Last Tuesday I attended John Platt’s On Your Radar. I’m closely monitoring the COVID-19 situation. None of the artists, John, or myself have turned up with symptoms. The artists are at the greatest risk as they are unmasked while performing. I would love it if we could have a follow-up from everyone who attended. As I wanted to be extra sure about myself, I went for a test today. If you live in New York use this website, NYC COVID-19 Testing. Look at the mobile sites. I had just one person in front of me on the line and that was at 3 PM. The entire process took five minutes. I had both a rapid and a PCR test done. The rapid result was emailed to me, no surprise it was negative. The best part was that this was motivation go get out of the house. I haven’t walked in days. After I got my test, I walked to Dunkin’. I no longer get the free donuts from Krispy Kreme but on Mondays if I order something on the app at DD, I get 100 bonus points added to my account. 200 gets me a free drink of any type and size. Now I now have enough for the free drink, so I have a motivation for getting out tomorrow.
I’m rewatching Agents of Shield and thought I caught them misusing the word clairvoyant. They said it meant seeing into the future. That’s precognition. Clairvoyance is the ability to see things that aren’t in your line of sight. I planned an entire entry on clarifying the differences between types of psychic powers. The problem is that I didn’t just want to trust my memory, so I looked it up. People use clairvoyant to broadly mean all sorts of psychic viewing, whether it be the past, present (what I would call clairvoyance), or the future (precognition). I didn’t make up these distinctions but they boundaries are not universally recognized; Agents of Shield’s writers did not make a mistake. Too bad as I love that people took this nonsense so seriously that they came up with names to distinguish psychic powers that don’t exist.
Back when I was growing up there were scientists that tried to study psychic powers; the most notable one was Joseph Rhine of Duke University. His training was as a botanist, but parapsychology became his passion. If you grew up in the 60s you couldn’t avoid seeing pieces on TV showing ESP tests using Zener Cards, named for Rhine’s colleague Karl Zener. They looked like this.
The cards were designed to be easily distinguished from each other. A typical experiment was that the deck was shuffled then one person picks up cards one at a time and looks at them. The test subject then tries to guess the cards. By random chance, the subject would get 20% correct. They would do runs of hundreds of cards and if a person did statistically significantly better than chance that was evidence of psychic ability. Which psychic ability? It could be telepathy, reading the mind of the person that flipped the cards, or clairvoyance, seeing the card even though it is hidden, or precognition, seeing the card before it is exposed. As an exercise for the reader come up with experimental designs that can distinguish between the three abilities. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about these things. There was one subject that got so many right that the odds of it happening by chance was one in millions, maybe even billions. Naïve child me thought that was proof that his ability was real. I was not happy with that as the entire experimental scheme was byzantine. Let’s say there was a country where everyone was blind (The plot of an H.G. Wells story), and someone claimed the ability to have light vision. Would she need to go through an elaborate series of tests like that? No. she’d go across the room and tell people to hold up fingers and she’d tell them how many and get it right every single time, not just a statistically significant number of corrects. Anyone with telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition could prove it to a skeptic immediately. The problem with that thinking is that the data said it couldn’t be chance. Did you see why I, and Dr. Rhine, and Margaret Meade (she was influential in getting the Parapsychological Association an affiliation with the American Association for the Advancement of Science), were naïve? Sure, the odds of getting that many right by chance is almost zero, but ESP is not the only way of beating chance; there’s also cheating. Once professional magicians like the Amazing Randi got involved the jig was up. They knew the tricks; the way mentalists can cheat. Once precautions were made to prevent that the powers mysteriously disappeared. I found out about this when Martin Gardner wrote about it in Scientific American. I then wrote a computer program where cheating was not possible to test psychic abilities. Nobody passed. On my first run of 100 I did very well, much better than chance. But probability says that will happen. A one in ten chance will happen, one in ten times, duh. My abilities disappeared in consequent runs. Too bad, otherwise I could have retired on my winnings in Vegas. Funny how the only way that psychics make money in Vegas is doing shows. If their abilities were real, they’d do better at the roulette or poker table depending on their ability. Telekinesis is the ability to move things with your mind, you could win at craps or roulette every time if you had that.
I experimented with lots of psychic, or to use a word I like better Fortean, named for Charles Fort, phenomena as a kid and young adult. After reading about using a pendulum to predict the future or answer questions my friend and I tried it. We held my pocket watch by its chain and saw that sometimes it would move back and forth, sometimes in clockwise circles, and sometimes counterclockwise. That’s how it is supposed to answer your questions. My friend and I suspected that it was just our hand making small movements that created the motion so we could subconsciously affect it. We tested this by suspending the watch from a rod and not touching it. Guess what, it didn’t move.
I guess progress has been made while there are still psychics out there, I don’t see scientists giving them credence. I don’t see pictures of Zener cards on TV, not even in fiction. If psychic abilities are in stories now it’s portrayed as fantasy. Despite this I bet some of my Gentle Readers believe the claims. That’s the way the world works. Some people want things to be true so much that they will believe them in the face of all the evidence against it. I bet you can think of political examples.
Hey, I ended up writing about this even though I was wrong. If you want to read my original idea, just go to Wikipedia and read List of Psychic Abilities. Notice that it uses my definition of clairvoyance.
Wise Madness 