As I suggested in 'serious synchronicities'
meaningful [synchronicities] tend to come in meteoric showers scintillating and hinting at half-seen connections as though a woven fabric of intent pervades everything.
I wonder what is the meaning of these wonderful synchronicities we've been having in this thread. I think the meaning which Mr Explanatory Anthropomorphism has been sending us with increasing emphasis is "It's over before it's begun".
The theme of the experiments at SR was the question of whether dreaming together is real, and as we have seen, the question was answered magnificently.
If there's something to the idea that people can dream together, there's gonna be some sign of it.
There was, by the way, another forum-wide experiment at SR (about three years later, I think in 2007) which also had a serious theme, on the question of collusion (which means 'playing together').
I will look for some details about that as it fits very well into this theme-oriented way of looking at these experiments.
But first I'd like to continue straight on and ask, what is the theme of the experiments in this thread? Well, can I put it in the nicest possible way and say that this thread seems to be just for fun. There are no serious skeptics here, we are all kind of OK with the idea of statistical normality being blown out of the water and not being much bothered by it. So why are we doing this?
Mr EA might well have been asking the exact same question. All over the world there are presumably groups of people continually asking serious questions about the paranormal, and now along comes this group at f4 and does it for fun.
I would think that the intent of the universe is not going to want to hang around crafting exquisite synchronicities as the experiments proceed.
The best we might hope for in such a case, I suggest, would be if a junior sprite were to condescend to bonk each experiment on the head with a serious synchronicity when it has barely got started, or even
before it has got started, then moving swiftly away to more serious arenas elsewhere in the world.
Let us look again at what happened in Round 1. Previously I gave a very
conservative analysis (in the sense described in post #170). I simply put together all the guesses, and all the targets, and asked how well they match.
But what actually happened is much much more startling. Here it is in more detail:
(1) initial targets 2-30-30-31, initial guesses 2-12-12-40
Outcome: very first guess of very first round correct! What more could anyone ask? Well, the arithmetically curious might go on to observe that all the other guesses were also correct insofar as adding up the digits of each guess against the digits of each corresponding target, but that is really just the icing on the cake, and I ignored it in my previous analysis.
The rational thing to do at this point would have been to declare the experiment and outstanding success and leave it at that. But no! The fun-loving Mr G then made
another guess, forcing Mr X reluctantly to admit that actually there was
another target that he hadn't disclosed the existence of:
(2) fun-loving extra guess 37, hitherto undisclosed extra target 37
Jeepers! Can we go home now? ... No!! Mr G is not a person to be stopped in mid track. He then went on to make
two more guesses, forcing Mr X (who had by now run out of targets) to go back to the target generator and generate another target.
(3) indomitable further guesses 45-14, target
that had not even been generated yet 45
Well that takes the biscuit, for utter statistical abnormality. That should have been enough, or thousands of times more than enough, for any rational person. Why we went on to have another round is a mystery to me, but we did. Or at least we tried to. However, it didn't even get started, as the junior sprite was by now perhaps deciding that it was time to be more inventive.
what is the probability that of the pre emptive dream numbers of g, the "miss x" who was set to pick 3 numbers, picked 2 of those by g. she was very ill when choosing the numbers. which will soon be fixed with antibiotics.
round 2 seems to be broken already.
So did we stop there?
No!
The next round (A, hat) was broken by logical methods before anyone made a guess.
The next round (B, xhosa) was broken before the target had even been selected.
Well, I think this will blow the sweet spot clear out of the water.
And then ... ... ... yet another round! OK, let us look again at Round C.
Broken the moment it got started, by the very next word posted.
Neat reference to the fact that the moniker of the poster is 'translator', hence guess is translated into native language of poster.
A senior sprite would probably refrain from expressing exasperation at the seemingly wilful refusal of the forum to heed its indications that these rounds are being systematically broken, but if a junior sprite were to have muttered a quiet "damn" at this point, and smoehow incorporated it into the guess, it would be quite understandable I think.
