Christopher Hawley

Comment Threads

• Dirk Bruere commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  Enjoy: http://media.noetic.org/uploads/files/PhysicsEssays-Radin-DoubleSlit-2012.pdf...
• Jay commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  I skimmed that paper. Their approach to statistical sampling is truly remarkable. They got a fairly even statistical distribution around the null hypothesis expectation. They threw out all the data on one side of the distribution, and then claimed that such a skewed dataset was remarkably unlikely to be the product of chance....
• paws4thot commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  Never assign to chance that which is a product of blatent pockling! My grandfather once (working in what is now "Royal College Building, University of Strathclyde") got "nonsense results" from a lab, and pockled up "good data" using his textbooks. He was subsequently summonsed to see his course tutor who said "Mr C---, these results for $experiment are very interesting. To the best of my knowledge that equipment has never worked correctly since the railway was built!" (said line runs directly under the building.)...
• Bellinghman commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  remarkably unlikely to be the product of chance. Well, you have to admit that they're right. That skew is prima facie evidence that something's interfering with the data. I loved the way they covered their arses on the matter of reproducibility. Classic psi research disclaimers: "It didn't work? You weren't trying right!" (To be fair, and assuming they're for earnest, that's going to be a big problem whether they're right or not.)...
• Jay commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  It's hard to say if it was a deliberate con, a case of confirmation bias gone nuts, or a little of both. In the end, the difference doesn't matter much....