Paul the Precognitive Cephalopod

So, imagine you're an octopus...

One of the biggest stories to come out of the World Cup -- apart from Suarez's new "hand of God" -- was Paul the Octopus flawlessly predicting the result of every world cup game he was presented with. You can check Google New or Wikipedia if you're unfamiliar with the cephalapod, and pay attention to this paragraph: "Assuming Paul's predictions were no better than fair coin flips, the probability of 12 or more successful predictions in 14 attempts is ~0.65%, as given by the binomial distribution.[34] The probability for 8 out 8 successful predictions is ~0.39%"

So according to scientific standards the result is "significant", which means that it was unlikely to have occured by chance. So, proof of future-predicting powers if only in cephalopod mollusks? A skeptic will of course deride this as ridiculous, usually without giving any reason for the result apart from a vague "in an infinite universe anything can happen" statement.

Of couse, one might suggest retrospective bias, where only successes are remembered...but this falls down when you realise that Paul was preselected before the World Cup as being able to predict the outcome of matches, which he then went on to do with one hundred percent accuracy. You might suggest that the handler was somehow guiding the octopus, but that merely implies the handler can predict the future. What do you want, a double-blind test where neither the octopus nor the handler knows what is being predicted? That just doesn't make sense.


So the challenge is: Why should we not consider this as evidence of precognition? Try to think for yourself before heading to Google...

(Image is photoshopped and from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_the_Octopus.jpg)