'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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".