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ddt said:
You're misreading that: that's still a probability of 8.7 in 1000. (easy mistake, I counted the number of zeros twice just to be sure).


Very good points.

While it's refreshing a prospective candidate doesn't start out with "my powers are absolute", a 55% success rate is just too low to organize a practical test.
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Nope. Count again. It's 8 in 10 thousand.
 
rulef said:
As stated before, there are 2 people claiming that they feel the otherones stare. Nobody else would be involved. They are both ok with being starred at.
Do you think the rule would still apply? (btw I could not find it on the FAQ)
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You couldn't find it on the FAQ because it isn't there. Learner was making a joke.

The ability to sense someone staring at you would definitely be a form of ESP, and therefore eligible for the challenge. (You shouldn't refer to it as remote viewing, because this term normally refers to being able to "see" things at a distant location, such as in a different city.)

rulef said:
I was/am interessted in this probability!
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I don't think that there's any official rule as to the probability required to pass the test. There have to be clearly defined conditions that determine whether or not the applicant has passed or failed, and JREF/Randi has to agree that the protocols constitute a fair test, and as far as I can tell that's all.

I'd guess the reason is that it's often hard to say for certain what the odds are.

For example, how would your participants know that they're correct 55% of the time unless they've performed the test many hundreds of times? And the odds may be skewed by poor methodology without them realizing it.

For example, there might be slight difference in the sounds of the starer's movement that sometimes provides a hint of whether or not he is staring at the other person, and the other person might be responding to this without consciously aware of the existence of these barely perceptible sounds.
 
JJM 777 said:
The obvious problem here is that with 1000 applicants, someone would pass the test with sheer luck, without any supernatural forces involved. But the challenge is not intended as a lottery, which a million people try and a lucky one wins it with sheer statistical odds. For this reason, small statistical oddities like 1:100 or 1:1000 are not of interest, actually the requirement should be as solid performace as any known force of nature has. The apple _always_ falls with gravity, the force exists and never fails.

In the setting proposed in the OP, 550 correct guesses out of 1000 does not sound of any interest to science. If you let me use my looking force, called the eyes, I can tell 1000 times out of 1000 trials whether another person in front of me is staring at me or not. The force is there, and it functions with 100,0% accuracy. There is no reason to give a discount to a claimed paranormal force to fail 450 times out of 1000, if the human eyes don´t fail even once out of 1000 trials.

If the claimant had a force, or if he at least sincerely believed to have it, there would be no reason to talk about "550 out of 1000", the talk would be about 999 or 1000 out of 1000. To me, talking about 550 out of 1000 is a confession that the person does not believe even himself that he has the claimed ability.

I do not represent the JREF, but if I did, my answer would be: succeed 999 times out of 1000, and you pass the preliminary test.
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What if the guy gets 550/1000, _and then you test the same guy again_ and they get 550/1000 _again_, and so on and so on for like 5 rounds of testing? I.e. _consistent_ results higher than chance on _every_ trial. And then on a second, independent test rig they get some number higher than chance, but still less than "perfect"?
 
mike3 said:
What if the guy gets 550/1000, _and then you test the same guy again_ and they get 550/1000 _again_, and so on and so on for like 5 rounds of testing? I.e. _consistent_ results higher than chance on _every_ trial. And then on a second, independent test rig they get some number higher than chance, but still less than "perfect"?
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If the guy does that under controlled conditions, I'm pretty sure he can win the million.
 
AvalonXQ said:
If the guy does that under controlled conditions, I'm pretty sure he can win the million.
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I agree, but that's a tremendous number of trials and that is going to end up being time consmuming and expensive. The expense is all on the applicant, but the time will be used (some might say wasted) by everyone else involved. If those people have any brains, they will ask to be paid for all that time which will make it even more expensive. But it can be done.

Ward
 
I'd think 5 seconds per trial would be enough.

If you can establish occlusion breaks the effect, then just have the staring friend looking through a piece of glass. Randomly place a black barrier in front of the glass and remove it in five-second intervals according to a pregenerated list of coin flips.

Heck, the barrier could be automated. Just make the glass in the shape of a quarter circle, then place a half-transparent wheel in front of it that randomly rotates a quarter circle either clockwise or counter-clockwise each five seconds (or whatever interval is agreed-upon). An electrical or computer engineer could probably whip the whole thing up using spare parts in less than an hour.
 
Five seconds would be plenty for you and me and we were looking at the person staring at us, and we'd probably get 100% correct. But we are not the applicant and it's up to the applicant to say how long it would take him or her to register the sensation of being stared at. And people with paranormal powers seem to become exhausted very quickly while using those powers.

So, we'll have to wait and see if we need to wait and see.

Ward
 
JJM 777 said:
The obvious problem here is that with 1000 applicants, someone would pass the test with sheer luck, without any supernatural forces involved.
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Yes, statistically, about one in a million applicants will walk away with the price money by sheer luck.


But the challenge is not intended as a lottery, which a million people try and a lucky one wins it with sheer statistical odds. For this reason, small statistical oddities like 1:100 or 1:1000 are not of interest, actually the requirement should be as solid performace as any known force of nature has. The apple _always_ falls with gravity, the force exists and never fails.
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As far as I can tell, this is not at all how the challenge works.

Also, what reason is there to assume any particular degree of confidence in supernatural powers?

In the setting proposed in the OP, 550 correct guesses out of 1000 does not sound of any interest to science. If you let me use my looking force, called the eyes, I can tell 1000 times out of 1000 trials whether another person in front of me is staring at me or not.
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I dissagree.

First of all - why should it even matter what other ways there are?

If I could bend a spoon just using the power of my mind, that would be very impressive - even if there are countless other ways to bend spoons.

And if it only worked one in 100 times, it would still be more than just interesting.

The force is there, and it functions with 100,0% accuracy. There is no reason to give a discount to a claimed paranormal force to fail 450 times out of 1000, if the human eyes don´t fail even once out of 1000 trials.
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There is, if that is the claim.

What reason do you have to make the assumption that paranormal powers work just like other powers?

If the claimant had a force, or if he at least sincerely believed to have it, there would be no reason to talk about "550 out of 1000", the talk would be about 999 or 1000 out of 1000. To me, talking about 550 out of 1000 is a confession that the person does not believe even himself that he has the claimed ability.
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Why?



This guy has the ability to stack 10 bowling balls. There is no reason to assume he'd manage it 9 times out of 10, and if he bet me he could do it once out of 10 times, he'd still have shown me that he is able to do it.

Why should paranormal ablities have to be different?

Say the bet was that he could stack 150 bowling balls. I'd happily give him a week to try with as many attempts as he wanted to. (I wouldn't bet a million dollars, because i don't think it is impossible to achieve that, though.)

I do not represent the JREF, but if I did, my answer would be: succeed 999 times out of 1000, and you pass the preliminary test.
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Your answer translates into: Do something you never said you could do, even tohugh what you said you could do would already be impossible.

Edit: Fixed video embed
 
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Rasmus said:
If I could bend a spoon just using the power of my mind, that would be very impressive - even if there are countless other ways to bend spoons.

And if it only worked one in 100 times, it would still be more than just interesting.
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The difference is that the spoon never bends itself purely by chance. If you had some kind of special bendy spoon that bends all on it's own ten times in a hundred, then you'd frequently see the spoon bend 11 times in a hundred just by chance. If someone claimed that they could make the spoon bend an average of 11 times in a hundred instead of the 10 times in a hundred you'd normally expect, it'd take a lot of effort to prove that this was a genuine ability and not just a statistical anomaly.

That's the sort of situation we have here.
 
Thanks, the thread can be closed

Since the first post already answered my question.

As far as I am concerned this thread can be closed.

Thanks those who carefully read my post and responded.
 
All abilities aren't probabilistically certain. No batter in baseball has a career batting average above .4; that doesn't mean they have no ability.
 
rulef,

Assuming you are still reading this thread and also assuming that you ever had any desire to apply for the MDC, here's a suggestion. There are many other paranormal challenges which offer cash prizes. Those other challenges do not necessarily require things like a media presence or academic attention. None of them offer a million dollars, but they all offer some significant cash prize. Also, passing any one of them should give you all the academic and media attention you'd need to apply for the MDC. Pick whichever one's closest to you.

Here is a list of such cash challenges:

There's the Australian Skeptics' AU$100,000 Prize
http://www.skeptics.com.au/features/prize/
They also offer AU$20,000 as a "Spotter's Fee"

There's the IIG's US$50,000 Challenge in California, USA
They now have affiliates in Atlanta, GA and Washington, DC and are developing affiliates in Denver, CO, Calgary, Canada and probably other places as well.
http://www.iigwest.org/challenge.html
They also offer US$5,000 as a "Finder's Fee"

There's the North Texas Skeptic's US$12,000 Challenge in the USA
http://www.ntskeptics.org/challenge/challenge.htm

There's Prabir Ghosh's 2,000,000 Rupee Challenge in India
http://rationalistprabir.bravehost.com/

There's the Swedish 100,000SeK prize offered by Humanisterna
http://www.humanisterna.se/index.php...d=27&Itemid=49

The Tampa Bay Skeptics offers a US$1000 prize in Florida, USA
http://www.tampabayskeptics.org/challenges.html

In Canada there's the CAN$10,000 from the Quebec Skeptics
http://www.sceptiques.qc.ca/activites/defi

In the UK, the ASKE organization offers £14,000
http://www.aske-skeptics.org.uk/challenge_rules.htm

Tony Youens in the UK offers £5,000
http://www.tonyyouens.com/challenge.htm

In Finland, Skepsis offers 10,000 Euros
http://www.skepsis.fi/haaste/

The Fayetteville Freethinkers in Arkansas, USA offer a US$1000 prize
http://fayfreethinkers.com/

There's a 1,000,000 Yuan prize in China offered by Sima Nan. This is his blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/simanan

The Belgian SKEPP organization offers a 10,500 Euro prize
http://www.skepp.be/prijzen/de-sisyphus-prijs/

If you find any mistakes or broken links, or know of any tests not on this list, please notify me in this thread.

Good Luck,
Ward
 
The problem with staring (sorry if this has been said already) is that everybody thinks they're being stared at. It's a basic law of the human ego that we think we are the center of everyone's attention - see "imaginary audience."

Thus, people will always report being stared at. Any test where they are stared at just 50% of the time will show up as people being 50% right. A 55% positive seems to be so close to random as to be statistically meaningless.

Perhaps you could line up six people, roll a die, and then stare at just one of them. If they all guess correctly, that would be a hit. Do that five times in a row and call it a test.
 
JJM 777 said:
The obvious problem here is that with 1000 applicants, someone would pass the test with sheer luck, without any supernatural forces involved. But the challenge is not intended as a lottery, which a million people try and a lucky one wins it with sheer statistical odds. For this reason, small statistical oddities like 1:100 or 1:1000 are not of interest, actually the requirement should be as solid performace as any known force of nature has. The apple _always_ falls with gravity, the force exists and never fails.

In the setting proposed in the OP, 550 correct guesses out of 1000 does not sound of any interest to science.
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I agree with Rasmus and others.

FDA trails do not have to show a 100% recovery rate for a new drug to be considered useful. I see no reason to hold "psychics" to a higher standard than we use for medicine.

...............

Femke said:
I had the same feeling of deja vu. And I found the thread. I think. Makes interesting reading.
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Yes, and I had a feeling someone was looking at that thread while I was thinking about that thread. So there is that.

jk
 
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Pixel42 said:
Which is why there are two tests. Repeatability is a key requirement for scientific evidence, because of the possibility of fluke results.

Most people seem to expect that the odds would be set higher than 1:1000 for the final test, but I've never seen the need. Anyone who beat odds of 1:1000 twice would have beaten combined odds of 1 in a million.
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Indeed!
 
JJM 777 said:
The obvious problem here is that with 1000 applicants, someone would pass the test with sheer luck, without any supernatural forces involved. But the challenge is not intended as a lottery, which a million people try and a lucky one wins it with sheer statistical odds. For this reason, small statistical oddities like 1:100 or 1:1000 are not of interest, actually the requirement should be as solid performace as any known force of nature has. The apple _always_ falls with gravity, the force exists and never fails.

In the setting proposed in the OP, 550 correct guesses out of 1000 does not sound of any interest to science. If you let me use my looking force, called the eyes, I can tell 1000 times out of 1000 trials whether another person in front of me is staring at me or not. The force is there, and it functions with 100,0% accuracy. There is no reason to give a discount to a claimed paranormal force to fail 450 times out of 1000, if the human eyes don´t fail even once out of 1000 trials.

If the claimant had a force, or if he at least sincerely believed to have it, there would be no reason to talk about "550 out of 1000", the talk would be about 999 or 1000 out of 1000. To me, talking about 550 out of 1000 is a confession that the person does not believe even himself that he has the claimed ability.

I do not represent the JREF, but if I did, my answer would be: succeed 999 times out of 1000, and you pass the preliminary test.
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I disagree. Plenty of scientific studies have a much lower bar than 100%. If we demanded effects to be there 100% of the time we'd pretty much have to give up studying psycology, physiology, pharmacology and so on.

Also you're making a very large assumption on how supernatural forces might operate. Just because say ESP exists, it doesn't mean that a person can master it 100% of the time. Likewise Usain Bolt cannot always run sub 9.6.

If someone could show a 55% hit rate over say 10,000 very well controlled tests, that would strongly suggest something interesting is going on. I'm not a statistician but I'm pretty sure that is statistically significant.

Now the challenge is not a piece of scientific research as such. JREF do not need to allow such small margins and cannot really afford to do so but they need to set the bar to a level that whilst weeding out chance allows real paranormal powers to show up.
 
Ladewig said:
I agree with Rasmus and others.

FDA trails do not have to show a 100% recovery rate for a new drug to be considered useful. I see no reason to hold "psychics" to a higher standard than we use for medicine.

k
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I think you DO have to hold them to a higher standard than medicine, just not that high.

As pointed out in the thread on extraordinary evidence, a medical trial isn't usually carrying implied claims that re-write almost everything we know about science.
 
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