It's just a coincidence!!!

[-Fran-]

As to the asking about Sara it could've been as easy as your friend had heard someone calling for a Sara in the background noise and not registered it.

Yeah, several people have pointed this out, and I think it's probably the most likely explanation. Trumps my interpretation of it as a lucky guess

 

[PrincessIneffabelle]

Fascinating story! What's their woo-take on it? If you don't mind me asking?

One thinks that witchcraft (the black pointy hat type) is somehow involved.

One thinks that God and/or angels are at work.

One just thinks "it's really freaky and things like this happen for a reason, y'know".

Like I said, .

 

[-Fran-]

One thinks that witchcraft (the black pointy hat type) is somehow involved.

One thinks that God and/or angels are at work.

One just thinks "it's really freaky and things like this happen for a reason, y'know".

Like I said, .

I often have to deal with my rather wooish relatives too.

The third thing you mention here though. Coincidenses happening for (a never revealed) reason. That's so common thinking it seems, that most people don't recognize it as woo-thinking. I've heard people I know say things like that, who otherwise claim they do not believe in silly things like ghosts and psychics.

 

[eir_de_scania]

Me and my dad are the boring voices of reason in the family. The other are happy to believe in ghosts and psychic abilities, the garden variety ones. Some of my relatives are full of stories what they or someone close to them have experienced. Strange coincidences are among the stories, along with ghosts and premonitions.

Then I get a Look and are told "you of course think there is a natural explanation". Which I do, but I don't press my point. There's no chance I could convince them so I'd only end up ruining the family dinner. Naturally, if someone ask me to explain why I don't believe I'm happy to.

Just realized I'm probably a psychic myself. When chatting to a friend in Australia I've never met in RL we often make the same comment on something at the very same time. Must be telepathy. It can't be that the reason we are such good friends is we think along the same lines? Can it?

 

[-Fran-]

Then I get a Look and are told "you of course think there is a natural explanation". Which I do, but I don't press my point. There's no chance I could convince them so I'd only end up ruining the family dinner. Naturally, if someone ask me to explain why I don't believe I'm happy to.

I recognize this It's funny how you can end up the "black sheep of the family" by reasonable thinking alone

 

[Rodney]

I don't see any evidence for the paranormal, no! So it seems very unlikely to me that that could be the explanation, or part of the explanation, yes. So, lacking any evidence for anything paranormal, why would I reach for such an explanation? That would leave a natural logical explanation, of which a coincidence is one.

Yeah, I don't believe in the paranormal, and I don't because there is currently no evidence for it at all despite investigations carried out in this vein for a very long time. It would be a weird thing for me to do, to believe in something so unlikely while I wait for evidence. If evidence comes and it's convincing enough, I'll change my mind and add that as a possible explanation. I won't hold my breath though

There's plenty of evidence: Ganzfeld experiments, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, Edgar Cayce, and many well-documented anecdotes, such as Lincoln's dream of his death.

What evidence do you see for a paranormal explanation in a case like this? And I still would like to know how you define 'coincidence' and why it isn't good enough as an explanation? Why is it wrong thinking to think A) It has a natural logical explanation, or B) It was just a coincidence? Why is a C) alternative needed?

Because you didn't prove A). Sure, it could be B), but why not C)? Let me throw out another story and ask how you would react if it had happened to you:

"A well-known example of synchronicity is the true story of the French writer Émile Deschamps who in 1805 was treated to some plum pudding by the stranger Monsieur de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Many years later in 1832 Émile Deschamps was at a diner, and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the setting complete — and in the same instant the now senile de Fortgibu entered the room." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

My basis for thinking it was a coincidence, by the way, was that I interpreted her getting the name correct at the first try, as a lucky guess! Others have pointed out in this thread that it could have been more than a lucky guess, she could have gotten clues to the name in different ways. I gladly accept that as something I can "fill out" the explanation with. It's likely and logical. More likely than just a lucky guess=a coincidence. If it WAS a real lucky guess though, it's not unheard of, and not something that you need something paranormal to explain.

So, yes, since I do not, on well-founded grounds, believe in the paranormal, I would not base any conclusion on that. Why would you?

Besides, if we would take the paranormal into the equation here, the number of explanations suddenly becomes so many that there is no use in trying to explain it at all anymore. What, or who is it then that has the last saying in what kind of paranormal activity made her guess the girl's name right?

Was she pyschic? Could she read minds? Was she in telepathic contact with the girl, or the girl's parents/any other person who knew the girl? Is my friend maybe a medium? Did a dead person whisper in her ear what the girl's name was? Did god speak to her? Which god? Did any of the other millions of paranormal creatures whisper the name to her? A pink unicorn? A leprechaun? maybe it was reincarnation? The girl had been my friend's daugther in several past lives, and she simply recognized her? And so on, and so on...

Do you see? The possibilities become endless, and no matter how silly some of it may sound, it is all equally unproven, and so equally valid here. If we are to accept a paranormal explanation then there's just as much chance that all-knowing fairies circles my friend's head telling her these things, as that she would be psychic.

So, because the possibilities are -- in your opinion -- endless, you figure it must be just a coincidence? You might want to read Carl Jung's book "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle."

 

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

Yeah, my extended family is all woo so I get that quite a lot whenever the subject comes up.

 

[-Fran-]

There's plenty of evidence: Ganzfeld experiments, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, Edgar Cayce, and many well-documented anecdotes, such as Lincoln's dream of his death.

The examples you mention here does not aid you in convincing me, you know, or most people around here, I suspect.

http://skepdic.com/ganzfeld.html
These studies were peppered with problems and hardly proves anything, really.

The same goes for
http://skepdic.com/pear.html

And Edgar Cayce... Please... he was as nutty as they come

Lastly, anecdotes, no matter how well documented, are not proof of anything other than that one person spoke and another heard it!

OK, no evidence here. You want to try again?

Because you didn't prove A). Sure, it could be B), but why not C)? Let me throw out another story and ask how you would react if it had happened to you:

"A well-known example of synchronicity is the true story of the French writer Émile Deschamps who in 1805 was treated to some plum pudding by the stranger Monsieur de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Fortgibu. Many years later in 1832 Émile Deschamps was at a diner, and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fortgibu was missing to make the setting complete — and in the same instant the now senile de Fortgibu entered the room." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

So? Why would a series of coincidences be any more supernatural than a single one? Exactly what is it that you want to show with this example? Why would this make me believe in the supernatural? I don't get it?

Something similar actually did happen to me once. I thought it was funny, but didn't think anything more of it.

I had recently finished reading the trilogy of the biblical Joseph by the German author Thomas Mann, and was looking him up on the net to see if he had written any other interesting books. I found out he had written 'Death in Venice' and made a mental note to read it some time.

The next day my mom was going to an antiquarian shop and asked if I wanted to go along, which I did. And as soon as I walked through the door I saw it, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, so I bought it. It's a thin book so I finished reading it the same day, and as I laid it down I was thinking that it would be fun to watch the film as well. I knew there was a film made.

A few hours later I was lazily flipping through the channels on the TV and suddenly found myself looking at... yes, you guessed it right, the 1971 film Death in Venice by director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde.

Now, for the ones who doesn't know this story, it's about an older man falling for a teenage boy, and the film is rather boring actually. Bogarde is basically following the boy around Venice, admiring his beauty from afar, never even speaking to the boy, that's all, and then he dies sitting in a sun chair at the beach. Well, the actor who played the beautiful boy was a Swedish guy called Björn Andrésen who after this film got rather famous for his looks and pretty much nothing else, and it made me wonder what Andrésen would look like today. I looked him up on the Internet and he had only made a few films later in life. Thus I was pretty surprised when I, the very next day, as I was again flipping through channels, stumbled upon one of these films.

Coincidence after coincidence as you can see... It was like, as soon as I wanted to know something that had a connection to this book, the answer was served to me. So, was there anything supernatural about this then? No it wasn't. Those films would have been shown, the book would have been sold at the book shop and so on, regardless of my curiousity about this book, films and actors. It just became a series of coincidences because I was thinking about these things around the same time. If I hadn't happened to have these thoughts I might have watched both films and read the book without even noticing the connections. Or do you think that book would never have been in that store and the films never scheduled to run on those channels, if I had not come to think of these things? Now, that's just silly, reality doesn't work that way.

Things like this happens all the time. Why is it supernatural? And if it IS supernatural, then please explain, IN DETAIL, what kind of supernatural power it is that is at play here? Don't just say it's supernatural, explain WHAT the supernatural consists of here!

So, because the possibilities are -- in your opinion -- endless, you figure it must be just a coincidence? You might want to read Carl Jung's book "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.

Uhhh.. yes! partly because of that, yes.

And now Jung? So, Jung says so, and then it's true? Jung's ideas about Synchronicity is hardly scientifically valid.

OK, now, would you answer some of my questions?

How do you define 'coincidence'?
Why is it supernatural?
What kind of supernatural is it? How does it work? What does it mean? And so on. You can not give me too much details here!
What's your proof?

 

[Cuddles]

There's plenty of evidence: Ganzfeld experiments, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, Edgar Cayce, and many well-documented anecdotes, such as Lincoln's dream of his death.

Man, I was worried for a bit. Rodney posting in a thread and no mention of Cayce until the second page.

I do love that your best evidence consists of some experiments that no-one considers valid, PEAR, which shut down because they didn't get any results, Cayce, who, as Fran says, was utterly nuts, and a few anecdotes, the only one of which you actually provide is not actually true.

 

[eir_de_scania]

One more page and he will start telling us The Truth about pyramid construction.

 

[Cainkane1]

I have a set of coincidences. My cousins found a rhesus monkey in the woods. They captured it and called animal control. Their last names are Love. The next day I saw in the newspaper where someone else had captured a rhesus monkey. Their name was Love but they are unrelated to my cousins. Not too long afterward I was reading "The Saturday Evening Post" when I came to the amazing coincidences section. It said that two familys had found rhesus monkeys in the woods and that their last name was Love. They were unrelated to each other and the article was not about either my cousins or the other kids named Love. Different Loves altogether.

 

[-Fran-]

One more page and he will start telling us The Truth about pyramid construction.

No no .. not the pyramids

 

[-Fran-]

I have a set of coincidences. My cousins found a rhesus monkey in the woods. They captured it and called animal control. Their last names are Love. The next day I saw in the newspaper where someone else had captured a rhesus monkey. Their name was Love but they are unrelated to my cousins. Not too long afterward I was reading "The Saturday Evening Post" when I came to the amazing coincidences section. It said that two familys had found rhesus monkeys in the woods and that their last name was Love. They were unrelated to each other and the article was not about either my cousins or the other kids named Love. Different Loves altogether.

Four sets of Loves, all catches monkeys?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

So? Why would a series of coincidences be any more supernatural than a single one? Exactly what is it that you want to show with this example? Why would this make me believe in the supernatural? I don't get it?

<snip>
Things like this happens all the time. Why is it supernatural? And if it IS supernatural, then please explain, IN DETAIL, what kind of supernatural power it is that is at play here? Don't just say it's supernatural, explain WHAT the supernatural consists of here!

Fran, you've answered Rodney with patience and clear language. I commend you!

(By the way, I am still in love with you!)

Rodney, saying something is "just a coincidence" is an explanation. Please read the essay on the law of truly large numbers. Invoking the supernatural is NOT any kind of explanation because it raises more questions than it purports to answer.

 

[-Fran-]

Fran, you've answered Rodney with patience and clear language. I commend you!

Thank you
Looks more patient in writing than I felt writing it. It does sometimes feels very much like the proverbial head hitting the proverbial wall discussing things with some people

(By the way, I am still in love with you!)

Still intent on making me blush, I see

By the way, is that you breathing fire there on your avatar?

Rodney, saying something is "just a coincidence" is an explanation. Please read the essay on the law of truly large numbers. Invoking the supernatural is NOT any kind of explanation because it raises more questions than it purports to answer.

Thanks. I think you just very elegantly compressed in these few words what I've been trying to say in all my long blabbering posts to Rodney

 

[Rodney]

The examples you mention here does not aid you in convincing me, you know, or most people around here, I suspect.

http://skepdic.com/ganzfeld.html
These studies were peppered with problems and hardly proves anything, really.

The same goes for
http://skepdic.com/pear.html

Let me give you just one example of skepdic.com's logic:

"According to Dean Radin, the criticism that there 'was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment...was tested and found to be groundless' (Radin 1997: 221). His source for this claim is a 1991 article by Jahn et al. in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, 'Count population profiles in engineering anomalies experiments' (5:205-32). However, Jahn gives the data for his experiments in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 352-353). McCrone has done the calculations and found that 'If [operator 10's] figures are taken out of the data pool, scoring in the 'low intention' condition falls to chance while 'high intention' scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results." According to McCrone, the 'size of the effect is about .1 percent, meaning that for every thousand electronic tosses, the random event generator is producing about one more head or tail than it should by chance alone' (McCrone 1994).

"These data should remind us that statistical significance does not imply importance."

Do you agree with skepdic.com that, if results are statistically significant, they can be dismissed as unimportant?

And Edgar Cayce... Please... he was as nutty as they come

Skeptics should get their story straight about Cayce. Some say he was nutty, others say he was a fraud, others that he was unconsciously repeating what he had read. Kind of makes you wonder if skeptics know what they're talking about, no?

Lastly, anecdotes, no matter how well documented, are not proof of anything other than that one person spoke and another heard it!

That's the dodge skeptics use when they can't refute a well-documented anecdote -- it's easier to do that than to confront the facts.

OK, no evidence here. You want to try again?

First, I'd like to hear your views on statistical significance.

So? Why would a series of coincidences be any more supernatural than a single one? Exactly what is it that you want to show with this example? Why would this make me believe in the supernatural? I don't get it?

So I take it that no series of coincidences -- no matter how unlikely -- would cause you to believe in the paranormal?

Something similar actually did happen to me once. I thought it was funny, but didn't think anything more of it.

I had recently finished reading the trilogy of the biblical Joseph by the German author Thomas Mann, and was looking him up on the net to see if he had written any other interesting books. I found out he had written 'Death in Venice' and made a mental note to read it some time.

The next day my mom was going to an antiquarian shop and asked if I wanted to go along, which I did. And as soon as I walked through the door I saw it, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, so I bought it. It's a thin book so I finished reading it the same day, and as I laid it down I was thinking that it would be fun to watch the film as well. I knew there was a film made.

A few hours later I was lazily flipping through the channels on the TV and suddenly found myself looking at... yes, you guessed it right, the 1971 film Death in Venice by director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde.

Now, for the ones who doesn't know this story, it's about an older man falling for a teenage boy, and the film is rather boring actually. Bogarde is basically following the boy around Venice, admiring his beauty from afar, never even speaking to the boy, that's all, and then he dies sitting in a sun chair at the beach. Well, the actor who played the beautiful boy was a Swedish guy called Björn Andrésen who after this film got rather famous for his looks and pretty much nothing else, and it made me wonder what Andrésen would look like today. I looked him up on the Internet and he had only made a few films later in life. Thus I was pretty surprised when I, the very next day, as I was again flipping through channels, stumbled upon one of these films.

Coincidence after coincidence as you can see... It was like, as soon as I wanted to know something that had a connection to this book, the answer was served to me. So, was there anything supernatural about this then? No it wasn't. Those films would have been shown, the book would have been sold at the book shop and so on, regardless of my curiousity about this book, films and actors. It just became a series of coincidences because I was thinking about these things around the same time. If I hadn't happened to have these thoughts I might have watched both films and read the book without even noticing the connections. Or do you think that book would never have been in that store and the films never scheduled to run on those channels, if I had not come to think of these things? Now, that's just silly, reality doesn't work that way.

Things like this happens all the time. Why is it supernatural? And if it IS supernatural, then please explain, IN DETAIL, what kind of supernatural power it is that is at play here? Don't just say it's supernatural, explain WHAT the supernatural consists of here!

Lots of possibilities, but most likely a form of unconscious telepathy.

Uhhh.. yes! partly because of that, yes.

And now Jung? So, Jung says so, and then it's true? Jung's ideas about Synchronicity is hardly scientifically valid.

OK, now, would you answer some of my questions?

How do you define 'coincidence'?
Why is it supernatural?
What kind of supernatural is it? How does it work? What does it mean? And so on. You can not give me too much details here!
What's your proof?

Not all coincidences are paranormal, but some are so astounding as to realistically be beyond what could realistically be expected to occur. What I suggest is that you keep a daily log of events and periodically evaluate whether all of your coincidences can be readily explained by the laws of probability.

 

[ThatSoundAgain]

First you write this:

Skeptics should get their story straight about Cayce. Some say he was nutty, others say he was a fraud, others that he was unconsciously repeating what he had read. Kind of makes you wonder if skeptics know what they're talking about, no?

Demanding that "skeptics" (a large group) get their story straight and agree unanimously how to explain a lifetime accumulation of anecdotes from a well-publicised "medium".

Then, in the same post, you write this:

Things like this happens all the time. Why is it supernatural? And if it IS supernatural, then please explain, IN DETAIL, what kind of supernatural power it is that is at play here? Don't just say it's supernatural, explain WHAT the supernatural consists of here!

Lots of possibilities, but most likely a form of unconscious telepathy.

So you, a single person, commenting on a single anecdote, get to hand-wave a very direct question away?

Careful. Your double standard is showing.

So I take it that no series of coincidences -- no matter how unlikely -- would cause you to believe in the paranormal?

Not to answer for Fran, but yes, that's right. Until some hypothesis, other than "anything is possible" has been put forth, I will interpret the stories presented here, as coincidences.

It's very simple - show me that another explanation is not only imaginable, but necessary.

 

[Cuddles]

Skeptics should get their story straight about Cayce. Some say he was nutty, others say he was a fraud, others that he was unconsciously repeating what he had read. Kind of makes you wonder if skeptics know what they're talking about, no?

Nope. Those explanations are not mutually exclusive. In any case, expecting us to all agree on the motivation behind his nonsense is a bit silly really. All sane people agree it was nonsense, they just might disagree on why he kept spouting it. On the other hand, it would make we wonder if you know what you are talking about if it wasn't perfectly obvious that you don't.

That's the dodge skeptics use when they can't refute a well-documented anecdote -- it's easier to do that than to confront the facts.

There's no such thing a refuting an anecdote. An anecdote is not a fact and it never will be. There is no need for us to dodge anything. If you want us to confront the facts then please provide facts and not anecdotes.

Lots of possibilities, but most likely a form of unconscious telepathy.

Most likey? Well, at least you made me giggle.

Not all coincidences are paranormal, but some are so astounding as to realistically be beyond what could realistically be expected to occur. What I suggest is that you keep a daily log of events and periodically evaluate whether all of your coincidences can be readily explained by the laws of probability.

Ah, the old arguments from ignorance and personal incredulity. Is that all?

Edit: Actually, don't bother replying. If anyone wants to see Rodney try to wriggle and squirm away from a rather severe whomping they can do so here.

 

[fls]

Let me give you just one example of skepdic.com's logic:

"According to Dean Radin, the criticism that there 'was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment...was tested and found to be groundless' (Radin 1997: 221). His source for this claim is a 1991 article by Jahn et al. in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, 'Count population profiles in engineering anomalies experiments' (5:205-32). However, Jahn gives the data for his experiments in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 352-353). McCrone has done the calculations and found that 'If [operator 10's] figures are taken out of the data pool, scoring in the 'low intention' condition falls to chance while 'high intention' scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results." According to McCrone, the 'size of the effect is about .1 percent, meaning that for every thousand electronic tosses, the random event generator is producing about one more head or tail than it should by chance alone' (McCrone 1994).

"These data should remind us that statistical significance does not imply importance."

Do you agree with skepdic.com that, if results are statistically significant, they can be dismissed as unimportant?

There are a couple of things to consider here. First of all (I realize that I am repeating myself), "statistical significance" is not a measure of the truth of an idea. So dismissing a statistically significant result does not mean that you are dismissing an idea that might be true. I have already explained to you numerous times why this is the case.

Second (I realize that this is also a repeat), bias (a tendency to create measurements in a particular direction that is not representative of the population under study) is very difficult to eliminate completely. What we can do reasonably successfully is eliminate most sources of bias, so that we can say at the end "any source of bias, if present, would have to be miniscule and therefore cannot account for an effect of this size". However, the effect that we are talking about for PEAR is miniscule. Which means that it would be very easy for any residual bias in the experiment to completely account for the effect.

You have to remember that this data was based on a machine that was supposedly able to generate random numbers. Over the years, various ways have been developed to simulate the process of generating random numbers and we test whether or not they are successful using a Goodness of Fit test. However, these tests are fairly crude and will miss moderate deviations from true randomness. What the researchers did was make a machine, do a rough test to see if it was grossly different from true randomness (no), generate millions of outputs, and then apply an especially sensitive test to see if those outputs were different from true randomness (yes). All they really proved is that their machine was not a perfect random number generator. But what they (and you) wanted to conclude was that it was not perfect because of the existence of psi. What skeptics point out is that maybe it just wasn't perfect because machines are rarely (if ever) perfect.

So I agree with Skepdic that one should favour highly probable events as a explanation over highly improbable events.

Skeptics should get their story straight about Cayce. Some say he was nutty, others say he was a fraud, others that he was unconsciously repeating what he had read. Kind of makes you wonder if skeptics know what they're talking about, no?

To say that an elephant has a trunk does not mean that the one who says he has a tail is wrong.

That's the dodge skeptics use when they can't refute a well-documented anecdote -- it's easier to do that than to confront the facts.

The first mistake you make is in considering the anecdote well-documented.

So I take it that no series of coincidences -- no matter how unlikely -- would cause you to believe in the paranormal?

Unlikely events are supposed to occur under normal circumstances. I'm not sure how a normal event is supposed to be evidence of something not normal.

However, I do think extremely improbable events would give us (skeptics) pause - in particular if someone was able to replicate a highly improbable event (e.g. dreaming of the winning lottery numbers for a specific lottery). What I consistently find from those who believe in the paranormal is that they do a very poor job of understanding the probability of an event.

Lots of possibilities, but most likely a form of unconscious telepathy.

I think it's unicorns, myself.

Not all coincidences are paranormal, but some are so astounding as to realistically be beyond what could realistically be expected to occur.

From what I have seen, you have a very poor understanding of what could realistically be expected to occur.

What I suggest is that you keep a daily log of events and periodically evaluate whether all of your coincidences can be readily explained by the laws of probability.

I think you should do the same, but actually make a serious effort to understand the probability behind those events you see as astounding. Seriously. It is far more amazing and enlightening than defaulting to a "mystery force" as an explanation.

Linda

 

[-Fran-]

Thanks, fls, Cuddles, and ThatSoundAgain for writing such good replies to Rodney, while I had my beauty sleep I have nothing of value to add really, but I will reply anyway, since it was addressed to me and all.

Let me give you just one example of skepdic.com's logic:

(snip)

"These data should remind us that statistical significance does not imply importance."

Do you agree with skepdic.com that, if results are statistically significant, they can be dismissed as unimportant?

I don't think that alone is a proof of the paranormal, no.

Besides, I linked to skepdic.com because it was one of the first links that showed up googling the experiments you mentioned. This is not really PEAR versus skepdic.com, you know. More like 'these experiments versus pretty much the whole of the scientific world'. There's a lot of search results on google with criticism of these experiments. Maybe I should have provided more links.

Skeptics should get their story straight about Cayce. Some say he was nutty, others say he was a fraud, others that he was unconsciously repeating what he had read. Kind of makes you wonder if skeptics know what they're talking about, no?

Yeah, so one skeptic discovered one aspect of Cayce, another discovered another aspect of him, and a third yet another... So?

That's the dodge skeptics use when they can't refute a well-documented anecdote -- it's easier to do that than to confront the facts.

The fact is that an anecdote is an anecdote is an anecdote... and not a proof of anything.

First, I'd like to hear your views on statistical significance.

Yeah, it's the rule of this game, I've come to realize. You want to hear my views on things, and stupid me answers to all your questions at the best of my ability, while you ignore all or most of my questions *sigh*

I think that statistical significance can be significant but does not have to be proof of something in itself and as an isolated event.

So I take it that no series of coincidences -- no matter how unlikely -- would cause you to believe in the paranormal?

D'UH. How many times do I have to answer this?

And it all comes down to that we have very different ideas about what is unlikely here!

Lots of possibilities, but most likely a form of unconscious telepathy.

fls is of the opinion that it is unicorns. Myself I have always liked leprechauns. Myself I absolutely want it to be leprechauns. So, I guess now it is

Not all coincidences are paranormal, but some are so astounding as to realistically be beyond what could realistically be expected to occur.

Yes, that is what an awed mind usually think until it learns more about it.

What I suggest is that you keep a daily log of events and periodically evaluate whether all of your coincidences can be readily explained by the laws of probability.

Yeah, uh, I don't have time for that. If you have the time, I suggest you do it yourself, and then read up on the things that others here have suggested. Again, it all comes down to what you can expect from reality. Many people underestimate and misunderstand what you can expect to a rather high degree, it seems.

I do too, sometimes. Yeah, I am really stupid sometimes . The difference seems to be that I realize that I can be stupid, and recognize when I have most likely jumped to the wrong conclusions, and then I try to find out more, before I say something in public that will make me look like a fool. Sometimes, I don't succeed in this, and do say foolish things in public, but then I can always count on people that knows more than me to correct me, and then I feel pretty foolish and embarrassed for a while, but then I learn from it and end up feeling much better! (sorry for the run-on sentences )