It would be nice if you could elaborate on this. To me it seems like he exclusively either flat out told me "no" or gave me completely useless confirmation. When I guessed the palm trees by the lake, he said it wasn't bad but he didn't want to give me any more information. This seems like the only potentially useful hint, I'm imagining he said it wasn't bad because I mentioned a body of water. Then I guessed the bee. I have no idea why he said it seemed on track, the only thing I said that seems relevant was "sharp". But he told me that it wouldn't help me and I couldn't guess based on this confirmation. Then I guessed a helicopter, and he said it might be on target, but to ignore it. Again, I have no idea how this would lead me to the shark.
So we have two confirmations, two of which he explicitly told me not to think about and that they wouldn't lead me in the right direction.
A question: how would you expect an honest person to act in this situation vs. a charlatan?
I would expect an honest person to deny incorrect guesses, and to give very vague words of encouragement when the other person said something that was close. This is in fact how DavidM behaved, except for some reason he was overly trigger-happy with the encouragement.
I would expect a charlatan to be much more leading. For example, I would expect that after my initial guess of the lake, he would have told me or at least hinted towards the fact that water had something to do with it.
EDIT: Also, I'm surprised he outright rejected the elephant guess, given that it and the shark are both big gray animals.
Also if 50% of people really get it on the first try without being led it should be easy to reproduce this in a controlled experiment since the effect is far stronger than that allegedly found by psychic phenomenon researchers.
Good point. (Then again, ChristianKI also makes a good point.)
I would expect an honest person to deny incorrect guesses, and to give very vague words of encouragement when the other person said something that was close.
No, that's how an honest person fools themselves. The encouragement gets stronger as you get closer, so finding the solution goes from a brute force search to a simple hill climbing exercise. The answers should all be "No" without any variation. No hints, no "I think you have some of the right ideas", no "that's not even close!", just "No" "No" "...
I was recently reminded of something I have encountered that seems to me to be good evidence for paranormal phenomena. Can anyone help me figure out what might be going on?
When I was a little younger, I used to play the online riddle game Notpron. In this game, the player (essentially) has to analyze a webpage for clues towards the URL to the next webpage, and then repeat for 140 stages. The creator of this game, DavidM, at some point became a huge new age conspiracy theory loony type. Three years after the original ending of the riddle went online, he revised it to include an additional final level: Level Nu. This level is very different than the ones preceding it. I can't link to the page for obvious reasons, but I will transcribe it here: