The VFF Test is On!

I'm surprised she's not hedging and saying her "gift" is not bound by conventional time, or time as we experience it. Instead, she percieves not only what has happened, but what will happen.
 
Sadly, I didn't do as well as that. By guesswork alone and before seeing any of the participants:

I chose 11 left, 25 left, 33 left.

The correct choices were 11 right, 24 left, 36 right

VfF chose 14 left, 24 left, 36 left

My 16 year old daughter watched things along with me and did better than Anita in that she chose 11 right, 24 left, 35 right (so she had two completely correct). My daughter claims no ability, she picked on the basis that some of them looked "ill" or "fidgety".
 
The odds of doing what Anita did by chance alone are 19% (just over 1 in 5.)

Care to explain that number?

As I see it, there are two possibilities, depending on whether we consider half hits:

Two misses, one hit: 21%
One full miss, one full hit, one half hit: 6.94%

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
Care to explain that number?

As I see it, there are two possibilities, depending on whether we consider half hits:

Two misses, one hit: 21%
One full miss, one full hit, one half hit: 6.94%

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

There can not be a half hit. Anita was not asked to identify who was missing a kidney and incidentally, which side. She was asked to identify which kidney out of 11 was missing. In the last test she failed.
 
There can not be a half hit. Anita was not asked to identify who was missing a kidney and incidentally, which side. She was asked to identify which kidney out of 11 was missing. In the last test she failed.

Yes, I know. I was talking about what Anita did, not how it should be interpreted according to the protocol. According to the protocol she failed both the first and the third trials.
 
Yes, I know. I was talking about what Anita did, not how it should be interpreted according to the protocol. According to the protocol she failed both the first and the third trials.

Yes and I am sorry I misunderstood you. Will read more carefully in the future.
 
To answer the audience questions, there was probably no more than 30 people, not counting the subjects.
 
Admittedly, I'm lousy at probabilities, so I don't understand why it isn't figured this way:

Chance of succeeding in one trial=1/12
Chance of succeeding in two trials=1/12 + 1/12 = 1/6
Chance of succeeding in three trials=1/12 + 1/12 + 1/12 = 1/4 or 25%
 
I'm watching the post-demo-video and this old guy is interesting. If she had blown the first one and gotten the other two, I'd suggest that she work on honing her ability and come back in a few years. At best, she got 1.5/3 if you're feeling really generous. And if there was more fidgeting, then it's less interesting.
 
First trial: wrong person
Second trial: right person, right kidney
Third trial: right person, wrong kidney

That becomes 50% right and 50% wrong by the sort of faulty reasoning that VfF has shown herself all too prone to.

I'm pretty sure her "50/50" talk was strictly about her performance on the 3rd round only. It's still wrong, but just want to be fair that she wasn't claiming she got 50% right overall.
 
So if she saw the missing kidney very quickly without being told in the open test, why did it take 27 minutes for everyone else?
 
He said 23%, but I checked the Binomial with p=.0833, n=36 and successes =1 and it still came out to be a bit less than 0.19.
Once again, n=3, not 36. There are 3 trials, each with a probability of success of 1/12, or 0.0833333.

Also, you have to calculate the odds of getting 1 or more correct, not exactly 1 correct.

with n=3, p=0.08333, and x=1, you get 22.97%.
http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~west/applets/binomialdemo.htmlhttp://stattrek.com/Tables/Binomial.aspx


The odds of getting exactly 1 correct is 21%
 
Last edited:
I'm watching the post-demo-video and this old guy is interesting. If she had blown the first one and gotten the other two, I'd suggest that she work on honing her ability and come back in a few years

I wouldn't. Her claim was that when she looks at a person she can see inside them and see the internal organs and has never failed. It's clear she cannot.

She didn't claim it was something that worked some of the time, or that she was doing something that required looking a number of times and tallying up how many times she saw the organ compared to how many times she failed to see one.

And the rubbish about her getting tired in the 3rd round is insulting. She should be ashamed for saying that.

She was asked ahead of time if there was any reason she couldn't perform, and she said there was not. Most skeptics (and presumably the IIG) didn't want to make the subjects sit still for so long anyway--the long trial times was strictly Anita's demand. She never claimed that her skill took any effort or that it diminishes over any period of time.

All of us urged her to do a self-test on her own. She continued to ignore that advice and instead made her claim based on a couple of anecdotes that no one can verify.

The only reasonable conclusion is that she is a liar and a fraud, or she has some fundamental cognitive deficit.
 
So if she saw the missing kidney very quickly without being told in the open test, why did it take 27 minutes for everyone else?

See the last sentence in my previous post. :) I don't see any other possible explanation.


The odds of getting exactly 1 correct is 21%

I'm not opining on the disagreement over the odds, but I just like to point out again that whatever the correct calculation is, it still doesn't account for the slight bias of missing left kidneys and the skewing of the odds by information leakage.
 
I'm watching the post-demo-video and this old guy is interesting. If she had blown the first one and gotten the other two, I'd suggest that she work on honing her ability and come back in a few years. At best, she got 1.5/3 if you're feeling really generous. And if there was more fidgeting, then it's less interesting.

The old guy who was "Not from your organization but still consider myself a skeptic" who seemed to want a re-test right then and there? His point was that Anita said she felt good about the second test, she was really sure. However, I seem to remember that while she was describing her results, she didn't see a kidney in one of the other participants as well.

I'll need to re-watch it but if you go by Anita's notes, she claimed to have not found a kidney 5 or 6 times out of 33. Not much attention was paid to this because it does not reflect on the results but it is noteworthy.
 
While I do agree with JoeTheJuggler and others about the problems with the protocol, she did fail according to the requirements laid out prior to the show. From a posting at www.stopvisionfromfeeling.com...

Anita at stopvisionfromfeeling.com... said:
I am tremendously pleased with the test protocol. From my perspective it is absolutely perfect, and it contains no elements that I worry could reduce my performance. I have confidence in my single past experience of detecting that a left kidney was missing, and am willing to let this specific claim represent the entirety of the medical perceptions claim. And so if I fail this Preliminary test with the IIG, I will be happy to announce my paranormal claim as falsified.


When you return to the conversation, Anita, we look forward to your announcement that your paranormal claim has been falsified.

Any bets whether this was another lie and no such announcement will be forthcoming?
 

Back
Top Bottom