It’s about time this thread was treated to Spoonbending with Mr Nude.
No, it makes the converse equally untelling.
Because I think it places the testee at an advantage.
True, but I think that is because most claimants come to the table without the slightest idea of how to do a fair test (if they did, and tried it on themselves, they probably woudn’t be so confident). I imagine if a claimant proposed a good protocol up front, it would be accepted with little or no modification.
As far as Kramer, he is beginning to get me a little hot under the collar, too. I think his position should be held by one with infinite patience and tact. It is possible to be clear and forceful without slinging mud.
This is even more important when you have a man at the top, James Randi, who bristles so readily. I completely understand why he does, but I don’t think it improves JREF’s public relations. I count myself as one of his greatest supporters, yet he has replied to me in a manner which is insulting or at least grating. He needs someone as a diplomatic go-between, and Kramer doesn’t seem to be the right person for that job.
To continue Mangetout’s hijack, here is an interview from Space Ghost Coast to Coast:
SPACE GHOST: Bobcat, what is your superpower?
BOBCAT GOLDTHWAITE: I can bend forks.
SPACE GHOST: With your mind?
BOBCAT GOLDTHWAITE: Yeah. But only the ones at Denny’s. And you have to look away. For a little while.
I would like to comment on your “bullet points.”
The “no judging” concept is designed to derail, in advance, any accusations of a biased judge. If it is plain to all what the results of a test mean, no judge is necessary, and no bias can be claimed. Yes, it means the results must be definitive and not subjective, which is a good thing.
Quantifiability: Similarly, this avoids the need for subjective judging. If the results can be reduced to simple, unabiguous mathematics, they cannot be as easily challenged. Sure, that may remove some possible claims from the table, but it is necessary. This is how science is done.
Astronomical odds: Again, this requirement is to avoid post-accusations of fraud and bias, although I would disagree that the odds that are set (and agreed to by the claimant as fair) are astronomical, at least as that implies that they are impossible to meet. If I jump off a chair and there is nothing to break my fall, I will hit the ground every damn time. 100 times out of 100. A thousand out of a thousand. Are these odds astronomical? Sure, but they are attainable, and if you will agree to give me $1mil to do it, I will jump at the chance. 
Or given a simple set of laboratory tools, I can produce oxygen and hydrogen from plain water. Every time. 100 trials? No problem, I will be 100% successful. If someone proposes a test where I only need to do it 85% of the time, great.
The prize claimants are equally sure they can perform, and their quotas are usually set high, but well within the range that they claim to be able to reach. They claim they have done it before and can do it again. For dowser tests, they perform with great accuracy when they know where the water is and they fully expect to repeat that same accuracy when they do not.
The bar must be set high enough to rule out chance and fraud. The challenge is not designed as a test of chance and wouldn’t it be embarrasing to give out the prize for a fraudulent performance?
You must remember that a lot is at stake here. This is not a $10 bar bet. It’s a lot of money and a lot of science. Surely the criterion for winning a bundle of money and overturning basic science should be extremely high, shouldn’t it?
Extraordinary claims…
The testee failed fer crissakes, KC.
It never ceases to amaze me when people criticize Randi’s tests, which testee’s always fail, on the ground that they are biased in the testee’s favour as if this somehow makes his tests unfair.
The trouble with this rule is that it not only rules out tasks whose results must be subjectively judged (perhaps a good thing), but also those whose results require expert interpretation (not a good thing). If someone claims to heal cancer through paranormal means, that’s just as difficult to assess as whether a drug is effective in healing cancer. And so on. You need experts to determine what meaningful results are in the first place and assess the results once they come in.
Can we agree that Randi is not equipped to assess the validity of a vast range of phenomena? His application says that he will not even attempt to do so. This is perfectly fair. It’s fair, however, for skeptics to claim that the Randi Challenge has universal application (i.e., if a phenomenon were real it would have won the Challenge already). Such a claim by skeptics has the simplicity and punch of one of Bush’s political mantras (“They hate freedom”). At the end of the day it’s also a lie.
Science certainly quantifies where it can, but much is not quantifiable. The things that make you schizophrenic or bipolar are mostly qualitative (though quant factors are not totally absent).
“Big-hit psi” is essentially unquantifiable (remote viewing, extreme clairvoyance, mediumship, etc.), though people try to quantify the odds of any given hit. It really comes down to an acceptance or rejection of whether the purported pyschic could have come up with the information and how accurate it is.
On the other hand, most non-big-hit-psi effects are by definition not that big and therefore inappropriate for testing under point A (just show me without the need for judging). We all know about the kinds of experiments that are used to test for such effects: Ganzfeld, etc.
Sure, according to Randi’s principle here, every drug ever invented would be deemed “ineffective,” since no drug can cure 10/10 people. Every experiment in the social sciences would be declared meaningless. Some phenomena are attended by the kind of 100% odds you describe; many are not.
No disagreement: If they agree, they agree. But the real point is that those who know they can’t overcome such odds simply won’t participate. For most psychic phenomena, at least, they are way too high. For that matter, I doubt many psychiatrists would accept a test of their skills in which they had to get 10 out of 10 diagnoses correct. Or even endocrinologists, or any type of MD.
The sciences that can guarantee that kind of consistency are chemistry, physics, and various applied sciences based on them. The others cannot.
There’s the rub again. The bar is set too statistically high for just about any phenomenon outside of the hard physical sciences. Again, if those testing principles were applied to many phenomena that require judging and cannot guarantee 100% success that we know have validity and are essential to modern civilization–medicine being a good example–then those same sciences would be deemed invalid.
Yes, it should. Can we also agree that the bounds of what the Randi Challenge actually purports to test are limited? And that not every “paranormal” phenomenon can be ridiculed simply because it hasn’t won the Challenge yet?
But I don’t think skeptics are going to give up their favorite rhetorical weapon, even if they have to dissemble to keep it.
No shit. I have what increasingly seems to be the paranormal ability to cite things both in favor and against an argument! I am commenting on experiment design with no regard to fairness/unfairness. Just because the test supported what he Randi thinks doesn’t make it a good design. Fer crissakes.
Well, we’re just trying to impose order on the vaguely-defined territory chosen by the paranormal-boosters. Don’t blame us if you can’t get your act together, and then claim that getting one’s act together is a sign of a closed mind.
Dude.
(a) Eonwe, thanks for picking that up…
(b) Aeschines, those were thoughtful and well-articulated presentations on reservations that one may legitimately raise about the Challenge. Great contribution, and a nice relief from “Is so! Is not! Is too!”
How is that not possible?
Bricker did not say “list all types of claims and a fair test for each”
Here is an example:
Paranormal Ability: Ability to accurately predict the role of a die 100 times in a row
Fair Test: Testee predicts the roll of an agreed upon die that is rolled by an agreed upon 3rd party on an agreed upon table. Lather, Rinse and Repeat 100 times.
Non-sequitur noted, dude.
It was your totally unnecessary axe-grinding sentenced tacked onto your post about rhetorical weapons and dissembling that prompted it, pal. Don’t try to pick the battefield and then whine about the terrain, as many of the Randi’s challengers have tried. It’s unseemly.
Aeschines, some thoughts. Granted, not every phenomenon in the world can be reduced to numbers and an obvious, no-judge-needed test. But I think more can than you may realize. Things that are typically judged subjectively can sometimes be tested in an objective manner. I shall elaborate.
Let’s take a paranormal claim: “I can detect the energy field around a body without touching it.” Perhaps you feel the energy field, perhaps not. Sounds subjective, no? But a properly designed test can be done 11 year old Emily Rosa did it) and quantified as pass, fail, or chance. Repeatedly.
from http://www.phact.org/e/tt/sarner.htm (Items in square brackets added by me for clarification)
Let’s take another you mentioned – remote viewing. Say I claim to remote view an object from a group of five choices. I draw the object, I compare it to the five, and subjectively decide your picture of a mountain is what I was viewing, since I drew something that went up in the center. So I win, right?
Wrong way to judge. Let’s redesign the test so that subjectivity is minimized, unconscious cueing is not a factor, and participants are ignorant of even partial results until the final ones are in. Five images are chosen from 25, but none shown to me. A random number from 1-5 is generated, recorded, and a “sender” tries to transmit that image number to me in another room, isolated for communication. I draw the object. The sender does not see my drawing, I do not see the original. At the completion of this round, the drawing is put aside and the process is repeated, with 5 new images chosen from the 25. After ten of these rounds, a person chosen by me who has seen none of this up to now is given my ten drawings and the 25 originals, and without anyone else present, tries to match the sent ones up with the received ones. If he can match 8 of 10, that’s pretty good, isn’t it? Way above chance, but not a requirement for perfection.
What have we done here? We have converted a subjective remote viewing test into something very quantifiable.
Then the expected results should be set lower, but not so low as to allow chance to be the single factor. I can’t stress this enough – the claimants are the ones who accept the performance level. “Can you perform at 85%?” “Sure, duck soup!” “Do it, then – just repeat, under proper observing conditions, what you feel so confident that you can do. No more, no less, and you can’t cheat.”
When they subsequently fail, what does this suggest is at work here? Their confidence level has been artificially set high by their failure to impose proper controls on their own tests. They were unwittingly fooling themselves; it wasn’t a mysterious, paranormal force that detected the water, it was their very un-paranormal vision.
If they can only perform at or near chance level, there is no evidence of a paranormal phenomena.
There are at least three separate issues being discussed here:
(1) Is the basic structure of the JREF challenge fair? In particular, does it test the things it claims it can test about as well as such things can be tested, and clearly distinguish between them and things it can’t test?
(2) Are the people who administer the JREF challenge perfect? And if not (well, of course they’re not PERFECT), how flawed are they? And how does that affect the challenge?
(3) If the challenge is, basically, fair, and has not, in fact, been won for however long it exists, what does that tell us about the potential existence of various proposed paranormal phenomena?
My thoughts:
(1) Yes, it is. Period. I really can’t think of any substantial improvements to the way its rules are established.
(2) Beats me. And, to a certain extent, I don’t really care. But, reading various complaints about Randi and this Kramer guy, it seems that while they may be grouchy, short tempered, and insulting, they are not dishonest, unfair, or blinded by prejudice. To put it a different way, I am quite certain that, if I suddenly developed the ability to, 1 try out of 10, levitate a jelly bean 2 inches above my palm for 30 seconds, and I applied for the test with even a REMOTE ability to intelligently compromise and work together with the JREF people on how to set things up, I would walk away a while later $1,000,000 richer and quite a bit famouser.
(3) This is perhaps the most interesting question. First of all, it bears repeating that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If someone claims that they can read my mind, my immediate response is “I find that very unlikely, and require extraordinary proof”. My response, given the existence of the JREF challenge, is STILL “I find that very unlikely, and require extraordinary proof”. It doesn’t CHANGE anything, it just provides a focus for skepticism, if you will.
As for the point that several people (such as Aeschines) have made about testable claims vs. untestable claims, judges, etc., well, that’s a case where I have to use some common sense, and some extrapolation from what I know about the universe.
For instance, if someone claims “I can read your mind. Look at a card from this deck and I’ll tell you what it is that you are seeing”, that’s a very concrete claim, and one to which I would very likely respond “then why haven’t you won Randi’s $1,000,000”? And I would feel good about so responding. Suppose, on the other hand, that someone claimed to have basically the same ability, but in much different circumstances. For instance, “On July 2, 1997, I felt a sudden and utterly overwhelming sense of panic just after noon. Only later on did I learn that my identical twin was in a car accident at that exact moment. I believe we communicated telephatically”. Obviously, in that case it wouldn’t make much sense for me to say “well, then, why haven’t you won Randi’s money?”. But, here’s where common sense kicks in… how likely is it that there’s an ability that humans have that:
(a) is totally and completely undependable and unreproducible
(b) works completely outside the currently understood laws of nature
and
© conveniently never leaves proof
Any one of those is enough to make me VERY skeptical about a claim. All of them together are downright damning, imho.
How much sense would it make, after all, for there to be a “sense” which mammalian brains can access, but which no species of mammal (or any other animal) ever succesfully evolved to DEPENDABLY access? Why would human evolution have gotten far enough to be able to communicate telepathically in extreme moments of crisis (and only very very rarely, because there are plenty of moments of extreme crisis in which no one claims that telephatic communication occurred), but not in everyday life? It just doesn’t make sense.
None of which, of course, PROVES that such things aren’t possible. But the JREF challenge, and its state of un-won-ness, is strong evidence that no such reproducible and dependable ability exists. And if no such reproducible and depdnable ability exists, that makes it all the more likely that no such ability exists at all.
Eloquently put, MaxTV. My hat is off to you.
Of course, I rarely wear one…
I’d suggest that it is very easily quantifiable, by casting it in terms of, say, a 10% chance of success for each test (see post #4 in this thread). That is, out of 10 different options the medium/clairvoyant/remote viewer would do significantly better than chance over a day’s multiple testing. If they can perceive information, however vague, this will bump up their success rate way past 10% even if they still guess the wrong option most of the time.
Not with multiple tests which show up any significant deviation from chance. If I call a ten-sided dice correctly 30% of the time, all day, there is definitely a significant effect present.
Even cancer healing and the like is subject to this kind of statistical treatment (after all, that’s how medical trials are run routinely). Some testing regimes might be expensive, but they are all quantifiable.
I knew you were going to say that.
< D&R >
So what exactly is your point then? You are not saying the test is unfair (or indeed fair), you say. You’re just commenting on … what?
Indeed. And saying to a claimant “I hope your mother gets bone cancer” probably falls well outside acceptable. Yes, he actually said that. He apologised afterwards and withdrew the comment, but it’s not the first time he’s blown his stack in this way, and there’s only so many times you can apologise for behaving badly before the apologies start sounding more than a little hollow.
Aeschines you say this regularly. Every time you say it, in what seems like thread after thread, it is explained to you why it is completely wrong. You have no answer to the explanation as to why you are wrong, but you just keep on keeping on regardless. You need to think about the difference between not understanding why you are wrong, and being right. Seriously.