Amos,

I have no problem at all with the noise argument. I've done experiments at the threshold of detectability and I know that noise of several kinds and variability of performance can make it very difficult to detect a signal.

However, if in many trials the performance isn't (not each time, for sure, but on the average) above chance level, one possibility is that noise is all there is.

The lottery companies, by the way, check the distributions they get against chance just to make sure that there is no extrachance influence.

I love the new thread title: Psychics - what do they know

Wolfgang