Originally Posted by
mickeycrimm
In the past Coach has made assertions that he believes 98% video poker can be beaten.
And "Rob Singer" has done the same...about a thousand times. Of course, that was only cover for his AP play. And of course, five years from now, we may learn that his double up bug claim with the systems cover story was really a cover story for a better system that was so good he had to use the double up bug claim to hide the fact that his secret system was so much better than his various publicly reported systems. And I need to watch Victor/Victoria again so I can keep up.
But back to coach. People making paranormal claims often use coach's posting style. Let me explain. Paranormal claimants rarely, if ever, actually venture into the math itself. Their claims rarely crunch numbers unless it's to ask rhetorically how many sessions would be required to hit a "long term" that would squeeze claims into a well nigh impossible category. Instead, they argue that all things are possible, with "possible" somehow translating into, "How dare you impugn my integrity by suggesting I'm lying about a 1 in 1000 claim?" So what paranormal claimants offer are "philosophies of math" rather than math itself. If something isn't impossible, then it becomes, rhetorically at least, possible, and instead of presenting, "There's a 99.9% chance of this" versus "There's a .1% chance of that" the entire presentation becomes one of impossible on one side and possible on the other. "Possible" becomes the "good guy," the side of truth and justice and human abilities and the human spirit with a dose of discipline and family values conquering the profane math and so on. "Singer" has, of course, spouted these things on many occasions. In gambling, "possible" also implies that no matter what beatings one has privately taken from negative games, one can keep playing with the hope of turning it all around.
Thus, stone cold impossible becomes ruled out. In the meantime, the possible (and also extremely unlikely) is not consistently tagged with math. So no consistent math references with math used adjectivally, as in .1% chance of this or .003% chance of that. Instead, the emphasis is on the verbiage of "possible."
The entire debate swivels away from probability and into the realm of morality and philosophy. Calling someone a liar becomes reason for pistols at dawn, rather than the sheer improbability of an event becoming reason to define someone as delusional. Instead of highly probabilistically unlikely claims requiring high standards of proof, the claims are considered testament and proof in themselves to the reality.
It's an old claimant presentation style, and what never, ever happens is that the claimant passes any rigorous mathematical test. So people who claim to have done something, when tested, inevitably fail, even though the mathematical possibility exists that they could succeed. The mathematical possibility also exists that they had reported reality -- they were just experiencing one of those once-in-a-lifetime streaks. But somehow, when the spotlight is on them, their abilities become "shy," to use a term from paranormal research, and their abilities fade into the realm of anecdotal history.
Usually, they know how it will all end, so they delay having that spotlight on them as long as possible, creating hoops and drawbacks and delays, all while sucking up the attention and publicity inherent in announcements of spotlight proceedings without ever actually stepping into it.
It's an old style. No adjectival math attached to claims, very few specific math references at all, everything is about defining things as "possible" as opposed to "probable," and evading the testing spotlight like the chicken being chased by Rocky Balboa.
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