 Have you ever noticed that when you look at a clock, it tends to be in some interesting pattern, like 123 or 234 or 111 or 222? Heck, look at the time right now. As I write this, it's 1111. Why is that? It seems highly unlikely given all the possible times that don't have such numerological significance. What explains that phenomenon? Seriously, I'm asking. Watch the video and think about an explanation. Now if your explanation involves something about the universe making us aware of itself or that time is an illusion pulled over our eyes or quantum consciousness or something equally creative, you may have a promising future in the budding science of noetics. However, if your explanation included some element of human psychology, the relative abundance of numerologically significant numbers in digital time, we're most especially confirmation bias where we remember the hits and forget the misses. I have bad news. Noetic science is obviously too sophisticated for the likes of you. The term noetic science was invented in 1973 to give a name to an institute to study the supernatural elements of human consciousness. The root means inner wisdom, and the actual scientific work they do is not to put too fine a point on it, so badly done that it actually comes out the other side as anti-science. Their projects fail on so many levels that we could simply package their documents up into a textbook on how not to do science. I submit as a single example the global consciousness project run by Princeton, also called the PAIR project for Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. Scattered around the globe at 70 different sites are quantum random number generators, usually called eggs. They read a quantum bit and register a zero or one. These results are synchronized and transmitted to a central site called the basket, at a rate of about 200 bit trials per second. There are 12 years of historical data on the quantum states of these bit generators. Usually they add up the number of times that the one, or on state, is registered in those 200 bit trials. True randomness would predict a regression to a mean of 100 on states per 200 trials. Like if you could flip a coin 200 times a second, heads would come up about 100 times allowing for a distribution of randomness. Now what would you predict about the patterns of these 70 different quantum random bit generators? Mostly you'd see noise, but sometimes there would be anomalous blips where all the eggs give biased readings. Heads keep coming up, or tails. Now if you are a budding noetic researcher, you can conclude that some outside global force is influencing the quantum state of that bit trial. We could call this the global consciousness of the minds on planet earth. They're responding to some profound emotional stress and their response somehow interacts with the quantum states of certain bits. Our minds influence the matter around us, what they call the noosphere. These deviations they hypothesize are evidence for the noosphere's existence. If you are a real scientist, you might have a different conclusion. Statistical methods allow for extremely rare random vents to occur. The fact that they happen to occur at the same time as some global event may or may not be significant. I have to admit, noetics has a certain coolness factor. I'm reminded of the poor folks on Alderaan who cried out and were suddenly silenced as relayed by Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. But as much as I would like to be a Jedi, I'd rather live in the real world. I care if my beliefs are true and self-deception robs us of our chance to face the world honestly and see it as it is. So let's see which career is right for you. Are you a Jedi or a scientist? This is the deviation from 9-11, 2001, the single greatest tragedy in American history since the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. The timing of the attacks is given as crossed boxes, representing the window of time. The blue represents a basic p-value of 5%, which means that the odds of explaining these results by chance are 19-1. The line does eventually cross this basic significance line, but not until more than 3 hours after the first attack. As you stare at this analysis, do you think it supports the idea that people were emotionally reacting to a tragedy? What if I show you data from a much broader window of time? The data for 10 hours from 4 a.m. to 2 p.m. on 9-11. It shows a spike at around noon, but also a spike at 6 a.m. Maybe that's significant anticipation, right? Maybe we just discovered that not only are we all part of the noosphere, but we're also all psychic. The blue curves here are 10 random days in August, each of which shows very similar types of spikes and troughs. If we narrow the window back to 3 hours, the effect disappears. The noosphere makes no response at all to this large national tragedy. If we expand it to 10 hours or 10 days, the effect is not much more than a typical type of chance occurrence, properly called an anomalous result. What happened at 6 a.m. on 9-11, 2001 that the eggs were responding to more than they responded to the loss of 3,000 lives broadcast live around the world? So where do they go wrong? 1. This is a classic case of data dredging. The whole research project is based on the idea of coming up with the test after the data is obtained. This practice is called harking for hypothesizing after results are known, or in more popular parlance, data dredging. Scientists are always very eager to start obtaining results. But if they just pick a methodology and start creating a data set, then decide what to do with it after the data is in, they almost guarantee that the results will be invalid. Why? Well consider a hypothetical scenario. We take the entire state of Alabama, and we measure their height, weight, IQ, street address, eye color, shoe size, favorite color, criminal record, medical history, TV view its and childhood pet names. How many associations could we find between one factor and another? If you lined up all the data, you could find that shoe size determines whether a person likes the color blue, or that brown-eyed people are more likely to have asthma. There are a near infinite number of possible associations, but most of them will be spurious. If you watched my video on why most medical studies are wrong, or if you're familiar with John Yoniti's work, you'll recognize that the PAIR project has a near 100% expected false positive rate based on this design. It's the reason medical research isn't conducted by grabbing 10,000 people off the street and trying to find any associations between diseases and any other factor. Good science involves a specific hypothesis first, then data collection, and analysis afterwards. Every good scientist knows that the goal of any test is falsification. How would you falsify the hypothesis that global events of any significance have an effect on random numbers when analyzed after the fact? Think about it. To falsify even a single notable event, the distribution of values has to be completely random, evenly distributed, and if the noetic researcher is allowed to scan on either side of the event for 4 hours, that means for 8 hours there are no slight changes to that normal distribution of randomness. Actually, even an increase in the proper randomness is subject to interpretation, which brings me back to the example of looking at a clock when it reads 1111. The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition device. Stare at background noise for long enough and it will find a pattern, whether it exists or not. That's why good science is designed to remove the scientist from the equation. We rely on objective test criteria as much as possible. We agree in advance to what a positive outcome represents, which allows us to ultimately falsify our conclusions. Dean Raiden has designed this study to be unfalsifiable, and that's the moment it stopped being science. 3. The effect is so nonspecific as to be meaningless. Bob Park, physicist and skeptic, has suggested that if they really want to convince skeptics, the global consciousness people could set up a scale in a vacuum chamber that measures force or mass of even a microgram less than the weight of a grain of sand. Surely, if we can affect matter, we could move that tiny scale. There wouldn't be the random noise or the reliance on statistical probabilities. A good Jedi can lift a small spaceship. Why not a tiny force on a scale? It would remove that pattern-seeking behavior as well. There's no subjectivity. Of course, they won't do this. 4. The entire process lacks any objective controls. Even my 7-year-old understands the idea of an experimental control. We did the classic plan in the dark plan in the light experiment. He understood that the plan in the light was something we set up so we would know what normal is to establish a baseline for non-experimental intervention. Here's the control set for pair. How do you keep 6.7 billion minds from being surprised or angry or whatever? If this was actually being done scientifically, there would need to be an egg shielded from all influence. You can't pick yesterday's scan as a control dataset because you don't know what influence it's under. You can't ever know what a baseline actually looks like. 5. There is no reason to attribute anomalies to any particular cause. I don't know about you, but if I look up and I see the clock say 12.34, I don't ascribe that to much of anything, except coincidence. If my car doesn't start and I'm late for work and there's a wreck along my path a few hours later, I don't see that as any agency protecting me from harm. Such thinking is fine for people who are a little superstitious or have a poor grasp of rational or scientific methods. They aren't as cognizant of how our brains deceive us. However, the people behind pair have no such excuse. They're attributing anomalies to active agency without any explanation of why they choose agency. What if random sunspot radiation or gravitational fluctuations or the actions of invisible aliens are causing those deviations from randomness? You've just developed a method to detect nonrandomness. That's not evidence for anything specifically. It says a lot that they can jump from nonrandomness to the minds or emotional states of humans. Why not the flights of pigeons or earthworm orientation? Both are just as arbitrary. In fact, we've come full circle to what this truly reminds me of. I want to introduce you to Dean Raiden's spiritual ancestors, the Diviners. In ancient Rome, they scanned the sky for signs of lightning or birds flying in a certain pattern, and that divined the will of the gods. What pair does is no different. It is self-validating, self-deluding, anomaly-seeking behavior. It is certainly not science. If there is any science to be had, I would suggest we conduct a study on the psychology of noetic researchers. I hypothesize that we'll find some pretty desperate motivations. Thanks for watching. The resale of each plant and animal contains genetic information coded onto the DNA molecule.