The Functionality of the Black Iron Prison

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Of course! But there's an even bigger flaw that means that even if I'm right — in fact, ESPECIALLY if I'm right — I will "fail".

This is a game you can play only before you explain the rules. Even if I played the mystical witch lady here, I already explained the statistics of it. Which means the word would be chosen with them in mind. You don't get to play this game after everyone understands the rules.

That's not to say it's impossible. For instance, he chose a two syllable word. Six or seven letters long. Written in lower case, it would have at most one descender. And he had to squash the last letter in, because he ran out of space.

But because I won't play the witch lady, if any single piece of that is wrong the whole thing gets tossed, where she spoke in far vaguer terms and got a full success handed to her. (Also, if you ignore the statistical likelihood's part, that description of the chosen word being even half right would be "crazy". I'm betting it's almost entirely correct.)

You still haven't guessed what I wrote. In fact, you're living up to the example I provided in my story: those who make extraordinary claims will usually come up with some reason why they can't be tested.

You're not really contributing to the conversation in any constructive way that matters to me, you're just storming in like James Randi and being snarky and acting like anyone I've ever met is a professional illusionist. I've already gone over this; she wasn't the type. She certainly wasn't your type.

I'll save you the trouble. I wrote, "Rent is due." I even gave you a good shot at guessing the right answer.

I'm bored. Does anyone else have anything mildly interesting to say?

[altered]

 

I could well have guessed that Es were present, I just assumed you’d modify your behavior after I pointed out that statistically, that’s the easy mode version.

I had assumed you would write a single word, because most people would. Again, that’s the easy mode version, but I hadn’t brought it up so it seemed less likely to be changed.

But I could have always said “oh I can’t tell... the distance is clouding my mind.... I see something.... there are few curved lines but a prominent one is at the start... I can’t see clearly...”

If I hadn’t begun by telling you that you got played, you’d have eaten it up. And it still would have been correct for most things you could have written. Including this.

ETA:

Also, when it comes to parapsychological woo, I’m one of the more credulous people there are, which makes this all far funnier.

I was absolutely willing to buy that you saw something worthwhile right up until you described the experience.

But I’m Randi, of course. Never mind that I’m pretty sure telepathy is physically possible over short distances and that under the right conditions weak telekinesis could happen too.

I don’t even draw the line at remote viewing. I just have seen far better examples of it than this exposed as shams.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

I could well have guessed that Es were present, I just assumed you'd modify your behavior after I pointed out that statistically, that's the easy mode version.

I had assumed you would write a single word, because most people would. Again, that's the easy mode version, but I hadn't brought it up so it seemed less likely to be changed.

But I could have always said "oh I can't tell... the distance is clouding my mind.... I see something.... there are few curved lines but a prominent one is at the start... I can't see clearly..."

If I hadn't begun by telling you that you got played, you'd have eaten it up. And it still would have been correct for most things you could have written. Including this.

[Doktor Howl]

By the way, Faust, your choices of Red and Triangle say more about you playing Control recently than humans in general. "Think of a random shape/color/abstract concept" is very volatile, and you can get different answers by PUTTING DIFFERENT OBJECTS ON YOUR DESK.

that makes sense and is terrifying

I am totally not catching the gist of this.

Basically, "pick a random color/shape/abstract concept" is more influenced by environment and current mental obsessions than anything else. To the point that if you put a green cube on your desk prominently, most people will say green and square.

Faust has been playing a game where a pyramid and the color red are extremely important visual themes. It's more likely that's why he said red and triangle than it is that most people would say those things.

Thanks.

[chaotic neutral observer]

I'm making a second pass.  This sort of thing is my version of mental hygiene.

I figured that if I had stumbled upon something truly unique and world-shattering, it was something that would prove to be elusive if I actually attempted to catch it. It was almost like the universe was allowing me a glimpse of something, and if I ran after it, it would vanish forever, and I'd be left with nothing but the question of whether or not I ever saw it in the first place.

In other words, you wanted to believe in something more than you wanted to find the truth.

But this could all be described as mental gynmastics,

It was.

I like to consider myself a logical person who sticks to the rules of critical thinking,

Almost everybody likes to think that.  It's kind of a Dunning-Kruger effect.

I also, again, did not wish to become so rigorous in my pursuit of an answer that I would put any strain on the relationship I had with the subject. She was coming out of a relationship with a very controlling boyfriend at the time, and I didn't want to put her under any real pressure.

Now you're just rationalizing.

Consider that if she had actual usable astral projection ability, she could be finding people trapped in collapsed buildings, or lost in avalanches.  Or making a fortune in the oil/gas/mineral exploration industry.  Or performing just enough corporate espionage to make a killing on the stock market.

She never struck me as someone who would gain anything from fooling anyone.

She doesn't need to have the intent to fool other people, if she was already fooling herself.

I've known a lot of bullshitters, and nothing about her character ever smelled of it.

She didn't need to be a bullshitter; she only needed to be a wishful-thinking type.

Most people who make extraordinary claims will come up with some reason they can't undergo a test, and if they don't, they'll try to do as you originally expected, which is design the test themselves.

She did come up with reasons that the test might fail.  She said (your words): "she had described it as being somewhat fuzzy, not exactly easy to make out details in"...."She warned me that she couldn't make any promises"

She came out of it after a little bit, and asked me if I had drawn something. I said, no. So she does it again, and comes back and says she keeps seeing little drawings, did I really not draw anything? I said, no,

Altered said something about how a person's childhood could be a significant source of false memories.  As a child, she was probably used to the refrigerator having drawings on it.  Since that is what she expected to see, that is what she believed she saw.  She didn't actually describe any of the drawings, and saying there are drawings on a refrigerator isn't much of a leap.

She stops for a moment and says she did see something like the letter "E", but it looked scribbled, like it had been written twice.

Seriously?  I mean, that could be anything.

Could she have guessed the exact circumstances of just how I'd written down my name, and with what?

She didn't guess that, though.

The chances are 50/50 each, or 25% combined:

1. pen/pencil
2. vertical/flat surface

You write on vertical surfaces 50% of the time?  Weird.

Not to mention also correctly guessing the first letter; a 1/26 chance.

That's wrong, but altered already addressed that.

And being savvy enough to skirt around it long enough to "seem" like she was having a hard time getting it? And then making it subtle by not revealing the whole word but only the first letter?

What you're saying is that because she was less accurate, that makes her more believable.  That's idiotic.

I took her into the kitchen and showed her the fridge. She started to freak out and got super excited; the door was covered with stick-figure drawings my roommates had done over the months. She pointed to them and shouted "That's what I kept seeing! These!"

Uh-huh.  I don't doubt she believed she'd seen that, but unless she actually described the stick-figures during the initial reading, then saying "yes, I got it right!" afterwards means exactly nothing.

This ultimately gives me several nearly equally inexplicable options:

1. She was a fucking ghost ninja.

A ninja would have actually passed the test.

2. She was a female Sherlock Holmes and a con-artist with nothing to gain but the satisfaction of fooling a random person this one time.

No, she was fooling herself just as much as you.

3. She was an extremely lucky guesser, so good, in fact, that she should be playing roulette in Vegas.

What did she guess right?  There was an "E" (unsurprising) and there were drawings on the refrigerator (not exactly a stretch).  The scribbed/doubled-E is slightly interesting, but she said a lot of other things as well, and that's just the one that stood out in your memory.

4. She astrally projected.

If she did, she wasn't very good at it.

In all the times I've been over this, the simplest answer has always been that she astrally projected. The other explanations actually make less sense, in my opinion.

The option you missed was that you went in wanting to believe, and you saw what you wanted to see.

I decided it was better to just let it be what it was and not try too hard to figure it out.

So, when you encounter something mysterious, you stand back and say "oooh" instead of investigating further?  This is exactly the reason you believe in magic.  If you keep investigating long enough, the mystery goes away.

Or you run out of research budget.

I think she said something to the effect of it having been a long time since she messed around with any of it.

Not surprising.  Her level of ability doesn't seem to have any practical applications.

I don't tend to have beliefs in anything, but my mind remains open.

And yet, you believe in astral projection, and your mind is closed to the idea that your the test was yet another case of cold reading.


Now:  SOMEBODY GIVE ME A TL;DR !

[LMNO]

Now:  SOMEBODY GIVE ME A TL;DR !

[chaotic neutral observer]

Now:  SOMEBODY GIVE ME A TL;DR !

Thank you, thank you, you're a great crowd.

[LMNO]

Honestly though, thanks for the work you're doing in this thread. 

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I will take this opportunity to reiterate that nothing and nobody has ever managed, no matter their effort or skill, to defy my Universal Tedium Principle, which states that given two equally plausible explanations for any given phenomenon, the most boring explanation is the correct one.

The universe is intrinsically uninteresting, and it is incapable of working itself into a state where the miraculous is real. Remote viewing, astral projection, winning an Amazon giveaway, and such things would be amazing. They are therefore impossible.

[Doktor Howl]

I will take this opportunity to reiterate that nothing and nobody has ever managed, no matter their effort or skill, to defy my Universal Tedium Principle, which states that given two equally plausible explanations for any given phenomenon, the most boring explanation is the correct one.

The universe is intrinsically uninteresting, and it is incapable of working itself into a state where the miraculous is real. Remote viewing, astral projection, winning an Amazon giveaway, and such things would be amazing. They are therefore impossible.

You're certainly not wrong.  I mean, outside of the Dirty T.

[LMNO]

If you combine the Universal Tedium Principle with the Malevolent God Theory, you've pretty much solved everything.

[Doktor Howl]

If you combine the Universal Tedium Principle with the Malevolent God Theory, you've pretty much solved everything.

Yeah, you'd expect them to cancel out, but they don't.

[Doktor Howl]

The great thing about humans - maybe the ONLY great thing - is that we can break anything.  We can even break things that don't exist. 

Magic, for example.

"I wish for no wishes."

[The Wizard Joseph]

The great thing about humans - maybe the ONLY great thing - is that we can break anything.  We can even break things that don't exist. 

Magic, for example.

"I wish for no wishes."

Science too to some degree. We analyzed the composition of common rocks by grinding them to super fine powder and putting them through solvents and heat in ways that just don't happen in nature, discovered that a teeny tiny fraction of a percent of it was made of super heavy and rather unstable atoms forged in supernovae from long before the sun had ignited and planets formed, refined them, and found that the stuff could basically smash itself and everything else on an atomic level releasing an incredible amount of heat, electromagnetic energy, and chunks of nuclei if you get enough of them close together in one place, and primarily use the shit to either unravel reality instantly to make explosions that rival meteor impacts and super volcanoes for sheer destruction or set it up to unravel a bit slower to boil water and power relatively primitive wheel turbines to spin magnets and get the electricity we use to make machines chew up resources and spit out products at a pace that you just don't see in the natural world unmolested by monkey sciencing. All of the shit is also profoundly toxic and durable.

Also we made the deadly microbes on our only planet that we all know and love into weapons and discovered means to engineer myriad other deadly substances.

There's a certain irony to us in that we used to smash rocks together to make tools for survival and got so good at it that smashing rocks together may also become horrible, firey doom for us and everything else living on the planet.

Humans are as far as I know the most destructive things in a universe just LOADED with destructive things. That's kind of an accomplishment when you think about it.

[Doktor Howl]

The great thing about humans - maybe the ONLY great thing - is that we can break anything.  We can even break things that don't exist. 

Magic, for example.

"I wish for no wishes."

Science too to some degree. We analyzed the composition of common rocks by grinding them to super fine powder and putting them through solvents and heat in ways that just don't happen in nature, discovered that a teeny tiny fraction of a percent of it was made of super heavy and rather unstable atoms forged in supernovae from long before the sun had ignited and planets formed, refined them, and found that the stuff could basically smash itself and everything else on an atomic level releasing an incredible amount of heat, electromagnetic energy, and chunks of nuclei if you get enough of them close together in one place, and primarily use the shit to either unravel reality instantly to make explosions that rival meteor impacts and super volcanoes for sheer destruction or set it up to unravel a bit slower to boil water and power relatively primitive wheel turbines to spin magnets and get the electricity we use to make machines chew up resources and spit out products at a pace that you just don't see in the natural world unmolested by monkey sciencing. All of the shit is also profoundly toxic and durable.

Also we made the deadly microbes on our only planet that we all know and love into weapons and discovered means to engineer myriad other deadly substances.

There's a certain irony to us in that we used to smash rocks together to make tools for survival and got so good at it that smashing rocks together may also become horrible, firey doom for us and everything else living on the planet.

Humans are as far as I know the most destructive things in a universe just LOADED with destructive things. That's kind of an accomplishment when you think about it.

Everything we do happens in nature because we are part of nature.  That's the whole point.

Just because intelligence is confined to one part of nature doesn't make it less natural.  In fact, the only actual phenomenon that isn't natural is the wasp.  It is not part of the food chain, it exists only to cause pain. 

They are proof of my earlier statement that you cannot appease the gods.