http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_%28listening_device%29

A passive/driven listening device invented by Leon Theremin, Soviet inventor of the surf rock/50′s B movie musical instrument (the theremin).  Not quite remote viewing, but with the right device it’s remote listening and I doubt many people were pointing to Leon Theremin as an inventor of spy apparata.

So in other words maybe remote viewing isn’t a realistic concern, but going by Clarke’s law there are probably many possible technologies that look a whole lot like remote viewing.  In this view, it’s worth asking what it would take to defend against RV as an indication of what it would take to defend against these other technologies.

In other words, citation needed.

However, you could start actually researching the actual IC with either one of these helpful resources:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/index.html

http://www.loyola.edu/departments/academics/political-science/strategic-intelligence/index.html

http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/lehman/guides/intell.html

Seems too far fetched? This “ancient” (2008) web article points at delivering images directly from the brain to a computer screen, something that was considered science fiction (bad science fiction, at that) in the not-too-distant 1980s: http://www.physorg.com/news148193433.html

Okay, okay… you want something practical. In the 1990s, say, an invisibility cloak would have seemed like a silly thing to consider when designing future strategies. Fast forward to 2010, and we’re tantalizingly close to having a practical invisibility cloak (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Weekend/scientists-step-closer-real-invisibility-cloak/story?id=10155543)… all science, no woo. The futurist’s contingency for this sort of emergent tech would certainly come in handy, now wouldn’t it?

The point is, developing contingencies for things that seem to be in the realm of fantasy _now_ is exactly part of the futurist’s job. We, as a species, have an interesting tendency to make fantastic things _real_ in one way or another… so long as we don’t get too comfortable with our assumptions.

Despite warnings about its safety, Japanese regulators from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the sixreactors at Fukushima Daiichi just one month before a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami damaged reactors and caused a meltdown.

What makes Fukushima *not* a black swan (and, conversely, an avoidable disaster due to human greed and incompetence) is the fact that some people *did* prospectively predict that there was a problem.  That ineffective (and possibly corrupt) regulatory agencies did nothing to heed that advice does not take away the fact that *some people* identified problems with the site, thus breaking the third requirement for a black swan – because if their advice had been heeded in time, the accident would not have happened (and it was always going to be the case that there was going to be a large earthquake and tsunami).

And from the Wikipedia entry on remote viewing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing]:

For the largest paranormal research institution, the James Randi Educational Foundation, out of all of the applicants who applied for the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, nobody has even passed the preliminary tests.

Sounds like a non-starter to me.

At the bottom of the home page for the site – which calls itself the “Institute for the Future” – you will note that the copyright notice is dated 2009.

Thus, some of you may be making hysterical remarks about the historical or vice versa…

I truly love the work of IFTF, but some very broad strokes were painted here.

About Fukishima not being a black swan; can we really say it was poor planning and bad management?  It seems to me to be a case of experts with incredible resources doing the best they can to eliminate or mitigate all threats and then being surprised about something “impossible” that they couldn’t plan for.  If Fukishima isn’t a black swan, how about 9/11? Global warming? The Titanic? The breaking of the curse of the Bambino by Boston in 2004?  In retrospect, the evidence was there for all these but something about our worldview/evidence gathering/smarts as a species wasn’t up to snuff and they were impossible.  I look forward to seeing where others take this line of reasoning.

P.S. In reference to another comment in this thread, has RV been “proven” to be impossible? I don’t “Person A remote viewed Situation B” is a disprovable statement.

It’s not that people are willy-nilly disregarding potential scenarios as impossible, it’s that they’re willing to disregard as many scenarios as they think they can get away with.  Come up with a technique that’s twice as good at accurately predicting and mitigating risk for the same cost, and they’ll simply spend half as much money on it…at best.  And that’s my prediction.

So that means that we should expect (and I would argue are certainly experiencing) a growing incidence of events that would have been rationally rated low-probability, or not even considered, a given amount of time previously. The problem is that as our probability distribution flattens and spreads out, our overall allocation efficiency suffers, because our analytical tools are best at the center, where our models are reliable and our information complete. We don’t have the requisite methods or concepts available to usefully evaluate, compare, and map many heterogeneous unlikely events.

It sounds somewhere between dry and alarmist, but I really find it pretty inspiring. In global practice and in theory, we’re pushing the horizons into a faster, unlikelier world, where our understanding of the possible and the real transforms to fit a larger, more uncertain and chaotic domain.

Methodology: A pretentious way of saying “method”.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Research+methodology

The irony isn’t lost on me…

From Merriam-Webster, the first definition of methodology: “a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline : a particular procedure or set of procedures”

Your definition is the second one.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/methodology

Methodology = The Study of Method.

A more accurate title would be “A new method for studying world events”.(Not that it actually matters that much).  :-)

Anything else is snake oil.

For all I know there might be a way to remotely spy on people via quantum entanglement or from a topologically higher dimension.

I can’t think of a way to flat out disprove either of those possibilities, but I’m not a scientist.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for someone to actually demonstrate these phenomena, either.

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.

He absolutely emphasizes the lack of prospective predictability here.

If we imagine a new model which takes into account how to allocate these outlier bets, haven’t we just moved the boundary of what we think is likely? We are simply saying that based on a more sophisticated model, those outliers are more likely than the much larger set of outliers upon which we choose not to bet. Aren’t we?

I’m not a philosopher or mathematician, so perhaps I’m just putting too much stock in the analogies without understanding the complexities of the underlying ideas.

Dosing of mental patients, staring at goats, prayer — I’d say they’ve planned for that quite well.

–GimpWii

The point is that this entails an allocation of analytical resources more broadly distributed across the probability spectrum (which includes remote viewing and reincarnation, unless we granted current scientific models sacred doctrinal status while I wasn’t looking), even more so because of the spillover and reinforcement benefits of training to immediately, effectively assimilate and respond to major, unforeseen disruptive events. The ‘call to theorize’ being put forth is a statement to the effect that we need statistical and epistemological methods that are more robust and useful outside the center peak of high-comprehension, high-predictability outcomes.

Rough, but maybe useful analogies I’d draw would be to paraconsistent logics and the thermodynamics of systems far from equilibrium.