From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Sun Jan 01 2006 - 16:12:53 MST
At 02:31 PM 1/1/2006 -0800, Eliezer wrote:
>Until parapsychologists win the lottery, or it's demonstrated that it was
>all fraud after all, this implies that the conventional rules of science
>are too weak.
This last might be so, but not necessarily in the way I think you imply. A
friend of mine, a physics prof, has a model that she claims accounts of the
(undoubtedly significant) + and - deviations in a proportion of well-done
experiments as well as certain aspects of tunnel plots of the aggregated
experimental data (which tend to converge to chance in meta-analyses). Her
model implies a kind of stickiness or recurrence in otherwise random
events, creating unlikely strings of hits and misses (not just psi
experiments, but also in other natural phenomena involving Markov chains).
Her work is in press. In her view, the intentions of operators somehow
couple to this aspect of the substrate. I don't know, it's almost weird
enough to be right. If it is, there'll probably be ways to buffalo the
effect into improving psi applications. I watch with interest.
I could address the matter of psi and lotteries--beyond what I've written
in an entire book on the topic, alas before I learned much about the
formerly classified RV work--but most of what I know remains confidential;
annoying, and evasive-looking (for now), but there it is.
Damien Broderick
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