🚀 go-pugleaf

|-|ercules wrote:
> Peter Bowditch wrote
>> A question was stated. You claimed to be able to "get an
>> answer from God from random quotes of information". You
>> did not say that the answer would be in any book, but that
>> it would come "from God from random quotes of information".
>> You offered no random quotes. Therefore you offered no
>> answers. Therefore you failed a preliminary test and
>> nothing further needed to be done.
>
> For your FINAL test you have to break 1,000,000:1 odds.
>
> Not sure what your preliminary requirement is but JREF
> is just 1000:1 odds.
>
> I.e. to pass a preliminary all I have to do is roll a 6 on
> a dice 4 times.
>
> To guess Barry's questions right, it would be equivalent of
> selecting one single atom out of every atom in the Universe,
> such are the odds.
>
> Which is harder?

Your assessment of odds seems very arbitrary. The total number of words 
in all the languages spoken by humans is going to be far fewer than the 
number of atoms in the universes. If you are asked for 10 names they 
will come from the total set of words.

Your problem here mostly stems from your inability to formulate your 
claim such that it precisely describes what it is that you think you can 
do. If you make the unqualified assertion that you can answer questions 
then you can expect the testing of that assertion to be cantered around 
the asking of questions, where the failure to answer will be taken as 
failing the test.

The odds of correctly answering the questions does not come into it, 
until or unless you qualify your claim in such a way as to exclude 
questions where the odds of guessing the answer are too long, or where 
the odds are anything but meaningless (if the latter is what you 
actually want).

For example, if you qualified your claim such that "for any question 
where the accuracy of any response is undeterminable (such as a 'should 
I do ... ?' question, where it is not possible to compare the 
consequences of 'doing' with those of 'not doing' as it is never 
possible to do both) you can generate a response, where if that response 
were inserted into a list of, say, 9 random quotes (genuinely randomly 
generated) from the same book, a minimum of 90% of ordinary humans would 
be able to pick out the psychically generated response from that list as 
the most apt/appropriate response to the question", then such a 
formulation would not be tested with questions that you were expected to 
accurately answer. Indeed test protocols for such a claim should be 
fairly easy to devise, and many of them would be completely acceptable 
'sceptic organisations'.

It is the vague claims that encompass things that you clearly are not 
capable of doing, such as 'answering questions' or 'reading minds', that 
are going to leave you running around in circles not being taken 
seriously by anyone.

If you win a paranormal prize by being able to do what you say you can 
do (where what you say you can do would be paranormal) then it seems 
like a good idea to be very precise about what it is exactly you are 
saying you can do.