[LegibleCrimson]

That's an experiment that is extremely susceptible to biases and unintentional information sharing, including things like expressions on either party's face. Not to mention your very subjective determination of whether or not the predictor is confident, or the fallibility of human memory and experience.

For that experiment to be fair, you'd have to interact with them, and then they would have to write their guess and confidence down without you knowing what they're writing, and then afterward you'd have to collate the information.

This is the common thread that I've always seen, as someone who used to be very interested in the paranormal and supernatural. When you actually start measuring things properly and controlling for biases, the supernatural mysteriously disappears. It's only there when it can't be proven. Human imagination is extremely powerful. Remember the story of Clever Hans. Everybody, including the trainer, believed the horse could do math: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

This story comes into my head whenever I see psychics and readers of anything like this. Nobody is lying. Everybody believes it, even when it's not real. You can read body language and pick up on things without even understanding how. It's interesting, because you seem to be the opposite of me. I started out open to much of what I now consider hoodoo, and became a naturalist and a skeptic through my experiences. You had the reverse path. I suspect the answer may lay closer to the middle than either side, but I'll keep with what can be objectively shown in well-controlled tests.

[explaininjs]

I'm well aware of the tricks that can be played, but there's simply no other explanation for the sheer volume of people who have said to me point blank, no hesitation, no beating around the bush, no listing out options to gauge responses, no nothing: "Oh that's easy, you're a XXX". Even totally disregarding confidence filtering, it's a staggering proportion.

There's really nothing not "fair" about it, but folks like you are so perverse to the idea of anything that doesn't fit your perception of the "scientific consensus" that you'll make up hoops in the name of "bias" to throw out every experimental result that doesn't agree with your preconceived notions up until the point all you have left are those experiments that you didn't see fit to invent hoops for because they already matched what you think you know. It's honestly terribly ironic, when you take the time to examine it.

I really do hope you can take the time to try this yourself and see for yourself what your own personal results are, there's no use at all for me to waste my time debating my own personal experience with someone so hell-bent on discrediting it on the basis of "actually I once read a paper that said..." and "well actually I know X Y Z errors with your experimental setup that you've told me next to nothing about and I never was able to even observe..."

[LegibleCrimson]

The unfair bit is the filtering happening in your own brain. Without actual hard statistics, it's an anecdote. I don't care about scientific consensus, but I do care about process and data.

If I try it myself, it'll be done right, and I won't keep the stats in my head. I know how fallible my own perception is, and as somebody with an anxiety disorder, I know how easy it is to read patterns out of thin air. For some people, reading patterns that don't exist seems mystical or illuminating, for me, it's a sense of constant unease and fear. I can't be universally open to just accepting things, or reading patterns with my intuition, because my intuition is that everything is potentially poisonous and I'm definitely going to die in less than a week.