New telepathy test, the sequel.

[Jack by the hedge]

I wonder if a different approach might be valuable.

It is an interesting question as to how to design a valid statistical experiment in which there is an issue about the credibility of the answers. (There has been at least a little discussion about this in the past.) As someone who doesn't do experimental design, I would be interested in learning how this might be done. If a design appeals to Michel, fine. If not, also fine.

As an initial suggestion, I think one could design a setup where both responses and any accompanying comments go to a third party. The third party then tosses a coin and either changes the specific response or leaves it as submitted, keeping track of which were changed. Everything then goes to the person who evaluates each response and who can decide which ones are credible. Those considered credible are then revealed to all. It ought to be possible to back out a valid statistic I would think.

That's an interesting idea. To get around having to trust the third party, they could share a version of the original answers (plus a few random letters to stop its being guessable) scrambled with an MD5 Hash generator, and only reveal the key to decode it later.

 

[abaddon]

That's an interesting idea. To get around having to trust the third party, they could share a version of the original answers (plus a few random letters to stop its being guessable) scrambled with an MD5 Hash generator, and only reveal the key to decode it later.

We tried that before. We were nearly at a workable protocol and Michel went with it. Right up until he realised that it would prove him utterly wrong.

One must remember, the goal is not to prove the hypothesis, rather, it is to cling to it at all costs.

 

[JayUtah]

We tried that before. We were nearly at a workable protocol and Michel went with it. Right up until he realised that it would prove him utterly wrong.

Correct. Michel insists that he needs to see the respondent's answer as part of his credibility judgment because his protocol considers the possibility that a wrong answer was given deliberately in order to skew the results. That is, if a wrong answer was given, Michel apparently needs to know that it was wrong so that he can consider the possibility, based on metadata in the response, that the respondent would have given the right answer if the respondent were not compromised by bias or skepticism. Or if the respondent gave two or more answers, Michel can evaluate (again based on metadata in the response) which of several possible values is the most "credible." By this means he can "correct" wrong answers to be right.

Michel defines "good" data as data with a hit rate that supports his hypothesis that others can hear his thoughts. That's really all we need to know about his commitment to a proper methodology.

 

[Startz]

I'm mostly hoping to learn something about how to set up an experiment. Whether Michel would like to conduct such an experiment is up to him.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Logically, Michel H is complimenting everyone on Earth for their honesty.

Despite his claim he is broadcasting his bank, bank account number and PIN number, no one has ever cleared his bank accounts.

You're not the first person to point this out. Don't expect the obvious logic of it to make any impression at all.

 

[Lothian]

I'm mostly hoping to learn something about how to set up an experiment. Whether Michel would like to conduct such an experiment is up to him.

Your experiment is perfectly sensible. An alternative would be to simply remove the numbers from all guesses and add them back in once Michel has decided which have credibility from what else has been said.

The issue as others have point out is that Michel wants to know whether the number is right before deciding whether or not to count it in the experiment. Without that he knows his telepathic skills are no better than chance.

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

We tried that before. We were nearly at a workable protocol and Michel went with it. Right up until he realised that it would prove him utterly wrong.

One must remember, the goal is not to prove the hypothesis, rather, it is to cling to it at all costs.

We actually got him to try once doing the ratings blind, and predictably he bombed. When asked why he wouldn't that again his answer was:

This has been done before:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9572476#post9572476
but I found that this was complicated, and that the results:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9608775#post9608775
were less good than when the simpler version of the test is used.

In addition, this is not really necessary because people have an opportunity to verify the credibilities assigned.

So that's his answer. If he can't lie to get the answers he wants it's not a good test.

 

[abaddon]

Correct. Michel insists that he needs to see the respondent's answer as part of his credibility judgment because his protocol considers the possibility that a wrong answer was given deliberately in order to skew the results. That is, if a wrong answer was given, Michel apparently needs to know that it was wrong so that he can consider the possibility, based on metadata in the response, that the respondent would have given the right answer if the respondent were not compromised by bias or skepticism. Or if the respondent gave two or more answers, Michel can evaluate (again based on metadata in the response) which of several possible values is the most "credible." By this means he can "correct" wrong answers to be right.

Michel defines "good" data as data with a hit rate that supports his hypothesis that others can hear his thoughts. That's really all we need to know about his commitment to a proper methodology.

At one point, I thought he might pay attention. Pixel42 gave solid at that time. So did you, or I or any amount of other members. We could have nailed down a test protocol that might have had a hope.

Michel simply refused because we are all criminals, somehow.

Quite how he concluded that is anyone's guess

He refuses to actually say beyond claiming just claiming it. And it was a mere unevidenced claim. What shall anyone do with that?

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Logically, Michel H is complimenting everyone on Earth for their honesty. Despite his claim he is broadcasting his bank, bank account number and PIN number, no one has ever cleared his bank accounts.

You're not the first person to point this out. Don't expect the obvious logic of it to make any impression at all.

There is a 25,000Euro award from the Belgium Skeptics, that Michel H avoids. He simply has to read out and think of a phone number while a person in the next room waits for anyone to ring that phone number. Michel H can't claim all humans are 100% dishonest (not ringing) and 100% honest (not clearing his bank account) at the same time.
https://skepp.be/en/sisyphus-prize

I have already tried to explain on this forum how I seem to be able to communicate telepathically with animals (cats, dogs, birds) near my building, but I am not sure you paid any attention. And this phenomenon is very easy to verify: for example, when a dog is barking, I talk to him/her from inside my apartment with a weak voice (so he/she cannot hear me normally, sensorially), and I study whether there is a reaction, a change (often there is).

Again, as dogs aren't honest or dishonest, all Michel H has to do it disrupt dogs at the starting gate of the two greyhound tracks run by the National Belge de Courses de Lévriers. He won't.

 

[abaddon]

There is a 25,000Euro award from the Belgium Skeptics, that Michel H avoids. He simply has to read out and think of a phone number while a person in the next room waits for anyone to ring that phone number. Michel H can't claim all humans are 100% dishonest (not ringing) and 100% honest (not clearing his bank account) at the same time.
https://skepp.be/en/sisyphus-prize

Told ya. The goal is to maintain the delusion at all cost.

Again, as dogs aren't honest or dishonest, all Michel H has to do it disrupt dogs at the starting gate of the two greyhound tracks run by the National Belge de Courses de Lévriers. He won't.

Oh he has wheeled out any amount of porkies. To him that matters not. The priority is to maintain the illusion. nothing else matters. He did claim that he could shut up all dogs barking in his neighbourhood by merely thinking. Now he is claiming he never said that. Yet that very claim can be referenced. Because he did, Right up to when that claim became inconvenient.

In such circumstance, I and I guess you, would fess up and say "I got that one wrong, sorry". But not everyone has that honesty.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

I seem to recall another of our imagined thought projecting members declined to try the million dollar challenge as he feared he could not trust anyone to want a share of $1M badly enough to overcome their loyalty to the worldwide conspiracy to pretend we couldn't all hear him.

It's a dilemma for the projector. Since his illness made him absolutely convinced we could all hear him, we must all have been lying about the plain fact that we can't. So however impossible and inexplicable that conspiracy was, he couldn't trust anyone to be honest during the challenge.

 

[steenkh]

I always find it curious why we should be scared if any of the supernatural phenomena should turn out to be real, in this case telepathy.

My view is that if telepathy is real, it has always been real, and so it has always happened, but it has never influenced anybody’s life. And it is unlikely to change anything after we become aware of it being real.

For instance, police will not start using telepathics for questioning, because it has never worked before, and it is unlikely to suddenly start working.

 

[abaddon]

I always find it curious why we should be scared if any of the supernatural phenomena should turn out to be real, in this case telepathy.

My view is that if telepathy is real, it has always been real, and so it has always happened, but it has never influenced anybody’s life. And it is unlikely to change anything after we become aware of it being real.

For instance, police will not start using telepathics for questioning, because it has never worked before, and it is unlikely to suddenly start working.

If Michel's claims were true, police questioning of witnesses or suspects for any matter would be superfluous. Cops, judge and jury would all know without any court needed.

 

[JayUtah]

The other chestnut is the notion that skeptics and scientists are averse to concluding that telepathy exists because it would upset some sort of sacred order of belief. That's entirely untrue. If objective, verifiable evidence of telepathy could be obtained, it would open up a whole new field of research. There would be a mad rush to characterize telepathic phenomena, harness them, and profit from them. Much of my hard science was done in the private sector where being (1) right and (2) first to market is paramount. Students would flock to university psychology and neuroscience programs. Grant money will fall like snow in the Himalayas.

What scientists and skeptics abhor is not the possibility that telepathy and other psi phenomena exist, but the constant attempts on the part of advocates to misuse the credibility of scientific inquiry in order to prove their abilities exist, for personal notoriety or gain. And that misuse takes exactly the form of trying to manipulate the method or hide the confounding variables in precisely the ways science has evolved to preclude. Evading proper control by claiming it's unnecessary, that it somehow interferes with the effect, or that it's too tedious to carry out -- and then arrogantly claiming that the resulting method is far superior to anything previously tried -- is what turns science off to this sort of research. Michel's approach flies every flag that psuedoscience has -- proudly. And his lament that everyone around him is closed-minded and biased is just one voice in the chorus of pseudoscientists who have gone before him.

 

[Nay_Sayer]

Dollars to donuts Michel doesn't get the joke.

Michel has several spreadsheets and a chalkboard rife with equations trying to work out why the chicken crossed the road.

He's made no headway as of yet.

 

[Michel H]

A new telepathy test

A member of this forum said recently, in another thread:

You are being delusional. The preparations for genocide are clear as day. ...

Delusional, me?

In order to hopefully help clarify things a little bit, I invite you to participate in a new, simple telepathy test, which will perhaps help proving your remarkable extra-sensory perception abilities.

I recently wrote (and circled) one of the following four words: "2022", "Russia", "attacked" and "Ukraine" on a piece of paper near me.

I ask you to tell me which of these four words I wrote.

This word was selected by means of this random number generator: https://www.random.org/integers/, all four words have equal probabilities.

 

[Pixel42]

How on earth could anyone here know which word you circled?

All any of us could do would be to make a wild guess, and with just four options and a handful of posters guessing the sample would be far too small for the result to be statistically significant. So as a test for whether or not telepathy exists it's utterly worthless, even if rigorously executed.

 

[Michel H]

How on earth could anyone here know which word you circled?

The answer seems clear: though extra-sensory perception, perhaps related to (as yet unmeasured) electromagnetic waves emitted by the sender.

All any of us could do would be to make a wild guess, and with just four options and a handful of posters guessing the sample would be far too small for the result to be statistically significant. So as a test for whether or not telepathy exists it's utterly worthless, even if rigorously executed.

You seem to be forgetting that answerers could write some interesting comments, together with their answers, for example these skeptics' favourites:

I am seeing a 4 very clearly. It's almost as though I had written it myself.

... Early on, I used my telepathic powers to see into your weak and ordinary mind and pull out the number you were thinking of. You did not feel aggressively towards me back then so your thoughts were very easy to read and you did not change your answer when you knew I was right. ...

Try answering the test yourself, your answer might not be so random.

 

[Mojo]

The answer seems clear: though extra-sensory perception, perhaps related to (as yet unmeasured) electromagnetic waves emitted by the sender.

What wavelength?

 

[Michel H]

What wavelength?

The frequency is perhaps of the order of 100 MHz, and the relevant frequencies might belong to a wide range, for example from 10 MHz to 1 GHz (but I don't know much about this myself, this is speculative).