Control Group- Subject #02 Not-So-Psychic Predictions

#1 I believe that the stability of the globes climate is going to take a leap and 

spiral downward 

#2 I believe a big TV icon shall die in the same base publicity as Michael Jackson

or Billy Mayse 

#3 Therese going to be an assassination attempt on President Obama 

#4 Nasa shall make yet another great discovery in the cosmos 

#5 The 2012 prophecy is going to escalate 

#6 The war in the east is going to take a sudden turn 

#7 a breakthrough in cancer treatment 

#8  A great scandal "similar to Quammy Kilpatric" in high places 

#9 Many people will die in natural disasters this year 

#10 and Dan dirty apes shall inherit the earth! lol jkjkjk 

The economy shall greatly stabilize

My Not-So-Psychic Predictions For 2010

1. I predict that obesity is going to be a real problem this year. I mean it's going to get really out of control. I think a lot of states in the south are going to have real problems with it.

2. I predict that there's going to be a lot of turmoil between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

3. I think Jessica Simpson is going to end up having a few relationship problems this year. She's going to be very hurt and I think the people around her see this coming.

4. Obama is not going to have an easy year. Something that he does is going to strike a nerve and I really think it's going to be about gay marriage.

5. The South is in for some real rough weather this year. I see flooding and hurricanes.

6. Winter in the midwest will be pretty much average, but  think it will start out mild, but then there will be some real cold days.

7. There going to introduce a new medication, like Viagra, but not. It's going to be for some kind of condition relating to erectile dysfunction.

8. There's going to be a lot hybrid sales this year. Consumers are going to get fed up with paying for gas, so I think more people will buy hybrids.

9. There's going to be a really crazy work out trend that gets started. It's going to be very strange, and I think it's going to involve some sort of special equipment.

10. The Harry Potter movie is going to be huge. The kids are going to start to branch out once the movie is over. The girl who plays Hermoine is going to really head towards becoming a serious, dramatic actress.

Step one of a control group,check.

Sylvia Browne's Not So Psychic Predictions

In light of the recent posts on Skepticblog regarding Sylvia Browne, I felt it was necessary to add my two cents. (Imagine that).  I decided to take several of Sylvia’s end-of-year predictions from the past several years, and compare them with what has actually happened. This isn’t new.  Smugbaldy did this for several years. He divided his results into 4 separate groups, Hits, Misses, False Alarm, and Correct Rejection and created a complex system of scoring.  There are a few flaws in his methodology  and weaknesses in his classification system, however, that led me to do it my way.
1) Baldy had no mechanism that allowed for a comprehensive analysis. He evaluated each year separately, and came up with a new figure, rather than average her averages to find out what her typical rate of accuracy was. 2) His system of classification was unnecessarily complicated. A ‘Correct Rejection’ is still an incorrect prediction, and there appears to be no practical reason to separate them. The same goes for a False Alarm. There appeared to be no standardized criteria to separate a ‘false alarm’ from a miss, and both are simply incorrect. 3) He uses unproven assumptions in his calculations. In some instances he marks a correct prediction as incorrect because it was possible that Sylvia had ‘foreknowledge’. However it is equally possible that she did not have foreknowledge.  If you are claiming to be objectively evaluating data, then you are obligated to do it objectively, regardless of your personal opinions.
It turns out that there is no reason to ‘pad the data’, because Sylvia is pretty damn wrong on her own. To reach my results, I divided her predictions into several categories: Correct, Incorrect, Cannot Be Verified, and Obvious. I’d like to note that ‘obvious predictions’ are the smallest percentages and they had to be really really obvious for me to place them in this category. Some examples of these are when Sylvia predicted tornadoes would hit Kansas and Texas, two states in tornado alley.  Do you think tornadoes would be likely or unlikely in a place known as Tornado Alley. I don’t think Francine (Sylvia’s spirit guide who tells her the future) is necessary for that one. Another example of an ‘obvious’ prediction is when Sylvia predicted that Jamie Lynn Spears would have her baby.  The fact that Jamie was pregnant was already common knowledge, and having a baby obviously follows being pregnant. One could argue that there are events like miscarriages, but events like that are far from likely, and they typically don’t strike wealthy females who can afford the best doctors. Other predictions can’t be verified. For exmple, Sylvia predicted that Owen Wilson would have another “dip” into depression after his highly publicized suicide attempt.
What kind of prediction is that?
What constitutes a dip? A dip in who’s opinion? Sylvia’s? Owen’s? The lack of specificity makes it impossible to evaluate whether or not the prediction was accurate.
(In my opinion, I have “dips” into depression occasionally. I think everyone does)
I managed to thoroughly evaluate predictions for the years 2007-2008 (58 predictions total). Here are her statistics:
In 2007, 24 out of 39 predictions were incorrect (61.538%). 6 out of 39 were correct (15.385%). 8 out of 39 couldn’t be verified (20.513%). 1 out of 39 were obvious predictions (2. 564%). ß that was the Tornado Alley prediction.
In 2008, 9 out of 19 were incorrect (43.368%). 5 out of 19 predictions were correct (26.315%). 4 out of 19 could not be verified (21.052%). 1 out of 19 was obvious (5.263%).
That means Sylvia was wrong in her year-ahead predictions about 52.453% of the time. (You’d be better off flipping a coin.) She was only right about 20.85% of the time. Her predictions were too vague to evaluate about 20.783% of the time and simply obvious the remaining 3.914% of the time.
Does that count as being psychic. Supporters will point ot the fact that my own experiment yielded a success rate of only about 11%, and Sylvia’s success rate was almost double that. That’s true, by my respondents had to guess one word out of a random sequence of 20. Some of the predictions that I counted as correct for Sylvia included such banal fair as “a democrat’ will be the next president. She had a 50/50 shot of getting it right. Some other 50/50 questions she got wrong- for example she predicted that Tom Kat’s baby would be a boy, but Suri was a girl.
But I digress… as I began to evaluated Sylvia’s predictions for 2009, I began to notice a pattern. She predicted the same events over and over again. She’s been predicting that this will be the year that Brad and Angelina break up every year since 2007. Coincidentally, she also predicted Jennifer Aniston would marry, 3 times in a row, that Lindsay Lohan would straighten her life out make a comeback in 2008 (and that’s obviously wrong unless Sylvia Browne has VERY different definition of comeback than you and I).
She has predicted that the war will end for 3 consecutive years, and each time she’s been wrong Her latest not-so-psychic prediction says the war will end this year... pass that one on to the top brass).
Now it stands to reason, if you make the same predictions year after year, you’re bound to be right one year. I can predict with a 100% certainty that the war in Iraq will end one day, the part that would make that somehow psychic would be if I could tell you the day it would end… or the month… or ever the correct year. C’mon! Francine needs to get her story straight…
The weirder thing is Sylvia’s own interpretation of her accuracy.  She claims to have predicted Obama would be the next president, but in 2006 she claimed that Kerry and McCain would be the presidential candidates and Kerry would win. Do you frequently confuse Kerry and Obama, because from where I’m standing there’s a huge difference.  Is her spirit guide blind? In 2007, she predicted we wouldn’t have a black president for another 8 years. Obama was elected in 2008, and 2008 + 8 = 2016. Francine is not only blind, but also shitty at math.
BY DEFINITION, A PSYCHIC CAN NEVER BE WRONG. A psychic has to know the future, that’s what makes them psychic in the first place. Theoretically that means all of their predictions would be accurate. If any are wrong, then the psychic obviously didn’t know what was going to happen and was only guessing- hence they aren’t psychic.
Even if we want to play make believe and we pretend that Francine is real and she tells Sylvia the future, how does that change the fact that Francine is typically wrong? If your spirit is only guessing does that make you special?
I see no compelling evidence to support the idea that Sylvia is psychic. One thing bothers me though… there’s no control group. In order to be a solid case study, I would have to prove that Sylvia is accurate with about the same frequency as a non-psychic person. Since I have no statistics from a control group, my case study is flawed.
I don’t intend to all that oversight to continue…. I’m making some predictions of my own, and I’m going to conduct another mini-experiment to valid my conclusions.



Sources Used to List and Validate Predictions (Go Ahead, Check My Stats... Unlike Sylvia's, Mine Are Right)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSKzKv5fwck&NR=1&feature=fvwp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmNP6wZJg6A
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123085598438247705.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqdJNrkUv8c&feature=related
http://realestate.yahoo.com/Foreclosures/2008-year-end-foreclosure-market-report
http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2009/04/08/legalmatch-data-shows-foreclosure-rates-skyrocketed-in-2008/
http://www.smugbaldy.com/2008/01/22/how-well-did-sylvia-browne-do-with-her-2007-predictions/
http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=06
http://www.cdc.gov/measles/stats-surv.html
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/whooping.htm
http://www.tmz.com/

Pick A Sign, Any Sign

I don’t now, nor have I ever, believed in psychics. Vague or obvious predictions don’t impress me.  In fact,  I’m rather hard to impress in general.  I have, however, had several friends who do believe in psychics, and some who consult psychics regularly. One of my friends poured a considerable amount of her money into psychic readings, and it started to get on my nerves. Typically, I have a policy of not directly interfering in my friend’s lives- but in my opinion this qualified as an exception. My friend assured me that this psychic was the “real deal” and she offered to set up an appointment, and I agreed only because I was absolutely certain that I could debunk this “real deal”. I let her refer me, but the caveat was that I wanted her to tell the psychic nothing about me and I wanted to make my own appointment. I heard that some psychics do background checks on clients to find out basic information in advance. So I lied about my name, and made the appointment under a friend’s name (with her permission of course). I didn’t trust my friend to not pass along vital information, so I fed her false information about when I would make my appointment and I didn’t mention that I would use a different name. So when I went, I was quite surprised when one of the first statements the psychic made was “you’re a Scorpio aren’t you?”
(I am). I was incredulous.
The friend, who’s name I had used, was a Leo not a Scorpio. I had selected her for that reason. So it was impossible for the psychic to have gotten that information from a background check. It was unlikely that the friend who had referred me was aware of my ruse, and hence unlikely that she could have been an informant. That only left the friend who had lent me her name- and it was doubtful that she would have assisted the psychic because she was as skeptical as I was.
I could not arrive at an explanation that sufficiently explained my experience. It was possible that it was a lucky guess, a damn lucky guess. The other possibility was that she  was psychic, but I’m not convinced of that for reason’s I will explain later.
I couldn’t leave it alone. In spite of the fact that this happened years ago, I was haunted by the fact that I was unable to solve this mystery. When the topic of Sylvia Browne came up, I decided that I wanted to conduct an experiment to see how likely it was that a “non-psychic” could correctly guess a random zodiac sign.
The methodology of the experiment was fairly straightforward. I would assemble several lists of 20 zodiac signs at random. To prevent any unknown variable from impacting the experiment, I wrote all 12 zodiac signs on slips of paper that were identical in size and material. Those slips of paper were placed inside a bag, the bag was shaken, and then I drew a slip of paper from the bag, recorded the result, and placed the slip back into the bag. This was repeated 20 times, in 4 separate sets.
I selected 20 people from my list of family and friends, and asked them to participate in the experiment by making a list of 20 zodiac signs.
18 of 20 individuals responded with a list. I then proceeded to compare their answers to my random lists of 20.
My hypothesis was that each person would most likely guess one correct sign out of twenty, but in reality, the number was slightly higher.  After comparing the experimental set of 20 against the random ones, the median number of total correct guesses were 4, but the average was slightly higher: 4.29. That means that out of 40 random signs, the average non-psychic person guessed correctly 10.73% of the times.
The number of correct guesses ranged from 0-10 . My sister guessed correctly most frequently, and averaged 2.5 correct guesses in each set.
However improbable,  a lucky guess is entirely possible- according to my mini-experiment it can occur 10.73% of the time.
However, if I was going to try to convince someone I had psychic powers, I would probably approach the task with a bit more of a method.  I would use census figures to sketch out a portrait of each demographic by examining census records. From the extrapolated data, I would make seemingly specific predictions based on my guess of the client’s approximate age. Theoretically, if the census reflected the information that more babies between 1980-1981 were born between October and November it would be fairly easy to guess that people approximately that age (do the math you lazy bastards) would  be statistically more likely to be a Libra or a Scorpio. This information is attainable at various website like this one : http://www.babycenter.com/0_22-surprising-facts-about-birth-in-the-united-states_1372273.bc.
I’d naturally be wrong sometimes- but never fear because a good talker can work around a simple stumbling block like inaccuracy. I would just say “Oh well I am definitely seeing Scorpio (Libra, ect) around you. Do you know someone who is that sign?” or how about this gem “I bet that Scorpio is in a strong house in your chart!”
Quite frankly, I do not know for certain that my chum’s psychic friend used this strategy. I do, however, know for certain that the psychic friend’s predictions for me were way off. She told me I’d change jobs, nothing remotely close to that happened in any reasonable span of time- and we can only assume that she was making predictions for the near future, since almost anyone could predict that an individual will change jobs at sometime in their lives. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the average person born in the later half of the baby boom held 10.8 jobs between the ages of 18 to 42.  Most of these jobs were held between the ages of 18 to 27.
She made vague predictions that “something” will be happening in my love life. Nothing new “happened” in my love life.
She also told me that I was worried about my income (I wasn’t particularly worried) and that I would “stable out” (I don’t even know what ‘stabling out is, and thus I can’t evaluate that statement). About the only specific information she gave me was my zodiac sign… and I already knew that.
The World’s Foremost Psychic herself, Sylvie Browne did not fair any better, but I will address that shortly in a separate post. But if you’re psychic maybe you can just read my mind… don’t forget that if dearies.