🚀 go-pugleaf

Sylvia Else wrote:
> On 18/09/2010 4:20 PM, Richard Cornford wrote:
<snip>
>> But a question remains; what precisely is your supposed
>> paranormal ability? Apparently it is not an unqualified
>> ability to answer questions, and it certainly is not an
>> ability to tell people what they are thinking, so what is
>> it? (And before you say it, thinking that you are Napoleon
>> is not a paranormal ability, just an abnormal condition.)
>
> It appears to be an ability to channel responses that have
> a better than random correlation with the questions.

Disregarding all the caveats about the nature of those questions.

> The test protocol involves shuffling the response, and letting
> another person assign responses to questions.

That is a test protocol. I don't think it is a good enough protocol to 
decide whether your interpretation of his ability is possessed by its 
owner. On the other hand, it probably is good enough protocol to see if 
something interesting is going on, given a large enough sample set. That 
is, fine as a preliminarily to see if it is worth going on.

> If a power exists (albeit, as BigLN observed, either in Herc, or in 
> the other person) then the matchings produces by the
> other person should have a better than random correlation
> with matchings produced by Herc.

So far the results I have seen from this protocol show people failing to 
make the 'correct' associations, and Herc fixating on the best (3 out of 
5) results and dismissing all of the 'incorrect' responses. So while 
looking for a "better than random correlation" suggests taking all the 
results together and looking at the average/mean/etc., the reality is 
that nobody is recording the totals and Herc is cherry picking the best 
outcomes to reinforce his beliefs.

People who are asked to make associations will make associations. For 
example, if a question relates to sporting activity and one of the 
responses includes the words "win" or "lose" people will make that 
association, or if a question asks how long someone will live and an 
answer includes the word "funeral" then those are likely to be put 
together. And on average (or rather at the lowest common denominator) 
people will tend to make the same associations, there will be noticeable 
patters in how people respond. Which means that if the set of 
questions/responses is too small you risk getting correlations that are 
meaningless.

In the late 1980s I was occasionally willing to talk to the Jehovah's 
Witnesses that showed up at my door. One of the things they thought 
would impress me was a list of 9 steps in biblical creation that they 
asserted corresponded with the order of creation as determined by 
science. They asserted that the odds that the bible could get these 
steps in the correct order by chance was too great for that to be 
coincidence; if you randomly sorted this list the odds of its coming out 
in the correct order were small. However, the order of the list was 
never going to be random, it would be assembled by humans. One of the 
items in the list was labelled "The Beginning", and what sort of human 
is going to put an item labelled the "The Beginning" at any place other 
than first when chronologically sorting a list? Other items in the list 
included 'separation of land and water' and 'the creation of fish', so 
who is going to put fish before water? If you are going to test 
something against random outcomes it seems like a good idea to have 
something that is genuinely random in the comparison.

Fortunately for this particular protocol Herc's associations tend to be 
so indirect/tenuous/convoluted that ordinary people won't see them at 
all. So the protocol's ability to produce false positives is unlikely to 
be a problem in reality.

> Of course, as psychic powers go, it would have to be one of
> the most useless,

Nobody said that they had to be useful (what use is spoon bending?).

> but consistent above random performance would indicate that something 
> strange is going on.

Yes they would, or at least given sufficiently large numbers of both 
participants doing the sorting and question/answer sets. It would still 
be necessary for Herc to see the results for what they were, rather than 
only looking at the best hits and ignoring everything else. And he would 
have to agree that his supposed ability was to produce results that have 
a "better than random correlation", else showing that they don't have a 
better than random correlation is not showing anything that is 
meaningful for him. This is why it is important that he pin down 
precisely what his ability is, and why he will never do that. If he pins 
it down to something precise it can be shown to not exist, but if he 
only makes grandiose general claims he can keep on asserting that it is 
unreasonable/unrealistic to expect him to live up to them (even though 
it actually isn't).

> We don't know why Herc believes he has this power,

It is still not particularly clear what exactly this 'power' that Herc 
claims to have actually is. He says he can answer questions, but does 
not answer questions, he says he can read minds, but cannot tell someone 
what they are thinking, and he is apparently not willing to be pinned 
down to "better than random correlation".

> since he's clearly never performed a proper test. Randi's
> post-facto rationalisation hypothesis seems plausible,
> and even likely.

Given Herc's attitude towards Ockham's razor I don' think the most 
direct description that explains the evidence is going to be appealing.