🚀 go-pugleaf

On 19/09/2010 3:54 AM, Richard Cornford wrote:
> 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.

It's conceivable that it's a power possessed by everyone, or almost 
everyone, and I suppose test runs would have to be made to exclude the 
possibility that Herc is merely a person who's noticed it. Though were 
that the case, Herc would have made a discovery, but would also turn out 
not to be special, which I suspect wouldn't be very happy about.

>
>> 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.

Yes, to the small extent that it has been applied, the protocol seems to 
be falsifying Herc's belief.

>
> 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.

Bear in mind that although the other person is applying their mind to 
doing the matching, Herc's choices are supposedly random except for the 
alleged channelling ability. The details of the protocol have to prevent 
him from choosing answers (the version tried in the newsgroup doesn't do 
that). So there should be no correlation between the other person's 
matchings and Herc's matchings, even if some of the questions and 
responses have a particularly attractive association.

Certainly one needs a large enough set, and Herc would have to show an 
ability to do this repeatedly for it to be at all convincing.

>
> 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?).

One might want bent spoons. At the very least it had a demonstrable 
ability to earn money for the person who claimed (albeit falsely) to 
have the power. I would anticipate considerable difficulty for Herc 
obtaining the required public presence before being tested by JREF 
(threatening to poison food doesn't count) even if Herc had the power, 
because it is so obscure.

>
>> 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.

Sylvia.