The Paradox of Consistency - Part One
Background: The government is testing citizens for telepathic potential.
Procedure: Each citizen is pulled into a room containing an experimenter, a face-down deck of 100 Zenner Cards (5 possible symbols), and 5 buttons each marked with a Zenner Symbol. The experimenter draws and looks at a card without showing it to the citizen, and the citizen tries to press the correct button, until the entire deck is depleted.
Question: At what threshold of correct guesses should the government consider it extremely likely the citizen has telepathic potential (<1% chance of reaching by random guessing)? Feel free to approximate.
Assumptions: The deck is perfectly random and can contain infinite duplicates. No cheating whatsoever occurs. No information leaks (except through telepathy).
Hint: Only trying values in this tool is necessary to find the answer. The pre-loaded values show that there is a 44.05384% of chance of guessing more than 20 cards correctly without telepathic ability.
The Paradox of Consistency - Part Two
That is the correct answer and thank you for hosting qoto. The scenario is from a book where a telepathic child underwent such a test and tried to hide their ability, and was therefore caught because they gave no correct answers (which is impossible for a non-telepath).
Too Good To Be True: when Bayes transforms abundant success to abject failure - 20 minutes at 2x speed
I found the theme of this video interesting because it reminded me of a characteristic of certain political theories often discussed today; namely that when you grant their assumptions it almost seems like they are “too good” at predicting or explaining every event that happens. One can posit a heuristic, then, that if a certain complicated-sounding theory or mode of analysis seems to produce “too consistent” a result; then it is likely that complicated-sounding theory or mode of analysis (T/MA) is actually effectively isomorphic to a far simpler (and less persuasive) T/MA for all values tested. It is as though the complicated-sounding T/MA is a complex electronic device which has a flaw resulting in a short circuit, causing it to behave as a much simpler and probably unintended T/MA. This also resembles a complex mathematical function intended to produce a complex mathematical shape containing a hidden factor that reduces to a far more degenerate shape over the values tested.