re: Magician's Trick
My friends had the opportunity to trick me since we regularly played Risk (and I would have been highly amused if they had done so). Since the dice were mine and were distinctive they would have had to get trick dice that matched my own. Then they would have had to wait for the right game opportunity, e.g., my 26 armies against my opponent's last remaining army on his last territory. Knowing my friends very well, it doesn't seem likely to me that they would go to all that trouble and then never laugh about how they fooled me.
My friends didn't appear all that surprised by the event. Both believed in "luck" and neither had a mathematical understanding of just how rare such a "chance" event would be. I interacted on a daily basis with these friends for several more years and they consistently expressed the view that it had been a "lucky run", unusual but nothing earth shaking. My impression was that they viewed it as a one in a thousand event consistent with their belief in lucky people and lucky streaks. To me it was amazing because I didn't believe in "lucky people" and could calculate how unlikely such an event was. ("Rare" events might happen frequently and pass relatively unnoticed because people just can't calculate how unlikely the events really are.)
I have difficulty believing that trick dice would work well enough to fool me in this particular case. My opponent didn't roll a string of sixes. He beat me with sixes, fives, fours, threes, and even a two. (The two sticks in my mind because at the time I thought to myself that I seemed to be trying to lose.) We are talking about a trick die that occasionally rolled every number except a 1 but still managed to beat or tie my best die for 25 times in a row. That is unbelievable control of little plastic cubes considering we are rolling at the same time using die cups.
I have no explanation for that event. I never saw my friend do anything similar before or after and I really don't think he had anything to do with it. In my opinion the three of us were observers in something strange but none of us were really in control. I don't attribute it to luck or psychic powers.
PS. If I were reading some anonymous poster describing this event on the Internet, I'd assume he was lying, was delusional, had been tricked, or was badly mis-remembering the event. However, people who have personally experienced something similar might get something out of my description.
When you say "that is unbelievable control", you seem to be assuming the exact outcome with trick dice would be exactly and entirely predetermined. But there's no reason to think that. The trick dice would only have to make winning much more likely to pull your "impossible" odds down into the realm of the possible. What you describe as a die that "occasionally rolled every number except a 1" is what you would expect to see if the "1" side were weighted a bit - it would often roll a 6, sometimes roll a number adjacen...
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.
I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.
So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.