[ExI] Sigh

[Damien Broderick]

On 7/2/2010 12:37 PM, John Clark wrote:

> I have no explanation because lotteries are run by states and get to
> keep all the profits, they pay nothing to the IRS.

In Australia they are run by private companies under the watchful eyes 
of State governments. However, your comment evades the point that by 
your earlier account the states should be screaming with rage if 1 in 
1000 guesses is modified by psi. But you still haven't told us what 
difference you think this would make to the number of prize winners, and 
whether this would necessarily exceed the noise floor. Maybe it 
would--but I want to see your numbers, not your hand-waving guesses, 
however intuitively true they seem to you. People used to be quite sure 
the earth couldn't be spherical because you'd fall off.

> And Damien, I don't have 800,000,000 lottery data points on my computer
> as you do but if you can find a significant variation from probability
> using accepted statistical practices in all that data then it would
> convince even the most diehard psi skeptics, including me, that there
> must be something to it. Nobody could dispute the data and if your
> mathematical analysis is also OK then it's game over and you have won.

I analyzed that data in terms of differences in guesses (normalized to 
take account of population preferences) at each number in the range 
1-45, depending on whether the number won or not. I had the full data 
from 23 draws made available to me. There is just the right-sized mean 
deviation to accord with other parapsychological findings.

You would not be convinced, however, for the same reason I'm not; 
although 138 data points drawn from nearly a billion guesses is pretty 
impressive, it's not really enough to be certain that bias factors have 
washed out. I'd like to see 100 or 1000 draws analyzed this way, but I 
have no access to further data, and neither does anyone else I've 
consulted over the years. So I regard this as a promising result, a 
useful pilot study, and hope some day to read the results of a far 
larger study.

But in the meantime, the results I got tend to support my claim, not 
that of die-hard skeptics.

Damien Broderick