[sxp]

For those who want to consider the mundane explanation about remote viewing: remember that humans can still be surprised by the birthday paradox and other synchronicities that occur when sampling data at large scale. So across thousands of sessions, the weak coincidences documented by the Stargate project are expected.

For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund. Remember that theses are groups who pay millions for millisecond advantages in information. And you only need an ~51-55% success rate to make a killing in HFT (vs a 50% success rate from a coinflip). The fact that hedge funds don't have remote viewers on staff is evidence against RV providing utility greater than an RNG.

And for curious people who want to try a scientific approach, I suggest joining https://www.social-rv.com/ which is collecting data about RV and trying to make the experiment ironclad via blockchain authentication of predictions.

[lofaszvanitt]

Or certain knowledge is just not available for anyone. No matter how much power and money you have. There are a lot of areas that are buried underneath technology, while it is an innate ability to certain individuals. Most people do not really understand how their gadgets work or what they are capable of beyond what is advertised....

[LargoLasskhyfv]

That, and psyops to saturate the channel, because it's considered a 'born secret', falling under the 'invention secrecy act' or equivalents elsewhere for reasons.

And lastly simple inability by most to perceive that, and other ESP/Psi stuff, maybe akin to so called aphantasia for people who can't visually imagine things.

Edit: Also Weapons of Class Disruption. Can't have that, ever.

[krackers]

That social-rv is really interesting, apparently the target is randomly assigned _after_ submission, so it's not just remote viewing but also precognition?

The popular ones on the "explore sessions" are a very close match, but if you look at other predictions by those accounts, they're less sure. It's very easy to form a connection between any two images if you allow abstracted forms of similarity, and fundamentally there are very limited themes when it comes to images (natural things, man-made things. Smooth vs sharp.).

A good control test might be to have LLMs produce output instead, and score that.

[krackers]

Hm I did notice this bit "list of up to the last 50 targets you've done (so you don't get duplicate targets too frequently)" which seems to invalidate some of the methodology. If the target is never among the last 50 you've done that skews sample space a bit. The fact that this needs to be done also seems to imply the set of images is not that large...

And this is worsened by the fact that the LLM-based auto scoring explicitly uses the last 10 as decoy targets

>When you submit a session, the system collects your last 10 targets (including the current target) to create a pool of possible matches. A multimodal AI agent is presented with your complete session (including all drawings, text, and data) along with all 10 targets from the pool. The agent is instructed to analyze and rank the targets based on how well they match the session content.

The protocol otherwise seems good, but the specific carveouts here would seem to bias results.

The source for the judging is at https://github.com/Social-RV/comparative-judging which is the part which would need to be studied carefully. At first glance, it exposes raw filenames to the LLM which might bias things. The ranking logic also seems a bit sketchy, it does some tournament-style elimination thing which I haven't analyzed thoroughly but if decoys are eliminated in an earlier round it could bias things compared to just asking the LLM to order the 10 images based on similarity in a single-pass which is obviously unbiased.

[krackers]

I guess another thing, is that the null hypothesis is that an incorrect image is equally likely to be matched to any of the 10 decoy targets. But this isn't the case, the LLM has its own implicit bias. For instance, if you modeled things as a "bag of words" then longer target descriptions are more likely to match with images that contain bunch of text. So some decoy targets are more likely to be hit than others.

I think to counter this, you'd need to model your null hypothesis as the distribution that results when you have the LLM score a deliberately incorrect image against your target + dummies.

[chasemc67]

Hey, creator of Social RV here! Awesome to hear you're enjoying what we're doing.

Some answers to your questions: - the target pool has 275 targets in it - we USED to use the last 9 targets as decoys, but changed to randomly sampling 9 targets from the pool instead several months ago. I've updated the FAQ to reflect that - the unique identifiers we show the LLM for the decoy targets is not the file name but rather the DB primary key for that target. There should be no information in it the AI could use to bias a decision - in regards to the tournament-style elimination, we have a new judge coming out soon that does a single pass. When this was originally built, the single-pass wasn't reliable enough on available models

Thanks very much for your thoughtful feedback and questions about what we're doing!

[krackers]

You should do a show HN post, it's definitely interesting. One of the few good cases where blockchain is useful.

And maybe find some statistician to define a proper metric for statistical significance here, since my gut feeling is that naively using a uniform distribution of ratings as the null hypothesis isn't correct (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438181)

[pmontra]

Hedge funds? Yes but before than that, armies would use RV to get targets, secrets, etc. There are plenty of wars around the world and a lot of money involved.

[bfuller]

What would be the price of revealing this information advantage?

[sxp]

There have been hedge funds and other investment groups that claim to use RV. (At least according to Google and pro-RV books.) They also claim to be able to beat the market. Based on those anecdotes, I think any hedge fund that thinks they can use RV will publicly brag about it to get more investors.

None of these groups can replicate their results beyond the initial claims. This is strong evidence that positive results in RV are just due to selection bias, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias. If those investment groups could actually replicate their results, they would still be major names and others would be actively trying to copy them since it should only take a couple of millions of dollars to find capable RV candidates.

The non-skeptical view is that if people try to predict the stock market via RV, they will interfere with the future and their prediction ability will decrease. But when weighing this hypothesis against the hypothesis that RV is just selection bias, the latter wins due to Occam's Razor.

[fumeux_fume]

Just go to wikipedia for the mundane explanation: data leakage to the judges of poorly designed experiments. Absolutely zero reproducibility.

[stevenhuang]

You are wrong. There has been many reproductions. People don't study it because there is no known mechanism of action and so it's fringe.

Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician

> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html

[krackers]

Before you can define statistical significance, you have to clearly define the success criteria. From what I see, remote viewing produces vague results, so some amount of human interpretation is necessarily. What counts as a "hit"? If you look at "verified" examples from the social-rv site GP mentioned, some of them match only in an abstract sense, but are still counted as a success. The more reliable thing would be to remote view a coin flip and have the person say heads or tails, but that's not how the stargate experiments were defined and I haven't been able to find any trials like this.

Edit: Actually I did find at least one experiment-ish, which is more precognition rather than remote viewing to determine crypto coin price trends [1]. Seems 53 correct predictions, 50 incorrect predictions which is well within statistical chance.

Also seems the social-rv GP linked will eventually have a remote-viewing for real-world events prediction-market type thing. Now that's interesting, and they cleverly avoid it devolving into a traditional prediction market by introducing indirection where two images are arbitrarily assigned to the outcome (true/false) and the person RVs the image, without knowledge of which outcome that image represents.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/lg6sf2/precognit...

[the_af]

> Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician

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?

[chasemc67]

There have been many reproductions.

social-rv is our attempt to do yet another reproduction, as publicly as possibly. And we got the same result

[MontyCarloHall]

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/808/

[jjk166]

> For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund.

Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio?

Remote viewing is bunk, but not because hedge funds in their omniscience have determined it to be unprofitable.

[squigz]

> Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio?

Because they didn't know about such a vaccine. We know that remote viewing "exists"

I think that GP's point - that, if such things exist, they would actually be utilized - is a good one. The framing might not be great but it's also not entirely relevant. You could just as easily make a non-capitalism example - like why don't fire departments use them

[jjk166]

The concept of vaccines had been known for centuries during the 1940s. No one had ever gotten a polio vaccine to work. Imagine if they had concluded since it had never been done that it therefore could not work.

We are aware of remote viewing as a concept but it does not currently exist - no one has ever gotten it to work. There are very good reasons to think it can't work, but the lack of a practical implementation alone is not such a reason.

The issue is not capitalism specifically, it just frequently takes that form. Firefighters not doing something is equally fallacious proof of impossibility.

[kjkjadksj]

The issue with remote viewing as the CIA understood it was not that it didn’t work. By all means there are documents that indicated it did work. The difficulty however was that the training program was unreliable and insufficient to establish a reliable pipeline to competency like other military skills.

[the_af]

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.

[mnky9800n]

I would be supportive of blood magic if it made things work lol

[buildsjets]

Don’t knock it till you try it:

I call upon thе blood-moon goddess for I have but one request.

I've laid the altar, charged the crystals, the circle, I have blessed.

Then make clean && make all, BOOM compiles with no errors or warnings every time.

Witchcraft.

[lijok]

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.

[the_af]

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?

Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.

[lijok]

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?

[the_af]

> 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.

> Maybe stay out of it

???