PartSkeptic’s Thread for Predictions and Other Matters of Interest

Status
Not open for further replies.
"Study" is a far cry from "research". I can study the bible, for example - this limits my knowledge to that tome. However, I can also "research" the bible, and then gain insight into the knowledge that is presented in said tome, and make rational, nay, critical decisions on its contents.

You may be the human guinea pig, but I'm one of the experts making you run through the maze. You and I both know the effects, but I understand them, whereas you just feel them.

Fair point. Study the bible all one wants. One will learn what the bible claims. Those claims are....meh. And unsupported by anything else.

Research the bible and one discovers a wealth of other data.

The same applies to EMF. Study the crank literature and one reaches the pre-ordained conclusion. Widen the scope and one arrives in an entirely different destination.
 
Your original claim was as follows
The original claim which you pointed out was testable, and which PartSkeptic agreed to test, two months ago, yet which is still untested.

I see no reason to involve a meter in testing that claim.

Your headache should tell you whether the wifi is off or on.
No one with the slightest understanding of the scientific method, and why it needed to be invented, would need any of this stuff explained even once. Yet here we are, still trying to get him to understand why a simple blind test is all that's required to find out if he is on the right track.
 
Does anybody really believe that PS will reconsider his position?
Suppose he does the testing, and gets all the trials correct (It could happen). He will be vindicated. No further testing will be done. All those skeptics didn't know anything... Even though it has already been explained that it only means that further testing with better controls may be indicated.
And if he only gets it right a few times, well, he has already started with the excuses of why the test did/will not work. Nothing it seems will have the result of PS reexamining his theory/believe.

I commend you all for taking so much time to interact with PS, but it will all be fruitless. Not that any of you should stop, I find many of the posts very interesting, and informative.

This has probably already been asked, but if so, I don't recall the answer.
PartSkeptic, What would it take for you to consider that you are incorrect about your source of ills?
 
Does anybody really believe that PS will reconsider his position? Suppose he does the testing, and gets all the trials correct (It could happen). He will be vindicated.
.....and rich

The Center for Inquiry Investigations Group (CIIG), formerly the Independent Investigations Group (IIG), is the largest paranormal investigation group in the world, with allied groups and field investigators in the United States, Canada, the UK, Italy, Australia, South Africa, and Germany. It investigates fringe science, paranormal and extraordinary claims from a rational, scientific viewpoint, and disseminates factual information about such inquiries to the public, and offers a $250,000 prize to anyone who can "prove paranormal ability, under scientific testing conditions"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Inquiry_Investigations_Group
 
It would be interesting to ask CIIG if they would consider being able to tell whether the WiFi was on or off without a measuring instrument a paranormal claim. There's currently no scientific explanation for such an ability so I would think they probably would. Of course PartSkeptic doesn't claim it as such, instead believing that there is some, so far unidentified, natural mechanism by which low levels of non ionising radiation can affect his health.

JREF's position was that, once they'd accepted an application for their paranormal challenge, they would pay up even if it was later established that there was a non paranormal explanation for the applicant's success, and I suspect CIIG would take the same view.
 
It would be interesting to ask CIIG if they would consider being able to tell whether the WiFi was on or off without a measuring instrument a paranormal claim.

I agree. I supply in this link an application form for Partskepic to make his application to prove us all wrong and walk away with $250,000.

"CFI / Facebook / Can you prove the supernatural?"
https://cfiig.org/

However, deluded people never like proof they are deluded. I do not think Partskeptic will make the application. :)
 
You just added that in. Your post in question says nothing about defunding the police.

What, are we playing three card monte here? That's the sort of not-so-slick maneuver, intentional or not, that racks up the false positives.

Add: In 1992 there were HUGE riots following the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King. Predicting racial tensions in 1992 requires a Master of the Obvious degree.
Summary:

(1) PS posts something he wrote in 1992 about racial tensions as evidence of prophetic ability
(2) When it was pointed out there are long standing racial tensions in the US, he boasts about having predicted the movement to defund police
(3) When it was pointed out that his defund prediction never actually occurred, and that the Rodney King riots occurred in 1992, he fell silent.

<whack--a-mole!> What next?
 
Yeah obvious predictions are easy

There will be a panic on Wall Street
A world leader will be assassinated
A famous celebrity will die unexpectedly
There will be tension in the middle east
North Korea will make threats
There will be strikes in France
There will be racial/religious riots in India
Etc., etc.

All of these will happen at some point, no god or predictive ability needed
 
An argument from authority is not a fallacy if the authority is backed by expertise in the field in question. What is a fallacy is to set yourself up, through a narcissism that thinks personal experience is a match for that expertise, as an authority that is equal. You're also arguing from authority, you just appeal to yourself as one.


So when an "expert" says that IN HIS OPINION, he does not know what is causing an effect it is no fallacy because it is backed by expertise in the field.

And this is then extended to say that because AN EXPERT does not know the cause then I cannot be right in proposing a cause?

How many "unknown side-effects" have begun with patients reporting them? Anecdotes from ordinary people suffering them? I would say it is quite typical.

The Epstein-Barr virus was eventually discovered to be real. This was despite the MANY if not ALL experts saying that the sufferers symptoms had no medical cause other than psychological problems.

There are a number of other ailments that have been attributed to "psychological problems" that eventually proved to have a testable physical cause.

Why is this forum SO SURE that my proposal has absolutely no merit?
 
Last edited:
Details, please.

I've done my research, and LO! I've found out how the majority of these more recent meters are made up. Clever little IC available from a couple of manufacturers. Actually, there are a few variants on offer, but the 8 GHz points to one or two specific ones.

I know exactly how the ICs work now. I could give you a detailed breakdown, and show you the pitfalls, but I suspect you'll not even read my posts, so I'll just watch you waste your money trying to come up with another obfuscation.

Of course, you don't actually need a meter at all to do the test we proposed like 7 weeks ago.

Spectrum analyser output? Too many laughing dogs.


Could you give me the details of the IC, please? I WILL read your posts on this and follow up with you. It is exactly this sort of post I hope to get input from. I will, of course, do some searching to find such chips. It will give me some idea of what they do and how they do it.

I am well aware of how poor the spectrum analysis may be. But if it tell me that there was a week signal from a nearby tower at 1800MHz and strong signal from the WiFi modem at 2400 MHz then it is far better than having no idea.

Did you not read my post where I say that the modem can be on but transmitting at low power? Low enough that I do not get a headache?

It is like saying I could hear when the people next door put their radio on. If they are at high volume then I could hear it. If they used headphones instead of speakers, then obviously I would not be able to hear if the radio is on. Can you not see the analogy?

Why are people pushing for a "simple" test that proves very little? If I got 10 out of 10 because each time the power was high then it would work. But if I said it was never on and got 5 out of 10 because the power was low then everyone would never let me forget those test results and would co-mingle them with any future results.
 
Why is this forum SO SURE that my proposal has absolutely no merit?

If we were sure your idea had no merit we would hardly have gone to so much trouble to explain to you how to go about finding out if it had merit, would we?

For myself I think it very unlikely to have merit, for the simple reason that those who were as convinced as you on the same anecdotal grounds have so far failed to demonstrate its merit under scientific test conditions. But I'm not completely dismissing the possibility that you might be the first, which is why I keep encouraging you to do the test you agreed to nine weeks ago today.
 
It would be interesting to ask CIIG if they would consider being able to tell whether the WiFi was on or off without a measuring instrument a paranormal claim. There's currently no scientific explanation for such an ability so I would think they probably would. Of course PartSkeptic doesn't claim it as such, instead believing that there is some, so far unidentified, natural mechanism by which low levels of non ionising radiation can affect his health.

JREF's position was that, once they'd accepted an application for their paranormal challenge, they would pay up even if it was later established that there was a non paranormal explanation for the applicant's success, and I suspect CIIG would take the same view.


It is not paranormal at all. I doubt that they would take the challenge. If they do, it would be easy money.

I am stunned that you can conflate a science claim with a paranormal claim. Look at how sensitive some living creatures are to magnetic and electric fields. Sometimes a huge difference between calculated and observed.
 
Did you not read my post where I say that the modem can be on but transmitting at low power? Low enough that I do not get a headache?

You also said that you knew how to make sure it ran at high power.
 
The original claim was a simple 'if wifi, then headache', no mention of any other consideration at the time.

If PartSkeptic wishes to add things that were not in the original claim, then they need to retract that original claim and add a new claim, then that can be tested.


And God intervened with a serendipitous event to demonstrate that my "simple" test had a flaw. Having the flaw exposed no means that the power of the modem (and possibly the frequency) is a factor. This is not a paranormal experiment - and God was quite right to make me procrastinate in doing it.

So consider the original test retracted and the new one to be "if max power Wifi from modem, then headache in 15 minutes if within 1 meter."

The qualification is the the modem performs the same way each time. With similar frequency for example.
 
Did you not read my post where I say that the modem can be on but transmitting at low power? Low enough that I do not get a headache?
So you are withdrawing your original claim to always be able to tell when the wifi is on? OK then.

It is like saying I could hear when the people next door put their radio on. If they are at high volume then I could hear it. If they used headphones instead of speakers, then obviously I would not be able to hear if the radio is on. Can you not see the analogy?
Of course.

Why are people pushing for a "simple" test that proves very little? If I got 10 out of 10 because each time the power was high then it would work. But if I said it was never on and got 5 out of 10 because the power was low then everyone would never let me forget those test results and would co-mingle them with any future results.
As I already explained, you don't need to get 10 out of 10, you just need to consistently do better than the 5 out of 10 expected by chance. The only way you would only get 5 out of 10 is if the power was low every single time you did the test. Which, given your original claim to get a headache every time the power was on, would be very unlikely. At most, it would mean that you needed to do a few more trials than originally expected before you got a hit rate significantly better than chance.

You could also enhance your test protocol, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, to include a power measurement which would also be recorded in your wife's envelope along with the on/off information. Then you could (after the testing was complete, of course) see if you were more likely to guess it was on correctly if the power level was high.
 
Yeah obvious predictions are easy

There will be a panic on Wall Street
A world leader will be assassinated
A famous celebrity will die unexpectedly
There will be tension in the middle east
North Korea will make threats
There will be strikes in France
There will be racial/religious riots in India
Etc., etc.

All of these will happen at some point, no god or predictive ability needed


Choose one major world changing event in the next 10 years and make that your one key prediction. Let us see how well you do. I do not need to know the day and time.
 
It is not paranormal at all. I doubt that they would take the challenge. If they do, it would be easy money.

I am stunned that you can conflate a science claim with a paranormal claim. Look at how sensitive some living creatures are to magnetic and electric fields. Sometimes a huge difference between calculated and observed.
I am not conflating a science claim with a paranormal claim, I am merely pointing out that you might be able to take advantage of the fact that there is currently no known scientific explanation for your claimed ability to tell whether or not the wifi is on or off.

If you recall, this was exactly DowserDon's plan: he believed there was scientific explanation for his ability to locate underground disturbances (something to do with piezoelectricity IIRC) and planned to use his MDC winnings to finance research into it.
 
So you are withdrawing your original claim to always be able to tell when the wifi is on? OK then.


Of course.


As I already explained, you don't need to get 10 out of 10, you just need to consistently do better than the 5 out of 10 expected by chance. The only way you would only get 5 out of 10 is if the power was low every single time you did the test. Which, given your original claim to get a headache every time the power was on, would be very unlikely. At most, it would mean that you needed to do a few more trials than originally expected before you got a hit rate significantly better than chance.

You could also enhance your test protocol, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, to include a power measurement which would also be recorded in your wife's envelope along with the on/off information. Then you could (after the testing was complete, of course) see if you were more likely to guess it was on correctly if the power level was high.


My original test made the assumption that the modem broadcast at the same power each time. This assumption was based on the fact that the computer modem WiFi can have the power output changed to broadcast at a percentage less that 100%. Why did none of the experts on this forum warn that the power could (at times) be very low?

God had to help me make the discovery myself.

It is now very clear that the power measurement must be included. A meter that has a produces a log of the measurement is a plus.

There is no guessing. It is a matter of how severe the headache is.
 
I am not conflating a science claim with a paranormal claim, I am merely pointing out that you might be able to take advantage of the fact that there is currently no known scientific explanation for your claimed ability to tell whether or not the wifi is on or off.

If you recall, this was exactly DowserDon's plan: he believed there was scientific explanation for his ability to locate underground disturbances (something to do with piezoelectricity IIRC) and planned to use his MDC winnings to finance research into it.


Okay. So you think that VGCC changes either do not exist, or are so low that something like a headache would not happen?

Do you not think that people paying out $250,000 would not do their homework?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom