Ashles...
But when you do collect data, you completely ignore it and never conclude anything. Everyone else concludes from the data you gather that there is no ability as claimed. That is the conclusion that can be drawn.
I think what is confusing you all here, is that I had a lengthy
study of my claim. The study involved several types of little tests for the purpose of trying out various test conditions and test procedures in order to learn from trial and error and experience how to design the best suitable test both for the performance of my claim and for the quality of test design.
For instance, I did a test at home in which I try to perceive of a person in darkness, and I failed that. That does not falsify the claim; the study instead
defines the claim. I was exploring the boundaries of what the claim can do, and to best do so it was necessary to expose my claim to conditions in which it would be likely to fail! This is the only way I was able to design a test.
I do not see evidence that the claim is falsified. Try not to confuse study results with test results.
But you simply decide to add more variables and parameters to ensure you never reach any conclusion. This is not scientific. It is basically the exact opposite of scientific.
I disagree with your interpretation of how I investigate this claim. (I assume here that we are discussing my medical perceptions claim, and not my study of the migraine healing which I have not begun yet.) I regret that you do not have background in chemistry, because in chemistry you set up your experiment and then begin to define any additional and unforeseen variables as they come along. Chemistry experiments rarely run along as expected, and as a good chemist you are supposed to define all the variables that affect the outcome, and to adapt your testing procedure around those. If you are testing a hypothesis of a desired effect, you define the variables
usually experimentally and not just theoretically and in advance and you continue to improve on the protocol to give the proposed result the best chance to manifest itself. This is not "cheating", this is research.
Research is a tedious and iterative process, and is rarely concluded on in an afternoon.
It's also about forming conclusions based on what the evidence indicates. Your idea of skepticism appears to involve clinging to your beliefs in direct opposition to what the evidence actually indicates.
This is not skepticism. It is basically the exact opposite of skepticism.
Immediately after I handed in my answer from trial 1 on the IIG test, I complained to everyone there that I was unhappy with my results of this trial, and that I knew it would be incorrect. If you are attempting to demonstrate a claimed talent, you try to show what you can do, but the claim is not "I CAN NOT ONLY DO IT - BUT I CAN ALSO DO IT ALL THE TIME!"... The claim is, "I CAN DO IT". Why all the time? Do it or don't do it, nothing can be done all the time. If I come from an attempt and I say "No, this didn't go well. Let's not use this one, let me try again." And I said that before the results were in.
In trial 2 I was very confident in my performance. Before the results were in.
It is not me clinging to my beliefs here, it is you, clinging to your beliefs that there is nothing here to investigate further. I find valid reason consistent with the scientific method to carry out another test.
I hope they never allow you to do scientific research.
If your claim is to produce the winning lottery numbers, and you sit down and you start to write down your numbers. You write the numbers on a little card and you seal it in an envelope. The numbers will be checked two days after this day when you produce them. From an attempt, you produce three envelopes each with a full set of numbers. But you hesitate, you say in advance that you do not feel good about the first envelope, so you do not hand that in, you say it does not represent what you do because it didn't feel right then. But you feel really good about the second envelope, you say that this time it felt really good and this is what you want to submit to testing. The third envelope you say feels partly correct but you got tired at the end, which you did, because it was obvious that you were tired.
So you say, please discard the first envelope, I don't want to submit that, it didn't feel right, I don't think it worked this time. Do submit the second one, I feel it went really well, in fact so well that if I am wrong in the second one, I will falsify the claim and be entirely convinced that I can not do this, because this represents the best of what my claim thinks it can do. This is the most compelling answer I could ever produce. So, please do test this. This one went really well.
As for the third one, you say, I was doing well, but I am sorry I got tired. Please do not hold that against me, I can not do this when I am tired. My head was hurting and I was not getting the numbers anymore.
So, there are three envelopes. Each has its own set of numbers, each for a different lottery draw.
The first one is wrong. Skeptics are happy and say they knew you couldn't do it. But you had said it would be no good and that it did not work. The second one is right. The third one is partially right.
Skeptics say the claim is falsified, well, they said it was falsified even before there was a test, because of their preconceived disbelief. What are the arguments? Should you be able to do this every time you are asked and every time you try should you be able to produce an answer that you can be confident in? If so, why? And should you be able to do this when you are tired?
I do not understand. Please explain carefully, because I just don't get it.
You failed. An actual scientist would have accepted the results and considered the claim to be without merit. But you however will always choose to interpret any set of results as requiring of 'further study'. No matter how much they indicate nothing of the sort.
What you say contradicts with everything I know about research in chemistry. Failing a test is not automatically equal to falsifying a claim. And I do accept the results. It is obvious that you and I do interpret the results differently, and I want to understand which of us is more correct. All of the answers that I handed in and was confident in was correct. This is not interpretation after the fact. I clearly made these statements before the results came in.
*sigh* Another transparent way to continue running failed tests for ever.
I want to make an answer like I did in trial 2, that I am fully confident in, only to find that it is inaccurate. And that is the only way I will be convinced that I can not do this... I clearly stated on the test, that if my answer in trial 2 is incorrect, the claim is falsified and it is over.
If I make an answer when I am exhausted and I say this is no good it does not represent what my claim tries to do and it is wrong, that does not convince me that I can not do it. It just convinces me that I can not do it when I am tired.
When a claim is clear and well stated why on earth could this not happen? So how many failed series of tests are you intending to run?
Only until I make an answer that I am confident in and find that it is inaccurate.
When a Chemist claims he can make water boil at room temperature simply by adding a spoonful of salt to a beaker of water, how many trials would you expect him to run before declaring that this was not actually the case?
I am so glad that you would ask. The Chemist, if he is a good one, will also notice - if he did not know this from before - that pressure affects the boiling point also. So if his test fails, he thinks, well lets test this at standard pressure instead of being on high altitude or low altitude. He then tests the same experiment at different pressures, while keeping all other variables constant, and is able to define the influence of pressure on his test results, and to define the best pressure that allows for his claim to manifest. If a Chemist is unable to question his test results even when they seem to have concluded an answer, he is not a very good Chemist. If he is attempting this boiling experiment on high altitude, he might conclude his claim as falsified when in fact it really isn't.
There is nothing wrong with having additional tests. If there is any reason to suspect the involvement on an additional variable, you test that curiosity. As a Chemist you do not say, "Well, I think we have an answer, yet I have not explored the influence of pressure on my results, but I am going to be lazy and not test this variable. Also by ignoring this possible variable I can publish my results sooner, so I will conclude the hypothesis as falsified." Then comes along some other scientist who makes it happen at a different pressure.
It does not have to be. It depends on the scope of what is being studied. When someone claims they can, at will, look into a person's body to an atomic level and identify the molecules and atoms, offering them crushed pills to identify would be a fairly conclusive test.
Not necessarily. The human body is much easier for me to feel into and I want to test the claim on what makes it manifest the easiest.
Anyway all this is irrelevant - what you (as the *cough* 'researcher') are actually kind of supposed to do is state, at the start, what your statistical rate would be for failure.
And that is hard to do without having a study of the claim first.
Those of us actually familiar with research understand that you don't just randomly keep testing something, mucking about with parameters, without structure or any form of conclusion or end to the series of experiments.
And those of us who are familiar with Chemistry research know that research is an iterative process. You test something, identify problems with procedure, correct the procedure and do again, until you run an experiment without any new issues with it and obtain the results you are happy with. It can be simple things like, the flask you intended to use ended up being too small with the expansion of the fluid, the addition of a catalyst caused an explosion so you should try again with less catalyst or no catalyst, the experiment was suspected to be light sensitive so you run one set of experiments in the light and one in darkness and compare results to see whether there is a difference.
In the process you learn more about the thing being studied and you define the best possible protocol to enable a chemical reaction to go to completion and yield the hypothesized product. Through a series of tests you identify all the parameters that seem to inhibit the reaction, you test each of those parameters to find out whether they do affect the results or not, you then implement the optimal value or range for that parameter in the next experiment, and as a chemist trying to make a sensitive reaction take place, you give those chemicals the best chance you can to do it before you conclude that you as a scientist can not make it happen under those conditions, or that the hypothesis is falsified.
If my claim involved cards instead of human subjects, I would have enjoyed testing a wide number of parameters and having a large amount of tests, because that
is how research is done. The inconvenience and complication of involving human subjects in a test and a human talent, with all of its nonuniformity and variation, does not permit us to try to "simplify" the process of testing such an inconvenient situation just because we feel lazy and impatient, Ashles. When ever we involve human or animal performance in a test it will always be inconvenient. Just think of a film crew trying to make an animal or a child do a certain trick on a film. You go through a lot of bad takes until they do it. If this were cards or even chemicals there would be no problem.
But the one thing none of your tests/studies/experiments ever have is a clear stated falsification scenario.
For all your pretense to be investigating this scientifically, you refuse point blank to ever have any set of results which you would accept as demonstrating conclusively that you have no special abilities.
When I make an answer that I am confident in and it turns out to be incorrect I am convinced that I can not do it. If I hand in an answer and say but I could not do it this time because I was tired, I could not care less about those results, other than that they show that it seems I can not do this when I am tired.
You have never provided such a set of parameters and you never will. Because you have absolutely no intention to ever stop running these pointless tests. You'll keep tweaking parameters and 'learning new things' about the ability and changing the claim being study...
Those parameters are defined experimentally; not in advance by sitting and thinking about the claim.
But we know that you simply never want the testing to end.
Don't make me laugh, I do wish this was over! But it ain't. Do you know why I was so happy, giddy and excited at my test from trial 2? It was because I had just made an answer that was so compelling that if it were wrong the claim would be falsified and I could stop talking to you Ashles about this.
Not if you never actually add a falsification scenario.
When I make an answer that I am confident in and that answer is incorrect that is convincing evidence against the claim.
You have failed to perform above chance. In multiple different tests. It's hard to know how much worse you can realistically do without starting to have an amazing anti-ability.
I have only had one test, the earlier testing was a study that deliberately implemented hard test conditions just to confirm that they prohibit the claim, in order for the best possible test to be designed around those. I learned new things from the IIG test that is taken into consideration in the design of the next test.
Nice little addition of the word 'reliable' there. So presumably you will be allowing people who are not reliable into your study, but then just ignoring them if they tell you you are having no effect.
Another 'out' pre built into the test. As usual.
Not at all. I use the word reliable in describing the intended migraine study, because I question the reliability of the man who is making this claim, and I would regard someone like LightinDarkness, LostAngeles and bookitty to be reliable volunteers. They are Skeptics so if they say that the treatment method coincides with significant improvement in their migraines, I will hold that to be reliable. But someone who might interpret the results positively, I do not know, I question the reliability of such reported positive results.
The assumptions are all coming from your side of the claim. You assume you have some ability so testing must continue until some statistical anomaly is discovered. Even if that takes forever.
Not so. There is a claim and I am testing it until it is falsified, and it won't take forever, nor will it be falsified quickly enough to suit your impatience. You were already convinced that it was falsified before there was a test. You do not believe that I detected Dr. Carlson missing a left kidney under the circumstances as claimed, but I know I did and that it was not a false memory so the claim exists, but not for you.
I AM TRYING TO FALSIFY THE CLAIM, NOT PROVE IT.
But for some reason not any of the data you have produced so far. That's apparently the wrong sort of data - the sort that concludes you have no ability.
The data from the IIG test suggests that when I present an answer that I am confident in it is correct, and when I say I am wrong it is wrong. I also identified two reasons that I felt reduced my performance AND I IDENTIFIED THOSE TWO CONCERNS BEFORE THE RESULTS WERE IN SO THEY ARE NOT MADE AFTER THE FACT NOR DO THEY ARISE FROM INTERPRETATION I said them immediately after each trial AND I SAID THEM VERY CLEARLY TOO so to have another test in which these concerns are corrected for is entirely consistent with the scientific method of studying a claim, even perhaps if it is not consistent with your method. Your method concludes me a liar and a fraud before any tests.
Which is why no-one here thinks of you as a skeptic.
I am a Skeptic. Were I not you could come and get a psychic reading from me for $2,000 (Would've linked to Brent Atwater's site but it appears to be down.)
We're all for research into the paranormal. But not meaningless random 'research' that is poorly conducted, has no structure and refuses to entertain the possibility of failure. That's not real research, just delusion and attention seeking behaviour.
I SAID AT THE TEST THAT IF MY ANSWER FROM TRIAL 2 IS INCORRECT, THE CLAIM IS
FALSIFIED. There is no delusion here, there is an interesting claim. I am not seeking attention, besides this is negative attention. I am engaging in a skeptical discussion about my claim and investigation.
Do you know Ashles what I did before the IIG test? I was behind the screen telling Mark Edward and James Underdown how nervous I was and that I did not feel good about going out in front of everyone and they both had to comfort me before I could. That is inconsistent with your assertion that I am attention seeking.
So, care to actually clearly state a falsification scenario?
If I experience that my claim kicks in and I make an answer that I am so confident in and it turns out to be incorrect. But if I am tired and I say it wasn't working that does not convince me that I can not do it. It just tells me I can not do it when I am tired.
Are you able to detail a test and a set of results from which you would be happy to conclude you have no special ability and no further testing is required?
No. I have to happen to make an answer I am confident in. There are many parameters and variables involved, some of which can not be foreseen.
