My medium testing protocol

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by eyemsougly

OM
1. chosing skeptical sitters who are the same age and gender sounds like a good idea to me.

OK, if one must, lets choose middle aged females. That would be more coherent, women take far more interest in mediumship than males like us.

I cannot agree about choosing 'skeptical sitters' in this type of protocol. A believer cannot cheat the protocol, they can only try to help the medium succeed by rating accurately. A cynic on the other hand can deliberately rate badly.

Also why should we assume psi works as well with skeptics? Dog telepathy seems to work with an owner or family member, it would like assuming dogs should know when Wiseman is coming for an experiment

The sitters absolutely should not be involved in rating the accuracy of the readings, because that is too subjective. All the sitters should do is pick which of the readings is theirs. That way we rule out rater bias.

I think the rater bias is still there, what is to stop a skeptic deliberately choosing the wrong message? If one uses believers, that is less likely to occur and your protocol becomes better and fairer to mediums IMHO.

[eyemsougly]

I doubt a skeptic would deliberately choose the wrong message, the only danger with a skeptic is that they not try as hard to find out which reading is theirs.

I guess it would be harmless to have psi believers take part in the experiment and would probably be more likely to be successful.

[Venom]

Originally Posted by eyemsougly

I doubt a skeptic would deliberately choose the wrong message, the only danger with a skeptic is that they not try as hard to find out which reading is theirs.

I guess it would be harmless to have psi believers take part in the experiment and would probably be more likely to be successful.

I think the good way to go is to pick people at random in the street. You can always ask them to fill a form after the experiment about their beliefs...

[scomsjw]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

What is to stop a skeptic deliberately choosing the wrong message?

I hope you don't think that that is how a skeptic would typically behave. A skeptic should be interested in an accurate result from a well-designed experiment. You're talking about someone with a different agenda. More a saboteur than a skeptic.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by eyemsougly

Somebody like John Edward

Feh.

2. they would know who they were doing the reading for based on the number assigned to that sitter. The experimenter would just be like, "aight, now do a reading for sitter #1"

No, but how would they find the sitter in mind-space, or wherever the heck mediums are doing their thing? How can the medium "connect with" the sitter from among the gajillions of sentient beings in the universe?

~~ Paul

[eyemsougly]

Just for the record, I'm not an Edward fan as I think he is flaky and I've seen him fall flat on his face many, MANY, times. That said, it was some of his impressive hits that got me interested in Psi. He is far and away the best medium I've ever seen. Sylvia Browne is terrible and the chick on Lifetime is pretty bad most of the time as well.

As for how the hell the mediums would do it being so far away from a sitter they don't even know, I don't know, it makes no sense to me either. But they claim they can do it so that's what we should test. Any other experiment that involves bringing the medium and sitter together would be more expensive, time consuming and subject to rater bias.

[eyemsougly]

Originally Posted by Venom

I think the good way to go is to pick people at random in the street. You can always ask them to fill a form after the experiment about their beliefs...

Yeah, you could, but Open Mind makes a good point that with my protocol their prior beliefs really don't matter. If you were going to use a Schwartz style protocol then you would definately want to only pick skeptical sitters.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by eyemsougly

He is far and away the best medium I've ever seen.

Ian Rowland is the best I've seen.

~~ Paul

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by scomsjw

I hope you don't think that that is how a skeptic would typically behave. A skeptic should be interested in an accurate result from a well-designed experiment.

Most skeptics believe remarkable paranormal claims are due to fraud, cheating or bias .....if that is what skeptics think of human nature, what makes one think skeptics are always honest? Are psi opponents honest and psi proponents dishonest?

With regard to mediumship, I reckon believers tend to remember the hits better and forget the misses .... I reckon die-hard skeptics tend to focus on the misses and downplay the hits as not precise enough, too general or lucky . The believer is making possible hits out of imperfect information, the skeptic is dissecting possible hits into failures.

For example take a hypothetical medium phrase...

'Do you understand why I am seeing black cats?'

Believer's thinks '... yes, I have a cat ...and my parents have a black cat called Pooky..' - a hit

Die-hard skeptic thinks '.... no, my cat isn't black, my parents have a black cat, just one, not more, it is alive so why would a medium see a living cat? - a miss

Now the skeptics reasoning has some merit but it is just inappropriate IMHO, when the protocol depends on matching hits rather than counting fewest misses ... and particularly since mediums claim die-hard skeptics tend to block communication ... an excuse perhaps but science can still test for evidence on the mediums terms.

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by eyemsougly

Yeah, you could, but Open Mind makes a good point that with my protocol their prior beliefs really don't matter. If you were going to use a Schwartz style protocol then you would definately want to only pick skeptical sitters.

In some ways yes ... however my point is rater bias might still occur if the debunker or challenger of mediums subsconsiously does not choose the best matching reading .... the believer or neutral probably would like the medium to suceed, nothing wrong with that, so one should favour such sitters.

Possibly the best test of mediumship claims is the protocol by Roy/Robertson, it tests whether the information fits the target better than an audience of others. They found statisically significant results in favour of mediumship being real effect. However it requires a lot of people so it is harder to organize.

Regardless of the protocol chosen, to test mediumship researchers should feel obliged to look for the best mediums they can even if they doubt there is such a thing.. good research means assuming the hypothesis under test might be true, at least until the weight of evidence shows otherwise.