Reality shopping; a consumer's guide to new age hokum

Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986 by Alan M. MacRobert

2. Cloaks of Fuzz

This next guideline grows out of the first. Watch out for paranormal phenomena that are cloaked in noise.

"Noise" in this sense means any kind of confusion, static, or fuzz that obscures what you're looking for. Leonard's moon marvels are an example, lost as they are in the graininess of his photographs at the limits of resolution, where everything gets fuzzy and random.

Another example comes from the journal of the American Society for Psychical Research on my father's bookshelves. One psychic investigator theorized that psychokinesis, the mind's alleged ability to move objects by will power, might depend on what elements the objects were made of. Zinc might respond differently than zirconium. The straightforward way to test this would be to suspend a piece of each element in such a way that the slightest force would move it, then sit back and concentrate on each one to see which moves in response. Of course, the objects would probably sit there and do nothing. The experimenter seemed to unconsciously realize this, so he instead fashioned dice out of different elements and rolled them thousands of times down a sloping board, concentrating on what numbers he wanted to turn up.

Obviously, the amount of force needed to influence bouncing dice is far greater than the force needed, say, to deflect a needle suspended on a string in a vacuum. But the rolling dice added statistical noise to the experiment, giving the researcher something to work with. His results were not clear-cut, but with a statistics-based experimental design a researcher can fiddle around endlessly, matching good and bad runs to mood, the weather, phases of the moon, sunspots, and so on, making a nice thick report for a psychical research journal.

Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University pioneered the statistical approach to the study of psychic phenomena in the 1930s, and it still dominates the experimental design of modern parapsychologists, who seem to delight in devising new ways to make their experiments more complex and the results more confusing. As Albert Einstein wrote of Rhine's experiments in 1946: "I regard it as very strange that the spatial distance between the [telepathic] subjects has no relevance to the statistical [ESP] experiments. This suggests to me a very strong indication that a nonrecognized source of systematic errors may have been involved.

This data-to-noise ratio can be applied to many popular paranormal claims, such as the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud is an ancient cloth bearing the image of a mournful looking man. It is widely claimed to be the burial cloth of Jesus, imprinted by a miracle, though it turned up in a church in the 14th century and is not known to have had a prior history. A team of modern Christian scientists has produced volumes of analyses of the Shroud in an attempt to demonstrate its extraordinary characteristics. But recently, secular researchers found that the image contained a red pigment commonly used by 14th-century artists (a conclusion that few newspapers bothered to report -- the public always prefer a mystery). Even before this discovery, the Shroud could have been evaluated by the data-to-noise ratio guideline.