RE: Spooky dreams (not about the Amish) (Full Version)

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TheHeretic -> RE: Spooky dreams (not about the Amish) (2/20/2011 1:34:59 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen

Or it could be simple coincidence.

Or the second women may have lied when she claimed to have had the same dream.

Or both women could have felt a minor temblor in their sleep which caused the dream.

Which is why anecdotes are not evidence.



Your denials without even noting the facts of the story are evidence though, Ken. Evidence of the sort of biases we expect to see from the devoutly religious, rather than impartial observers who want to understand.

Thanks for your contribution.




DomKen -> RE: Spooky dreams (not about the Amish) (2/20/2011 3:11:22 PM)

You simply don't get it. This stuff never holds up to rigorous examination. Did you read the books I recommended that dealt with the Maimonides hospital experiments? Do you now understand why the results were at best questionable?

Do you even begin to understand why you should never consider anecdotes as evidence?




TheHeretic -> RE: Spooky dreams (not about the Amish) (2/20/2011 3:36:59 PM)

Of course I didn't run right out to buy your reading list, Ken. Nor, it appears, have you yet bothered to read the link I provided you (free, no less), because you are still prattling about the single item I included as a snip of the much larger piece.

I am going to go eat and drink with my favorite yellow-dog union Democrat for a few days. We love to argue politics, and will probably make our wives a bit crazy, but at least he can share a laugh or five.

Enjoy your holiday, and sweet dreams.




DomKen -> RE: Spooky dreams (not about the Amish) (2/21/2011 1:47:37 PM)

Did you really want to read pages and pages of technical details of how the authors messed up in their attempt to use sophisticated nonlinear equations?

Well let's just look at the two studies, not the Maimonides study but woefully bad and the ones all the graphs and tables are built with. To start with the 'participants' simply filled out a questionaire which apparently asked a great many questions one of which was "There have been events that I dreamed about before the event occurred." This is not evidence but simply collecting anecdotes. This true/false question was then used to build a 3D cusp graph but for no reason at all the Z axis was eliminated (by only considering the true answers and setting Z = 1). In other words the studies authors simply excluded from their modeling the unreported part of the two groups that had never had anything they classed as a precognitive dream.

In short the authors assumed precognitive dreams occur. The studies are therefore worthless.





GotSteel -> RE: Spooky dreams (not about the Amish) (2/21/2011 8:50:26 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
Here's another example of the "magical thinking" you mention, Got. Unless you are sitting right on top of the fault, earthquakes start with a fast moving jolt, followed by the slower-moving shaking, moments later. People can easily be awakened by the jolt without being aware of what happened, then find significance in waking right before the shaking starts. Nothing there.

This in no way negates the experience of the woman who wakes up from an intense dream that she is picking up the shards of her heirloom china and crying, tells her best friend about the dream that morning, gets a call from her sister, who dreamed about the china as well, and the new china hutch dumps the contents in a temblor that afternoon, leaving exactly the scene of destruction she saw in her dream.

Now, if we use the criteria of the attempted debunking paper I posted earlier in the thread, we have to rule out the sister's dream as potentially telepathic, rather than precognitive, but otherwise and as noted at the beginning of Kirata's link, there is something going on here.

I'm not bothered that science cannot explain this. It is bothersome that science prefers a position of aggressive denial before admitting that.

What bothers me is people asserting that things are unexplainable which are trivially explained. Walk under enough street lights and eventually one is going to go out at a time that's downright spooky. Get enough people in a earthquake riddled area and eventually some are going to have earthquake dreams around the time that one occurs.




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