So, suppose I have this game... let's call it Unreal Tournament 2004. There are some physics within the game that attempt to make the virtual world fairly consistent. The physics and the game have an intelligent designer(s) (oh believe me I hate putting those two words together). Could you use science to figure out the rules of the physics within the game?
Could you hypothesize what something might do, then design an in-game experiment to test it? Could we put forth claims which are testable? Repeatable? Falsifiable? I would say, most assuredly yes you could. Yet the whole virtual universe in this case was manufactured by some intelligent being.
We could extrapolate this thought experiment one more step and suppose that we managed to make a very good AI that could only interact within the game. If the AI were capable of asking questions about the physics of the virtual world, is it a requirement that the AI disbelieve in the programmers who designed the game?
Are you sure science and God are mutually exclusive? Do you understand them both?
Moreover, every single one of you who's going to go home tonight and tell your friends about the big, bad, RIAA, is doing exactly what they hope you'll do. The Slashdot editor who posted this submission is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. The Slashbot who submitted the article is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. You... quite honestly, the RIAA doesn't give a crap whether you think they're greedy or not, but they are glad you're commenting on the case, and they are very glad you're suggesting they're ruthless.
I disagree. Eventually they will piss off enough people that legislators will notice that it is a sensitive issue among their constituents. Congress will then start making adjustments to curtail flagrant abuses. The best thing you can do is get lots and lots of people pissed off about the RIAA in general and the DMCA specifically. The **AA's have been brought before congress to answer for their abuses once. A couple more times and maybe something will happen.
However, potato's hit your body with sugar harder than sugar does. They will wear out your pancreas and/or make you insulin resistant over time.
Really? And your evidence is? Here's my counter-example: 300 years of poor irish farmers. Somehow I doubt they would have managed for so many generations if they were all type II diabetics by the time they were 20.
There are many problems with just using glycemic index. There is an enomormous difference between eating a 1lb potato and a mars bar. The "sugar crash" that follows consuming a couple mars bars doesn't follow a potato because, unlike the mars bar, the potato has NINE grams of protein.
Do you really know how small 100 calories of potatoes is? I can assure you that it is not a 6" x 3" beast that you are served at most restaurants. It's roughly 3" x 1.5". I probably have half a portion of potatoes a day.
I don't think the irish were on potatoes long enough to adapt to them.
You should really give up attacking potatoes. It just doesn't get much more misguided than that. A 1 pound potato contains:
330 Calories 9 grams of protein 150% RDA of Vitamin C 45% RDA of Vitamin B 8.1 grams of dietary fiber 0 grams of fat
Pound for pound, there just aren't many foods that exceed the nutritive quality of potatoes. Best of all, nobody needs to "adapt" to them.
I'm going to have to disagree with most of your comment here. Sugar tastes good to us because we have evolved a preference for it. Simply put, those who liked sugar reproduced and those who didn't like sugar did not. Now our evolution didn't anticipate how good we'd get at manipulating sugar, but never the less, there is nothing inherently wrong with carbohydrates.
We can argue about the merits of having potatoes be your only source of high-energy food (or, if you're in Africa today, it's yams), but millions of people (such as the Irish) managed to survive for generations off of potatoes because they are a very good food. They paid for it when potato blight came (and in Africa they have their own problems with yam-infecting microbes) but it worked for a very long time.
Most of the reason people do not like vegetables is our history of easy access to them. We do not have the same evolved preference for roughage. There is a right and wrong amount of cooking a vegetable should get. You don't specify what you mean by "lightly cooked" but several nutritious compounds are not produced, or not usable, unless the vegetable achieves a certain internal temperature. The starch in potatoes, for example, is nearly indigestible until the potato is well cooked and the starch breaks down.
I'm not sure what the sulphur argument is about. If that were a significant portion of it, I somehow doubt things like grilled onions and garlic would be very popular because they contain a proportionally large amount of sulphur. Unless you have one of a few varieties of onion, such as Georgia's Vidalia or Washington's Walla Walla Sweets, if you do not cook the onion, the sulphur makes raw onions unappetizing to most people. Also makes your eyes burn like heck.
If you want to do the atkins thing, and you are morbidly obese, more power to you. The diet is often injurious to your kidneys, but that risk is mitigated by the damage to your heart that extra weight does. However if you are otherwise healthy: eat a balanced diet containing meat, breads, sugars, fruits and vegetables and get some exercise.
If it's ATi trying to buy out AMD (which is perfectly possible)
And they would get the money for this from where? How does a $4 billion company that is losing money manage to buy an $8 billion company with a positive EPS?
-and- give them control over the CPU that looks set to take over.
And that CPU is? Make sure it is one that is cheaper and/or faster and/or more efficient than the Core 2 CPUs that have been launched, or will be launched next week.
You need to bear in mind that the GPU is the critical component in most systems
No, the GPU is critical only in gaming rigs. Which is a fairly small fraction of the market. There is a reason why Intel dominates the graphics market, even though their offering ain't so great.
AMD is gaining market-share
Seeing as how AMD has said they don't intend to try to survive on razor thin margins again, how will this trend continue up against Intel's new offerings?
They are just making up extra requirements to blow off applicants.
They can only be "making up extra requirements" if those requirements are not stated elsewhere. Since requiring 3 sworn affidavits is mentioned several times in the FAQ, I do not see how that would qualify as being made up. If he can really do what he says, why would he have the least bit of difficulty obtaining three affidavits from people? He attends a college, there are probably hundreds of well qualified observers at his disposal. Ask 10 of them to watch. If 3 of them agree that something beyond our understanding of physics is going on, I doubt they'd decline an affidavit.
I think any rational person reading this persons claim would realize that he is simply deluding himself. This is probably why they required 3 affidavits. It increases the odds that someone will point out to him that nothing special is going on.
Your focus has become cross-eyed. Seriously dude, drugs are bad, 'kay? Maybe you oughtta take one of those homeopathic detoxifying concoctions. Your chi obviously needs a recharge, you were born under the sign of the fish weren't you? Fish are highly susceptible to heavy metal poisoning. Cut out the drugs and the metallica. Then swing by for a free personality test, 'cuz I think you have some bad thetans in there.
Great, you've just described a reliable, repeatable form of telepathy. Does it magically disappear when it is being tested? If not, please have your friend apply to be tested. There's a million dollars in it for her, and a profound leap forward in our understanding of the human mind to be made for all mankind.
That is unfortunate because your insight was incorrect. You must find something that cannot be explained rationally and perform it. If you say you can move a rock with the power of your mind using a force that is currently unknown to science and you do so, you win. What process enabled you to do so? Quantum Mechanics? Dark energy? The will Allah? Nobody knows? Doesn't matter, you still win.
After having done so, many people will naturally be interested in finding out how you do so in an effort to advance human knowledge and maybe even greater things. Maybe many dangerous activities could be made less dangerous for humans if more of them had powers of telekinesis.
In academia it is in our best interest to try experiments both sound and outlandish (and even outlandish but sound). The fact that Princeton is the university associated with PEAR may give it an air of authenticity, but the real question is: does their data say what they claim? Can we test it elsewhere?
See this skepdic entry on why one should be skeptical of positive claims made by PEAR. There are two meta-analysis of PEAR data that shows a statistically significant increase above chance. One claims there were no star performers, the other claims a single operator (subject), believed to be one of their staff, is responsible for half of all excess hits. Remove his results, and the results of this meta-analysis return to within the expected margin of error of random results.
There are two known attempts to replicate the PEAR results. Both failed.
Have you actually bothered to look at the scientific studies performed in the field, or are you just saying this because nothing has come up in the news media that you paid attention to?
I have looked, and I have been disappointed. We call it "pseudoscience" because it is something that looks like science, but is in fact fatally flawed. The situation is complicated because many people wishing to prove Psi have flat out lied about or doctored their results in an otherwise legitimate trial. It usually takes years to discover this, but we have a number of shining examples of this to point to.
Okay, some applications from long ago aren't posted. Fine, whatever.
You are still dancing around one thing:
Provide evidence of your claim. Show a reasonable protocol that was rejected.
If someone provided one and was rejected, the firm-believer sites on the net would hold it up for all the world to see, to prove that Randi's million is a fraud. So where are they?
If you look, I know of at least one that is heralded as such. Somebody who claimed to be able to live off of nothing but water and 'prana'. Randi always rejects such claims because it would be highly unethical to conduct an experiment which could be gravely injurious to any person. (Incidentally I think Randi's rejection letter to the claimant was unnecessarily rude, and he should have just pointed out the no-harm policy)
So stop with this "oh gee, old applications aren't on the site, your whole argument must be wrong" strawman. You claim that even if someone had the proposed ability, JREF would find a way around paying it, implicitly you are saying that they would rig the protocol so it could not be accomplished. Let's see some evidence for this claim.
I don't think you intended to, but you're committing a strawman fallacy. The item which 'exists' in this case is accompanied by a claim that it manifests itself in non-ambiguous ways. The 'God' argument is generally not accompanied by a non-ambiguous evidence claim. Then you're hanging on 'prove' when it should be fairly obvious that in science you generally provide convincing evidence, you don't prove anything. There has been a lot of research on quantifying love from the philosophical to the biochemical. I think it conceivable that a set of criteria could be developed to determine love.
Yes, and that leaves no wiggle room at all for JREF.
Exactly the point. And nobody has made it past the preliminary challenge where the million dollars is NOT in jeopardy.
So find someone who was presented a proper challenge (meaning they've proposed a test protocol, they've made a positive statement of measurable paranormal phenomena, testing the phenomena would not hurt anybody, etc.) and hasn't been recorded. You've made several statements in opposition to JREF's prize, support one.
And there are many examples on non-ludicrous claims. They only highlight the outrageous ones. Check the jref forums. All challenges, even those sent in handwritten and requiring transcription, are there.
If you force the other person (person B) to change his/her routine... (i.e. tell them to specifically do something else) then it makes sense that the other person (person A) would think person B is going to do something else, because that's what person B is thinking at the time anyway.
Wow, that is some seriously weird logic. Let's put it this way, suppose we take person B to another part of the world and alter their circadian rhythm, then bring them back. Essentially person B is now jetlagged and will be doing everything they would normally doing, only shifted some number of hours. Without telling B to do anything different, is person A going to accurately determine what person B wants, given that all the normal patterns have now been changed?
If you tell person B "think about X" whereas person B wouldn't think about X on their own, then aren't you asking if person A can read your mind rather than person B's mind?
That is just daft. If person B is thinking it, we're obviously asking to read what is on person B's mind. Whether the thought was planted or not is immaterial. If person B is thinking it, and person A can detect the thought with no sensory cues from the normal 5 senses, then you have something.
It's pattern recognition.
Stop playing fast and loose. Nobody considers deductive or inductive reasoning to be psychic or paranormal. Nobody considers mind-reading to be deducing what someone might be thinking based on clues gathered in the last 24 hours and knowledge of their individual quirks. Here's a simple rule of thumb: if you could enter all the information you have about someone into a computer and then conceivably write a computational algorithm which could guess what they're thinking, then nothing paranormal has happened.
As for the Randi foundation, I have zero confidence in their ability to make an unbiased report on anything they might find. Why? Because if they do find real, actual psychic powers, thats a million they owe. And I don't know about anyone else here, but if I can avoid forking over a million, I will,
Before addressing anything else in your post, I wanted to address this because this is by far the most often used excuse for arguing against the JREF's million dollar prize. They have this one nicely covered:
Both sides must agree before the test is administered what will constitute a positive result.
If what you say is true, then please find several examples of JREF making the challenge impossible to complete with a positive result assuming the person under test has the ability as they claim. JREF publicly posts all the properly presented challenge applications.
This argument that they will somehow weasel out of it after the fact is nonsense. I know that is not the specific charge you made, but it sure seemed implicit to me. It does not work that way. Before you take the challenge all the ground rules are laid out including what must happen for you to get the million. There can be no alteration after both sides have agreed.
How, exactly, would that be distinguishable from mind reading?
If we have one person change his/her routine, and the other person fails to accurately predict the new routine, then we have distinguished it from mind reading.
Mind reading implies the ability to use something other than our five known working senses to detect the thoughts of another person. Using your ears to notice your spouse's stomach is rumbling and guessing that they are thinking about food is not mind reading. It's extrapolation based on readily available cues.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist?
While there may be some out there shouting paranormal things couldn't possibly exist, most of us are just pissed. Pissed that for every genuinely deluded person who believed they had witnessed a paranormal event, there are 20 others out there looking at using it to scam people out of money.
We have looked, and looked, and looked and come up empty handed EVERY TIME. The vast majority of the people who have said they had special powers were LIARS. The rest were just wrong. Nobody has ever passed muster. There are people out there doing genuine harm to others under the veil of paranormal abilities.
For example EVERY instance of "psychic surgery" (where someone performs surgery with just their hands, leaving behind no scar or wound) has been a scam for money.
James Randi has a web site with a forum that documents applicants for the $1 Million Challenge. Go follow those threads and watch how people weasel out of taking the test. Like the most recent guy who said he had a computer program that could produce accurate horoscopes for people. So accurate that their wives would confirm that the horoscope was indeed that of their husband. The JREF people said "fine, we'll give you 8 people, produce 8 horoscopes, we'll give the 8 to the wives and ask the wives to tell us which of the 8 is her husband." Apparently that was a ridiculous requirement to him. I don't see why. If the horoscopes are specific to the person, and not just general feel-good crap, why would someone's spouse be unable to determine which was for his/her partner?
The U.S. government financed development of 'remote viewing' for over 20 years. It's said that the spooks hated the program, but because they got results, right from the start, they allowed it to continue until the soviet union broke apart.
Or there is an alternate explanation... Like maybe the researchers involved were scientologists, most of the supposed psychics were too, and this was just a clever project to milk the public for a few million dollars.
How can it exist but be unprovable? If you and your family have a super-natural connection, or at least one that is not currently explained by science, it can be tested.
Too many times to be coincidence has things like this happened. But trying to force it never has produced any results...
That statement implies that you've done the statistics. Let's see them. How many times have you guys not thought the same thing at the same time vs. how many times have you thought about the same thing? Keep in mind that because you are in the same family, some of the things you think about will inevitably be related. I mean if you're thinking about your mother, it's pretty reasonable to think your daughter might also think about her grandmother at some point during the day.
There is a wealth of literature on what is likely going on. You are only noting the times it happens, rarely or never the times it doesn't. So when you "think back on it" the hits greatly outnumber the misses in your memory when in reality the hits are just coincidences amidst a sea of misses.
Slashdot Mirror
So, suppose I have this game... let's call it Unreal Tournament 2004. There are some physics within the game that attempt to make the virtual world fairly consistent. The physics and the game have an intelligent designer(s) (oh believe me I hate putting those two words together). Could you use science to figure out the rules of the physics within the game?
Could you hypothesize what something might do, then design an in-game experiment to test it? Could we put forth claims which are testable? Repeatable? Falsifiable? I would say, most assuredly yes you could. Yet the whole virtual universe in this case was manufactured by some intelligent being.
We could extrapolate this thought experiment one more step and suppose that we managed to make a very good AI that could only interact within the game. If the AI were capable of asking questions about the physics of the virtual world, is it a requirement that the AI disbelieve in the programmers who designed the game?
Are you sure science and God are mutually exclusive? Do you understand them both?
Moreover, every single one of you who's going to go home tonight and tell your friends about the big, bad, RIAA, is doing exactly what they hope you'll do. The Slashdot editor who posted this submission is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. The Slashbot who submitted the article is doing exactly what the RIAA hoped he'd do. You... quite honestly, the RIAA doesn't give a crap whether you think they're greedy or not, but they are glad you're commenting on the case, and they are very glad you're suggesting they're ruthless.
I disagree. Eventually they will piss off enough people that legislators will notice that it is a sensitive issue among their constituents. Congress will then start making adjustments to curtail flagrant abuses. The best thing you can do is get lots and lots of people pissed off about the RIAA in general and the DMCA specifically. The **AA's have been brought before congress to answer for their abuses once. A couple more times and maybe something will happen.
Just download your movie off the net. Someone will have shrunk it to fit on a CD-ROM.
</sarcasm>
Hey man-- Irish farmers... great example of how good potatoes are for your health... you go for that 40 year life expectancy.
Straw man.
From your article:
It is possible to stay healthy on a diet of potatoes alone.
QED.
However, potato's hit your body with sugar harder than sugar does. They will wear out your pancreas and/or make you insulin resistant over time.
Really? And your evidence is? Here's my counter-example: 300 years of poor irish farmers. Somehow I doubt they would have managed for so many generations if they were all type II diabetics by the time they were 20.
There are many problems with just using glycemic index. There is an enomormous difference between eating a 1lb potato and a mars bar. The "sugar crash" that follows consuming a couple mars bars doesn't follow a potato because, unlike the mars bar, the potato has NINE grams of protein.
Do you really know how small 100 calories of potatoes is? I can assure you that it is not a 6" x 3" beast that you are served at most restaurants. It's roughly 3" x 1.5". I probably have half a portion of potatoes a day.
I don't think the irish were on potatoes long enough to adapt to them.
You should really give up attacking potatoes. It just doesn't get much more misguided than that. A 1 pound potato contains:
330 Calories
9 grams of protein
150% RDA of Vitamin C
45% RDA of Vitamin B
8.1 grams of dietary fiber
0 grams of fat
Pound for pound, there just aren't many foods that exceed the nutritive quality of potatoes. Best of all, nobody needs to "adapt" to them.
I'm going to have to disagree with most of your comment here. Sugar tastes good to us because we have evolved a preference for it. Simply put, those who liked sugar reproduced and those who didn't like sugar did not. Now our evolution didn't anticipate how good we'd get at manipulating sugar, but never the less, there is nothing inherently wrong with carbohydrates.
We can argue about the merits of having potatoes be your only source of high-energy food (or, if you're in Africa today, it's yams), but millions of people (such as the Irish) managed to survive for generations off of potatoes because they are a very good food. They paid for it when potato blight came (and in Africa they have their own problems with yam-infecting microbes) but it worked for a very long time.
Most of the reason people do not like vegetables is our history of easy access to them. We do not have the same evolved preference for roughage. There is a right and wrong amount of cooking a vegetable should get. You don't specify what you mean by "lightly cooked" but several nutritious compounds are not produced, or not usable, unless the vegetable achieves a certain internal temperature. The starch in potatoes, for example, is nearly indigestible until the potato is well cooked and the starch breaks down.
I'm not sure what the sulphur argument is about. If that were a significant portion of it, I somehow doubt things like grilled onions and garlic would be very popular because they contain a proportionally large amount of sulphur. Unless you have one of a few varieties of onion, such as Georgia's Vidalia or Washington's Walla Walla Sweets, if you do not cook the onion, the sulphur makes raw onions unappetizing to most people. Also makes your eyes burn like heck.
If you want to do the atkins thing, and you are morbidly obese, more power to you. The diet is often injurious to your kidneys, but that risk is mitigated by the damage to your heart that extra weight does. However if you are otherwise healthy: eat a balanced diet containing meat, breads, sugars, fruits and vegetables and get some exercise.
If it's ATi trying to buy out AMD (which is perfectly possible)
And they would get the money for this from where? How does a $4 billion company that is losing money manage to buy an $8 billion company with a positive EPS?
-and- give them control over the CPU that looks set to take over.
And that CPU is? Make sure it is one that is cheaper and/or faster and/or more efficient than the Core 2 CPUs that have been launched, or will be launched next week.
You need to bear in mind that the GPU is the critical component in most systems
No, the GPU is critical only in gaming rigs. Which is a fairly small fraction of the market. There is a reason why Intel dominates the graphics market, even though their offering ain't so great.
AMD is gaining market-share
Seeing as how AMD has said they don't intend to try to survive on razor thin margins again, how will this trend continue up against Intel's new offerings?
They are just making up extra requirements to blow off applicants.
They can only be "making up extra requirements" if those requirements are not stated elsewhere. Since requiring 3 sworn affidavits is mentioned several times in the FAQ, I do not see how that would qualify as being made up. If he can really do what he says, why would he have the least bit of difficulty obtaining three affidavits from people? He attends a college, there are probably hundreds of well qualified observers at his disposal. Ask 10 of them to watch. If 3 of them agree that something beyond our understanding of physics is going on, I doubt they'd decline an affidavit.
I think any rational person reading this persons claim would realize that he is simply deluding himself. This is probably why they required 3 affidavits. It increases the odds that someone will point out to him that nothing special is going on.
I don't think doctors would want to work in the PMITA Surgical Suite.
Your focus really does determine your reality.
Your focus has become cross-eyed. Seriously dude, drugs are bad, 'kay? Maybe you oughtta take one of those homeopathic detoxifying concoctions. Your chi obviously needs a recharge, you were born under the sign of the fish weren't you? Fish are highly susceptible to heavy metal poisoning. Cut out the drugs and the metallica. Then swing by for a free personality test, 'cuz I think you have some bad thetans in there.
Great, you've just described a reliable, repeatable form of telepathy. Does it magically disappear when it is being tested? If not, please have your friend apply to be tested. There's a million dollars in it for her, and a profound leap forward in our understanding of the human mind to be made for all mankind.
That is unfortunate because your insight was incorrect. You must find something that cannot be explained rationally and perform it. If you say you can move a rock with the power of your mind using a force that is currently unknown to science and you do so, you win. What process enabled you to do so? Quantum Mechanics? Dark energy? The will Allah? Nobody knows? Doesn't matter, you still win.
After having done so, many people will naturally be interested in finding out how you do so in an effort to advance human knowledge and maybe even greater things. Maybe many dangerous activities could be made less dangerous for humans if more of them had powers of telekinesis.
In academia it is in our best interest to try experiments both sound and outlandish (and even outlandish but sound). The fact that Princeton is the university associated with PEAR may give it an air of authenticity, but the real question is: does their data say what they claim? Can we test it elsewhere?
See this skepdic entry on why one should be skeptical of positive claims made by PEAR. There are two meta-analysis of PEAR data that shows a statistically significant increase above chance. One claims there were no star performers, the other claims a single operator (subject), believed to be one of their staff, is responsible for half of all excess hits. Remove his results, and the results of this meta-analysis return to within the expected margin of error of random results.
There are two known attempts to replicate the PEAR results. Both failed.
You did it again. Provide some evidence of your claim: a reasonable protocol that was rejected.
Have you actually bothered to look at the scientific studies performed in the field, or are you just saying this because nothing has come up in the news media that you paid attention to?
I have looked, and I have been disappointed. We call it "pseudoscience" because it is something that looks like science, but is in fact fatally flawed. The situation is complicated because many people wishing to prove Psi have flat out lied about or doctored their results in an otherwise legitimate trial. It usually takes years to discover this, but we have a number of shining examples of this to point to.
Okay, some applications from long ago aren't posted. Fine, whatever.
You are still dancing around one thing:
Provide evidence of your claim. Show a reasonable protocol that was rejected.
If someone provided one and was rejected, the firm-believer sites on the net would hold it up for all the world to see, to prove that Randi's million is a fraud. So where are they?
If you look, I know of at least one that is heralded as such. Somebody who claimed to be able to live off of nothing but water and 'prana'. Randi always rejects such claims because it would be highly unethical to conduct an experiment which could be gravely injurious to any person. (Incidentally I think Randi's rejection letter to the claimant was unnecessarily rude, and he should have just pointed out the no-harm policy)
So stop with this "oh gee, old applications aren't on the site, your whole argument must be wrong" strawman. You claim that even if someone had the proposed ability, JREF would find a way around paying it, implicitly you are saying that they would rig the protocol so it could not be accomplished. Let's see some evidence for this claim.
I don't think you intended to, but you're committing a strawman fallacy. The item which 'exists' in this case is accompanied by a claim that it manifests itself in non-ambiguous ways. The 'God' argument is generally not accompanied by a non-ambiguous evidence claim. Then you're hanging on 'prove' when it should be fairly obvious that in science you generally provide convincing evidence, you don't prove anything. There has been a lot of research on quantifying love from the philosophical to the biochemical. I think it conceivable that a set of criteria could be developed to determine love.
Yes, and that leaves no wiggle room at all for JREF.
Exactly the point. And nobody has made it past the preliminary challenge where the million dollars is NOT in jeopardy.
So find someone who was presented a proper challenge (meaning they've proposed a test protocol, they've made a positive statement of measurable paranormal phenomena, testing the phenomena would not hurt anybody, etc.) and hasn't been recorded. You've made several statements in opposition to JREF's prize, support one.
And there are many examples on non-ludicrous claims. They only highlight the outrageous ones. Check the jref forums. All challenges, even those sent in handwritten and requiring transcription, are there.
If you force the other person (person B) to change his/her routine... (i.e. tell them to specifically do something else) then it makes sense that the other person (person A) would think person B is going to do something else, because that's what person B is thinking at the time anyway.
Wow, that is some seriously weird logic. Let's put it this way, suppose we take person B to another part of the world and alter their circadian rhythm, then bring them back. Essentially person B is now jetlagged and will be doing everything they would normally doing, only shifted some number of hours. Without telling B to do anything different, is person A going to accurately determine what person B wants, given that all the normal patterns have now been changed?
If you tell person B "think about X" whereas person B wouldn't think about X on their own, then aren't you asking if person A can read your mind rather than person B's mind?
That is just daft. If person B is thinking it, we're obviously asking to read what is on person B's mind. Whether the thought was planted or not is immaterial. If person B is thinking it, and person A can detect the thought with no sensory cues from the normal 5 senses, then you have something.
It's pattern recognition.
Stop playing fast and loose. Nobody considers deductive or inductive reasoning to be psychic or paranormal. Nobody considers mind-reading to be deducing what someone might be thinking based on clues gathered in the last 24 hours and knowledge of their individual quirks. Here's a simple rule of thumb: if you could enter all the information you have about someone into a computer and then conceivably write a computational algorithm which could guess what they're thinking, then nothing paranormal has happened.
As for the Randi foundation, I have zero confidence in their ability to make an unbiased report on anything they might find. Why? Because if they do find real, actual psychic powers, thats a million they owe. And I don't know about anyone else here, but if I can avoid forking over a million, I will,
Before addressing anything else in your post, I wanted to address this because this is by far the most often used excuse for arguing against the JREF's million dollar prize. They have this one nicely covered:
Both sides must agree before the test is administered what will constitute a positive result.
If what you say is true, then please find several examples of JREF making the challenge impossible to complete with a positive result assuming the person under test has the ability as they claim. JREF publicly posts all the properly presented challenge applications.
This argument that they will somehow weasel out of it after the fact is nonsense. I know that is not the specific charge you made, but it sure seemed implicit to me. It does not work that way. Before you take the challenge all the ground rules are laid out including what must happen for you to get the million. There can be no alteration after both sides have agreed.
How, exactly, would that be distinguishable from mind reading?
If we have one person change his/her routine, and the other person fails to accurately predict the new routine, then we have distinguished it from mind reading.
Mind reading implies the ability to use something other than our five known working senses to detect the thoughts of another person. Using your ears to notice your spouse's stomach is rumbling and guessing that they are thinking about food is not mind reading. It's extrapolation based on readily available cues.
I'm always been surprised at the kind of reaction anything labeled "paranormal" gets from rational people. Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist?
While there may be some out there shouting paranormal things couldn't possibly exist, most of us are just pissed. Pissed that for every genuinely deluded person who believed they had witnessed a paranormal event, there are 20 others out there looking at using it to scam people out of money.
We have looked, and looked, and looked and come up empty handed EVERY TIME. The vast majority of the people who have said they had special powers were LIARS. The rest were just wrong. Nobody has ever passed muster. There are people out there doing genuine harm to others under the veil of paranormal abilities.
For example EVERY instance of "psychic surgery" (where someone performs surgery with just their hands, leaving behind no scar or wound) has been a scam for money.
James Randi has a web site with a forum that documents applicants for the $1 Million Challenge. Go follow those threads and watch how people weasel out of taking the test. Like the most recent guy who said he had a computer program that could produce accurate horoscopes for people. So accurate that their wives would confirm that the horoscope was indeed that of their husband. The JREF people said "fine, we'll give you 8 people, produce 8 horoscopes, we'll give the 8 to the wives and ask the wives to tell us which of the 8 is her husband." Apparently that was a ridiculous requirement to him. I don't see why. If the horoscopes are specific to the person, and not just general feel-good crap, why would someone's spouse be unable to determine which was for his/her partner?
The U.S. government financed development of 'remote viewing' for over 20 years. It's said that the spooks hated the program, but because they got results, right from the start, they allowed it to continue until the soviet union broke apart.
Or there is an alternate explanation... Like maybe the researchers involved were scientologists, most of the supposed psychics were too, and this was just a clever project to milk the public for a few million dollars.
How can it exist but be unprovable? If you and your family have a super-natural connection, or at least one that is not currently explained by science, it can be tested.
Too many times to be coincidence has things like this happened. But trying to force it never has produced any results...
That statement implies that you've done the statistics. Let's see them. How many times have you guys not thought the same thing at the same time vs. how many times have you thought about the same thing? Keep in mind that because you are in the same family, some of the things you think about will inevitably be related. I mean if you're thinking about your mother, it's pretty reasonable to think your daughter might also think about her grandmother at some point during the day.
There is a wealth of literature on what is likely going on. You are only noting the times it happens, rarely or never the times it doesn't. So when you "think back on it" the hits greatly outnumber the misses in your memory when in reality the hits are just coincidences amidst a sea of misses.