The Telepathy Tapes

Mendel said:
The fact that the receiver is part of the test team should rule out most cheating methods.

That said, what I would want to see is a control experiment with a non-telepath in the sender position, and the same receiver.
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Nah, I want to be the reciever, and I want my share of the $500000!

EDIT: Also, I don't think a tester should be the receiver - because that invites claims of deliberate bias.
 
Mendel said:
The fact that the receiver is part of the test team should rule out most cheating methods.
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Can you expound? I'm not sure I follow.


Also, more generally and not in response to Mendel's post, it is worth keeping in mind that there is deliberate cheating, and there is also not knowing that you are getting the information through other channels, such as hearing what the sound of the numeral being drown is and inferring the number subconsciously. Not all ways to get a false positive result involve deliberate falsification.
 
I think non-reporting is a receiver's most honest way of saying "I'm getting nothing". Forcing the person into making a guess changes the whole business from telepathy into mere statistics. If you want to test telepathy, the receiver would have to sense something, but if you're just testing statistics you would need a much greater number of tests.
 
Ann K said:
I think non-reporting is a receiver's most honest way of saying "I'm getting nothing". Forcing the person into making a guess changes the whole business from telepathy into mere statistics. If you want to test telepathy, the receiver would have to sense something, but if you're just testing statistics you would need a much greater number of tests.
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I agree. But, how does she explain the rounds where she did write a number then? Did she "get" something? If so how?

The whole thing just seems like they pulled it together on their lunch break. Why couldn't they have grabbed a random stranger off the street to be the reciever and/or not tell them what the test is about.
 
Giddierone said:
The whole thing just seems like they pulled it together on their lunch break. Why couldn't they have grabbed a random stranger off the street to be the reciever and/or not tell them what the test is about.
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This was designed by students, remember? I hope later class discussions made them think about what they should have done.
 
JMartJr said:
Can you expound? I'm not sure I follow.
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Mentalism acts—stage telepathy—work by setting up a system in advance where a confederate signals the receiver the answer via a pre-arranged code. This obviously requires that the receiver knows about the code, so they're not going to be fooled into thinking it's telepathy. So then the test team knows it's fake.

If the receiver isn't a stooge, then they have to cheat some other way, e.g. through stochastic prediction or by controlling which number the sender reveals after the recipient has committed.
 
Mendel said:
a confederate signals the receiver the answer via a pre-arranged code.
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Like the Zancigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Agnes_Zancig

They used a secret code to perform demonstrations of telepathy. Mrs Zancig, with her back turned, 10ft away, or even in another room, could divine letters, calculate numbers, or describe images from Mr Zancig, writing them on a slate tablet.

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Skeptical Inquirer's Stuart Vyse writes about "Upward Bound", supposedly written by autistic Woody Brown using the point-to-the-letter method.
External Quote:

Now, Woody has produced his first novel, which was published by a division of Penguin Random House, one of the legendary "big five" publishing companies.

This is a truly remarkable achievement, but not for the reasons most people think. Rather, it is remarkable that this mother-son pair has been able to mislead so many people and get this far. I realize that sounds harsh, but this view is based in evidence provided by the Today Show videographers. Often the video footage of nonspeaking individuals being subjected to RPM or other spelling methods does not give a clear view of the letter board held by the communication partner, and in other cases, the autistic individual genuinely appears to be tapping out recognizable words and sentences. In contrast, the Today Show staff gave us an unusually clear view of Woody's typing, and the results were devastating. The full six-minute Today Show segment on Upward Bound is shown in the YouTube video below, and the clearest examples of his typing begin approximately at the 3:00 minute mark.


Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tLz-5ZEOT80&time_continue=1&source_ve_path=NzY3NTg&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fskepticalinquirer.org%2F


Shockingly, for anyone who pays even the slightest attention, it is obvious there is a problem. Woody's taps on the letter board bear no relation to the words attributed to him. U.K. YouTuber Jill Bearup did a detailed analysis of an earlier video of Woody and his mother, and she pointed out that (a) the number of taps Woody makes for a word rarely match the number of letters in the word attributed to him by his mother, and (b) the actual letters tapped are gibberish. A screenshot from Bearup's video is shown in the banner of this article, with the words attributed to Woody at the bottom and Bearup's best determination of the letters typed at the top. Bearup also points out two common flaws of the spelling methods: Mary Brown does not hold the board steady, and, even more troubling, Woody is often not looking at the letter board.
 
Giddierone said:
Like the Zancigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Agnes_Zancig

They used a secret code to perform demonstrations of telepathy. Mrs Zancig, with her back turned, 10ft away, or even in another room, could divine letters, calculate numbers, or describe images from Mr Zancig, writing them on a slate tablet.
Click to expand...

My sister and I had a party trick like this - fooled our friends for years and never revealed the secret. #1 could telepathically divine the word #2 was sending (a word suggested by the friends while #1 was out of the room) with 100% accuracy.
 
Giddierone said:
Ugh, this stuff is so tragic. He's obviously just "typing" an unintelligible string of characters. Do people just need to believe so strongly?
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In such contrast to the example I remember very clearly from my youth, that of Joey Deacon, who had severe cerebral palsy.
External Quote:
In 1970, Deacon began to write his autobiography with three friends. Ernie Roberts, who also had cerebral palsy, had been in hospital since the age of ten and was able to understand Deacon's speech. Roberts listened to Deacon's dictation and repeated it to another patient, Michael Sangster, who wrote it down in longhand. After proof-reading by Chris Ring, a student who visited the team each week, it was typed by a fourth member of the team, Tom Blackburn, who was initially unable to read or write but taught himself to type in order to help. The forty-four page book took fourteen months to write.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Tongue_Tied
The book was turned into a 70 minute docudrama, published by the BBC's in its /Horizon/ series, which is available on youtube -
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZqbSNRa8Fk


I was sure I remember some communication integrity checks (it was 45 years ago when I last watched it), and indeed several are dramatised therein:
- Firstly, Joey alone is shown a picture, and asked to tell Ernie what's wrong with it, which Ernie correctly does. So Joey's input's good, and his output can be made understandable by Ernie.
- Secondly, when writing the book, there seems to be an extra step not listed above which proves that the pipeline works at least at the character level - Joey spells out the proof-read text to Ernie, which Tom then types. If what's typed doesn't closely match what's already written down, then clearly the pipeline isn't working, and you'd have hardcopy evidence of the failure. That second step was an almost unnecessary step, because it almost halved the possible throughput, but it did at least have the benefit of adding Joey's approval to Tom's rendering of the sentences.

Joey's words deserved respect, so they were given their full information-theoretic value to reflect that respect; in contrast, my annoyance at the facilitators in this modern case is, quite frankly, visceral. I too will "swerve", lest I breach any policies.
 
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