--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Bill (William)Simmons" <unclewas@> wrote: > > > > I cut and pasted this claim from a MUM web page claiming that Where > > as little as 1% of population is practising TM "the trend of rising > > crime rates is REVERSED. > > > > Think it through carefully. It is entirely possible that the ME doesn't work. On the other > hand, statistical analysis require LARGE groups of test subjects. For something like the > ME, the group required to notice the effect reliably might conceivably be much larger than > Fairfield itself. Consider the Taste of Untopia course. The effect on Fairfield would be large > just because everyone is there, but the effect of several people running stop signs in a > hurry to get to the Domes for group practice would be many times larger than, say, a 10% > reduction in traffic violations by the local non-meditating population. > > Likewise, the Maharishi Effect WITHIN a group of sidhas might also be large, but the > redution in crime rate affecting the group itself would be overwhelmed by the presence of > a single sidha who happened to be a pickpocket (this happened during a course in DC-- > don't know if the person was a sidha or just wandered in off the street but the police were > called because of an incident--either way, a single individual's behavior in a group of > 10,000 can skew the ressults in ways that don't happen when you look at the changes in > behavior in a group of one million or 10 million or a billion, even if the effect is far, far > smaller than in the group of sidhas allegedly having the effect). > > If you want a truely silly example, that really happened, consider the ME and its affect on > sewage problem. Nothing in the theory says much about such a measure, but in fact, the > immeditate effect of the ME in Fairfield was todestroy the town's sewage system. 8000 > people in a town of 8000 getting up at the same time, using the bathroom at the same > time, and flushing at the same time, explodes sewers. It's all the faultof the ME. > Statisticians call it the "Law of Large Numbers" --things behave differently when you look > at small populations and large populations. > > Again, this doesn't say anything about whether or not the ME > exists, but it DOES explain why you can't disprove the ME by > looking at the local effects in Fairfield.
This is an example of what Curtis accuses the TMO of doing: "carefully wording" the ME claims to be unfalsifiable. Oops. Except that the Law of Large Numbers wasn't invented by the TMO, was it? It's a standard principle of statistics, right? So therefore, when you're doing a statistical analysis, you *have* to take the Law of Large Numbers into account, which means, as you just said, that the ME theory can't be falsified by evidence that the crime rate in Fairfield has gone up without violating statistical principles. > > It also explains why much of the research on the local effects in fairfield is just pure > marketing. Fairfield is a lousy place to conduct ME studies, and deep down inside, the TM > researchers know this. You can't prove the ME or even offer reliable support for the ME, by > looking at local statistics, but it DOES make for nice woo-woo feel good reports when > things get better in Fairfield during a big course. > To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
