Clarifying misquote and repeating comment...
(snip)
Miss Kitt:
My goodness. The extent of my automatic associations between one form of information that was actually experienced and to other forms of information that were associated to, is greater than I had thought compared to others! I must immediately take back that statement!
Anita -- This (your comment above) is an important piece of information. You now know that the
level of vividness with which you experience associations to stimulus is much higher than that of other people. Have you thought of how to determine the way(s) in which your medical Perceptions differ from those associations? Could the same neurological / psychological mechanism that makes you re-experience the taste of fried chicken when you look at some be involved in your Perceptions? Or, to put it differently, how can you test the difference between a triggered vivid association, and a Perception? Put your science-student hat on and figure out that aspect of Control versus Test.
Miss_Kitt said:
If you are prepared to accept that the actual accuracy is not high, you must be open to the possibility that self-deception, faulty memory, selection bias and other issues that would indeed be due to you. Failing to include your own contributions to the perceived results is failing to seek the truth. I'll put this next statement in big type:
Not all systemic testing errors are deliberate, even though the tester may be responsible for them.
Your refusal to blind your 'study' protocols to any contribution unintentional bias on your part might make to apparent success is one of the things the skeptics here have been consistently calling you on. Yet you ignore them.
Of course I am open to the fact that cold reading etc would be due to me and I have consistently stated that in many past experiences cold reading was available, but that I do not know what cold reading was available for all of them which is why I have the study and tests. If there is apparent accuracy because a person lied or was mistaken about their health then it was not "due to me" as in it was not "my fault". I already know all that.
You seem to have decided that "self-deception, faulty memory, selection bias and other issues" is what is meant by "cold reading". The two terms are not synonymous. Simple, common steps can be taken to protect against the former. For instance, writing out (in a bound journal) each step you take, observation you make, comment by you and/or by the subject
at the time they occur are safeguards against faulty memory. That's why you keep a lab notebook in Chem Lab, right? Please take the time to read carefully and answer the questions and comments that are put to you, instead of grabbing a piece of the post and pouring out a paragraph in response to something you have inferred but that was not in fact stated or implied. I will cite a second example below.
I have noticed no delusional behavior on my part.
MissKitt said:
I am not a psychologiest, but I know that one of the things about delusional states is that the person cannot tell they're delusional. So statements like the first one are useless. What you could do, is go talk to a counselor at the health service of your school, and share your Perceptions and the frustrating experiences you have had on this Forum with them. If the counselor says, "No, you're fine, they're just out to get you," that would be important information. But that's having a trained professional look at you, not looking in the mirror.
The issue you have raised is not a reason for me to do so. I made no incorrect perceptions with Wayne.
I responded to your statement that you didn't see yourself as delusional with an observation that
that, in and of itself, does not deal with the question of mental state. * Yet in response to my comment of a way to remove that mental state concern from the list of possible explanations for your perceptions, you somehow connected it with your perceptions of Wayne?? You completely disconnected my comment from its subject, even though I specified which sentence I was referring to.
This is the kind of logical mis-match that is confusing and concerning, and it's not the first one by any means. (Many pages ago, you interpreted an anecdote that I had provided about my experience with having disproven a 'special ability'--dowsing--that I thought
I had as somehow being an analysis of your latest Perception... But I'm not digging through the thread to find that.) Again, I urge you to read carefully and respond to what is said.
One last comment, which perhaps no one has said directly: When you offer an explanation and someone raises logical objections to it,
re-iterating your prior statement is not answering their objection.
For example, if someone says, "You noted a problem with the left eye, but the subject did not report one," and your reply is, "I said it was minor! I didn't think it was worth noting," you have offered a response. If they then reply, "Then why did you note it?" you cannot just repeat, "I said it was minor!" to this objection. You need to explain WHY you noted it
even though you thought it wasn't noteworthy. And you should explain how you will, in future 'study' or 'test' scenarios, keep the problem from re-occurring. You might say something like, "Next time I will put not-worth-noting Perceptions in a separate column, so it's clearer..." and then indicate whether, if the Subject notes something that you consider "not worth noting", will you call it a Hit or a Miss?
There is help being offered here in designing your study to yield useful information; but you don't accept them. Then you wonder why the same objections are raised again on the next Perception! It's pretty simple, actually: Fix the known problems in your protocol, state how you will fix them, use those procedures/controls next time, and it's resolved.
To use a chem-lab analogy: If you are trying to identify a chemical by adding a known reagent to a beaker, someone might ask, "How are you verifying that it wasn't X (another chemical that precipitates with that reagent)?" If your answer is, "I made sure the glassware was clean, and covered the beaker immediately to keep contaminants from falling in," the question has not been answered. The same objection will be raised on your next use of that reagent, because you have not shown what your control method(s) will be to eliminate that concern.
Good science involves trying to attack your own hypothesis and answering each objection in its own experiment--or by altering the experiment design--to remove that objection.
All the work I'm putting in today, Miss Kitt
* btw, I'm by no means saying you have any mental health issues; I'm just saying that that is one of the possible, known explanations for seeing things other people don't that could be easily removed from contention.
I wanted to BELIEVE! 
