Find an adult autistic person and use Facilitated Communication to accuse the P.E.I. Health Department chair of rape.
Seems like this issue would just then work itself out naturally.
Ah, yes, that would be the old James Randi/Banachek set-'em-up trick. It fooled Washington University.
I would recommend using a state agent with no conditions that could be called a disability, they would simply act non-communicative. No need to fabricate an accusation of rape, just let the idiot faciitator sink themselves with their fantasy of what the subject is saying.
It failed in the past for other facilitators because they did it wrong but I do it right so it works for me.
Yeah, this is exactly my point. It’s trivially simple to test every individual facilitator who claims to be the real deal. It would take five minutes to verify anyone claiming to be able to do this. How this is still a thing after decades is amazing.
This is interesting, though. A judge actually did that five-minute test. I pulled up a New York Times article about Anna Stubblefield and found this, about the woman who originally came up with facilitated communication:
So is it possible that it does sometimes work? It’s obvious that most of the time it’s bullshit, and dangerous bullshit, but are there exceptions?
It’s because the parents so want it to work. It must be such a horror – this is (probably) a loved, dearly wanted child. And it’s extremely handicapped to the point you can’t communicate with it.
And here come someone who says, Oh, your child is really in there, just trapped. And if we do this easy thing I can tell you what your child thinks. And I’ll bet one of the first communiques is always “I love you mommy.”
Of course they aren’t clamoring to disprove it.
This is only a WAG, but the controls sound very loose. Someone in the room might have whispered the answers, not with an intent to give them away – I’m not saying conspiracy – but just to the guy in the next seat over. There are several other ways this could have gone wrong.
(This sort of thing goes all the way back to simple cloth blindfolds for magic mind-reading acts. You can actually see fairly well through a single layer of fabric.)
Like Trinopus mentioned, remember that thing about “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?” Well, I looked at what took place and it is clear to me that the judge there was fooled or did not look at what others had found already before the trial.
BTW that article seems to be the one having the quote you cited with no link, it needs to be noted that the whole article was against facilitated comunication.
Indeed, the article is mainly about a very sad case where a facilitator, Anna Stubblefield, convinced hersef that his subject wanted to have an affair with her. It did end badly.
I just read the New York Times article about Anna Stubblefield.
Holy shit, what a story! This unfortunate woman destroyed her own life with her belief in this.
The article describes the rationalizations supporters go through, and how they accuse critics of being guilty of ableism and oppressing the disabled. They insist that the failed tests were either because some people do it wrong, or because testing people is insulting and stressful. It’s the same kind of arguments made by people who believe in psychic power nonsense. “It works, but not if you test it!”
That’s what happened to my brother with his wife’s grandmother, but it did not involve FC: it involved figuring out that she did communicate (albeit in a limited fashion) and how. Grandma had a stroke which left her infirm and unable to speak; she also didn’t have the best caretakers, her children were happy with merely moving her from the bed to the armchair and from the armchair to the bed. She could sing/hum and smile. Bro noticed that he’d get smiles if he did certain actions when she was humming certain songs, he hypothesized that song A meant “please change my legs’ position” and song B meant “please fluff up my pillows” and song C meant “I need changing”. When her brain pathways had lost the way to speech, they’d rewired to the songs. The testing held as far as we can tell, making the woman’s few years a bit more comfortable than the previous ones. But we’re talking about someone who had the mental acuity of a two-years old… back when she was two years old. And the meanings were completely personal, nobody tried to extrapolate them to “people who are unable to speak due to a stroke”.
Oh, there’s no doubt that in the vast majority of cases it’s dangerous bullshit (like I said above). And even if it does work 1% of the time, that raises the problem of how on earth you would know which communications fall into that 1%.
But the possibility of it working occasionally is still interesting. It raises the possibility that a less fallible method of facilitated communication (a mechanical arm-steadier with no human involvement, say) might actually be useful in a small percentage of cases.
This may be part of it–I think there have been concerns on the part of some FC supporters that some untrained people have gotten in there and are doing it “wrong”–but I think it’s more global than that.
I think it’s an attitude that FC CAN’T be tested and SHOULDN’T be tested.
If it “failed” for other facilitators (a big “if”) it’s because it doesn’t work in an atmosphere of skepticism; it’s because people needing facilitation are not trained monkeys, but human beings with dignity and feelings and they maybe don’t want to play along; it’s because using the scientific method to deny that these people are intelligent amounts to hate speech. The rules are different.
I agree, it would be worth testing such methods - either a mechanical device that carries most of the load of the arm, or an electronic device such as an EMG that detects the attempt to communicate even if the person is incapable of moving their own weight.
Ironically the truth is that they are not trained monkeys, they are puppets, and made so by their “facilitators”.
Yes! I saw a documentary on this quite a few years ago. Apparently, some stroke patients who cannot speak **can **sing what they want to say. It was really amazing to watch. They couldn’t talk. At all. But they could sing the message they wanted to communicate. Singing and speaking take different neural pathways. It’s really not intuitive at all.
Hippotherapy has proven benefits, and not just for children. The people who do it around here also have clients who had strokes, were in car accidents, were injured in the military, etc. I have two relatives who have done it, and yes, it really does improve core strength in addition to other benefits.
When Ricky Hoyt, of the famed father/son marathon combo (he has cerebral palsy) got a talking computer, his first words were “Go (his favorite sports team)”.
Not trying to be funny, but it would have to, lest the patient fall of. Sounds scary the first few times.
Actually, she couldn’t sing what she wanted to say either; she just hummed religious songs. They could tell that she seemed happy or uncomfortable or anxious, but until Bro made the connection, not what was causing discomfort. It was along the lines of “O Come Oh Ye Faithful = please move my legs”.
Are Bro and his wife 100% sure that they got it right? No (if they’d been sure, my sister in law would have been able to get an article out of it, she’s a doctor)… but based on the Smile Index, it worked. So they hope that they did indeed get it right and made her last few years that little bit easier.