[ExI] Sigh

[Damien Broderick]

On 7/1/2010 11:21 AM, John Clark wrote:

> if psi exists at all it just can't be infinitesimal.

Of course. "Infinitesimal" is overstating the case. As Prof. Utts has 
noted, the effect size of laboratory psi using protocols such as 
ganzfeld is about the same as the effect size that allowed medical 
scientists to know that small amounts of aspirin daily mitigate the 
damage done by heart attacks.

> If the psi effect
> were anywhere near large enough for crummy scientists with teeny sample
> size to detect it then the effect would be obvious to a blind man in a
> fog bank when dealing with casinos with their HUGE sample size.

You keep saying this without offering any argument beyond assertion. 
I've already shown that in the Florida lotteries you mentioned earlier, 
the volatility is very much greater than any psi results found using 
non-selected untrained subjects.

The way reductionist science works is to make a toy model of some part 
of the world, removing as much extranaeous noise as possible, and then 
looking for a proposed salient effect. Eventually the results can be 
imported back into the larger world. Generally speaking, there's too 
damned much happening all at once in uncontrolled events to draw any 
useful conclusions, which is why scientists used lab bench experiments 
to study electricity rather than standing in the middle of thunderstorms.

 > In
> particular it would be obvious to government tax collectors who would be
> screaming bloody murder and asking why their take of the action is
> smaller than mathematicians say it should be. Casino operators would
> have to prove that psi is real or somebody is going to jail for tax
> avoidance.

You might be right, but how would that happen? I don't know much about 
lotteries (other than Tattslotto in Australia, where I have some 
800,000,000 data points in my computer), but doesn't the government 
always take a declared percentage *off the top*--that is, from the 
amount paid by customers? How could psi change that? But I might be 
wrong--please post the details of your analysis.

Damien Broderick