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Robert Anton Wilson's "Prove the Normal" Challenge

Atwill

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Has there ever been such a thing? This came up in a conversation about Randi's challenge. Supposedly, R.A. Wilson, in reaction to Randi, held his own contest with the challenge being to "prove the normal". I've been googling around for a while, but I couldn't find anything useful. Does anyone else have some information on this, maybe even the rules for the challenge if there were any?
 
I wonder what possible challenge could there be? Like, if you pick up the apple with your hand, I give you a million dollars! =)
 
I would assume that the challenge refers to proving non-paranormal things that we all take for granted. For example:

The Earth is round
The speed of light
Bodies of different mass falling at the same rate

That sort of thing. I suspect that the challenge was presented to try and make some point about proving the paranormal - "How can you say mediums can't talk to the dead if you can't prove that the Earth is round? Therefore you only believe that the Earth is round" - which, quite apart from the obvious fallacies would be a ridiculous idea anyway.

When the woosters hold themselves to the same standards of proof and evidence that science does, they may get taken a bit more seriously. Since they don't, have no intention of doing so and couldn't if they wanted to, I won't hold my breath waiting.

I would also point out that Randi's challenge only asks for proof by demonstration, which is a far lesser standard than science requires of it's proof. Woo and it's practitioners have still failed to meet it.
 
I had assumed that "prove the normal" meant that if someone claimed they had a paranormal ability, the challenge was to prove it was accomplished by only normal means. In other words, it was a fancy way to require proof of a negative. Once again, it wholly misses the burden of proof and the methods of science. It also is in stark contrast to the demonstration aspect of Randi's challenge, as well stated by azzthom.
 
From that website:
Finnegan's paper began with the electrifying sentence, "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolph Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed." He then went on to demonstrate that the normal or average human lives in substandard housing in Asia, has 1.04 vaginas, cannot read or write, suffers from malnutrition and never heard of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald or Brian Boru. "The normal," he concluded "consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits."
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He seems to thing that "average", "median" and "normal" all mean the same thing.
 
Wouldn't a neutrino qualify under his definition?
 
Czarcasm said:
From that website: He seems to thing that "average", "median" and "normal" all mean the same thing.
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Or he's having fun with language, as evidenced by his German scientist having a name that means poopy-pants in (mock?) German. At most we can say he's making a point about generalizations and prejudices in a way that triggers some of our prejudices.
 
The entire website is satirical - and it's actually hilarious! Sadly, the man himself died in 2007 according to the home page.
 
Czarcasm said:
From that website: He seems to thing that "average", "median" and "normal" all mean the same thing.
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From the link:
No normalist has yet produced even a totally normal dog, an average cat, or even an ordinary chickadee. Attempts to find an average Bird of Paradise, an ordinary haiku or even a normal cardiologist have floundered pathetically. The normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in statistics, i.e. the human mathematical mindscape. They never appear in external space-time, which consists only and always of nonnormal events in nonnormal series


Since he doesn't see math concepts in real life they must not exist.
 
tsig said:
Since he doesn't see math concepts in real life they must not exist.
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Well....They don't. I mean, they're useful simlifications and for dealing with complex data, but they often don't, in any physical sense, exist. They are constructs, hypotheticals--useful lies.

Taxonomy runs head-first into this problem, particularly in paleontology. Organisms used to be defined by the type specimen, under a very Platonic view of the world. However, evolution has forced us to accept that variation is the rule, and many species are defined by ranges of various traits, expressed as the mean plus or minus the standard deviation. Problem is, traits from different species can overlap. And you have the issue of sexual dimorphism (check out ammonites sometime to see just how nasty that problem can be!). Or mixed populations, for that matter.

It seems a bit pedantic, but it's always useful when applying statistical evaluations to the real world to remember that the mean may not actually exist. Helps you avoid a few blind spots you otherwise will always develop.
 
Dinwar said:
Well....They don't. I mean, they're useful simlifications and for dealing with complex data, but they often don't, in any physical sense, exist. They are constructs, hypotheticals--useful lies. Taxonomy runs head-first into this problem, particularly in paleontology. Organisms used to be defined by the type specimen, under a very Platonic view of the world. However, evolution has forced us to accept that variation is the rule, and many species are defined by ranges of various traits, expressed as the mean plus or minus the standard deviation. Problem is, traits from different species can overlap. And you have the issue of sexual dimorphism (check out ammonites sometime to see just how nasty that problem can be!). Or mixed populations, for that matter.

It seems a bit pedantic, but it's always useful when applying statistical evaluations to the real world to remember that the mean may not actually exist. Helps you avoid a few blind spots you otherwise will always develop.
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Lies? That seems to be overstating the case quite a bit since you use math concepts later in your post.
 
tsig said:
Lies? That seems to be overstating the case quite a bit since you use math concepts later in your post.
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Math, in science, is used as a language. You may as well say "...you use French concepts later in your post." Further, I was explaining why the concept of a mean doesn't necessarily represent any individual in a population, particularly in biology--I need to use math concepts, because I'm discussing a math concept. I mean, try to explain a medical term without using medical concepts. The idea is nonsensical.

Secondly, I didn't say means were lies. I said they were USEFUL lies. The modifier makes it a different concept, and you cannot treat "useful lies" as equivalent to "lies". Useful lies are all around us, particularly in education. The whole "First assume a spherical chicken" joke highlights the useful lies physicsts use, even the top theoretical physicsts. Useful lies aren't necessarily wrong; the parts they're simply simplifications of concepts to make them easier for our minds to work with. Means are exactly that. It's very, very hard to handle an entire population. The mean is a single number (and the mean member is the mean for all the measurements). That's MUCH simpler to work with.

Ask yourself this: why do we include error bars in means of populations where we know all the members? The answer is that, fundamentally, those error bars are our admission that what we're working with isn't the population itself, and we're accepting a certain amount of screwyness in our data in exchange for making the calculations easier. (Yes, I know the justification for error bars in many fields; I'm not addressing them. I'm addressing the existence of error bars around a mean in a population where all members have been measured. Even the best-case scenario for means includes error.)

Why would a mathematical concept have to have a physical expression?
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Depends on the concept. The mean height of a population, for example, really should have physical experession--we're dealing with discrete data here, individual organisms to be specific. If the mean doesn't exist, in what sense is it true? If no human has the average height, the average height is entirely fictional. It's USEFUL, but it's fictional. It's a very serious error to confuse the simplifications with reality, one that gets you into all kinds of trouble once you try to use them to deal with reality. Maybe not so much in physics, but in biology and geology those errors can quickly add up, until you realize that your concept of what the world should look like is completely different from what it is.
 
Gazpacho said:
Details here:
http://www.rawilson.com/csicon.html

The challenge is to present an object with only attributes that can be confirmed by measurement to be normal.
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From the linked article:

Thus began the science of Patapsychology, Prof. Finnegan's most enduring, and endearing, contribution to the world -- aside from the computer-enhanced photos of the Face on Mars with which he endeavored to prove that the Face depicted Moishe Horwitz, his lifelong mentor and idol. This, of course, remains highly controversial, especially among disciples of Richard Hoagland, who believe the Face looks more like the Sphinx, those who insist it looks like Elvis to them, and the dullards who only see it as a bunch of rocks.
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You know, I think he might be onto something:

Moishe Horwits

Face on mars
 
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