"...But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is possible to predict the future..." http://www.redorbit.com/news/scienc...vinced_that_man_can_see_the_future/index.html nitro
If you believe in this stuff, how much can trading "talent" be attributed to it? BTW, this is a sub-category of Noetics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noetic nitro
reminds me of when some engineers were concerned about the cold weather during the Challenger launch, but NASA ignored them. The O-rings proved to be the weakness that caused it to explode.
I'm sure there were also a few financial precogs who sensed something amiss with the subprime CDO packages, who were promptly dismissed as quacks and told to be silent or lose their jobs. There were also some great engineering precogs who noticed an alarming number of pintos exploding, of course the brilliant leaders at Ford told them to shut up and keep producing. Sometimes you don't have to be that much of paranormal expert to see these things in foresight or hindsight.
Imagine that I asked you to a play a very simple gambling game. In front of you, are four decks of cards--two red and two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings. What you don't know at the beginning, however, is that the red decks are a minefield. The rewards are high, but when you lose on red, you lose a lot. You can really only win by taking cards from the blue decks, which offer a nice, steady diet of $50 and $100 payoffs. The question is: how long will it take you to figure this out? A group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago, and what they found is that after we've turned over about fifty cards, most of us start to develop a hunch about what's going on. We don't know why we prefer the blue decks. But we're pretty sure, at that point, that they are a better bet. After turning over about eighty cards, most of us have figured the game out, and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea. This much is straightforward. We have some experiences. We think them through. We develop a theory, and then finally we put two and two together. That's the way learning works. But the Iowa scientists did something else, and this is where the strange part of the experiment begins. They hooked each gambler up to a polygraph--a lie detector machine--that measured the activity of the sweat glands that all of us have below the skin in the palms of our hands. Most sweat glands respond to temperature. But those in our palms open up in response to stress--which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous. What the Iowa scientists found is that gamblers started generating stress responses to red decks by the tenth card, forty cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks. More importantly, right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They started favoring the good decks, and taking fewer and fewer cards from A and B. In other words, the gamblers figured the game out before they figured the game out: they began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making. The Iowa study is just an experiment, of course, a simple card game involving a handful of subjects and a polygraph machine. But it's a very powerful illustration of the way our minds work. Here is a situation where the stakes were high, where things were moving quickly, and where the participants had to make sense of a lot of new and confusing information in a very short time--and what does the Iowa experiment tell us? That in those moments our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation. The first is the one we're most familiar with. It's the conscious strategy. We think about what we've learned, and eventually come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards to get there. It's slow. It needs a lot of information. There's a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after ten cards, and it's really smart because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately. It has the drawback, however, that it operates--at least at first--entirely below the surface of consciousness. It sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels, like the sweat glands on the palms of our hands. It's a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it's reaching conclusions.
romANUS thinks Jack Hershey can predict the future: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2056566#post2056566
I dont know - I have a few comments on the 9/11 aspect of this article. People miss flights all the time, so just by sheer statistics there is a chance someone would have missed being on one of those planes or would have changed plans at the last minute. Also: "All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away, but all four?" Its highly probable that planes with a high # of empty seats were purposely picked by hijackers within the days before the attacks, because it is easier for them to control a smaller crowd. This was also at a time when the airlines didn't need to overbook flights because they weren't on the verge of bankruptcy. Ever do exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time? Its mainly chance, plus I'm skeptical because these people are probably looking for some research money.
I am not denying the proposition in the opening post that the future to some small degree can be divined in advance. From time to time in past posts I have pointed out that losing in trading or being a loser is a choice. This is not the supercilious or patronising remark it may seem. Many or most predict their future; they adopt the collection of attitudes and actions that compose failure and disappointment. One of the best parts of this for these many is the process itself of unjustified optimism and a giddy stupidity of anticipating success (in the end and in actuality no more than a sustained fantasy). They want the outcome of failure; they do not want riches which is a place where they have never been and which they only want to dream about but never go to - and never stay.
So if this could be possible to know the future seconds before, and then a person act to change their behavior for a better outcome, ok, then you have changed the future. So if 2 people both are going to the same destination in the future that is dangerous, and each changes the future by their acting differently, how do they know their future will be changed the way they thought they could change it, if more than one behavior of the future is changed?