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no longer arguing about the Telepathy Tapes
Monday, April 21 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
At some point in the night, I heard Charlotte doing an especially frantic version of her highly-piercing bark somewhere outside. Also, very faintly, I could hear Neville barking as well. His bark doesn't carry far and is much deeper. It sounds something like this: "Woo woo woo woo! Woo woo woo!" It seemed like the sort of thing I should maybe do something about. So I grabbed a flashlight and stumbled out into the darkness. The barking was coming from just across Dug Hill Road on the forested hill just below That 80s House (the one occupied by our across-the-road neighbor, a Trump-loving ethical vegan we no longer socialize with). Charlotte saw my flashlight, lighting up her eyes as she came trotting back across the road. Whatever had Neville's interest was much less interesting for her. When I got to Neville, I shined my flashlight up into a white pine tree and saw, not unexpectedly, a mid-sized bear clinging to the trunk. I said nothing (as is the protocol) and simply grabbed up Neville in my arms and carried him home, putting him down briefly at one point to rest. Once I had him in the house, I barricaded the pet door. I then carried Neville up the stairs and secured him and Charlotte in the bedroom. This was the first occasion I knew of where Charlotte had been in proximity to a bear, and I was liking that bears weren't nowhere nearly as interesting to her as they'd been to Ramona, the dog she replaces.
At work this morning, I started listening to the the Telepathy Tapes, armed with the skeptical takes of various (though not all that common) YouTubers and podcasts. So I knew to pay attention for the many examples of "care" the producers were taking to make sure their telepathy "tests" were scientifically valid (or at least "sciency"), things that were entirely red herrings when it comes to the technique being used to communicate with the profoundly autistic: a long-discredited method called facilitated communication, something I have mentioned in this blog in the past and which has fascinated me (given its popularity coupled with the ease with which it was debunked) since I saw an episode of Frontline about it back in the early 1990s. The things done to give the impression of science were to remove all the mirrors, make sure blindfolds had foam around their edges, and that sort of thing. But the thing not mentioned in the audio podcast was something revealed to anyone watching the few videos of these telepathy tests: the facilitators were almost always in contact with the people whose communication they were facilitating. And if they weren't in contact, they were in the room with them. And, as was demonstrated repeatedly in the 1990s, a facilitator can easily control the movements and thus the communications of a non-speaking person using whatever method they use to type out letters, and they can do this without even being aware of it. So it was clear from the start that the whole podcast series was a massive attempt to manipulate the audience with just enough science theatre to fool a sizable fraction of the audience while doing essentially the same old tricks as had been discredited in the 1990s, though this time playing up the telepathy angle.
I wasn't even done with listening to the first episode when I sent Gretchen the first message, saying I'd just seen the first episode of the Telepathy Tapes and that I had some thoughts. I said that it sure looked like the facilitators were ventriloquizing their messages onto the non-verbal autistic subjects of the tests, and that there was lots of talk of things done to preserve the science of the test setups but no mention of the arrangement between the facilitators and the facilitated. I wondered how Mia, the Mexican girl featured in the first episode, had aquired her proficiency for written language. And I wondered if there was evidence that she ever, you know, read. I also said it was suspicious that a teenage autistic girl would be interested in subjects like "wellness," and that this sounded suspiciously like interests imposed on her by her mother, her facilitator. After saying something about the moral implications of a parent forcing her child to communicate the parent's messages as if they are the child's, I mentioned how easy it would be to test facilitated communication to see who was the author of the messages, as had been done in the 1990s. Initially Gretchen retorted that I was dredging up 35-year-old critiques of facilitated communication, evidently unaware that the problems with it remain the same and that nobody was bothering to test its newest incarnation for its well-established problems. Gretchen has been accusing me of being dogmatic and even "fundamentalist" for not having a more open mind to what the Telepathy Tapes were purportedly revealing, apparently not understanding that the claims it was making were so extraordinary that to accept them without careful analysis, much more than was being provided by the highly-manipulative tapes themselves, would be an act of epistemological malpractice. I concluded my initial analysis by saying I'd expected better evidence from what Gretchen had said and that I found it "embarrassingly bad." This seemed a little mean even as I was typing it, since it obviously reflected poorly on Gretchen's judgment that I would feel that way about something she'd seemed to find at least somewhat convincing. But Gretchen had been urging me to watch the tapes for days, and I wanted her to know what the consequences were for her making me watch obvious pseudoscientific garbage.
Later in the day, I found and watched a video of a "test" Gretchen had excitedly told me about in the Telepathy Tapes. It was in that first episode, the one with Mia the profoundly autistic Mexican girl. In this test, Mia is blindfolded and given colored popsicle sticks to sort. Gretchen had heard the test described in the podcast, and it had sounded like bullet-proof evidence of telepathy between Mia and her mother as Mia accurately sorted the sticks into piles by color without being able to see them. (In the podcast, a great deal of verbiage was spent describing how impossible it was to see with the particular blindfold that was used.) In the video, though, it's immediately apparent how the information of what pile to place the sticks in is transmitted to Mia from her mother. Because the whole time the test is being done, Mia's mother has an eagle-talon-like grip on Mia's blindfolded face. Mia's mother hands Mia a stick and them obviously pushes her face in the direction of the appropriate pile. If the Telepathy Tapes were an objective documentary, they might've told us this. But this very important detail was left entirely out, clearly demonstrating an effort to manipulate the audience. I of course sent a link to this video to Gretchen, partly to demonstrate that nothing in the podcast could be believed and also to demonstrate (despite Gretchen's protests to the contrary) that the Telepathy Tapes has an obvious agenda. This evidence was impossible to refute, and Gretchen had to agree that it looked like Mia was being controlled by her mother in the video. But she resented something I'd asked at the end of the blurb describing the video. I'd asked if Anna, our recent guest from Brooklyn (and the person who had turned Gretchen on to the Telepathy Tapes) had framed it as "anti-ableist." Anna, it should be noted, is a dwarf, and has a particular sensitivity to ableism in our society, which might predispose her to a podcast claiming that autistics are actually magical beings with supernatural powers. And I've seen Gretchen be susceptible to kooky ideas if they are framed in a way that conforms to her leftie (or otherwise "woke") worldview. For Gretchen, though, this question suggested that I might be thinking she is "stupid." I replied that I didn't think she was stupid but that I was looking for an explanation for why it was that she had suspended her critical thinking skills, which I implied would normally reject such nonsense as the Telepathy Tapes. Gretchen's communication became terse after that, and it was clear that she was now feeling a little embarrassed for having been so credulous about the Telepathy Tapes. She wasn't going to say I won the argument, since she always has to win her arguments. But she completely stopped talking and messaging with me about the Telepathy Tapes, which was fine with me, since I really had no interest in discussing something so obviously stupid. To the extent I am interested in the Telepathy Tapes at all, it is because I am interested in scams.
[REDACTED]
Back home in Hurley, I took Charlotte (Neville didn't come) on a walk up the Farm Road and then back home through the abandoned go-cart track and the trails on the plateau west of the Farm Road. I then used a dough and pizza sauce we'd bought yesterday at Trader Joe's to make a pizza, using mushrooms, tofu, and onions as toppings. I found some unlabeled shredded cheese in a glass container and assumed it was vegan mozzarella Gretchen had put into a convenient container for making matzo pizza, so I used that for the pizza cheese. But when Gretchen came home, she told me that that cheese had been vegan parmesan cheese. "Maybe it will be delicious," I said hopefully. The pizza ended up pretty good, but that cheese was so dense and salty that I only had to eat two slices to feel like a python who had just eaten a warthog. After Jeopardy!, I jumped in the bathtub and lay in the water digesting it as best I could.
For audio entertainment this evening, I listened to episode ten of the Telepathy Tapes, having been told in another podcast that this was the kookiest of them all. It was a mailbag edition, with lots of facilitated-communication-produced letters talking about how "we," the non-verbal autistics, are all spiritual beings bringing about the next stage of human evolution. It was so over-the-top, it was hard to imagine anyone listening in thinking it was anything other than nuts. It sounded like the ravings of a bunch of cult members. Of course, the sad reality of these letters is that they had all been written by facilitators and the actual autistic people who had been present when they were dictated simply had these words projected onto them and anything they might've wanted to say had been denied to them. If Gretchen ever tries to claim again that the Telepathy Tapes have no agenda, I will demand that she listen to this crazy episode.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250421 feedback
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