In a test for ESP, the experimenter picks up a card in a shuffled pack, observes the symbol, and records the answer of the person being tested, who would guess which of the five designs is on the card. The experimenter continues until all the cards in the pack are tested.
K. Zener and his colleague for whom he made the cards, J. B. Rhine, published a number of experiments using zener cards. (I think Rhine’s name is on them and Zener’s isn’t.) The exact methodology changed over time as other people failed to replicate the effects or pointed out potential ways the subject/receiver could have been getting information other than telepathy. There isn’t a singular canonical experiment, instead there’s a back and forth between various researchers trying to figure out what’s going on.
The part of this that seems to me to make for a good meetup isn’t the full literature review, it’s thinking about how to design an experiment that provides evidence one way or another. Hence “do a couple of draws” and then “the meetup is largely in [the attendees] hands.”
Do the cards matter? The Zener Card symbols are clearly differentiated and easy to visually recognize, so maybe if extra sensory perception is blurry and indistinct a subject/receiver can perceive the difference between a red cross and a yellow circle, but not the difference between a hearts and a diamonds. If you didn’t have Zener Cards handy and that’s the objection, maybe you can filter the 52 deck to contain only aces, tens, and kings, which are fairly visually distinct from one another. Or maybe the cards matter for some other reason. Does the tester/sender actively trying to transmit information matter? Maybe ESP functions like sight, and the tester/sender doesn’t need to actively transmit any more than they need to actively try and be visible. Are we testing the ability to send, the ability to receive, or both? 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? In all of these cases it’s good form to point out these objections before running the experiment, not after.
I agree, doing experiments by rote without thinking about what you’re testing isn’t a good way to practice doing science on something confusing. Hence my suggestion to have people think about what experiments would provide interesting evidence. “Maybe it works like this, and we could test it by doing that. Hrm, nope, that looks like normal variation.”
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.
Quoth wikipedia,
K. Zener and his colleague for whom he made the cards, J. B. Rhine, published a number of experiments using zener cards. (I think Rhine’s name is on them and Zener’s isn’t.) The exact methodology changed over time as other people failed to replicate the effects or pointed out potential ways the subject/receiver could have been getting information other than telepathy. There isn’t a singular canonical experiment, instead there’s a back and forth between various researchers trying to figure out what’s going on.
The part of this that seems to me to make for a good meetup isn’t the full literature review, it’s thinking about how to design an experiment that provides evidence one way or another. Hence “do a couple of draws” and then “the meetup is largely in [the attendees] hands.”
Do the cards matter? The Zener Card symbols are clearly differentiated and easy to visually recognize, so maybe if extra sensory perception is blurry and indistinct a subject/receiver can perceive the difference between a red cross and a yellow circle, but not the difference between a hearts and a diamonds. If you didn’t have Zener Cards handy and that’s the objection, maybe you can filter the 52 deck to contain only aces, tens, and kings, which are fairly visually distinct from one another. Or maybe the cards matter for some other reason. Does the tester/sender actively trying to transmit information matter? Maybe ESP functions like sight, and the tester/sender doesn’t need to actively transmit any more than they need to actively try and be visible. Are we testing the ability to send, the ability to receive, or both? 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? In all of these cases it’s good form to point out these objections before running the experiment, not after.
I agree, doing experiments by rote without thinking about what you’re testing isn’t a good way to practice doing science on something confusing. Hence my suggestion to have people think about what experiments would provide interesting evidence. “Maybe it works like this, and we could test it by doing that. Hrm, nope, that looks like normal variation.”
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.