Quick ESP test

[TreasureTales]

Congratulations to Lucky1777 for the correct guess knowledge of the date. ESP has always been fascinating to me. Sometimes I think it is a 6th sense we had that has become suppressed due to living in civilization.

 

[Oroblanco]

I sure wish I had some of that ability! Here is a quick jot on the odds of having guessed it right:

Chance of hitting it correct, using US only from 1795-1964: 1:170
Chance of hitting it correct, using US from 1795-2007 1:213
Chance of hitting it correct, using all types of silver dollars to 1600, 1:407

Even at the LOW end I would never have expected someone to hit it so quickly. DAng!!!

Oroblanco

 

[aarthrj3811]

Thanks for the test Oroblanco....Never tried anything like that before....That was an interesting Mental experiment....Art

 

[Oroblanco]

Thank YOU Art for participating! I am still shocked that they got the date in fourteen tries, when it should have taken a LOT more than that, since really the odds were about 400 to 1! I figured it would take a couple hundred guesses, but...NO!!!!

There is something about this too - we heard so much about Sandsted's test, which is (in my opinion) pretty much the same thing - so maybe we will be surprised.

Oroblanco

 

[lucky1777]

Thanks, I cant tell you how I did it. I don't want to defend myself on here. I do agree with what TT says. I think most people have had experiences that they can not explain. But with that being said, I still don't believe in dowsing.

 

[COUNTRY GIRL]

Have you tried it?

 

[dowser 501]

He just did. Max

 

[lucky1777]

UMMMMM, no HE didn't.

 

[Mike(Mont)]

Picking up telepathic information is not the same as physical dowsing. With physical dowsing you are searching for the location of a specific item. That's a world of difference from trying to read a person's thoughts. Maybe a different test could avoid the telepathy by picking a random coin out of a money jar and not look at the date until after the test.

 

[ClonedSIM]

I sure wish I had some of that ability! Here is a quick jot on the odds of having guessed it right:

Chance of hitting it correct, using US only from 1795-1964: 1:170
Chance of hitting it correct, using US from 1795-2007 1:213
Chance of hitting it correct, using all types of silver dollars to 1600, 1:407

Even at the LOW end I would never have expected someone to hit it so quickly. DAng!!!

Oroblanco

I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong with the numbers here till I surfed over to the PCGS website and it hit me. The production numbers need to be taken into account before you can get correct odds on this one. I'm not downplaying the results at all, but I saw that there were better than 8,000,000 1923-D dollars minted that year, and over 20,000,000 plain 1923 dollars. The more coins available, the better then chance you're carrying one of those.
I don't really want to go through and add them up, but I know the mintages on 1795 through the mid-1840's were much lower than this, and because of their relative scarcity and resulting value, those can be somewhat discounted as far as someone carrying one around in their pocket. Than would leave, say 1840 to 1976. And there were no dollar coins produced from 1935-1971, and no silver dollars after 1976, so that leaves you with right at 100 years of possible guesses.

 

[aarthrj3811]

So out 14 people how many would you GUESS would come up with the exact date..Art

 

[Mike(Mont)]

In case anyone doesn't understand, I suggest that determining the date of an unknown coin is more difficult than one which the date is known by the tester.

 

[ClonedSIM]

In case anyone doesn't understand, I suggest that determining the date of an unknown coin is more difficult than one which the date is known by the tester.

I agree with you, but not from an ESP-related standpoint. By knowing exactly what the date on the dollar was, Oro was able to give information which somewhat lead the guessers in the right direction. He said that is was a silver dollar, as opposed to a clad dollar or an 8 reale coin or a British silver pound or a golden Sacajawea dollar. He also said that is was not an ancient coin, so we knew to look more to a more modern coin. And, except for an oddball guess or two, all the guesses were within the 1840-1976 range, which should be telling.

 

[ClonedSIM]

So out 14 people how many would you GUESS would come up with the exact date..Art

Art,
You've already shown that you have a failure to grasp most basic mathematical concepts as well as exhibiting an odd paranoia of odds charts that you don't understand, so I don't think that answering your question here would be of any benefit to anyone.

 

[Oroblanco]

Not to dismiss the re-evaluation of the odds based on a narrower date range and taking the number coins minted as probabilities, but PCGS does not know the exact number of many minted coins still extant. How many are lost, melted down etc is simply not known. Also I am a coin collector, and do have fairly old dollars including an 1800 that I no longer carry (would really tick me off if I were to lose it) and until recently had even older dollars. I also did not specify that it had to be a US dollar, it could have been a Spanish or Dutch dollar for that matter. For these reasons I stuck to the year range as an odds calculator, not just by the most common mintages; a coin that was minted in the 1700s or even the 1600s is in no way "ancient" - my oldest coin is over 2500 years old.

I really expected it to take much longer to get it right though - not in 14 shots.

Oroblanco

 

[ClonedSIM]

Not to dismiss the re-evaluation of the odds based on a narrower date range and taking the number coins minted as probabilities, but PCGS does not know the exact number of many minted coins still extant. How many are lost, melted down etc is simply not known. Also I am a coin collector, and do have fairly old dollars including an 1800 that I no longer carry (would really tick me off if I were to lose it) and until recently had even older dollars. I also did not specify that it had to be a US dollar, it could have been a Spanish or Dutch dollar for that matter. For these reasons I stuck to the year range as an odds calculator, not just by the most common mintages; a coin that was minted in the 1700s or even the 1600s is in no way "ancient" - my oldest coin is over 2500 years old.

I really expected it to take much longer to get it right though - not in 14 shots.

Oroblanco

But if you re-read your post you said yourself that you had an 1800 dollar that you used to carry but stopped because you didn't want to lose it. I went back to 1840 because that was the first year minting for the Trade Dollars, and even though many of those can bring over $1000 in nice condition, I wanted to give as much of a range as was likely.

As far as PCGS, it's true that they only have the original minting numbers, not accounting for dollars that had been melted down or lost. But, what are the odds that you would be carrying an 1889-CC Morgan or an 1893-S Morgan?

I do agree that 14 guesses was quick, but another thing you have to take into account is that you revealed the answer not long after you got the correct response. If you had let the contest run on, how many guesses would you have gotten before a duplication of the correct answer?

 

[Oroblanco]

af1733 wrote:

I do agree that 14 guesses was quick, but another thing you have to take into account is that you revealed the answer not long after you got the correct response. If you had let the contest run on, how many guesses would you have gotten before a duplication of the correct answer?

I sure don't know the answer to that, but fail to see what information would be gained by simply allowing the guessing to go on, to what point? For a year, for two years, etc? Keep going on until....when? Until we have exactly the number of guesses that would MAKE the result FIT with the sheer mathematical odds of chance? Isn't that really skewing the results by ADDING more guesses than it actually took to hit it correct? This was hardly a scientific test anyway, just something for fun; I didn't think anyone could "dowse" the date and mint since I have the coin in my possession.

I should say that the dollar I carried in place of the 1800 was an 1878-CC in MS60, but had to sell that one or would be still carrying it. (It is less painful to sell a coin you carry than to sell a gun for instance when you happen to have the bad luck to break down hundreds of miles from home.) That is how I ended up carrying one of the much-less-valuable and less rare coins.

Good luck and good hunting to you, hope you find the treasures that you seek.

Oroblanco

 

[Peg Leg]

It is amazing how people will try to explain something they have no information on.
They will always try to explain why something will not work and then give reasons why it CAN NOT work. They live in the NEGATIVE WORLD with a very closed mind (if a mind at all ).
Some things you have to disect to see what went wrong and like the old saying goes.
"If it ain't broke don't try to fix it".
Peg Leg

 

[ClonedSIM]

It is amazing how people will try to explain something they have no information on.
They will always try to explain why something will not work and then give reasons why it CAN NOT work. They live in the NEGATIVE WORLD with a very closed mind (if a mind at all ).
Some things you have to disect to see what went wrong and like the old saying goes.
"If it ain't broke don't try to fix it".
Peg Leg

Yo Peggy! The statement "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a close-minded statement. If people looked at the Model T and decided that was as good as any car needed to be, would we have the any of the modern vehicular conveniences we have now?