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Apparently Hot Tub Time Machine was a documentary.

At least, that's what I read when I lougled it.

This guy just ruined his academic career...whats left of it.
53% is not a statistically significant number to determine cause, or correlation. Its a totally useless figure. To compare it to casino's wins or election results is a joke.

What are you talking about? Do you even know what statistical test you use to determine if 53% is significantly different to 50%? And why do you think that has anything to do with determining cause? And why do you mention correlation?

I should add that I'm not defending Bem's results -- I think there are myriad alternative, more parsimonious, less bizarre explanations.

>> ^charliem:

This guy just ruined his academic career...whats left of it.
53% is not a statistically significant number to determine cause, or correlation. Its a totally useless figure. To compare it to casino's wins or election results is a joke.

*promote

There is an excellent article in Skeptical Inquirer (Vol 35., No 2, Mar/Apr 2011) that decimates Bem's research.

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Friday, January 28th, 2011 8:50pm PST - promote requested by berticus.

http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/back_from_the_future
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/response_to_alcocks_back_from_the_future_comments_on_bem
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/response_to_bems_comments

>> ^charliem:

This guy just ruined his academic career...whats left of it.
53% is not a statistically significant number to determine cause, or correlation. Its a totally useless figure. To compare it to casino's wins or election results is a joke.


You don't have enough information to say that 53% isn't statistically significant. It COULD be. It's NOT in this case, because this jackass is embarrassing his university with this horse shit, but it could be.

Basically the issue is this: he did some significance test, and found that the distribution of votes in this porn experiment only had a 1 in 100 chance of coming from 50/50 random events. 1 in 100, that's pretty small. Of course, he ran 200 experiments while looking for such an effect, so it's EXPECTED that he would have outlier vote distributions like this. And he grouped and massaged the experimental data in very odd ways to get a set of votes that were quite far from chance.

Here is a great article that points out why the psy research was badly flawed, actually performs the correct statistical tests (finding the results are not in fact significant) and examines the bigger question of why psychologists mis-learn and mis-apply statistics.

http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pcd%20pubs/wagenmakersetal.pdf

"...................Do these results mean
that psi can now be considered real, replicable, and reliable?

We think that the answer to this question is negative, and that the take home message
of Bem’s research is in fact of a completely different nature. One of the discussants of the
Utts review paper made the insightful remark that “Parapsychology is worth serious study.
(...) if it is wrong [i.e., psi does not exist], it offers a truly alarming massive case study of
how statistics can mislead and be misused.” (Diaconis, 1991, p. 386). And this, we suggest,
is precisely what Bem’s research really shows. Instead of revising our beliefs regarding psi,
Bem’s research should instead cause us to revise our beliefs on methodology: the field of
psychology currently uses methodological and statistical strategies that are too weak, too
malleable, and offer far too many opportunities for researchers to befuddle themselves and
their peers.

The most important flaws in the Bem experiments, discussed below in detail, are the
following: (1) confusion between exploratory and confirmatory studies; (2) insufficient attention
to the fact that the probability of the data given the hypothesis does not equal the
probability of the hypothesis given the data (i.e., the fallacy of the transposed conditional);
(3) application of a test that overstates the evidence against the null hypothesis, an unfortunate
tendency that is exacerbated as the number of participants grows large. Indeed, when
we apply a Bayesian t-test (G¨onen, Johnson, Lu, & Westfall, 2005; Rouder, Speckman,
Sun, Morey, & Iverson, 2009) to quantify the evidence that Bem presents in favor of psi,
the evidence is sometimes slightly in favor of the null hypothesis, and sometimes slightly in
favor of the alternative hypothesis. In almost all cases, the evidence falls in the category
“anecdotal”, also known as “worth no more than a bare mention”............."