<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Jul 3, 2010, at 1:52 PM, Damien Broderick wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font>Humans can't make random guesses. We don't feel right repeating the same number in a sequence of numbers, for example, yet we do cling to favored numbers on separate occasions.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>True, apparently psi is misleading them.</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>People often feel some numbers are "lucky" and others aren't.</div></blockquote><div><br></div>And misleading them again.<br><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>When we place bets on an array of numbers from, say, 1 through 50, we tend to choose numbers in the range 1-31, since those contain the birthdays of people we love. </div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>And yet again.</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>If you want to see the collective effect of such biases, take a look at the normalized scale I posted </div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>So if you eliminate a very large chunk of wrong answers that psi provides you will find in the remaining answers that psi does better than random probability. Wow what a surprise!</div><div><br></div><div>Normalized is such a nice word, so much better than "cooking the books". Damien, if this "bias" toward certain numbers had turned out to work and resulted in more winning numbers would you have thrown them out? Of course you would have not! Not in a million years! This sort of behavior is intolerable in real science. </div><blockquote type="cite"><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font>Most parapsychological studies are far simpler and more controlled than lottery behavior</div></blockquote><div><br></div>Controlled indeed, controlled to produce exactly the results the "experimenter" wanted to produce. This is a fine example of the quality of psi "researchers" and their methods; but then as I've said if they had any talent in experimentation they'd be doing real science.</div><div><br></div><div>The lottery is the real world, there is no hand waving or fudging the books, you pay your dollar make your guess and then you either win or you do not. Usually you do not, just as the laws of probability say you should not.</div><div><br></div><div> John K Clark <br><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>