Oct

9

For the military guys here- does remote viewing work? friend of mine - a statistician - who was tangentially involved decades ago- said what is striking: "those who didn't believe in it - scored worse than chance". Can imagine that.

I go with the notion it may work in rare cases - but when it comes to forecasting mkts - one may run into many new challenges. probably takes time and would require years of training. not exact science anyway. could help with overall intuition perhaps.

Alex Castaldo is skeptical:

"those who didn't believe in it - scored worse than chance".

Trying to salvage something from a negative experimental result. Reminds me of "Well, our anticancer drug failed in a large sample test, but it seemed to work for left handed women between 65 and 75 years of age. That's very promising". Shifting the analysis to a question other than what was asked.

Nils Poertner responds:

for trading (or life in general) - it is good to be skeptical- and don't believe anything that comes along. on the other hand, one wants to keep the option of some (pleasant) surprises that one does not know everything. Controlled RV was used by the Military to my knowledge. that itself is a hint it may work.

Eric Lindell asks:

were these controlled experiments where either the viewer or viewed were in a faraday cage? Personally, I think there are two possible outcomes statistically: chance and not chance.

I'd like to see a rigorous study of remote viewing by those who don't believe in it — with faraday and standard scientific controls. I'd be surprised if it held up. You would need an objective measure of similarity of appearance between viewed and vision — which itself would be hard to gauge — statistically or even anecdotally. The faraday control especially is key to identifying the question itself — let alone its answer.

Humbert H. writes:

I've seen at least two Sci-Fi type movies where the remote viewer is tortured by all the evil he can see to the point of not being able to live on. I would say there are enough people in this world who wouldn't be troubled by seeing evil if they can become really rich, so I would say there is no real evidence of statistically significant remote viewing.

Steve Ellison comments:

There is a huge problem in academia, where the paradigm is "publish or perish", of research that can't be replicated. A 1940 study by Rhine and Pratt that found evidence of extrasensory perception was the original poster child for this problem. A big part of the problem is the traditional significance cutoff of p = 0.05. That's a reasonable starting point, but when thousands of researchers are working at any moment, 5% of their studies will reject the null hypothesis purely by chance. It adds up to a lot of non-replicability.

I have often thought that an advantage for those of us who are scholars of the market is that we don't have any pressure to publish and hence don't need to force dubious findings into practice. Instead of a pat on the back for being published, we get a cruel but not unusual form of "capital punishment" if our backtests can't be replicated in the market.

Anders Hallen actually finds research for critique:

Stock Market Prediction Using Associative Remote Viewing by Inexperienced Remote Viewers

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