[extropy-chat] A paranormal prediction for the next year

[John K Clark]

One year ago I sent the following post to the list, I did not change one
word. One year from now I intend to send this same message yet again.
=================
Happy New Year all.

I predict that a paper reporting positive psi results will NOT appear in
Nature or Science in the next year. This may seem an outrageous prediction,
after all psi is hardly a rare phenomena, millions of people with no
training have managed to observe it, or claim they have. And I  am sure the
good people at Nature and Science would want to say something about this
very important and obvious part of our natural world if they could, but I
predict they will be unable to find anything  interesting to say about it.

You might think my prediction is crazy, like saying a waitress with an
eight's grade education in Duluth Minnesota can regularly observe the Higgs
boson with no difficulty but the highly trained Physicists at CERN in
Switzerland cannot. Nevertheless I am confident my prediction is true
because my ghostly spirit guide Mohammad Duntoldme spoke to me about it in a
dream.

PS: I am also confident I can make this very same prediction one year from
today.

    John K Clark


















----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 26, 2006 4:36 PM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings (was: cold fusion warms up)


> At 04:16 PM 12/26/2006 -0500, John K Clark wrote:
>
>>So here is my bet, as before if
>>the article appears in 2007 I will publicly admit that I was wrong and you
>>were right about cold fusion. But If the article does not appear you don't
>>have to renounce your views, all you need to do is say "I thought the
>>article would appear in 2007 but I was wrong", and I get to say "I knew we
>>wouldn't see the article". So do we have a bet?
>
> I haven't stopped beating my wife either.
>
> I don't have any expectations about when or whether "cold fusion" (or
> "bubble fusion" or whatever) turns out to be real and publishable and
> patentable. Yes, it would be a nice feature of a future we'd all like
> to see (with the usual danger! danger! provisos), but so would real
> AI and real nanotech and real SETI signals and real superluminal
> travel and real time travel. So I remain interested, and will keep
> posting links to any claims that seem to have some measure of support
> by non-idiots. Otherwise, I couldn't care less.
>
> The reality of psi, on the other hand... yes, I do have a personal
> interest in that, and I've done both primary research and a lot of
> journal reading, and have a book on the topic coming out next year
> (OUTSIDE THE GATES OF SCIENCE). But there, too, I'm happy to admit
> that I might be mistaken. There are plenty of obvious reasons why psi
> looks not just anomalous but entirely inconsistent with aspects of
> the world we experience every day. However, the history of science
> persuades us that what seems obvious ain't necessarily so.
>
> In short, John: you're taunting me with a bet I'm just not
> interesting in making. Sorry about that.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>