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Author Topic: Conspiracy Theories: The Reread The Civility Clause Thread  (Read 46543 times)

wierd

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Pro-epidemic Rorschach ArchaeologyThread
« Reply #180 on: May 30, 2018, 03:26:05 am »

Also, CRTs / LCDs / Other display showing text, bone conducting speakers, and of course, speakers in general.

Then there's also whatever the hell it is they were using on the people in the Cuban embassy..... ;P
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Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Pro-epidemic Rorschach ArchaeologyThread
« Reply #181 on: May 30, 2018, 03:37:46 am »

However, we don't know whether it's emf in general or specific frequencies which could trigger something. e.g. for something like emf exposure they haven't found a link in the lab for exposure vs symptoms, but I don't know anything about their methodology, and specific molecules do only pick up energies of specific wavelengths, e.g. the entire point of spectrographic anaylsis.

So it's not just a case of aiming "general" signal at something and saying there is or isn't a link, because if you average out the results across all frequencies that might just mean there's some real signal in there that's being drowned out by so many irrelevant data points that it's hand-waved as "noise". Also, in terms of possible emf sensitivity or emf effects, any long-term exposure results might not be evident on a short-term exposure test, so short-term "lab results" showing that nothing happened aren't really helpful evidence one way or the other. e.g. they might be akin to hand-waving away the long term effects of cumulative toxin exposure on the basis of "lab results" that showed that giving your daily dose to you for one day, or even a week "didn't do anything statistically significant'. e.g. standard "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence". e.g., in this case, you have marketed products and some lab didn't find a link between that and harm, so it's widely publicized as "disproving" any link. But, many companies, who are advertisers for the same newspapers, have a vested interest in those products, so they're not value-free news articles when an article assuages people's fears that a particular product or product class could be harmful.

So, while there might not be anything to find, it would also be equally wrong to just do a blanket scan of the entire emf frequency range with short-term exposures then average out the results and say you didn't find anything.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2018, 03:46:57 am by Reelya »
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Kagus

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Pro-epidemic Rorschach ArchaeologyThread
« Reply #182 on: May 30, 2018, 04:05:41 am »

I still think that a pretty big point against psychic abilities is to look at the James Randi foundation, and their offer of $500,000 (later upgraded to $1,000,000) to anyone able to prove paranormal ability in a controlled setting.

The offer was finally terminated in 2015, but that was after many years of nobody being able to claim the reward. There were a couple people who tried, but they were quickly discovered as being charlatans who were just very confident about being able to fool the testing.

One can make the statement about bias and trying to prove something to a cynic, but I'm rather of the opinion that Mr. Randi would have been over the moon if they discovered some actual paranormal effects.

Think about it... It's something which all of our understanding of the natural world contradicts, something that doesn't make sense. So if you were to prove that it does happen, then we'd need to change how we interpret reality at a fairly basic level. And who knows what all kinds of new discoveries that kind of change could lead to? I'm fairly certain that he'd be delighted by the prospect of finding something that required such a profound change of perspective in the scientific community.

But, for however much he or anyone else might have wanted it to be, there have as yet been no substantiated and proven events or abilities of such a caliber.

Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Pro-epidemic Rorschach ArchaeologyThread
« Reply #183 on: May 30, 2018, 05:26:32 am »

I’m not aware of any special frequencies at which the human brain or all matter in the universe vibrates at myself, unless that’s like, derived from the average length of a nerve impulse and the speed of a nerve impulse?

Edit: also it’s a neat enough theory I guess, but if it’s being presented without evidence it should be clearer as to what it’s trying to explain?

Brain wave frequencies. There's fairly good evidence that they are important.

e.g. you don't have to measure any "special" frequency from looking at nerve impulses you just have to look at existing emanations from actual brains, and the evidence that those are in fact documented to correlate with different states of mind. e.g. the question would then be how much bleed over from one brain to another is there and is it statistically significant.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2018, 05:29:55 am by Reelya »
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Trekkin

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Pro-epidemic Rorschach ArchaeologyThread
« Reply #184 on: May 30, 2018, 07:47:01 am »

Thank you for the response Trekkin. You have raised some very good counterpoints which..is good for the debate, I suppose.
   you are right, if I am to define a theory under which telepathy may be possible, I should do so completely and concisely first, shame on me for forgetting the scientific method..So, to reply to your second paragraph-The way I think of mathematics is wildly different from most people, so that may be an possible reason for the miscommunication. So if we want to define things quantitatively most times, is your suggestion this;to instead define it qualitatively? Honest question.
   Next, on to the 'mathemetical sum of said equation part'. I did not mean to imply this, but I did, my apologies. What I meant by that was that the supposed sum of such an equation wouldn't be native to the current, state-of-the-art even human understanding or psychological understanding. We wouldn't be able to for a long time, unless we shortened such a timeline by another alternative. Next, when you say 'greater predictive power', I may interject that that the whole technique, theory, thesis IS to an extent 'predictive power' in and of itself. There could be a million other explanations of the data, but it leads to the same thing-a natural or learned ability to predict things to a certain extent, but there are so many factors that go into that, that the variables themselves couldn't(or just havn't, and should be)be quantified, or maybe even the qualitative variables too.
   Next, that is precisely what I'm saying as well, this supposed phenomena would be easier understood in a group of conceptual factors, rather than put into 0's and 1's, or variable, or what have you. as far as your third point-Your right, calculating the sample size would be impossible at this point in time. The 'effect size' is something that I don't know if would be a proper term for this scenario-or the signal-to-noise ratio. So here is a small, short basis that I propose-

   The human brain has scientifically to operate on certain frequencies, which range widely and have different variable effects on the human psychology and physiology, at the very least. Now, it is a scientific fact(correct me if I'm wrong) that everything in the universe 'vibrates' or 'oscillates', as well as meaning it does so on a certain frequency, or wavelength. My theory is that when you naturally or learn to align your frequency through muscle or neuroplasticity based methods, to the other individuals, then that is what creates the basis for everything further along in the theory. Make your counterpoints, if you would.
Finally, the well-known explanation of the phenomena you speak of is true, but by proxy would you agree, or disagree that the explanation itself that you just provided is a proof of the probability factor of the theory? But as I said earlier and as you mentioned-we may be talking quality-wise, not quantity.
Just thought I would take the time to actually type an educated to the best of my ability response.
Well, since you asked:
1. Making your points concisely has nothing to do with the scientific method. It's just basic argumentation. In what's going to become a running theme here, if people can't understand what you're saying they can't respond to it -- and that doesn't mean they aren't smart enough to understand, just that you've garbled things beyond all hope of comprehension. I could easily claim that telepathy works because of a random jumble of woo buzzwords and people would shrug and move on because there's nothing worth falsifying therein.

2. Quantitative definitions are much to be preferred, given the choice; I meant only that even if we assume this theory of yours is somehow "beyond mathematics", provided it's reproducible (meaning if it works in any meaningful sense at all) it could still be tested. How we define the theory has no bearing on the data generated.

3.  The ability of people with your supposed telepathy to predict things is totally different from the predictive power I was referring to; I refer simply to whether or not your telepathy is a better explanation for your allegations than everyone else's nonverbal communication. What I mean, in layman's terms, is this:

4. What you are describing is not telepathy, much like bending a spoon with your hands is not telekinesis. It is a perfectly mundane operation requiring no mystical explanation whatsoever. We don't need telepathy to explain it; the phenomena you describe can be accounted for perfectly by well-known psychological phenomena.

5. Even setting aside all of that, your theory has four main problems: first, de Broglie waves (the everything-in-the-universe sort of wave) are not at all the same kind of wave as neural oscillations. You can't "align the two" any more than you can tune an audio speaker to emit light. Second, you can't get neurons to oscillate at anything comparable to the frequency one would logically expect to correspond to the de Broglie frequency of anything at the macroscale anyway. It is not physically possible for nerves to fire quickly enough to set up a wave of that frequency; the ions can't diffuse fast enough. Third, big things (meaning most things the size of a macromolecule or larger) don't have single de Broglie wavelengths; neurons certainly don't. Fourth, the de Broglie wavelength would only tell you the momentum of the neuron, not its state, which is what actually does the thinking.

So the basis of your entire theory is that people can train their neurons to do something physically impossible in order to establish an arbitrary equivalence to a property neurons do not meaningfully have in order to transmit completely irrelevant information through a medium you haven't defined to a receiver that cannot be sensitive to it and has no way of decoding the information sent even if it were meaningful.

And, as proof, you posit that people can communicate without speaking if they train themselves for an extended period of time, for which there already exists an explanation perfectly compatible with neurology and physics and logic: you're moving in some small way the receiver is perceiving, and after a long enough time trying you've trained yourselves to correlate those movements to numbers. This isn't telepathy any more than sign language is telepathy; it requires no extraordinary understanding whatsoever, let alone all the mysticism you've tacked on to it.

If you had something that worked -- reproducibly, mind you, and statistically significantly more frequently than would be expected by chance -- without the receiver observing the transmitter in any mundane way, then you might have something that could credibly be called telepathy if proven to work.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2018, 07:48:58 am by Trekkin »
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Doomblade187

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Think of a number 1-10, It's Seven! Thread
« Reply #185 on: May 30, 2018, 10:14:35 am »

I strongly appreciate this telepathy discussion, as I was raised by my mom around New Age philosophy and psychics and energy healers, and my dad has always been a hardcore skeptic. In my mind, conspiracy theories typically are harmless, and add a sense of mystery and adventure to this world. It's... Not surprising that I ascribe to many, including things like telepathy. I would love to do proper experiments on this stuff, and this thread has so far managed to avoid the worst of hostile tone, so yay.

Also, I don't care what you say about it, crystals are pretty.
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In any case it would be a battle of critical thinking and I refuse to fight an unarmed individual.
One mustn't stare into the pathos, lest one become Pathos.

Leodanny

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Think of a number 1-10, It's Seven! Thread
« Reply #186 on: May 30, 2018, 10:33:04 am »

Also, I don't care what you say about it, crystals are pretty.
Really depends.
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Hanslanda

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Think of a number 1-10, It's Seven! Thread
« Reply #187 on: May 30, 2018, 10:35:02 am »

Oh shit, better title ahoy.

Ah Land of the Lost joke. Much better.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2018, 10:37:00 am by Hanslanda »
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Well, we could put two and two together and write a book: "The Shit that Hans and Max Did: You Won't Believe This Shit."
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Doomblade187

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Think of a number 1-10, It's Seven! Thread
« Reply #188 on: May 30, 2018, 10:47:28 am »

Also, I don't care what you say about it, crystals are pretty.
Really depends.
Fine, most crystals. Gem and mineral shows are a grand time.
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In any case it would be a battle of critical thinking and I refuse to fight an unarmed individual.
One mustn't stare into the pathos, lest one become Pathos.

Leodanny

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Okay, I guess.
Crystals are the foot soldiers of a war between the government and heaven, aided by Sams and Deans.
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Trekkin

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Re: Conspiracy Theories: The Think of a number 1-10, It's Seven! Thread
« Reply #190 on: May 30, 2018, 11:00:45 am »

I would love to do proper experiments on this stuff

There's really nothing stopping you from doing so, you know, as long as there's no risk of harm to your volunteers and you don't need any special equipment or anything. Telepathy is nicely amenable to amateur experimentation that way; all you really need are sets of two test subjects who can't see or hear each other and a piece of data for them to transmit. You could probably do it over the Internet if you were so inclined, provided you randomly matched the participants.

Telepathy is tricky to run blind studies of, since of course the participants know what they're getting into, but it might be informative to run a fake test for psychic potential first, randomly sort people into "psychic"/not-psychic cohorts "based on the test results", and then not only test every combination of those cohorts but also every combination of which cohort the participants are told their counterpart falls into, all while their brains are scanned. In other words, do people think differently when they think they aren't psychic but their brain is being listened to by someone psychic? What if they think they're transmitting psychically to someone not psychic? It probably wouldn't prove anything about telepathy but it might say something about how we communicate.
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wierd

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Another fun one that would be good for amateur science would be psychohistory.

For those that dont know the term:

Basically, the idea is that objects held by people, or near intense psychic events can get an "Imprint" of either that person or that event become permanently attached to them, that psychically sensitive people can then read.

A simple double blind could be constructed with mundane objects without any attempt at an imprint, objects that a "psychic" has attempted to leave an imprint on (a specific thing that can be tested for, unique to that individual), objects that a non-psychic has attempted to leave an imprint on (another unique thing to that individual), and reader participants of both "psychic" and non-psychic bends.

The imprinters are kept separate from the readers.  You use random people (that are not in the know about what objects have had what done to them, or what the imprints are supposed to be) to present the objects to both the imprinters and the readers. You ask the readers to attempt to read the object, and then record what they perceive.

You then cross-check that against what the imprinters were told to imprint, and against the non-imprinted items.

Evaluate results.
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ChairmanPoo

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Another fun one that would be good for amateur science would be psychohistory.

For those that dont know the term:

Basically, the idea is that objects held by people, or near intense psychic events can get an "Imprint" of either that person or that event become permanently attached to them, that psychically sensitive people can then read.

I thought psychohistory was a discipline which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people(eg the population of the whole galaxy)

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wierd

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Shows how much I pay attention to hocus pocus. :P

It's actually psychometry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)

Still, the double-blind could test for it.
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Trekkin

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You could go a step back and simply generate sets of physically identical items with some sort of individual serial number, imprint some of them (or put them in places likely to be subject to "intense psychic events"), mix them with their unimprinted counterparts and see if the psychically sensitive are more likely to pick them out than the psychically insensitive.

If one were so inclined, one could even do it with machined quartz wafers for extra crystal woo.
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