Clearly brilliant people saying that something that later turns out to be noise is statistically undeniable signal is worth noting. I'm not sure what you're seeing here.
Yeap, that's all fair. I was mainly poking at your word choice of "phenomenon" because it can be reasoned. I'm not quite sure about your last sentence but that's an entirely different discussion with much more noise than signal to parse through.
> There's a rule in physics that "the impossible doesn't happen very often". What's more likely, a stunning unexpected discovery, or a subtle experimental error?
You're implying that a a subtle error would be sufficient to explain the observations, which doesn't seem to be the case here.
Gross experimental or interpretation errors are a possibility, of course, but are correspondingly less likely.
It means the original result is an anomaly that doesn’t fit into a scientific understanding. Maybe there was an error in the experimental setup, or some unknown factor was at play, or the situation was unique. Whatever the case, nothing scientific can be determined if it can’t be replicated. It’s akin to the WOW SETI signal.
> It could be that there is a reproducible 1% "mystery" effect that works from future to past, but only in experiments like this. In which case claim wouldn't be extraordinary, it'd just be something we can't understand.
Erm, no, that would be pretty damn extraordinary. We know of nothing else in the universe that acts like this.
I have don't have any interest in the subject of ESP, but you are completely incorrect. Statistical significance isn't hard to calculate and the number of data points here is fairly large, so there is a measurable effect by reasonable standards. The actual statistics and calculations are right there in the paper.
The idea that the effect could be the result of a programming error or a small amount of light leaking through/around the screen is completely plausible. Or it could be dumb luck as you suggest, but it's extraordinarily unlikely.
It's always a bit terrifying to me how often I see people on Hacker News confidently asserting some phenomenon can be explained by something that any rational person would recognize as non-nonsensical.
That is explained in pretty much the section I quoted. The explanation of the effect is given in the article's links.
But the article is written specifically to make the point that it should be enough to observe that it isn't possible for the effect to be real. You aren't making a good point when you cite an effect that is obviously nonsense.
You seem to imply that novel things are not statistically highly probable as a chain of thought in a specific context. That's a significant claim and I'm not sure we'd all agree on.
> But the prev post chose a particular outcome, and any particular outcome is rare.
No, we first observed a particular outcome (the giant ring). This would be like running coin flips for long enough, spotting some interesting sequence that wasn’t decided beforehand, then deciding it must not be random because that sequence should have been incredibly rare.
Sure, that sequence was rare but it was just as likely as all the other sequences which we didn’t end up seeing.
> Perhaps it's a muscular display of their power in the field of energy.
The mere fact that you use "perhaps" and have to imagine an interpretation for what could or could not be regarded as a vague signal, tells us that it's not it.
You know, just by definition of what a "display" is.
> How many people have come to a crowded area just outside an elevator, only to find that the problem is that nobody has pushed the button?
That's easily explained by information cascade: everybody tries to assess the situation calmly, notice no one is doing anything, and conclude nothing shall be done. Eliezer gave the example of smoke under the door (vs a fire alarm): the more people in the room, the less likely they are to act.
The $20 bill is very different: while the area is crowed, each individual is alone, and doesn't expect any attention from bending down and picking up the bill.
> The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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