Talk:Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab/Archive 3

Vandalism of the PEAR Article
Every attempt I've made to improve the sourcing of the original paragraph has been consistently reverted by the user TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom, who has made a consistent habit of destroying the article's prose, removing relevant sources, removing all scientific analysis of PEAR and dissenting opinion (i.e., from scientists in Nature, in the New York Times, etc).


 * Wikipedia has a specific definition of WP:VANDALism, and preventing WP:FRINGE views from being inappropriately presented is not among the actions defined as vandalism. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  19:46, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * That's not vandalism. That's just the user disagreeing with your edits for reasons elucidated clearly in talk. Remember WP:AGF and please stop with the text-walls too. Simonm223 (talk) 19:47, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Bullshit. Let's compare the current article (by TRPOD) with my original version of the page (removed by TRPOD without discussion). I think this is better than the current version, and I further think this is a good starting point for further revision.

 Simonm223 (talk) 19:59, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

The last time I tried posting this proposed revision on the talk page, TRPOD removed it with the comment "I would not normally delete another user's talk commentary, but when a user is pointedly reposting their preferred version of the page over and over on talk that's just too far.)" I'm not reposting my "preferred version" "over and over"; I'm trying to create discussion where we can collectively craft a better, more accurate introduction for the article. Every attempt I've made at this, you've removed, without proper sourcing, and without proper talk page discussion. THIS IS WHAT A TALK PAGE IS FOR.


 * "Wikipedia has a specific definition of WP:VANDALism, and preventing WP:FRINGE views from being inappropriately presented is not among the actions defined as vandalism."

What in the above paragraph is fringe or inappropriately presented? A malady can be remedied--but only if you engage in a thoughtful, rational discussion. Censorship will get us NOWHERE.

Old comment of mine (removed by TRPOD):
 * Stop presuming to speak for "mainstream academia"--you are not the totality of the scientific community, you are a single individual editing a Wikipedia article on parapsychology--and you need to learn how to start sourcing your clams.
 * What sources call PEAR pseudoscience? Nature doesn't. Google doesn't. The Harvard article doesn't. Neither of the two NY times articles do. There are a dozen interviews with lab manager Dunne online, and none of those science journalists do either. You're creating straw men and blowing them down...well done. Except nobody knows what the hell your point was supposed to be.
 * Either read the sources, read PEAR's books, and start contributing meaningful text to this article to document the historical context within which PEAR operated, or stop editing this article altogether. Stepping in to vandalize the article every now and then with unsourced accusations of "pseudoscience" (essentially against Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Jung, and Robert Jahn!) advances nobody’s understanding.

68.181.206.200 (talk) 20:00, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Just a clarification, it's me who keeps removing your text wall. Talk is not an appropriate place to store personally preferred drafts. Especially not when you've already done so in previous comments. Simonm223 (talk) 20:01, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * You'll note I did NOT remove it from the section titled "Note on reverting revision by 68.181.207.149" - when you first posted it. You really don't need to keep re-posting your draft. It isn't helping you gain any support. Simonm223 (talk) 20:03, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

as for the issues we can start with "which contradict the status quo position of most modern brain theory, have been questioned by the mainstream scientific community, with most conventional researchers choosing to remain doubtful about the existence of psy" which is complete hogwashery positioning the woosters as if their opinions and practices were of equal validity to actual science. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  20:05, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Also please don't assume what books editors on these subjects have or have not read. For instance, I am fascinated with Hermetic magical grimoires from the late renaissance, and I've read most of them. That doesn't make demons real. Simonm223 (talk) 20:08, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

To the IP that keeps pasting entire sections of the article (reflists and all) onto the Talk page: go to the article and select the "history" tab, click on the date of the version you wish to discuss, then copy the link here. Like this:. Much less disruptive, thanks. - LuckyLouie (talk) 20:14, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Article now semi-protected
I'd hate to see a low-speed edit-war become a high-speed one. Article is under semi-protect for a week. Suggest that users who have issue with content take that time to discuss specific edits here, along with how those specific edits align with WP:DUE and WP:FRINGE and preferably without reposting preferred drafts over and over. Simonm223 (talk) 21:28, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm not trying to get my panties in a bunch here arguing over trivial aspects of parapsychology, but there is ample reason to believe that nonlocal cognition is a bit more than a complete fantasy. I'd recommend anyone seriously interested in this topic watch the following three videos before proceeding, since they set the stage for the modern discussion in cognitive science about the origin of consciousness: Is it an algorithmic process in the neurons, or could quantum nonlocality play a role? All of PEAR's research basically investigated this one single question, and that's how we should try to frame the article: in a rational historical context, to be understood in light of the most recent developments in the field. Anything less would be tantamount to misrepresenting modern scientific views on the subject--even quoting a scientist from 15 years ago on quantum consciousness might not cut it, since quantum biology and quantum psychology are still such new ideas to this human race of ours.


 * Rupert Sheldrake at GoogleTechTalks on nonlocal cognition as an evolutionary mechanism
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnA8GUtXpXY


 * Stuart Hameroff, neuroscientist who has published many works on his idea of "ultimate computing" in microtubules: "Is Consciousness Computable?"
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpUVot-4GPM


 * Roger Penrose at the Alan Turing Centenary Conference in 2012: "The Problem of Modelling the Mathematical Mind"
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gscEK5df8vE


 * The details of the Penrose-Hameroff Model
 * http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/a/a_12/a_12_m/a_12_m_con/a_12_m_con.html
 * http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/#4.5
 * http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~sabry/teaching/b629/f06/QuantumComputationInBrainMicrotubules.pdf


 * (Sheldrake, a biochemist, wrote a book about his own nonlocal model of perception, Morphic Resonance, if you want to look into that.)


 * Nonlocal, quantum consciousness is on the cutting-edge of research (it's only really been acceptable in academic circles for the past 5 to 10 years (people still regularly mock Penrose and Hameroff), even though people have been hypothesizing since Wigner's friend). I'm not saying it validates PEAR's results, or even that it's true, but to dismiss these groups so callously as has been done is downright foolish.


 * http://www.kurzweilai.net/discovery-of-quantum-vibrations-in-microtubules-inside-brain-neurons-corroborates-controversial-20-year-old-theory-of-consciousness
 * These findings were just published last year, and they certainly seem to resonate a lot with everything Jahn wrote about in Quirks of the Quantum Mind: consciousness temperature, consciousness kinetic energy, the wave mechanics of consciousness, etc. Doesn't mean any of it's true, but it's an interesting mathematical hypothesis that deserves testing.


 * Calling PEAR pseudoscience doesn't even make any sense; all PEAR did was run experiments and gather data. It's like calling your eccentric, alcoholic uncle who manages a Fortune 500 Company a failure. Personally, he might screw up plenty and be a weird guy with some weird ideas...but he still knows how to manage a company. Jahn still knew how to manage Princeton's Engineering Department despite being deeply imbued in his weirdo research on man-machine margins and parapsychology. Unless you have some comparable scientific credentials, I don't think insulting smart people like Jahn along with his 20+ years of research is any way forward. Being outside the mainstream isn't the same as making claims on faulty reasoning.


 * Neuroscience325 (talk) 23:30, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * This page is for discussing article content changes, not for you to present a thesis on why you think  "there is ample reason to believe that nonlocal cognition is a bit more than a complete fantasy"

I apologize for presenting my "thesis on nonlocal cognition", but it's the single key point that everybody editing this article has hitherto failed to take into account. For now, I think a good place to start looking are the following PEAR papers:

"The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective" (Proceedings IEEE, 1982)
 * http://www.irva.org/library/pdfs/jahn1982persistant.pdf

It was this original paper (and ONLY this paper) that the CSICOP article called into question. As the Wikipedia article stands, this point isn't clear: PEAR ran from 1979 to 2007, but the way the Wikipedia article is currently written, it sounds like the CSICOP article addresses the totality of PEAR's research, when in fact it only mentions the single 1982 paper and Margins of Reality (1987), PEAR's first book. PEAR ran for another 20 years after publishing Margins of Reality. (CSCIOP paper: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/pear_proposition_fact_or_fallacy/.)

"On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, with Application to Anomalous Phenomena" (Foundations of Physics, 1986)
 * https://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1986-quantum-mechanics-consciousness.pdf

"Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program" (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997)
 * https://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1997-correlations-random-binary-sequences-12-year-review.pdf

Additionally, Jahn's book Consciousness and the Source of Reality does a very thorough job detailing every varied type of experiment that PEAR conducted over its quarter century runtime. Now I'm well aware that these are primary sources and so cannot be directly cited with regard to the verisimilitude of their research, but they provide a broad overview of what PEAR was. We should start from here and look for secondary news sources reporting more on what PEAR actually did than the "controversy" surrounding the lab--hunting around the pseudo-journalism that is the popular scientific press for decent secondary sources only works if you know what to look for.

Wikipedia's policy on primary sources:
 * Primary sources are original materials that are close to an event, and are often accounts written by people who are directly involved. They offer an insider's view of an event, a period of history, a work of art, a political decision, and so on. Primary sources may or may not be independent or third-party sources. An account of a traffic accident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the accident; similarly, a scientific paper documenting a new experiment conducted by the author is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment. Historical documents such as diaries are primary sources.

There isn't anything wrong with citing the above PEAR research paper as evidence that such research was in fact conducted; they simply cannot be cited as evidence that such research was methodologically sound or valid. But I don't see anything wrong with citing these papers or Consciousness and the Source of Reality to give the reader background into what PEAR actually did--if the article doesn't describe in good detail what PEAR's experiments actually were, any sort of commentary on their validity cheats the reader since they don't know what's even in dispute.

Similarly, if we're trying to add a History section, we ought to mention the remote viewing research done by SRI (the Stanford Research Institute), the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and the CIA.
 * http://www.lfr.org/lfr/csl/index.html
 * http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/CIA-InitiatedRV.html
 * http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/

The NY Times article mentions that the government expressed interest in working with PEAR, but that the lab declined; so clearly there are reputable agencies (however reputable you consider the American government) that have done this sort of research in the past (see Stargate Project) and think it worthwhile to continue into the indefinite future.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 02:06, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * what this article takes into account, per policies WP:UNDUE / WP:FRINGE / WP:REDFLAG is what the current mainstream academic assessment of the subject is. If you have evidence that in the 70's or 80's there was actually mainstream academic acceptance of PEAR, please provide it, and it may be worthy of historical placement (along the lines of "In the early years, before 30 years of work produced no evidence, X, Y, Z commented that 'PEAR's work was interesting'(footnote)"). (note that claims that a government agency talked to the group is merely claims that a government agency talked to the group and nothing more). speculations of what 19th century philosophers might have thought about the subject is irrelevant. speculations about what future mainstream academic views may be IF some wild new discoveries are proven are also irrelevant. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  17:24, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * , you are clearly the person behind these University of Southern California IPs, as indicated by your last edit and others. This means you are also Biotheoretician, an account that stopped editing shortly after receiving a notice about discretionary sanctions. All this points to avoiding scrutiny and sockpuppetry, which are blockable offenses.


 * In addition, comments such as "I won't let you get away with this pseudo-skeptic, pseudo-scientific hogwash--STOP VANDALIZING THE PEAR PAGE" indicate that you are unlikely to be an asset to Wikipedia, at least at present. Please see fringe scapegoating.


 * Please take the time to read the various Wikipedia policies that I and others have mentioned. You need to completely change your behavior and outlook if you wish to accomplish something here. I am forced to mention this here, as opposed to a user talk page, because you keep bouncing around with these IPs. Manul ~ talk 17:44, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * That's fine; I have no problem with public discussions of this sort. Journalism and science ought to be an open endeavor.


 * I locked myself out of my other account (having forgotten my password) and so was editing without being logged in. After the article went into semi-protected status, I decided to make this account so as to make more meaningful contributions to the article. Obviously "pointedly reposting their preferred version of the page over and over" is not helpful, and I still have to learn quite a bit about the actual mechanics of Wikipedia.


 * I read and research about this stuff (nonlocal consciousness) for hours every day, and it ties in very well with my academic study. I own all three of PEAR's books, have exchanged brief e-mail correspondences with lab manager Brenda Dunne, have read an enormous range of news sources of varying quality both pro and anti-PEAR, etc. I care about this as science, I believe it's important, and I know that I am able to add something meaningful to this article given by vast knowledge of the subject (there is a hell of a lot more to the quantum mind hypothesis than just PEAR--I certainly didn't start investigating this body of knowledge from the PEAR perspective).


 * I'd hate to see myself blocked from Wikipedia, given that I am a science major who's very well educated on these issues and wants to improve the way the FACTUAL information on this article is presented. I'm not claiming to know "the truth" better than anyone else, and I'm really not trying to get into edit wars. I'd love nothing more than to see a peaceful resolution to this dispute, with the PEAR article expanded to include a wide array of factual information, objectively presented to the reader. (I'm also not sure how that would work given that the university IPs are constantly changing and there are 40,000 other possible contributors if not more on this wireless network, all of whose contributions would also be blocked.)


 * If you'd take note, I stopped editing the article for a while after it was clear we weren't getting anywhere, went to my studies, researched more about the topic for a few months...and then came back with new knowledge to try to contribute. I'm not trying to force my views on the Wikipedia article; I genuinely want nothing more than a long and well-written PEAR article filled with FACTUAL INFORMATION to OBJECTIVELY tell the reader. If after this most recent discussion we don't accomplish this, I'll probably do the same thing. I'll go study more, talk to my professors, read more from the founders of QM and psychology (Pauli, Schrödinger, Bohr, Jung...), and then come back to the article, armed with new learning, ready to share this condensed information with the array of other Wikipedia editors. I'm not trying to avoid scrutiny; quite the opposite, I thought it was pretty obvious that I'm the same person (I referred to myself as a "neuroscience major" earlier on the talk page and earlier edited my user page to say the same).


 * I made this new account when the article went into semi-protected status so I could create my own talk page, create a history of my edits to other articles, and generally try to be a force for the expansion of knowledge. I'm not trying to sockpuppet anything; it was a gesture of good-faith.


 * Fair enough?


 * Neuroscience325 (talk) 18:42, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Would you please login to your Neuroscience325 account and add to User:Biotheoretician? That is how to avoid being blocked. Manul ~ talk 18:45, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * , also place on the User:Neuroscience325 page. Manul ~ talk 19:00, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Done. And thank you. :)

Fixing again
76.107.171.90 has blindly reverted without explanation again. I am restoring these changes again, most of which are obvious and/or have been discussed before, but for good measure here are the main points.


 * Move "PEAR's activities have been criticized for their lack of scientific rigor, poor methodology, and misuse of statistics" back to the lead, and restore the missing sources again.
 * The lead is already heavy with criticism, and excessive piling on can detract from the criticism itself. The Park quote is already somewhat redundant, and in any case we have WP:ITA, "Be careful not to use in-text attribution carelessly to imply that only the named sources would agree".
 * As explained previously, DFP is a poor source for the "pseudoscience" label -- it always places "pseudoscience" in quotes. I couldn't find the text of the Washington Square News source, but in any case that is a student newspaper. Pigliucci is probably the best source for the claim, though it's not quite explicit.
 * We can't write "broadly rejected" without a source actually saying that. Scientists generally don't care about PEAR, whereas "broadly rejected" implies a level of attention that doesn't exist. Also see WP:FRINGELEVEL, "a lack of consideration or acceptance does not necessarily imply rejection, either; ideas should not be portrayed as rejected or labeled with pejoratives such as pseudoscience unless such claims can be documented in reliable sources."
 * The material dealing with "the request of the US Army Research Institute" is out of place, e.g. "The panel criticized macro-PK experiments for being open to deception by conjurors" -- this stuff has little or nothing to do with PEAR; it's like it was cut & pasted from another article. I've removed it again because it doesn't directly pertain to the PEAR article.
 * The paragraph starting "In all cases, the observed effects were very small..." had been orphaned from its original context. Restored the context again.

When these kinds of blind reverts happen without discussion or even apparent thought (e.g. restoring grammar mistakes and spelling mistakes), it is somewhat disconcerting. It's also time-consuming merging later changes. Please don't do that again without some kind of explanation. Manul ~ talk 17:14, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * There is no point in discussing this. Simonm223 has gotten the article protected, so I won’t be able to edit it anyway.  76.107.171.90 (talk) 18:32, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * It is only semi-protected for a week. Are you going to continue these no-discussion reverts after the semi-protection expires? Manul ~ talk 18:49, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Manul, I reverted the article to the last version that appeared to have any real consensus supporting it. Boldly reverting an article the last version supported by consensus is not against the rules.

Your own personal opinion that exceptional sourcing is required to call something a pseudoscience is not supported by Wikipedia policy. WP:PARITY allows us to use sources such as “The Daily Free Press” to support the pseudoscience label. Furthermore, PEAR is undisputedly a parapsychology laboratory and reliable sources strongly support the fact that parapsychology is pseudoscience. Therefore it is not WP:SYNTH to refer to PEAR as pseudoscience per SYNTH is not obvious II.

Also, you reinserted the “more pronounced results” sentence complete with primary sources. I removed that sentence back in December because MrBill3 had tagged it as requiring a non-primary source. 76.107.171.90 (talk) 13:35, 22 February 2015 (UTC)


 * You're criticizing a learned scientist--Jahn--based on what some half-educated undergrad decided to write in a student newspaper that never even directly calls PEAR pseudoscience.


 * This is simply the equivocation fallacy--some people who do X (parapsychology) are also regarded as Y (psuedoscientists); therefore all X (parapsychologists) are Y (pseudoscinetists)--and many previous editors on this article have agreed that PEAR ought not be referred to as pseudoscience since there are dozens of other, much more reliable sources, that never make once this claim once, nor even hint at it...because it isn't true.


 * The Nature article is the best one to cite with regard to the "controversy" about PEAR because unlike the NY Times or the Daily Free Press, Nature is written by actual scientists who are educated in their field. The DFP is not a science paper, is not edited by scientists, does not purport to accurately reflect the latest science, etc...so why are you trying to push it through as a "science" source when there are so many far superior sources--like Nature and the NY Times?
 * http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/bi/articles/Nature_PEAR_closing.pdf


 * If the Recursed blog (some Princeton alum's personal opinion piece) can be quoted as a reliable source (as it currently is), I think the TuringChurch blog is equally as reliable for scientific things (probably more so since it isn't just one emotional guy spouting off the first through that comes into his head)...this is how they summarized PEAR:
 * "The PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) program is a good example of why I vigorously oppose and condemn PC (un)scientific bigotry. They do very thorough experimental work and professional analysis of experimental data. So far they haven’t produced results that are accepted by mainstream consensus, but they follow the scientific method professionally and to the letter, and most PEAR researchers have impeccable qualifications. So dismissing PEAR research as “pseudoscience” is total bullshit."
 * http://turingchurch.com/2014/11/16/keep-imagination-in-our-science-and-fiction-and-leave-pc-bs-out/


 * Another TuringChurch article which mentions PEAR positively in passing...there are plenty of scientifically literate people who take PEAR seriously
 * http://turingchurch.com/2012/01/02/shadows-and-the-concept-of-self/


 * The book 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession claims that both Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize winning physicist) and Carl Jung believed in parapsychology and tentatively believed that an experiment like PEAR would succeed. (It even cites PEAR's research in reference to Pauli and Jung'g beliefs.)


 * Dean Radin's book Entangled Minds (which discusses his work on the GCP, relevant to PEAR, since Roger Nelson who ran it was originally a PEAR researcher) was endorsed by Nobel Prize winner Brian Josephson as "Cutting perceptively through the spurious arguments frequently made by skeptics, Radin shows that the evidence in favor of [psi] is overwhelming."


 * Are Jung, Pauli, Radin, Nelson, and Josephson pseudoscientists too?

"reliable sources strongly support the fact that parapsychology is pseudoscience."


 * Give us those sources. And you've deceived yourself with your own cunning word choice; what you meant to write was: "reliable sources strongly support the fact that every single parapsychology lab ever to run in history, conducted pseudoscience." This is actually what you're claiming--parapsychology is by definition pseudoscience, and anybody who believes there is evidence for it is by definition a pseudoscientist.


 * You can't make this BOLD claim like this without producing sources--which you never had because it's obviously impossible to disprove psi without invalidating PEAR's work because PEAR was one of if not the largest and most methodical study of psi performed, EVER. None of the short criticisms in the article deal with PEAR's results holistically, as a whole--only small subsets of them. Taken together, PEAR's impressive database of anomalous results currently has no well-established explication by anyone, PEAR researcher or not.


 * All PEAR did was run these experiments, collect their results, and build theoretical models based on them. What part of this scientific method makes the PEAR researchers pseudoscientists?


 * Neuroscience325 (talk) 17:26, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

(For the record I tried to get Neuroscience325 to stop the WP:WALLSOFTEXT.) 76.107.171.90, taking these points in order, Manul ~ talk 18:40, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * You seem to misunderstand WP:BOLD. Repeatedly reverting without any discussion is against policy, called edit warring.
 * When a source consistently places quotes around a word, Wikipedia cannot strip the quotes from the word. It's really that simple. WP:PARITY has nothing to do with it. In any case the issue is irrelevant because prior to your above comment the pseudoscience sentence had already been kept, now sourced to Pigliucci.
 * Removing the text to which "In all cases,..." refers doesn't make sense. The reader is rightly confused: "What cases? What?" Keeping a primary-sourced sentence is always better than that. However this is now irrelevant because I have replaced the sentence with a secondary-sourced one.


 * Manul, when an article has suffered a fringe push it is not an uncommon practice to revert the article to an earlier version which had more support. Between your efforts to soften criticism of PEAR and Neuroscience325’s (and his many incarnations’) efforts to push fringe the article had suffered.
 * My revert changed “considered an embarrassment by many scientists” back to “was an embarrassment to Princeton”.
 * It restored the "an embarrassment to science" quote.
 * It restored “PEAR's work has been rejected by the scientific community and is considered pseudoscience”.
 * And it removed the “the decision whether to pursue a tiny apparent effect or put it down to statistical flaws is a subjective one” paragraph which served little purpose other than misleading the reader into thinking that PEAR’s results were open to interpretation when, in fact, PEAR was objectively wrong.
 * If you really want to continue to accuse me of edit warring then you can do so on WP:AN3 where they can decide if 2 reverts in 2 months constitutes edit warring. If not, then I suggest that you drop the stick and focus on content.


 * Including the title the article refers to “pseudoscience” or “pseudosciences” 5 times. Pseudoscience is placed in quotes 4 of those times.  Are you seriously contending that the article in “The Daily Free Press” is not representative of the mainstream scientific view?


 * The “more pronounced results” sentence was originally written by me in early January of 2014, so its removal was technically a self-revert.  I’m pretty sure that I’m free to second guess the quality of my own sources.
 * The “In all cases” line was originally written by Brenda Dunne in July of 2013.  Obviously my sentence is not required in order to give Dunne’s sentence context because Dunne’s sentence predates mine.


 * Now, are you going to continue to nit-pick the finer points of my revert or can we try to move on to other issues? 76.107.171.90 (talk) 19:47, 23 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Note that I had agreed with reverting everything Neuroscience325 he did, for instance the "..is a subjective one" bit. I spent time separating those changes from mine after your no-discussion reverts.


 * Do you agree with the current state of the article, or are you going to continue reverting after semi-protection expires? I can't tell from your above comment. Not only is "pseudoscience" in the lead, but my addition is there as well: "PEAR's activities have been criticized for their lack of scientific rigor, poor methodology, and misuse of statistics". That is considerably more substantial than the attributed quote from Park. An attributed quote is among the weakest ways to express criticism, as it can suggest that only that person would agree with it, hence my earlier reference to WP:ITA. The lead now describes why this stuff is considered pseudoscience rather than just saying so. The reason I insist on rigorous sourcing is precisely to forestall efforts to soften the reception of PEAR's activities. Manul ~ talk 20:59, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

When I first wrote the “lack of scientific rigor, poor methodology, and misuse of statistics” sentence I placed it in the body of the article next to the three sentences dealing with reproducibility. Because the introduction is supposed to summarize the body of the article I don’t think that the “lack of scientific rigor, poor methodology, and misuse of statistics” sentence should be in the introduction unless we are going to elaborate on all three of those criticisms in the body. At present, the body of the article doesn’t really discuss “misuse of statistics”. If you insist on trying to keep that sentence in the lead then I think “misuse of statistics” should be elaborated upon. Pigliucci’s contention that “statistical “significance” is not at all a good measure of the importance or genuineness of a phenomenon” is one of the weakest sounding criticisms of PEAR, and so I think it would be better to just state, as a fact, that PEAR has been criticized for misusing statistics.

I added the pseudoscience category last year, and I’ve noticed that it has been removed. Do you object to reapplying the category?

As for the rest of the article, I haven’t yet decided how I feel about it. If any issues crop up I’m sure they can be dealt with in the normal WP:BRD fashion. 76.107.171.90 (talk) 14:00, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Psyleron--is it notable?
"Psyleron is an outgrowth of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (PEAR), which studied the role of consciousness in the physical world."
 * http://www.psyleron.com/researchSummary.aspx

I found the following two articles online about Psyleron's Mind Lamp, which purports to demonstrate the influence of the human mind on the material world through electron tunneling.
 * http://www.gizmag.com/psyleron-mind-lamp/11570/
 * http://www.businessinsider.com/million-dollar-idea-mind-lamp-that-turns-into-the-color-youre-thinking-about-2010-10

Is this notable enough to deserve mention?

(Also, I think the Global Consciousness Project, an outgrowth of PEAR, ought also be mentioned in the article's intro.)

Neuroscience325 (talk) 08:11, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

James S. McDonnell & SRI International Ought to be Mentioned
Jim McDonnell was the aerospace pioneer who funded a large chunk of PEAR's research through his James S. McDonnell Foundation--the Cabinet article and two NY Times articles mention this and establish it as notable. Similarly, Jahn and Dunne's pre-PEAR background in parapsychology needs to be explained.

Dunne, originally a psychologist from U Chicago, was attempting to replicate the Parapsychology research at SRI done in the mid 70s when she met Robert Jahn, who had done a parapsychological project with a Princeton undergraduate several years prior. After consulting with one another, gathering the appropriate funding, and going through the proper university channels, and the duo founded PEAR.

Dunne's initial paper attempting to replicate SRI (published in 1979):
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1979-precognitive-remote-viewing-stanford.pdf

"Mysteries of Consciousness with Brenda Dunne" (5 minute video, details her background in trying to replicate SRI)
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c4hOIZO_SM

And as a slightly unrelated note, to all of those who incessantly continue to make the claim that parapsychology is of no scientific value--always without evidence or intelligent sourcing or discussion, I might add)--the following ought to serve as evidence that academic institutions other than Princeton U recognize the discipline as legitimate as well:

Jeffrey Mishlove's 1980 Ph.D. in Parapsychology (UC Berkeley)
 * To those who might claim that major universities do not acknowledge parapsychology as a legitimate, academic discipline -- this degree stands as a clear example of the contrary. An additional note regarding the legitimacy of parapsychology as a science is the fact that, since 1969, the Parapsychological Association has been an affiliate organization of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.
 * http://www.williamjames.com/diploma.htm

Other academics closely related to PEAR:

Hal Puthoff, "Who is Hal Puthoff?", Dr. Puthoff is one of the original parapsychological researchers at SRI International and at Project Stargate who inspired the PEAR project
 * http://archived.parapsych.org/members/h_puthoff.html

Dean Radin, "They Laughed at Galileo Too", Dr. Radin is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and did work at SRI International, PEAR, and the GCP

Brian Josephson, Nobel Laureate in Physics--he favorably mentions Jahn's Journal of Scientific Exploration
 * "Strong statistical results are of course meaningless if experiments are not properly conducted. Debunkers of parapsychology are fond of showcasing the very few experiments that have been found to have serious problems. But that ignores the fact that the vast majority of experiments were done using excellent protocols, paying close attention to potential subtle cues, using well-tested randomisation devices and so on. For the past decade the U.S. government experiments were overseen by a very high-level scientific committee, consisting of respected academics from a variety of disciplines, all of whom were required to critique and approve the protocols in advance. There have been no explanations forthcoming that allow an honest observer to dismiss the growing collection of consistent results."
 * http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/azpsi.html

Neuroscience325 (talk) 08:09, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

The “History and Influence” Section
Neuroscience325, whenever you use a quote you need to attribute that quote. Please don’t reinsert the “History and Influence” section without properly attributing the quoted material. Wikipedia takes plagiarism very seriously. 76.107.171.90 (talk) 09:03, 24 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I added the missing ref tag for the excerpt from Jahn's book. Thanks for catching that.


 * --James
 * Neuroscience325 (talk) 09:48, 24 April 2015 (UTC)


 * You misunderstand. Whenever you use a quote you need to make an in text attribution.  If you will look at WP:QUOTE you will see that it says “Attribution should be provided in the text of the article, not exclusively in a footnote or citation. A reader should not have to follow a footnote to learn whose words a quote is.”  The offending quotes are:


 * "then a graduate student in psychology at the University of Chicago working on self-perception and the quantitative analysis of subjectivity.”


 * "Jahn’s own interest in testing for evidence of such “anomalous” interactions between mind and machine stemmed from his efforts to replicate experimental work done in the late 1960s by a fellow plasma physicist, the German Helmut Schmidt, then employed as a research scientist at Boeing.”


 * “intended as a working document, subject to revision as insight matures and the empirical databases continue to expand,”


 * 76.107.171.90 (talk) 10:18, 24 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Okay, I think I get what you were saying now. I rephrased the the first passage in question and added some additional text to clarify where the other the two quotes are sourced from--Game of Chance (Cabinet Magazine) and Quirks of the Quantum Mind. Think that should take care of any outstanding referencing issues.


 * Thanks.
 * Neuroscience325 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 19:24, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Adding a Controversy and Criticism Section
The introduction states that PEAR was controversial, but the section on parapsychological experiments offers no more than the following elaboration:
 * "PEAR's results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility. In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results.[25] An attempt by York University's Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR's results.[9]"

The CSICOP article cited reads:
 * If the claims are credible, it should be possible for other groups to replicate them. To their credit, the PEAR group did enlist two other groups, both based at German universities (Jahn et al. 2000) to engage in a triple effort at replication. These attempts failed to reproduce the claimed effects. Even the PEAR group was unable to reproduce a credible effect.

The conclusion paragraph:
 * In their book Margins of Reality Jahn and Dunne raise this question: “Is modern science, in the name of rigor and objectivity, arbitrarily excluding essential factors from its purview?” Although the question is couched in general terms, the intent is to raise the issue as to whether the claims of the parapsychological community are dismissed out of hand by mainstream science unjustifiably. This paper argues that in the light of the difficulties in replication (even by the PEAR group itself), the lack of anything approaching a theoretical basis for the claims made, and, perhaps most damaging, the published behavior of the baseline data of the PEAR group which by their own criteria indicate nonrandom behavior of the device that they claim is random, then the answer to the question raised has to be no. There are reasonable and rational grounds for questioning these claims. Despite the best efforts of the PEAR group over a twenty-five-year period, their impact on mainstream science has been negligible. The PEAR group might argue that this is due to the biased and blinkered mentality of mainstream scientists. I would argue that it is due to the lack of compelling evidence.

It needs to be noted that although this article was written in 2006, it barely even touches on the mass of PEAR's research. Margins of Reality was published way back in 1987, and PEAR had 19 years with which to work on other REG devices (during which it founded the Global Consciousness Project), yet neither of these key facts are made at all clear by the article. And some of the things Jeffers writes are simply just incorrect.

This is the paper on PortREG replication referenced by the CSICOP article and the current Wikipedia page as evidence against PEAR (from the year 2000): http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2000-mmi-consortium-portreg-replication.pdf

The article abstract:
 * The primary result of this replication effort was that whereas the overall HI–LO mean separations proceeded in the intended direction at all three laboratories, the overall sizes of these deviations failed by an order of magnitude to attain that of the prior experiments, or to achieve any persuasive level of statistical significance. However, various portions of the data displayed a substantial number of interior structural anomalies in such features as a reduction in trial-level standard deviations; irregular series-position patterns; and differential dependencies on various secondary parameters, such as feedback type or experimental run length, to a composite extent well beyond chance expectation. The change from the systematic, intention-correlated mean shifts found in the prior studies, to this polyglot pattern of structural distortions, testifies to inadequate understanding of the basic phenomena involved and suggests a need for more sophisticated experiments and theoretical models for their further elucidation.

Who in this study has "criticized PEAR for deficient reproducibility"? And if this isn't the study that does criticize PEAR for deficient reproducibility, where is such a study?

Consider the following 1997 PEAR paper that Jeffers conveniently never mentions (from the abstract):


 * Although the absolute effect sizes are quite small, of the order of 10^(–4) bits deviation per bit processed, over the huge databases accumulated the composite effect exceeds 7 sigma (p ~ 3.5*10^(-13)). These data display significant disparities between female and male operator performances, and consistent serial position effects in individual and collective results. Data generated by operators far removed from the machines and exerting their efforts at times other than those of machine operation show similar effect sizes and structural details to those of the local, on-time experiments.
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1997-correlations-random-binary-sequences-12-year-review.pdf

This 12 year program, which ran for a large portion of the intervening time between the publication of Margins of Reality and Jeffers writing in 2006, surely ought to be mentioned as another critical aspect of PEAR's research. But he never does.

Similarly, he mentions once of PEAR's papers published in the Proceedings of the IEEE, "The persistent paradox of psychic phenomena: An engineering perspective" (1982); but he never bothers to bring up "On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomena" (1986), published in the Foundations of Physics. Or what about "Evidence for Consciousness-Related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems" (1989), also in the Foundations of Physics?

Jeffers never even mentions PEAR's papers on FieldREG--and certainly not the Global Consciousness Project.
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1996-fieldreg-anomalies-group-situations.pdf

But if PEAR has two papers in a well-established physics journal laying out its broad theoretical framework, and if research into the noosphere and global consciousness has had positive experimental results since long after Margins of Reality was published and remains ongoing at Princeton U, what does it mean for Jeffers to write: "This paper argues that in the light of the difficulties in replication (even by the PEAR group itself), the lack of anything approaching a theoretical basis for the claims made, and, perhaps most damaging, the published behavior of the baseline data of the PEAR group which by their own criteria indicate nonrandom behavior of the device that they claim is random, then the answer to the question raised has to be no"?

The source isn't all bad--it certainly clarifies a few things and Jeffers ought to be mentioned as a relevant skeptic--but it isn't comprehensive enough to substantiate the claims that it's being used as source material for.

Since my "History and Influence" section beefed up the physical size of the PEAR article considerably, I think it might be worth adding a third section entitled "Controversy", which can objectively document whatever controversy surrounded the PEAR laboratory: their inability to publish in mainstream journals, supposed issues with replication and statistical analysis, the "outraged Nobel Prize winners" (a quote from the NY Times article), the sympathetic Nobel Prize winners (namely, Brian Josephson and Wolfgang Pauli), as well as tensions with both Princeton University and academia.

And it really isn't fair to promote a pseudo-skeptic like Robert Park (quoted in the intro) as the spokesperson for all physicists--or all respectable physicists. Certainly there is a generation of individuals, particularly on the West Coast and related to various circles at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, that doesn't give two damns about Robert Park or his materialist dogma. Schrodinger talked about the "inadvisability of locating a man's thoughts within his head," and Pauli wrote of the need for experimental work in the area of ESP to determine whether such effects are physically real because gut instinct alone cannot tell us. I can promise you Robert Park has never read the relevant passages in his Schrodinger or his Pauli because he simply does not care--but a Wikipedia article ought to.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 07:08, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
 * If after 25 years, all PEAR managed was to sneak 2 papers into publication - two papers that then went into radio silence with no effect- there is no need to address them. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  18:58, 25 April 2015 (UTC)


 * The extent of PEAR's experimentation with RNGs and REGs was enormous and the article ought to explain what their experiments were all about. Jahn published most of PEAR's papers in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, managed by the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group he helped found and of which he was formerly Vice President.
 * http://www.scientificexploration.org/about_sse.html


 * PEAR's online list of 62 publications (their full discography includes hundreds of technical notes and other gems--not to mention Jahn's three books on parapsychology)
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html


 * Selected Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications on Psi Research (Institute of Noetic Sciences, compiled by Dean Radin--former PEAR researcher)
 * http://noetic.org/research/psi-research/


 * Essays on Science and Other Topics, Related Research by Others (by Rupert Sheldrake--has collaborated with Dr. Radin)
 * http://sheldrake.org/research/essays-on-science-and-other-topics
 * http://sheldrake.org/research/related-research-by-others


 * What is that radio silence of which you speak? From by perspective, parapsychology as a science is flourishing more than it ever has. To argue otherwise is to simply be blinded by your own hubris preconceptions about science.


 * This is a sensitive topic and we need to tread carefully--the Wikipedia article needs to fairly acknowledge all educated viewpoints surrounding PEAR. To do otherwise is disingenuous and does a disservice to all readers (and isn't in line with editorial standards regarding a NPOV!)


 * From NPOV:


 * All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.


 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view


 * According to Dr. Sheldrake,


 * The Guerrilla Skeptics are well trained, highly motivated, have an ideological agenda, and operate in teams, contrary to Wikipedia rules. The mastermind behind this organization is Susan Gerbik. She explains how her teams work in a training video. She now has over 90 guerrillas operating in 17 different languages. The teams are coordinated through secret Facebook pages. They check the credentials of new recruits to avoid infiltration. Their aim is to "control information", and Ms Gerbik glories in the power that she and her warriors wield. They have already seized control of many Wikipedia pages, deleted entries on subjects they disapprove of, and boosted the biographies of atheists.


 * As the Guerrilla Skeptics have demonstrated, Wikipedia can easily be subverted by determined groups of activists, despite its well-intentioned policies and mediation procedures. Perhaps one solution would be for experienced editors to visit the talk pages of sites where editing wars are taking place, rather like UN Peacekeeping Forces, and try to re-establish a neutral point of view. But this would not help in cases where there are no editors to oppose the Guerrilla Skeptics, or where they have been silenced.


 * If nothing is done, Wikipedia will lose its credibility, and its financial backers will withdraw their support. I hope the noble aims of Wikipedia will prevail.


 * http://sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/blog/wikipedia-under-threat
 * http://sheldrake.org/reactions/wikipedia


 * Neglecting to mention PEAR's research is as bad as lying about it. It does not make any sense to call PEAR controversial if the controversy goes unexplored and unexplained.


 * Neuroscience325 (talk) 03:48, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

CSICOP, the primary "skeptical" source cited, is an ideologically motivated group of crackpots
I found the following passage discussing the foundation of CSICOP in Prof. David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics (pp. 98-100), discussing the parapsychology research at SRI done in the mid 1970s--namely by Dr. Hal Puthoff and Dr. Russell Targ:


 * More than just organize, critics such as Randi, Gardner, and Wheeler began to organize. They formed groups like CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal) and ASTOP (the Austin Society to Oppose Pseudoscience; Wheeler having moved from Princeton to the University of Texas at Austin.) Labeled a "scientific vigilante organization" by some sociologists at the time, CSICOP attack what its members considered New Age excesses. They conducted replication studies, founded a journal (the Skeptical Inquirer), and issued their own press releases, at times blurring the line between seemingly objective scientific body knowledge and self-interested lobbying group.


 * And yet, as we now know, the joke was ultimately on the debunkers. Despite the thoroughgoing criticism and the overheated rhetoric, reesearch on remote viewing continued unabated for more than twenty years, paid for with more than $20 million of taxpayer money (in 2010 dollars). The initial grant of $50,000 from the CIA, back in October 1972, snowballed over the years, with frquent inputs from the Defense Intelligence Agency and other branches of the Pentagon. While Wheeler pleaded with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to bar research like Puthoff and Targ's, the budget for their psi lab at Stanford Research Institute swelled to nearly $1 million per year [emphasis Kaiser's] (about $3 million per year in 2010 dollars). Top-secret spin-offs sprang up around the country, usually established with Puthoff's help. No number of failed replications seemed to quell their backer's interests. When researchers at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland conducted their own pilot study in 1978-1979--having dished out $100,000 in consulting fees to Puthoff's SRI lab to get them going--they found no statistically significant results. But just like Rauscher and the Fundamental Fysiks Group members, the investigators at Aberdeen (including Evan Harris Walker, of consciousness-hidden-variables frame) had found enough surprising gems in the transcripts to keep at it. "The evaluation process is truly an art," concluded the secret Aberdeen report. "Our replication of the [SRI] protocool did not result in statistical significance," the report concluded, but "we learned a great deal about ourselves." And the cash kept flowing.

Since PEAR was founded in part (on Dunne's behalf) as an attempt to replicate Puthoff's research, it's strange and unprofessional and unencyopedic to use as a source a group that was incepted for the very purpose of discrediting Puthoff and Targ--an ideologically motivated group rather than a scientifically motivated one, in other words.

You need to tread carefully when you're citing an opposing scientist to make sure they've thoroughly reviewed PEAR's work and have useful commentary and aren't just talking out of their ass about something they couldn't possibly understand.

Relevant quotation from Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli from Robert Jahn's post-PEAR publication, Quirks of the Quantum Mind (2012):


 * I still want to consider briefly the controversial theme of "extrasensory perception" (ESP), which constitutes a frontier of both physics and psychology and which can as reasonably be called "parapsychology" as "biophysics." By now there are available some quantitative experiments which are carried out with scientific methodology and which apply modern mathematical statistics. Usually these concern themselves with guessing numbers or pictures on cards. This border field has elicited much interest among physicists, but also much rejection. Some speak of experimental or mathematical mistakes, other say carefully that they "don't feel comfortable with it." To the former point it can be said that as far as my knowledge extends, in the carefully conducted experiments there has been no evidence of mistakes. To be sure, the phenomena are always relatively rare, and partly associated with a special gift of the subject.


 * Concerning the latter point I would like to indicate that epistemological a priori grounds are not sufficient to reject the existence of ESP from the outset. In fact, as outspokenly critical a philosopher as Schopenhauer considered parapsychological effects, even beyond the empirically established, not only possible, but considered them as supports for his own philosophy. The question of ESP must therefore be decided through critical empiricism. The recent investigations of such phenomena return to importance the old question of how the psychological condition of the subjects fits into external occurrences. Can the ESP phenomena be artificially induced positively or negatively? The results to date agree on a so-called "decline effect" which points to the importance of the emotional factors in the subject.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 21:31, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
 * that a group organized to present and represent the mainstream views is not problematic in the least. WP:FRINGE - and certainly FAR LESS problematic than the wholesale unquestioned regurgitation of highly questionable quackery by quacks that is so often found in the parapsychology field. --  TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  14:24, 26 April 2015 (UTC)


 * "that is so often found"
 * You're making hasty generalizations here. I think we need to clearly define what Wikipedia's attitude toward Robert Jahn and Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research is and ought to be, in part based on the way other parapsychology articles present the oddball scientists who engage in these sorts of far-out exercises.


 * Attitude 1: There is evidence in favor of psi that ought to be considered, though criticism of this type of research is acknowledged
 * Attitude 2: Psi may or may not exist, but it cannot be rejected from the outset--parapsychologists are presented in an open minded setting
 * Attitude 3: Psi cannot be true a priori and anybody claiming to successfully conduct parapsychological exercises is either not following proper scientific controls or lying
 * Attitude 4: Because most physicists and psychologists find psi to be distasteful, parapsychologists are pseudo-scientists and quacks by default.


 * "a group organized to present and represent the mainstream views"


 * What meaningful definition can "mainstream view" have when it comes to science or scientific research? Are Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm and Brian Josephson and Robert Jahn not mainstream physicists? Are Carl Jung and Dean Radin and Timothy Leary not mainstream psychologists? They were educated at the same institutions as the rest of us, they taught at the same institutions, and yet they personally advocate views far outside the norm. Are you claiming that this by default means they are improperly educated or that their science is therefore by default not a proper science?


 * You sound like you're advocating groupthink, not objective science.


 * Anyway, your argument is beyond me, and I simply do not understand what about Jahn or Nelson's research with random numbers and physical noise is so upsetting.


 * I'm not sure to which of the above attitudes you precisely subscribe--I suspect somewhere between Attitude 3 and Attitude 4--but unless you can produce a source that establishes this as the appropriate attitude for Wikipedia to take toward PEAR, I think your efforts are misguided. Robert Jahn is a well-respected academic physicist with sponsorship from the Air Force and NASA who devoted a significant portion of his professional work to investigating the kind of anomalies that Puthoff and Pauli and others before him found so interesting and worthwhile.


 * Some other articles on parapsychological topics:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Radin
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Targ
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI


 * If you'll notice, the pseudoscience accusation and associated nastiness is only thrown against the four men--the parapsychological projects Puthoff ran (at SRI and Stargate) are saved from this criticism because of their reputable associations and big-name funders--namely the Central Intelligence Agency and SRI International, formerly associated with Stanford University.


 * PEAR was similarly funded by the big-name James S. McDonnell Foundation by aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell and several other wealthy Princeton benefactors. PEAR was run out of the Engineering School of Princeton U, the top-ranked school in the nation, and the parapsychology accusation is NOT repeated against Robert G. Jahn on his own Wikipedia, Jahn having served as Dean of Engineering for many years (including during the time period in which he founded PEAR).


 * Because
 * (1) Jahn is a well-regarded scientist--i.e., not a pseudoscientist, and
 * (2) PEAR was essentially his personal research project, and
 * (3) Their team was tiny and Jahn was personally friends with all of those involved (see: http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/staff.html), and
 * (4) The entire thing was personally founded by Jahn to replicate an earlier project that he had personally done with an undergraduate, and
 * (5) Wikipedia finds PEAR notable enough for inclusion, and
 * (6) PEAR's notability is an almost direct consequence of the controversial nature of its research


 * I don't think it's unreasonable to include a more holistic discussion of what PEAR was as a research group, who its researchers were as academics and as people, and what its influence on others has been.


 * PEAR was an Ivy League parapsychology project that employed students from Princeton U as interns (some of whose discussions you can find in the blogosphere) whose research was funded by private philanthropist and innovator Jim McDonnell and whose project director Robert Jahn was the Dean of Engineering, just about the best position you could be in to run a parapsychology project.


 * Former Princeton student Herb Mertz, co-founder of Psyleron, inspired by his professor's--Robert Jahn's--research.
 * http://www.trentonian.com/article/TT/20101114/FINANCE01/311149998


 * Like I've said before, the PEARtree (the name for the Princeton students, professors, alums, and others who either secretly or publicly support PEAR, Jahn, and Dunne) ought to be mentioned (Jahn's 2012 book Quirks of the Quantum Mind is dedicated "For the PEARtree" and the PEARtree is similarly mentioned in one of the NY Times articles), and I still don't understand why you keep saying no academics are interested in this stuff. Certainly if not at Princeton then on the West Coast at Stanford and Berkeley there is an actual academic following for this sort of thing. Are you disputing this as a fact?


 * Anyway, I think you need to make clear your beliefs about the proper attitude for Wikipedia to take regarding the validity of PEAR as a scientific organization--unless you can clearly articulate your beliefs, the reasons for them, produce sources to back up such assertions in the article, and prove beyond all reasonable doubt that nothing PEAR did could be legitimate science, I think Wikipedia needs to acknowledge the possibility that Jahn actually did something special. Not necessarily define what that something was, but acknowledge that PEAR was a unique institution in the history of science, much like the Fundamental Fysiks Group.


 * It was the lab that asked the wrong questions, after all.


 * Neuroscience325 (talk) 16:44, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Nature ought to be one of the primary sources used by the article
Given the problems I pointed out with using CSICOP as an objective source for a PEAR article, I think we should try to reincorporate the Nature article, "The lab that asked the wrong questions" back into at least the article's introductory section, which earlier versions of the page did. Currently, it is commented out of the page's source in the list of references text, and my attempt to incorporate it back the intro was removed by the IP 76.107.171.90.

The issue with parapsychology as a science generally is that the process of statistical analysis is more of an art than a science (which is not to say that useful and scientific conclusions don't come from statistical data: this is exactly the point on which the totality of PEAR's work rests)--and unless you've ever done actual statistical work with real data sets as in SPSS or R, this is a difficult point to appreciate.

From Nature:


 * In the end, the decision whether to pursue a tiny apparent effect or put it down to statistical flaws is a subjective one. “It raises the issue of where you draw the line,” says sceptic Chris French, an ‘anomalistic psychologist’ at Goldsmiths, University of London, who tries to explain what seem to be paranormal experiences in straightforward psychological terms. French thinks that even though the chances of a real effect being discovered are low, the implications of a positive result would be so interesting that work such as Jahn’s is worth pursuing.


 * Many scientists disagree. Besides being a waste of time, such work is unscientific, they argue, because no attempt is ever made to offer a physical explanation for the effect. Park says the PEAR lab “threatened the reputation” of both Princeton and the wider community. He sees the persistence of such labs as an unfortunate side effect of science’s openness to new questions. “The surprising thing is that it doesn’t happen more often,” he says.

And again:


 * But parapsychologists are still limited to publishing in a small number of niche journals. French thinks the field is treated unfairly. “I’m convinced that parapsychologists have a hard time trying to publish in mainstream journals,” he says, adding that he even has difficulty publishing his ‘straight’ papers on why people believe in paranormal events: “Simply because the paper mentions the word telepathy or psychokinesis, it isn’t sent out to referees. People think the whole thing is a waste of time.”

I feel like all this is worthy of inclusion somewhere...perhaps in a controversy section, if not the introduction?

Another relevant description of the process of data analysis, this one from David Kaiser in How the Hippies Saved Physics. The larger context of his discussion is given in one of the sections above--Kaiser is discussing Hal Puthoff at SRI, whose work inspired PEAR lab manager Brenda Dunne, originally a grad student in psychology and Human Development at U Chicago, who met Bob Jahn at a parapsychology conference in the mid to late 70s.

As an important historical aside that ought to be mentioned somewhere in the PEAR article, we ought to recall that Dr. Puthoff and Dr. Targ published their book Mind-Reach in 1977, which was favorably reviewed by Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), itself praised by physicist David Bohm, of hidden variable fame, successor to Einstein, and author of Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), which discussed the importance of consciousness to the so-called "New Physics" (and which some members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, a major collaborator with Puthoff and SRI, would go on to take as a mechanism for distant information transfer between minds--i.e., parapsychology), as:


 * Recommended highly for those who want to understand the essential significance of the modern physics, and for whose who are concerned with its implications for the possible transformation of human consciousness. (from the first page of the book)

Here is what The Dancing Wu Li Masters writes about Puthoff and his book Mind Reach (1977)--Puthoff is undoubtedly known to Jahn just as well as Jahn is undoubtedly known to Puthoff, and I'm fairly certain Puthoff has at least published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which Jahn formerly managed as Vice President, and in which most of PEAR's papers are published. The both of them are perhaps the two most notorious parapsychologist-quantum physicists (after Wolfgang Pauli) of the last 100 years, educated at Stanford U and Princeton U respectively, and each sponsored in some of their academic research (though not necessarily exactly in parapsychology) by NASA as well as the Air Force--and Puthoff is additionally sponsored by the Navy and the CIA:


 * Superluminal quantum connectedness seems to be, on the surface at last, a possible explanation for some types os psychic phenomena. Telepathy, for example, often appears to happen instantaneously, if not faster [i.e., precognitive remote viewing, what initially got Brenda Dunne interested in parapsychology]. Psychic phenomena have been held in distain by physicists since the days of Newton. In fact, most physicists do not even believe that they exist*


 * (footnote section)
 * There are some notable exceptions, chief among which are Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, whose experiments in remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute are presented in their book, Mind Reach, New York, Delacorte, 1977.

From Kaiser:


 * No number of failed replications seemed to quell their backer's interests. When researchers at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland conducted their own pilot study in 1978-1979--having dished out $100,000 in consulting fees to Puthoff's SRI lab to get them going--they found no statistically significant results. But just like Rauscher and the Fundamental Fysiks Group members, the investigators at Aberdeen (including Evan Harris Walker, of consciousness-hidden-variables frame) had found enough surprising gems in the transcripts to keep at it. "The evaluation process is truly an art," concluded the secret Aberdeen report. "Our replication of the [SRI] protocool did not result in statistical significance," the report concluded, but "we learned a great deal about ourselves." And the cash kept flowing.

And from Parapsychology research at SRI:


 * From 1972 till about 1991, research was carried out at the SRI research centre (or Stanford Research Institute as it was called at the beginning) on various aspects of parapsychology. Early claims of success were published in several mainstream scientific journals, including Proceedings of the IEEE and Nature. Later work was sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency; it continued till 1995 as the Star Gate Project at the Science Applications International Corporation.

Since the SRI article mentions the successful publications that Puthoff and his associates got into mainstream academic journals, I think it's also fair that this PEAR article mention the couple of successful papers that Jahn and his associates have managed to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

(1) The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective (1982). Proceedings IEEE
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1982-persistant-paradox-psychic-phenomena.pdf

(2) Consciousness, Information, and Living Systems (2005). Cellular & Molecular Biology
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2005-consciousness-information-living-systems.pdf

(3) Radin, D. I., and Nelson, R. D. (1989). Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems. Foundations of Physics, Vol.19, No.12, pp.1499-1514.

(4) On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomena (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No.8, pp.721-772.
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/1986-quantum-mechanics-consciousness.pdf

(5) Physical Aspects of Psychic Phenomena (1988). Physics Bulletin, 39, pp.235-236.

(6) Deviations from Physical Randomness Due to Human Agent Intention? (1999). Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 10, No. 6, pp. 935-952.

(7) The Case for Inertia as a Vacuum Effect: A Reply to Woodward and Mahood (2000). Foundations of Physics, 30, No. 1,pp. 59-80.

(8) Inertial Mass and the Quantum Vacuum Fields (2001). ''Ann. Physics'', 10, 5, pp.393-414.
 * http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2001-inertial-mass-quantum-vacuum-fields.pdf

Neuroscience325 (talk) 17:38, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Concerns/Comments regarding the History section
As it currently stands, the PEAR History section I wrote has been removed from the article, the result of a "lack of consensus".
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab&diff=659204295&oldid=659201627

Given the odd nature of the topic, I thought I made a pretty well put together exposition of the historical framework behind PEAR's research along with Jahn and Dunne's personal background.

Additional information on PEAR's origins is absolutely needed to supplement the article as it presently stands, so I would be much obliged if people could step forward with whatever concerns they may have about the current construction of the History section.

Neuroscience325 (talk) 00:53, 26 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Gosh, I'm getting boggle-eyed with all these walls of text! I think that the consensus we had back in September - here - was that a brief History section might be appropriate. Specifically, one which just outlines the private philanthropic support, the lack of government funding, summarizes Jahn's prior academic background, etc. Let's start with two or three well-cited sentences that we all agree on, and then proceed carefully, with consideration and consensus. jxm (talk) 01:05, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

The Intellectual Influence of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung on PEAR
The following is excerpted from the prologue of Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (published in paperback as 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession) by Professor Arthur I. Miller, recommended by Walter Isaacson: "Miller is a master of capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence":


 * Pauli told very few colleagues about his discussions with Jung. He feared their derision. Nevertheless his sessions with Jung convinced him that intuition rather than logical thought held the key to understanding the world around us...Scientists who have not examined Pauli's vast correspondence and writings still place him in the old Newtonian straightjacket. But Pauli was alive to the alchemical roots of science. Modern science, he believed, had come to a dead end. Perhaps the means to break through and to develop new insights was to take a radically different approach and return to science's alchemical roots.


 * Although a twentieth-century scientist, Pauli felt an affinity with the seventeenth century--perfectly natural to anyone who, as he did, accepted that there was, as Jung postulated, a collective unconscious.


 * Today, a vocal minority of scientists believe in paranormal phenomena. For twenty eight years a laboratory at Princeton University tried to establish evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP)--using card-guessing methods--as well as evidence for telekinesis, the ability of the mind to move objects. It had been privately funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and closed down in 2007. Its founder, Robert G. Jahn, a pioneer in jet propulsion systems said, "it is time." He claimed to have demonstrated that test subjects "thinking high" and "thinking low" could alter a sequence of numbers flashed from a random number generator--very slight, however, two or three flips out of ten thousand. Pauli and Jung discussed experiments of this sort. They, too, believed un the power of the mind inexplicable by the logic of physics.


 * The two men also discussed at great length the notion of consciousness, considered by most scientists at that time to be sheer nonsense--"off-limits." Today it is a burgeoning field of research using concepts from quantum mechanics, some of which Pauli speculated on.

A lot of PEAR's and the GCP's scholarly work--particularly as it relates to the humanities and psychology--has to do with these more cryptic parts of quantum mechanics. PEAR's original book, Margins of Reality, is literally filled with marginalia of quotations from Pauli, Bohr, Heisenberg, Jeans, Schrodinger, etc. that it does an honest attempt to explicate. Can we try to incorporate the intellectual history--early in the history of QM, long before Jahn--that gave rise to PEAR somewhere in the article?

Neuroscience325 (talk) 18:40, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
 * that PEAR tried to cloak its mumbo jumbo under the labcoat of science is covered in the general dismissal as pseudoscience. that some people want to add a layer of quantum mysticism over the labcoat is hardly groundbreaking nor particularly informative. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  00:08, 4 May 2015 (UTC)


 * That you don't know jackshit about the quantum theory and would rather call people names than construct a respectable intellectual argument or cite even a single iota of some fucking research makes you a THEOLOGIAN. And that you, a theologian, would accuse actual credentialed scientists--Jung, Pauli, Dunne, and Jahn--of fraud and "mysticism" makes you a preacher. You're a Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. And I hate those guys.


 * If this is how you're honestly going to behave--or think it's appropriate to behave--on this talk page, you'd be better off not making your voice heard at all.


 * GIVE ME SOME EVIDENCE FOR WHAT YOU ARE BLINDLY ASSERTING OR GET OUT AND STOP SLANDERING ROBERT JAHN.


 * It's that fucking simple. That's just how science works. Nut up or shut up.


 * Neuroscience325 (talk) 12:44, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I am pretty sure that Jung never discussed PEAR. If I am wrong, please present the sources. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom  17:43, 3 June 2015 (UTC)