Critical Thought Experiments

Heisenberg

Heisenberg

Well-Known Member
You don't know me. I send you a letter stating that I am a precognitive psychic. To prove this I tell you I am going to make one specific prediction per week for the next 6 months. I then proceed to send you 26 letters, each with some sort of successful prediction. Some predict the outcome of elections. Some predict the winners of sports events of all types and regions. I predict trophy winners of various races and contests. Some predict the rising and falling of various unrelated stocks. I successfully predict the next president, the next to be fired on The Apprentice, the outcome of a popular murder trial, and so on and so on. My last prediction was even personal, that you would have a car accident sometime in the next week damaging your left fender. Each prediction is well in advance and is never wrong. The variety is such that I can not have inside information about all areas, and the volume is such that it can not be pure chance. At the end of the 6 months do you believe I am a psychic? If I am not physic and it wasn't left to chance, how did I do it?
 
"...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth..."

Being psychic is impossible
 
Heisenberg said:
You don't know me. I send you a letter stating that I am a precognitive psychic. To prove this I tell you I am going to make one specific prediction per week for the next 6 months. I then proceed to send you 26 letters, each with some sort of successful prediction. Some predict the outcome of elections. Some predict the winners of sports events of all types and regions. I predict trophy winners of various races from horse to human to car. Some predict the rising and falling of various unrelated stocks. I successfully predict the next president, the next to be fired on The Apprentice, and so on and so on. My last prediction was even personal, that you would have a car accident sometime in the next week. Each prediction is well in advance and is never wrong. The variety is such that I can not have inside information about all areas, and the volume is such that it can not be pure chance. At the end of the 6 months do you believe I am a psychic? If not, why?
Click to expand...

OK I'll take a nibble. It is very improbable but still possible that Mr. Psychic threw the dice 26 times and won every time. So while I would be quite impressed, and would need to allow that Mr. Psychic is probably onto something big here, I can't countenance that as proof.

Verdict: inconclusive. cn
 
I agree with MP. Let's say you send out one million letters. Of those letters, half say the stock will go up and half say the stock will go down. You'd be correct for 500,000 people. you do this again and this time is correct for 250,000 people. By the fifth letter you have been correct 100% of the time for 30,000 people. A lot of those 30,000 will buy what you are selling.
I did this kind of thing as a teenager: I got a letter with a 2 cent stamp and the seller said he would teach me the secret of mailing any letter for 2 cents (I was into direct marketing at the time, and this would've saved me a fortune). I sent in the $20 and never received anything, keep in mind this was before the internet. I then realized that if you stick a 2 cent stamp on a shitload of letters, some were bound to slip through the cracks. I ran the scam myself and received a few hundred dollars in profit. Then, one day someone rang my apartment buzzer early in the morning. It was a post office executive! I let him up and he handed me about 500 of my most recent mailed letters with the 2 cent stamp. He explained that if I do this again, I'm going to jail. I think he was surprised to see an 18 year old was running this scam, and I bet he's told the story and laughed his ass off dozens of times throughout the years. I certainly would have ;)
 
cannabineer said:
OK I'll take a nibble. It is very improbable but still possible that Mr. Psychic threw the dice 26 times and won every time. So while I would be quite impressed, and would need to allow that Mr. Psychic is probably onto something big here, I can't countenance that as proof.

Verdict: inconclusive. cn
Click to expand...

You are on the right track thinking about odds, but the 26th prediction was not simply 1/6 chance.
 
tyler.durden said:
I agree with MP. Let's say you send out one million letters. Of those letters, half say the stock will go up and half say the stock will go down. You'd be correct for 500,000 people. you do this again and this time is correct for 250,000 people. By the fifth letter you have been correct 100% of the time for 30,000 people. A lot of those 30,000 will buy what you are selling.
I did this kind of thing as a teenager: I got a letter with a 2 cent stamp and the seller said he would teach me the secret of mailing any letter for 2 cents (I was into direct marketing at the time, and this would've saved me a fortune). I sent in the $20 and never received anything, keep in mind this was before the internet. I then realized that if you stick a 2 cent stamp on a shitload of letters, some were bound to slip through the cracks. I ran the scam myself and received a few hundred dollars in profit. Then, one day someone rang my apartment buzzer early in the morning. It was a post office executive! I let him up and he handed me about 500 of my most recent mailed letters with the 2 cent stamp. He explained that if I do this again, I'm going to jail. I think he was surprised to see an 18 year old was running this scam, and I bet he's told the story and laughed his ass off dozens of times throughout the years. I certainly would have ;)
Click to expand...


Very good!! and the car accident? Bonus question, assuming each situation had a 50/50 chance, how many letters did I send out?
 
Heisenberg said:
You are on the right track thinking about odds, but the 26th prediction was not simply 1/6 chance.
Click to expand...

Did I imply that? I'm not seeing how ... I'm discarding the last one because it could be made to happen. I'm assuming here that the remaining 25 were not obtained by cheating ... considering the sorts of events being predicted, it would have to be a sophisticated sort of cheat using maneuvers not covered in your "situation setup" description. So getting those 25 right by sheer luck remains improbable but possible. cn
 
cannabineer said:
Did I imply that? I'm not seeing how ... I'm discarding the last one because it could be made to happen. I'm assuming here that the remaining 25 were not obtained by cheating ... considering the sorts of events being predicted, it would have to be a sophisticated sort of cheat using maneuvers not covered in your "situation setup" description. So getting those 25 right by sheer luck remains improbable but possible. cn
Click to expand...
That was my way of saying, hypothetically, that luck wasn't involved. I accept that it could have been, but for fun I was saying it wasn't.
 
Heisenberg said:
That was my way of saying, hypothetically, that luck wasn't involved. I accept that it could have been, but for fun I was saying it wasn't.
Click to expand...

I did notice a sentence in the opener about "the volume being such that it cannot be pure chance". I am unable to derive this as being so from what I understand of the rest of the setup. Volume of what, in any case? Tyler's solution relies on what i consider a cheat: saying that the recipient was not the only one. I can find no indication of other players in the opener. Having to presume them without information supplied would be ... inelegant. cn
 
I will bite but what does a physic have to gain by doing this, if he or she is one she knows it and has nothing to prove to anyone. Instead of a random person why not use their skills to stop a murder or solve a crime that would happen over if not stopped. Why not win the lottery and give the money to the needy. Why send letters to a perfect stranger?
 
You may laugh but I am serious..there is an extremely small % of people who are psychic ....99.99% of the so called psychics are con artists..I would never give one a dime to even find out..but there are a handful of people who have predicted things and solved cases for the police that can be explained no other way.
 
chrishydro said:
I will bite but what does a physic have to gain by doing this, if he or she is one she knows it and has nothing to prove to anyone. Instead of a random person why not use their skills to stop a murder or solve a crime that would happen over if not stopped. Why not win the lottery and give the money to the needy. Why send letters to a perfect stranger?
Click to expand...

Those are all excellent reasons to doubt, but don't explain how I did it.

Ok I guess I should not have ended a puzzle with an opinion based answer. I was looking for an explanation of how it could be done without being psychic, ruling out coincidence. I shouldn't have worded it as "if you dont believe why not".
 
cannabineer said:
I did notice a sentence in the opener about "the volume being such that it cannot be pure chance". I am unable to derive this as being so from what I understand of the rest of the setup. Volume of what, in any case? Tyler's solution relies on what i consider a cheat: saying that the recipient was not the only one. I can find no indication of other players in the opener. Having to presume them without information supplied would be ... inelegant. cn
Click to expand...

Well the mistake was mine for being ambiguous about what I was looking for. I wouldn't waste your time on a puzzle whos answer was chance, but you were totally correct in listing that as a reason not to believe.
 
Heisenberg said:
Well the mistake was mine for being ambiguous about what I was looking for. I wouldn't waste your time on a puzzle whos answer was chance, but you were totally correct in listing that as a reason not to believe.
Click to expand...

But one thing that was not ambiguous is Critical Thinking Puzzle. If I take the "was not chance" sentence and use that as a fulcrum, i deduce that the letters were part of a scam, mooting the question of the letter-writer's psychic ability. But that would then reduce this to a riddle, not a thought puzzle. I cannot believe that you would misrepresent a (insert favorite pejorative here) riddle as a thought-puzzle. So I reject that as an ugly, cheating way of "solving" this one.

Which leaves me stumped, since I am not finding the place to apply the logic-lever. cn
 
mindphuk said:
More probable than psychic powers IMHO.


BTW, I see no real practical difference between the terms riddle and thought puzzle.
Click to expand...

One can be derived from the premises by an application of logic. The other hinges on a sly twist of semantics. Example:
How far can someone go into the forest?
Halfway. After that, one is headed out.

That is a riddle, not approachable by logic and hinging on cuteness. Riddles are nothing without the twist. Logic puzzles are nothing with it. Jmo. cn
 
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