Bruce Weaver wrote:
> Suppose you were conducting a test with someone who claimed to have ESP,
> such that they were able to predict accurately which card would be turned
> up next from a well-shuffled deck of cards. The null hypothesis, I think,
> would be that the person does not have ESP. Is this null false?
Technically, the null hypothesis is that
P(card is predicted correctly) = 1/52
- it is a statement about parameter values. Thus, any bias, no matter
how slight, affecting this, would make Ho false - whether the subject
had ESP or no.
For instance, if the shuffling method tended to make a card slightly
less likely to come up twice in a row than one would expect, *even by a
few parts in a million*, and if the subject avoided such guesses, then
Ho would indeed be false.
-Robert Dawson
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