Weird Experience

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

My point is that if someone makes a prediction (e.g., channeling a "spirit" to get the winning numbers), and the odds are hundreds of millions to one that they get it right, and they get it right, that would be exceptionally compelling proof that something weird went one.

Not necessarily. As I pointed out above, someone correctly predicts the lottery numbers almost every week. If you have "hundreds of millions" (actually more like 14m) of people all predicting different numbers, then the fact that one of them comes up is not at all surprising. That's the problem with using the lottery as an example - millions of people do play it. And picking the numbers correctly seems significant to the person in question, but if you take a step back and look at the big picture, then it's not remarkable at all. It's exactly what you'd expect to happen.

No. If John predicts he can remote view, and we give Sally a license plate, and John and Sally are in different states, and John gets every number/letter right, that would be confirmation of psychic ability. Either that, or John got very very lucky (probably on par with predicting a lottery win based on numbers "channeled" by a dead person).

Or they cheated.

 

[Cainkane1]

I've been obsessing about death lately. My wife is very spiritual, and yesterday she said, "Why don't you ask my mom (deceased, lived with us for years) for help? I know you're a skeptic, but it doesn't cost you anything". My wife then told me she gets signs from her mom all the time, mostly in the form of seeing license plates, particularly New Mexico. It has something to do with some experiences they had in New Mexico. I rolled my eyes (pareidolia, and all that).

But I said, OK, and mentally asked for a sign yesterday morning. A few hours later, we're walking out of a theater, and we walk down the wrong row of cars, looking for my car, and of course, there's a New Mexico plate. My wife gets all excited, and even I think it's a little strange, because we don't see them much in California (they're bright yellow plates). So we go down another row of cars and there's another New Mexico plate. And this is literally hours after she told me about the license plate thing.

I could laugh it off as coincidence (and no doubt anyone reading this probably is), but it was very strange. I commute an hour a day on the freeway and can't recall seeing a New Mexico plate in a long time. It's a small state, doesn't border California, I live in the sticks, and it's rare to see any non-California plate.

Anyway, I thought it was strange. Does anyone else have experiences like that?

I live in Georgia and I sometimes see New Mexico plates. California is closer to New Mexico than Georgia so why is this that weird? Are you suggesting your deceased mother in law caused people with New Mexico plates to be in those places? Coincidence is the word of choice for me.

 

[Fudbucker]

Not necessarily. As I pointed out above, someone correctly predicts the lottery numbers almost every week. If you have "hundreds of millions" (actually more like 14m) of people all predicting different numbers, then the fact that one of them comes up is not at all surprising. That's the problem with using the lottery as an example - millions of people do play it. And picking the numbers correctly seems significant to the person in question, but if you take a step back and look at the big picture, then it's not remarkable at all. It's exactly what you'd expect to happen.



Or they cheated.

Millions of people play it, but no one has ever taken up the Randi challenge by claiming to have "powers", predicting a lottery win, and then actually winning. If that happened, they should get the million dollars, wouldn't you agree?

 

[Fudbucker]

I live in Georgia and I sometimes see New Mexico plates. California is closer to New Mexico than Georgia so why is this that weird? Are you suggesting your deceased mother in law caused people with New Mexico plates to be in those places? Coincidence is the word of choice for me.

Right, they're not non-existent, but if I said, you, CainKane, will see at least one N.M. plate this afternoon, and you see two, are you telling me you wouldn't wonder about how I predicted that? What if I told you your tire would blowout on the freeway today and it happened?

 

[marplots]

Right, they're not non-existent, but if I said, you, CainKane, will see at least one N.M. plate this afternoon, and you see two, are you telling me you wouldn't wonder about how I predicted that? What if I told you your tire would blowout on the freeway today and it happened?

I'm always going to suspect shenanigans over the supernatural.

For example, if I wanted to tweak your bean, I might get a couple NM plates (ebay maybe?), put some magnets on them and make sure I visited the parking lot before you had your stroll. Naturally, being a good citizen, I'd remove them afterwards.

In so many of these, it's not hard to construct something ordinary, if complicated. When I cannot readily do so, I'm still more likely to suspect a failure of imagination on my part rather than an entirely new (to me at least) system beyond what I understand about the world.

 

[Stray Cat]

Millions of people play it, but no one has ever taken up the Randi challenge by claiming to have "powers", predicting a lottery win, and then actually winning. If that happened, they should get the million dollars, wouldn't you agree?

Yes indeed... If someone comes to an agreement with the JREF and then completes their demonstration to or beyond what was agreed to constitute a win, they would win the million.

It doesn't however (as I said earlier) prove that the person has special powers. It is simply a means of finding someone to study thoroughly to gather as much objective evidence as possible to support the claim that they have special powers.

 

[Spock Jenkins]

None of this is relevant, because Fudbucker is putting forward hypotheticals and saying, "if this happened, you'd have to concede something supernatural". Yes, if one of my kids sprouted wings and flew away, I'd concede something pretty supernatural happened. Isn't going to happen though.

None of these scenarios has anything to do with noticing two New Mexico plates in a California parking lot after thinking about a dead relative from New Mexico.

If somebody submits to the rules of the million dollar challange with respect to lottery numbers, I would expect there would have to be some standard higher than a one time event to be put foward as evidence of the super natural. Could be an elaborate hoax, computer break in, whatever that enabled them to cheat one time. Doing it five straight times under conditions mutually agreed upon and in multiple lotteries run by different systems / programs - then now you're talking evidence of some precog/psychic ability. Believe it when I see it.

 

[Stray Cat]

Right, they're not non-existent, but if I said, you, CainKane, will see at least one N.M. plate this afternoon, and you see two, are you telling me you wouldn't wonder about how I predicted that? What if I told you your tire would blowout on the freeway today and it happened?

One really important aspect of the scientific method is repeatability.
You would need to show consistent ability to be able to make predictions.

If you were to claim "I can predict the lottery numbers, but I can only do it once in my lifetime and this is that time" There would be nothing to learn from a scientific viewpoint.

 

[Spock Jenkins]

You can have a three number lottery that's harder to win than a Powerball lottery.

Just a hunch, but I'm going to say that in no way, shape, or form can this statement be correct. I'll have to defer to somebody more skilled in the maths than I to confirm. It would have to be some odd new structure to make it harder to win than the Power Ball. I've only ever seen the run of the mill three single digit lottery.

No. If John predicts he can remote view, and we give Sally a license plate, and John and Sally are in different states, and John gets every number/letter right, that would be confirmation of psychic ability. Either that, or John got very very lucky (probably on par with predicting a lottery win based on numbers "channeled" by a dead person). If someone actually succesfully remote-viewed a license plate, the luck hypothesis would be irrational.

Remote viewing is a pretty standard magic trick. The test environment would have to be awfully controlled to eliminate the possibility of cheating. But again, you're asking for concession of a discussion topic based on things that have never been proven in a properly controlled environment. None of which has anything to do with seeing two random New Mexico license plates in a California parking lot which remains pretty unremarkable.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Millions of people play it, but no one has ever taken up the Randi challenge by claiming to have "powers", predicting a lottery win, and then actually winning. If that happened, they should get the million dollars, wouldn't you agree?

They'd certainly pass the preliminary test. I don't see the relevance to the OP, though.

Right, they're not non-existent, but if I said, you, CainKane, will see at least one N.M. plate this afternoon, and you see two, are you telling me you wouldn't wonder about how I predicted that?

According to your previous posts, that's not what happened to you. Your wife asked why didn't you ask her mum for help, and then told you that she got signs all the time. Also, according to you these signs don't always take the form of licence plates, and nor are the licence plates always from New Mexico.

That is not a prediction that you would see a New Mexico licence plate. It's actually a fairly broad category of "signs" of which licence plates are a subset, and of which New Mexico licence plates are also a subset.

 

[Fudbucker]

I'm always going to suspect shenanigans over the supernatural.

Sure, but I would hope you would have an open mind. What if scientists had just concluded that washing hands and a lowering mortality rate were just coincidence? When coincidences begin piling up, they need to be explained. I brought up Multiverse theory before because the fine-tuning problem is a problem of coincidence- it is exceedingly unlikely that the values of the physical constants are what they are by chance alone, so multiverse theory is invoked as a way to explain the fantastic coincidences.

I mean, if someone correctly got 10 out of 10 zener cards right 10 times in a row, would you really think they just got lucky? If you were in charge of the prize money, wouldn't you give them the million? I think you would.

For example, if I wanted to tweak your bean, I might get a couple NM plates (ebay maybe?), put some magnets on them and make sure I visited the parking lot before you had your stroll. Naturally, being a good citizen, I'd remove them afterwards.

Yes, it's possible to cheat, but if we're talking about what happened to me, I doubt my wife went around switching license plates. What happened was, she correctly predicted (or at least talked about) a rare event, and it happened twice. Probably, it was coincidence, but it would be closed minded (not skeptical) to not wonder if something else was going on. The best theories in science are those with high predictive power.

In so many of these, it's not hard to construct something ordinary, if complicated. When I cannot readily do so, I'm still more likely to suspect a failure of imagination on my part rather than an entirely new (to me at least) system beyond what I understand about the world.

Why do you have a bias against "entirely new systems beyond what you understand"? Our view of the world routinely undergoes extreme paradigm shifts. Did you think, 20 years ago, that we wouldn't be able to explain what 95% of the universe is?

 

[Fudbucker]

Yes indeed... If someone comes to an agreement with the JREF and then completes their demonstration to or beyond what was agreed to constitute a win, they would win the million.

It doesn't however (as I said earlier) prove that the person has special powers. It is simply a means of finding someone to study thoroughly to gather as much objective evidence as possible to support the claim that they have special powers.

Then you will never have proof. Even if they did it 100 times in a row, maybe they just got lucky, or maybe they found a way to cheat that no one can figure out. You're not talking about "proof", you're talking about "certainty", and you'll never get that, because the probability of the luck or cheating hypothesis will never be zero. It can be exceedingly remote, but in the case of someone predicting a lottery win to beat Randi's challenge, the odds of it happening even once are so vanishingly small, if it doesn't constitute proof, I don't know what would. Winning it two times? Five? At what point do you feel it would constitute "proof", or would you always suspect cheating or luck, rather than the existence of something paranormal?

 

[rcfieldz]

My Dad

I happened to be thinking about my father who passed away some years ago and how we bonded after mom passed on. I had been thinking about the things we did together and a post card fell to the floor, it was addressed to him and was from a meet(Ham fest) we used to attend. It was definately a sign to me and perked me up.

 

[Fudbucker]

One really important aspect of the scientific method is repeatability.
You would need to show consistent ability to be able to make predictions.

If you were to claim "I can predict the lottery numbers, but I can only do it once in my lifetime and this is that time" There would be nothing to learn from a scientific viewpoint.

ROFL!

So if someone said, "for one day I'm going to predict the exact time, longitude, and latitude of every earthquake that happens, no matter how small" and they then proceeded to do just that (50 earthquakes), and never did it again, you think there would be nothing to learn from that? Your worldview wouldn't change at all? Seriously?

 

[Stray Cat]

ROFL!

So if someone said, "for one day I'm going to predict the exact time, longitude, and latitude of every earthquake that happens, no matter how small" and they then proceeded to do just that (50 earthquakes), and never did it again, you think there would be nothing to learn from that? Your worldview wouldn't change at all? Seriously?

Moving the goalposts much?

A data sample of 50 is oooooooh at least 50 times bigger than a data sample of one.

 

[Stray Cat]

Then you will never have proof.

Proof is for maths... what science wants is evidence... The more the merrier.

Even if they did it 100 times in a row, maybe they just got lucky, or maybe they found a way to cheat that no one can figure out.

And there would be 100 events to study, to refine the testing protocol to understand more about what was happening.

You're not talking about "proof", you're talking about "certainty",

No, I'm talking about as large a data set as it is possible to get.

and you'll never get that,

Phew, that's lucky then... because science rarely deals in certainty.

because the probability of the luck or cheating hypothesis will never be zero.

Indeed... so?
When the scales tip the balance of evidence in favour of someone with predictive powers, that's all that's required for it to be taken more seriously than the present. A single event will NEVER do this. What's so difficult to understand about this?

It can be exceedingly remote, but in the case of someone predicting a lottery win to beat Randi's challenge, the odds of it happening even once are so vanishingly small, if it doesn't constitute proof, I don't know what would.

Your standards of what constitutes 'proof' are very low then.
It is a single data point. As has been pointed out to you already, a single data point (someone winning the lottery) happens on a weekly basis.

Winning it two times? Five? At what point do you feel it would constitute "proof", or would you always suspect cheating or luck, rather than the existence of something paranormal?

Like I keep saying: If someone claimed to be able to predict it once and actually did. That is a starting point to study that person to see how consistent they were. It is not 'proof' of anything other than that sometimes people win the lottery.
That is when the real science starts not when it concludes.

 

[wardenclyffe]

Sure, but I would hope you would have an open mind. What if scientists had just concluded that washing hands and a lowering mortality rate were just coincidence? When coincidences begin piling up, they need to be explained. I brought up Multiverse theory before because the fine-tuning problem is a problem of coincidence- it is exceedingly unlikely that the values of the physical constants are what they are by chance alone, so multiverse theory is invoked as a way to explain the fantastic coincidences.

I mean, if someone correctly got 10 out of 10 zener cards right 10 times in a row, would you really think they just got lucky? If you were in charge of the prize money, wouldn't you give them the million? I think you would.



Yes, it's possible to cheat, but if we're talking about what happened to me, I doubt my wife went around switching license plates. What happened was, she correctly predicted (or at least talked about) a rare event, and it happened twice. Probably, it was coincidence, but it would be closed minded (not skeptical) to not wonder if something else was going on. The best theories in science are those with high predictive power.


Why do you have a bias against "entirely new systems beyond what you understand"? Our view of the world routinely undergoes extreme paradigm shifts. Did you think, 20 years ago, that we wouldn't be able to explain what 95% of the universe is?

It probably would make me wonder. Then, I'd have the choice to investigate further or leave it alone. If I left it alone, I'd have to file it in my brain as a either a coincidence or something paranormal. I'd probably choose the coincidence file.

If I investigated further, I might find that my mother-in-law was indeed communicating with me from beyond the grave and I might be able to decipher her message. Or I might discover that it was likely just a coincidence.

In this forum, we cannot make those choices for you nor can we do the investigation necessary to figure out what's going on. All we can do is posit the most likely answers from our experience.

The rest is up to you.

Good luck,
Ward

 

[marplots]

Sure, but I would hope you would have an open mind. What if scientists had just concluded that washing hands and a lowering mortality rate were just coincidence? When coincidences begin piling up, they need to be explained. I brought up Multiverse theory before because the fine-tuning problem is a problem of coincidence- it is exceedingly unlikely that the values of the physical constants are what they are by chance alone, so multiverse theory is invoked as a way to explain the fantastic coincidences.

Why do you have a bias against "entirely new systems beyond what you understand"? Our view of the world routinely undergoes extreme paradigm shifts. Did you think, 20 years ago, that we wouldn't be able to explain what 95% of the universe is?

Pair up these statements and I think you'll hit on my bias. It is fine to say "I don't understand what's going on" and it's fine to say there might be something to explain. What it is not fine to do is say that offering up a bookmark as if it explained something. What exactly is the information content or explanatory power in attributing something to the supernatural?

If we just want to say we don't know how something happened, we should state that. And I think you would be correct in that point of view.

I mean, if someone correctly got 10 out of 10 zener cards right 10 times in a row, would you really think they just got lucky? If you were in charge of the prize money, wouldn't you give them the million? I think you would.

I wouldn't say it meant anything particularly significant, other than my description of how odds works doesn't apply to this challenger. You can't ever get from here to there unless you have a causal chain, an explanation. The prize gets awarded because that's the terms, but I'd still doubt.

I'll happily grant that my bias stems in part from doing magic and being familiar with the way mentalists are able to fool the public. Because I have this insider's view, I know there exists a methodology to imitate the supernatural. And I can tell you that when I see a performance I cannot explain, I absolutely do not believe the person has supernatural powers. But why not? If I cannot expose the method in a particular case, am I not in exactly the same position as you in your anecdote?

 

[Hokulele]

Then you will never have proof. Even if they did it 100 times in a row, maybe they just got lucky, or maybe they found a way to cheat that no one can figure out. You're not talking about "proof", you're talking about "certainty", and you'll never get that, because the probability of the luck or cheating hypothesis will never be zero. It can be exceedingly remote, but in the case of someone predicting a lottery win to beat Randi's challenge, the odds of it happening even once are so vanishingly small, if it doesn't constitute proof, I don't know what would. Winning it two times? Five? At what point do you feel it would constitute "proof", or would you always suspect cheating or luck, rather than the existence of something paranormal?

Don't forget, this sort of thing works both ways. I know you are certain that out-of-state plates are rare in your area, but why not have an open mind, keep a plate journal for a few weeks, and see what the probability actually is, rather than relying on what you think you know?

 

[HighRiser]

I don't know if this'll be helpful, but I hope it is.

I did an annual walk-through inspection on my three-level parking garage this afternoon, looking for damaged sprinkler heads and such, and with this thread in mind, I kept count of NM license plates. Of several hundred cars, parked over a thousand miles away from NM, three are from there.