🚀 go-pugleaf

On 18/09/2010 2:38 PM, |-|ercules wrote:
> "Richard Cornford" <Richard@litotes.demon.co.uk> wrote ...
>> |-|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.
>
> I would still have to do 30 THIRTY correct channels running and the odds
> are in the realm of Avagadaros number squared : 1 to be correct.
>
> I stated I get the answers from quotes, all skeptics assume any mention
> of 'psychic' means they can ask for lotto numbers or fail.
>
>
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> There is a CLAIM, and then there is a mutually worked together test
> protocol
> which details all the specifications and limits of the claim.
>
> I've designed 10 TEN test protocols on my own, 2 to Sylvia's satisfaction
> but skeptics ignore them.

I remember one. Not sure about two. But it doesn't matter. You want to 
go directly from inventing a reasonable test protocol to consuming the 
time and effort of skeptics organisation members when those people could 
reasonably anticipate that you will fail and be a complete waste of 
their resources.

The next step after devising a protocol is to show that you can succeed 
with it. Only when you have credible third parties who support your 
claim can you expect skeptics organisations to take notice. In the case 
of JREF, you're also required to have a media presence.

> They ask for lotto numbers instead.

Some do. I've yet to see the proposed answers to BigLN's questions and 
the MD5 hash of the video in which those answers were produced.

Sylvia.