New telepathy test, the sequel.

JayUtah said:
How do you know it's interesting?
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'Interesting' was certainly not the adjective that sprang to mind when I read it.

There's a 'Computers and the internet' subforum where a discussion of the algorithms used by Yahoo Answers might be more appropriate, Michel.
 
JayUtah said:
How do you know it's interesting?
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I found an interesting analogy between what I posted very recently on this forum:
Michel H said:
For example, in my first two tests on this forum, I found that eight answers were credible (3 in the first test and 5 in the second), and that seven of those only were correct (with a hit rate of 7/8=87.5%). The p-value is p= 0.00038146973, and is statistically significant (probability of success on a single trial = 0.25 because of four possible answers).
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and
10. There have been 6/7 clones of Barack Obama (maybe more).
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Also of interest:
9. There's another bad sun behind our sun.
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I think that this could be a joking way to refer to ... myself.

Censorship is of course very bad for my research project. All attemps to "normalize" postings are worrying for me.
 
Pixel42 said:
'Interesting' was certainly not the adjective that sprang to mind when I read it.

There's a 'Computers and the internet' subforum where a discussion of the algorithms used by Yahoo Answers might be more appropriate, Michel.
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I believe this more a human problem, than a computer/algorithmic problem.

Questions that I find interesting or amusing seem to be particularly targeted.
 
Michel H said:
I found an interesting analogy between what I posted very recently on this forum:
...and
...Also of interest:
I think that this could be a joking way to refer to ... myself.
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Is that a serious argument?

Censorship is of course very bad for my research project. All attemps to "normalize" postings are worrying for me.
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You don't know that that's happening.
 
Michel H said:
I believe this more a human problem, than a computer/algorithmic problem.

Questions that I find interesting or amusing seem to be particularly targeted.
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Page after page of you whining about all of Yahoo's imagined sins gets you no closer to proving you're telepathic. Don't like Yahoo? Fine, dump them and go with one of the other suggestions. You insisting on sticking with Yahoo despite all the injuries they claim to inflict upon you is irrational.
 
Michel H said:
I think that this could be a joking way to refer to ... myself.
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Out of a pool of how many words did you isolate those ones to focus your attention on? It appears that you were just scrolling through polls on Yahoo! Answers. Even that one had 10 possible answers, and you focussed on that one.

In a large enough pool of words, one is almost guaranteed to self-identify with some of them. So, statistically, what was that chance?

You have never, in all your years here, referred to yourself as a "bad sun" or claimed you were hiding behind the power of "our sun." You've never referred to yourself as a "sun" or any other type of star. So why now do you identify with those words? Better yet: Why should anyone confidently believe those words identify you?

And, of course, the continually constant thing is that you didn't recognize that entire poll as a joke. The writer appeared to just pick the most outrageously ridiculous choices he could, including that women shouldn't drive because it hurts their souls to be lifted off the ground, and that teddy bears deserve equal respect to humans. I recognized it as a joke. And, being off-topic, it was rightly delisted (either by human or computer hands). Does it not seem odd to you that you cannot detect silliness in others?

People are sometimes silly. People who find "alternative science" to be lunacy sometimes spam it with nonsense just to show their contempt. Yet you found a couple words that you read today out of hundreds? Thousands? And those are the words you chose to care about. The fact that you can't admit to coincidence or, in this case, purposeful pattern-fitting on your part ... well, it doesn't bode well for your chances of designing a proper experiment.
 
Or perhaps the fact that it finally got two answers in the last hour after getting none in the first 7 hours after it was posted caused it to be selected, rather than filtered out, by the automatic algorithm that decides these things.
 
Loss Leader said:
Out of a pool of how many words did you isolate those ones to focus your attention on? It appears that you were just scrolling through polls on Yahoo! Answers. Even that one had 10 possible answers, and you focussed on that one.

In a large enough pool of words, one is almost guaranteed to self-identify with some of them. So, statistically, what was that chance?

You have never, in all your years here, referred to yourself as a "bad sun" or claimed you were hiding behind the power of "our sun." You've never referred to yourself as a "sun" or any other type of star. So why now do you identify with those words? Better yet: Why should anyone confidently believe those words identify you?

And, of course, the continually constant thing is that you didn't recognize that entire poll as a joke. The writer appeared to just pick the most outrageously ridiculous choices he could, including that women shouldn't drive because it hurts their souls to be lifted off the ground, and that teddy bears deserve equal respect to humans. I recognized it as a joke. And, being off-topic, it was rightly delisted (either by human or computer hands). Does it not seem odd to you that you cannot detect silliness in others?

People are sometimes silly. People who find "alternative science" to be lunacy sometimes spam it with nonsense just to show their contempt. Yet you found a couple words that you read today out of hundreds? Thousands? And those are the words you chose to care about. The fact that you can't admit to coincidence or, in this case, purposeful pattern-fitting on your part ... well, it doesn't bode well for your chances of designing a proper experiment.
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This question was not in the Polls & Surveys category, it was in the Alternative category of Yahoo Answers.

In this category, only relatively few questions get asked (I saw it on the top of the list, I did not have to browse through hundreds of questions to find one that was "special"), and I often find a certain "meaning" in them.
 
Pixel42 said:
Or perhaps the fact that it finally got two answers in the last hour after getting none in the first 7 hours after it was posted caused it to be selected, rather than filtered out, by the automatic algorithm that decides these things.
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No, such an explanation seems to be ruled out by my own case: my test question: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20200104181250AA43dsx finally managed to get two answers too. Yet it was not put back in the Parapsychology list: https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396547172.

I don't dare appealing myself, because it's too risky (based on previous experience). If my test question is considered "chatting" (which it is not, I think), many previous similar questions could be deleted.
 
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Loss Leader said:
The writer appeared to just pick the most outrageously ridiculous choices he could...
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I don't know. Anyone who's ever owned a cat will seriously consider that it was made by aliens.

Does it not seem odd to you that you cannot detect silliness in others?
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The four people who heroically struggle through my in-depth analysis of Michel's statistical prospects will see how sensitive his significance measurements are to very small variances in the number of subjects and responses. This makes the criteria by which "outlying" data are culled very important, as errors in the criteria or in the application of them will have profound effects on the confidence in the conclusion. When Michel is the sole author and applicator of the criteria, his skill at doing so become arguably the most salient part of the experiment.
 
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Your question didn't get two answers within an hour, they were separated by 4 days. So no, your experience does not rule out that two answers within an hour is sufficient to bump a question. It might even be a combination of that and the fact that a couple of people here clicked on the link when you posted it at about the same time that got it bumped.

The point is you don't know, and you have apparently made no attempt to find out, how Yahoo Answers' algorithms work. You have jumped to the most paranoid possible explanation with no justification whatsoever.
 
Michel H said:
I often find a certain "meaning" in them.
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This alone should cause you to worry about your ability to detect when you are the subject of anyone's words. The vast majority of words written every day have nothing to do with any particular person. Heck, the vast majority of words written every day have nothing to do with the President of the United States. And yet you "often" find personal meaning in some phrases.

That's not a normal distribution. Which is more likely: 1) you are more important to the world than the President; or 2) you're improperly finding patterns that don't exist?
 
Pixel42 said:
Your question didn't get two answers within an hour, they were separated by 4 days. So no, your experience does not rule out that two answers within an hour is sufficient to bump a question. It might even be a combination of that and the fact that a couple of people here clicked on the link when you posted it at about the same time that got it bumped.

The point is you don't know, and you have apparently made no attempt to find out, how Yahoo Answers' algorithms work. You have jumped to the most paranoid possible explanation with no justification whatsoever.
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Your post contains some interesting suggestions.

However, it is likely that several people clicked on my test question: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20200104181250AA43dsx and yet this question did not get restored in the list. I strongly suspect that 100,000 people could click on this question from this forum or from elsewhere, and still it would not get restored.

Emphasizing so much people answering quickly doesn't seem reasonable to me. In addition, it seems to me I saw answers to https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20200109121050AAhdcmn only after the question was restored, and not the other way around (though I am not 100% sure about this).

It is possible that the poster of the funny question became aware of my reporting about it through telepathy, and next decided to go ahead with appealing it, an appeal which was perhaps quickly accepted.
 
What does or does not appear reasonable or possible to you is irrelevant. Speculating that malice, let alone telepathy, is behind the behaviour of what are almost certainly automatic algorithms without first ruling out less - imaginative - explanations is completely irrational.
 
Michel H,

Did it never occur to you that you posted this...

Telepathy text: which text did I write?
I recently wrote and circled one of the following four simple texts (or words):

(1) Soleimani

(2) gone

(3) climate change

(4) still alive

Thank you for your attention and participation.
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Identically in two locations which is likely to trigger spam detection? Really? You never thought of that?
 
The upshot of all of this nonsense about Yahoo! Answers is this:

1. Michel's questions fail to be properly controlled experiments and, thus, fail to provide useful data.

2. Michel is unable and/or unwilling to understand this.
 
Loss Leader said:
Which is more likely: 1) you are more important to the world than the President; or 2) you're improperly finding patterns that don't exist?
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I don't think I have to choose one of these two alternatives. However, the sentence
9. There's another bad sun behind our sun.
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(from https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20200109121050AAhdcmn)
could be a joking allusion to both myself and the current U.S. president, in my opinion. This is perhaps one of the reasons why it was considered "sensitive", and the corresponding question was initially censored and removed. Totalitarian regimes usually try to present a certain idealized picture to the public, differing views tend to get eliminated.
 
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