Cephus
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2007
- Messages
- 31,034
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- Location
- CA
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- Political Leaning
- Slightly Conservative
Of course, I would only want a valid claim to be paid out on, there are far too many scam artists out there.
Here's the problem; let's take the example of the repeated experiments that showed the weak but very significant effect of being able to "sense" when being watched.
So, you setup the experiment according to randi ' s conditions, and suddenly realize that he is demanding that you demonstrate a p value that is 1000 times more significant than has already been established to prove to the sceptic that this is a real effect, which means scaling up your experiment by the same amount, at your own expense, and then, as randi has done a few times in his challenge was to, in the middle of the challenge change some stuff to try to "trick" the challenger....
So ya, I don't think that he ever intended his prize to be paid out because he controls the conditions to payout and just had to set unreasonable expectations of an effect that might already be weak in the best of circumstances.
It would be very easy to do. Anyone who claims they have that ability would simply need to be tested, under controlled conditions, where they can identify if someone is looking at them at a rate significantly higher than chance. If you can't do that, you have no demonstrable ability. They've done the same thing with psychics and the psychics have all failed to perform any better than if they had just been guessing.