Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping!
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Posted on 04/02/2014 9:55:23 PM PDT by Theoria
The morning I met Elaine Rich, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her small town home in suburban Maryland trying to estimate refugee flows in Syria.
It wasn't the only question she was considering; there were others:
Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile before May 10, 2014?
Will Russian armed forces enter Kharkiv, Ukraine, by May 10? Rich's answers to these questions would eventually be evaluated by the intelligence community, but she didn't feel much pressure because this wasn't her full-time gig.
"I'm just a pharmacist," she said. "Nobody cares about me, nobody knows my name, I don't have a professional reputation at stake. And it's this anonymity which actually gives me freedom to make true forecasts."
Rich does make true forecasts; she is curiously good at predicting future world events.
Better Than The Pros
For the past three years, Rich and 3,000 other average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of the Good Judgment Project, an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community.
According to one report, the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information, and many of the people involved in the project have been astonished by its success at making accurate predictions.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping!
To get onto The Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping List you must threaten to report me to the Mods if I don't add you to the list...
True that. Now if only Art Bell were available to do a show on this, I'd be listening.
Me too! OTOH, he isn’t totally retired is he?
Jepoardy? (lol)
Not really. He’s publicly accounced his intention to return to the airwaves on the day his non-compete agreement with SiriusXM radio expires. September 2015. In the meantime, he’s never far away and lurks in many places. :)
I’ve been going back through the Dark Matter shows he did, to deal with my withdrawal of not having Art on Air live.
I feel your pain. There’s a huge Art Bell-sized hole in broadcast programming that nobody else can fill, not even close.
Ditto. FReepers do this 24/7.
Aren’t diplomats on a one day strike?
This is a study. The CIA failed to predict the fall of the USSR, failed to recognize the threat of Islamic terrorists, etc.
They need more than a study.
I was listening to an interview he did last October (IIRC) with a guy that Art believed was a charlatan, but Art kept pulling more and more outlandish assertions out of the guy until the interviewee finally realized he was making a fool of himself!
Which actually turned out to be crap.
That also turned out to be crap as well.
All of the pseudo-scientific claims you've made have been shout down whenever their results have been evaluated by judges who had no idea what the "experimenters" were trying to predict.
There is no "psi" in science. No reliable scientific study has ever found any basis for claims of non-local or non-temporal consciousness. Transcendental Meditation is a bunch of baloney. Please get real.
Classic Art Bell :)
the collective unconscious is an amazing thing
Hey comment # 55 !
My response is to the original post that is already making some fairly wild claims about predicting the future. I was referencing some other studies in fields that could be compared to the article’s claim, not trying to convince you it’s true.
I find FR to have a wide variety of informed readers who, though I knew I’d probably get flamed by a few, also thought would turn up someone sharing similar works in these areas where I might get pointed to some new good reading material.
My comment on TM was (....“group think experiments” that resulted in some success; the concept of Gestalt Psychology from the early 1900’s Germany and The 1% factor from Transcendental Meditation in the 1970’s) See my words “Some success” There Was some success but their testing methods I agree were questionable.
However, there are still several groups pursuing this line of experimentation. I hope someone gets lucky !!
In the research done by Stanford and Princeton, especially the PEAR Project, on Non local consciousness and remote viewing they are aware there are many who scoff at their results. I was impressed at the extent they went to to try and set rigid test parameters. This is an incredibly difficult subject to study much less have test parameters that are completely bullet proof.
I have followed their work for years and am impressed with the statistics they have been able to produce even if the statistical results are rather slight in some instances.
The work Rene Peoche did with the baby chickens was I think, remarkable. Many others agree and I see more science thumbs up then down in that experiment even though it was a bit silly.
By the way, how do you know you’re real? Please explain
Everyone serious scoffs at PEAR. Among many -- and a decent summary: http://www.skepdic.com/globalconsciousness.html
By the way, how do you know you’re real? Please explain
A poster responding to appeals for sanity suggests that his critic's arguments may be baseless because the critic cannot prove his own existence. This surely wins you this weekends's Gormless Irony For The Entire Internet Award®. Congratulations! You have demolished Descartes: "I answer you, therefore you do not exist."
Or something.
This kind of confused, magical thinking is entirely representative of people who believe the kinds of things you do. [And of people who believe this article is actually reflective of anything other than cherry-picking the definition of "successful prediction."]
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