[Venom]

Originally Posted by alextsakiris

Worried about falling prey to the cruel duplicity of a ‘cold reading'? Call up a psychic (as I did about a year ago) and tell them you're not a debunker but that the most valuable thing you could get out of their reading is confirmation of psychic phenomena. Explain that you would therefore like to provide them with as little information as possible during the reading. ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answers usually works well enough. Once they agree with to this protocol, proceed with the reading. When you’re done, listen to the recording and rate the accuracy of each answer, or have a friend/spouse independently rate it. You may have to try a few different psychics (it took me three tries), but once you get a good reading the results will be self-evident.

First of, cold reading is not only about the medium fishing for verbal answers. If you read books about mentalism, and especially about cold reading, you'll discover that. It's also about looking for external informations, taking from the way you look, and any other non-verbal informations your body (the way you look, you move, and so on) can give during the interraction with the psychic or mentalist. So in the "experiment" your proposing there, you're not controlling at all for cold reading, you're just preventing the medium for fishing for verbal informations. It's of course important, but it's not enough for preventing cold reading at all.

Second, cold reading uses knowledge about human behing. For exemple, if the medium says: "Do you sometimes have back pain?". In your experiment, you'll probably score that has a hint. The problem is: in average, more than half the people will answer "yes" to that answer. So in reality, it's not a hit at all, it's just that your medium knows well the art of cold reading. But your "experience" doesn't control for that either.

Third, your "experiment" doesn't control at all for hoaxer or "hot reading". Let's play this little script: someone does what you're proposing. After a while, he goes to Mr. X, and this medium is really really good: the scoring is really really good. According to you, that's good proof that psi does exist. The only thing is: Mr. X had small microphones in the waiting room, and he was listening to the converstion his client had in his waiting room with someone else, before letting him inside his office. So with this easy trickery, he scores a lot of hits. You're "experiment" doesn't control for that either. And this kind of trickery is an old one. I know someone who was doing that in the 40s, in a fare, with a friend of his listening for him in the waiting room, then reporting to him before he met a client. Nothing new to that kind a trickery, and really easy to pull of.

So I must say the advice you're giving is really a bad one...

they can only as long as you don't know what the game is, then the blindspot goes away.

I don't agree with that: I think that cognitive bias plays even when you know a lot about a subject. Nobody is above cognitive bias. Cognitive bias are hard-wire in the human brain by evolution. A lot of Skeptics will agree with that, I think.

But anyhow, by reading what you're saying above about "cold reading", I don't think you really know what the game is. So it doesn't matter...