4 ms·

By asking for details from a set of arbitrary, random dates, such as people's birthdays. A set of dates the questionee could have no way of knowing. In order

By asking for details from a set of arbitrary, random dates, such as people's birthdays. A set of dates the questionee could have no way of knowing. In order for him to know the answer to trivia on multiple arbitrary dates off the cuff would require him to, you know, have memorized the trivia for all the dates -- which kind of proves the point.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
Unfortunately, just having someone tell you something doesn't prove anything, unless you have a way to check that the fact is true- and for most of Kim Peek's life this was not the case. For instance- his article on wikipedia mentions that he "enjoyed approaching strangers and showing them his talent for calendar calculations by telling them on which day of the week they were born and what news items were on the front page of major newspapers". I assume he did that throughout his adult life, so when he was in his 30s an 40's, in the 1980's and 1990's, how would the person he approached this way check the news that Peek told them were on the front page of X newspaper? They couldn't very well google it on their iPhone back then. Besides, this is not very clear in his wikipedia entry, but it seems to me like he made a living out of his skills, so you know, it was at least partly entertainment (without trivialising, or in any way shape or form ignoring, the fact that the guy had obvious disabilities). So I'm saying, when a guy tells you he can recall for you a bunch of facts you dont' really remember yourself and you can't very easily verify, and by the way you're welcome to a donation, you can take what he says with a big pinch of salt.
- matt-snider 10y ago
  You don't seem to get it. These sorts of things are all examples of verifiable facts. Calendar calculations are trivial to verify with a computer, and news archives existed long before iPhones and ubiquitous internet access. You don't think given his fame, that his talents were rigorously tested and verified?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  You'd probably get a better discussion from a place like http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/ http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/ .
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    I've tried skeptics-stackexchange but I was not convinced by the arguments.
    - MichaelBurge 10y ago
      At the extreme end, you could try a site like http://lesswrong.com/ http://lesswrong.com/ . If someone bites, you probably can't expect a more rational argument from anywhere else.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
        I could move to lesswrong, but then I'd miss all the posts on deep learning and functional programming :0
- ajkjk 10y ago
  If you're that skeptical, shouldn't your first step be looking up more details on how he was verified to be legitimate? Rather than saying in a comment thread that there's no way to know?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    I had a look on wikipedia. There is a section on some "tests" conducted by NASA, but "the intent was to create a three-dimensional view of his brain structure and to compare the images to MRI scans done in 1988". That doesn't tell me much about why they thought he had an interesting enough brain to try to image, i.e. why they were convinced he was a savant. Does your comment mean you know why NASA (and others, I guess) thought he was legit?
    - ajkjk 10y ago
      No, I just wonder why you came in here doubting it. It's so unlikely that nobody ever thought to check. It's not impossible, but it's certainly unlikely.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
        What do you mean "why I came in here"? I post here very frequently.
        ajkjk 10y ago
        Broken_Hippo is correct. "why I came in here" means "you seem to have come in here wanting to doubt it, even though there's very little reason to do so." It seems very disingenuous.
      - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
        to YeGoblynQueenne: What do you mean "why I came in here"? I post here very frequently. Likely mid-western colliquial (I'm from Indiana). It means that you originally posted with the sole thought of doubting it. It has no bearing on how often you are there. For example, a regular at a bar might get told one day, "You came in here looking for a fight!" - it speaks of intentions, not frequency.
- xg15 10y ago
  Why is it so important that the person check the facts the instant the demonstration is done as opposed to taking the time and checking them later (e.g. by going to a newspaper's archive)?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    Because by the time you get the opportunity to verify the accuracy of the "recall", it's too late to challenge the mentalist about it. That's how those tricks (when they're tricks) work. Imagine it like this: say you're at some mentalist's show, and she picks you out of the crowd. She asks you your birthdate, you tell her, she concentrates (silence in the audience) then suddendly she starts riffing off headlines from that day's newspapers. Why, she can even remember the crossword hints from the Times of Pallookaville! And even their answers! (well just one of them but-) Music! Lights! The audience clap their hands! The mentalist moves on to the next target. Did you, at any point during all that, have any chance to challenge the accuracy of the mentalist's recall? Not really. Would you do it even if you could? Most people will dread so much being the asshat that ruins the show everyone paid to watch, that they'd never say anything, even if they had a tattoo of that damned crossword on their butt, solved and done. And does it make any difference if you go back to your house and google the information and it's all made up? What 'you gonna do? Call up each one of those 1200 people who watched the show and tell them the mentalist is a fraud? 'Course it's a fraud. It's entertainment! That's one setting and it's a bit formal, like, but ceteris paribus, the same goes for any situation where someone is pulling that sort of trick on you- the whole trick is to move fast and not give the mark time to think and react.
    - chei0iaV 10y ago
      So you're saying no one, not the scientists, not the interviewers, had an idea to look up a specific date and then ask him about it? Or to pick a random number from the phone book he memorized and see if he can recall the name? You're not providing a convincing argument as to why such scepticism is at all warranted. If this was an account of a guy from a few hundred years ago, sure it might make sense to doubt it. But this guy was alive just over 7 years ago...
- closed 10y ago
  > but it seems to me like he made a living out of his skills People are downvoting you, maybe for manner in which you're expressing skepticism, but a lot of the issues you bring up are a constant concern in psychology. For example, 1. Clever hans, a horse that was supposed to answer people's questions, turned out to just be responding to auditory/visual cues (seeing people gasp). 2. In the book, Mind of a Mnemonist, the author documents a guy who uses a memory technique to remember a lot of information. However, the guy also plays up the idea of his having synesthesia (crossing of perceptual modalities, like "hearing" visual things, etc..). The author is concerned that some of the things the guy says are motivated by his desire to make a living as a performer. 3. A lot of cases, like Kim Peek, raise the same concerns about the person being made larger than life, for whatever reason. Or the person having learned (whether intentional or not) some very specific skill for remember certain types of information. With practice, a person can learn to memorize phonebooks pretty quickly. Often it's clear that people are exhibiting exceptional memory, but teasing apart the exceptional bits among media hype, people having a lot of unaccounted study time, and past accounts gets pretty tricky.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    How can you tell I'm being downvoted? My posts aren't greying-out yet. I'm a bit surprised at the downvotes. I've said things I thought would get downvoted in the past and in the end it turned out I got more ups than downs. But today, in this thread, they're pouring down like rain and it's very unusual. So, quite aside from the fact I'm losing my high score (hey, I like a game like the next person) I guess I've said a few things that people strongly disagree with. I wonder if it's what you say- the way I express my skepticism, but I'm not commenting in a different style today than in other days. If anything, I was even a bit more guarded today than usual, because there's the matter of disability and all. I think what's up is that people know Kim Peek as the Rain Man, from the movie, a guy who had a severe disability but nevertheless had an amazing talent, and they're upset at me for saying that maybe he was faking it after all (edit: faking the talent, not the disability; and I'm not even saying he was faking it, just that, like you say maybe he was made larger than life). The way I read them, a few of the comments in this thread are basically saying that, cooks and entertainers aside, Kim Peek was the real deal. Well, I don't know the guy. I googled him, I looked him up on wikipedia. There are some claims of extraordinary ability. But, if he only did the same things that entertainers do, then his skills were not that extraordinary, only unusual. The fact that he had a mental disability makes them more unusual, but still not so far outside ordinary human potential that he should really get his head scanned by NASA. So I dont' think I'm being unreasonable to remain skeptical, and demand evidence. I think what's unreasonable is that most other commenters in this thread are simply demanding that I agree with them, just because they know and everyone they know knows that what they say is the way they say it is. Well- sometimes you just have to stop and think how you know what you know.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

Unfortunately, just having someone tell you something doesn't prove anything, unless you have a way to check that the fact is true- and for most of Kim Peek's life this was not the case. For instance- his article on wikipedia mentions that he "enjoyed approaching strangers and showing them his talent for calendar calculations by telling them on which day of the week they were born and what news items were on the front page of major newspapers". I assume he did that throughout his adult life, so when he was in his 30s an 40's, in the 1980's and 1990's, how would the person he approached this way check the news that Peek told them were on the front page of X newspaper? They couldn't very well google it on their iPhone back then. Besides, this is not very clear in his wikipedia entry, but it seems to me like he made a living out of his skills, so you know, it was at least partly entertainment (without trivialising, or in any way shape or form ignoring, the fact that the guy had obvious disabilities). So I'm saying, when a guy tells you he can recall for you a bunch of facts you dont' really remember yourself and you can't very easily verify, and by the way you're welcome to a donation, you can take what he says with a big pinch of salt.

matt-snider 10y ago
You don't seem to get it. These sorts of things are all examples of verifiable facts. Calendar calculations are trivial to verify with a computer, and news archives existed long before iPhones and ubiquitous internet access. You don't think given his fame, that his talents were rigorously tested and verified?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
MichaelBurge 10y ago
You'd probably get a better discussion from a place like http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/ http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/ .
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  I've tried skeptics-stackexchange but I was not convinced by the arguments.
  - MichaelBurge 10y ago
    At the extreme end, you could try a site like http://lesswrong.com/ http://lesswrong.com/ . If someone bites, you probably can't expect a more rational argument from anywhere else.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
      I could move to lesswrong, but then I'd miss all the posts on deep learning and functional programming :0
ajkjk 10y ago
If you're that skeptical, shouldn't your first step be looking up more details on how he was verified to be legitimate? Rather than saying in a comment thread that there's no way to know?
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  I had a look on wikipedia. There is a section on some "tests" conducted by NASA, but "the intent was to create a three-dimensional view of his brain structure and to compare the images to MRI scans done in 1988". That doesn't tell me much about why they thought he had an interesting enough brain to try to image, i.e. why they were convinced he was a savant. Does your comment mean you know why NASA (and others, I guess) thought he was legit?
  - ajkjk 10y ago
    No, I just wonder why you came in here doubting it. It's so unlikely that nobody ever thought to check. It's not impossible, but it's certainly unlikely.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
      What do you mean "why I came in here"? I post here very frequently.
      - ajkjk 10y ago
        Broken_Hippo is correct. "why I came in here" means "you seem to have come in here wanting to doubt it, even though there's very little reason to do so." It seems very disingenuous.
    - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
      to YeGoblynQueenne: What do you mean "why I came in here"? I post here very frequently. Likely mid-western colliquial (I'm from Indiana). It means that you originally posted with the sole thought of doubting it. It has no bearing on how often you are there. For example, a regular at a bar might get told one day, "You came in here looking for a fight!" - it speaks of intentions, not frequency.
xg15 10y ago
Why is it so important that the person check the facts the instant the demonstration is done as opposed to taking the time and checking them later (e.g. by going to a newspaper's archive)?
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  Because by the time you get the opportunity to verify the accuracy of the "recall", it's too late to challenge the mentalist about it. That's how those tricks (when they're tricks) work. Imagine it like this: say you're at some mentalist's show, and she picks you out of the crowd. She asks you your birthdate, you tell her, she concentrates (silence in the audience) then suddendly she starts riffing off headlines from that day's newspapers. Why, she can even remember the crossword hints from the Times of Pallookaville! And even their answers! (well just one of them but-) Music! Lights! The audience clap their hands! The mentalist moves on to the next target. Did you, at any point during all that, have any chance to challenge the accuracy of the mentalist's recall? Not really. Would you do it even if you could? Most people will dread so much being the asshat that ruins the show everyone paid to watch, that they'd never say anything, even if they had a tattoo of that damned crossword on their butt, solved and done. And does it make any difference if you go back to your house and google the information and it's all made up? What 'you gonna do? Call up each one of those 1200 people who watched the show and tell them the mentalist is a fraud? 'Course it's a fraud. It's entertainment! That's one setting and it's a bit formal, like, but ceteris paribus, the same goes for any situation where someone is pulling that sort of trick on you- the whole trick is to move fast and not give the mark time to think and react.
  - chei0iaV 10y ago
    So you're saying no one, not the scientists, not the interviewers, had an idea to look up a specific date and then ask him about it? Or to pick a random number from the phone book he memorized and see if he can recall the name? You're not providing a convincing argument as to why such scepticism is at all warranted. If this was an account of a guy from a few hundred years ago, sure it might make sense to doubt it. But this guy was alive just over 7 years ago...
closed 10y ago
> but it seems to me like he made a living out of his skills People are downvoting you, maybe for manner in which you're expressing skepticism, but a lot of the issues you bring up are a constant concern in psychology. For example, 1. Clever hans, a horse that was supposed to answer people's questions, turned out to just be responding to auditory/visual cues (seeing people gasp). 2. In the book, Mind of a Mnemonist, the author documents a guy who uses a memory technique to remember a lot of information. However, the guy also plays up the idea of his having synesthesia (crossing of perceptual modalities, like "hearing" visual things, etc..). The author is concerned that some of the things the guy says are motivated by his desire to make a living as a performer. 3. A lot of cases, like Kim Peek, raise the same concerns about the person being made larger than life, for whatever reason. Or the person having learned (whether intentional or not) some very specific skill for remember certain types of information. With practice, a person can learn to memorize phonebooks pretty quickly. Often it's clear that people are exhibiting exceptional memory, but teasing apart the exceptional bits among media hype, people having a lot of unaccounted study time, and past accounts gets pretty tricky.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  How can you tell I'm being downvoted? My posts aren't greying-out yet. I'm a bit surprised at the downvotes. I've said things I thought would get downvoted in the past and in the end it turned out I got more ups than downs. But today, in this thread, they're pouring down like rain and it's very unusual. So, quite aside from the fact I'm losing my high score (hey, I like a game like the next person) I guess I've said a few things that people strongly disagree with. I wonder if it's what you say- the way I express my skepticism, but I'm not commenting in a different style today than in other days. If anything, I was even a bit more guarded today than usual, because there's the matter of disability and all. I think what's up is that people know Kim Peek as the Rain Man, from the movie, a guy who had a severe disability but nevertheless had an amazing talent, and they're upset at me for saying that maybe he was faking it after all (edit: faking the talent, not the disability; and I'm not even saying he was faking it, just that, like you say maybe he was made larger than life). The way I read them, a few of the comments in this thread are basically saying that, cooks and entertainers aside, Kim Peek was the real deal. Well, I don't know the guy. I googled him, I looked him up on wikipedia. There are some claims of extraordinary ability. But, if he only did the same things that entertainers do, then his skills were not that extraordinary, only unusual. The fact that he had a mental disability makes them more unusual, but still not so far outside ordinary human potential that he should really get his head scanned by NASA. So I dont' think I'm being unreasonable to remain skeptical, and demand evidence. I think what's unreasonable is that most other commenters in this thread are simply demanding that I agree with them, just because they know and everyone they know knows that what they say is the way they say it is. Well- sometimes you just have to stop and think how you know what you know.