The future is influencing our behavior

No, I'm not kidding. Well, at least this guy isn't (and it's not April 1st yet AFAIK)

Quote:

The paper, due to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology before the end of the year, is the culmination of eight years' work by Daryl Bem of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I purposely waited until I thought there was a critical mass that wasn't a statistical fluke," he says.

8 years wasted?

You be the judge.

here

So, anyway, if such a thing were true how would you apply it to betting?

I'm not sure about applying this to betting, but there is no reason to assume that he is wrong just because it doesn't seem logical to you or me. There are many examples to show that our understanding of the nature of reality, the physical universe, history, etc has not been correct. Newton's laws were unquestionably correct and logical until Einstein showed that space-time is curved. Quantum physics has shown particles to be in 2 places at once, and they have even did experiments firing a particle across the room which arrived at the other end before it left. Some Christians believe man has only been around about 6000 years, and mainstream scientists say we evolved from cave-dwellers about 30 or 40 thousand years ago; but I think both are wrong as there is evidence that man has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and even had advanced technology at various times past.

Since more and more evidence is being uncovered that time is NOT linear, nor is it unidirectional (the way we three-dimensional humans perceive it to be), i think that such studies are very valuable. A lot of people will sneer at such work as being "sheer fantasy", but 100 years ago, who would have imagined an instantaneous global communication network, or a bomb the size of a suitcase that could destroy a city? (or robotic arms that could enable a double amputee to shuffle a deck of cards...)

As far as betting goes, I think we've been conducting this experiment for quite some time now, every time someone bets on a future outcome. If there was some kind of resonance from the future back to the present, then logically, overall results for the players would exceed expectation--even if only a small percentage of players were able to perceive that resonance. But players' predictive abilities seem to be no more than what randomness would suggest.

That said, I don't think it's theoretically impossible to perceive the future. Practically, perhaps. But I hesitate to say even that.

The problem with perceiving the immediate future is you would have no idea when you're doing it, so it would be useless.

Quote: EvenBob

The problem with perceiving the immediate future is you would have no idea when you're doing it, so it would be useless.

Not necessarily. Others on this board have mentioned having a "feeling" that they should bet 12 on a craps table (and reported making money).

What a bunch of baloney.

It seems an odd thing to do, but the researcher could be perpetrating a hoax. He wants to go on TV and sell books?

The next step in the Scientific process is to see if anyone else can produce the same results in an independent experiment, and the article already admits this has had one failure, albeit inconclusive due to the "online" factor perhaps. It does look like "dozens" of other proper experiments will be saying yay or nay very soon.

If not a hoaxer, perhaps something in his methodology is not right. I think we gamblers can definitively say we have run trillions of experiments of our own on this, all failing ultimately!

Quote: odiousgambit

It seems an odd thing to do, but the researcher could be perpetrating a hoax. He wants to go on TV and sell books?

The next step in the Scientific process is to see if anyone else can produce the same results in an independent experiment, and the article already admits this has had one failure, albeit inconclusive due to the "online" factor perhaps. It does look like "dozens" of other proper experiments will be saying yay or nay very soon.

If not a hoaxer, perhaps something in his methodology is not right. I think we gamblers can definitively say we have run trillions of experiments of our own on this, all failing ultimately!

Even if it is a hoax, it can provoke some nontraditional thinking, without which many "outlandish" concepts that turned out to be perfectly valid would never have been considered in the first place.

If it is a serious attempt to find out the truth, I applaud it for a similar reason, especially since the experimenter would have to endure hoots, catcalls, and thrown fruit from people who can't conceive of phenomena that may exist outside their realm of perception or belief sphere. I think his data and his premise are probably baseless, but why not let him muck around? There's at least SOME (non-zero) chance that he may uncover some kind of new insight.

Personally, for me time is a perceived dimension. When we make a measurement, we measure coordinates x, y, and z and time t. Quantum mechanics aside you get can't from any one coordinate to any other without passing through the other ones. An object must travel through space to get to another coordinate. The time it takes to get to that coordinate is the velocity, and that velocity is measured in distance / time.

That said, I think it is absolutely impossible for time to transmit "from the future", and I think in the end, some flaw in the experiment will be found.

That's because in my view, the past and future is just a perception to us. Our memory uses the past to remember and takes the lessons we learn to try to predict the future. There really is no past or future. Time is now. We can't rewind time and we can't fast forward it without passing through the points in between. The predictive nature of coordinates is based on the laws of Newton and Einstein which accurately can produce a prediction of where an object will be based on its current passage through space-time.

Quote: boymimbo

Personally, for me time is a perceived dimension. When we make a measurement, we measure coordinates x, y, and z and time t. Quantum mechanics aside you get can't from any one coordinate to any other without passing through the other ones. An object must travel through space to get to another coordinate. The time it takes to get to that coordinate is the velocity, and that velocity is measured in distance / time.

That said, I think it is absolutely impossible for time to transmit "from the future", and I think in the end, some flaw in the experiment will be found.

That's because in my view, the past and future is just a perception to us. Our memory uses the past to remember and takes the lessons we learn to try to predict the future. There really is no past or future. Time is now. We can't rewind time and we can't fast forward it without passing through the points in between. The predictive nature of coordinates is based on the laws of Newton and Einstein which accurately can produce a prediction of where an object will be based on its current passage through space-time.

But if what you're saying is true, we should eventually be able to view what we wrongly call "the future".

Quote: boymimbo

That said, I think it is absolutely impossible for time to transmit "from the future",

The only way it would work is if time is different than we perceive it and the future isn't really the future, but exists already and we don't see it.