I had an odd experience today. I was humming a particular Grateful Dead song, and when I turned on my XM radio, which starts on the 24 hour Grateful Dead channel, the song they were playing was exactly the one I was humming, and at about the same point in the song.
The non-rational reaction: "Ooo! I'm psychic!"
My reaction: "Wow, I wonder what the probability of that was? Well, lemme think... the Dead have a repertoire of several hundred songs, so that sets an upper limit. I was singing a song by the Dead so it has a much higher chance of turning up on that channel than on any other. Also, this is one of their more popular cuts among Deadheads, so it probably has a slightly higher chance of being played than any other song. And it's one of their own songs and not a cover. So we'll say it's in the top 50, and it's been in regular rotation since 1973, so it got a lot of concert play. It's about seven to ten minutes long in concert, and the coda is an extended jam and a significant proportion of the song."
Practical upshot: I'm not psychic, it was small odds but even taking the whole repertoire into account, if I picked a random song I'd hit more often than one in a thousand. Taking into account hitting roughly the same part of the song, it's still no more than one in a thousand, thereabouts, and since it was a popular song that stayed in the repertoire for 22 years, the probability is probably considerably better than that.
And I got to start my day with a smile. :D
EDIT: I found the numbers I was looking for: the total number of songs played by the Dead in concert, and the total number of times each song was played. From 1965-1995, 436 different songs were played; 37318 individual song performances total. The song I was singing to myself was played 269 times, for a raw chance of 0.72% of guessing the song right; estimating where I was in the song and having it come in around then, say 0.25% -- one in four hundred. Granted, it doesn't take into account that the station also plays solo works and studio cuts, but adding those in does not make the odds astronomical considering concert play is the band's meat and potatoes. I'm sure they're still well under one in a thousand.
Not bad for a ballpark guess!
I wonder what the odds are that you're psychic? I could be your manager. Atheist Psychic = $$$$$
Quote from: Goon on April 25, 2015, 08:02:09 PM
I wonder what the odds are that you're psychic? I could be your manager. Atheist Psychic = $$$$$
You know, if I weren't a good and moral atheist with a well-developed sense of right and wrong honed on the whetstone of logic and reason... I'd be well and truly up for fleecing the gullible. :D
I find that oddly amusing that you would post this as a couple days ago a similar thing happened to me and I was going to mention it but I also realized that over my life it has happened many times, at least 4 that I can actually put a relative time too, so it happens a little more than you think. And I am pretty sure I am not psychic.
There are people I've met who honestly think I'm psychic. When I explain that I'm just very observant and that anyone could have noticed what I did, they don't believe me. Yes, there are people who actually prefer to believe I have special powers rather than a set of skills I could easily teach them.
Quote from: aitm on April 25, 2015, 09:33:51 PM
I find that oddly amusing that you would post this as a couple days ago a similar thing happened to me and I was going to mention it but I also realized that over my life it has happened many times, at least 4 that I can actually put a relative time too, so it happens a little more than you think. And I am pretty sure I am not psychic.
That's kinda the whole point -- these things
do happen more than you think, and when you do the math, they're not as uncommon as one thinks.
I can do no better here than to refer to The Infinite Monkey Cage from BBC Radio 4, and their episode on Randomness, Probability and Chance (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/timc/timc_20101129-1700a.mp3), with guests Tim Minchin and Alex Bellos.
Quote from: trdsf on April 25, 2015, 02:09:44 AM
I had an odd experience today. I was humming a particular Grateful Dead song, and when I turned on my XM radio, which starts on the 24 hour Grateful Dead channel, the song they were playing was exactly the one I was humming, and at about the same point in the song.
The non-rational reaction: "Ooo! I'm psychic!"
Yeah, well what's really weird is that I knew three days ago, that you were going to start this thread.
Quote from: SGOS on April 25, 2015, 10:45:30 PM
Yeah, well what's really weird is that I knew three days ago, that you were going to start this thread.
There was about a 3 in 700 chance you were going to do that, too.
Quote from: trdsf on April 25, 2015, 10:00:39 PM
That's kinda the whole point -- these things do happen more than you think, and when you do the math, they're not as uncommon as one thinks.
I can do no better here than to refer to The Infinite Monkey Cage from BBC Radio 4, and their episode on Randomness, Probability and Chance (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/timc/timc_20101129-1700a.mp3), with guests Tim Minchin and Alex Bellos.
Given the time spent on research, next meshing your research with the math that provided calculations and odds of this happening, is it any wonder some would just say it's voodoo? Or god. Just god. Good on you for not taking the lazy way out. Now, about next weeks lottery..........?
People get all goose bumpily when they watch these TV specials where they find three sets of twin who were separated at birth but married other twins with the same names and lived in the same town and on and on and on and the idiots buy into this being some type of fucking god ordained miracle when no one, for the fucking sake of common sense point out the millions of twins that have absolutely no type of coincidence in their lives…..because the fucking ODDS are it will happen to x amount of people…….le sigh
Okay, this is getting weird. It happened again today, and the radio was within about a second of where I was in the song. Different song. Odds when I get home. That's two days out of three.
I feel obliged to point out, yes, I know this is all anecdotal evidence to the rest of you, you have no evidence beyond my word that it's happened at all, and yes, I still maintain that I am not psychic, this is just a weird coincidence. Assuming the odds are comparable, it's going to be around one in 160,000. Not even near lottery odds yet.
Quote from: trdsf on April 26, 2015, 04:14:32 PM
Okay, this is getting weird. It happened again today, and the radio was within about a second of where I was in the song. Different song. Odds when I get home. That's two days out of three.
I feel obliged to point out, yes, I know this is all anecdotal evidence to the rest of you, you have no evidence beyond my word that it's happened at all, and yes, I still maintain that I am not psychic, this is just a weird coincidence. Assuming the odds are comparable, it's going to be around one in 160,000. Not even near lottery odds yet.
What the hell are you doing here, telling us this stuff??!! Get you ass to Vegas--right now--bet everything ya got on whatever your brain says to--you are dialed into the universe right now--go for it!!!!
Quote from: Mike Cl on April 26, 2015, 08:09:53 PM
What the hell are you doing here, telling us this stuff??!! Get you ass to Vegas--right now--bet everything ya got on whatever your brain says to--you are dialed into the universe right now--go for it!!!!
I will be picking up some lottery tickets on the way home. Just to keep the unrational part of my brain happy. :D
Funny thing is, last week I dreamed I called a friend at 3.30 in the morning to tell her that I'd just won the MegaMillions draw *and* the state lotto in the same week...
Quote from: trdsf on April 26, 2015, 08:30:58 PM
I will be picking up some lottery tickets on the way home. Just to keep the unrational part of my brain happy. :D
Funny thing is, last week I dreamed I called a friend at 3.30 in the morning to tell her that I'd just won the MegaMillions draw *and* the state lotto in the same week...
What the hell--I'm rootin' for ya.
Are you a musician or good at kareoke? I mean it's not like you are starting at the begining of a song, singing the exact lyrics and tempo and hit right on it, or maybe you are? Also it's not a coincidence that the station you prefer plays the same songs over and over again that they also prefer.
Quote from: TrueStory on April 26, 2015, 10:49:54 PM
Are you a musician or good at kareoke? I mean it's not like you are starting at the begining of a song, singing the exact lyrics and tempo and hit right on it, or maybe you are? Also it's not a coincidence that the station you prefer plays the same songs over and over again that they also prefer.
I am a musician, in fact, and I'm by and large starting at or near the beginning and carrying on. And even though it's a channel dedicated (or Dead-icated) to one band (and their various solo/side projects, so their songs are in the mix, too), it's a band with a
huge repertoire, and I'm catching the concert hour when I tune in, so I'm getting not only the band's original songs, but the covers they've done.
Isn't statistics fun? :D
Okay, I have my concert stats in hand, and the song I nailed today was even more frequently played than the first one. The raw percentage is 0.87% of getting the correct song, although I should imagine that getting as close as I did to being in synch would shrink the odds considerably.
Even so, we're still not in the area of the odds necessary to hit the Powerball, or the MegaMillions. It's probably in the vicinity of the odds of being struck by lightning once in your lifetime (http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/odds.shtml): about 1 in 12000.
I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm outdoors during a storm.
I bought lottery tickets. I expect it to be wasted money. If I hit big, then I will begin to consider the possibility of psychic awareness. But there will need to be laboratory tests and everything. Now where's my old 'Studmuffins of Science' calendar...
Quote from: trdsf on April 28, 2015, 01:05:51 AM
I bought lottery tickets. I expect it to be wasted money. If I hit big, then I will begin to consider the possibility of psychic awareness. But there will need to be laboratory tests and everything. Now where's my old 'Studmuffins of Science' calendar...
And when you get really polished with this skill (for a skill it must surely be) you can take the Skeptics challenge and win that million they offer. The physic dollars will just roll in!!!
I often read while listening to talk radio. Occasionally I will be reading a particular word at the same time someone on the radio uses that word. Usually not such a common word, either. I've never calculated the odds of such a thing, but they can't be too bad, as this happens at least 2 or 3 times a week.
I've never even considered the possibility of psi powers being involved. I'm not psychic, just psychotic.
Predictably, I promptly forgot where I put the lottery tickets. XD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bptjghTNUkE
I was thinking about that episode. :D
It's all just coincidence based on a numbers game of preconceived thoughts at a moment in time. I was thinking about cartoon series I watched years ago (it being tiny toon adventures) and not long after when talking to my old school friend he mentioned the show, and I said that's a funny coincidence. I put it down to the fact we both use to watch the show and so attributed memory on something from both our pasts we happened to be thinking about when thinking about one another, which had more chance of it being that cartoon then something we didn't have in common.
Oh, definitely. And add to that the fact that we tend to remember the unusual incidences and not the unusual ones. I remember the times that I don't match up with my radio now, because I'm going out of my way to keep track, but I'm sure a year, even just six months from now if you asked me how many times I hit and how many times I missed, I could tell you the first but not the last. I like the way Tim Minchin put it when he was on The Infinite Monkey Cage -- "Sure, the chances of any particular thing happening are small, but there are a lot of things happening." And when, by a stroke of statistics, it happens to us, we remember, and we have no reason at all to remember the millions of odd coincidences that don't happen to us because they didn't happen.
Compare Robert Anton Wilson and the 23 enigma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma) -- and after reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy, you will start seeing 23s everywhere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia) (and 17s, but to a lesser extent). We humans are so good at seeing patterns, we even see them where they don't actually exist.