Police and Psychics

Psychic investigations are next to useless because the info CANNOT STAND UP IN COURT and only ever become relevant AFTER the killer/kidnapper or whatever is caught.

"Ahh, but how else can you explain their results?" I hear people cry...well alright maybe just Luci. Again, simple.

Profiling

The results gained by profilers are infinitely more precise and accurate than anything gleaned from a psychic. This area of investigation is also inadmissable, but instead is used as a basis for enquiries and the results are far more impressive an accurate than anything a psychic has ever provided. They are also willing to say "sorry, my mistake" if they get it wrong.

Can I propose we end this debate now please? No-one is going to change anyone's mind and it is now degenerating into a slanging match.
 
SteveGrenard said:


How do the police differentiate between any good and bad tips, even if they are not from a psychic?



Click to expand...
Well, I suspect that a newly arrived Lithuanian immigrant marching in and suggesting he has first hand knowledge of the OJ case might be safely ignored. Similarly, if psychics tend to produce wild ass guesses (or, for a real hoot, look at the "reading" from the RVers re. Saddam) they become, for all intents and purposes, Lithuanians. (This is a metaphor)

I am suggesting, based on performance, that this is a dismissable class. A bit of profiling, if you will.
 
Thus far, a psychic's reliability for law enforcement has not been established. Anecdotal information is sometimes impressive and even surprising, but nothing can be concluded about using psychics as resources in solving a crime.
Click to expand...

Source: here

Never a truer set of words spoken.

Steve you asked about grading quality of normal info - see my previous answer relating to grading info on the "5x5" scale
 
O: If a doctor is examining a patient with snakebite wounds, it's hardly anecdotal. The doctor can at least verify that a bite did occur; the patient bears physical evidence.

Reply: It would amaze you how many people come in complaining of a snakebite, with puncture wounds, who were not bitten by a snake: people who placed their hands, for example, into some brush that was thorny and people bitten by spiders and other stinging bugs. Or a non-venomous snake. Or a dry bite. Or a??? Diagnosing a snakebite in the absence of a visual
identification of the offender is sometimes quite problematic.
Before beginning treatment, which itself is not exactly fun, doctors are forced to sometimes play a waiting game for symptoms. This can be very risky as they lose the element of early neutralization of the toxic components.

O: Hmm. I don't think you can blame this on the "anecdote argument". If good evidence was lacking, it meant that someone needed to find it. Heck, in recent years, drugs have been pulled from the market because adverse events occurred in patients that did not occur in clinical trials...it wasn't pulled because of anecdotal evidence.

Reply: I think I can as this is an area I have been studying and observing for 40 years. My first piece on this appeared in a journal called Modern Medicine back in 1964. Up until the FDA approved the new antivenom a few years ago, cries of anecdotal
provided the justification for Wyeth to have NEVER ever considered changing the formula or method of manufacturing its North American polyvalent crotalidae antivenom. Faced with the same cries of "anecdotal" from evolutionary biologists who rightfully point out there is no evidence that hybridization between neurotoxic and hemotoxic species occurs in spite of enormous quantities of anecdotal evidence and even live specimens which provide evidence of this, I almost didn't get to publish the piece in the URL below. But it was published, in the same issue of the magazine with one of Steve Gould's last contributions on this subject. So in spite of these cries of anecdotal, Natural History still was willing to publish my article on this. Two months after this the FDA, after years of delay and objections by the current maker, approved the new antivenom. The FDA in fact raided and shut down their plant for making these products shortly before approving the new antivenom. And it only took 40 years and anecdocity as the cause of the inertia, a saga that began with the death of a herpetologist-physician named Fred Shannon from one of these neurotoxic species. But , Fred was just another anecdote.

http://www.amnh.org/naturalhistory/features/0700_feature.html
 
Hannibal said:


Source: here

Never a truer set of words spoken.

Steve you asked about grading quality of normal info - see my previous answer relating to grading info on the "5x5" scale
Click to expand...

Sorry, but with 18 pages and some 700 posts to this thread I must have missed it. Can you reference this again please. Thank you.
 
CFLarsen said:


Surely, you cannot ask Steve Grenard to do his own homework.

Really, Bill!
Click to expand...

Silly me. It is an old habit. Often the ladies at the strip club ask me to help them with their outfits. Its not in my job description, but how can I say no?
 
Thanks, I have just proved what I was hypothesizing all along ... everybody here does answer for others. But this is not the information I asked about, at least it does not appear to be.
 
SteveGrenard said:
Thanks, I have just proved what I was hypothesizing all along ... everybody here does answer for others. But this is not the information I asked about, at least it does not appear to be.
Click to expand...

How have you "proved" this, Steve?
 
Reply: It would amaze you how many people come in complaining of a snakebite, with puncture wounds, who were not bitten by a snake

Which exactly illustrates our point that anecdotes are not reliable. Thank you for changing your position.
 
thaiboxerken said:
Reply: It would amaze you how many people come in complaining of a snakebite, with puncture wounds, who were not bitten by a snake

Which exactly illustrates our point that anecdotes are not reliable. Thank you for changing your position.
Click to expand...


So you would say if half the people who come in with puncture wounds believe they were bitten by a snake, it is okay then not to treat 100% of all the puncture wound victims who think they've been bitten because one anecdotre is no better than another? My point is yes, anecdotal. No, you can't ignore even if it is anecdotal.

Lets say we did a study and really found half the victims of puncture wounds are eventually proven to be not the result of being bitten by a snake. So by the reckoning of those who want such studies then, if two people come in with puncture wounds you would treat one for snakebite and send the other home with a tetanus shot and a band-aid.

You may not find anecdotes 100% reliable sir, but you cannot ignore them.
 
SteveGrenard said:
You may not find anecdotes 100% reliable sir, but you cannot ignore them.
Click to expand...

This, from someone who (pretends to) ignore my questions....
 

So you would say if half the people who come in with puncture wounds believe they were bitten by a snake, it is okay then not to treat 100% of all the puncture wound victims who think they've been bitten because one anecdotre is no better than another?

No.. you do what you have said doctors do. They look for evidence of that bite and if it may be something else.

My point is yes, anecdotal. No, you can't ignore even if it is anecdotal.

This snake-bite analogy is a false analogy, it is nothing like the claims of ESP. There is physical evidence that some people have been bitten by snakes, it's a fact that some snakes have venom and that snakes bite. The "anecdotes" that the victims are giving do not contradict known sciences and neither do they threaten to change our understanding of physics. The nature of an anecdote plays an important role as to whether it is reliable or not.

You illustrated that many people that claim to have been bitten really weren't. Yes, we must consider the snake bite claim seriously and look into it because that person's life may be at stake AND it is a fact that snakes can bite and kill people. The ESP claims have ZERO scientific evidence to support the anecdotes and often waste police resources.


You may not find anecdotes 100% reliable sir, but you cannot ignore them.

Dependant on the nature of the claim, yes we can and we should in cases of ESP and other paranormal claims... Until some reliable scientific evidence is found.
 
SteveGrenard said:




You may not find anecdotes 100% reliable sir, but you cannot ignore them.
Click to expand...

So, rather than evidence that there is value we are reduced to the intellectually barren position of listening because they have some non-zero probability of being correct? Not a very efficient use of resourse, is it?
 
Freud related anecdotes. He didn't take notes during a session, he scribbled them down at a later time, filtered through his interpretation.
He never did an experiment, except in medical school, with electric eels.
But his pseudoscientific cult dominated the practice of psychiatry and clinical psychology for about 50 years.
And anecdotes are the food of science?

So endeth the lesson.
 
Steve - what bit didn't answer what you asked? Itelligence is recieved, graded, reviewed and disseminated. Did I miss something out? if so tell me - I yearn to talk!

It still doesn't alter the fact that psychics and Police are not bedfellows.
 
SteveGrenard said:
Thanks, I have just proved what I was hypothesizing all along ... everybody here does answer for others. But this is not the information I asked about, at least it does not appear to be.
Click to expand...
If this is somehow problematic for you, may I respectfully suggest you never enter a thread without a specific, personal invitation from another poster?
 
This entire discussion is absurd on the face of it (Figures, Luci started it).

Let us take a step back and look at this rationally.

I am going to make a big assumption now.

Police are judged/evaluated/promoted based, primarily on their track record in closing cases.

If that is not a primary indicator of success in police work, please state that now (and frankly, the only responses that a\will not be BS are those of Cops or city officials or some other political type).

IF this is so, and given the number of psychics crawling out of the woodwork (Steve said thousands, as I recall) would one not expect, if there were any value at all to these characters, that there would be a cop network, both within and accross departments, that knew about this stuff? Would it, in fact, not be ubiquitious? Is it?

No. This simple fact, the lack of awareness and public knowledge suggests that psychics don't add a whole lot and that their use is notable by infrequency. This whole area is Woo-wooism of the worst sort.
 
Hannibal said:
Steve - what bit didn't answer what you asked? Itelligence is recieved, graded, reviewed and disseminated. Did I miss something out? if so tell me - I yearn to talk!

It still doesn't alter the fact that psychics and Police are not bedfellows.
Click to expand...

In the answer I received from Hoyt pointing me to a post on the previous page which, in fact I did see, I saw nothing of the term "5 x 5."..... if you check my original question to you it was to re-reference this term. Thank you. I am sorry for any misunderstanding. Your last remark is irrelevant to my question
but I left it in.

So can you explain 5 X 5 for me? (Besides saying 5 x 5 = 25).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom