From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Sep 20 2001 - 14:03:07 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> I immediately noted, a few hours after the WTC event blanketed the world's
> media, that this terrible event was a perfect natural experiment. If their
> instruments failed to show a major blip, this would serve as a suitable
> refutation of the theory that mind can couple `paranormally' to machines
> (or perhaps that we live inside a simulation using common objects or
> macros). The preliminary results are now in, and they are rather... striking.
>
> Go to http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
>
> and hit the link titled
>
> Analysis of the EGG response to the terrorist attacks on WTC and
> Pentagon September 11, 2001.
Damien, have you ever heard the saying, "If you torture the data enough,
it will confess?" This looks to me remarkably like the analysis of
allegedly significant events in the so-called "Bible Code".
If they could go over the EGG data for twelve unknown and unlabeled weeks
starting and ending at random times of day, and pick out the moment of the
911 attacks, then I might at least concede that they were claiming to
follow properly blinded experimental procedure. As it is, this report is
a null-op even if it's true.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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