Can a psych major, perhaps one who is familiar with parapsychological studies, explain the definition of AND importance of a psi-missing event? Maybe you should start by defining the term “psi”, as well…
Thanks,
- Jinx
‘Psi’ was coined as an all-purpose term to refer to any kind of personal psychic or paranormal ability, and especially the manifestation of same under experimental research conditions. So, for example, tests of individuals who claim to be able to demonstrate telepathy, precognition or PK would all be tests of ‘psi’.
‘Psi-missing’ refers to experimental test results in which there are more misses than would be expected by chance alone, and to the notion that this might theoretically be said to consitute evidence of psi just as much as a greater than average number of hits.
In simpler terms, suppose the experiment involves guessing which one of five symbols will be turned up next from a randomised, shuffled deck of symbol cards. If we do lots of experimental trials, we would expect the subject to guess correctly 1 in 5 times just by chance alone. If he does significantly better than this, i.e. gets more hits than we’d expect purely by chance, then some would say this is evidence of psi. However, some researchers have suggested that getting far fewer than 1 in 5 right could also be regarded as evidential support for psi. This would be ‘psi missing’: psychic powers causing you to get more things wrong than you would by chance alone.
At the time of writing, I know of no set of parapsychological tests which have yielded good evidence for the existence of either psi or psi missing.
And James Randi won’t give you a million bucks for it, either.
This kind of thing usually comes up in fiction, when psi-gifted characters want to hide their abilities from a tester. They know what all the correct answers are thanks to their psi powers, so they use this knowledge to make sure they give the wrong answer every time in an attempt to throw the tester off the scent. But the clever tester usually realizes that someone is unlikely to “guess” wrong every time through sheer chance. How statistically significant this is depends on how many possible answers there are for each test item, though.
I think it would be amusing to write a story about a character who wasn’t trying to pull a fast one with this “psi-missing” stuff but instead had a rare ability to make unfailingly incorrect predictions.
In real life I have encountered a sort of psi-missing situation, although it was more like grammar-missing. I had put some sentences up on the board, and my student was supposed to choose which of three possible verbs would properly complete each sentence. This was a private lesson with a teenaged boy, and he apparently decided he’d like to waste some time. For every sentence he “guessed” the two incorrect choices before finally choosing the correct word. But since he managed to do this every time, I knew he understood the grammar perfectly well.
Check out a William H. Macy/Alec Baldwin movie called The Cooler.
There once was a man who thought a country had a large number of weapons of mass destruction, that invading that country “would be a cake walk”, and the residents would welcome him with flowers and chocolate …
Look, DanBlather, I doubt I’m any less happy about the election than you, but I’m really, really tired of constant political highjacks. It’s rather annoying that even avoiding the political threads isn’t enough to miss the idiotic back-and-forth sniping.
DanBlather.
A mild warning. QUIT injecting politics into GQ threads. It’s not just you.
But try to remember which forum you are in.
samclem GQ moderator
The so called ‘psi-missing’ thing is a way for psychic phenomena proponents to count a ‘statistically surprising miss’ as a sure fire ‘hit.’
Of course, when you do these tests enough, there will be coincidentally high misses and hits. To count either as proof is not proof at all unless the subject can get statistically high misses or hits each and every time they’re tested in a controlled environment.
There’s a million dollars on the table for the first person who can do it.
Peace.