Re: screwing the inscrutable

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jul 14 2001 - 03:16:41 MDT


At 12:19 PM 7/13/01 -0400, Eliezer wrote:

>is there a reason why the flaws in the Matrix only appear to groups of a
>few believers and only when the video cameras are turned off?

Could be, and this is an interesting question, but they certainly do seem
to appear when the binary data recorders (well, ternary, actually) are on,
as I said, at PEAR:

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/2.html

=========
In unattended calibrations these sophisticated machines all produce
strictly random outputs, yet the experimental results display increases in
information content that can only be attributed to the influence of the
consciousness of the human operator. Over the laboratory's 20-year
history, thousands of such experiments, involving many millions of trials,
have been performed by several hundred operators. The observed effects
are usually quite small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on
average, but they are statistically repeatable and compound to highly
significant deviations from chance expectations. These results are
summarized in "Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated
Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program." (view PDF)

[ http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/correlations.pdf ]

A number of secondary correlations reveal structural features within these
human/machine databases. In many instances, the effects appear to be
operator-specific in their details and the results of given operators on
widely different machines frequently tend to be similar in character and
scale. Pairs of operators with shared intentions are found to induce
further anomalies in the experimental outputs, especially when the two
individuals share an emotional bond.

================

Could be bullshit, pure and simple, sure. So could the solar neutrino results.

But for heaven's sake don't look at these data.

Damien Broderick



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