[ExI] Precog PCs

[Damien Broderick]

On 10/24/2010 5:28 PM, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> You mean that the experimenter would influence psychokinetically the
> random generation of the "guesses"?!

It's a possibility that has to be taken into account. (It also has to be 
taken into account when assessing the outcome of supposedly blinded 
placebo trials, which opens a large nasty nest of worms. Luckily, the 
psi effect size is usually small.)

>   What if the program is diffused, installed and run randomly and
> unpredictably, e.g., in a virus-like fashion?

I don't know enough about stochastic programs (well, anything about 
them, really) to say, except that the source of the machine's output has 
to be somehow open to modification. You can't stare at a book and change 
the third word on the fifth line of page 67, because it already exists. 
But experiments have shown that it is possible to influence a random 
machine *running in the past* such that its unobserved output is found 
to be significantly different from chance expectation *when the output 
is subsequently observed.* To work, this sort of experiment has to be 
done with a true random source for the data sequence.

Don't blame me, I just work here.

Damien Broderick