showme2 said:
Could you explain this comment please, epepke, since you seem to be well up in this kind of stuff, because the WHOLE ISSUE is whether belief in SB's "talents" by the person receiving the reading would push the result in her favour.
As I understand it, all participants must believe in her talents.
One gets the reading.
The reading is then presented to the other 9 on the basis that it is THEIRS. (They don't know whether it is or not.)
Randi suggests that because the person who was read is a believer in SB's talents, this pushes the result in her favour.
I don't think I'm necessarily any better up on this stuff than anybody else, but I'm reasonably good at math and anthropology.
I haven't seen that suggestion from Randi, but it seems reasonable to me.
The thing that Clancie pointed out is that the believer would have first-hand knowledge that the phone call was theirs, but only a second-hand idea that the tape recordings or transcripts were theirs.
Upon re-reading the passage, though, the description is unclear to me. I'm not sure whether "reading over the telephone" is done
to the target, that is, with the target on the line, or simply to a JREF representative. I can't be sure of an interpretation based on my reading, but the interpretation that the reading is done live to the volunteer seems the more reasonable.
If the reading is done
to the target,
i.e. Sylvia is talking into a telephone connected to the target, then the target would know the contents of one reading that was done to them and may be influenced to prefer that reading because they have personal knowledge that it was from Sylvia. On that basis, they may be prejudiced to prefer that over the other transcripts.
In other words, the target has one reading that he and/or she
knows is of him and/or her, compared with ten that he and/or she is simply told is of him and/or her.
There's also the possibility that they may rate the reading done over the telephone on the basis of the excitement and social experience. At minimum, if this is the case, I would expect that the actual reading also be included as one of the transcripts after a few weeks have passed
for forgetfulness to set in.
Furthermore, they could just google and see this site. Then they'd know for sure that only the personal reading is for them as a target. All in all, it seems a rather poorly designed test in that it would be a big gamble for Randi and not quantifiable.
If, on the other hand, the reading is only told to a Randi representative and not to the target, so the target really has no way of telling which of the readings were done specifically by Sylvia to the target, then the numbers become simple, and what I said initially would hold and not simply be a limiting case. Since there's no way of telling with the information between 9 to 1 and 9 million to 1, it's a bit hard to come up with a number.
Now, upon re-reading the passage, it also seems possible that Sylvia only does one reading, in which case the test would be really lousy. I think I rejected it based on a prejudice that Randi generally provides decent tests.
If the person knows that he and/or she was getting the reading (from talking to Sylvia on the telephone), then all the others could just google and know for sure that the transcript is not for them. If it's only reported to Randi or a representative, then the simplest case of my analysis applies, but only as an approximation. There is also the possibility that, with integers from 1 to 10, there could be duplicates and that there isn't a partial ordering of the responses.
This is the kind of math that I hate to do analytically, so I'll do it stochastically (type type type).
Assuming a uniform distribution, the chances of fulfilling the requirements randomly, from ten million trials, are about 0.18, or about 5.5 to 1. Assuming a normal distibution, the odds are only changed slightly to about 0.15, or about 6.7 to 1. Neither is close to 50 to 1.
Hell, I'd put up $10,000 for such a challenge, simply by finding a generic cryogenic read and appending "Your lost loved one's name began with a 'B.'" If I had $10,000, that is.
