From: Barry Markovsky Newsgroups: sci.skeptic Subject: Re: Maharishi Effect: New Critique Date: Fri, 3 Feb 1995 13:03:54 -0600 Organization: University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA Lines: 60 Distribution: world Message-ID: References: , <1995Jan30.194215.2727@sfov1.verifone.com> <3gmbkd$ef4@news.primenet.com> <3gp7dr$nqf@news.primenet.com> <3gsh46$6p8@news.primenet.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: blue.weeg.uiowa.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII In-Reply-To: <3gsh46$6p8@news.primenet.com> On 3 Feb 1995, Lawson English wrote, responding to Kal Marchi (kal@uh.edu) > : Of course. That's why I suggested concentrating on a small neighborhood, > : say, eight blocks square. Maybe 20,000 people. SQRT(1% * 20000) = about > : 14. Twenty would be almost overdoing it. Surely there are 20 civic-minded > : meditators living in DC who are willing to do this? > > > Now you're just baiting me, no? Statistics don't work well with smaller > groups. That's not quite right. It's not the group size *per se* that matters, but the number of observations on which statistical inferences are based. I could do a perfectly legitimate (from a statistical point of view) study whereby 10 Sidhi-meditators sit in a room and meditate either at randomized intervals or on randomized days, and measure moods, task performances, etc. for "targets" in a nearby room over a number of "trials." Assuming no information gets to the targets with regard to the on-set and off-set of the group meditation, I'd have a legitimate experiment. (The greater the number of targets, by the way, the more reliable, in the statistical sense, the measures of their responses.) > In the case of the proposed effect of group hopping, we are > looking at a small group of participants. Who knows what (if it even > exists) the threshold would be for the effect? Certainly, from Physics > analogies, we wouldn't expect to find statistical effects on a larger > population from a group as small as 14 individuals, even if the simple > arithmetic suggested that we would... In the 1988 Journal of Conflict Resolution article, Orme-Johnson et al. suggest that their mathematical model of the Maharishi Effect should work for "values of N over 100", referring to the equation ME = aN1 + bN2^2 where N1 is the number of regular meditators (I'm not sure what they're called), and N2 is the number of Sidhi meditators. The "^2" indicates the square of N2. No basis for the "100" minimum was mentioned in that article. > In other words, even if the properties of a system suggest that > the square-root of 1% of the elements of the system can have an effect on > the entire system, no-one seriously looks for effects on a larger system > from only 14 elements. Not in Statistical Mechanics they don't. Makes sense, but as far as I know, the principles of statistical mechanics aren't invoked by the researchers as a theoretical basis for the ME claims. But anyway, intuitively, if I sit in the center of a circle of 14 TM-Sidhi meditators, only 100 of whom are presumed to have profound effects on 1,000,000 people at unspecified distances from the group, well, shouldn't I expect to feel *something*? The theoretical model indicates enough coherence there to influence close to 20,000 people. Perhaps the proof in the pudding would be to develop non-biological indicators for the phenomenon. Are there physicists out there who could suggest a way that one could construct a meter whose needle deflects when changes are induced in the Maharishi Technology Unified Field? ............................................................................ Barry Markovsky / Dept. of Sociology / U. of Iowa / Iowa City, IA 52242 Ph: 319.335.2490 Fax: 319.335.2509 E-MAIL: barry-markovsky@uiowa.edu ............................................................................