Quote:
Originally Posted by cylon  ...I just did an experiment. I asked for a Morrissey song to come on. Instead it was the Smiths which is the same thing. So that was three songs later, a three in 12,354 chance. I don't know how to do statistics. I suppose you could subtract the amount of morrissey and smiths songs I have (basically everything ever recorded by them) but still, that can't be more than a hundred or so songs.
Right now I'm freaking out. I was tempted to not even ask for a song, but to just go with it. Happened anyway.
Science or not, it's still cool/weird. |
That's right. You did an experiment, and you don't know how to do statistics. This report of your experiment demonstrates several of the common mistakes in thinking that lead people to believe they are psychic - and that's what you're saying, after all, basically - call it IM if you like - you're predicting a Morrissey song. Now, I'm not an expert at stats either, but I know enough about it to tell you that if you examined this with a purely objective, mathematical eye - or submit the problem to someone who can crunch the numbers for you - you would find absolutely no reason to get freaked out. For a start, you say you have all the smiths and morrissey songs on your ipod, so you can get the proportion of those (hits - I mean a positive result, not chart hits
) to non-morrissey-smiths songs (misses - tails). Next, you have to take into account the fact that you waited for another three tracks, which makes the odds of getting a hit within any of those three much much higher than you probably realised. What is more, you have already tricked yourself. You ask for a morrissey song, and get a smiths song, and tell us it's the same thing, but it has a different name, so it isn't the same thing. Then, when you asked for it, you were not specific about how many tracks you would wait and still consider a hit as significant. I'll bet you originally intended it to be the next track. This is a big big problem in all sorts of social sciences - things like complimentary medicine - very often people test these and find that the improvement is no better than chance - the medicine does not work in terms of scientific objective tests. Why are we so convinced? Because, if you're ill and you take no action whatsoever towards curing it, the illness is likely to get better itself. People who are susceptible to self-hypnosis on these matters just keep waiting for the 'hit' for as long as it takes. How many songs later would you have considered your so-called experiment a failure? That's rhetorical - the point is you didn't set yourself any specific targets and stick to them when testing time came. In other words, no offence, you cheated. You don't mean to cheat. You just want it to be true so you cheat.
Toss a coin and try to get heads if you want to find out whether you're psychic. All these IMers telling me I should just experiment and I'll find the truth of it! There's a real challenge for you, an experiment rather than an opportunity for self-hypnosis. Most people dont get too far before they realise the difference between gravity and psi. The longer you continue, the closer it gets to 50-50. Now, if you were psychic, presumably, the longer you went on, the further it would get from 50-50, or it would at least maintain a steady positive ratio that is significant. What's significant? Well, of course, that is subjective, but if it's anywhere
near 50-50, your powers aren't very impressive are they, batman? That's when the Dr Jahns of this world start talking about micro-effects, because they want it to be true so much that they just keep hanging on, or, in some cases, have started to make a career in that direction and decide to fix the results to keep their funding.