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Can the mind influence random number machines?

ZeroTheory

New Blood
Z
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Nov 14, 2009
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5
I've seen this claimed several times, specifically on "What the Bleep" in which
they say a machine producing 0's and 1's can be pushed to a majority of one number or the other with the mind alone. Is there any truth to these claims?
 
I presume you mean by some form of "psi"? If so then there is no evidence to suppose it can happen.

Some of these threads discuss some experiments that have looked into it.
 
A better question would be "Is there any evidence to support this claim?"
 
ZeroTheory said:
I've seen this claimed several times, specifically on "What the Bleep" in which
they say a machine producing 0's and 1's can be pushed to a majority of one number or the other with the mind alone. Is there any truth to these claims?
Click to expand...

No evidence for it, so I'd say no.
 
ZeroTheory said:
I've seen this claimed several times, specifically on "What the Bleep" in which
they say a machine producing 0's and 1's can be pushed to a majority of one number or the other with the mind alone. Is there any truth to these claims?
Click to expand...

Well, coming from such a worthy source, why would you possibly question it?!

The answer's very probably 'no', by the way.
 
ZeroTheory said:
I've seen this claimed several times, specifically on "What the Bleep" in which
they say a machine producing 0's and 1's can be pushed to a majority of one number or the other with the mind alone. Is there any truth to these claims?
Click to expand...
PEAR at Stanford spent 25 years trying to show that it could.

They could not come up with any statistically significant evidence in any of their trials.

The best they could do was a meta-analysis of all their experiments which demonstrated, they claimed, that they had overwhelmingly proved the claim.

However in this section I have shown that - even if the results were not cooked - the same statistical "significance" could have resulted from losing a positive result in only 1% of trials.

So there are two possibilities:

1. A new and radical scientific phenomenon or,
2. Slightly sloppy lab practice in 1 out of 100 experiments over a period of 12 years.

I know which seems more plausible to me.
 
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Welcome to the forums, Zero Theory.

I wouldn't rely on What the Bleep as a reliable source for information. It sounds like the subject is the PEAR experiments (though PEAR turned out to be a scam to sell home-PK kits). You can read a lot about those in the threads Darat mentioned.

Even though it doesn't cover PEAR in particular, Randi's Flim Flam goes into a lot of the problems of lack of scientific rigor in paranormal research.

There have been some good paranormal researchers, but there has mostly been naive believers who will fall for the shakiest cold reading techniques, researchers who don't understand how to set up a decent experiment (or who are easily deceived) to out-and-out frauds.

The first group (the good research) shows consistent, reproducible results that do not support any psi effects.
 
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I've done similar experiments on the roulette wheel in my local casino. Just about the time I get three or four black spins in a row those damn green numbers(0, 00) screw everything up. It then becomes a battle of wills to see whose kung fu is the best. Usually, the green has better kung fu. I'm not going to give up no matter how many red chips I have to put down.:(
 
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