[extropy-chat] the structure of randomness

[gts]

On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 16:37:33 -0500, Damien Broderick  
<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> Sarfatti is also a raving monster loony.

I don't know about Sarfatti but John Walker is brilliant.

I think I understand why Walker may not have considered his results a  
clear refutation of Shnell. From reading Shnell's papers, it seems his  
team relies on visual analysis of the histograms. Walker used an automated  
statistical program to test for similarities, which may not be sensitive  
enough.

This is from the discussion at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/shnoll2.html

Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 12:43:59 +0200
From: Dick J Bierman
To: John Walker , rdnelson
Cc: nick herbert , Jack Sarfatti ,
      Dean Radin , creon at isso.org
Subject: Shnoll et al replications

Hi to all,

We just recieved a confirmation by W.I. Axford of the Max-Plank
Aeronomy  Institute, Lindau, Germany, that he has done an independent
replication  of the Schnoll effect.

If I understand him correctly he just produced sets of  histograms
 from two (random?) sources, removed all time information, randomized
the order and then send them to Tatiana for human judgement.
She then returned to them the pairs that were simlar and these turned
out to be from simultaneous measurements.

No stats were given but from his words it seems the result is robust.
(He is a bit worried about the stretching operation but that can't
explain the results; it is worrying from a physics perspective though).
So this is a good reason (at least for me) to become more optimistic
and to invest a bit more time in getting the human judgement replaced
by computerized judgement.

The results produced by John suggest to me that the chi-2 isn't the
measure that corresponds very well to their human scored similarity.
===



-gts