One paranormal/psychic experience I know of

Beth said:
Um, not exactly. Christine was estimating the probability as 50/50 based on the fact that the psychic guessed the name 'Alice' and one of the two Alice's known to the mother was a very significant person to the mother. That's an incorrect application of conditional probability.
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Sorry, misread you there. My bad.

You're right about the assessing the odds of the psychic randomly guessing the name of her best friend would be the wrong probability as well but that wasn't what I was comtemplating. The probability of interest is that of the psychic correctly guessed at random the name of someone close to the woman who had predeceased her. That probably would be considerably lower than 50/50,
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How do you know?
 
No, I still believe it's valid but very crude.

As I said, I think we can assume everyone that age knows someone named Alice. The question is, how many people are likely to know someone important named Alice?

We then look at our example of one. This woman knew at least two Alices, possibly more. She looked at all the Alices she knew, and one of them was important. Perhaps she knew two to five. That gives a rough estimate that one in two, to say, one in five people known to this woman were of importance to her. Like I say, its an order of magnitude calculation. I am not arguing that the exact chance is 50/50, I am arguing that the likelyhood she knows an important Alice is closer to 1/2 than to 1/20.
 
Well, we can get a bit of statistics going here.

First, I've got the numbers for how many Alice's there were and the total number of births. I've collected this data for people born from 1920 until 1990. I used a broad range because, remember, the psychic did not hint at any sort of specific relationship. Note, hoever, that excluding the more recent dates will only make these numbers higher, as Alice has declined steadily since the 1920's:

Year......Alices..........Total Female Births
1990......6,435..........19,616,454
1980......7,284..........18,427,957
1970.....11,111..........16,447,641
1960.....26,959..........18,892,808
1950.....52,044..........19,722,134
1940.....72,322..........14,881,731
1930.....78,933..........11,040,309
1920....110,455..........12,395,538

Total....365,543.........131,424,572

That gives us a percentage of 0.278% overall for an "Alice".

Now, how many females would a person possibly know? Using an average family size of 2.5 (probably larger for the time period covered, but we'll use this), that means 1.25 females per family. So, that's 2 grandmothers and (.25*4) 1 great aunt (from both sides of the family, and both grandparents spuses), mother and (.25*2, gotta include Dad's family) .5 aunts, .5 sisters or sisters in law, .25 daughters, .3125 granddaughters, .25 daughters-in-law. Then, we consider close female friends and cousins, which I'm going to back-of-the-evelope at ten over a lifetime that might be signifigant. So, that gives us 15.6625 possible signifigant females. Now, we plug in the cjhances that none of these is named Alice and we get 95.7% (roughly), or 4.3% of knowing an Alice. That works out to a little more than a 1 in 25 chance of getting it right on the first guess. Yeah, the percent is low, but suddenly this doesn't seem that unlikely.

If you start trying to make this calculation more realistic, you'd have to understand that larger families were more common in the first half of the century, and we could actually discount granddaughters and all the data from say 1980 onward. This would actually increase the chances and lower the odds. Also figure that there are probably more than ten or twenty people we would consider signifigant besides immediate family types I listed (I can name twenty at half her age), and the chances increase even more.

So, while a 1/4 percent chance of Alice seems very, very, small...the sheer number of possible targets for the name makes it much less impressive.

Now, I've done the calculation to the best of my ability, but I may have made a mistake in there somewhere, so if someone wants to check it feel free. Also, if you can get a better quantification of the number of possible female relatives that would help. THis is very back-of-the-envelope, but I think it clarifies the point about random chance a bit.
 
Saw you posted while I was, Christine. Even 1 in 20 makes it completely unremarkable, IMO. Especially since we don't know how many guesses she made, or even if she did the "I'm getting an 'A'" bit or "Alma, Allison, Ally, Amy, Alicia, Alice...." which immediately adds to the odds. Also consider that the ones most likely for people to post here as "I can't explain this" are the ones when the psychic hits that 1 in 20 or 1 in 25 chance, and it's not that remarkable at all.
 
Glite said:
again, the possibility gets higher of a "hit" when the "psychic" gives more than one name. and in this case we have no way of knowing if that happened, and its quite possible it did. also, the prior knowledge argument is also valid.
this was a way of making the mother feel better about her condition, it worked, but i would imagine that having her children with her was much more comfort than some woo woo information from some delusional woman. (no matter how nice she seems to be)
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I think you're right. We have no way of knowing how many names she might have given. Also I think if the "message" was of comfort to her on her deathbed, well, that's a good thing.
 
Huntsman said:
Saw you posted while I was, Christine. Even 1 in 20 makes it completely unremarkable, IMO. Especially since we don't know how many guesses she made, or even if she did the "I'm getting an 'A'" bit or "Alma, Allison, Ally, Amy, Alicia, Alice...." which immediately adds to the odds. Also consider that the ones most likely for people to post here as "I can't explain this" are the ones when the psychic hits that 1 in 20 or 1 in 25 chance, and it's not that remarkable at all.
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This brings us back to my very first post on this thread, and a line of argument that hasn't been followed much here. If the psychic's guess was a complete miss, the poster and his brother would have laughed it off, and forgotten about it.

My sister once paid a psychic for a aura reading. She actually wanted to buy me one. Because I scoffed at it, she said that she would not answer the cold reading questions. While she got read, I went to a bookstore and bought The Demon Haunted World, which at that time was still out only in hardcover. Also, we were in Canada, and it was more expensive than it would have been in the States. But I just felt that I needed to buy that book. Afterwards, we listened to the reading and scored it, counting her statements and her hits.

We both agreed that my money was better spent. I think we gave her 2.5 hits on a thirty minute reading.
 
Steven Howard said:
Sorry, misread you there. My bad.



How do you know?
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Think about it. How many possible names are there too have guessed? How many of those names would have been someone close who predeceased her? That probability is most likely much lower than 50/50.
 
Beth said:
Think about it. How many possible names are there too have guessed? How many of those names would have been someone close who predeceased her? That probability is most likely much lower than 50/50.
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But the name she choose to guess was roughly the 10th most popular name for girls of her age. So I contend that she only had 10, maybe 25 names to pick from.

Although it is not said explicitely, from reading the original post I get the impression that this women died at a very old age, and almost everybody her own age was deceased. So we're back to these questions:

How many signifigant women were in her life?
How many of these signifigant women roughly her own age were in her life?
How many of these were deceased? (Almost all, probably.)
How many were named Alice? (About 1%)

So even if we assume she only had 5 important women her own age in her life (very, very conservative!) there is still a 5% chance of a hit.
 
ChristineR said:
No, I still believe it's valid but very crude.

As I said, I think we can assume everyone that age knows someone named Alice. The question is, how many people are likely to know someone important named Alice?

We then look at our example of one. This woman knew at least two Alices, possibly more. She looked at all the Alices she knew, and one of them was important. Perhaps she knew two to five. That gives a rough estimate that one in two, to say, one in five people known to this woman were of importance to her. Like I say, its an order of magnitude calculation. I am not arguing that the exact chance is 50/50, I am arguing that the likelyhood she knows an important Alice is closer to 1/2 than to 1/20.
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Sorry, I can never resist an opportunity to give a statistics lesson. :D

I've known a couple of Alices myself, but I'm not close to either of them. The key point is that you aren't close to 50% of the people you know, but a much lower percentage. Therefore, while the probability of having known one or more Alices is quite high, the probability of having been close to one (or more) of them is still low.

If the mother had known more Alices, the probability that one would have been close to one of them is higher than if she only knew two, but it's still not 50/50. Think about it: What percentage of people that you have met in your life did you become very close to? This is termed the baseline probability by the way. For example, if you knew 100 people in the course of your life and were close to 5 and two were named Alice, then the probability of being close to an Alice is (2*5)/100 or 10%. If you know 3 Alices, the probability of being close to one of them is now (3*5)/100 or 15%.

Now, multiply this by the probability that this close friend predeceased her and the probability of scoring such a 'hit' on a random guess of even a relatively common name is pretty low. 5% is closer than 50%, but I would guess it to be lower still when you factor in the predeceased aspect.

I think it's much more reasonable to consider the possibility that the OP's brother had mentioned Alice in the hearing of his future MIL or that she had some other knowledge of Alice or that she made multiple guesses before 'hitting' on Alice than to assume coincidence. Sure, it might be just coincidence (that's an unfalsifiable hypothesis by the way), but it's an unlikely one.

P.S. Apologies for the lecture on statistics. I used to teach college stat courses, but since I gave up teaching, I find I really miss it. Your error is an easy one to make.
 
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Actually, just to make this clear, without knowing the context of the reading we cannot assume a requirement that Alcie must have been deceased. You're reading too much into it.

For example, consider the two following hypothetical exchanges:

Psychic: I'm getting an A, Allice or Allissa...
Mark: I know an Alice...
Psychic: I have a message for Alice, who is she?


Psychic: I'm getting an Alice or Ally...
Mark: My mother knew an Alice...
Psychic: Alice has a messgae for your mother...

See? If the psychic started with a name, chances are the wording of the mark reflected whether that person was alive or dead (know versus knew, in this example), and the psychic can immediately switch gears to line up with this. So, unless the psychic specifically mentioned that Alice was deceased when she initially came up with the name, the argument that it must be a deceased person is invalid.
 
Beth said:
Sorry, I can never resist an opportunity to give a statistics lesson. :D

I've known a couple of Alices myself, but I'm not close to either of them. The key point is that you aren't close to 50% of the people you know, but a much lower percentage. Therefore, while the probability of having known one or more Alices is quite high, the probability of having been close to one (or more) of them is still low.

If the mother had known more Alices, the probability that one would have been close to one of them is higher than if she only knew two, but it's still not 50/50. Think about it: What percentage of people that you have met in your life did you become very close to? This is termed the baseline probability by the way. For example, if you knew 100 people in the course of your life and were close to 5 and two were named Alice, then the probability of being close to an Alice is (2*5)/100 or 10%. If you know 3 Alices, the probability of being close to one of them is now (3*5)/100 or 15%.

Now, multiply this by the probability that this close friend predeceased her and the probability of scoring such a 'hit' on a random guess of even a relatively common name is pretty low. 5% is closer than 50%, but I would guess it to be lower still when you factor in the predeceased aspect.

P.S. Apologies for the lecture on statistics. I used to teach college stat courses, but since I gave up teaching, I find I really miss it. Your error is an easy one to make.
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We don't know exactly how many Alices were known to her. What we do know, is that was close to one Alice, and reasonably close to another. Probably there were a bunch of other Alices that nobody takes any account of. What this indicates (again, it's very crude and not very convincing) is that a woman her age would know several Alices and that it is likely that she knew enough Alices to be close to one. I am not taking the fact that she knew two Alices, one important, and dividing 1 by 2 to get my estimate. I am considering the likelyhood that she knew someone important named Alice by considering that she apparently knew enough Alices to know one somewhat important and one important Alice. Using this as a model, I made the guess that most women her age would know a fair number of Alices, enough so that some of them might be important or very important. This also implicitely calculates how socialible she was: socialible enough to have two friends named Alice.

As for the chance that her friend predeceased her, I suspect that is close to 100%. I'm guessing her, but from my reading of the original post, I think that this woman outlived most of her contemporaries, and that the psychic knew that.

So there's my guess of an order of magnitude. Huntsman's is more conservative, but he is also doing a ballpark calculation based on assumptions.
 
ChristineR said:
But the name she choose to guess was roughly the 10th most popular name for girls of her age. So I contend that she only had 10, maybe 25 names to pick from.

Although it is not said explicitely, from reading the original post I get the impression that this women died at a very old age, and almost everybody her own age was deceased. So we're back to these questions:

How many signifigant women were in her life?
How many of these signifigant women roughly her own age were in her life?
How many of these were deceased? (Almost all, probably.)
How many were named Alice? (About 1%)

So even if we assume she only had 5 important women her own age in her life (very, very conservative!) there is still a 5% chance of a hit.
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Excellent! A much better assessment of the probability. Congratulations.
 
Huntsman said:
Actually, just to make this clear, without knowing the context of the reading we cannot assume a requirement that Alcie must have been deceased. You're reading too much into it.

For example, consider the two following hypothetical exchanges:

Psychic: I'm getting an A, Allice or Allissa...
Mark: I know an Alice...
Psychic: I have a message for Alice, who is she?


Psychic: I'm getting an Alice or Ally...
Mark: My mother knew an Alice...
Psychic: Alice has a messgae for your mother...

See? If the psychic started with a name, chances are the wording of the mark reflected whether that person was alive or dead (know versus knew, in this example), and the psychic can immediately switch gears to line up with this. So, unless the psychic specifically mentioned that Alice was deceased when she initially came up with the name, the argument that it must be a deceased person is invalid.
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What's any of this speculation got to do with the issue at hand? The Opening Post stated: "The mother of my brother's girlfriend at the time (now his wife) allegedly had some psychic ability and was asked by my brother if she could offer our mother any consolation. She told him to tell her Alice would be there waiting for her . . . I met this psychic woman only once briefly. She seemed quite shy and unassuming . . . She did not have these revelations or whatever you choose to call them very often, and she did not accept anything in return for them according to my brother. As I understand it, the whole thing was rather a private matter within the family . . . I was not at the hospital when my brother conveyed this information to my mother, but he said it was a great comfort to her, as I would expect under the circumstances. My brother did not recall having mentioned Alice to the woman, and given that he had been dating her daughter very briefly at that time, there is no reason that her name would have come up. He told me himself he had forgotten about Alice, as I had, until her name was mentioned."
 
I had a sort of psychic experience back when I was 18. I lived in a house with this woman and she lived in another room. She would wake up at night and come into my room and do various things to me while I was sleeping so that when I woke up I was aroused and we would have sex. While I did not mind this, I found that I would wake up suddenly with the idea in my head that she was coming. I would make my bed look like I was sleeping hide behind the door and wait for her to come in and surprise her from behind. Anyway how did I know she was coming? The only thing I can think of is I had lucid dreaming a lot in those days and somehow my subconscious sleeping mind heard a clue that she was coming and woke up. This happened several times so it was not a coincidence and I never woke up if she wasn't coming over.
 
Rodney said:
What's any of this speculation got to do with the issue at hand? The Opening Post stated: "The mother of my brother's girlfriend at the time (now his wife) allegedly had some psychic ability and was asked by my brother if she could offer our mother any consolation. She told him to tell her Alice would be there waiting for her . . . I met this psychic woman only once briefly. She seemed quite shy and unassuming . . . She did not have these revelations or whatever you choose to call them very often, and she did not accept anything in return for them according to my brother. As I understand it, the whole thing was rather a private matter within the family . . . I was not at the hospital when my brother conveyed this information to my mother, but he said it was a great comfort to her, as I would expect under the circumstances. My brother did not recall having mentioned Alice to the woman, and given that he had been dating her daughter very briefly at that time, there is no reason that her name would have come up. He told me himself he had forgotten about Alice, as I had, until her name was mentioned."
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It means that I have doubts that the OP stated everything exactly as it happened. We've gotten the summary, not the full details. The situation I described could still be quite similar, although upon re-reading it seems likely that Alice was known to the gf's mother, at least by name. Perhaps mentioned in passing while the mother or gf was around. IN any case, the second line of the OP is where I wonder if anything was left out. In other words, did the psychic simply reply immediately with "Alice will be there waiting" or was it a similar situation to my second scenario? Also note that "will be there waiting" is really a non-sensical statement that could (assuming an afterlife) easily apply to anyone you knew. The name is the only part of this that is remotely interesting, and even that is surrounded by doubt and not that unlikely statistically.
 
Dogdoctor said:
I had a sort of psychic experience back when I was 18. I lived in a house with this woman and she lived in another room. She would wake up at night and come into my room and do various things to me while I was sleeping so that when I woke up I was aroused and we would have sex. While I did not mind this, I found that I would wake up suddenly with the idea in my head that she was coming. I would make my bed look like I was sleeping hide behind the door and wait for her to come in and surprise her from behind. Anyway how did I know she was coming? The only thing I can think of is I had lucid dreaming a lot in those days and somehow my subconscious sleeping mind heard a clue that she was coming and woke up. This happened several times so it was not a coincidence and I never woke up if she wasn't coming over.
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<emerges from lurk mode>

Dude...what?!?!?!!!! This could be its own thread!

</back to lurk>
 
Dogdoctor said:
I had a sort of psychic experience back when I was 18. I lived in a house with this woman and she lived in another room. She would wake up at night and come into my room and do various things to me while I was sleeping so that when I woke up I was aroused and we would have sex. While I did not mind this, I found that I would wake up suddenly with the idea in my head that she was coming. I would make my bed look like I was sleeping hide behind the door and wait for her to come in and surprise her from behind. Anyway how did I know she was coming? The only thing I can think of is I had lucid dreaming a lot in those days and somehow my subconscious sleeping mind heard a clue that she was coming and woke up. This happened several times so it was not a coincidence and I never woke up if she wasn't coming over.
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Personally, I think of lot of psychic experiences can be explained as some sort of unconscious gathering of information and putting it together to form a conclusions that just sort of come into one's mind without any conscious understanding of how it came to be there. I agree with you that likely there was some sort of clue that your sleeping brain processed and decided that you needed to become conscious, but this sort of experience could (and would) be deemed psychic by many.
 
Actually, if these visits occurred at about the same time every night, then simply that timing could be an explanation, as well. Without hearing clues that she was coming or anything else. When I've been on a regular schedule, I don't need an alarm clock to wake up, for example. The body will fall into certain patterns and rythms, and expect things at certain times. Wake/sleep cycles seem to be the most prone to this type of conditioning.
 
I see no reason to assume that “Alice” was a close acquaintance to the dying woman. Nothing in the original piece post says this. The only thing implied is that she knows of an Alice.

I’m not impressed.

LLH

ETA I know at least 4 Alices, and with my crappy memory there might have been more I've just forgotten.
 
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