--- In [email protected], "salyavin808" <fintlewoodlewix@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], Shain McVay <shainm307@> wrote: > > > > Whoever wrote that never truly did their research. I mean when they did the > > Washington DC study, they had a whole bunch of skeptics in with them making > > sure the study was conducted correctly. When they did the study not only > > did all the skeptics agree to all the ways the study was conducted, but > > also they agreed to the findings of the study. The Maharishi people weren't > > the only one's directing and analyzing the study. The findings of just > > this one study are overwhelming in presenting that the Maharishi Effect is > > true. Now they've done the studies over 90 times and they've found the same > > thing happen everytime - the crime rate goes down.\ > > If it's overwhelming how come no-one believes it? It looks like > a bunch of unconvincing statistics to me, and even if it had > dropped by 20% the crime rates fluctuate by that much all the > time, if you can't tell if they're there or not it isn't of much > use!
If you think about it a moment, you'll realize your claim doesn't make much sense. Non-TM-related crime rate studies are published all the time, so obviously there are ways to distinguish normal fluctuations from changes that are the result of specific factors (reduced crime due to higher numbers of police, e.g.). "Looks like a bunch of unconvincing statistics to me" seems to me roughly equivalent in its rigor to the dismissal of Heinz Pagels's statements about consciousness and QM on the grounds that a lot of discoveries in QM have been made since he made the statements. > And the Lebanon study was worse as one of the WPAs took place > in Holland and they still claimed it as proof! If you're referring to the study published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, I believe you're mistaken. There was only one extended WPA involved, and it took place in Jerusalem. If this effect > travels via a field the effect would be dramatically reduced > by the time got to lebanon - it wasn't so it makes me wonder > what they think they were testing. Again, this is incorrect. All the meditators were in Jerusalem. My memory of the war isn't > one of conflict seperated by periods of calm so again, if you > can't tell they are there..... Another statement not exactly distinguished by its rigor. You might want to take a look at the abstract of the study: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/174032?uid=3739864&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=56192438703 http://tinyurl.com/d4xxcqv It was not predicted that the WPA would result in salyavin remembering that there were periods of conflict alternating with periods of calm in Lebanon during the study period (August and September 1983). > How would it work anyway? Terms like "creating coherence in > collective consciousness" don't actually make a whole lot > of sense, what is the mechanism that can make people do > something different at a distance without them realising? This is a reasonable question. But the study results seemed to indicate there must be such a mechanism, even if we don't know what it is yet. > At the very best the washington study is like tossing a coin > and getting five heads in a row, impressive but if you do it > 100 times it evens itself out. I forget what the p-values for the DC study were, but they were calculated on the basis of the results to be much less than a 1-in-100 chance of the same results occurring. > All paranormal research has > done this the IA course has been running for years in tandem > with huge groups of meditators and the yagya programme, can > anyone honestly say things have got better in the last 5 years? > And don't give me any "phase transition" crap, if that was a > part of the theory why didn't it happen in Washington? Over eight weeks?? The fact is that the ME theory is fundamentally unfalsifiable. It can in principle be shown to exist (as the DC and Lebanon results suggested) but not *not* to exist. For example, with the Iowa course, we cannot know whether things would have been far worse if the course were not taking place. (You can always postulate that things would have been *better* rather than worse without the course, but then you'd have to acknowledge that there *is an effect*, just the reverse of the one the TM folks claim.) > Case not proved.
