[ExI] A paranormal prediction for the next year

[John Clark]

On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 12:18 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> What if psi is an unreliable thing?
>

Very recently scientists discovered that xenon-124 was not stable as had
previously been thought but was VERY slightly radioactive, it turns out it
if you watched one atom of xenon-124 for 18 thousand billion billion years
there is only a 50% chance you will see it decay, and yet scientists were
able to detect that decay. Is psi more unreliable than that?


> > In college my class took that test with four shapes.  One person looked
> at it and the other person guessed what it was.  Nobody got above chance
> except one guy who was doing 80%.  The next day the did 80%.  Then he
> 'lost' it.  Back to chance.
>

And that is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to happen if it's all
due to chance, it's very easy to be fooled by probability if you're not
extremely careful. It's not as if psi was the first time scientists tried
to measure something that was ultra rare and elusive with unreliable
equipment, experimentalists successfully do it every day, it's how they
make their living.

 John K Clark
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