[ExI] psi yet again.

[Damien Broderick]

On 6/29/2010 6:11 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote:

> You're suggesting that even with
> incontrovertibly real psi at 1/1000 power to guess correctly (by
> whatever effect: precog or other) that simply getting another number
> right in the lottery fails to produce noteworthy outcomes anyway?

I'm raising that possibility, which is apparently so counter-intuitive 
that even people as smart as my friend Pelagius aka John Clark appear to 
miss it. (By the way, by hypothesis 1 in a million punters could get 2 
extra guesses right by psi, and 1 in a billion could get 3 right by psi. 
Since nearly everyone selects 2 or fewer winning numbers by chance, this 
isn't likely to have a big visible impact either.)

Incidentally, the 1 in 1000 extra correct is not just an arbitrary 
postulate; it derives from a lot of results in somewhat similar 
forced-choice parapsychology experiments. (Ganzfeld and remote viewing 
by trained operators tend to have better results, but they take a lot 
more intensive work).

I studied nearly a billion aggregated Lotto guesses made available to me 
by the Tattslotto company in Melbourne. (All the computer work of 
recording the data was done by the government-overseen company, so 
there's no likelihood that they screwed with the data to give a false 
impression of psi.) I looked at the scores for numbers 1-45 when they 
won compared to those when they were not winners. See if you can guess 
what the mean deviation I found was?

(by-the-way-2: I'm not directing these posts only to whichever 
individuals I happen to be citing at the top, but to everyone who's 
reading this thread...)

Damien Broderick