What Do You All Think Of TED...?

[Love Zhaoying]

16 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

The NYTimes quotes from her book "Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain." That is pretty much what I've been proposing all along. Similarly Daniel Kahneman suggests that the human desire to define oneself via stories, along with confirmation bias, might be the basis for religion. Again, there is no need for supernatural or paranormal activity, we're naturally predisposed to imagine the supernatural.

This is exactly how some “religions” help you adjust - in my personal experience even. 

[Luna Bliss]

The trees talk to me, and the birds bring messages
Colors of energy surround everything that's alive, and all things are alive.

[Qie Niangao]

27 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If you wanted to have a vote, or at least some insight, in how the future unfolds, would you study physics... or metaphysics?

Admittedly I've not followed this thread, but this question grabbed me and wouldn't let go.

The thing is, the era is rapidly coming to a close when humans have had the hubris to think they can or should have any influence on the future. It's been a relatively brief interval since it first seemed possible until now when it seems to have all gone wrong -- and anyway, we'll soon trust our machines to make those decisions for us because they'll surely do a better job of it.

So if we're lucky, "physics" will retire the topic and "metaphysics" will give us the grace to accept that.

[Luna Bliss]

56 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

we've turned almost everything we know on its head and reshaped the planet

this is good?

[Luna Bliss]

The trees talk to me, and the birds bring messages
Colors of energy surround everything that's alive, and all things are alive.

Flowers open in spring, without a name.

Oh but would a time return where I ceased to tell you what you are.

[kali Wylder]

17 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Yeah, if you do anything for a long time, you'll never tease apart the causes for change. I'm sure not the same after my marriage as I was before it.

I'm truly fascinated by the evidence that a single psilocybin trip can change your perspective.

you might enjoy reading "How to change your mind - what the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence" by Michael Pollan.  He writes about guided psychedelic trips which are a bit different than the unguided, wild and free trips I took over the years.  One of the things that struck me was the fact that my heavy tripping years were less affected by my chronic depression than otherwise.  I think it's possible I accidentally hit upon a way to self medicate to alleviate the depression due to my fondness for psychedelics during that time.

[Love Zhaoying]

17 minutes ago, kali Wylder said:

you might enjoy reading "How to change your mind - what the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence" by Michael Pollan.  He writes about guided psychedelic trips which are a bit different than the unguided, wild and free trips I took over the years.  One of the things that struck me was the fact that my heavy tripping years were less affected by my chronic depression than otherwise.  I think it's possible I accidentally hit upon a way to self medicate to alleviate the depression due to my fondness for psychedelics during that time.

Yep, heard the interview with the author.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Admittedly I've not followed this thread, but this question grabbed me and wouldn't let go.

The thing is, the era is rapidly coming to a close when humans have had the hubris to think they can or should have any influence on the future. It's been a relatively brief interval since it first seemed possible until now when it seems to have all gone wrong -- and anyway, we'll soon trust our machines to make those decisions for us because they'll surely do a better job of it.

So if we're lucky, "physics" will retire the topic and "metaphysics" will give us the grace to accept that.

I'm a li'l more optimistic than you, but I don't think I need to study metaphysics (though I do). That "understanding", useful as it is, came built in. Though I've been questioning things for as long as I can remember, I still wake up every morning in awe of what I see... and grateful for it.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

2 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

we've turned almost everything we know on its head and reshaped the planet

this is good?

Here's the entire statement from which you quoted that snippet...

Science is going to continue to probe this, and if we pooh-pooh it, firmly holding to metaphysical explanations, science is going to get way out ahead of us with nobody to watch over it. Look at it this another way... we've been working on metaphysics for thousands of years, and not a hell of a lot of change has resulted from it. But in the only 4-5 centuries of the scientific method and the technology it has spawned, we've turned almost everything we know on its head and reshaped the planet. If you wanted to have a vote, or at least some insight, in how the future unfolds, would you study physics... or metaphysics?

I see both good and bad in our technological progress, and I made no overall judgment.

Eradication of smallpox - good or bad?
Extension of human life span from 30 something to 72 years - good or bad?
Starving/malnourished as fraction the world's population probably the lowest it's ever been - good or bad?
Planet warming at an alarming rate, threatening the previous two line items - good or bad?
Creation of new forms of communication that render humans potentially maladapted to modern discourse - good or bad?

Do you find it possible to put an overall grade on science? I think it's been generally positive so far, but it's still accelerating, if not jerking, and that's cause for concern in almost anything.

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

This is exactly how some “religions” help you adjust - in my personal experience even. 

Religions also help societies exert control over members and sharpen the dividing lines between in and out-groups - in my personal experience even.

I don't deny that religion works well to build inner narratives that help make "sense" of ourselves, but I think there may be better ways, particularly in a world that's so much different than the one in which we evolved. Our physical evolution isn't keeping up with our social evolution.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Religions also help societies exert control over members and sharpen the dividing lines between in and out-groups - in my personal experience even.

I don't deny that religion works well to build inner narratives that help make "sense" of ourselves, but I think there may be better ways, particularly in a world that's so much different than the one in which we evolved. Our physical evolution isn't keeping up with our social evolution.

Ah, humanism? I hope it catches on.  Very Soon.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Eradication of smallpox - good or bad?
Extension of human life span from 30 something to 72 years - good or bad?
Starving/malnourished as fraction the world's population probably the lowest it's ever been - good or bad?
Planet warming at an alarming rate, threatening the previous two line items - good or bad?
Creation of new forms of communication that render humans potentially maladapted to modern discourse - good or bad?

 Bigger overall population also means the possibility of bigger wars, more suffering..and a mortality rate of 100%. 

There’s a story told to me often, about 2 yogis who went to heaven and stole a sacred cow. The one who stole the cow was sentenced to rebirth and a long life. The one who only helped steal the cow was given a much lesser sentence of being reborn, but dying at birth and immediately returning to heaven.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Extension of human life span from 30 something to 72 years - good or bad?

Leading to population growth, among other things deforestation to raise grazing animals, leading to..

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Planet warming at an alarming rate, threatening the previous two line items - good or bad?

Population will auto-correct itself, maybe.

But again in response to lifespan and population growth: 

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Starving/malnourished as fraction the world's population probably the lowest it's ever been - good or bad?

If the greater population means more TOTAL people are suffering (regardless of % of population) - good or bad? It’s my understanding that in many societies, things aren’t getting “better” at the same rate.

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

But again in response to lifespan and population growth: 

If the greater population means more TOTAL people are suffering (regardless of % of population) - good or bad? It’s my understanding that in many societies, things aren’t getting “better” at the same rate.

Right. In my list of things that might be good or bad, I could build an argument for going either way on every one of them, although the eradication of smallpox was a pretty nifty accomplishment.

On NPR years ago, I heard a presentation by a physician (head of Harvard Med school, I think) waxing rhapsodic about increases in human lifespan...

"The first person to live to 200 is alive today!"

He went on to argue that this was in a good thing in every way, while I was thinking...

Hey, I'm in line for that job, but there's a guy with 125 years seniority ahead of me.
Oh look, the average congressman serves 42 terms in Congress.
Welcome to government service, you can collect a full pension in 140 years.
C'mon great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great Gramma, all the kids are doing this!

The implication in the fella's presentation was that our mental health would extend with our physical health. That might be, but he never addressed the problem of people becoming set in their ways, of harboring long obsolete beliefs, etc, etc, etc. I think Steve Jobs was right...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/O-zone/steve-jobs-death-is-very-likely-the-single-best-invention-of-life/

I'm amused to see that the first search result for his famous quote came from the times of... India, where Jobs sought enlightenment in his youth.

Edited January 9, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

The implication in the fella's presentation was that our mental health would extend with our physical health. That might be, but he never addressed the problem of people becoming set in their ways, of harboring long obsolete beliefs, etc, etc, etc.

Get off my lawn!

2 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/O-zone/steve-jobs-death-is-very-likely-the-single-best-invention-of-life/

I'm amused to see that the first search result for his famous quote came from the times of... India, where Jobs sought enlightenment in his youth.

Great quote. I agree, in part because a healthy sense of mortality should help us “be here now”, be more compassionate, and make the world a better place.

[iamyourneighbour]

I would say about 20% of all talks are of substance. Rest 80% are buzzword fueled intense patting on the back. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

33 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Get off my lawn!

Great quote. I agree, in part because a healthy sense of mortality should help us “be here now”, be more compassionate, and make the world a better place.

I agree, but now I can't help but think of Woody Allen saying “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

 

Edited January 9, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters

[Madelaine McMasters]

20 minutes ago, iamyourneighbour said:

I would say about 20% of all talks are of substance. Rest 80% are buzzword fueled intense patting on the back. 

...pats you on the back so intensely she knocks you over.

I won't quibble with your estimation.

Edited January 9, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters

[kali Wylder]

14 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

....

https://froese.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/froese-et-al-18-a-role-for-enhanced-functions-of-sleep-in-psychedelic-therapy.pdf

The term "annealing" comes from metallurgy, where a process of heating heating a metal above some critical temperature, then cooling it slowly, releases internal stress and promotes growth of larger metallic crystals. The idea behind "simulated annealing" in AI is that, by temporarily increasing the ease of adjusting neural connections, decision thresholds, or whatever self learning mechanisms the AI uses (effectively increasing disorder), then slowing returning to normal, the system can more rapidly converge on a correct understanding (which has more order).

Normally, the brain must adapt to new stimulus at the rate we all expect, requiring significant repetition to acquire new skills. Yet the brain can make spectacular leaps on its own, as in epiphanies. Brain damage can both destroy and create (or reveal, or unlock) tremendous capabilities.

So much to discover!

Fascinating article! I'm going to sleep on it....

[Madelaine McMasters]

On 1/8/2019 at 12:05 PM, Luna Bliss said:

Anyway, here's some better experiments to check out. I probably will look at a few eventually

http://deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm

I found some time to check into Dean Radin's "evidence" summary and I'm not impressed.

Several of the studies dealing with retroactive healing at a distance (http://deanradin.com/evidence/Leibovici2001.pdf) (http://deanradin.com/evidence/Schlitz2012.pdf) claimed to be double blind, yet revealed the first name and or photographs of the patients to the remote healers and researchers. Some studies claimed to be double blind, but did not indicate how that was achieved. Though it's reasonable to wonder how to conduct an experiment in remote healing without the healer knowing who they're helping, there's enough research into name and appearance bias to warrant at least a footnote in any study that claims double blindness while divulging names and or photographs. One author declared that the design of his study was "flawless"!

There are also studies in the Radin's list that show no effect (http://deanradin.com/evidence/Masters2007Prayer.pdf) or negative effect.

Some papers were surveys of studies, and seemed to be more journalism than science. A good meta-analysis requires evaluating the quality of the experiments, not just the results. And that requires the summary authors to know as much or more about the subject matter and the design of experiments than those who did the experiments. As with a lot of other research, there is an overemphasis on the value of the statistics. Getting good statistical performance from a poorly designed experiment isn't compelling.

In one of the reviews (Astin et al (2000). The Efficacy of “Distant Healing”: A Systematic Review of Randomized Trials) evidence for distant healing was weak at best, and declined as the Jadad score of the study increased. I'd expect that. If the presence of the thing you're trying to detect goes down as the quality of your measurements increases, you're in trouble.

There is ample research showing that people benefit from all manner of alternative medical treatments, including prayer (when known to the recipient) and get well cards. There's also plenty of research showing that we have unconscious biases at work (name, appearance, confirmation, selection, etc). Any psi research must convincingly remove the effect of those known mechanisms from any experiment. This is terribly difficult to do, but that does not absolve psi researchers from their burden of proof.

During the few years I was involved in both producing and reviewing IRB clinical trial data, it became clear to me that the scientists doing the experiments, though quite capable in their fields of endeavor, were fairly ignorant of the psychology of experimentation (biases, effects of sample size, control group selection, exclusion of samples from training sets for use in test sets, etc.) and the correct way to use statistics. In the case of pure physical research, the underlying things (ex: Higgs boson) don't care about the beliefs of the researchers, but in clinical trials involving humans as both experimenters and subjects, the potential for psychological contamination is considerably higher.

A common thread in the cited papers is that alternative therapies like prayer improve outcomes. I don't think many mainstream scientists would dispute that, given the large body of evidence that social support systems and state of mind really make a difference. To take the leap from that to the claim that mystical forces are at work requires careful study design and execution which can be repeated and produces compelling evidence. As I said earlier, in cases of noetic treatments, this is very difficult to do, given the vast body of evidence for non-psi effects of noetic treatments. If it can't be done, then the experimenters should realize they're not sufficiently within the bounds of the scientific method to merit scientific acceptance.

All that said, there's a new mystery appearing in recent clinical trials of pharmaceuticals that wants explanation. The placebo effect is becoming more powerful over time, but only in the US. Some medications that gained FDA approval decades ago (Prozac) would face rejection if going through clinical trials today, because they don't beat the placebo effect now. In the Scientific American article I linked, there is a suggestion to use whatever mechanisms are discovered to improve the placebo effect to actually treat patients. This is very akin to the noetic treatments covered by the research in Radin's "evidence", but doesn't suggest there's any psi component at work. It's just a lot of as yet undiscovered human psychology/physiology.

I think I've driven this as far into the ground as I can.

[Lindal Kidd]

Maddy, you should never have retired.  The world needs your mind!

[Rolig Loon]

Maddy didn't retire.  She retooled.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Maddy, you should never have retired.  The world needs your mind!

One of the reasons I retired was that the very nature of my consulting business put me at the epicenter of product designs that were both terribly important to the small customers I served and completely absent of oversight. The entrepreneurs who hired me were happy to rush forward, oblivious to their own ignorance of science, technology, and sometimes ethics. I grew increasingly uncomfortable being the only expert in the room, worrying that the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train.

I missing working with smart people, but not as much as I enjoy not working with unethical people, and certainly not as much as enjoy not imperiling other people with my own limited competence. And so, take any critique I make of other people's work with a grain of salt. I'm as unable to escape confirmation and selection bias as the next geek girl.

Oh, before I forget, one of the studies showed that remote prayer lowered morbidity but not mortality. I like thinking about that.

[Luna Bliss]

20 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

but doesn't suggest there's any psi component at work. It's just a lot of as yet undiscovered human psychology/physiology.

Glad you brought the thread back. I've been reading about the Enlightenment and trying to understand if, while it did get rid of some superstition, it threw out the baby with the bathwater. Reading a slog of a book atm..

But, how are you defining this "psi component" vs "as yet undiscovered human psychology/physiology"?

[Love Zhaoying]

21 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

All that said, there's a new mystery appearing in recent clinical trials of pharmaceuticals that wants explanation. The placebo effect is becoming more powerful over time, but only in the US. Some medications that gained FDA approval decades ago (Prozac) would face rejection if going through clinical trials today, because they don't beat the placebo effect now. In the Scientific American article I linked, there is a suggestion to use whatever mechanisms are discovered to improve the placebo effect to actually treat patients. This is very akin to the noetic treatments covered by the research in Radin's "evidence", but doesn't suggest there's any psi component at work. It's just a lot of as yet undiscovered human psychology/physiology.

 I think I've driven this as far into the ground as I can.

I listened to a recent talk by my guru, in which he was trying to explain some recent research he heard or read on the Placebo Effect. I had not heard this before and have not googled it:

Apparently, it has been found that for some drugs (medications), including some Placebo allowed the researchers to achieve the same effect with a lower dose of the medication. (Less bad side effects, etc.) So far, I follow. 

Here’s where I become skeptical. The way it was explained, in this case the body manufactured the drug itself.

“Why” he was discussing the Placebo Effect is probably off topic.