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Ishaan comments on Halloween thread - rationalist's horrors. - Less Wrong Discussion
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I was playing a card game with about 6 people in an AP calc class. One component of the game involved guessing: some of the cards were "good' and some were "evil". You had the option to either pick up a card or pass it on to the next player, and the objective was to pick up the "good" cards and pass on the "evil" ones.
Prior to guessing, I would look in my opponents eyes, and ask them: "Is it good or is it evil?". If it was good, I'd get this mischievous, friendly vibe from them. If it was evil, I'd get a sort of adversarial or guilty vibe.
I must have guessed between 60-120 times throughout the game. I got every single guess correct. It was creeping me out.
After the game was over, we tried having the professor draw some cards and pass it to me, and I was supposed to guess whether it was good or evil. My professors face was like a stone, and I was guessing at chance. (Note, however, that this wasn't a real game so there was no winning-losing at stake - that might have made it easier to avoid micro-expressions.)
This sort of thing had never happened to me before and has never happened to me since. I attributed it to luck and temporarily heightened sensitivity to face reading (It certainly felt like reading faces)...but the sheer accuracy of my intuitions and my inability to replicate it still spooked me. And, of course, part of me was screaming you managed to find psychic powers and you lost them you idiot!.
Assuming it wasn't sheer luck, I'd very much like to successfully replicate it one day and master the skill. I scored 33/36 my first time taking the RMET and mean is ~25 so my face-reading skills are probably above average, but it's not like I hit ceiling.
I think a large part of it is learning to listen to gut feeling, not second guessing, not letting your imagination interfere with your perception...but I really don't know. It's hard to introspect on phenomenon that I can't replicate.
If you could read micro expression with 90% accuracy, the chance of getting every card right 120 times is 0.000322924%.
Once when I was maybe 13, I played a card-guessing game with my father. He would hold up a card and I would guess what it was, then he would show me what it was. For what seemed a very long streak -- like 15-20 cards in a row -- each of my guesses was not the card my father was holding, but the next card he held up, drawing from the top of a face-down deck. Although at the time I was inclined to believe in ESP, I knew this was anecdotal evidence, however bizarrely improbable a coincidence it might seem. In retrospect I wonder why we never repeated the game or tried to specify a hypothesis to test.
A few years ago my brother told me our father was an amateur hypnotist, and that he has memories of being hypnotized by him without his informed consent. I now wonder if he did something similar in this instance -- for instance, using a suggestion to prevent me from noticing that after each guess, he was searching through the deck for the right card to hold up next time.
2^-60 and 2^-120 are both zero, so if it happened as you say, you were clearly reading them. It's not that surprising, since we pick up on a lot of subtle stuff that we can't consciously pinpoint.
I was playing a similar card game once, however no one could see the cards in advance and I still guessed wrong 18 times in a row (~4 in a million)
I's certainly expect at least some face-reading on my part...but as solipsist pointed out, even at 90% accuracy getting every card right is pretty unlikely. It starts entering the realm of not-spooky but still improbable if you do 95%^60, but I don't regularly experience that level of certainty in daily life...so why did it happen then? (And I did feel unusual levels of certainty on that day - those "vibes" I described were pretty unmistakable)
Although, this is pretty much the only really "weird" experience I've ever had. I suppose at least a few miraculously unlikely yet salient things must occur during most people''s lifetimes.
Still, this experience has definitely upped my respect for the notion that one might gain certain cognitive abilities by putting one's mind in a certain mental state.
googles it and takes it
Are the questions supposed to get harder the further I progress? I scored 18/36, but among the first fifteen questions I got all of them right except 2 and 10, and among the last twenty-one I only got right 18, 24, 28 and 35. (Maybe my expression-reading skill is usually decent when rested but quickly gets fatigued, or something.)
I'm not sure. I don't think that the 3 that I got wrong clustered at the end and I don't think I felt any increase in uncertainty as the test progressed.
Maybe you got bored and started going faster towards the end? Or maybe you started out going on instinct and then began to second-guess yourself, in a sort of "beginners luck" way? (if such a thing exists)
Edit: Skimmed this paper by the creators, found no mention of intentionally increasing difficulty.
(Also, my mean of 25 was from cursory skimming of this, which I found via google search and didn't check the sources. The mean found by these authors was lower, at 18 for males and 21 for females. So I'm not sure what's 'normal". Eyeballing, the distribution seems rather wide.)
Well, even if any given person had 50% probability of getting each question right, there would be a s.d. of 3 from statistical fluctuations alone.
Both sound plausible; maybe both happened, their effects on time spent per question cancelling out but their effects on accuracy adding up together.