From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue May 12 1998 - 06:11:50 MDT
At 09:37 PM 5/10/98 -0700, johnkc wrote:
>I don't know enough about the Zenith study to comment specifically but in
>general I do know that if I flip a coin a million times the probability I
>will get exactly half a million heads and half a million tails is almost
zero.
Correct. But if a significantly large excess of heads over tails found in
the first pre-announced set of a million flips is repeated in the second
and the third and the fifth of five, you are talking about something akin
to the results detailed in the major parapsychology meta-analyses.
This comment of John's is the kind of handwaving `rebuttal' that rightly
infuriates habitues of this list when it's applied to the prospects of AI
and nanotechnology (as Stix did in Scientific American, say). I have
posted several relevant urls to peer-reviewed papers dealing with these
claims for psi, but all I see here in response are people telling me that
by gum they are *not* going to waste their time looking through that
damfool telescope.
Damien Broderick
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