Where is he now? Has he demonstrated such abilities elsewhere?
Oh look, another 'Peter tries to appeal to…someone.
Your problem is that is not what happened. No matter how much you try to twist reality this is not the course of events. The results are not as you describe it. You are lying, pure and simple.
Actually, I have a very good answer: You are not telling the truth about what happened.
Actually, I object to you calling it a ‘test of an astrologer’. It wasn’t. I’ve explained what it was several times above. You just don’t like it because you’ll lose your precious little straw-man to beat up.
I never said that the Mars Effect was not astrologer. What I said was that Gauquelin did not consider himself an astrologer. No more so that PEAR labs, who tested for psychic abilities, consiered themselves to be Sylvia Brown psychics.
My information comes from primary sources that centered around this event and those involved in the aftermath. Jim Lippard, Suitbert Ertel, Bruce Hutchinson, all would find Peter’s description of the events wrong. He doesn’t like that, so he tries to twist and bend facts to suit his version.
For those who do want to learn more about the events, I would advise Googling Jim Lippard’s chronology of the Mars Effect. Its a rich text file. You can also ask questions of Lippard himself (I think his email is in the file), who could put you in contact with Ertel and others.
We have a rule against personal insults, which includes “you are a liar.” My understanding of the rule is that “you are lying” is considered synonymous. Don’t do this again.
I have tossed a coin between closing this thread and moving it to GD – the latter won. The GD mods may choose to close it, of course.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
Miskatonic, please try to understand. I was making a point about a canard that you (and others) often use. You claim that a paranormal test is proved to be fair if both parties agree to the protocol.
Well, that is wrong. I’ve given a counter-example to demonstrate that.
Try and answer that point, if you can.
I refuse to play your silly word games.
It sounds to me like he had practiced a lot. I know personally, the more I do crosswords, the faster I can fill in the answers for the easier clues. Sometimes I can even fill in words without looking at the clue, or only looking at half the clue. But it’s not because I’m psychic. It’s because I know the sorts of clues crossword writers use, and the sort of answers that are necessary to make crosswords fit.
Similarly, the kid probably knew that if they were asking a question about a story by Edgar Allen Poe, the answer is going to be The Tell-Tale Heart 80% of the time, The Fall of the House of Usher 15% of the time, and maybe something else if the question is a real stumper. And if they’re asking a question about an object in an American painting, the first thing that comes to mind is a pitchfork, because that’s the most famous object in an American painting.
Yes, Peter, I know exactly what you were trying to do. Trouble is, when the example you give is completely different from how you present it your point fails utterly.
I will let the readers decide whether Peter Morris or Mr. Miskatonic have had the better of their argument, thus far.
That is because that discussion is now ended.
Whatever the merits of this thread, (and I do not see any), rehashing old arguments with bitter words is not among them.
Take it to The BBQ Pit or off board.
[ /Moderating ]
But no one said “plate,” or “shrimp” or “plate o’ shrimp”?
I am a remarkably good test taker. I can frequently pick the right answer from a multiple choice question without looking at the question. I cannot do this with math questions. It requires too much precision unless one of the answers is one or zero. If he was doing it with math questions then there is something fishy going on.
Not necessarily. He may be good at doing the same thing with math questions.
Coincidence, most likely. Consider how many trillions of trillions of unlikely events that are possible, although of extremely low likelyhood. Trillions of those will seem to have some ‘psychic’ significance. Although the likelyhood of each is extremely low, there are so many possible in a given day, to a given person, that a few are bound to occur to every person, at least occasionally.
Consider my ‘psychic powers’ story:
I was babysitting my sister’s kid, and was bored out of my skull. ‘Hmm, here’s today’s newspaper in the mail that just arrived. I think I’ll read it.’ I read all the stuff I usually read, and still had hours to kill. ‘Hmm, let’s read the stuff I always skip. Like the Obits.’ There, while I was still in my mid 20s, was someone I went to high school with.
[Twilight Zone Theme] I never read the Obits, but the one time I do, there’s someone I know, who died extremely young. What are the odds?[/TZT]
So I ran it as what’s known in the sciences as a Fermi problem, AKA “Back of the envelope calculation”. It was a very good way to relieve my boredom. I came up with the result that this particular ‘psychic phenomenon’ should occur to approximately 5 people in the world, each and every day*, purely by chance. So now the question becomes: Why should I be ‘special’ so that I couldn’t be one of those random chance 5 for today, rather than ‘do I have psychic powers’? The same question applies to the kid in Hilarity N. Suze’s story. Shit like that happens by chance all the time! What’s so special about that kid that we should prefer the ‘psychic phenomenon’ explanation over the ‘random chance’ explanation? Does the kid ever repeat the performance? Can the kid repeat the performance on command? If not, then the ‘random chance’ hypothesis is the preferred explanation, for simplicity’s sake. If you want to propose the ‘psychic’ explanation, then the burden of evidence is on you. Show us some reason to think that might be better than the ‘random chance’ explanation. The ‘random chance’ explanation handled my ‘reading the obits and finding someone you know’ problem quite handily. It wasn’t a problem if you ran the numbers.
- That’s an ‘order of magnitude calculation’. Take it to mean anywhere between 0.5/day (1 every 2 days), and 50/day. It also wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it was 2 orders off, or 1/20days to 500/day.
I’m with Zayda: the arguments in this thread have become so painfully involute, I can’t tell what exactly is being promoted. I can’t tell who has won, and I can’t even tell whom I would agree with! Maybe neither.
The quark argument was one of the weakest arguments I’ve ever seen. There are a lot of things we haven’t discovered yet; of course they exist. We just don’t have evidence for them. To argue that they don’t exist is asinine; to argue that some specific thing does exist solely on that basis is asinine too!
I cannot comprehend why anyone would be banned from alluding to James Randi’s challenge; I see Randi as having successfully debunked certain kinds and classes of psychic powers. The ones with objective, large-scale, measurable effects on reality. Randi and his group refuse to examine certain kinds of claims of psychic effects: the kinds that can’t be measured under controlled conditions.
The classic of these are the people who say that they can disperse clouds in the sky. People who sense a meaningful level of signal over noise in the number of coincidences in their lives also fall into this category.
(The other day, for no reason, I thought about a song from Jesus Christ Superstar. Later in the day, I heard the public radio interview with Stephen Colbert, where he sings exactly that song! WOW! Coincidence! Some people would find it significant and meaningful. Others – me, for instance – would say, “Meh. Big deal. Of the hundreds of thousands of things that I see, think, do, hear, eat, meet, and have in the course of a month, two happened to be the same. BFD!”)
(Yeah! Stephen Colbert can sing!)
Cite?
Wait. What?
Under controlled conditions, we can detect subatomic particles. What do you imagine that:
- doesn’t have a measurable effect on reality, and
- can’t be measured under controlled conditions?
Keep in mind – a “one in a billion” occurrence happens to 7 people a day.
And confirmation bias is an amazing thing.
Maybe a million dollars isn’t enough money to risk spending the rest of your life strapped to a lab table and wired like a Christmas tree, with your brain sitting in a nutrient vat while “top men” try to figure out how it works?
Yeah. See my earlier post, where it comes out to 5 people a day should experience my ‘spooky experience’…
Well, that explains it then.
ETA: a Christmas tree? Serious?
Long story, but if you need to raise the question, take it to ATMB, not this thread.
[ /Moderating ]