'Are You There, Spenser?' Attempts at 'PK by Committee' in a Seance-like Situation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term PK by committee refers to a group psi effect that was hypothesised by D. Scott Rogo (1986) as being more consistent than a psi effect produced by an individual psychic. The Philip group (Toronto, Canada), formed by I. M. Owen with M. Sparrow (1976), was essentially a 'committee' of individuals attempting to elicit PK effects. The Philip group inspired the formation of the Spenser group (Adelaide, South Australia), which was comprised initially of a team of eight professional and amateur paranormal investigators. The Spenser group attempted to generate a fictional entity, the sea captain Spenser Blake (1770-1850), with whom conversation was attempted. No visual manifestations of Spenser were sought or produced. Spenser group sitters' attempts at table-tilting and table levitation met with failure. Doubt remains over the cause of some rapping and scratching sounds. Attempts at influencing a candle-flame psychokinetically produced a statistically significant effect. The more salient anomalous effects produced across a series of 27 sittings are reported and attempts to explain them in rational terms are presented.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".