Why would you think he’s joking? It’s an excellent idea. Perhaps the image they show the kid could be Duran Duran performing “Rio.”
I think they should rickroll him.
No, it can work if you do it in stages.
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Show the kid something her mother can’t see.
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Then sit the kid down at the keyboard, with her mother “guiding” her hands, and challenge the kid to describe it.
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Ignore tears.
Guys, there’s a giant whoosh going on here. ** Don’t fight the hypothetical’s** suggestion is about the fifth time it has been mentioned in fifty posts or so.
But I only came into the thread to suggest just that… 
Or the “Smash The Mirror” scene from Tommy.
Do you hear or fear or do I smash the keybooooooooard?
Are you taking any prescription medication?
Why, is some missing? Because whenever it disappeared I wasn’t there.
Why do you ask?
Is this some kind of reverse double whoosh?
This thread is making me think I need to start some kind of prescription medication.
I’m definitely not supposed to be off the grounds for more than an hour.
Hey everyone, I think we’ve been whooshed. It was obviously a play on the fact that so many people had already mentioned showing an object only to the kid and having the mom interpret the kid’s motions.
This has the potential to turn into a running gag that I would find more amusing than the “Hi, Opal” though possibly not as much as “I, for one, welcome our new _____ masters!” or the classic metaphor for all poorly though out plans, “Step 3: Profits!”
And I think this particular gag has run into the ground. Please stop.
I am not blind to the fact that the “show mom something different from the kid” test keeps cropping up like a 20’s Style Death Ray, but it’s only funny since it is so obvious to everyone here that such a test is ridiculously easy and so definitive.
But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the FC proponents. An entire fucking department at Syracuse University (!) exists just to promote it.
If James Randi were doing the experiment, he would first do a control run in which mom does see the object, but represents to Randi that her knowledge is not affecting the child’s communication.
So if the child identifies the object correctly 10 times out of 10, it establishes a baseline for comparison.
Anyway, like somebody pointed out earlier, it’s a shame that mom’s fraud and self-deception deprived another child of the chance to win the essay contest.
Here’s an interesting page from that Syracuse University site that has something to say about “demonstrating authorship”.
ETA: Hmm, that was supposed to be a follow up to a previous post of mine. But the previous post seems to have failed to have been posted somehow.
Basically, I said I wasn’t so sure the Syracuse site was an example of something illegitimate. I said it appears to me there are good kinds of FC and bad kinds of FC.
-FrL-
So how do you distinguish good from bad?
Good link to the list of reports. As far as “legitimate”, Syracuse U has been a proponent of the technique for a long time, even when others have dropped the idea for lack of validity. I think they’re serious, but driven mostly by wishful thinking, especially after reading some of the reports.
From Frylock’s link, scroll down to “Klewe, L. (1993).”
One thing we are not told is how the pictures were chosen or evaluated to be similar or dissimilar or how much “slop” there might be in the responses, also how many different ones there were (to establish the probability of getting some right by guessing), or how the randomization was done.
But that’s a pretty strong result. And this test includes a baseline (Setting A).
Heck, I don’t know, that’s for researchers to think about.
Iit looks like sometimes FC is genuinely allowing purportedly non-communicative people to communicate, and sometimes it’s wishful thinking. You’re exactly right that the task should be figuring out how to separate the BS techniques and circumstances from the non-BS. But given that there remains evidence that this kind of thing does work for some people in some circumstances, it seems to be a mistake to simply dismiss anything that goes under the FC label.
There’s both a scientific and an ethical issue here. To address the ethical issue in a way that may be tangential to the scientific issue: I’d rather risk the possibility that some non-communicators are falsely treated as communicating than the possibility that some communicators are falsely treated as not communicating.
-FrL-