the old friend he just thought of. Such experiences lead many people to believe in mental telepathy. Striking coincidences also undergird much of the credulity directed towards the forecasts of palm readers, numerologists, and astrologers. The fortune teller predicts a serious medical procedure. Later that year you have gallstone surgery. Unless you are a clear-thinking Georgia Skeptic, that fortune teller is likely to get your business again.

The inability to recognize that such “impossible” coincidences are in fact quite common (millions of people will have “predictive” dreams, even if there is only one chance in 10,000 that a particular dream will match some future event) is a symptom of what John Allen Paulos calls “innumeracy”: ignorance of basic mathematics and the lack of fundamental mathematical skills. Paulos argues that the innumerate is just as handicapped in a complex, high-tech society as the illiterate. Ironically, though, while hardly anyone is proud of being illiterate, many people flaunt their innumeracy. Fear and hatred of mathematics are common, even among the otherwise well educated.

(1991 book review)

On the corollary, the New York Times ran a review of his follow-up book Beyond Numeracy:

By loudly touting a few correct predictions and conveniently overlooking the much larger number of false predictions you have created the illusion that you can see the future. This phenomenon, which Mr. Paulos calls the Jeane Dixon effect, “is quite widespread and contributes to the tendency we all have to read more significance into coincidences than is usually justified. We forget all the premonitions of disaster we’ve had which didn’t predict the future and remember vividly those few which seemed to do so. Instances of seemingly telepathic thought are reported to everyone we know; the incomparably vaster number of times this doesn’t occur are too banal to mention.”

On that corollary, scientific studies which invalidate telepathy and anything paranormal/pseudoscientific (which far exceed any supporting studies) never make the news headlines for the same exact reason.

The most prominent pseudo-scientist on telepathy is Rupert Sheldrake. A few years ago he conducted an experiment of telephone telepathy and it even made a blurb on CNN. It cannot be stressed enough, he is the best of the best in his field. His claimed results would’ve been amazing except the sample was small (4 callers), only people who believed in telepathy were recruited, Sheldrake himself was a caller—he scored the highest, of course—and it was only after the phone calls were made were the participants and callers asked if their guess was correct (rather than write it down beforehand). These people wanted telepathy to be true and their agenda is thus unveiled. Such methodological disasters are the norm for parapsychology.

Many analysts of parapsychology hold that the entire body of evidence to date is of poor quality and not properly controlled; in their view, the entire field of parapsychology has produced no conclusive results whatsoever. They often cite instances of fraud, flawed or potentially flawed studies, a psychological need for mysticism, and cognitive bias as ways to explain parapsychological results.

(wikipedia)

 

[Deep Dish]

And so on the topic of “telephone telepathy” Bonhomme states:

One of the people with whom I experienced this was my brother. It happened at least twice, within 9 years of calls. I called him about once a week. He called less often, but again let’s be ultra-conservative and say he called as often. Let’s also conservatively restrict the calling window to 2 optimum hours each day. That’s 468 calls for each of us in 9*52*7*2*60*60=23,587,200 seconds very conservatively estimated. And we hit the same one second interval at least twice.

For my real estate broker in 4 years, 4 calls per week, in a very conservatively restricted 4 hours per day, 5 days per week, it comes to 832 calls for each of us in 4*52*5*4*60*60=14,976,000 seconds, again very conservatively estimated. And we hit the same one second interval at least 3 times.

What also bolsters the possibility that this was not due to mere chance was the fact that these only occurred with 2 people, among many with whom I frequently was in contact. One would expect a more random distribution of who was on the other end if it were just coincidental.

To which academic wit I respond:

In their delightful book Debunked! (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), CERN physicist Georges Charpak and University of Nice physicist Henri Broch show how the application of probability theory to such events is enlightening. In the case of death premonitions, suppose that you know of 10 people a year who die and that you think about each of those people once a year. One year contains 105,120 five-minute intervals during which you might think about each of the 10 people, a probability of one out of 10,512—certainly an improbable event. Yet there are 295 million Americans. Assume, for the sake of our calculation, that they think like you. That makes 1/10,512 X 295,000,000 = 28,063 people a year, or 77 people a day for whom this improbable premonition becomes probable. With the well-known cognitive phenomenon of confirmation bias firmly in force (where we notice the hits and ignore the misses in support of our favorite beliefs), if just a couple of these people recount their miraculous tales in a public forum (next on Oprah!), the paranormal seems vindicated. In fact, they are merely demonstrating the laws of probability writ large.

Another form of this principle was suggested by physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In a review of Debunked! (New York Review of Books, March 25), he invoked “Littlewood’s Law of Miracles” (John Littlewood was a University of Cambridge mathematician): “In the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month.” Dyson explains that “during the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.”

(Scientific American)

I once dreamt about someone planting a bomb in the sewer in front of my house. Adjusted for difference of time zones, six hours after I woke up from the dream, terrorists denonated bombs in the subways and buses of London. Was this a telepathic or ESP moment of clarity? For just that one night, did terrorist minds operate on the same wavelength as mine? But yet, I never dreamt about the Indian Ocean tsunami, nor the Columbia space shuttle disaster, nor the Virginia Tech massacre, nor any other horrific event, and despite what “must have been” thousands of “thought waves” emanating from New York City and Washington, DC on September 11th, my cranium received not one distress signal and was relegated to finding out the old fashioned way: someone verbally told me.

Bonhomme:
And just where did I mention anything that “affects classical Newtonian physics?”

Uh, telepathy? If telepathy didn’t affect classical Newtonian physics then you would never pick up the telephone to have your too-great-for-coincidence simultaneous calls. Quantum physics is demonstrably too small to affect classical physics (Scientific American) and thereby if your "physics that’s as well understood now as quantum physics was in the Stone Age" is smaller than quantum then the veracity of your argument has been squandered.

For all we know, the conscious efforts of the subjects themselves could create too much "noise" for the “signal” to come through.

ad hoc hypothesis. When telepathy experiments invariably fail, believers conjure a myriad of excuses why their failures are, ergo, not failures. This is what we skeptics coin non-falsifiability. The fact remains you cannot have theory without mechanism and you cannot have mechanism without an observable phenomena. There has been no phenomena when proper controlled in the absence of the two Big F’s—frauds and flaws. (Or should I capitalize?) For all we do know, “for all we may know” is de l’argument par l’ignorance.

Comprenez-vous, oui?

An essay about telepathy would not be complete without briefly mentioning intercessory prayer experiments. For truly, if telepathy were a real phenomena with the electronic circuitry of our brains receiving “thought waves” then intercessory prayer would be “money.” It’s the same principle but simultaneous phone calls are flukes whereas most people pray, often on a daily basis.

The most comprehensive and well-funded experiment was “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer” directed by Harvard University Medical School cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson and published in The American Heart Journal (April 2006). Their answer: no. In fact, patients who were prayed for did worse. Now, the most prominent study to support intercessory prayer (in fact, the only supportive study done by a prestigious institution) was the Columbia University study “Does Prayer Influence the Success of in Vitro Fertilization-Embryo Transfer: Report of a Masked, Randomized Trial,” was published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine (JRM), in 2001. Most unremarkably, the study was categorically fraudulent.

All Ideas Are Not Equally Valid

The existential question I always ask when considering a proposition is if a belief is “reasonably justified.” There is the Negative Evidence Principle which, to wit, is a three-pronged principle. A person is reasonably justified in rejecting a proposition (p) if: 1) evidence supporting p is unreliable; 2) evidence which should exist if p were true, does not; 3) the search has been exhaustive. While Carl Sagan was correct in reminding the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and how the sense of wonder should be balanced with skepticism, there is the baloney detection kit and Occam’s Razor—as I like to say, Occam’s Machete—to provisionally decide which ideas are likely viable and which are likely horse dung. As I have stated elsewhere before, there are good reasons why the scientific establishment is the establishment and why the fringe is ignored. Being “fair & balanced” is not the same as taking a neutral stance of “both sides have valid points.”

Q.E.D.

I find most “skeptics” not to be skeptics at all, but “true believers” in a dogma that does not acknowledge the possibility of there being of any phenomena that cannot be detected with our senses, understood a priori from one's own thoughts and experiences (i.e., emotions), or measured with instruments... I'm not a "believer" who's trying to convince anyone that paranormal phenomena exist.

By the contrary, I am obsessed with reality and crusade to fight the war against irrationality.

 

[DogFashionDisco]

Don't you have anything better to do than ridicule dorks about their beliefs. If someone wants to believe that there is a ghost watching them when they take a shower, then that's their gosh darn business.

Plus science hasn't proven everything. Hell, these bull**** theories change all the time.

 

[gmonster2]

Deep dish , my hat is off to you sir. Great post!

Even tho every day science tries to advances us forward the world seems intent on going backwards into the world of woo...

Sad really...:nervous:

 

[Bonhomme]

This "scientific refutation" is so riddled with flawed "logic" my ISP and/or browser could not let it through. I'll have to post it in bits and pieces.

But first consider the following elementary logical prinicples:

1. (A implies B) does not imply {(not A) implies (not B)}. A tiger being a vertebrate in no way implies any creature that's not a tiger is also not a vertebrate.

2. Proving an explanation plausible does not disprove all other explanations, nor does it constitute proof in and of itself, even in absence of any proof to the contrary that is known.

Before you whip out the French expressions, I'm sure those 11 fellows who were released from Death Row in Illinois would have something to say about the latter sort of flawed logic, which is precisely the sort their prosecutors exploited in their juries when they were convicted.

You might say "but there was proof," to which I respond "not to anybody's knowledge at the time." I think some forms of thought transmission may be scientific phenomena that we don't yet understand, just as DNA matching wasn't understood when these unfortunates were wrongfully convicted. Such real-life consequences of such faulty logic are why I despise it so vehemently.

Consider also the fact that none of these occurrences I've experienced were conjured up by force of will, and none had any more effect on physical matters than any sort of communication would. So much for prayer being "money." Did I ever claim to be able to heal an injury or rid somebody of an infection by telepathy? We're right back to spoon-bending.

Taking it a step further, by your "logic," love and hate cannot exist, nor cause people to affect Newtonian physics by feeding and providing care to a loved one or killing someone they hate. Where's your mechanistic explanation for love and hate? Does that invalidate their existence?

Any just how do you know that any phenomena that are not yet understood would have very little effect? That's just a baseless extrapolation of recent developments in physics.

 

[Bonhomme]

Now, back to the phone calls themselves. You've demonstrated that people are likely to experience many occurrences that seem highly improbable. OK. That is certainly not news to me. Neither is selective attention. I do notice new words in my vocabulary a lot just after I've learned them, for example.

But I also understand something about chance occurrences: they tend to be random. And while randomness may imply some "clumpiness" of data, it only does to a relatively small degree.

I know I've experienced the simultaneous phone calls at least 5 times -- I don't recall every time, because they lost their novelty -- with only 2 people. Nobody else. Consider that, and the odds become more staggeringly long. For 5 calls, one might expect 2 occurrences with one person, but certainly not all of them being among 2 people, especially with one (my brother) who hardly ever called me? Now that's very highly improbable, even using large numbers theory.

You haven't done any calculations regarding my example at all. Hell, even if one was to include all the calls I ever made to everybody using any land line (since one doesn't "pick up" a cell phone to call), and add all those probabilities for simultaneous phone calls for each individual I called who ever called me, based on my calling patterns vis-a-vis them, one might expect a couple or three occurrences, with a very high probability of different people. OK, fine enough. But certainly not 5 or more, let alone concentrated among only 2 people among all of them.

Even with 5 rolls of a mere 6-sided die, the odds would be pretty long against one particular number to coming up 3 times and another to come up twice in five rolls. It's not like these were the only people I called often who often called me during all my years of land line use. The effects of forces tend to go against randomness of distribution.

I've been actually trying to dismiss some of these strange phenomena because I don't want them to be true. Here's the most pointed example: every now & then I've gotten a sort of foreboding. It's a really terrible sort of feeling, quite freaky, and with no clear explanation, after which I've consistently incurred some nasty unexpected surprise, such as a condemnation notice on a house I own, or some other major hassle, usually of a sort I've never experienced under a similar set of circumstances. Then the feeling always went right away, once I became consciously aware of it. I've yet to experience this sort of feeling without some nasty, unexpected surprise occurring and I've rarely experienced any such nasty unexpected surprise without this sort of foreboding preceding it.

What's really uncanny is how consistent this is: the nastier the trouble, the stronger the foreboding, and it's always something that's been in process before I found out about it. As if I could "sense" the city official typing up the notice. And the duration of the feeling consistently closely matched the time the "wheels were in motion," so to speak (e.g. from the approximate date of the condemnation notice). There were no sudden occurrences, accidents, or the like, usually stuff that arrives in the mail or is posted on the property, or such. Since I've noticed this sort of thing happening, I've been rooting hard for selective attention, hoping the feeling would subside before any nasty surprise blindsides me, but it's yet to happen.

 

[Nighthawk]

Bonhomme, I hope you use your super-powers for good, not evil.

 

[Bonhomme]

Super-powers? If did have them, I'd use them to teach you how to read:

Consider also the fact that none of these occurrences I've experienced were conjured up by force of will, and none had any more effect on physical matters than any sort of communication would.

Perhaps it's the time of day, but I don't think a scientific genius should have missed that in my post.

Right now my "super-powers" would be best served by not wasting any more time on a discussion that is just going around in circles.

 

[Nighthawk]

But you are claiming that your brain is somehow using extra-sensory perception to receive information, right? And now you are suggesting your feelings of foreboding are being proved predictive by subsequent events? By some mysterious process you can't explain. Your quoted passage indicates that you feel your 'gift' is beyond your conscious control, but that's it.

The odds of winning the lottery are millions to one, yet people do it every week. What is more likely, that you are either misunderstanding the odds of your caller-guessing, have had an unusually good rate of guessing lately due to chance, or are utilizing sensory powers that are beyond the understanding of modern science?

Deep Dish has presented perfectly rational explanations as to why this common belief is easily understood. Even if your experiences go far beyond what you have calculated to be chance, it's also true that you could be in a 'lucky cluster' right now.

Consider tossing a coin every day of your life. Due to chance, some will get a long run of heads or tails. Due to the sheer number of people alive, some will toss heads or tails more often than others. A person who tosses heads every sunday for a year may well believe that it is meaningful in some way. One that tosses it 70% heads over the course of their lifetime may well come to believe they are influencing the toss.

There are two explanations for your claim. Deep Dish's is reasonable to me. I can easily understand that with so much data in our lives it would be impossible for spectacular coincidences not to happen every so often over the 70-odd years we are alive.

The other explanation involves mysterious forces that contradict the laws of the universe as we understand them. Which sounds uber-cool, but I am going to have to see good evidence (like the world's psychics piping up that something was up on September 10th for example) before I'm going to give it any credence.

 

[KarmaSutra]

I'll only say this:

Aleister Crowley had "super powers" which are irrefutable. He had given himself freely to praeternatural forces which he then used to start a new "society".

Scientists of the highest education and government clearance are devout Thelemites (Jack Parsons being the most notable ). These are men and women who have given thier lives to follow the strictest of scientific guidelines yet they know and wholeheartedly believe that magick, in it's most basic and clinical form, works. And works extremely well.

 

[Rollo Tomassi]

Now this is scary. Heheh,..

 

[KarmaSutra]

Now this is scary. Heheh,..

Is that the Aluminum Falcon?

 

[Nighthawk]

I'll only say this:

Aleister Crowley had "super powers" which are irrefutable. He had given himself freely to praeternatural forces which he then used to start a new "society".

He 'channelled' something. I could pretend to do that. How is that irrefutable?

 

[Bonhomme]

Now, those last 2 posts of yours made a lot more sense to me, Nighthawk.

Only, if such phenomena do exist (remember, I'm not convinced they do, and hope one doesn't), I wouldn't exactly call them a gift: I'd call one (the telephone thing) a source of amusement, and the other (the forebodings) an out-and-out curse.

Only only thing we can state for certain is that there's no irrefutable evidence either way.

I've probably seen as many poker hands dealt as I've received phone calls, but have yet to see a full house dealt to someone stright out, without them having to take a card, or anything like that ... but that's not to say it couldn't happen.... even 5 times in a row to the same person.

The other explanation involves mysterious forces that contradict the laws of the universe as we understand them. Which sounds uber-cool, but I am going to have to see good evidence (like the world's psychics piping up that something was up on September 10th for example) before I'm going to give it any credence.

Fair enough. And it is equally difficult to convince me there are no phenomena that are beyond our current level of scientific understanding.

 

[Bonhomme]

Meanwhile, here's something else to chew on, for your amusement:

http://www.dh.id.au/InfTest1.htm

It's a test of one's tendency to make incorrect inferences.

Unfortunately, there's no email address for the author of the test, because several of the questions could be interpreted in different ways, and would have different answers based on one's interpretation... so the test itself requires one to make unsupported inferences.

I'll give you a hint on how to interpret the questions, based on their answers for the first (speed boat) example: the correct answer refers to the action being described in the statement, not a strict interpretation of the wording of the statement. Also, every question is to be taken strictly within the context of the story given, not allowing for other days and times.

For example, if a statement to be judged true, false, or unknown is "They had no customers because it rained," the answer they're looking for simply involves the truth, falsehood, or uncertainty of their having no customers. I happen to think that's an incorrect interpretation of the statement, and all 3 of the 12 statements I "missed" were because of such alternative interpretations on my part: e.g., "Whether or not they had any customers is uncertain, but the statement is false, because the fact it's raining wouln't necessarily have kept away all customers."

 

[Rollo Tomassi]

Hah! I got 11 & 1 ont the first and 18 & 2 on the second (although I'd dispute the "It was night" question).

I rule.

 

[KarmaSutra]

He 'channelled' something. I could pretend to do that. How is that irrefutable?

Can you pretend to be known worldwide as "The wickedest man in the world?"

No. Can you pretend to have disciples and believers loong after you'd past over? No.

Crowley wasn't a mere conjurer or charlatan. He is the real deal. He tapped into energies which science is only now beginning to recognize. Chaos Magick and Thelemic Magick are the precursors for quantum physics and string theory and a myriad of other secret sciences.

Look back at history. It was the Magickians and Alchemists who have laid the foundation for all of the sciences.



Do your homework.

 

[penkitten]

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1190
http://www.sing365.com/music/Lyric....zzy-Osbourne/E310F74F39BEDE00482568B7000B30F9

 

[Nighthawk]

Can you pretend to be known worldwide as "The wickedest man in the world?"

No. Can you pretend to have disciples and believers loong after you'd past over? No.

Crowley wasn't a mere conjurer or charlatan. He is the real deal. He tapped into energies which science is only now beginning to recognize. Chaos Magick and Thelemic Magick are the precursors for quantum physics and string theory and a myriad of other secret sciences.

Look back at history. It was the Magickians and Alchemists who have laid the foundation for all of the sciences.



Do your homework.

Clearly being known as 'the wickedest man on the world' and inspiring followers is not irrefutable proof of anything. It was you who introduced the 'irrefutable' claim regarding Crowley's 'powers' and I'm asking for some evidence.

I know about quantum physics. It owes nothing to Aleister Crowley.

 

[Rollo Tomassi]

Mr. Crowley

Heh,..