Merged New telepathy test: which number did I write ?

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Working within the limitations of a public forum was always going to be a problem. IMO. It would have solved a lot of problems if it had been possible to post a poll that does not show the progress of the vote and only shows the results when the poll is closed. Then he could simply have sent his chosen number via PM to two trusted volunteers who would themselves undertake not to participate in the poll.

Certainly not water-tight by any means, but a lot better that what he been suggested here.


And yet he proceeded with the woefully designed "tests" that he's tried out here. They've been bad enough for some (me included) to doubt his academic credentials.

He definitely needs to rethink how telepathy can be tested (if it even can be) in an online forum. It's been a huge joke (i.e., "Credibility Rating" BS) so far.
 
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It's not the interest, or even belief, in telepathy that's drawing flak here so much as the appallingly unscientific way in which this 'experiment' has been conducted.

I find it hard to believe that it was dreamed up by a scientist.
 
I find it hard to believe that it was dreamed up by a scientist.

Well, to be honest, I can believe it. Just because telepathy is so elusive (to the point of non-existence). I can imagine a scientist being so convinced of this phenomenon that they are desperately trying to show it. Since their scientific training is in a whole different domain, they are starting from scratch, so to speak. And then they might forget which parts of their training are general, and which are domain-specific.
For instance, I have a PhD in biology, which is a small but very varied part of science. The normal procedures for conducting a growth test for lettuce cultivars can not be used for devising a test for fruit fly insecticide survival. I am familiar with lettuce, and not so much with fruit flies, so a fruit fly test designed by me would be flawed, although I am a scientist.

I think Michel is so specialised in his field, that he forgot the general rules for science when trying to test something that is extremely far from his domain.
 
Well, to be honest, I can believe it. Just because telepathy is so elusive (to the point of non-existence). I can imagine a scientist being so convinced of this phenomenon that they are desperately trying to show it. Since their scientific training is in a whole different domain, they are starting from scratch, so to speak. And then they might forget which parts of their training are general, and which are domain-specific.
For instance, I have a PhD in biology, which is a small but very varied part of science. The normal procedures for conducting a growth test for lettuce cultivars can not be used for devising a test for fruit fly insecticide survival. I am familiar with lettuce, and not so much with fruit flies, so a fruit fly test designed by me would be flawed, although I am a scientist.

I think Michel is so specialised in his field, that he forgot the general rules for science when trying to test something that is extremely far from his domain.

But why ditch the scientific method? A child could spot the flaws in his test.
 
I meant that no-one (whether Randi, the claimant or a third party judge) is allowed to make a subjective judgement about whether or not the test was a success or a failure. That is the question that was being asked.


The OP made a subjective assessment about each response by assigning a score from -10 to 10. From there it is a routine statistical analysis to determine if the OP meets the required significance above chance to validate his claim.


I never said it wasn't. Michel's previous tests weren't, but I agree with Agatha that this one was a considerable improvement, though it was still a long way from the sort of protocol that would be accepted for a real MDC test. I can understand why some posters thought it was a sufficiently big step forward to be encouraged but I had severe doubts that it would enable any genuine progress to be made - doubts that have sadly proved to be justified.


What's there not to accept? Sure it lacks the rigorous specification of the statistical analysis that must be used to analized the result. It lacks a specification for the number of trials but that cannot be specified until after a few trial runs. Probably the biggest drawback is that the protocol is dependent on the cooperation of the forum posters who are so terribly unsure of their own reality that they will choose to disrupt the test rather than face the possibility that they are wrong.

The failure on the "skeptics" side is catastrophic in that they didn't recognize how the protocol was not secure.
 
The OP made a subjective assessment about each response by assigning a score from -10 to 10. From there it is a routine statistical analysis to determine if the OP meets the required significance above chance to validate his claim.





What's there not to accept? Sure it lacks the rigorous specification of the statistical analysis that must be used to analized the result. It lacks a specification for the number of trials but that cannot be specified until after a few trial runs. Probably the biggest drawback is that the protocol is dependent on the cooperation of the forum posters who are so terribly unsure of their own reality that they will choose to disrupt the test rather than face the possibility that they are wrong.

The failure on the "skeptics" side is catastrophic in that they didn't recognize how the protocol was not secure.

I'm thinking of a number between 0 and 10. What is it?
 
The OP made a subjective assessment about each response by assigning a score from -10 to 10. From there it is a routine statistical analysis to determine if the OP meets the required significance above chance to validate his claim.
Once again: I was answering a specific question about the JREF MDC. I was not referring to the OP.

What's there not to accept?
All the problems with the protocol you go on to list, for a start.
 
Probably the biggest drawback is that the protocol is dependent on the cooperation of the forum posters who are so terribly unsure of their own reality that they will choose to disrupt the test rather than face the possibility that they are wrong.


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No-one who seriously want to think of themselves as a skeptic should ever stoop so low as to disrupt someone else's test, however unscientific they think that test is. Just don't participate, or if you must say something, use the PM system to suggest how the test might be improved.

As I quoted in another thread

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavour of science."
- Carl Sagan

ETA: or perhaps more applicable to this thread, and also from Sagan...

“The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”

 
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Can someone recap for me - did he (the OP) perform better than chance alone?

Before the results were revealed, Michel ranked the credibility of the answers, and the highest credibility score he gave was zero. By at least one reasonable way of assessing the results, that means he got zero of zero valid responses, which is not enough for any sort of statistical significance (to put it mildly).

However, if we threw out only the negative credibility scores, keeping the ones with zero, the results were revealed to be 2 of 6, which is ever-so-slightly greater than the expected 1.5, but not enough to be significant.

At this point, knowing the results, Michel decided to recalculate the credibility scores, and threw out three incorrect results, thus giving himself an astonishing 66% success. For some reason, he expects us to take this seriously.
 
Before the results were revealed, Michel ranked the credibility of the answers, and the highest credibility score he gave was zero. By at least one reasonable way of assessing the results, that means he got zero of zero valid responses, which is not enough for any sort of statistical significance (to put it mildly).

However, if we threw out only the negative credibility scores, keeping the ones with zero, the results were revealed to be 2 of 6, which is ever-so-slightly greater than the expected 1.5, but not enough to be significant.

At this point, knowing the results, Michel decided to recalculate the credibility scores, and threw out three incorrect results, thus giving himself an astonishing 66% success. For some reason, he expects us to take this seriously.

It should be remembered that this data fudging is consistent with his prior test. In that one, his results were consistent with what you would expect with random guessing. He threw out all the answers that were inconsistent with his claim, using something he calls a "credibility rating", and gave himself a perfect score.

This latest test was his attempt to prove, not that he had the power of telepathy, but that his credibility system was not influenced by his knowledge of the answers people were giving.
 
I know, that is the part I really don't understand.

I don't think it is really that big of a mystery. I suspect he doesn't use the scientific method because it doesn't give him the results he wants to see. I'd even say that a conditional acceptance of the scientific method is in itself a rejection.
 
So 6 answers are valid when they agree with your conclusions, but 3 of those are invalid when they do not. How non-scientific of you. ...
In this test, I got answers from 6 people (you [Hokulele], Ladewig, stanfr, Kid Eager, Femke and gabeygoat) who posted answers with "xx", and sent an unambiguous and valid numerical answer to the assistant Agatha (see post #127 and post #149). I think that one may reasonably adopt the point of view that these 6 people gave valid answers (not providing a MD5 hash is not very important if an answer is sent to the assistant, as Ladewig said:
...

.
I am not encrypting it, I will just send it to Agatha
). Two of those were numerically correct ( the answers by Ladewig and Femke, this is what Agatha found in her analysis), this gives us a correct answer rate (CAR) equal to CAR = 2/6 = 33%, which a little higher than the CAR expected from chance alone, which is about 25%. However, a closer look reveals that three of these answerers (stanfr, Kid Eager and gabeygoat) gravely violated the recommended protocol explained in the opening post, because they had sent to Agatha a text which was different from the one they had posted in the thread. For exemple, gabeygoat posted:
"I'm gonna guess xx
not sure what im doing
",
whereas he sent "guessed 4 de4f022d0deba6911bedf9a0350256aa". These two texts "sound" rather differently, and the credibility rating (CR = 0) I gave to gabeygoat's first text, using the "blind" procedure, does not necessarily apply (and, even, probably does not apply) to his second text. In my opening post, I "recommended" that participants send their texts (one, and only one for each participant in the test) to the assistant(s). I didn't say:"Hey guys, feel free to invent another text (please, show great imagination), and to send that one to the assistant(s)". I said: It may also be useful (I recommend it) that you send your (full) answer, in the form of a private message, to either Agatha, or Femke, or to both.... I said "your (full) answer". I didn't say "some text, with your chosen number". But now comes the interesting part. None of the three participants who violated the recommended protocol (stanfr, Kid Eager and gabeygoat, as said above) provided correct numerical answers. In other words the CAR of this group was equal to 0%. This is apparently an interesting confirmation of the ideas I have explained and developed in my previous threads, on the correlation between credibility (here, credibility stemming from carefully abiding by the recommended protocol) and numerical correctness. The average CR I gave (in a blind way) to people who followed the recommended protocol was (0-5+0)/3 = -1.7, the average CR I gave to people who did not, was (-5-5+0)/3 = -3.3 (a little less). The correct answer rate for the people who followed the recommended protocol in its most important aspects (Hokulele, Ladewig and Femke) was equal to CAR = 2/3 = 67%. This CAR is the most important and significant hit rate, I believe, the hit rate of the most careful, serious, credible and motivated people.

...
No, I don't rate for credibility in this way (or, at least, I try not to)
...
But you did. Go read your analysis of my response again.
No, that's not true. This what I said about your answer in post #127:
...
Her answer: "The first number that came to my attention is xx, so that is my choice for this test." does not make her answer credible, in my opinion, in a telepathy test, where the thing that matters is what you (telepathically) perceive, not the first number which "comes to your attention". Hokulele's answer is written using a rather formal style, which is odd here (and which I even find slightly arrogant ;), which is not favorable for credibility). Telepathic perception is probably mostly an involuntary process, something you mostly cannot control, it's not like "giving (visual) attention" to an image.

But she also said later 'I "predict" that his credibility ratings will no longer correlate with correctness'. This does suggest that she wrote a (numerically) correct answer, with a not credible answer (she most probably realizes her answer is not credible), so that the usual correlation is lost (her answer does not seem credible; if the frequent correlation must be lost, one should expect it to be numerically correct). ...
So, instead of giving a negative credibility, I finally choose: CR = 0 (I note also she gave no MD5 hash). I prefer to not give a positive credibility to an answer which explains a number choice by "a first number coming to attention" (as if she had seen it).
...
In other words, I revised my CR of your answer from negative to zero, because of what you said later.
 
In other words, I revised my CR of your answer from negative to zero, because of what you said later.

Why not design a protocol that doesn't involve you judging the credibility of the answers after you know what they are?

Why not leave out judging altogether?
 
Seriously, is it April 1st?

Credibility Ratings and Hash Tags?


Something weird has happened to to this place.
Attention: Nutter/Troll
 
Why not design a protocol that doesn't involve you judging the credibility of the answers after you know what they are?

Why not leave out judging altogether?
Why not design a protocol that doesn't involve you judging the credibility of the answers after you know what they are?
This is precisely what I tried to do in this new test.
Why not leave out judging altogether?
Because, when all answers are considered on an equal footing, regardless of how serious and reliable they sound, I seem to obtain results similar (or close) to chance (results).
 
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