>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