[ExI] psi yet again.

[Damien Broderick]

On 6/29/2010 11:38 PM, John Clark wrote:

> Many states have a game where you pay a dollar and pick a number from
> 000 to 999, if you guess correctly you get $500. These games have been
> going on for many years and the profit they make for the state is always
> highly predictable. Year in and year out the amount of money the state
> will have to pay out in prizes can be calculated and it always conforms
> to the laws of probability you'd get if the numbers were picked randomly.

Okay, so you admit you can't respond to my questions based on the 
playing field you first chose: lotto. Unfortunately I don't know 
anything about the wager you mention. Have you got links to sites where 
there's more precise information on numbers of players betting, payouts, 
etc? From what you are saying, it sounds as if roughly half the money is 
always forfeit to the state and perhaps the private corp (?) that runs 
the game. Are you sure the cumulative amount paid in prizes is very 
close to 50%, year after year? Would the despairing owners abandon this 
"scam," this "tax on the ignorant," if they only pulled in, on average, 
49.9% of the takings?

How often are the winning numbers posted? Given the noise created by 
population preferences, there must be a fair amount of volatility from 
draw to draw (if that's how it works). When 007 or 017 or 333 comes up, 
I expect there will be a significant excess of winners. But if, say, 082 
or 614 comes up, I'd expect somewhat fewer than m.c.e.. (You'd need to 
look at many hundreds of millions of guesses to know exactly what the 
bias factors are, and how stable they are.) Do you have this information 
available? Suppose for the sake of argument that beneath this noise 
there is a tendency to get one more winner per thousand entrants, would 
this be noticed and make any serious difference?

(This of course assumes that it's as easy to choose a three digit number 
via psi as a one or two digit number, something that would have to be 
tested. In general, it's known that experienced remote viewers don't 
respond very well to numbers, but they tend to acquire gestalts of a 
scene--so most attempted psi applications first blind-code numeric 
targets and decoys into high entropic shapes and activities.)

Damien Broderick