Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 151
13. When my play Illuminatus opened on the Liverpool street so strangely
linked with jung-beetle-Beatle coincidences, the premiere was November 23.
British playwright Heathcote Williams made a guest appearance as a walkon.
Later, Williams and 1 talked about other writers we knew, and
Burroughs was mentioned, along with the 23 coincidences he had collected
(only a few of which are mentioned above). Williams told me that when he
met Burroughs this subject came up, because Williams had mentioned that
he was 23 years old at the time. When Williams returned to his flat that
night (he had recently moved), he noticed for the first time that the building
across the street was number 23.
14. After Koestler's Roofs of Coincidence was published, Professor Hans
Zeisel, of the University of Chicago law school, wrote to Koestler about a
whole chain of 23s that had haunted his life: he lived at Rossaurerlaende 23
in Vienna, he had a law office at Gonzagagasse 23, his mother lived at
Alserstrasse 23. Once Zeisel's mother was given a novel, Die Liebe Der Jeanne
Ney, and took it with her to Monte Carlo, In the book, a character wins a
great deal by betting on 23 at roulette. Zeisel's mother decided to bet on 23
at roulette. Twenty-three came up on the second try.
15. This whole area, as if it weren't bizarre enough already, took on even
more exotic aspects after a celebrated experiment by Robert Harvie and
biologist Sir Alister Hardy that attempted to demonstrate the reality of
telepathy so totally that the last skeptic would be overwhelmed. The
experiment, conducted in London in 1967, involved 110 trials with 20
subjects in each. Using every possible safeguard to ensure rigorousness,
Harvie and Hardy obtained marvelous results. The subjects, trying to guess
or "telepathically" read target cards they could not see, scored well above
what might have been expected from chance.
Then, as a control, Harvie and Hardy randomized the response sheets.
That is, instead of just comparing the responses of 20 people who were
trying to "see" an invisible target card, as in the experiment proper, Harvie
and Hardy made up groups of 20 response sheets from different people in
different trials. This, they hoped, would prove that chance alone could not
account for the results of the telepathy trials.
SHOCKING CORRELATIONS
What appeared was more shocking than what came out of the initial
experiments. Correlations above chance were found again—correlations
Wildly beyond what could be expected according to probability theory.
What we have here is worse than telepathy from the orthodox view-
Point. Randomizing should have produced fewer correlations, according to
one application of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that