Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

What happens to patterns put on to the memory surface is largely determined by the traces left on the surface by previous patterns.

The same situation may appear completely different to two diffetent people because the contours of their memory-surface are such that the selected attention area or sequence of attention is quite different.

If you don't understand gonorrhea, you won't understand politics.

Not even God was satisfied with just creating the world, he had a book written about it...

But God help us if paranoiac, and luckily there's not so many of them, wants to change the world they can't stand.

A simple man will get his full vocabulary back relatively quickly, once he's managed to master the grammar, but woe betide the man who has to relearn all the words from prep school, secondary school and university!

If you have no house, no occupation, you have nothing to lose. You are free to see the oncoming catastrophe.

Are circular dystem effects a good way of thinking about business opportunities. Isn't this akin to Soros's reflexivity?

It means that a pattern does not have to be repeated in exactly the same way for it to be well established.

- 'memory','universe' de Bono obscures his points by his use of imprecise language.

The efficiency of the brain is probably due to its being a bad memory surface.

If photographs are shown to primitive people... - is there any anthropological evidence of this?

The folklore of our culture, told to us when our rationality was still developing, has left an indelible mark on us all.

The school system ideally should teach children about the limitations of their own reasoning, and the propensity for magical thinking in all of us.

It would seem, then, that a "scientific validation of psi" would be a contradiction of terms; if psi exists, science as we know it cannot

...even respectable publishing houses ask only two questions: "Will the book sell?" and "Will I get used?"

In astronomy and geology, one does not have replicability in the sense of being able to set up conditions so as to observe an effect. Yet, in both astronomy and geology, everything is publicly observable.

Unfortunately, psychologists and other social scientists often make many of the same basic errors - and that's before the journalist's get started 😆

The point to be learned to be learned from Newton's demonstration is the people's may be based in part on information that they have unconsciously "collected". - this is intuition, first language acquisition is exactly like this.

Dream telepathy - much more like my experience

One must also show the event does not also occur in [psi's] absence.

...the outcome is INDETERMINABLE although it is not INDETERMINATE

Whenever a large number of subhects and/or trials is used, very small effects can be statistically significant. - this is a result of the arithmetic of significance.

It is not unlikely that during the millions of bridge games played annually around the world, many commencing with fresh decks, someone will make two perfect shuffles.

The point is that statistical evidence is never, of itself "proof" of anything

Had [Galileo] based his "law" on mere observation, he would have observed that rocks and feathers do fall at different rates - Aristotelian vs. Galilean physics.

...if the [parapsychological researcher] ... ignores competing "normal" explanations for whatever he might observe, preferring instead to leap to a 'paranormal' explanation then he is being pseudo-scientific - a missing chapter in this book, the motivation of the parapsychologist. The actual lack of progress could be explained by a lack of interest in naturalising 'supernatural' phenomena

Parapsychology research makes little use of mathematics or logic, which is typical of pseudo-science. This is also true of much of social science.

Flew (1980)...underlined the fact that subjects who come up with 'extrasensory' information are unable to recognise that they are at the moment receiving 'extrasensory' information via their ESP "channel". - I did