 Now, facilitated communication is really interesting, but it's quite difficult to get your head around. And I think one of the tools that we can use is one that we saw last week. We can look at a two by two contingency table. So again, there are two ways of being right and two ways of being wrong in this case. You can say that the communication is coming from the client, or you can say that the communication is coming from the facilitator. In reality, what actually is the case, the communication can actually be coming from the client, or it can actually be coming from the facilitator. Now, let's take the first case, a hit. You can say that the communication is coming from the client when it actually is. That's a hit. Or there's a miss. You can say that the communication is coming from the facilitator when it's actually coming from the client. That's right, but I think it's worth pausing there for a second and unpacking what we mean by a miss here. Okay, so this is what we alluded to before Scott's conversation, where we were talking about what it would be like to be a parent of an autistic kid who can in fact communicate, but we're not essentially giving them the benefit of the doubt. We're saying that the facilitator is communicating, not the autistic individual, even though they have the capability of doing it. They have the ability to communicate. They have this rich inner life, and they're trapped inside. And this technique is useful, but it's the facilitator who's essentially putting the words in the mouth of the autistic individual. Now that's a miss. That's really tragic if there's a case. So we're going to link to this in the learn more section. It was a frontline documentary that aired in 1993, I think it was, but it's outstanding. It's called The Prisoners of Silence, and throughout this interview, throughout this documentary, they interview a bunch of the parents, show this technique, the facilitators, and it really puts some flesh on the bones of this topic that we're talking about. And there's one that still gets me just thinking about it. One of the parents of the autistic kids is talking about what it was like for the first time to have her daughter say, I love you, Mom. And your heart just fills. I mean, it's incredible just to imagine being a parent of this child who's never been able to say I love you and just going through years and years of having a silent child and then recognizing, well, in fact, they can communicate. The potential cost of a miss is huge. If these people can communicate, and we're not giving them the benefit of the doubt, we're not giving them the opportunity, then that's major. I mean, that's massive. And we need to consider that. I mean, yes, you can have this sort of cheap cynicism, in a sense, that hindsight is operating in 2020 here, and get outraged. Yes, they can't communicate. How could you have been so stupid? But that's not enough. I mean, what if they could communicate? Think of that. I think the cost of a miss is really worth considering. So that's a miss. Let's have a look at the other side. The way that you can be correct is a correct rejection. You can say that the communication is coming from the facilitator when it actually is coming from the facilitator. It's kind of a non-event. So there was a claim out there. We did some experiments, and we found no, there wasn't much to be had. But the other flip side is a false alarm. So this is the case where you say that the communication is coming from the client when it's actually coming from the facilitator. Now, the costs there are pretty huge, I think. It'd be tempting to say, you know, what's the harm in this case if we do make that kind of a mistake, but I don't think that's good enough. The costs are going to be huge for a false alarm. That's right. This is scottaluded to those costs as well during the conversation, right? Of going down this path, of treating clients using this technique when, in fact, there's nothing there to be had. Right? So the cost of shifting an entire line of research to facilitate a communication where it was completely ineffective, putting money into the research, putting, you know, changing, getting the hopes of parents up in a sense and saying, well, in fact, no, in fact, your child isn't communicating at all. It was the facilitator all along. Imagine that. I mean, that would be just as devastating. But what gets me about this, which really irritates me about this entire process, is the fact that this didn't need to happen. It didn't need to get to this point where you are giving these parents hope and then pulling the rug from underneath them. It didn't have to be that way. And the way that we could have resolved this entire thing before it started was to have a correct rejection, right? Was to say that, was to do a lot of these, we taught students in this course how to find experiments, right? About the power of double blinding and everything else. We did an entire episode on wine tasting and using this double blind technique. It was kind of cheap. That's something you could do on a weekend. But just as easily you could do it with something as big as facilitator communication. I don't think it would have been outside the realm of consideration for anyone who's taking this course to be able to design an experiment to determine whether it was the facilitator who was communicating or whether it was the client. But what I'm amazed is this was not hard. You could do this in an afternoon and $100 to design the mechanism to do that. But it wasn't done, right? Research is cheap. Clinical programs are really expensive, right? So when this was brought over to Syracuse University where they completely blew this out into training and hiring facilitators and doing this entire process, that's really expensive. But you could find out whether there was anything to it in an afternoon and a couple two-by-fours. I think that's not okay. Still on the costs of a false alarm, there's a great website called What's the Harm? This details a lot of alternative therapies and health techniques and healing. It just has the false alarm cells. It gives examples of people who have chosen homeopathic remedies over traditional ones and they've died. In the case of facilitator communication, there were accusations that autistic children were being abused. So the children were typing out, oh, my daddy has touched me and things like that. And the state took the children away and there were huge court cases. The harm there is huge. So I encourage people to go to the website to push against that idea of what's the harm when we deal with these things. Let people have these beliefs and go along our merry way. It's really tempting to say what's the harm. And people do this all the time. It almost has this sort of liberal cachet to it and saying what's the harm? Just let people do what they do and it'll be fine. And to argue against that or to be very seemingly very cynical. Yeah, arguing the other side of that. So it's a response bias in a sense. A response bias to say that the thing is working regardless of whether it is or not. Whether that thing be psychic phenomena or opiopathy or chiropractic treatment. What's the harm I'll give a go and actually see? Well, that website exactly shows you what the harm is. It shows you that people are now paralyzed from using this particular alternative treatment. Or again, allegations of sexual abuse when in fact it was this facilitator who was communicating. And on and on and on. To see what the harms actually are. And it's exactly the same problem that we face before. Consider all four cells. That's what we want people to do. Just consider both costs. I mean, hopefully we've done a bit of justice here in considering the cost of a miss relative to the cost of a false alarm. Neither are acceptable. Don't get me wrong. And we could have avoided both by doing a little bit of research in the beginning. So in the case of facilitated communication it's quite clear in the case of facilitated communication that the communications were coming from the facilitators and not the clients. So what does that mean for the facilitators? Were they aware that they were influencing these communications? Yeah, I really don't think so. And again, going back to the cases of sexual abuse to the allegations of sexual abuse. I can't imagine anybody in their right mind that would do that. That would actually say your child is being abused when in fact they weren't. I think what's... Well, we know. What's actually happening in this case is something called an experiment or expectancy effect. That is... Well, let's Scott tell the story of exactly what was happening in the case of facilitated communication.