Birdjaguar said:
Present your case. Show us how the null hypothosis applies and why it is sufficient to lable Bozo's dream event as coincidence.
We have already, we've explained why it is the most rational expnation countless, times from a perspective of probability. If you want the reasons simply look back through the thread.
I could bore you with statistical significance, and setting up a null hypothesis and z tests that determine wether there is a significance or that there is no statistical significance, or that a null hypothesis is consistent but I don't want to bore you with the maths.
Suffice to say since we only have 1 anecdotal peice of evidence we can't do this as the data pool is too small and the intangables too large, to do a significant z test we would need at least 30 pieces of data with which to estimate a mean and to have a standard deviation, now if as I suggested way back he took note of every dream he has from now on, and correllates them with real events then maybe we could talk about a test as it is there is no significance to 1 random occurence if weighed merely on the data we are given. Without it we have nothing statistically credible to work with.
What your asking is that we take this singular piece of evidence as a suggestion that it is a prescient event without any other reason to, we simply have to say that the most likely line of reasoning leads us, along with certain probabilities in the scenario, to say that it is most likely coincidence. We do not have enough data to come to any other conclusion.
If we say it is evidence of psychic phenomina, people will inevitably ask what series of events lead us to this conclusion, is Bozo someone who often has such dreams, if so are they accurate, to what degree, how many people also have such dreams and in that pool is there a greater than chance occurence of said events. You see what we have to work with here?
If you were told that an airline was safe because 100 people had flown on 1 flight succesfully you'd say, nonsense right? If someone said that a particular car was safe, because no one had yet crashed in it, but it had only been driven a few hundred times you'd say, yeah right, pull the other one? If someone said, I say that I can read your mind and then told you what you were thinking once, would you say they were psychic? No you'd ask them to do it again. That's all we're asking because otherwise it's just too random to make significant judgements.
This is how probability works, it is the foundation of a framework to investigate any statistical event, without it we're just making guesses and faking reality. I want scientific credibility in paranormal research, just as most credible pranormal researchers do, it's the only way to get science to sit up and take note. Arm waving suggestion should not be taken seriously, because research money is hard to come by, now why this is is the subject of a whole 'nother thread, suffice to say it's not about being blinkered but getting likely positive or negative results not speculations, or yes results that may make a buck sadly.
