Introduction
I
am hoping to undertake an experiment based on an idea by the late Ron Pearson,
for which I welcome responses. This will
only take a few moments, so I hope readers will participate. Details are given below.
Recently
I reread an article by Pearson in the Winter 2015 issue of the Society for Psychical
Research's magazine Paranormal Review
(PR) in which he invites readers to
guess when the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming, United States, will experience
its next ‘super eruption’. The last occurred
some 650,000 years ago and research has indicated that such events happen every
600-700,000 years. Pearson proposed an
experiment based on the notion of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to try to predict the
year of the next large-scale eruption.
Harnessing
the wisdom of crowds
In
his book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the
Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business,
Economies, Societies and Nations (2004), James Surowiecki argues that
aggregating data results in much more accurate information than any single
individual would be able to provide. The
classic example is Sir Francis Galton finding that the average of the guesses by
a crowd at a county fair trying to estimate the weight of an ox once it was butchered
was extremely accurate, even though many of the individual guesses were wildly
off. The crucial point is that the
guesses should be made independently to ensure guessers are not influenced by
others, as that would skew the results.
Pearson wanted to see if the same principle could be applied to the
Yellowstone supervolano.
Carrying
out Ron Pearson’s idea
Pearson
wrote a similar article to his one in PR,
requesting predictions of the year of the next Yellowstone eruption, for the Internationalist Survivalist Society (ISS) website, in
which he said he would publish the results in Psychic News in a few weeks’ time.
The article is not dated but probably preceded the one in PR as respondents were required to write
in, and it is likely few people did so.
Unfortunately it sounds as if the experiment as described in PR also came to nothing as there were
problems with the website set up to collect data, and it is no longer
operational.
Pearson
died last year, and in honour of his memory I thought it would be nice to
resurrect the idea and see if it is possible to get enough responses to arrive
at a possible year for the eruption of the volcano. Clearly this is of a different order to
guessing the weight of a dead ox or the number of jellybeans in a jar as there
is a precognitive aspect to it. That is
what makes it an interesting project, one which can be carried out with little
effort by participants.
In
his ISS article, Pearson included a form to record responses amplifying the year
supplied, presumably to see, after the eruption, which method proved most
successful (assuming enough data points).
I’ve adapted the items because the originals as set out are confusing.
Method
Please give a year for the next ‘super
eruption’ of the Yellowstone caldera. In
addition, please note which of the following applies:
* I just made a guess on my own.
*
I meditated and arrived at the date.
* I used remote viewing.
* I pendulum-dowsed a map at 1110W
440N.
* The year came to me as the result of a
dream.
* I am a medium.
* I am a healer.
* I used another method (state method).
Number of responses required
Pearson was relaxed about the number of
responses he considered necessary to give the experiment validity – in the ISS
article he says 100, in the PR
article he increases it to 200. I’d like
to go for the latter as a minimum, but really with something like this, the
sky, or the inevitability of running out of people willing to take a moment to send
in a guess, is the limit. Galton had 787
guesses for his ox, which seems a little ambitious, but then who knows how many
he might have obtained had he been working in the age of social media.
Assessing the result
Obviously another limiting factor is the
volcano erupting, but I am hopeful the data will be collected before that
event. I am aware the conclusion of the
experiment is possibly some way off. Pearson thought it could be a model for a kind of psychic
early warning system; unfortunately we will only know how good it is if/when
the volcano actually erupts and we, or our descendants, can see how close we
got. I shall publish the averaged date once
sufficient numbers are in, assuming they reach critical mass as it were.
Send
predictions to me at tom.ruffles[at]yahoo.co.uk. Only one attempt per person please, and I repeat
guesses must be private and not made after discussion with anybody else.
The
data protection bit: I shall delete all email addresses as soon as I have
recorded the guess, and promise not to use information received for any purpose
other than this experiment. Individuals
will not be identified.
References
Pearson, Ron. ‘Crowds and Catastrophes:
Can the Wisdom of Crowds Predict When the Yellowstone Supervolcano Will Erupt?
A New Experiment Aims to Find Out’, Paranormal
Review, issue 73, Winter 2015, pp. 22-23.
Pearson,
Ron. ‘An Extraordinary Psychic Experiment’, The International Survivalist
Society, n.d.
Surowiecki, James. The
Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective
Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, Doubleday, 2004.
Revised
28 August 2018
