🚀 go-pugleaf

Sylvia Else wrote:
> 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.

Conceivable, but for the time being it is probably more useful to 
establish whether the person claiming to have this 'power' is actually 
doing anything psychic.

> 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.

Yes, but at lest the first person to objectively demonstrate any psychic 
ability will win the various prizes offered, which would make him 
'special' in a different way.

>>> 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.
<snip>

It is still far too small a test set for this protocol, but if the 
effect was significant you would expect to see 5 out of 5 being a common 
enough result to have already shown up. If the effect is no more than 
"better than random" then it would probably take at least a few hundred 
samples to decide the issue.