Astrology test protocol in progress..

[sadhatter]

Kuko:

I can understand why what i say would come off as strange , if your not really versed in the tricks of the trade.

But what you see as reasonable criteria for him, is deck stacking. I mean what if he said he needed the email adress of each participant? would that be okay? Or what if he said that the volunteers had to be from a certain area? Or if he said he had to choose the people personally?

What you seem to be looking for is this person being an obvious fraud, but frauds arn't always obvious. But to show you what i mean, i would be perfectly willing to take the test myself using the criteria we discussed, and i assure you through trickery and some cold reading techniques, i could squeeze out much more than chance, my guess would be between 4-7 out of ten.

What he is trying to do is the same as a lot of applicants for the MDC, he is basically creating a game, akin to roulette, and is trying to stack the odds as much as possible. Again, i say this not as someone who thinks they are a bigger skeptic than you, but as someone who was woo obsessed, and eventually picked up the tricks of the trade. I was one of those people who used cold reading and other tricks, yet i did think that others were doing it for real. And i would put the psychic in question into that category, judging by his current actions.

 

[sadhatter]

"I think you're mistaken here, as far as I can tell, this test is far removed from a 1 to 1 situation where you could use Cold Reading skills and from the situation where the Forer Effect would kick in.

1) This is the same for all the participants.

2) This is the same for all the participants.

3) This is the same for all the participants.

4) I will do my best to edit all the age-related hints from the reading.

All of the participants are given 10 profiles and they are all going to have to choose one profile that describes them the best. I just don't see how your objections would matter in this test."

Okay, i will try to explain this a different way, from a more personal standpoint, as i used to be a decent " psychic" in my time.

If i do not have an age limit, then there are certain things i can say in the reading that will make me dead wrong, and obviously faking. For example.

If i give a reading and happen to hit on a few subjects, lets say, name, and a dead relative. This person may be thinking " oh this is actually going well" or in this case" hey this seems to be my reading" but if i put in that the person will soon have a child, and they are 12, then i am obviously wrong.

If there is no age limit , this is a possibility. But if i institute an age limit, i know that saying things like " you will soon have a child" will not automatically exclude my reading.

Or as another example. ( using the 40-50 age limit you were speaking of)

A person is reading one of the messages , and they are thinking it may be them. Now they hit a point where i take a guess at their favorite show during their childhood and i describe it as something like " one of the first sucessful comedies" or " the first show to focus on a strong female charecter.". If they are , lets say 15, bam we have an instant failure. But with an age limit we take away the option for instant failure.

What not many people realize, is that stacking the deck isn't always about making you have more hits. It is just as effective to eliminate your chances for misses, and people very rarely see that. And with an age limit the chances for large scale misses are reduced considerably.

It has no bearing if it is the same for everyone, because he is not trying to increase his chance to " hit" someone, he is simply attempting to minimize the chances that an otherwise successful reading could be kiboshed by a bad guess.

I am more than happy to clarify this particular point further because i feel it is one of the most important in the protocol.

 

[Kuko 4000]

The easiest way is to use an online calculator. Enter .1, 10, and 7 in the first three boxes and click "calculate". The odds you want are the cumulative probability x>=7, since you'd consider 7 or more hits a success.

If you want to know how to get the result I can walk you through it. Roughly it's .1^7 (that's the odds that a given group of 7 all picked correctly) times the number of ways you can choose a group of 7 out of 10, which is 120. That gives you about 1/100,000. The odds of getting 8/10 or more are so small they hardly matter.

How did you arrive at the bolded part? I mean, there has to be some kind of a shortcut.

Also, I entered the values into the calculator and got: 0.9999996264

The problem is deeper than I want to confess: how do you turn this into 1 / 100 000?

 

[Kuko 4000]

Okay, i will try to explain this a different way, from a more personal standpoint, as i used to be a decent " psychic" in my time.

If i do not have an age limit, then there are certain things i can say in the reading that will make me dead wrong, and obviously faking. For example.

If i give a reading and happen to hit on a few subjects, lets say, name, and a dead relative. This person may be thinking " oh this is actually going well" or in this case" hey this seems to be my reading" but if i put in that the person will soon have a child, and they are 12, then i am obviously wrong.

If there is no age limit , this is a possibility. But if i institute an age limit, i know that saying things like " you will soon have a child" will not automatically exclude my reading.

I feel like I understand what you are saying, I still just don't see how it's relevant in the way this test is built. Are you sure you are not confusing a 1 to 1 situation with this protocol?

The example you gave here has a big problem. If there are no age-limits, I would not be able to pass any profile like that trough to the volunteers in the first place. See, if one of the volunteers was 12 years old (remember, the astrologer knows and requires the birth details of the volunteers to do his magic), the 12 year old subject would absolutely write off the reading that had the prediction "you are going to have a child soon". I can't allow things like that into a profile where there are no age-limits. Now, if I have an age-limit of 45 or 50, this would not be a problem, or at least not even close to being as big of a problem. So, I don't see your example being relevant in a test like this.

Or as another example. ( using the 40-50 age limit you were speaking of)

A person is reading one of the messages , and they are thinking it may be them. Now they hit a point where i take a guess at their favorite show during their childhood and i describe it as something like " one of the first sucessful comedies" or " the first show to focus on a strong female charecter.". If they are , lets say 15, bam we have an instant failure. But with an age limit we take away the option for instant failure.

I just can't see the relevance. I don't think astrologers talk about stuff like this (or the names of dead relatives for that matter, that's more in the psychic realm) in their readings? At least this astrologer doesn't claim to get this kind of stuff at all. I have previously Google Translated the kind of stuff he claims to get, why not try to give a relevant example from those?

Anyways, addressing your main point here. If I had no age-limit, and had young people in the mix, the same as previously, I would of course NOT let a clue like this into the profile in the first place, it is too heavily age-related.

Just to give you an example, I would accept something like this: when you were 8 years old, you got your first pet, and it was a dog. Considering none of the volunteers were under 8 years old, of course.

What not many people realize, is that stacking the deck isn't always about making you have more hits. It is just as effective to eliminate your chances for misses, and people very rarely see that. And with an age limit the chances for large scale misses are reduced considerably.

It has no bearing if it is the same for everyone, because he is not trying to increase his chance to " hit" someone, he is simply attempting to minimize the chances that an otherwise successful reading could be kiboshed by a bad guess.

I am more than happy to clarify this particular point further because i feel it is one of the most important in the protocol.

Please do since I don't see the problem yet with the examples you gave.

 

[Kuko 4000]

But to show you what i mean, i would be perfectly willing to take the test myself using the criteria we discussed, and i assure you through trickery and some cold reading techniques, i could squeeze out much more than chance, my guess would be between 4-7 out of ten.

I like this, if you are willing to do the hours, I think we can sort something out from the people who volunteered before. If you want I can PM you the birth details of 10 volunteers and you can start writing the profiles. I would of course need to confirm whether the previous volunteers were still interested in this. It would work as a great practice and control run. I'm limiting the minimum age to 45 in this pre-test. What do you say?

 

[sol invictus]

How did you arrive at the bolded part? I mean, there has to be some kind of a shortcut.

There's a formula for it. If you want to choose p things out of q, there are q!/(p!(q-p)!) ways to do it. In this case you can get it quickly like this: you want to choose 7 people out of 10. Equivalently you can choose 3 out of the 10. There are 10*9*8 ways to pick those 3 people. But you don't care which order you picked them in, only who they are. So you should divide by the 6 possible orderings of those 3 (6=3*2*1). So the net result is 10*9*8/(3*2*1) = 120.

Also, I entered the values into the calculator and got: 0.9999996264

You're looking at the wrong row. You want P(x>=7) = 9.12E-06 ~ 1E-05 = 1/10^5 = 1/100,000.

The problem is deeper than I want to confess: how do you turn this into 1 / 100 000?

Does the above answer that?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

I agree, the best I can think to eliminate this is to choose participants with no prior knowledge of astrology.

The protocol I've been suggesting would eliminate it.

Again, what I suggest is to give the astrologer birth info and something else (either yes/no on a history of substance abuse or the results of a standard personality profile test or even a simple 3 point profile of our own that includes marital status, occupation and number of siblings/birth order). Then the astrologer can do his charts and write up a profile, compare that profile to the stuff we provide and match up the birth info with the correct other things.

No chance of information leakage and success or failure depends only on the astrologer and no one else's judgment.

ETA: This would make his request to use only non-skeptics meaningless. The subjects don't use their judgment at all, so they won't be able to sabotage the test.

 

[Pixel42]

ETA: The other problem, from the astrologer's point of view, is that success depends on how well the person knows himself/herself. Even if his "profiles" were perfectly accurate, this protocol would be a measure of how well the subjects can recognize themselves in a profile.

One way round this would be to get someone who knows the subject well, rather than the subject themself, to select the best match. But this objection (which I've seen made by believers when this kind of test produces results no better than chance) is actually absurd when you think about it: the only reason believers believe is because they perceive their astrological readings to be accurate descriptions of them. So they're saying astrology works on the grounds that people recognise themselves in their readings - except when they are required to pick them out of a bunch of other peoples' and fail, in which case astrology still works because people don't recognise themselves in their readings.

I do like your alternative protocol as it does get around some of the problems with the one under discussion but none of those problems are insurmountable if care is taken, and it looks like Kuko is well aware of them and knows how to eliminate them.

I don't understand why some people are still concerned about The Forer Effect, the whole point of this test protocol is to eliminate it. The Forer Effect applies equally to all 10 readings, so if that's all that going on (and all other sources of bias are also eliminated) then the result will be that expected by chance.

 

[Kuko 4000]

The protocol I've been suggesting would eliminate it.

Again, what I suggest is to give the astrologer birth info and something else (either yes/no on a history of substance abuse or the results of a standard personality profile test or even a simple 3 point profile of our own that includes marital status, occupation and number of siblings/birth order). Then the astrologer can do his charts and write up a profile, compare that profile to the stuff we provide and match up the birth info with the correct other things.

No chance of information leakage and success or failure depends only on the astrologer and no one else's judgment.

ETA: This would make his request to use only non-skeptics meaningless. The subjects don't use their judgment at all, so they won't be able to sabotage the test.

Yes, something like this would be good. First it would not require any subjective editing from the middle man (me), with a middle man doing the judgements and corrections any kinds of replications would be too messy. A big plus in my books. Second it would be slightly easier for everyone.

The downside is that it's pretty far removed from the real life situation and is only connected to a few areas of astrology. I don't think it would render his request about using sceptics meaninless, I think he is more afraid that they are somehow dishonest in their answers, or bring some other sort of negative energy to the whole test (tbh, I think he is only echoing someone elses objections with this). But I'm going to check his position on that again with this kind of protocol.

If we would do it like this, we should ask the astrologer what kinds of details or bits of info he can get most confidently through his skills and use those. I like this approach too Juggler, let's see what he says about it.

 

[Kuko 4000]

Btw. Joe, are there any standard personality tests available online, I mean the kinds that you had in mind? I would like to take a look.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

There's the "Big Five" here:

http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/