No, that would just make them believe even more strongly. In a sample of a hundred people, you should expect five of them, just by chance, to exhibit “statistically significant” physic powers. If you allow these people to interpret the data, they’ll choose to do it in a way that reinforces their beliefs.
elucidator
No, to be “inordinately proud” of something, one must be more proud than is justified.
Your willingness to believe that we would reject it, without any evidence whatsoever that we would do so, only reinforces my belief that supporters of ESP are not interested in rationality.
Just wanted to report the stuff on my desk still hasn’t moved, and no one has identified any of the three objects. I will stare at them a bit as I post this, so the mind readers in the audience can “tune” into the vibrations. Perhaps the psionics can do what the magicians have not.
One of the objects on your desk is a black (actually charcoal coloured) magnetic pyramid (7cm tall) covered in paper clips (47 of them if you would like to count), three of the paper clips are plastic coated (red), another is blue.
I also predict that somebody’s watch has stopped, possibly somewhere, or will do shortly, maybe, unless it doesn’t in which case let me know and I will explain how my mental powers kept it going.
Homer - when performing a statistical hypothesis test, one often demands that the null hypothesis be violated in a way that would only have a 5% chance or less of occurring.
So for example in this case, the null hypothesis to be tested would be that telepathy does not exist. We then perform some tests and would reject the null hypothesis if the probability of getting the test results we did is less than 5% (or one in twenty). This is known as testing at the 5% level. A positive result is said to be “significant”.
So, one would give (say) 100 questions to each person and then demand that their answers had a success rate with a probability of less than 5% (i.e. their results are significant). But then if we tested 100 such people, we would still expect to find 5 people whose results were significant. Much like if you roll 360 pairs of dice, you’d expect to get about 10 scores of 2.
Oh my god, this is so eerie! You’ve exactly described on of the objects on my desk! Well, it’s not actually a pyramid, it’s a sphere . . . and it’s not black, but blue–but you didsay that one of the paperclips was blue! And, well, actually, it doesn’t have any paperclips on it . . . they’re in my desk–but the blue thing, that was right on, and, like I said, there are paperclips in my desk!
Wow, Mangetout, that’s pretty incredible! You should get yourself a 900 number!
I’ll have you know that I am an accomplished mind reader, and the problem is entirely with your lack of mental control. You need to stop thinking of naked women. In particular, you need to stop thinking of naked redheads. Sexy naked redheads with large breasts. If you would only stop thinking of those beautiful naked readheads with those incredibly beautiful naked breasts then I could see what was on your desk. The problem is, I am particularly fond of naked redheads with large, sexy breasts so it is somewhat distracting of you to think of them so much. I must insist that you stop thinking of those naked redheads with those truly spectacular breasts. Would you please stop that for a moment, in particular the ones with the rather prominent nipples? I really am finding it distracting, and I must ask you to control your thoughts better. I must insist. Please control yourself. Stop thinking of all those naked redheads with those incredibly sexy breasts, please. If you would stop thinking of all those naked women, I would have a much easier time seeing those objects on your desk. Please exercise some self-control. If you cannot direct your mind better, I will have to terminate this exercise. Really, you seem to be obsessed with sex, and with naked redheads with large breasts. I am forced to stop this telepathic exchange now. If you think you can control yourself in the future, we can try again at your leisure.
[sub]Taken from “Moonchild”[/sub]
:giggles slightly:
The question I then pose, to play the devil’s advocate, is why would not consider 5% statistically meaningful? After all, were that the case then Einstien were no genius, Frost no poet, the mentioned Rembrandt no artist. They were simply flukes in an otherwise random sample.
It is just as interesting to me that the “crazies” dismiss the fact that it rarely holds up to statistical methodology as the “skeptics” dismiss it because of the statistical methodology, which is interestingly only applicable to the things they want to dismiss.
elucidator, there very well may be skeptics such as you described in your post, but surely not everyone would pooh-pooh evidence of mind reading.
Speaking as a skeptical person, one of the reasons that I am skeptical is because I would be delighted to discover that we could communicate with the dead, read minds, find baby dinosaurs frolicking peacefully on an unknown Pacific Island, and frankly, if Elvis were to show up alive and well in Reno, I would dance holes in my blue suede shoes. For that very reason, I want to see some rigorous proof before I get all excited about any of these things.
If legitimate scientifc experiments showed that there were people who could read minds, I would be very interested. I don’t want to end up like poor Thomas Edison, ranting and raving about AC current, in the face of all reasonable evidence. You do mention that you doubt that any experiment would produce such reasonable evidence, so I’m not sure where you would like us to go next. I also can’t produce any evidence that I can turn lead into gold on my kitchen stove, but that doesn’t mean I can do it.
I’m pretty good at those “subtle cues,” because there are some people I know what they are going to say word for word within minutes of meeting them. Can’t explain how it happens. I just say, “Oh, I must have heard you think.”
arl (good to have you back posting by the way - another work enforced absence?) - you’re misrepresenting the nature of statistical tests.
If we were to test for the existance of “painting ability” (assuming such is quantifiable), we might get someone to paint a picture and decide that if it rates more than 8.7 on our “painting” scale, the chance of such a thing happening randomly is 5%. In this case, if “painting ability” doesn’t exist then if we tested 100 people, we’d expect to see 5 of them score more than 8.7 anyway.
But if we then took one guy who scored 9.0 and got him to paint 100 times - well then we’d find out something closer to the truth. If he only scores 8.7 or higher 5 times then we can strongly suspect that his 9 was a fluke. If however he gets higher than 8.7 twenty-five times then we have evidence of something stronger.
Rembrandt, of course, would score more than 8.7 all 100 times. This is more than enough evidence of the existance of “painting ability”.
The point is that one person showing a “statistically significant” result once is something that is going to happen by chance from time to time. But if we repeat the experiment, the truth will start to emerge more realistically.
So in the telepathy case, we might want to test 100 people. 5 of them show statistically significant results. So if you claim that mindreading is a talent like painting, then test those 5 people again. If they have the talent then they’ll show a significant result again.
When you establish that the probability of such a result happening randomly is one in a billion, say, you’ve established a pretty damn strong case. One in a billion is only a one in twenty shot coming up seven successive times.
On a more rambling note, I’ll remark that statistics and statistical tests are tricky things. You think you’ve got the implications pinned down, but often find you’ve subtly missed the target. Professionals who actually use these things are still liable to screw up. Journalists and laypeople are particularly liable to misinterpreting results - hence The Ryan’s note that a believer might well point to our initial test and note that “5 people showed significant results!”
Statistics in general are poorly understood by the general public and probabilities even more so. For example, I’ve actually experienced a doctor screwing this up: Suppose that the probability of having a genetic condition is one in ten thousand. However there is a test screening for the condition. The test has just a 1% chance of saying you have the condition when you don’t and it has a 100% chance of saying you have the condition when you do. You take the test and it says you have the condition. What is the probability that you actually have the condition? I’ve seen doctors say “over 99%”, I’ve seen them guess at 50-50. The actual answer is just 0.1%!
People’s intuition is simply bad when it comes to probability.
That would, indeed, be something. Hell, if someone could show they could do it four out of seven times I’d raise an eyebrow (depending on the nature of “it” was, of course).
After reading this, I started speculating. Let’s suppose that there are a few people out there who can read minds. And of that small group, there are one or two who haven’t been driven crazy by it.
Wouldn’t it be greatly to their advantage to keep it secret? Sure, Randi is offering a million bucks - but that’s a one-time offer. You’d get a lot more money from sitting around in a Starbucks on Wall Street, collecting insider trading info. They’d also have an advantage in social situations - easier to get naked with the object of your desire if you know exactly what you want, no? And if the people around you knew you could read their minds, how would you be treated? Mind you, I think actual mind reading is not possible. But if it were, would they tell us?
I have to go now. I’ve received a radio message on my fillings that says I need to send three dozen carrots to the King of Sweden, with a note asking what color his mailbox is.
I don’t disagree with your reasoning. Once again we touch upon a popular SDMB mantra: you can’t prove a negative. One can always postulate any number of “silent” psi-talents, and indeed, this is the basis of many a fine science fiction yarn. I can imagine a few objections, though–maybe an unsophisticated person will turn up with the talent and not have the wisdom to hide it, or someone will unexpectedly develop the talent and be revealed before they figure out how to hide it, etc. None of this, precludes there being exactly one really smart genuine mind-reader guy somewhere, who, as long as he exists, makes the statement “No human can read another human’s mind.” false.
However, that salient point is that there are plenty people who do claim that they can read people’s minds, or claim to have observed this phenomenon in others. We don’t have the problem of trying to test an ability that nobody is willing to admit to–far from it; it’s hard to get the believers to shut up about it.
I don’t know if this really constitutes “mind-reading” per se, but psychoanalytic literature is full of rather striking sorts of coincidental examples, some debunked, others not, regarding mind-reading. I doubt I know a single therapist (and I know say, sixty or so?) who doesn’t have at least one story of “thought transfer” between himself/herself and a patient. In fact, it can sometimes get downright uncomfortable in a therapy room when, for example, a patient relates a dream she/he had over the weekend about the therapist, and it turns out to reflect something that had actually happened to the therapist in real life. I had a patient once who…oh yeah, I can’t talk about it. Confidentiality.
But I can say that it has happened to me, and while uncanny, there is a slight problem with such examples when approached “scientifically.” Dreams, for example, are symbolic in nature, and a skeptic can easily point to the fact that the surface appearance of consilience between a dream and a lived event builds on the therapist’s interpretation; while there might be some striking coincidences between the dream and the real event, the dream could in fact be dealing with something completely different than the therapist’s interpretation. Not to mention the even more skeptical belief that dreams are nothing more than “random neuronic firing” occurring during sleep. There is quite simply no way that I know of, methodologically, to answer such a critique.
That said, most therapists tend to take these sorts of things at face value. I’ve had therapeutic supervisors, for example, who even used such events as evidence that a patient was “borderline psychotic” (Note! not in the strictly DSM IV diagnostic sense), claiming that such patients are “more in contact” with unconscious processes. For what it’s worth, no less a worthy than Freud himself was intently interested in phenomena such as telepathy (he almost accepted an editorial post for a magazine dedicated to psychic phenomena at one point, but was dissuaded by his colleague Ernest Jones, who…ah, never mind. Not relevant.) On the other hand, as far as I know, in the handful of papers Freud wrote about the subject, he tended to present examples of therapeutic telepathy and then debunk them.
That hasn’t prevented his followers from continuing to speculate about it, however. There’s even a commonly excepted (among most analysts, especially object-relationists) psychodynamic process associated with it, known as “projective identification.” PI is rather complicated concept, but can be understood as a sort of non-verbal, unconscious form of communication. (Some therapists/analysts use the term “countertransference” to refer to similar phenomena). Psychoanalytic theory, being eminently empirical, finds nothing supernatural in such transfers, but explains them as a natural process. It is the act of your unconscious communicating with my unconscious, without the mitigation of our consciousnesses, if that makes any sense. What makes it different from thought reading per se, however, is that it involves the communication of inarticulate emotional states rather than “thoughts” as they are commonly understood. Nevertheless, it is believed that these “states” then sort of “bubble up” from the therapist’s unconscious until he can articulate them. Some theorists claim that the therapist’s ability to receive, contain, and eventually express such feelings in words is one of psychoanalytic therapy’s primary healing mechanisms.
One, perhaps not very good, example I have stuck in my head is the story of a therapist who agreed to take on a patient that had been interviewed by another therapist. Before meeting the patient, they sat down together and reviewed the interview material (therapists often perform a “deep interview” with a potential patient before beginning treatment). That night, after having studied the interview, the therapist had an intense dream about his new, soon-to-be-patient. She was struggling to make it to her first session, but was hindered by traffic, impediments, wrong bus schedules, and so forth. One thing that struck the therapist upon waking was that the patient had green eyes, despite the fact that the interviewer had described her as blue-eyed.
When they met, it turns out that the interviewer had remembered wrongly, and that the patient actually did have green eyes; and, according to the therapist, the dream he had turned out to be of profound import for the following therapy.
Not much of an example for the skeptical, I know, but there you go; these things can’t be studied in a lab as if they were a bacterial culture. The following notwithstanding:
Yeah, I’d run too after quoting from “Moonchild” here on the SDMB.
Yers,
Svinlesha nDelavesha, founding member (* currently in abstentia* ), Blue Bear Cabal, KSFSTP
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