This is not necessary or germane and you will stop posting this sort of passive agressive attack in GD.
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Will you at least admit that James Hydrick, who you cited, has admitted that he was a fake?
This, too, is off topic.
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**In the interst of keeping the discussion as fact-based and neutral as possible, further references to “woo” are prohibited in this thread. Use “psychic,” “paranormal,” or some other neutral word when identifying persons who believe in it or their actions.
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I see a problem in that there is no “unified paranormal theory”. Example: if anyone who claimed to have psychic abilities could demonstrate those with Zener cards even if their main claim is to dowse for gold, then we could devise a standard, computer-administered ESP test. This has been tried, and failed to preduce reproduceable results without cheating.
So we are left with the solution JREF made in the MDC, where each claim gets a customized test.
Personally, I think that points up the weakness in any paranormal claim and suggests that no such force or ability exists. ESP tests have been done for over a hundred years, yet* failed to find evidence of the phenomena. * And that’s the crux – if you can’t prove the phenomena exists, how can you test for it?
So every so often someone comes up with a new, seemingly paranormal talent – Ganzfeld, memory in water, therapeutic touch – all newer claims than 19th century mediums. You can’t test those in the same old way. So if you devise a test for X phenomena, and no one can perform better than chance, along comes a claim for Y phenomena and you have to design a different one.
So to answer the OP, I don’t think you can devise a “fair and effective” test for all phenomena, just for a limited range. It’s like whack-a-mole.
Can you really test for psychic abilities, is there a place that lights up when someone has a
“vision?” Some people are fakes, and some maybe real, but is there really a way to test for it, I don’t really think there is.
Paranormal-hoo! 
I too see a difference in tests that have a single pass/fail solution, and tests that require multiple passes to eliminate statistical anomalies.
Which categories of psychic claims fall into which categories of testing?
The problem, as I see it, is that even eliminating a statistical anomaly won’t necessarily solve things. Let us, just for the sake of argument, postulate that the Xist motherships really do use their Information Beams to give me knowledge that I couldn’t otherwise have. But due to that damn ozone layer, they just so happen to only come through clearly rarely enough that their effect is indistinguishable from random chance.
Or let’s say that I claim I see dead people, and I happen to have powers of observation, deduction and pattern recognition which place me in the top .00001% of humanity. Even over multiple tests, I may get a better percentage of ‘hits’ than a professional magician engaged in cold reading. That doesn’t mean I actually have “psychic powers”, merely that I’m better at cold reading than he is.
Likewise, someone can get outrageously lucky. It is possible, while hugely unlikely, that someone could guess a coin flip 100/100, or 1,000/1,000, or 10,000/10,000. Simply bucking statistical probabilities, even outrageously, even repeatedly, doesn’t mean that luck isn’t involved.
Any series of testing for “psychic” ability would have to have a winnowing process, IMO. You’d start by determining simple statistical abnormalities. Just like in FDA trials, something that doesn’t work better than a placebo isn’t necessary totally useless in 100% of cases, but it’s not worth perusing research on. So, too, anybody who didn’t display anything of note in the Challenge would be winnowed out.
After that, things get tricky. And additional protocol/tests would have to be determined to fully analyze any claims. Just because someone is able to do something we cannot explain does not mean that they’re doing it via “psychic” powers, Xist cooperation, or superhuman perception. To shoehorn an analogy, if a Neanderthal was transported to modern Manhattan, and saw an automatic door, he might think it was magic. Hell, if he was transported along with his Neanderthal shaman, his shaman might even explain it as being magic. That doesn’t mean it would be a valid explanation.
Likewise, simply because someone can beat the odds and/or do something that we can’t understand, doesn’t mean that their claims of “psychic” power would have merit.
I would, further, point out that to whatever degree “psychic” powers actually existed, they would be physical events, and not “psychic” at all. If there really is a spirit realm, then it exists and thus has properties. If it can be interacted with, even on the level of consciousness, then it can alter/effect the human brain, and thus can be measured and quantified. If I can utilize some force to flip quarters at 50 paces, then I am using some sort of force to change the world around me.
Saying that a power is ‘psychic’ is a God of the Gaps style argument. If there is a phenomena of nature which allows us to do something, via whatever method, which was thought to be magic? Then we need to come up with new theories and systems which take those phenomena into account.
Heck, I’ve heard stories of algorithms which are abnormally good at predicting the fluctuations of the stock market, and their creators aren’t always sure why. (I’ll see if I can track down a site, I remember a story of a firm that created a bunch of different computer programs, and then weeded those out that didn’t perform, while having no real understanding of why those that worked, worked). That doesn’t mean that certain algorithms work by magic, magick, “psi”, or Xist technology. If someone came up with a way to, mentally, duplicate those computer programs’ functions, and claimed it was “psychic”, that wouldn’t make it so. Although they would certainly survive the winnowing process and exhibit a statistically significant ability to predict the stock market.
Or, to invoke Clark’s Law: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Retreating to an answer that something is “psychic”, assuming that it’s a real phenomena, doesn’t tell us anything about how one could do it. As such, it is not elaboration or elucidation, it is obfuscation.
I think that everything should initially fall into the statistical-winnowing phase. I don’t care if it’s saying you can make someone pee on command or that you see dead people, read minds or whatever.
Past that, anything which survived the winnowing would be extensively tested for its individual merits. Subjects would be isolated, the the exchange of energy, neural states, etc… would all be monitored and carefully recorded. I’d wager that an experiment to determine the mechanism behind someone who could make other people urinate would be quite different from an experiment to determine the mechanism behind someone who could reliably beat practiced cold readers.
I don’t think so. Some abilities are not subject to statistical-winnowing-teleportation, levitation, transmutation fire-starting, just to name a few. You can either do them or not-they are not going to occur by chance(once fraud and trickery are eliminated, of course.)
Well, you’re right, I didn’t consider those types of ‘powers’.
I wasn’t aware that anybody would even make such a claim, didn’t even enter into my thoughts.
I guess for those types of things, a simple yes/no would suffice, since the statistical reality of any of those claims is zero. Any ability to make such things happen, at all, would be statistically significant. Can you make someone burst into flames for no apparent reason? Okay, you pass, now you move on to the next, post-winnowing phase. Teleport stuff? Okay, next phrase. Levitate a brick? Move right along sir.
I guess I’ve got a bit of a problem as I’m not sure what exactly “psychic” means, other than a grab bag of claims that seem strange to me. If we’re talking telekinesis and pyrokinesis, I think we’re be into the realm of “magic” rather than “psychic powers”, for whatever that’s worth.
Thinking about how to classify “things” that haven’t ever been shown to even exist is giving me a headache.
Would it help if we used “paranormal” instead of “psychic”?
Depends on whether you’re doing it with your mind or not. What’s the difference between magic and psychic anyway? Look at something and concentrate or mumble a few words and wiggle your fingers and something happens. The only real difference is the mythology built up around both. In both cases you’re circumventing the laws of physics, and in both cases we have absolutely no evidence of it’s existance. I am of course talking about actual evidence here, and not Lekatt with his fingers in his ears chanting ‘Is too’ evidence.
Thanks for the personal attack. Why would you want to devise any tests at all being so convinced no such thing exists? OK, I will stop posting in this thread as not to disturb the skeptics and get nasty messages from the mods. No truth allowed.
I suppose… how would you define it?
By “paranormal” are you referring to any and all claims that had no proof, defy all known laws, do not propose any laws to replace them, do not fit within a coherent system, and which are not open to empirical observation, quantification, testing, or refutation?
Whether you determine your hit points with a D4 or a D6? 
To be honest I’m not even sure. Claims of seeing dead people seem like “magic”, but they’re often defined as “psychic” phenomena. I always thought that “psychic” things had to do with the mind only, predicting stuff, reading thoughts, and that sort of jazz, while “magic” phenomena had something to do with controlling energy, but…
I would agree, and I’d feel that depending on their mythology, that’d give us a baseline to conduct tests. If someone claims that they can shoot ‘magic beams’ to make something burn, then you see if they’re able to emit any sort of EMR. If someone says that they can read thoughts, I’d imagine you could scan their brain to see whether areas that correspond to guessing or listening are lighting up.
But when proponents of weird claims get funky with their mythology, I’m not even sure how tests can be designed.
You can light something on fire just by thinking about it, with no direct transference of energy, by the ‘power of thought’? Um…
By using ‘ley lines’, you can design a building such that it gives its tenants good luck? Er…
You can feng shui up my apartment and I’ll make more money? Well…
I guess I’m just trying to figure out what claims people are making, and what mechanisms they’re using to explain their claims. “I can do [physically impossible thing] due to [psychic powers]” tells me nothing. It’s a God of the Gaps style evasion using meaningless words to refer to ill-defined claims of a phenomenon which hasn’t even been shown to exist.
Without firm operational definitions “I can read your aura with my psychic powers” scans, to me, the same as “I can snarfle your whooozam with my katangkatang.”
I can design tests to analyze quantifiable claims, dealing with well defined terms, that are used in cogent and coherent systems to provide a rational framework. “I see spirits using my Psi power and that lets me cleanse your aura” sounds like something out of through the looking glass, just with fewer nonsense words thrown in.
In the JREF challenge, the paranormalist is allowed to come up with his own test scenario. If he knows that the timing of his “visions” will occur randomly, he has simply to wait until ozone clears and then do the test. No one is forcing him to try to receive information waves right now; just when he can, according to the self-admitted limitations of his power.
But if he can’t tell when he’s receiving information waves and the knowledge they give him is truly indistinguishable from random chance–i.e. he’ll most often be wrong but have no idea whether the “knowledge” came from his imagination or the mothership, and the overall result of verifications of his “knowledge” is equal with that of a person who is not in contact with Xist motherships, then there’s no proof that he’s not simply delusional. If he is receiving any knowledge at all, the percentage of times that he is right will always be statistically higher than random guesses.
What if his superiors on the mothership or the spirit world are just really stupid? He could very well be getting information, just bad information. In that case we should assume that someone who does WORSE than the statistical average is proof of psychic ability…
I don’t see that as a big problem - because the same must logically be true of any observation in any discipline (although the numbers will vary) - it could be, for example, that ducks don’t really quack - it’s just that every single time a human observed a duck, it happened to be a duck with a sore throat.
Well, for the purposes of the hypothetical, let’s say that the Xists beam stuff to him all the time, 24/7, and he doesn’t know when it’s bullshit or not except by researching individual claims; he hasn’t yet figured out that environmental factor which turns the Information Beam into a Bullshit Beam.
Oh, I understand that. But having no proof that he’s not delusional doesn’t mean that you have proof that he is delusional. And a shitty psychic power might work (I guess) as often as shitty random chance.
I mean, if we take this example just for argument’s sake, then the guy really is in contact with the Xists, but their delivery system is just so crappy that his ‘hits’ are as frequent as random chance. If we accept this example for argument’s sake, then it’s possible that he’d both be in contact with the motherships and, at the same time, unable to prove it.
Not necessarily. Let’s say that the percentage of ‘hits’ for random guesses is 5%, and the guy gets 95% misinformation and 5% correct information from the Information Beam. He repeats whatever the Beam tells him, and so, he’s has the same accuracy rate as the guessers.
Hah, there is that.
Well, not quite. I’d imagine that there are ways to verify that a duck quacks… vivisection and such, that wouldn’t work on your average psychic. As a bonus, though, PETA probably wouldn’t care if you cut open a psychic to analyze his brain.
Even in the example you give, it wouldn’t make a functional difference. “Ducks quack” vs" Ducks have sore throats and make quacking noises" are pretty much saying the same thing, I think. But “Human gets very lucky predicting things” is not the same as “Human has contact with the Ascended Masters who tell him answers from beyond.”
??
You’re out of line for this thread.
From the OP:
Go start a Pit thread if you need to (or open a GD thread to examine another poster’s views in a civil fashion).
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You had the opportunity to report the post. Instead you took another passive agressive cheap shot at both the poster and at everyone you brand a skeptic.
Knock it off.
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