Book Test: Max & Any Others Interested

Paj,

Sorry if this seems like perseverating on my favorite topic, but your book test is really no different from someone picking anything correctly at random from ten choices, right?

For example, if this were ten psychic readings, rather than ten books, based on your results so far, it seems pretty difficult to correctly pick 1 out of 10 psychic readings as well, yes?

I say this because isn't this a pretty good idea of how difficult it would be for someone to select his or her psychic reading correctly from 10 possibilities simply by chance?
 
What you say would be correct if the readings have no bearing on the actual person. If that were true then, yes, the person would be making a random choice.

If, as Sylvia claims, the reading is accurate enough to be recognisable by the person for whom it is intended, then no. You would expect them to get it right almost all of the time.

Likewise, if someone has the ability to remotely view the book on my monitor (or even get a good enough impression that they can recognise the book in a selection), then you would expect them to score significantly above chance in my test.

So far, that does not appear to be happening but no one has yet attempted enough trials to show significance anyway.
 
The Boy Paj

So far that does not appear to be happening.
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No, but since no one claims to have any RV abilities anyway here, there's no reason to expect it to be better than chance.

I just think it's interesting, in practice, to see how difficult "guessing right" from 10 choices really is.
 
Lucianarchy claims RV abilities. As does Joe Black, by the sounds of things (thought he has not yet taken part). There are also participants from other forums.

The hard part is getting people who claim powers to actually take part. It seems people like to think they are special and don't want to risk finding out that they are just like the rest of us!

Simply guessing from 15 objects (I have 15 books, not 10) is difficult. You'd get it right one in fifteen times, in fact! :D
 
Hey Paj, is there anything you can do about the format of the results page? It doesn't render right in Firefox (and therefore probably not in Netscape) unless I let it load and then refresh it, and even then sometimes it doesn't. It looks like you got it straight out of Excel, and the source looks like, well, a seething mess of CSS and HTML tables. It's also over 400k, but contains only 12k of text.

If you can't do much with Excel, mind if I see if I can squish it down for you?

David
 
It doesn't surprise me that it's bloated. Stupid, crappy Microsoft.

I'll see what I can do in Excel. It would be best if it were automatic.
 
Clancie said:

No, but since no one claims to have any RV abilities anyway here, there's no reason to expect it to be better than chance.

I just think it's interesting, in practice, to see how difficult "guessing right" from 10 choices really is.
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Isn't it just as valid to see this as a test to see if someone may have RV powers?

And don't forget most of the professional RVers say that anyone, to a lesseer and greater extent can RV, i.e. it is a learned skill.

Don’t you find it strange however that the posters here who have claimed to be able to RV haven't persisted with this simple test?
 
TheBoyPaj said:
Rambling Onwards scored a hit in the round.
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Woo hoo!

I wonder if any interesting patterns could be found in the guesses - such as 'people tend not to vote for the first book, last book or a book that has been selected before'. It might be interesting to figure out the psychology behind guesses.

[I honestly try to picture the book first, and then match it - it would be interesting to see how much my 'picturing' is affected by what I've seen before]
 
Clancie said:
Just to be clear,
Personally, I think it sounds like fun to have various people presented with a list of 10 books, one of which has been selected to be on the shelf, locker, whatever. I think doing this repeatedly and then seeing if any patterns emerge would be fun, too. .
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So much fun you did it once.
 
Clancie: Personally, I think it sounds like fun to have various people presented with a list of 10 books.....

The Boy Paj:So much fun you did it once.
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Yes, Paj. I was wrong.

The only interesting part (to me) turned out seeing how difficult it is, really, to correctly guess the book by chance.
Posted by Darat

Don’t you find it strange however that the posters here who have claimed to be able to RV haven't persisted with this simple test?
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Darat,

The only person I know claiming RV ability is Lucianarchy. Maybe he got as bored with it as I did (no offense, Paj. Just wondering if there going to be some conclusion/point to it all reached eventually or.....?)
 
The only interesting part (to me) turned out seeing how difficult it is, really, to correctly guess the book by chance.
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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean here, but you don't need to take part in a test to work that out.

David
 
Clancie said:

Yes, Paj. I was wrong.

The only interesting part (to me) turned out seeing how difficult it is, really, to correctly guess the book by chance.
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Well, I'm glad I managed to demonstrate the concept of "one out of fifteen" to you so effectively. :rolleyes:


The only person I know claiming RV ability is Lucianarchy. Maybe he got as bored with it as I did (no offense, Paj. Just wondering if there going to be some conclusion/point to it all reached eventually or.....?)
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Read the bit at the bottom of the page. I don't make rash decisions based on inconclusive data. I leave that to Schwartz & co.
 
Another thing your book test is showing, Paj, is that it isn't at all easy to correctly say to someone (out of 12 possibilities), "You're a Gemini" or "He died in May" without -any- fishing around or getting misses first.

This book test shows those kinds of hits are more difficult than many people think. Yet I've had mediums do both of the above in phone readings for me (and hot reading possibilities were ruled out, btw).

So not so easy to do this as some here often assume.

Something to think about....
 
Well, I don't want to use this thread to discuss your medium experiences, but if you have transcripts of the readings I'm sure everyone would be very interested to see them. After all, we'd like to see all the misses as well as the hits. Perhaps you could start another thread with them?
 
Posted by The Boy Paj

Well, I don't want to use this thread to discuss your medium experiences, but if you have transcripts of the readings I'm sure everyone would be very interested to see them. After all, we'd like to see all the misses as well as the hits. Perhaps you could start another thread with them?
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No, I don't feel like doing that (and its all meaninglessly anecdotal anyway).

I only mention the "May, etc." kinds of hits here because I think its comparable to your book test and -might- give some people an idea that that kind of hit wouldn't be as easy to get as they think. (I'm assuming, of course, that they could at some point verify for themselves that such "hits" really do occur as described).
 
Well, you have a one in twelve chance of getting "May". That's actually not a big risk. You know that your sitter will conveniently forget about the misses so you only have to make about 12 guesses of a similar probability to get one convincing hit about which people will tell their friends and bring up in conversation for years to come.

Without those transcripts we'll never know the hit ratio, so you're right. It's useless as evidence.
 
Posted by the Boy Paj

Well, you have a one in twelve chance of getting "May"....you only have to make about 12 guesses of a similar probability to get one convincing hit about which people will tell their friends
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Maybe someone else will weigh in on the statistical part here, but I don't think that's how probability works, Paj.

Side note: "May" or "Gemini" isn't enough to carry a reading...much less to tell your friends about the great mediumship experience. My point is that mediums should probably point out to sitters what your test has to me--that doing this is harder than it looks.
 
I know how probability works. I'm not saying that if you make 12 guesses you're guaranteed a hit (Darat knows that there aren't any guarantees when you're up against random chance). But you don't have to make many to be fairly sure of one. And your misses will be forgiven by those who want to believe they haven't just wasted their money.

And we all know it's not all as risky as picking a month. Often it's "a name beginning with S", or "a stern but caring man". I don't know the odds, but I wouldn't mind betting it's a lot more favourable than one in twelve.
 
Clancie said:

Maybe someone else will weigh in on the statistical part here, but I don't think that's how probability works, Paj.

Side note: "May" or "Gemini" isn't enough to carry a reading...much less to tell your friends about the great mediumship experience. My point is that mediums should probably point out to sitters what your test has to me--that doing this is harder than it looks.
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But when the actual reading is more along the lines of "they're telling me that there's something to do with the fourth month or the fourth of a month..." then suddenly it is no longer a 1 in 12 chance of a guess being a hit.
 
But when the actual reading is more along the lines of "they're telling me that there's something to do with the fourth month or the fourth of a month..." then suddenly it is no longer a 1 in 12 chance of a guess being a hit.
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Uh huh. (Which is why that -isn't- the kind of hit I am referring to as being comparable to the results posted in this threadt...).
 
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