From: Guru George (gurugeorge@sugarland.idiscover.co.uk)
Date: Sat Nov 08 1997 - 09:19:02 MST
On Sat, 08 Nov 1997 16:01:01 +0000
Damien Broderick <damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>At 08:57 PM 11/6/97 -0800, Lee wrote, to my astonishment:
>
>>Since [...] every known
>>demonstration of psychic phenomena is in the fakable set, that
>>alone--while not proof--is strong statistical evidence that the
>>phenomena are in fact faked.
>
>This might be true of, say, `impossible objects' alleged to be created by
>teleportation, or levitation, etc, but your remark evades the heart of
>current anomalies research, which is the vast database of preferentially
>skewed distributions in binary and ternary sequences randomly generated by
>various firewalled methods, and Ganzfeld and RV experiments that have
>impressed even critics of the calibre of Dr Susan Blackmore - conducted at
>such places as the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research centre, tucked
>into an inconspicuous little burrow under the university, and the Koestler
>unit in Edinburgh. As Dr Roger Nelson of PEAR has written to me, this
>accumulated evidence is far more impressive, and baffling, than any number
>of corrigible anecdotal items of `paranormal' wizardry, the kind Randi
>makes his entertaining stock in trade.
>
That reminds me. Stephen King wrote somewhere (whether fact or fiction
I don't know) about an experiment done by sociologists in the 50s, in
which they got a bunch of stats together which demonstrated that there
had been a statistically significantly greater amount of people
cancelling their tickets on flights that subsequently crashed than on
normal, successful flights. That sounds like an interesting approach.
Guru George
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:45:06 MST