From my personal point of view, the most wonderful outcome would be serious evidence that Michel H is telepathic.
Indeed. A commonly misplaced criticism of the skeptical approach is that skeptics are ideologically opposed in principle to claims of the paranormal or supernatural. This is emphatically not true. Skeptics would be delighted to discover credible evidence of such things as telepathy, telekenesis, life after death, reincarnation, and so forth. Even skeptics would find it occasionally helpful, for example, to read their spouses' minds instead of trying to guess their way through conflict resolution. Even skeptics are at times confronted with the prospect of mortality. Even in the purest scientific sense, valid proof of telepathy would allow us to be witnesses to a groundbreaking discovery of something that has been elusive for centuries. Such opportunities rarely arise more than once in a scientist's life.
No, skeptics aren't opposed to the notion of telepathy. They oppose the misuse of science to deceive people into thinking they or someone else is telepathic when the evidence doesn't support that. Critics of skepticism mistake the objection over the abuse of method for objection to the implications of the question being tested. And, of course, we object to deception in general. We advocate critical thinking because the most practical benefit of thinking critically is defending oneself against the efforts of others to injure, defraud, or control. Naturally we oppose people who knowingly use trickery to pretend to have paranormal gifts and thereby defraud gullible, innocent people. I don't see that Michel is doing anything like that, so let's be clear on that point. But he is, to some degree, being inconsequentially deceptive.
I suppose we aren’t ever going to have a test that provides serious evidence, but I do find the question of how to design such a test interesting. (This isn’t the area of statistics I know, so it’s an opportunity for me to learn something.)
Statistical models certainly play a role, but I find the protocol design more instructive on these points, especially since various claimants to gifts such as telepathy and telekinesis have been remarkably successful at fooling even hardened scientists with relatively simple stage magic or common mentalist tricks.
For example, in another thread we spoke of a practitioner who made oil appear on his hands. Palming capsules filled with various liquids so that they can seemingly appear out of nowhere is a staple of stage magic, and of basic stagecraft when we need to make blood appear as if from a wound. Simple ways to do this include holding the capsule between the bases of two fingers, holding the capsule against the palm with the tip of a finger, and holding it between the meaty lobes of the palm. Any competent magician can show you how to do this. Most actors can do it competently with only a little practice. With the aid of some Latex and some higher-end stage makeup techniques, I can arrange for a conformal sachet to supply fluid to your hand on command such that the pre-effect appearance is nearly undetectable even if I am holding the practitioner's hands in my own and performing a close visual inspection.
A protocol to preclude this might, for example, including the experimenter placing gloves on the claimant's hands, which have been previously carefully inspected for hidden packets of oil. Similarly, the gloves will have been secured against tampering and inspected by the experimenter. if the claim is that the oil is produced spontaneously in the hands, then the claimant should be able to generate it with the gloves in place. The gloves hamper the ability to do it by the customary stage magic methods.
Protocols to detect telepathy have to preclude all the customary -- and extremely clever -- ways that previous claimants have appeared to succeed. This can be very difficult. The example I commonly cite is the one in which Penn and Teller purported to be able to direct the subject to where a playing card had been hidden on the set, the identify of the card having been named previously, arbitrarily by the subject. P&T revealed that the secret of the trick is to hide all 52 cards in different places on the set and memorize where each was. Protocols to eliminate such things as uncommon feats of memory are difficult to devise.
One problem is that Michel feels there is no reason for participants to tell the truth.
He thinks we don't want to see him succeed. Instead, we don't want to see him cheat. What a skeptic wants most out of something like this is good data. Skepticism means following the data wherever they lead. Our objection against Michel's approach is not that he got an answer that appeared to confirm telepathy, but that he obviously cheated to get it. it's the cheating, not the truth value of the answer, that matters.
Then of course there is the inevitable rhetoric when tests fail. Claimants to the Randi prize and similar contests have complained that suitable protocols are, instead, fixed to deny them success. Remarkable feats that occur only when the claimant controls the circumstances of the test seem to be
de rigueur. It seems to be important to sustain the belief that skeptics will cheat to make tests fail when they are acting to prevent claimants from cheating to make the test succeed.
