Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site oakhill.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!ut-sally!oakhill!davet From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel) Newsgroups: net.religion,net.philosophy,net.physics Subject: Re: Comment about Uri Geller [Long and flame content] Message-ID: <448@oakhill.UUCP> Date: Fri, 7-Jun-85 22:26:30 EDT Article-I.D.: oakhill.448 Posted: Fri Jun 7 22:26:30 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 10-Jun-85 21:18:58 EDT References: <470@nmtvax.UUCP> <1289@amdcad.UUCP> <1899@ut-sally.UUCP> Reply-To: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel) Organization: Motorola Inc. Austin, Tx Lines: 81 Xref: watmath net.religion:7084 net.philosophy:1893 net.physics:2575 In article <5220@ukc.UUCP> ptb@ukc.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE) writes: > ... The trouble >with both the Uri stories is that they're (to us) second or third hand. >We can't really analyse the possibilities. I can look for rational explanations >for the reported events. But I'm bound to suspect that something important is >being missed out from DT's portrayal; something which his friends didn't notice >and which may not be easy to guess at from this distance. ... Indeed, *none* of my friends that were there to this day feel (or have felt) that what happened is absolutely beyond fakery. The more incredible an event is that we witness the harder it is to accept the way we saw it to begin with. (To be precise - one thinks things very likely happened, the others are agnostic on the subject although open to the possibility that it could be genuine. Like I said, these were hard-nosed people - not the psychic true believers Tim had assumed.) As others have mentioned there are many reasons for NOT accepting the geller accounts. Unless one has good evidence to the contrary the assumption should be fraud. > ... But, as far as I'm aware, when films do exist >either nothing happens or magicians detect fraud. I have a images of just such a film where it is quite obvious that a fork is bending. The trouble is any such movie would be easy to fake even without special effect film techniques. Only such a film with reliable witnesses present and experimental conditions given would be worth examining. I am in the process of determining more background on the photos I have. > DT goes on to challenge TM to guess a number (and other things) which DT >has previously guessed. This really is pointless. TM is very likely to be worse >than DT at guessing this particular number, since DT has presumably chosen the >particular incident to be one where his guess was very good. The problem here is that I don't go around guessing future house numbers and trying to do ESP-type stuff. If I did then, as you suggest, my account would be meaningless. What makes it meaningfull is that during that time when I thought it would be fun to guess it is quite unexplainable why the "things" that popped into my mind should have been so accurate. They went far beyond what any amount of luck or coincidence could suggest. Since I have the events so well documented (I wrote things down with times and dates as they occurred) it's a little hard to put it off as misinterpreting things. The only recourse is that I am making the whole thing up, or there is some- thing going on in the universe which needs exploring. I don't see much middle ground. > ... Once DT tells us what actually happened, >we can look at the probabilities. Predictable sceptics like me will demand >that we try and estimate the number of cases where an astonishing coincidence >didn't happen, either to DT or to other people. There are two different types of events to look at. The first is the spontaneous event - "Me and person x happen to meet each other in New York." Here you would have to examine all the events in a persons life to try and determine how significant that event is with the thousands of non-meaningfull events which also occur. The second type is like mine - the times deliberate attempts are made to derive something through paranormal means. Since the number of times I have tried to "pick-up" information has been very few, just one dramatic success far beyond chance still outweighs the others. (However, the others have had their own significances as well.) > If anyone wants a test of their psychic power, they could try guessing >at the sentence I just read. Or anything else they can pick up about me. >The probabilities for this sort of thing are much more debatable than if >I asked for a string of random numbers, but I suspect more people feel able >to guess about words and people than numbers. I promise to report any >surprising successes. This brings up another problem with the whole paranormal thing. You are assuming that psychic power (or whatever is going on) is just turned on at will. In my case, I just had the feeling that I could do it. Why? I don't know. Oddly enough, just two weeks ago was one of those rare times I had "the feeling" that I knew something paranormal. I saw a picture in a magazine of someone and just "knew" that I was looking at a dead person. Sure enough, I found out the next day they were in a hospital and had just died (the next day.) It is very difficult to put any statistical value on how significant an event such as this really is. Dave Trissel {seismo,ihnp4}!ut-sally!oakhill