I think the cards are designed to have symbols that are easy to visualize and be distinct. My general impression of the telepathy idea in relation to the cards is that it’s about picking up what someone else visualized.
In the scenario where someone would be reliably able to get 30% instead of the 20% consistently right that would indeed look to me like there’s a lot of blur involved.
Alternately (as the person who did believe in ESP who showed up to my test meetup thought it worked) does this work by looking at your own future, so it doesn’t matter if the tester even sees the cards themselves before the reveal?
I’m a bit surprised that you would find someone holding that position who comes to an LW meetup.
How likely did they think the experiment would show evidence for ESP?
For clarity it was listed as an ACX meetup, not a LW meetup. Still, I’m not that surprised; the rationalist community seems to select for eccentricity, and sometimes the way someone’s eccentric is they believe in ESP. Do meetups you attend not have this?
Despite making sure Bayes was fresh in everyone’s minds, the believer couldn’t be prompted into using numbers. If I recall correctly, they were “pretty sure that it might” show up after enough trials. After three sets of ten cards each set, I believe they were 2, 2, and 3 for correct guesses. (Quote marks and correctness are to the best of my memory.) A different attendee worked out the base rates for different levels of correct guesses, most attendees made a rough guess at the base rates and were pretty confident the results would be one to three correct guesses. I wish we’d done more trials with them!
There’s a huge gap between believing that ESP is possible in principle and believing that this particular setup will show effects. This setup is about people doing the guesses without strongly developed skills and without much intentionality. on the part of the person who’s thoughts are guessed.
Even if a person would generally believe that ESP is possible in principle, I would expect a rationalist to be more into Leverage style intention phenomena experiments than having believes about these kinds of card-guessing in experimental setups that look like what you described.
I think the cards are designed to have symbols that are easy to visualize and be distinct. My general impression of the telepathy idea in relation to the cards is that it’s about picking up what someone else visualized.
In the scenario where someone would be reliably able to get 30% instead of the 20% consistently right that would indeed look to me like there’s a lot of blur involved.
I’m a bit surprised that you would find someone holding that position who comes to an LW meetup.
How likely did they think the experiment would show evidence for ESP?
For clarity it was listed as an ACX meetup, not a LW meetup. Still, I’m not that surprised; the rationalist community seems to select for eccentricity, and sometimes the way someone’s eccentric is they believe in ESP. Do meetups you attend not have this?
Despite making sure Bayes was fresh in everyone’s minds, the believer couldn’t be prompted into using numbers. If I recall correctly, they were “pretty sure that it might” show up after enough trials. After three sets of ten cards each set, I believe they were 2, 2, and 3 for correct guesses. (Quote marks and correctness are to the best of my memory.) A different attendee worked out the base rates for different levels of correct guesses, most attendees made a rough guess at the base rates and were pretty confident the results would be one to three correct guesses. I wish we’d done more trials with them!
There’s a huge gap between believing that ESP is possible in principle and believing that this particular setup will show effects. This setup is about people doing the guesses without strongly developed skills and without much intentionality. on the part of the person who’s thoughts are guessed.
Even if a person would generally believe that ESP is possible in principle, I would expect a rationalist to be more into Leverage style intention phenomena experiments than having believes about these kinds of card-guessing in experimental setups that look like what you described.