Do you mean me with 'he'?
The Law of Large Numbers does not apply, if there is not a large number to begin with. That was the essence of Beitman's contention was it not?
Make no mistake: There is truth to the Law of Very Large Numbers, but it can only be properly applied when we have data for those large numbers.
It may be the way you are stating this. Do you mean that because there are not a large number of events to compare it to, it cannot be compared? An irony of this is what isn't mentioned in the article. This is probably the most impressive example from the point of view of calculating the probability, and the probability being larger than other examples, but I have other similar examples. One happened within weeks of this event and followed a similar pattern. I was playing Scrabble with my wife when I suddenly had the inspiration to say "I will now withdraw all of the remaining "E" tiles from the bag (without looking, of course.) We had just started, and a quick look at the board showed there were eleven "E"'s remaining. I proceeded to pull out ten in a row before faltering and announcing I wouldn't get the last one, which I didn't. Another that happened when I was a teenager working at Comics & Fantasies comic book store in San Jose back in 1978 or so, I correctly announced every dice roll in advance of rolling it, but first determined the best roll for me and the worst roll for my opponent, my fellow clerk, an older teenager named Greg. Greg was so annoyed with my "luck" that he kept expressing his outrage during the game. At a certain point, I had almost all of his pieces on the bar, a nearly impossible position, as anyone who plays backgammon would know. Before I made the roll that would put his last couple of pieces on the bar, he picked up the board and tossed it into our front window.
The funny thing is that at the time, though I found the event remarkable, I did not think of it as paranormal or psi. To me, it was an uncanny string of amazing luck. What I actually thought at the time was that it was an example of the Law of Large Numbers, where improbable events are bound to happen to someone, somewhere, and I happened to be the someone that time. As I remember it, we were about forty rolls into the game, so the improbability of this is likely higher than the event described in the PT article, but it is much older and I don't recall exactly, so I don't like using this example as evidence. The most interesting event of this type to me, cannot have a probability calculation applied to it easily because the elements don't lend themselves to that type of analysis.
Here is the account, from my book:
"
Rhoda Gubernick of
The Atlantic Monthly magazine hired me in the first week of February, 1990 to make a double portrait of the musicians John Cale and Lou Reed. A week later, the art was done and I shipped it to her in Boston by Airborne Express. The next day, she called at about four-thirty in the afternoon with an emergency. “Andrew, we’re just about to ship this out to Wisconsin to have it printed, but we noticed an error on your art.” She said that because I used color overlays, she didn’t notice at first that the color of the singers' skin in the portrait had the wrong percentage of black. “It’s a hundred percent right now, it will block out all the line art underneath it.”
It was a serious mistake and I wasn’t proud to have made it. Without having the art to compare it to, I could only guess, so I said to change it to seventy percent, assuming it should be dark.
After hanging up, I worried that the problem hadn't been fixed. The darkness of a color doesn’t matter as long as it contrasts with the line art. In this case, I made the line art lighter than usual. That meant that the new value I gave Rhoda might be just as bad as the first one. It took ten minutes to figure this out, leaving plenty of time to call Rhoda and give her another value. Doing so would require admitting that I’d made another mistake, but I didn’t want to do that.
This mistake was embarrassing. I wanted to call, but at the same time I really wanted to fix the art some other way. A phone call on its own wouldn't be good enough. I had to see the art to fix the error. This was before computers were used to ship art, and I didn't have a copy of the illustration at home. While Kitty sat in the kitchen eating dinner, I paced in the living room.
“What I really want,” I said, loud enough for her to hear, “is for the package to get waylaid on its way to the printers in Wisconsin and mysteriously arrive here without anyone knowing about it. I’ll fix it and send it on its way and everything will be fine.” The concept made no sense, but it was the only option I could think of.
I said this over and over again to Kitty as if it was a mantra. “Either I call, or it just appears, that’s it. It can’t happen any other way.” I tried to think of other options, but the only idea that would work was the one that was impossible. “It has to show up here tomorrow.” After two hours of pacing and repeating this, I went to bed.
The house phone woke me the next morning. There was a package waiting for me downstairs - I had no idea what it could be. The Airborne Express truck sat in neutral by the curb, punching clouds of vapor into the cold February air. The deliveryman handed me a box and a signature sheet. I was about to sign when I saw that the box didn’t have an air bill. I turned it over to check the other side, but it wasn’t there either. The Airborne employee was impatient, but I didn’t want to accept a package if it didn’t belong to me.
By now I was wide-awake and knew I wasn’t expecting anything. This box had no address information on it at all. It didn’t have a sender’s address, a recipient’s address, or even a single name to identify it in any way. It also looked like it had been opened and then artlessly resealed. To say it was suspicious was an understatement. “Where’s the air bill?” I asked.
“Dunno.”
“How do you know this is for me then?”
“My supervisor said to deliver it to this address.”
“Where is it from?”
“Dunno.”
“Do you mind if I look inside, just to make sure it’s for me?”
“It’s your box, man. Do whatever you like.”
I borrowed a letter opener from the doorman and sliced open the box. Inside was every article, every original photo, every original slide, and every piece of original illustration art for the entire issue of The Atlantic Monthly to which I had contributed. Buried in the middle, I found my illustration.
I signed for the box and ran upstairs. “Kitty!” I yelled when I got inside. “You are not going to believe this!” I pulled out my illustration and brought it over to my worktable. I found the color I needed to fix quickly, because Rhoda had taped over the original value with a new piece of tape and a note in her handwriting. I didn’t want any mix-ups, so I pulled her tape free of the art. Underneath, I found my original number. It wasn't written very clearly, but I was familiar enough with my own handwriting to see that it said “10%.” Rhoda had read the percent sign as part of the number. I hadn’t made a mistake at all, but if I hadn’t caught the later error that Rhoda and I had made jointly to “fix” the first, my first job for the Atlantic Monthly would have been a horrible misprint.
I called up Rhoda, “It’s Andrew Paquette. You’ll never believe what I’ve got.”
“Pardon me?”
“The package you sent to the printers yesterday arrived at my apartment in New Jersey this morning.”
“Oh my God.”
“Just tell me where it needs to go. I’ll send it on its way.”
I asked Rhoda if she knew of any past occasion when all the raw materials of an issue had been lost. “Never,” she replied, “Not in eighty years of publishing.”"