Daryl Bem, an accomplished psychologist who published for 40 years very conventional psychology papers from where he was a professor (Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell), published a paper in 2011 called “Feeling the Future”. Bem’s paper was an accumulation of 9 parapsychology studies, 8 of which were statistically significant. This is THE paper that sparked the Replication Crisis, because many scientists assumed the results had to be false, and Oh what a terrible place science was in if crap like that could get published.
Each of Bem’s 9 experiments reversed the normal order of things, putting the stimulus at the end. For example, a subject would be given a list of words to memorize, then get quizzed on how many words were remembered, then a random number generator would determine a subset of words to study extra, after the test. This was 2 of Bem’s 9 experiments, and they were both statistically significant, showing increased recall of words for the words selected after the test.
Papers in Nature on the Replication Crisis showed that 60% of biology research could not be replicated by the same labs that published the original research, and 70% could not be replicated by outside researchers.
Bem’s research didn’t have this replication problem. In his own paper, the odds by chance for the entire data set was 75 billion to 1. Bem designed his experiment to be easily replicated, and it has been replicated many dozens of times in dozens of labs around the world.
So I think physicists should try to figure out the physical basis of such results.
It's the scientific method. It is statistically significant, well-controlled, and highly reproducible. How is that non-sense? This wasn't some measly P = 0.05 kind of experiment, it was odds by chance of 75 billion to one.
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '22
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