> When I was a child, there used to be a black bear in the zoo, pacing back and forth in its cage all day long. Then came the accident involving a little girl named Yanzi (meaning ‘Swallow’). She had gotten too close to the railings. The bear licked her leg through the bars. A bear’s tongue is covered in backward-facing barbs. That lick tearing off a chunk of flesh and severing her tendons instantly.Yanzi ended up in a wheelchair, never able to stand again.
Bear tongues don't work like this. While they are rough, much like a cat's or a dog's, they don't have barbs large enough to "tear off a chunk of flesh" or "sever tendons".
If this anecdote is not an embellishment, it must have been the bear biting the girl's leg, which is not at all unheard of from bears in zoos (we had such a case in Argentina in '88, a bear tore off a boy's arm through the cage bars in "Cutini's Zoo". The zoo was shut down as a result. I don't know what happened to the bear, but maybe it was put down like in your story).
No, she isn't. She's a statistician, but mostly known for being in the panel review of Star Gate, and for close associations with parapsychology organizations.
She was already involved in parapsychology, having coauthored papers with the director of Star Gate (a parapsychologist himself) before becoming part of the review panel! You cannot have vested interests in the phenomenon being real if you're going to judge it impartially. You cannot have a relationship with one of the key personnel in the project you're reviewing, and especially not a relationship specifically about the same kind of things you're supposed to review! This is a serious flaw, she shouldn't have been part of the panel.
> There has been many reproductions
Like which ones? A reproduction must be done independently, by scientists without the same sponsors and vested interested. Can you point to these reproductions?
By the way, Star Gate was canceled with the conclusion that the experiments were inconclusive. Had there been reproductions, surely the conclusions would have been different?
The PDF mentions a ship and some sort of unexpected catastrophe (in vague surrounding, horoscope-like terms) but it also mentions "high-powered lasers", Bikini atoll, H-bombs, and the drawings of the alleged ship superstructure look nothing like those of the USS Stark (some of the notes mention a "flight deck" like an aircraft carrier's; while the USS Stark does have a flight deck this is a mostly irrelevant detail about this class of ships). Plus this was done for the CIA, so unsurprisingly any "viewing" would be primed to refer to military hardware and events; imagine if they mentioned McDonald's, ice-cream, and an upcoming football match.
If you exclude H-Bomb, high powered laser, disregard the shapes don't match the USS Stark, and fixate on the coincidences -- pattern-matching, something the human brain has evolved for survival -- of course the similarities will seem impressive. This is "cold reading 101", a known trick. The average tarot reader knows how to do this.
Interestingly, we don't know of any other predictions that widely missed the mark. So if predictions 1 to 10 were made, most wildly inaccurate, but one of them vaguely/partially resembles something that happened some days after, that's not convincing to demonstrate anything but a random result. Let's say another prediction stated "calm waters, US dominance, safe passage, successful mission, happy sailors". How would we assess the accuracy of the predictive method?
Because talk is cheap, but when pressed, a crackpot like Puthoff cannot provide a single relevant detail. Had he been involved in actual top secret projects, he would shut up about them; instead he fantasizes.
He also has a history of quackery, belief in the paranormal, and being duped by Uri Geller.
I mean, he's the worst kind of crackpot: a sucker who believes magic tricks are real and will evangelize about it.
You didn't answer the question, you just went on another one of your rants. Why is it surprising that he can’t talk about it in concrete terms given “ all these people supposedly worked on things much more exotic”?
I did answer, but I realize arguing with parapsychology believers is a fool's errand.
Puthoff is a crank. Of course he won't provide evidence of participating in top secret projects that produced any results: he doesn't have it. He can only speak in the vaguest terms typical of pseudoscience cranks.
Ray Hyman, the other member of the review panel with Jessica Utts, disagreed with her conclusions ("the overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating."). Utts also seems to be involved in parapsychology organizations, which is pseudoscience -- I hope you won't dispute this much -- so I'd rule out her opinion as fringe, and not in any way the mainstream scientific opinion on RV.
RV is pseudoscience, you won't find scientific support for it, or anyone able to reproduce its purported results under controlled conditions.
The Amazing Randi probably had a challenge about RV that no con artist was able to win.
Edit: wait, it's even worse. Utts was completely biased and compromised:
> The psychologist David Marks noted that because Utts had published papers with [Edwin] May [a parapsychologist who took over Project Stargate in '85] "she was not independent of the research team. Her appointment to the review panel is puzzling; an evaluation is likely to be less than partial when an evaluator is not independent of the program under investigation."
So she was completely biased and wasn't independent of the leadership of Stargate! She had vested interests in it being "real", she was invested on RV and parapsychology!
I doubt the 40K universe will die any time soon, it has many fans and they are hardcore about it. And it's becoming more and more mainstream (relatively).
The "If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device" youtube series, which was in some ways one of the best pieces of Warhammer content made in years, had to be stopped because GW gave the author a cease-and-desist.
I think that their approach to fan uses of their IP is far too tight, and that they'd actually be making more money if they had, say, just licensed it. A bit like how they actually harmed their own hobby videos quite a bit with their reactions to their on-air talent leaving to go independent. Nowadays GW is the last place you'd go for painting videos, and the popular content they still have is old, and created by those people that left. But given the way the law works, they are within their right to manage things badly.
Just this year, I hear a very large percentage of the people that were in their external creators network decided to give up the early access, because the restrictions had become way too tight, even for simple things like people painting their miniatures.
"extraordinary claims/extraordinary evidence" isn't scientific rigor, it's adding qualifiers to make the evaluation of the claim and evidence more subjective.
It speaks volumes you don't see any problem with the lack of proof that the documents weren't backdated, and get defensive when people tell you this must absolutely be ruled out if we're ever to even start considering your alleged evidence.
> If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.
Indeed. I'm amazed so many HN regulars are surprised by this. It's how horoscopes work, we've known this for centuries now.
Have people forgotten the scientific method, the standards of proof, etc?
Extraordinary claims (that RV is a real phenomenon) require extraordinary evidence. The null hypothesis is the default position, it requires no extraordinary evidence; the opposite does.
This is scientific method 101. Let's not pretend we're not familiar with it just because some dodgy CIA document surfaced.
The "difficulty" with remote viewing is nonsense pseudoscience and crackpottery.
It absolutely does not work. Not "unreliably", but not work at all.
This reminds me of that one time on HN when someone tried to convince me that ritual witchcraft (I think they called it blood magic) on servers was a real thing, necessary to make them work, and my dismissal was typical of narrow minded people.
Dude claims “there are documents that indicated it did work”. You didn’t enquire about them, just completely dismissed it. That is indeed typical of narrow minded people.
Dudes claim all kinds of crap online. He already posted a PDF that indicated nothing of the sort.
If you will believe anything that seems true to you, because someone online said so, without any weight of evidence, and which is widely considered pseudoscience (go check)... I have a bridge to sell you.
What's with the wave of anti-intellectualism on HN of all places? Are we really trying to debate whether debunked crap like witchcraft and ESP is real? What's next, that Nigerian prince truly wants to gift you his money if only you can help him with a few dollars?
You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.
Examining something != believing it, it's step 2 in the scientific method, with which I advise you get familiar with before invoking it as much as you have in this thread.
If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?
> You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.
I never made any outlandish claims and therefore the onus isn't on me to prove anything.
> Examining something != believing it
But parapschyology has been examined and tested by scientists, and none of it has been verified in independent and controlled conditions. Unlike what the other commenter claimed, there are zero documents indicating RV works. Many of its practitioners have been shown to be frauds, pranksters or cranks (Puthoff thought Uri Geller was a psychic and was fooled by sleight of hand). What new evidence is there? RV isn't a new claim; it's an old debunked claim. Have they won the Amazing Randi prize yet? They could have, if RV was real!
> If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?
I'm reminding participants about how the scientific method works, which is important when discussing outlandish claims.
Bear tongues don't work like this. While they are rough, much like a cat's or a dog's, they don't have barbs large enough to "tear off a chunk of flesh" or "sever tendons".
If this anecdote is not an embellishment, it must have been the bear biting the girl's leg, which is not at all unheard of from bears in zoos (we had such a case in Argentina in '88, a bear tore off a boy's arm through the cage bars in "Cutini's Zoo". The zoo was shut down as a result. I don't know what happened to the bear, but maybe it was put down like in your story).
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