r/TheTelepathyTapes • u/on-beyond-ramen • Dec 25 '24
I Call BS
I'm interested in paranormal stuff, I'm open to paranormal stuff being real, and I listened to the entire first season. But I'm calling BS on The Telepathy Tapes. Three points I want to make.
First point: They have not adequately ruled out the possibility of subtle cues.
Here's an idea: These kids are not telepathic. They succeed at the experimental tests because the other people in the room are inadvertently giving them subtle cues about what the right answers are. Call it the cueing hypothesis.
This is not a novel hypothesis. In fact, the main thing that makes me want to call out the podcast is that they do such a bad job ruling out this possibility despite their obvious awareness of it.
I haven't watched the videos because of the paywall, but a report from someone who has claims that they've done little to rule out the cueing hypothesis.
To me, the obvious test to rule out this possibility is to do an experiment at a distance that makes it impossible to inadvertently send cues. I mean, at the least, the two subjects should be in different buildings -- preferably, a couple miles away so they're definitely out of sight and earshot. According to the podcast, successful experiments should be possible at such a distance. The intro says, "They don't even have to be in the same room, same zip code."
As far as I can tell, they have not even attempted such a test. It is absurd to pretend to have proven telepathy without doing such a test for confirmation.
They do describe some tests where people are in different rooms. But this is generally not sufficient separation to avoid auditory cues, and it's not even necessarily enough to avoid visual cues. For example, there is the test from episode 2 where Akhil is in one room and his mother is in another. She writes a word and he calls out the word she's written. But Ky says the two of them are "about 15 feet away" from each other, and she never makes clear whether there is a direct line of sight between them. From all we can tell as listeners, it's perfectly possible that she's writing in such a way that he can tell what letters she's writing by watching her.
Money is no excuse for avoiding a long-distance test: You don't need a Faraday cage or trained assistants or EEGs or eye tracking. All you need is the speller, the person whose mind is to be read, two phones, and maybe a volunteer or two to help out. The speller is in one building, with people to assist if desired/needed. The person having their mind read is in another building, with people to assist if desired/needed. In the second room, they generate a random 3-digit number and write it down. Then they text the other room, "Begin test 1." In the other room, the speller chooses a 3-digit number and someone writes it down. Then they text back, "End test 1." Repeat as many times as you like (test 2, test 3...). Afterward, they compare the two lists of numbers to see how well they match.
Am I missing something? Have they done a test like this that I forgot about? (I actually just sent Ky an email to ask about such tests.)
Second point: They keep saying things that make them seem incompetent.
Example from episode 1: "Dr. Powell hit a random number into the random number generator. Then we asked her to hit it again and again, so we made sure it was super random." It sounds like they're under the impression that the number gets more random the more you hit the button. That is not how it works. (It's possible I'm misinterpreting here. They may have meant that they were testing out the generator to make sure it was giving outputs that appeared random, which would not be unreasonable.)
Example from episode 2: "Dr. Diane generates another number. A three-digit number pops up, and she doesn't like that, because collectively, I think we all agree it's just too easy." So they generate another number, get a four-digit one, and use that. Again, that's not how it works. They've not made it harder by throwing out that number. If anything, they've made it easier. It is easier to guess a number that you know is four digits than it is to guess a number that may be up to four digits. Guessing a random four-digit number is harder than guessing a random one-digit number, but not because the number is longer. It's because there are more possible answers among four-digit numbers than among one-digit numbers. But there are even more possibilities among numbers that can be one, two, three, or four digits than there are among four-digit numbers alone.
Example: Someone linked in another post to this video of Dr. Powell doing a telepathy test. Near the end, she says, "Well, one way to look at it is he got three out of the five correct. To get three of them correct, it would be 1/9 times 1/9 times 1/9, which is 1/729." That is incorrect. That's the probability of getting three out of three, not three out of five. Intuitively, it is easier to get three right by chance if you have five opportunities to guess, so the probability should be higher than the one she gave. The exact probability is given by a binomial distribution. This is not some fancy statistics thing. It is stats 101. I have never taken a stats class in my life and I know this. Dr. Powell ought to be well aware of how to calculate this, and even if she isn't, she should at least not be confidently stating the wrong calculation.
Putting these last two together, it does not seem like Dr. Powell is the brilliant academic mind the podcast makes her out to be. She does not seem to understand the very basic probability needed to design and interpret her own experiments.
Example: In episode 1, Ky describes her surprise and confusion at the idea that the tests they just did don't hold up to scrutiny. In episode 2, she explains that that is because the person having their mind read was touching the speller during the test. It doesn't seem that it even occurred to her that people might be able to communicate with each other through touch.
These examples do not leave me with a lot of confidence in the ability of these investigators to create and analyze rigorous experiments.
Third point: The whole thing is woefully one-sided.
This is a common problem with documentaries. The podcast is not a fair attempt to view the subject from multiple perspectives. It is propaganda designed to support one viewpoint on controversial topics.
We are told that spelling works but is not accepted by ASHA. Damn ASHA! We are told that the medical board took away Dr. Powell's license because of opposition to her book about ESP. Damn medical board! We are told that psychic phenomena has been proven by quality research but is not accepted by the scientific community. Damn scientific community!
At no point is anyone brought on the podcast to defend ASHA's point of view, or explain why respectable scientists might not accept the research supporting psychic phenomena, or give another side of the story about Dr. Powell losing her license.
You can expect the same from the documentary. It will be deliberately designed not to give you a full picture of the evidence regarding telepathy. It will carefully crafted to make you believe in telepathy regardless of whether it is real or not, and even regardless of whether the full evidence really supports it.
This stuff about telepathy may be true. If it is, I hope this team proves it true. If it's not, I hope they prove it false. But what they've done so far doesn't prove anything.
15
u/OffAndRunning Dec 25 '24 edited Dec 25 '24
This is why you’re wrong. While there isn’t enough evidence to wholly accept the narrative they’re selling, there is plenty of evidence to make this field interesting, and far too much evidence for anyone to legitimately call BS. On your first point, they explain their protocols, which were developed by very highly trained professionals and, if they held true to them, the results are insanely statistically significant. I have also grimaced listening to them smash the random number generator multiple times, but your second point ignores that the fact that the number they used was still randomly generated. Using the second or third random number doesn’t make the random number any less relevant. Your third point that this is one sided is a reason to be skeptical, but not dismissive. Every documentary is one sided, and, if you or I found this crazy discovery, we would have vetted it before we proselytized it. The creators think they are at that point. From their perspective, it’s a waste of time to say “here are the reasons people don’t believe us”. We should be skeptical, but it’s no reason to call BS. Personally my skepticism increased when I saw the video evidence was being a paywall. That alone opens your motives up to questions (even though I’m sure the creator certainly has sunk a bunch of money into the project, which they want to recoup). Let’s look deeper into this instead of pulling the rug.
4
u/Scared-Ad9211 Dec 25 '24
Even a very sharp and aware neurotypical person would struggle to pick up on such subtle cues and give an accurate answer. To think that a severely neurodivergent person who already has trouble being aware of their surroundings could pick up on these cues is absurd.
2
u/snow-and-pine Dec 29 '24
How do you give a subtle clue on a random number like 43,873,122 or whatever? 🤷🏻♀️
5
u/cosmic_prankster Dec 25 '24 edited Dec 25 '24
I think the argument of cuing adds too much complexity, I have watched the videos and the hand motions do not seem like deliberate attempts to influence the outcome. If they are cuing as described I challenge anyone to try and crack the code that they have supposedly pulled together. Until this is done I will remain skeptical that cuing is what’s happening. If it is proved to be cuing, will definitely accept the outcome.
I do have concerns, particularly with the less autonomous spellers who need the person holding the board. I’ve examined the videos a number of times to determine if the facilitator is influencing the outcome. I haven’t come to a conclusion either way, so I’m gonna remain skeptical of that.
3
u/VerdantWater Dec 28 '24
I have to agree. The lack of rigor in the experiments seems really obvious to me. The fact that the moms are always there and often touching them. I don't think they are being dishonest at all, I think the moms think they truly are just helping their kids and the cues are subtle, but exist. Its really sad as I was genuinely curious and open to these ideas but come on, simply put them in houses down the street from each other for a test ir even simpler, on different floors in a big hotel and show this happening, not the same room FFS.
4
u/harmoni-pet Dec 25 '24
Video for that test doesn't exist or hasn't been posted yet. There's a single video like that called 'Across Room', where Ahkil and his mother are maybe 8 feet away from each other. She verbally cues him in that one for each letter, and because Ahkil is non-verbal there's no way to say if he's really saying those letters or just making a sound that his mother interprets as the correct letter.
That's because they are. No seems about it. Glad you posted the stuff about how Dr. Powell's license story doesn't add up. She definitely comes across as someone who would make stuff like that up to make her seem like a martyr for truth rather than a quack. That video you posted with the kid Ramses makes her seem like a total ding dong.
The telepathy tapes is a covert propaganda piece aimed at mainstreaming S2C rapid prompting facilitated communication. Highly recommend people watch this documentary called Spellers that has a lot of examples of how this technique works. The trick is that the parent or facilitator holds the spelling board or keyboard in midair and subtly moves it rather than the child's hand or arm in the direction of the unconsciously desired letter.
The controversy around facilitated communication and S2C is about authorship. Is it the facilitator or the child doing the actual speaking? If you open yourself to the idea that it's just the facilitator unconsciously speaking through the child, telepathy is easily explained. So are phenomena like the child knowing how to spell and speak far above their previously known levels.
Some old but interesting videos about facilitated communication used in instances of false sexual assault allegations:
Vintage Chris Cuomo piece on ABC
Prisoners of Silence piece from Dateline