The VFF Test is On!

[GeeMack]

And of course, that doesn't take into consideration that the picks were probably not random and may have been based on clues that more than one person might use.

And when Rodney gets around to showing that he understands the actual protocol and how chance works, I might just fill everyone in on how I came up with my answers. Since I got the same numbers as Anita, and the same answers as another observer, it might lend some interest to the speculation about how she made her guesses. Or maybe not.

 

[Uncayimmy]

Look, guys, this is what Rodney does. It's not about Anita specifically - he does this whenever statistics are involved. He's under the misguided notion that an "anomaly" in the numbers indicates something psi, with "anomaly" being defined as "whatever I think is unusual or unexpected." Whereas most scientists would look at a small variation and think, "Hmm...there's probably something in my protocol that needs tightening" our good friend, Rodney, says, "There must be psi at work!"

Notice his choice of words. He says that Anita performed "above chance." What he doesn't understand (or refuses to acknowledge) is that these tests are not designed to find someone performing above chance. The tests are designed to make "chance" an extremely unlikely explanation. This is done by the person actually doing what is claimed. That's very different.

What he falls back on at times is what medical researchers do when analyzing data. They may look at 10,000 people and compare those who had a certain medical issue (high blood pressure) with those who did not. The researchers may collect a wide range of information about lifestyle, for example.

They then compare the high blood pressure group to the rest of the group. Suppose they find that 10% of the "control" group eats chili dogs compared to 30% of the high blood pressure group. This might be a random distribution, so they crunch some numbers and determine the likelihood that the distribution was due to chance alone. If such a distribution only occurs 1 in 100 times, that might indicate that further research is warranted. Of course, if instead of chili-dogs (fatty foods known to affect body chemistry) it was red sneakers, nobody would be investigating anything.

What Rodney wants to do is look at Anita's three measly attempts to find a missing kidney and say that it was not likely to be due to chance , so therefore it merits further investigation. Of course, he won't actually get off his ass and do any investigating himself. He just combs the data looking for any possible way to claim that there "might" be "something" there and then tells everyone what should be done.

His approach is all wrong, and the way he's twisting the data still doesn't rise to the minimal standards required. Like with a Anita, it's not a battle you can win. He's never met a statistical anomaly he didn't like.

 

[GeeMack]

His approach is all wrong, and the way he's twisting the data still doesn't rise to the minimal standards required. Like with a Anita, it's not a battle you can win. He's never met a statistical anomaly he didn't like.

Okay, my chance of picking the Ace of Spades from a shuffled deck is 1 in 52. So I grab one card at random, the first card I pick, and what do you know, it's the Ace of Spades! I didn't have to pick 51 other cards first before I got to it, even though the odds were 1 in 52. And you're saying it's not psi? Aw, come on, man.

 

[SezMe]

Again, IF Anita had been successful then we would have made plans to increase the numbers of test subjects and the time necessary to do the test. This would have been a logistical nightmare that would have taken 2-3 days to do with 3-5 rounds of 10 subjects per round per day, but it would have been doable.

It's a LOT worse than that, Derek. Here, as you probably have read, our claimant is saying the third run didn't really, really count because she was pooped. So she is saying (assuming the 4.5 minutes per person holds) that she could do at most 2 rounds of 6 subjects per day. Well, maybe she could do more depending on how long she needs to rest between sets of runs. But your 2-3 days looks terribly optimistic.

Now, some other tricks could be used to cut the time requirement down such as letting the number of people who, in fact, have just one kidney range from zero to all for each set rather than specifying exactly one. But I'm betting Anita would balk at that.

No, my speculation would be that you could never get a 1:million protocol agreement with Anita.

 

[Uncayimmy]

Okay, my chance of picking the Ace of Spades from a shuffled deck is 1 in 52. So I grab one card at random, the first card I pick, and what do you know, it's the Ace of Spades! I didn't have to pick 51 other cards first before I got to it, even though the odds were 1 in 52. And you're saying it's not psi? Aw, come on, man.

Actually, I got into a very similar discussion on Facebook with a friend of Anita (the one who took her to the FACT meetings, I think). He was amazed that even though he doesn't play cards that much, he has gotten a royal flush twice!!! He also seems to believe he has been involved in a number of other event that were extremely unlikely statistically.

His first mistake was thinking that it was a 1 in ~650,000 chance to get a RF. Those are the odds of getting it on a five card deal. When you draw 7 cards (Texas hold 'em, stud, draw poker with two discards, etc), it drops down to a 1 in ~32,000 chance of a RF. In draw poker you can discard 4 cards if you get an ace, thus the odds of a royal flush are even greater.

I told him that I was playing cards that day and got A-Clubs, 4-Diamonds, 4-Hearts, 9-Clubs, 10-Clubs. The odds of getting that hand was 1 in ~2.5M. On the very next hand I got 2-Diamonds, 3-Diamonds, 4-Clubs, Jack-Spades, Queen-Hearts. The odds of getting *that* hand was also 1 in ~2.5M. The odds of getting both those hands in a row were 1 in (2.5M * 2.5M). Un-Freaking-Believable!!

He then countered that if you did a distribution of all the possible hands you find royal flushes to be statistical outliers. In other words they were extremely unlikely.

I patiently explained that he was wrong. Every possible five card hand is just as likely as the next. The distribution is completely flat. Only if you are playing poker and distribute the hands according to rank, royal flushes become outliers. They are useless in a game of Go Fish. You can group the hands any way you want, but it doesn't change the fact that each *individual* hand is just as likely as the next.

The only reason a royal flush has meaning is that we invented a game where it was important to have various card combinations that were ranked from weakest to strongest *and* have those hands be easy to remember. We could have said that the two hands I describe above were the best possible hands, but who in the hell is going to remember that?

Also, if you think about it, there are no "groupings" in poker if you're in a game that ranks suits. In reality there is a continuous ranking of hands from weakest to strongest. Groupings are just convenient ways of looking at the hands.

I realize this is somewhat off-topic, but understanding statistics is vital to understanding what is being attempted in these paranormal tests. If you don't approach the problem correctly, you end up seeing significance where none exists.

This test had the goal of making random chance an extremely unlikely cause for success (assuming she succeeded). At the extreme, suppose Anita was given one person missing a kidney and was asked to tell us which one was missing. If she picked the right one, how would we know if it was her ability or just a lucky guess? We couldn't know. So what they did was settle on a situation where they said in effect, "There's only one chance in 1,728 of success by guessing, so if she gets them all correct, we have enough confidence to investigate this further."

Contrast that with the sonagram lady. She would explain exactly how the device works, and we could verify that it fits with known science. She would then describe exactly what will be seen in both the presence and absence of a kidney. She would then do her thing, and we could all see for ourselves where the kidney was and was not.

In that case, we don't need to be so concerned about statistics. Fraud, maybe, but that's another subject. If I were a potential investor, I'd be happy with a demonstration with just a few people of my choosing.

Also, if that woman took the IIG test, she would have gotten all three correct without a problem. This is the difference between science and fantasy.

 

[lexvonrockets]

I'm not quite following you. How can a claim be proven false if it hasn't been tested? I would go with "very unlikely" , but if the claim was proven false before the test, there would be no point in having the test.

A claim can't be falsified without being tested, but I think what UncaYimmy is saying is that the burden of proof is on Anita to demonstrate that her claim is worth testing, since it contradicts many laws of currently accepted scientific theory, particularly in places where there are no other significant theoretical anomalies.

It would be an enormous waste of time and resources to investigate every claim made by every person, so we tend to use the occasionally-fallable but tried-and-true system of peer-review to determine which claims are worth spending resources and how much of those resources. For example, when I was in grad school, I did a lot of number crunching on some Hubble data. In order to get the images for the date, my advisor had to have time on the Hubble Space Telescope, time that is highly coveted, so she submitted a proposal outlining her research - both its history and what very real and quantitative information we hoped to gain, and most importantly, publish promptly to the public for further review. This proposal was received by the STSCI and sent to a few experts in this particular field for review, all of whom wrote detailed reports on whether they thought this was a worthy investigation, and if so, whether it was deserving of the resources requested. Etcetera.

So you know, a lot of red tape, yeah. Is it worth it? Well, yeah, sure! Else we would be paying taxes to build rockets to Arcturus by now.

 

[derekcbart]

It's a LOT worse than that, Derek. Here, as you probably have read, our claimant is saying the third run didn't really, really count because she was pooped. So she is saying (assuming the 4.5 minutes per person holds) that she could do at most 2 rounds of 6 subjects per day. Well, maybe she could do more depending on how long she needs to rest between sets of runs. But your 2-3 days looks terribly optimistic.

Now, some other tricks could be used to cut the time requirement down such as letting the number of people who, in fact, have just one kidney range from zero to all for each set rather than specifying exactly one. But I'm betting Anita would balk at that.

No, my speculation would be that you could never get a 1:million protocol agreement with Anita.

Oh, don't get me wrong. It would have been incredibly difficult to pull off the logistics of a million to one final test, but it would not have been impossible.

JoeTheJuggler has been inferring that Anita's Preliminary Demonstration did not qualify for the IIG Paranormal Challenge and that is simply incorrect.

-Derek

 

[Uncayimmy]

Lex, I agree with what you're saying, but I'm actually coming at it from a different angle.

No claim, scientific or paranormal, exists in isolation. We have a wealth of information available to us to evaluate those claims. Some are simply false the moment they are uttered. If I say, "I can bench press 20,000 pounds," we know it is false. We know it would crush the human body. We know with great certainty what the world record is for a bench press, and it's well over an order of magnitude less than my claim.

Anita's claim is false. We know a great deal about how humans - all animals, really - perceive the world. No animal can, as Anita claims, download vibrational information and form 3D images that can be rotated and zoomed down to the molecular level. We know the extent of hearing in animals, and no animal could hear a red blood cell scraping against a vessel wall. We know that no animal can look at a vegetable and envision a cure for cancer based on the chemical content.

So, to use the term "falsify" lends an appearance of credibility that is completely undeserved. Some skeptics like to preach that we should "wait until all the evidence is in" while ignoring the vast amount of evidence already out there. We don't need to test every crackpot theory to say it's a crackpot theory.

 

[lexvonrockets]

Lex, I agree with what you're saying, but I'm actually coming at it from a different angle.

No claim, scientific or paranormal, exists in isolation. We have a wealth of information available to us to evaluate those claims. Some are simply false the moment they are uttered. If I say, "I can bench press 20,000 pounds," we know it is false. We know it would crush the human body. We know with great certainty what the world record is for a bench press, and it's well over an order of magnitude less than my claim.

Anita's claim is false. We know a great deal about how humans - all animals, really - perceive the world. No animal can, as Anita claims, download vibrational information and form 3D images that can be rotated and zoomed down to the molecular level. We know the extent of hearing in animals, and no animal could hear a red blood cell scraping against a vessel wall. We know that no animal can look at a vegetable and envision a cure for cancer based on the chemical content.

So, to use the term "falsify" lends an appearance of credibility that is completely undeserved. Some skeptics like to preach that we should "wait until all the evidence is in" while ignoring the vast amount of evidence already out there. We don't need to test every crackpot theory to say it's a crackpot theory.

Ahh, yes, I see what you are saying.

I have a background in philosophy of science (it was once a fantasty Phd. program until one day I was like, "wtf am I doing??" but I digress...), and I think in philosophy class, more than any other place, I got beaten into making the strictest, most well-defined descriptions possible. In my post I was thinking of this ideal case in which we had no foundational basis to judge individual hypotheses.

Or, perhaps a better way to say this, if we absolutely didn't know which claims were BS (or if we were otherwise cited as unqualified to categorize them as such), we could always defer to various panels of experts to tell us which claims are worth investigating and which are not. In the end, a panel of experts is the best we've got.

Paul Hewitt gives this succinct and very post-modern definition of a scientific fact as a consensus amongst the experts (Conceptual Physics Ed. 9). He didn't make this up, either, Thomas Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions (I'm paraphrasing here) speaks of how it used to be a fact that the Sun orbited the Earth, and now it is a fact that the two are gravitationally bound, with the Earth and other planets completing an elliptical revolution around the Sun blah blah blah...

I'm not saying that the "Institution" is always RIGHT either, not right in the grander realm, the realm of absolute truth and brilliance. But that's okay, because we don't live there. So we're more plebeian than we'd like, big deal, get over it! We are human! We are tiny and on this crappy little planet, and we invented SCIENCE!! We hate each other and we still have managed to collaborate enough to agree upon facts about things going on in other clusters of galaxies.

What amazes me is that this is not amazing enough for everyone. I am disgusted at the general lack of respect for human knowledge and capability that pseudoscientists perpetrate when they make their ridiculous claims. Earth did not need to be populated by our extraterrestrial overlords. We do not need to have had magical wizards in ancient times to develop the technologies we use today.

Some people, like Anita, maybe, may shrug at my frustration with this. But, I'd like to remind those people that when you make <false> statements that contradict known scientific theory, spend time and resources having your <false> statements scientifically confirmed as false (there, UY, I didn't say it!), and then you deny the results, you are not doing science. You are doing something else entirely.

 

[Akhenaten]

<snip to avoid repetition>


The only reason a royal flush has meaning is that we invented a game where it was important to have various card combinations that were ranked from weakest to strongest *and* have those hands be easy to remember. We could have said that the two hands I describe above were the best possible hands, but who in the hell is going to remember that?

Also, if you think about it, there are no "groupings" in poker if you're in a game that ranks suits. In reality there is a continuous ranking of hands from weakest to strongest. Groupings are just convenient ways of looking at the hands.

I realize this is somewhat off-topic, but understanding statistics is vital to understanding what is being attempted in these paranormal tests. If you don't approach the problem correctly, you end up seeing significance where none exists.

Thanks for all of that Unca. I'm not a stats whizz and your prosaic explanations clear up a lot of stuff for me.

Cheers Mate.

 

[Uncayimmy]

Lex, you make me laugh!

All too often people like Anita and Rodney act like the IIG's $50K Challenge and the JREF's $1M Challenge are investigations or scientific tests. They are not. They are challenges.

Believers in the paranormal correctly claim that science won't give them the time of day. Of course they don't - it's a bunch of nonsense. So the IIG and the JREF put on what can be called publicity stunts to give these people a chance to put up or shut up. Their goal isn't detect if something "might" be there. Their goal is to make a public spectacle out of these people by offering money and publicity for them to simply demonstrate twice what they claim they can do. Easy enough, right? They agree to the protocol. They do open tests with great success. And then they fail, completely and utterly.

Fortunately (yes, fortunately), people like Anita do not shut up when they fail. They continue to make excuses and twist things around, which makes their claims look even more ridiculous. Sure, True Believers aren't swayed by this, but plenty of fence sitters scratch their heads and say to themselves, "these people be wack!" It also gives skeptics yet another example to trot out and an avenue to openly challenge those Spouters of Woo at a party.

That's why they offer the challenges. We know the claimants won't be swayed by failure, and we really shouldn't care because it's a waste of time and energy. We should spend our efforts using these challenges as levers inserted into those minds where there's already an opening.

 

[Agatha]

Yes, and how does that explain why you think it's my fault that trial 2 is now disqualified because of bookitty's knowing information leakage?

The demonstration had already been failed prior to round 2. You picked the wrong person on round one, so any information leakage that there may or may not have been by round two is a moot point.

 

[skeen]

Anita's boring now. Who's next?

 

[Moochie]

If I had been running the study I would have assigned all the volunteers a number (1 to 18) then had them draw numbers at random to determine the order in which they were to be presented to Anita. So in any given group of six volunteers there could be three, two, one or none missing a kidney. Of course, Anita would never have agreed to this, because it would have dramatically lowered her chance of guessing correctly.

Exactly. Looked at in this way, one sees what an utter sham this entire "claim" is.


M.

 

[Moochie]

Not true.

You have made this statement before and it is simply not true.

Just like the JREF MDC the IIG Paranormal Challenge has a preliminary round that uses easier odds of success (usually 1:10,000) and a final round that uses harder odds of success (usually 1:1,000,000). If Anita had been successful in the preliminary then we would have gone forward on doing a final round test that would have had the odds of success to 1,000,000 to 1.

What may be causing you confusion is that for this particular preliminary we used odds of success much easier than we would have normally done because of the logistical issues involved. This preliminary took 3-4 hours to do for odds at 1,728 to 1. We could have done it with our normal 10,000 to 1 odds, but we really didn't want to ask volunteers to have to spend 8-10 hours involved in this setup.

Again, IF Anita had been successful then we would have made plans to increase the numbers of test subjects and the time necessary to do the test. This would have been a logistical nightmare that would have taken 2-3 days to do with 3-5 rounds of 10 subjects per round per day, but it would have been doable.

Thank you.

-Derek

Derek, had Anita gotten 3 out of three, might the resultant buzz have been enough to approach potential sponsors for the final round, for instance TV rights and the like?


M.

 

[Marcus]

Lex, I agree with what you're saying, but I'm actually coming at it from a different angle.

No claim, scientific or paranormal, exists in isolation. We have a wealth of information available to us to evaluate those claims. Some are simply false the moment they are uttered. If I say, "I can bench press 20,000 pounds," we know it is false. We know it would crush the human body. We know with great certainty what the world record is for a bench press, and it's well over an order of magnitude less than my claim.

Anita's claim is false. We know a great deal about how humans - all animals, really - perceive the world. No animal can, as Anita claims, download vibrational information and form 3D images that can be rotated and zoomed down to the molecular level. We know the extent of hearing in animals, and no animal could hear a red blood cell scraping against a vessel wall. We know that no animal can look at a vegetable and envision a cure for cancer based on the chemical content.

So, to use the term "falsify" lends an appearance of credibility that is completely undeserved. Some skeptics like to preach that we should "wait until all the evidence is in" while ignoring the vast amount of evidence already out there. We don't need to test every crackpot theory to say it's a crackpot theory.

I do get your point. You have to draw the line somewhere. For me, Anita definitely falls on the "no interest" side of the line now, but something like, say, dowsing, is still worth further testing, even though there is a vast amount of evidence against it, because it enjoys so much popular support.

 

[Moochie]

Lex, you make me laugh!

All too often people like Anita and Rodney act like the IIG's $50K Challenge and the JREF's $1M Challenge are investigations or scientific tests. They are not. They are challenges.

Believers in the paranormal correctly claim that science won't give them the time of day. Of course they don't - it's a bunch of nonsense. So the IIG and the JREF put on what can be called publicity stunts to give these people a chance to put up or shut up. Their goal isn't detect if something "might" be there. Their goal is to make a public spectacle out of these people by offering money and publicity for them to simply demonstrate twice what they claim they can do. Easy enough, right? They agree to the protocol. They do open tests with great success. And then they fail, completely and utterly.

Fortunately (yes, fortunately), people like Anita do not shut up when they fail. They continue to make excuses and twist things around, which makes their claims look even more ridiculous. Sure, True Believers aren't swayed by this, but plenty of fence sitters scratch their heads and say to themselves, "these people be wack!" It also gives skeptics yet another example to trot out and an avenue to openly challenge those Spouters of Woo at a party.

That's why they offer the challenges. We know the claimants won't be swayed by failure, and we really shouldn't care because it's a waste of time and energy. We should spend our efforts using these challenges as levers inserted into those minds where there's already an opening.

All by way of saying, I suppose, that events like this, and the ensuing discussions, go some way toward putting the "E" in JREF. At least they do for me.


M.

 

[Rodney]

I'm admittedly lousy at probabilities, but that doesn't sound right. It sounds like you're calculating the odds for someone else choosing the same picks as GeeMack (for example), not the odds for any two people in the group choosing the same picks. I think we're getting into the birthday problem, and the actual probability would be much more likely. Can anyone who knows this stuff comment on the calculations?

Sure. It is the same general situation as the so-called birthday paradox, and I took that into account by considering all possible matches (28), and not just the possibility that McLuvin and GeeMack would match each other. I did make one minor unrelated error, however, when I stated: "Now, if you have 1728 persons or more picking, someone is going to exactly match somebody else." Actually, since there were a total of 1728 unique possible picks in Anita's test, there would have to be 1729 persons picking to guarantee that someone is going to exactly match somebody else.

And of course, that doesn't take into consideration that the picks were probably not random and may have been based on clues that more than one person might use.

Yes, but supposedly McLuvin made all of his picks prior to the start of the test whereas GeeMack made his picks during each of the three rounds.

 

[dlorde]

I think Yimmy is on to something here. In this very thread we have seen VFF evolve from this being a perfectly fair test. Which means she did not know the results. Then at the end of each test, she expresses some vague sense of how she did. After the test is over, she then claims to "know" how she did in each test. Finally, and utterly amazingly, she claims (#1539) "And I knew the accuracy of each trial beforehand" and "All it is, is I feel kidneys when I look at people, and I know the accuracy beforehand." My bold.

Here, in slow motion we see how Anita comes to her justifications of her "powers". It also perfectly explains the "knowing" of Carlson's condition. She rewrites history in her own brain as time goes on, each progressive step becoming very, very real to her. NO WONDER she claims she doesn't have false memories. With her approach to reality, it is actually true.

Memory works like that. It is only relatively recently that it has been shown experimentally that even long-term memories are far more labile than had been thought - each time they are recalled they appear to be as open to modification as when originally laid down. See Reconsolidation of Episodic Memories.

What is happening to Anita's memories is quite normal - the problem is not with the memories per se, but with the faulty belief structure that is progressively distorting them.

 

[derekcbart]

Derek, had Anita gotten 3 out of three, might the resultant buzz have been enough to approach potential sponsors for the final round, for instance TV rights and the like?

Possibly, but it still would have been a logistical nightmare. I work professionally in the entertainment industry and it would be difficult to get someone interested in televising this type of event. People in the chat room were complaining about how boring it was to watch three rounds of six people per round in one day. Just imagine how boring it would be to watch ten rounds of ten people per round over five days.

-Derek