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Perdicting Earthquakes

Drew599

New Blood
D
Joined
Feb 9, 2007
Messages
22
I've been reading posts on this site for a couple months now and I can understand why most of the people on this forum feel that people that can predict future events, talk with the dead or whatever it may be are lying. I'm sure that a good portion of them are either crazy or just looking for attention.

But over the last couple years I've felt that things were going to happen and they did. Some are small and some are big events. Some are things that happen that day and others a month or longer out. The thing I want to talk about is back in late July I felt that there was going to be an earthquake out here in California...I know what a big shocker with a state that seems to be riddeled with fault lines. But when I sat down and tried to get some information about something, anything that might happen, like an earthquake I came up with a date of Aug 18th. So I wrote this date on my calender and talked to a few people about it, like my family. I also felt that it was going to be a greater that 4.0 magnitude, something that doesn't happen too often.

About two weeks before the date I sat down again to see if I could get anymore information about this earthquake that might or might not happen. I came up with no specific location, which is what I really wanted. But I did come up with a time of 4:42. At the time I had no idea if it was AM or PM. I felt so strongly that this earthquake was going to happen that a couple days before the date was about to roll around I took all of my things down off of the shelves around my place so they wouldn't fall. The 18th of Aug came and went...nothing happened. So I figured that I must have been making it up in my mind what I was feeling. But the next morning at 4:41;48 there was a 5.0 earthquake in Northern California.

Now I would like to know what are the chances that I would be able to "guess" that there would be an earthquake over a month away from the date I thought it was going to happen. Let me correct myself, I perdicted it almost exactly one day off. I consider myself to be a fairly logical person and I've been trying to figure out how I could have gotten this information.

So what are the chances is what I'm asking?
 
Drew,
This is a mercy-post. I'm sure it's rather depressing to post what you feel is an earth-shattering story and get absolutely no response.

If you're correct and it really happened, obviously the chances are 1:1 or 100%. But this sort of anecdotal tale is far too common 'round these parts.

Now, if you were to tell us today when the next earthquake in the world is going to be, the hour and minute and day, and were to miss by a mere calendar day, we'd have some form of documentation. As it is, all you've got is a wow-isn't-that-freaky story. All of us have met someone who has something similar, but they don't stand up to scrutiny.

This is a skeptics' forum. We're not going to accept your word (not even if you get your mom and friends to write into the forum), but will demand evidence.
 
Drew599 said:
...I came up with a date of Aug 18th. .... I also felt that it was going to be a greater that 4.0 magnitude, something that doesn't happen too often.
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Of the 3720 quakes registered in 2006 for California, 32 were 4.0 or above. ( http://www.ncedc.org/ http://www.scec.org )

That's one a month. What are your parameters for saying that this "doesn't happen too often"?

...I came up with no specific location...But I did come up with a time of 4:42. At the time I had no idea if it was AM or PM. ...The 18th of Aug came and went...nothing happened. ...But the next morning at 4:41;48 there was a 5.0 earthquake in Northern California.
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Where did you get this information? The data list at http://www.ncedc.org/cgi-bin/catalog-search2.pl only lists one Mag 5.0 earthquake for NCal for 2006 - and that occurred on the 19th July.
Now I would like to know what are the chances that I would be able to "guess" that there would be an earthquake over a month away from the date I thought it was going to happen. Let me correct myself, I perdicted it almost exactly one day off. I consider myself to be a fairly logical person and I've been trying to figure out how I could have gotten this information.

So what are the chances is what I'm asking?
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Call it 1 Mag 4+ per month. Offhand you're chances of picking the date are 1 in 30, since you were out by 24 hours, your chances of picking the day give or take 24 hours is 3 in 30 - 0r 10%.

Fairly good odds of you getting close merely by chance guesses.
Now if you were to do it consistently, rather than just this "once off", perhaps you'd start to get excited about it - but again, you'd have better chance of convincing others if your predictions were before the fact and not post-fact rationalisation (my take on it).
 
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Drew,

As EHocking points out, earthquakes happen all the time... so the chances of you being "right" some of the time are pretty good.

I suggest you start a journal if you really want to see if there is something to it. If you could really predict 4+ within +/- 24 hours, then that would be something... not necessarily paranormal though.... but an extraordinary ability.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/
 
DangerousBeliefs said:
I suggest you start a journal if you really want to see if there is something to it. If you could really predict 4+ within +/- 24 hours, then that would be something... not necessarily paranormal though.... but an extraordinary ability.
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I second that. I also recommend you check out the article on Confirmation Bias at the Skeptic Wiki. Keeping a diary is an excellent tool to guard against it.

SkepticWiki said:
Confirmation bias, also known as "counting the hits and ignoring the misses," refers to the tendency of people to look for observations that confirm a particular belief, while ignoring, downplaying, or dismissing observations that would serve to contradict it. This is an invalid form of Inductive Reasoning.
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I do keep a journal and this is documented in it. Also I still have all the emails that I've sent to my family concerning the matter. The way I see it if I'm able to just sit down one day and pull a date and later on a time of when an earthquake of greater the average magnitude is going to happen then, to me, this would be strong proof of precognition. Of course it isn't rock solid proof and there is a chance that I could have guessed this date. Its not like I predict all these things happening so I can be right on some of them. This was the only big event that I had tried to get in over 6 months. I've been wrong on one date that I thought something was going to happen. But so far my average is 50%. It would be a little higher but I don't count predictions where I'm a couple days off.

I get all my earthquake info from the USGS website.
 
In addition to keeping a journal, Drew, why don't you post your perdictions here? That way you will have a time-stamped record with lots of witnesses.

Since there are almost three 4.0 or higher earthquakes in California each month (on average) if you tell us when the next one will be, we won't have to too wait long to know if you are correct.
 
I second Tricky's suggestion.
If you are sincere and open about this, as you appear to be, we can treat the record as an experimental log. If your success record is better than chance, we will all be fascinated. We would expect that after a few weeks , a pattern of chance success and failure will develop. And watching how that happens could be equally fascinating.

How you classify the predictions might be important. You say you reject "hits" that are more than a day or two off for instance: that time bracket might be appropriate for a major earthquake, but for something like a road traffic accident which happens pretty much daily, you might feel even a few hours off would be a failure.

It could be very educational to keep a detailed log open to analysis by sceptics- and I mean for everyone, not just for you.
Just post your predictions here with any data you feel important on how you made the prediction , what you felt like at the time, how confident you feel about it. There may be no psychic reason for your predictions- but there might be a real psychological pattern to them that detailed records would pick out.
While I do not believe in precognition, I'm pretty sure most honest believers in such effects are experiencing a real , subconscious process whereby certain ideas grab their conscious attention for various reasons and assume higher apparent significance than they would otherwise assign them.
I urge you to give it a try.
 
I'd like to see you post your perdictions here too.

Oh, as an off-topic suggestion: If you use firefox as your web browser, you can get this neat little add-on that will highlight any spelling errors you make in your posts and allow you to right-clk them and replace with the correct spelling. It saves all that nasty waste of time business of having to spell-check your posts.
 
I do have some dates that I pulled out of my head a couple months ago. But I'm not sure what it is that's suppose to happen. Doesn't feel like an earthquake. For whatever reason it feels as if the next date coming up will be a lead in to another event happening on a date almost a month away from that one. I'm a little leary about posting the date here. Not like it really means much if I don't have an event to go with it. But here it is...March 21st and then April 19th. I got these dates a little over 3 months ago. So if they do happen I'm really interested to see how off I might be because the last prediction I made that was a month out was off by 24 hours.

I know the people on this forum are going to tear this apart because I don't have an event to go with this dates. But you asked so I'm telling you. If I have an idea of what it is before it happens I'll post it here so there's a record of it.
 
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Drew, I wonder. Are you going to claim any event happening around the dates you posted as evidence that you perdicted the event?

ETA ah..sorry about the above 'perdicted'. I now see that you have run a spellchecker.
 
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I think you misunderstood what I was saying, but no matter, it seems you are going to try to name an event or events to go with your dates. That's good Drew.

Don't worry about being torn apart here, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. What will probably happen, if you are wrong with your predictions, is that the good people here will try to help you understand why it is that you think you could predict things. In the long run, if you stick with us and keep an open mind, you'll find that you will start to understand more and more about how the human mind works and how people's perceptions are the way they are.

You've taken a good first step here and I'm sure your time on this board will be productive.
 
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Drew599 said:
I know the people on this forum are going to tear this apart because I don't have an event to go with this dates. But you asked so I'm telling you. If I have an idea of what it is before it happens I'll post it here so there's a record of it.
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Thank you for being honest and open Drew. I have marked my calendar for those dates, along with a link to your post - we'll see if anything happens.

And please, follow-up as much as you like!
 
Drew599 said:
I'm going to try. I know it won't count if I don't.
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What Reno said.

If you are genuine on this, you will find people here that are quite happy to run the numbers for you.

Drew. If you are genuine on this, we will treat you genuinely. You need to give us the benefit of the doubt as much as the respondents so far are giving you that same "leap of faith".

Expect hard core scepticism, but counter that with honest projection of your beliefs/feelings and you'll get an honest appraisal of your potential and your results.

Note that you are not alone in your beliefs and that historically they have not really held up to critical interrogation, but I've been here long enough to know that at least you will be given a fair hearing.

Be prepared for VERY intense analysis of your assumptions, and be prepared to grow a thick skin very quickly.

The respondents so far will in fact be lenient on you as long as you are reasonable. You'd be surprised how much they want to help, rather than "debunk".
 
EHocking, I already have thick skin dealing with stuff like this as some of my friends and family don't believe me. So if it isn't precognition than what is it. Some of you seem to talk like you have the answer and that its in the human mind.
 
Some of us do already have the answer Drew, more than one answer actually, but I personally would rather help you work it out yourself than tell you. Let's wait for your prediction dates to pass and see what happens, eh?
 
Drew599 said:
EHocking, I already have thick skin dealing with stuff like this as some of my friends and family don't believe me. So if it isn't precognition than what is it. Some of you seem to talk like you have the answer and that its in the human mind.
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Again, I can only echo Reno.

I'll crunch numbers for you to help you form a case for/against your belief.

I'm impartial on number crunching - so on that score... Can you give us the detail of the questions I posed in my first post? There are some basic stuff that needs qualifying before we attempt quantifying.

As I said. if you're genuine on your request, I'm more than happy to genuinely follow up with analysing numbers to help you determine if you have a talent here.
 
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