[extropy-chat] Re: Damien grants psi evidence

[David]

> Finally: a small effect can always be amplified, in principle, by 
> redundancy and repetition. This was the approach I tested more than a 
> decade ago using entries to Lotto. Three quarters of a billion guesses, 
> in fact, made by millions of punters during a number of consecutive 
> draws. Scaled `when winning/when not winning' analysis of the ranking of 
> each option. Too bad, so sad, no blazingly obvious psi effect. A small 
> anomaly was found even so, but not one I'd predicted, so no cigar. Did 
> this prove to me that psi doesn't exist? No, but it suggested that using 
> a vast unscreened population of guessers, even one as madly motivated a 
> Lotto punters, was not a suitable approach.
> 
> Damien Broderick
> 

I assume someone must have already thought of the possibility that
if PK effects are real then millions of punters all mentally
commanding different numbers to be drawn may well cancel each
other out.

This leads to the idea that if a well known 'psychic' was to
announce next weeks lotto numbers :

1/ given human psychology this would be widely reported in the news,
2/ many people would take out tickets with those numbers,
3/ if PK is real then thousands to millions of people all willing
    a particular result may affect the results.

To help them work together it would be necessary for the 'psychic'
to specify the order in which the numbers are drawn as well.


Personally I'm fairly sure pk is not real, it violates too much of
established physics. TP and RV I regard as unlikely, but I'm not as
sure as I am about PK. Information transfer seems to be something
that could slide around many of the laws of physics in a way that
transfer of energy or momentum could not.

-David

ps. What was the unpredicted anomaly that was found?