Often times when data like this appears it is merely exposing a fundamental flaw in the data collection. In this case the random number generator that selects the words would need be be included.
What? New Scientist should never make the front page of HN, I'm ashamed to see it.
"In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type."
"The image's eventual position was selected at random, but volunteers guessed correctly 53.1 per cent of the time. That may sound unimpressive – truly random guesses would have been right 50 per cent of the time, after all."
Really? Go away. - I'll skim the paper for any other stomach-churning pseudoscience.
> "The image's eventual position was selected at random, but volunteers guessed correctly 53.1 per cent of the time. That may sound unimpressive – truly random guesses would have been right 50 per cent of the time, after all."
The sentence right after that addressed the seeming insignificance of 53.1%:
> But well-established phenomena such as the ability of low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks are based on similarly small effects, notes Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who has also blogged about Bem's work at Psychology Today.
Yes, the effects of aspirin are "well-established" because the studies involve far larger samples. 100 people being shown 12 erotic images does not put this on the same scale.
1200 images, 636 guessed "correctly", binomial distribution has variance np(1-p) =300, sd = sqrt(300)~17.
So this particular result is just outside 2 standard deviations from the mean. Woop-tee-do, get off my HN front page.
1) Knocking every single article in a publication because you have something against the magazine is a huge cognitive bias. You should be ashamed. Learn to evaluate each article on its own merits rather painting everything with the same prejudiced brush.
2) New Scientist is a long-standing, respectable magazine. Their explicit goal is to popularise science, and they do that rather well. Sure, reading a New Scientist article about quantum physics is no substitute for doing a physics degree, but for those who don't have the ability, desire or opportunity to do so, at least it gives them a glimpse of something fascinating. You may find it's not useful to you, but you can't argue that it's not a great publication for a fair number of above-average intelligence people out there.
3) If you are going to attack an article, do so in an intelligent manner. What you wrote there is the magazine-targeted equivalent of a lame ad-hominem. "Omg, X is such a loser, his articles should never make the front page of HN."
I have something against the magazine because it continually distorts the science behind the stories to such an extent that the person reading them is frequently left with the wrong impression. Having noticed this several times, it makes sense (if you trust induction) to treat all such articles from the same magazine with similar suspicion. This article is no exception.
You are of course correct when you say that many people enjoy reading it. I just expected most of the readers of HN to have studied science to a high-enough level to be aware that much of what is written in New Scientist is, not wrong, but perhaps immature.
Again? Variations of this story have been appearing in the last week, and they all have one thing in common: Precognition proof in the form of experiments with a perfectly valid deviation. Really if you have a 50% chance mathematically to predict the erotic picture, when you get 53% accuracy you call that precognition? Really?
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] threadWe've seen in the past how even online casinos have problems implementing truly random shuffles: http://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.ph...
"In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type."
"The image's eventual position was selected at random, but volunteers guessed correctly 53.1 per cent of the time. That may sound unimpressive – truly random guesses would have been right 50 per cent of the time, after all."
Really? Go away. - I'll skim the paper for any other stomach-churning pseudoscience.
The sentence right after that addressed the seeming insignificance of 53.1%:
> But well-established phenomena such as the ability of low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks are based on similarly small effects, notes Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who has also blogged about Bem's work at Psychology Today.
1200 images, 636 guessed "correctly", binomial distribution has variance np(1-p) =300, sd = sqrt(300)~17.
So this particular result is just outside 2 standard deviations from the mean. Woop-tee-do, get off my HN front page.
And no, it is 100 people, not 1000: http://www.dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
2) New Scientist is a long-standing, respectable magazine. Their explicit goal is to popularise science, and they do that rather well. Sure, reading a New Scientist article about quantum physics is no substitute for doing a physics degree, but for those who don't have the ability, desire or opportunity to do so, at least it gives them a glimpse of something fascinating. You may find it's not useful to you, but you can't argue that it's not a great publication for a fair number of above-average intelligence people out there.
3) If you are going to attack an article, do so in an intelligent manner. What you wrote there is the magazine-targeted equivalent of a lame ad-hominem. "Omg, X is such a loser, his articles should never make the front page of HN."
You are of course correct when you say that many people enjoy reading it. I just expected most of the readers of HN to have studied science to a high-enough level to be aware that much of what is written in New Scientist is, not wrong, but perhaps immature.