[extropy-chat] Precognition on TV

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Damien Broderick wrote:
> Or the growing number of controlled 
> "presponse" measurements, which physiological sensors register 
> significant responses not only in advance of a stimulus having been 
> generated but in advance of its being chosen at random from a 
> possible set of stimuli. I would not be surprised if this latter 
> protocol is what will finally establish the reality of some kinds of 
> reverse causality in perception, and will be published in the 
> heavy-duty scientific literature. It's sufficiently simple and 
> elegant that it edges toward resembling classic probes of visual or 
> acoustic acuity.

If the effect size is greater than 5%, and significant at p<0.0001, and 
a single hypothesis was specified in advance rather than the data being 
mined afterward, and the study is published in the heavy-duty scientific 
literature, and nobody finds that the study is a fraud a month later, 
and the experiment is replicated by a skeptical investigator, my head 
will officially explode and leave tiny little burning fragments of 
personal philosophy all over what I used to think was my universe.

Thankfully, that will never ever happen.  At least, not from this 
particular possibility.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence