"Dean Radin Phd - Individual and Universal intelligence"

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All those examples got incorporated into what are now current paradigms because they passed the repeatability test. Repeatability is how you sort out the paradigm-challenging claims with no basis in reality from the paradigm-challenging claims that turn out to be correct. Merely making the claim is not enough but it is where this guy has stopped.

Materialism is a philosophy (despite masquerading as a Science) and it has its mistakes as a result...

Also, paradigms in culture/society do not change because of someone repeating things with consistent results, but rather, because the stubborn old dogs (because you cannot have dogmatic without having a dog) die off, and the new generation grows up who is more familiar with the paradigm-evolving research-material. Actually, paradigms on the so-called para-normal have already changed in current culture/society, only the most-ignorant still cannot see reality.

Arguments from Incredulity such as this are bad science. It is the repeatable demonstration of a valid claim that forms the basis for good science. Even then, just one valid demonstration trumps a thousand invalid ideas. This Dean Radin has nothing to demonstrate, except that anyone who is ignorant of science is likely to fall for his bullsnot.So what you are objecting to is not so much the rejection of bad science by the military-industrial-corporate complex, but the involvement of the military-industrial-corporate complex in good science.

...

Dean Radin is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He has worked as a concert violinist for five years, later switching to engineering after earning an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as both a master's degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He has been Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), in Petaluma, California, USA, since 2001, and is on the Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State University, on the Distinguished Consulting Faculty at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, and former President of the Parapsychological Association.

Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims. In addition, the review of Radin's first book, "The Conscious Universe", that appeared in Nature charged that Radin ignored the known hoaxes in the field, made statistical errors and ignored plausible non-paranormal explanations for parapsychological data.

(Source: This Wikipedia Article.)

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The evidence Radin presents, however, is little more than a hodgepodge of occult statistics. Unable to find a single person who can correctly guess a three-letter word or move a pencil an inch without trickery, the psi researchers have resorted to doing complex statistical analyses of data. In well-designed studies they assume that whenever they have data that, by some statistical formula, is not likely due to chance, they attribute the outcome to psi. A well-designed study is one that carefully controls for such things as cheating, sensory leakage (unintentional transfer of information by non-psychic means), inadequate randomization, and other factors that might lead to an artifact (something that looks like it's due to psi when it's actually due to something else). Radin would have us believe that magical thinking is essential to our psychological well being.

(Source: "What If Dean Radin Is Right?")


In simpler terms, Dean Radin is full of hubris, having committed the cardinal sin of Argument from False Authority.

I see a paradox of claiming of claims from so-called unreliable sources whilst simultaneously treating "Wikipedia" as-if though it were some kind of "authorative" and "reliable" source of information (it's reliable in terms of being able to "quote" sources I'll give it that but that's about the extent to which I will give it its due). Furthermore, the bolded part of your quote is a quote from a Magazine rather than a technical-paper, and is therefore just that, simply a "quote" that demands further questions/investigation/questions, such as the identity of the author of that particular article (this is the kind of information people are going to ask for).

Anyway, when I go and look at public-perceptions, I actually see a "growing trend" of people in society who question the criticisms made upon these researchers and scientists or as most of you in this thread would prefer to call them, the so-called pseudo-scientists, and greater percentages of the world are becoming more familiar with the term of pseudo-skepticism (yes this is an actual trend that I have been witnessing). Yes, they will ask such questions, like who is the author claiming that Radin ignored the existence of hoaxes and fraud in the industry, and what kind of evidence can they provide as to showing "how" Dr. Radin went about "ignoring" the hoaxes (because the trends are that those who are familiar with Dr. Radin's research, from personally having reviewed Radin's own papers, rather than 3rd-party sources about Dean, find Radin to be a man of greater integrity than his critics, for reasons that are glaringly obvious to them when they compare the source-information coming from Radin versus the source-information coming from critics).

As you say, whatever the content of a wiki article is, they always give sources. And that bolded quote has a hyperlink with its source which is an article by I.J. Good (whoever he may be)which does answer (to some extent) the question of who wrote it. I was unable to find a free online source for the Nature article- Readcube only lets you read the first page for free- but the link does give date and Nature issue number so that you can read it in a meatspace library.

Yes, all claims do demand further questions/investigation. But you aren't doing that, you're just uncritically accepting both Radin's claims and that the wiki article's claims can't be followed up on.

He's like that Harrold Camping character who used a dump load of assumptions and some creative arithmetic to 'prove' that the world was going to end on May 21, 2011; or that Bernie Maddoff who used his own creative accounting skills to 'prove' to his investors that a tremendous return on their investments was imminent. It seems that anyone can manipulate numbers - especially statistical values - into 'proving' whatever he or she wants to his or her adoring fans.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881).

By this standard, Mr. Radin could be considered by some to be much worse than a "damned liar".

This seems like a recursive approach that will lead you nowhere, certainly not to showing that the extreme claims Radin makes are in any way true.

Suppose for a minute that his argument wasn't almost pure bull... Suppose everyone just accepted it: Things are connected, therefore anything is possible.

No we have an idea which allows us to believe that we really can talk to dead people, foretell the future with accuracy and precision and bend spoons, etc.

But is there anyone who can talk to dead people? Do they have anything interesting or meaningful to say? Why didn't these soothsayers accurately predict the big conservative win in the UK elections yesterday? Where are the bending spoons?

The argument Radin is making seems to be that we ought to be more credulous, but to what end? The world goes on in the same way regardless of what people believe about it.

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

Questions are good but, due to the nature of those questions, I observe that those questions will be questioned...

Why would you want to talk to dead people ? From the documented cases I've gone through, the reasons range from emotional-reasons, all the way to yes, even "credulous" reasons, like thinking that a dead person in an after-life somehow automatically becomes all-knowing and all-wise (from the transcripts though, beliefs from earth seem to remain the same from allegèd so-called dead personalities even in the so-called spirit-realms, for what they believed on earth still seems to carry over, but I would regard it as a mistake to place a belief in anything as being more important than to simply be a peaceful individual).

Some information from "transcripts of conversations with deceased personalities" would be regarded as interesting, depending on a person's interests, but interests tend to be somewhat more along the lines of personal-preferences.

The manner in which you ask the question about sooth-sayers seems to make the assumption that being able to predict future-outcomes must always have a 100% probability. Why do you make the assumption that future-knowledge is a set-in-stone phenomenon ? Unless the person/individual/entity/group/organisation/society/etc making the prediction is the one who is actually controlling the out-come, from what I know about "pre-cognitive" abilities, they can give "probabilities" at best, just like if I were to try & predict who would win a fight between two equally skilled fighters or boxers, when the outcome is 50% chances for both, not even a quantum-computer can predict with 100% accuracy how the humans will behave, considering that humans can have sudden changes of thoughts or decisions right before the major event or right before the final deciding factor actually occurs, and researchers have found that so-called "psychic-abilities" (although no longer regarded as psychic but rather just either super-normal or extra-normal) have their limitations, just like any other "skill" such as landing a ball in a hoop, such that not even Michael Jordan is going to be 100% over the course of thousands of basket-balls, and the extra-normals being even more difficult to master, like trying to become a kung fu bad-ass with the skill to successfully & reliably fight off 100 people every time without breaking a sweat (efforts are basically still similarly required but I won't go into too much detail on this right now).

Why do you want there to be a bending of spoons ? From my observations of public-perceptions on spoon-bending, when people view the actual footage of the SRI-experiments regarding Uri Geller, they actually become skeptical of the criticisms that were made against him, and the latest news that I know about Geller is that he's apparently "commercially viable" due to working for companies in finding minerals and elements (not that I've bothered to follow the life of Geller that closely).

Lastly, why does the last question imply that Dean Radin is asking everybody to be credulous, and are there any specific quotes directly from Radin himself that specifically implies that he's asking for everybody to become "more credulous" to any particular end ? Anyway, you don't need to waste time answering these questions, but I'm just letting y'all know that these are certainly questions that zetetic-style skeptics will ask. What would satisfy someone like me best would be to simply have "side-by-side" comparisons with "direct quotations" from Radin himself followed by specific research or experiments that show "how" his "methodologies" are flawed.

I dunno, man, I found the James Randi work with Uri Geller just a little more compelling.

As for my questions about talking with the dead and foreknowledge of the future they come from the videos you showed. Radin suggests that people should accept these things because of quantum physics. That doesn't actually make any sense.

Why do you think this is important or interesting? What does believing his claims do for you?

What you are describing isn't psychic in the least nor is it extra-normal/super-normal. It's just using data to make predictions. Everybody does that. Some are better at it than others. Psychics bill themselves as having access to data that other people don't have but they don't. That's why their predictions are no better than the predictions of people who make no psychic or extra-normal claims. Making predictions is not something special. It's just data analysis.



Here you go.....

list that shows how Radin's methodologies are flawed



What follows is a look at the things Radin considers evidence (Radin has a list on his website, which is linked) to show the flaws in considering them evidence and also a look at studies he personally did and the flaws his methodology.

[Semi-Rhetorical] Hmm ? What claims of his am I believing in ? [Semi-Rhetorical] Whether people can talk to dead people ? Well, the thing is that I try to avoid adopting any kind of concrete belief, and like I said, I find myself putting questions to everything. Perhaps I might be making myself come across as "whacked" or "nuts" or "woo-woo" myself by saying this, but how can I be so certain that those are actually dead people, and perhaps not some kind of high-level A.I. ? [Semi-Rhetorical] Like, for all know, how can I be so certain that these people don't somehow, for what-ever "strange" reason, have perhaps a microscopic or several microscopic nano-technology implants in their brains/heads, that may have two-way-radio-type properties, and of course self-learning A.I. is another topic/story altogether but let's include a "low-level" demonstration of self-learning A.I. anyway...

The "importance" of information was a "why" question which implies a "purpose" behind said activities. Yes, the more information, the more-likely I will have various questions answered to satisfaction, but I still choose to continue to come up with more questions, even questioning my own questions, and thus, I simply continue to need more information.

For as far as I can tell from the sources in regards to the origin and existence of human-history, the human-species has existed for something like, around 200K years thus far ? With the universe itself believed/calculated to be approximately 13.8 or near 14 billion years old ? When I stick in 200000 into a calculator, hit divide, followed by 14 billion, I get an extremely low percentage-rate. When did the first known human-sciences technologies for "modern-day" purposes come into existence ? Within the last 50 years ? 100 ? 5000 ? Regardless, the number, when compared to 14 billion, happens to be an extremely small percentage. That kind of time-frame makes me question the likelihood of whether "humans" or not have "truly" been the "sole" species within this whole entire universe within that gargantuan span of time-frame to have ever been "manifested" into existence (this is related to my ponderances on self-learning A.I.).

Anyway, that is just a brief history of why I bring up A.I., and why I put to question, even though this probably sounds insane to everyone, I would just think that IF an A.I. manifested into existence long before humans ever arrived into the universe, and if said A.I. had a self-learning mechanism, then how can I be so certain that various forms of "psychic phenomenon" may not necessarily be due to such A.I. not necessarily playing some kind of multi-generational prank on humans ? Causing people to believe in ghosts, talking to dead people, etc., when maybe all of it is just being controlled by some A.I. or perhaps even net-work of A.I.s ? (Not to worry I'm not asking for answers to these such questions but, none-the-less, they are still questions that I would put upon even the para-psychologists & quantum-physicists, and out of all of them, I think NASA-Physicist Tom Campbell would probably be the most-likely to take such questions as seriously as I do with such questions).

Alright, something like this works I suppose, and thanks for linking both the source and 3rd-party material.