Princeton Nukes ESP Department

[thaiboxerken]

This example , i´m afraid it´s not suitable to the discussion. Math is exact in it´s concepts, and subjects of cold reading are not. "2+2 = 4" is not the same as "someone in your family is moving on". The math example of yours is scientifically demonstrated and the cold reading counter part has not.

Sure it is. However, if you want a more accurate analogy. Let's look at Uri Geller's spoonbending.

He could be using telekinesis to bend spoons. OR, he could be using simple magic tricks that any magician can reproduce.

Sorry, bubba, but the burden of evidence is always on those who purport to use paranormal ability.

 

[thaiboxerken]

And speaking of being a believer, I could equally say that you are too. Cuz you are spinning around without noticing that there is no scientific evidence for cold reading being behind psychic claims.

It is an absolute fact that what psychics claim to do can be reproduced using cold-reading. It's been done quite a few times. Mentalists do it often.

 

[gnome]

Sure it is. However, if you want a more accurate analogy. Let's look at Uri Geller's spoonbending.

He could be using telekinesis to bend spoons. OR, he could be using simple magic tricks that any magician can reproduce.

Sorry, bubba, but the burden of evidence is always on those who purport to use paranormal ability.

I'd like to extend this... seeing someone bend a spoon "telekinetically"... without further information would you believe it equally likely that it was actual paranormal ability rather than a trick?

It's a logical fallacy I've seen before (maybe it needs a name) where someone assumes that propositions with unknown probablities are equally likely.

 

[Kage]

Let me advocate against it a little and see if I make sense. Darren and P&T are confirmed skeptics on the paranormal and not first time investigators. A human being (remember PEAR staff being accused?) can be greatly dishonest, biased and even unconsciously biased about what he/she is trying to prove. So these characters you mentioned might well have been suffering from these prejudices while trying to show the public that they were right. So if you are happy with this kind of evidence, i´ll have to place you as an opposite of the believer in paranormal believing that a Geller demonstration on spoonbending was sufficient for making his mind about the existence of such a phenomenon.

Watching outside I can pretty much put you two in the same sack labeled "believers". One taking for granted the skeptic´s approach and the other the mystic´s approach, both without needing scientific testing and replicability (misspelled, which is the right word!?!).

Unless these demonstrations you mentioned were successfully tested in lab and also replicated.

In both the shows I cited these people performed cold readings for an audience of people who were open to the idea. Of course the cold readers in your test will be skeptics. The shows have the performances there for you to watch and judge them.

 

[thaiboxerken]

Omega really is rather pathetic. Next he'll want scientific evidence that magicians use trickery, not superpowers, to make rabbits appear in hats.

 

[fls]

In your quote the bit in square brackets [xxxx] = "a miracle" in Hume?

Yes. I didn't want any complaints that the wording wasn't relevant to this discussion.

I seem to recall Hume was talking about miracles. Now I seem to recall Hume defined a miracle as an exception to natural law, or arbitrary exception thereof -- and supernatural. Now a paranormal (Dawkins: perinormal) phenomena is naturalistic, not super-naturalistic, and therefore within the purview of science.

If a phenomenon is naturalistic, hence within the purview of science, then extraordinary or not, the evidence required to qualify as proof is exactly the same as for any other scientific claim. Extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary proof - they require quite ordinary proof. If they are real ordinary proof should be possible to produce in abundance. If you can't prove them, they are clearly reasonable in inverse proportion to how extraordinary they are - just a hypothesis. Extraordinary claims are extraordinarily unlikely. Yet they require the same proof as anything else.

Does that make sense?

cj x

I don't know. You didn't answer me when I asked you why and how you differentiate between supernatural and paranormal. So I don't understand what distinction you are making.

They both seem to refer to the same vague idea - something that does not follow natural law.

Linda

 

[fls]

Occam's Razor is as I have pointed out many times a useful tool but by no means reliable unless used as part of a repertoire of investigative methods of enquiry. It is not a principle of the universe. Any accident report tends to invole multiplicatiuon of entities - that is how most catastrophes seem to happen - many unlikely circumstances coming together.

cj x

But you are not making up new forces of nature in order to explain the accident, which is what Occam's razor is referring to. It's not saying that the number of things that influence the outcome should be minimized. It's saying that when you have competing explanations that both have equivalent explanatory power, you should go with the one that doesn't require a new entity (a new force or supernatural being) as part of the explanation.

Linda

 

[thaiboxerken]

Unless you have factored out all mundane explanations, going to supernatural/paranormal explanations is simply... stupid.

 

[fls]

Hmmm, yes it has been proven to be useful for developing the materialistic and reductionist framework, but still not worth of being a bible for rationality and scientific exploration.

Who's suggesting it's a bible?

This philosophy can lead to over simplifying things even when they are more complex than they appear to be, just because the simpler explanation is currently making more sense for us. See how it can be misleading.

That philosophy doesn't say anything about simplifying, so your concern is irrelevant.

Linda

 

[thaiboxerken]

http://www.bad-language.com/psychicskeptic

Here's another example of a skeptic of successfully posing as a psychic by using cold-reading techniques.

 

[CFLarsen]

I´m not claiming this, i´m claiming that perhaps it´s not tenable to be so sure about cold reading being behind this without some scientific evidence.

(cough)

Hmm that one on Larry King´s show that she made a hit about the exact description of the dead person, and said even that in fact the person was planting two rosebushes the day he died and not one, like the caller said to Altea. Holy cow, I have to admit that the only natural explanation for this would be fraud! Altea may have set up with this person that if she manage to get her call on live, Altea would in fact produce this amazing hit, as arranged. I cannot believe that Altea is so skilled in fishing and cold reading. I cannot understand how cold-reading should be responsible for this specific hit.

A miss! A miss on cold reading or a miss on psychic powers, who knows. Like Larry Bird would miss a 3-point shoot, and not because of it we would have to dismiss that he was an outstading player on 3-point shoots.

But we are not talking about hitting a ball but seeing a ball. This is information Altea is shown by the dead person.

Look at the diagram in post #251. Something about a house, which can be moving to a new house, or restoring an old one, or it can be a collapsing roof.

Why is this not inflating the chances?

It´s a shame King had not insisted on asking about the roof issue. The upgrading or fix they did in the house could have something about the roof, oooh hell, I want to contact this caller and ask her about it!!!

Yeah, it's a shame. But that's exactly how cold reading works: King homed in on the hits he thought Altea had gotten and forgot all about the rest.

Look at the diagram again. Consider the many, many options that Altea carves out for herself. Then, consider what she actually got out of it: She guessed the cause of death was cancer (which is the 2nd most common cause of death). The rest was guesses, some wrong, and some which the sitter had to make the connections for.

Look at the "who is this for" branch: Altea doesn't want to commit to a specific person coming through, so she opens up a whole range of possibilities. It's very safe to say that at least one of the people made possible by Altea would have died from cancer. And BOOM! Altea has a hit.

If it doesnt have anything to do with roofs, then perhaps it was a miss on cold reading.

Indeed. But, by saying this, you are treating the two differently. If Altea guesses right, you say it can't be cold reading (oh, yes you did!). But if Altea guesses wrong, it is perhaps a miss on cold reading.

What you are doing here is classic post-hoc reasoning: You focus on the hits and ignores the misses.

A successfully replicated double blind test that I mentioned before. About mixing up cold-readers+self-proclaimed-psychics as readers, and skeptics+believers as sitters. Then we could pretty much see it objectively and this discussion would not be necessary. We could even do the following. Mixing up all the readings written on paper and hand out them randomly to the targets and having them to rate the readings. It would be expected to have quite high rates overall if it would be due to generalizations that could fit for anyone. Of course is just a rough sketch of a design I´m presenting here, it has to be fine tuned greatly, but this is a start. Or even perhaps handig 5 to 10 papers with readings to a sitter in order to have them pointing out what he/she thinks is her/his reading. Hmm still much to tweak though.

Name one psychic who has agreed to, and passed, such a test.

The burden of proof is carried by the claimant. If a skeptic is the claimant when the certainty of cold reading being the cause of the hit is presented by him, so he´s bearing the load now. And it appear to exist no scientific evidence up till now.

With this, you are not saying that it is equally possible that psychic abilities exist and that they don't exist.

You are saying that psychic abilities is the default position.

 

[Ersby]

I'm posting these, not because I think it'll make the blindest bit of difference to omegablue (it certainly won't) but it may be useful for people to know at least some of the papers written on comparing mediums and mediumship to chance. (NB, the first two are both papers describing the same set of results)

"An Experimental Test of Psychic Detection", Wiseman, West, Stemman, JSPR 61
"Table 1 presents the individual scores for each of the six participants [three mediums, three non-psychics]. None of the scores of any of the individuals was statistically significant or impressive."

"Psychic crime detectives: a new test for measuring their successes and failures", Wiseman, West, Stemman, Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb 1996
"An analysis of the comments made by the participants whilst they handled the objects revealed that the psychics made many more comments than the students but were no more accurate, and no comment made by either the psychics or the students would have been of value to the investigating officers."

Rhetoric in "Psychic Detection", O'Keefe, Alison, JSPR 64
"[...] Independent tests confirmed that psychics were no more accurate than controls"

"Testing Alleged Mediumship: Methods and Results", Wiseman, O'Keeffe, Proceeds of the PA Convention 2004
"The results of this work did not support the existence of genuine mediumistic ability as none of the mediums obtained significant results."

"A Re-Examination of the Possibility of Chance Coincidence as an Alternative Explanation for Mediumistic Communication in the Cross Correspondences", Moreman, JSPR 67
"If they [the coincidences found in two psuedo-random scripts] are correct, then it follows that if a determined group of investigators can find correspondences of a certain quality within a purely random sample, there may be no need to consider the Cross-Correspondences as anything more than the result of a combination of chance and ingenuity."

"The Element of Chance in Cross-Correspondences",Verral, JSPR 15
"The method of experiment made it practically certain that any connexions that occurred must have been purely accidental"

 

[Ersby]

No, Ersby. There is no such a thing as the first "rosebush being a hit", this was told by the caller. The previous hit I mentioned was about describing the physical appearance of the dead man. Ok, the first one could be, just could be made by cold-reading, and you have to agree with me, a masterful work of cold-reading.

"He was slim". That's masterful, is it?!

True true, misses are forgotten, but only by the most gullible believers.

No, by everyone. No one has a perfect memory, and even the most attentive will find things slipping their minds. I once read a post by a skeptic who'd been to see John Edwards and had taken notes throughout. By the end of the show, he walked out thinking he'd seen something quite remarkable - it wasn't until he sat down with his notes that he saw how many misses JE had done.

Hell, the caller did tell he was planting a rosebush. Damn it, how could possibly Altea think: "hmmm stupid girl, now you revealed me this clue, and....hmmmmmmmm yes, he´s obviously planting another one....no wait....two more!! because it was one for the grandmother also, hmmmm no...my intuition says 5, but wait...hmmm JUST ANOTHER ONE! YESSSS... just another one". Just HOW, HOW could she fish for this? Oo

I;ve already given examples of mediums asking for a second example of something that's already been established.

It still does not make sense for me. Man...if this cold reading stuff is true to these cases, I am more shocked by the subliminal things she can spot in a human than if she was paranormal. Truly a mutant power, this cold reading stuff.

No subliminal cues. Altea was just following certain rules.

So, still, you are implying that I believe in spirits...

I believe you are so impressed with yourself that you've decided you are right and therefore anything that disagrees with you is wrong. [smiley face]

You´ve explained very well your points of view Ersby, it is well understood.

Not by you.

 

[CFLarsen]

The previous hit I mentioned was about describing the physical appearance of the dead man. Ok, the first one could be, just could be made by cold-reading, and you have to agree with me, a masterful work of cold-reading. Ok , old guys exhibits only a few physical types, and there´s the thing of making generalities like "chest" and etc. But, still a hit to the eyes of the believer.

And to you, too. But, let's take a closer look:

KING: Well, what are you hearing now?

ALTEA: What I'm -- first of all, I'm seeing, I'm looking, that is the process, I'm looking. And I'm looking at a man, very slim built. I have no idea of his height, I'm sorry, don't do heights well. But he is a very, very -- he is a slim built man, rather slender face, gaunt face, and I know that he had some problems with his chest and with his breathing.

CALLER: Yes.

KING: Now, how do you know he had chest problems?

ALTEA: Because he is talking to me, as I'm doing this. We're actually using some hand signals, and he sort of, you know, pointing to his chest, he is describing his breathing. He tells me that the end, his passing was very sudden and very quick. And it is surprising, because I know that he had problems, and he was sick before he passed. He is nodding as I'm saying that, I see him nodding as I say that.

But even though the family knew that he was sick, and he tells me -- he is laughing and he is telling me he knew he was sick, it was still somewhat of a shock when he passed.

KING: How correct is that.

CALLER: She is exactly correct.

KING: He was slim?

CALLER: On his looks and on his health. He had open heart surgery, and he had a pacemaker, but he was -- just matter of time, but we didn't know when.

KING: All right. Wait a minute, was it a surprise or not a surprise?

CALLER: It was a total shock. He had just planted a rosebush for my mother, and they had a nice day at the park, and he just was going to feed the dog and passed over.

KING: And he was drawn and thin, and...

ALTEA: May I just say there -- you mentioned a rosebush, and he holds up his hand and tells me that there were two special rosebushes. You only mentioned one, and he tells me that there were two.

CALLER: He planted two that day, you are right. One in my sister's yard and one in my mothers's.

Look at the barrage of information Altea is presented: 11 pieces of information.

Again: Altea doesn't say if the extra rosebush was planted, where it was planted or by whom. She lets the caller say all that. Classic cold reading.

The crux of the matter is: It is the caller who brings up the rosebush, after which Altea takes the ball and runs with it.

And let's not forget: Altea is dead wrong about the cause of death. Clearly, the "breathing" sign she "saw" the dead person make was not correct.

If you want to point to the rosebushes as an indicator that this is really Altea talking to the dead, then you have to explain why the dead guy gave the wrong reason for his own death.

Was it really somebody else, and not the caller's father?

 

[cj.23]

I don't know. You didn't answer me when I asked you why and how you differentiate between supernatural and paranormal. So I don't understand what distinction you are making.

They both seem to refer to the same vague idea - something that does not follow natural law.

Linda

Ah, probably. In philosophy of religion we would define them as

Supernatural - what Hume said, basically. Something which exists above and beyond the natural laws, and therefore can provoke arbitrary exceptions to them. This concept causes me real problems...

Paranormal - purported phenomena not explained by any generally agreed scientific consensus, but presumed naturalistic, in accordance with natural laws, and hence explicable within and subject to the purview of science.

My point was that while exceptional evidence would be required to back up a highly improbable claim as you showed on another thread, the actual proof should be straightforward and like any other proof. If paranormal powers exist we should be able to show so scientifically, and they will cease to be paranormal. The term perinormal has been Richard Dawkins employed in the same sense - those phenomena which are currently outside of scientific understanding but will move within.

Some may be explained away by existing knowledge, others may be explained by new understandings, but all will ultimately be part of or dismissed as delusion by science.

cj x

 

[thaiboxerken]

So the only difference between paranormal and supernatural is that the paranormal is the idea that the paranormal just might be explained by science someday?

So, existence of pixies...paranormal or supernatural? Mediumship? Superman?

 

[Baron Samedi]

Interesting. CBC just posted an in-depth report about PEAR, as well as some background about other psychic experiments.

http://tinyurl.com/2ayh28

I wanted to throw in a few more comments about this, but work calls.

 

[thaiboxerken]

CBC article wasn't very good.

 

[fls]

Ah, probably. In philosophy of religion we would define them as

Supernatural - what Hume said, basically. Something which exists above and beyond the natural laws, and therefore can provoke arbitrary exceptions to them. This concept causes me real problems...

Paranormal - purported phenomena not explained by any generally agreed scientific consensus, but presumed naturalistic, in accordance with natural laws, and hence explicable within and subject to the purview of science.

My point was that while exceptional evidence would be required to back up a highly improbable claim as you showed on another thread, the actual proof should be straightforward and like any other proof. If paranormal powers exist we should be able to show so scientifically, and they will cease to be paranormal. The term perinormal has been Richard Dawkins employed in the same sense - those phenomena which are currently outside of scientific understanding but will move within.

Some may be explained away by existing knowledge, others may be explained by new understandings, but all will ultimately be part of or dismissed as delusion by science.

cj x

I'm not sure I understand. Paranormal claims also seem to be exceptions to natural laws. And both seem to require a similar approach with respect to evidence - documenting that natural, known explanations have been ruled-out.

Are you thinking that "supernatural" refers to something that couldn't happen, such as a human levitating or walking on water? And "paranormal" refers to phenomena that show up as natural events, but unusual in amount (such as making accurate statements)?

I'm not sure how useful it is to distinguish the two, as I haven't really seen distinctions made by those who claim paranormal or supernatural powers. Are ghosts paranormal or supernatural? The purported mechanisms for both are outside the realm of natural law - psychics claim to draw on the spirit world which is not subject to the constraints of the laws of nature. And they both reduce to natural mechanisms when there is an opportunity for proper investigation - such as fraud or psychological mechanisms. And Hume's statement applies equally well to both.

I have seen this argued here in the past (by one of the Davids, I think). That paranormal claims represent a real phenomenon that is of yet undiscovered. But when discovered and studied it will be incorporated into normal science. But that just sounds like normal science, to me. There are many things we do not fully understand. Arbitrarily selecting some of those things out and calling them paranormal doesn't seem to be useful. It creates an artificial distinction that doesn't seem to represent any sort of consistent characteristic or quality, except that they have been associated with magical thinking.

Could you give some examples of how you would differentiate the two, and how it would matter?

Linda

 

[Moochie]

It is no wonder I presented "vague reference" as I´m not advocating in favor of psi in this thread. But rather, i´m doing this against the certainty of cold reading without sci. ev. to back up the CLAIM.



Then, have you gone for it, regarding cold-reading over psi? It appears that you are spreading out you certainty about this w/o sci ev in first place. My ignorance is precisely this one. If you do possess this knowledge please do share with me then. I do not know any sci. ev. of this kind. Why there appears to be none, Linda?

Mate, your ignorance knows no bounds. You are beyond foolish. You are irredeemably stupid.

I don't even wish to breathe the same air as you.

M.