Ah, not a Fringe fan I see.
Any time they start dealing with stuff in teh brain, they pull out a colander that’s got wires and lights all over it and bolt it to somebody’s head so they can use their thoughts to remote-operate a car or anything. “Damn! It’s not an automatic! We’re gonna die!”
But seriously, if you look at the available literature, how often does somebody being outed as a psychic end well for the psychic?
Guy claims, “I can dissipate clouds in the sky using my psychic powers.” So we all troupe out into the parking lot, the guy stares at clouds, and they dissipate.
How do you do this under controlled circumstances? The sky kind of eludes scientific control! This is one of the tests that the Randi group refuse to test, simply because there isn’t any way to make it meaningful. The tests can’t be repeated or duplicated.
Stephen Colbert can sing.
Statistics and meteorological records. If the clouds dissipate significantly more quickly, on average, when our hero is staring at them than when he is in another state, we may have something. Or does he believe he can only dissipate clouds once?
That was pretty interesting. Thanks!!!
No, it’s usually stated as a consistent power. I’ve actually met such people, along with their close relatives, those who can cause street-lights to go out.
And, yeah, I guess you could do some statistical correlation. It’d be tough, but a lot of the Randi challenges involve some very strict negotiation over terms. Anyway, it’s one of the challenges that the Randi group have said that they won’t address.
He was a National Merit scholar and went to UCLA and was going on to med school, but we’ve lost track of him. He could be a doctor by now. Or not.
Well the thing is, unless he got a similar question in some other competition–which is quite possible, because he was good at it and did it a lot–I don’t know why he would think the answer was an object in the painting, rather than some other thing about the painting, and that wasn’t the artist’s only painting (although it was the most famous). But as I heard it, he answered the question even before hearing the name of the artist.
For the Poe story, my son said he would have guessed “Cask of Amontillado” as they’d just read it.
The math questions, I don’t even know.
I will say that, usually, at the other competitions I went to, they didn’t let the contestants buzz until the whole question had been read. So while I saw this kid in action before, this was the only time he seemed to have psychic powers–although he always did very well.
Someday we may find out that all these coincidences are some actual connection. Meanwhile, people continue to believe in psychic ability because coincidences DO happen with great frequency.
Just in the last couple of years I’ve had two. First one: we were driving through Nebraska, and very bored. I started singing a stupid song from years before, a Mad Magazine version of the Mexican Hat Dance. I couldn’t remember most of the words…“They dance on something in Calcutta…in Wisconsin they dance on fresh butta…which they get from sow cow or an udder…But the Mexicans dance on their hats.”
We get to the motel, turn on the TV to see if there’s anything worth watching, and some outfit is doing THAT VERY SONG.
Second: An accident was blurbed on the first page of the Sunday paper. It said “reporter in critical condition after bike accident.” I though–oh my god, that’s my friend. Then I told myself it was ridiculous. I had just had an email conversation with him, he wasn’t the sort to have a bike accident, there are lots and lots of reporters, including more than one who are my friends, so why did I focus on him? But I tore through the paper to find it, and it was him.
Now of course if it had not been him, I would have forgotten the whole thing. And if the TV at the motel in Nebraska had been showing “Revenge” I would have forgotten that whole thing. (Except I would have been really psychic, because “Revenge” wasn’t on yet.)
On the other hand there’s the whole bit about how I didn’t for one minute consider that the bike accident had happened to any other reporter I happened to know.
There are clouds pretty much every day in most places. And scientists have tested chemicals that dissipate clouds.
Um… What is the relevance of this? There are a dozen or so different kinds of clouds, varying widely in coverage, density, thickness, darkness, pattern; they come and they go; some move with the breeze; others are still.
And, yes, there are such chemicals. Is it your suggestion that so-called psychics have an arrangement with a friend in an airplane, dispersing such chemicals overhead during Randi’s test?
At best, these observations make a Randi-style test vastly more difficult. Small wonder his group refuses to bother with it.
There is a reason that the online Merriam Webster removed “gullible” from their dictionary out of “sensitivity to those who argue for an alternative to science.”
The psychic supporters in this thread are proof they made the right decision.
Film clouds, say for twenty minute lengths of time. Alternate those twenty minute cycles as control and “test” segments. During the test segments have The Amazing Cloudo concentrate on dissapation.
Have the twenty minute segments analyzed blindly. Look to see if there is a meaningful statistical difference between test and control data.
If there is a difference, propose a mechanism.
Bingo. Far, far too many electrons are spent criticising the doubts of sceptics, as if sceptics are being dreadfully unfair in having doubts without having definitively proven that psychics have no supernatural powers. Since when has the onus been on sceptics to come up with perfect tests to prove wild claims made by others? There are many in these threads who are exceedingly pedantic about pointing out supposed flaws in tests and challenges set by sceptics. Wouldn’t their high standards be better applied to psychics and their claims?
I think you miss a crucial point: this whole subject is about the subjective claims made by psychics. That is, it’s all about the mindset of psychics. There is no other reason to even look into the matter. The list of conceivably existent supernatural powers is literally infinite. It’s silly to bother testing the claims of psychics who can only produce an effect that is indistinguishable from an effect that is possible to produce by normal means. If you are going to do that, why not test my claim that I can cause the entire world to blink out of existence and be replaced instantly by an exact replica? Why not test my claim that I cause the Earth to travel round the Sun in exactly the same way as it would due to gravity, but using solely the power of my mind?
The only reason to test psychics’ abilities is that they claim to be able to do something remarkable namely read people’s minds in a way that people’s minds could not be read by ordinary cold reading. When “Pat” of the OP thought that she could produce a cold reading effect but without seeing or talking to the subject, that was interesting and worth testing. When it turned out she can’t, then there ceased to be any effect interesting enough to be worth testing. There is already a perfectly well understood explanation for the only effect that (post-test) Pat claims; namely cold reading combined with human duplicity or ignorance. Nothing to see here folks.
Sure, we could go looking for psychic mind reading effects more subtle than psychics claim, and those effects may exist. Searching for those effects is number three on my to-do list. I fully intend to start my search right after I tick off numbers one and two: finding Russell’s Teapot and proving the existence of Invisible Pink Unicorns.
And how many nearly impossible things fail to occur each moment? Why, just this very second I had no sense whatsoever of anything happening to any old acquaintance.
More to the point, the vague sense of foreboding I had on halloween resulted in nothing remarkable happening at all.
But really seriously, when has this ever happened in real life?
Yet, bizarrely enough, the kind of clouds occurring over the course of several days or even weeks in most places in the world is fairly similar over the course of a single day, several days, or even weeks. Here in Panama the cloud pattern is consistent enough to allow for a reasonable degree of replication for months at a time. Similar weather and cloud patterns repeat over fairly short periods in the temperate zone as well, and these can be predicted several days in advance if one wanted to set up a test. This is not as difficult as you seem to think.
I have no idea why you might draw such a interpretation from my remark. My point was that scientists have no problem with obtaining replicable results from experiments on clouds, despite variability.
How do you know his group refuses to bother with it? Has anyone ever approached them claiming to be able to dissipate clouds?
Apropos of nothing but the last word of the second paragraph on page 32 of the manual for King’s Quest V is either below or information depending on whether you start counting from the top of the page or from the first complete paragraph.
AFAIK, The James Randi Educational Foundation takes on all comers. They had a “Breatharian” who claimed to derive every necessary nutrient by breathing. He was caught sneaking over to a Burger King during the multi-day test of his abilities.
They don’t do that anymore, however. Once was enough and they specifically said they’re not wasting time on such claims. It made for a funny story but I suspect sitting in a car staking out the claimant’s hotel room for hours on end got really boring.
The challenge was actually changed a few years ago as far as who can apply. They have to establish themselves in the media and a few other qualifications to apply. The JREF was getting tired with wasting time of spurious and silly claims, and the antics of nobodies demanding ridiculous conditions.
Ooopsie!
Although in my version, that paragraph ends with “the man in the yellow hat.”
Okay, I don’t have King’s Quest V or the manual. I wonder if there was just some kind of glitch that would have allowed any word to be entered and accepted. If so, had I had gone with the first image that came into my mind at that time, the correct response would have been “beaver.”