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Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:37:26 +0200
From: Peter Bancel
Subject: Re: 9/11 and the GCP
I'm happy reading these posts, because I feel that there is
general
agreement on many of the issues.
Regarding distance dependence, York states correctly that no
specific
distance dependence is required, but that *some* distance
dependence
is implied by the notion of field reg; alternatively, an
infinite
uniform effect could still be imagined as a "field", but a
trivial
one (and uninteresting one in the sense it would not lead
to
further hypotheses about distance). James seems to agree in
saying a
1/r^2 was mentioned simply as an example. York's "best
guess" of a
drop off at distances beyond the earth's size is a way of
thinking
about field-reg in the absence of data sensitive enough to
probe
shorter distances.
Regarding the general GCP hypothesis, Roger is completely
correct
that the formal experiment tests a valid hypothesis. The
issue -
which I didn't explicitly go into in an earlier post - is
that the
hypothesis is so broad that it doesn't tell us much beyond
simply
demonstrating that something is going on in the data. I have
always
felt that this generality of the GCP hypotheses is a
brilliant
approach. I frequently come back to a quote from Anthony
Freeman in a
discussion of consciousness studies. Alluding to John
Searle, he
helpfully lays out the obvious when dealing with research in
a nacent
field:
"The importance of not overdefining the topic ahead of
investigation
is routinely stressed by John Searle... He distinguishes
between an
analytic definition, which is arrived at only at the end of
an
investigation, and a commonsense definition, which comes at
the start
and serves to identify the target of the research program.
He advises
taking as a starting point a simple statement such as this
one:
Consciousness consists in the those states of awareness that
begin in
the morning when we wake from dreamless sleep and continue
throughout
the day until we fall asleep again, or fall into a coma or
die."
It's easy to see how this carries over to the GCP
hypothesis.
As Roger says, he wisely makes a conscious effort to keep
the
hypothesis broad, even including events based on
"anti-hunches". In
statistical terms, the GCP hypothesis is a complex
hyothesis, as
opposed to a simple hypotheses which would have more
interpretive
power, but would possibly not get us very far, given our
ignorance at
this stage.
Regarding fishing, the formal experiment is thus not fishing
at all.
Further, aside from providing a demonstration of some there
there,
the formal experiment delimits where in the mass of data one
might
look further. My role in this happy collaboration has been
to focus
on that. The logical guess is that there should be
additional
anomalous structure (temporal, spatial, etc) in the subset
of data
corresponding to events. And that is what the analysis (we
can drop
calling it fishing) is starting to reveal.
Regarding 9/11, that particular day was so unusual, both as
an event
and in terms of how the data behaved, that it is difficult
to
interpret. It remains an outlier in several aspects. Roger
is right
to emphsize the importance of finding a "data" outlier
precisely
where we have a singularly unusual event. On the other hand,
it is
diffucult to understand in the context of what we have found
in the
analyses, because the data deviations for 9/11 are somewhat
different
than what we characteristicly see in the event data. I think
that the
9/11 data holds some secrets, but I don't yet see how to
unlock them.
We will certainly return to the 9/11 data as we learn more.
best to all,
Peter
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