Divinity Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.
Grouped by the kind of thing the question is about, so you can go straight to the entity type you work on.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Showing 2 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
Studies 2
The Autoganzfeld Series
Does the ganzfeld effect survive a pre-registered multi-laboratory replication meeting the standard set in the 1986 Hyman-Honorton communique?
Open The Autoganzfeld Series
Why It Is Open Hyman and Honorton wrote down, jointly and in advance, what a decisive ganzfeld study would look like. No series run since has been accepted by both sides as meeting it. Two later meta-analyses, Milton and Wiseman in 1999 and Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio in 2010, reach opposite conclusions on differently defined study pools, so the accumulated literature cannot settle it either.
What Would Settle It A pre-registered adversarial collaboration with laboratories on both sides of the dispute, an analysis plan agreed and lodged before data collection, and a commitment from all parties to publish whatever results.
Expertise Needed Experimental psychology; meta-analysis; pre-registration methodology
Question posed in
A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld Controversy, Ray Hyman, Charles Honorton.
The Global Consciousness Project
Would the Global Consciousness Project result survive an event list and set of analysis windows fixed prospectively by an independent party?
Open The Global Consciousness Project
Why It Is Open The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.
What Would Settle It An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.
Expertise Needed Statistics; pre-registration methodology
Question posed in
The Global Consciousness Project, Roger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project).