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God-charged correction dice game

שו”תCategory: generalGod-charged correction dice game
asked 3 years ago

In the appendix on prayer at the end of God Plays Dice, you addressed the topic of the “Biblical Code.”
In your words, you attempted to demonstrate the biases that exist in discussions in areas such as this, and therefore you cited the following section from Wikipedia as an example:
“A committee of mathematicians, including Israel Oeman and Hillel Furstenberg, examined the claim that it was possible to unequivocally prove the existence of hidden information in the Bible, from 1996 to 1998 (the report was written later). The committee conducted additional experiments intended to prove this claim, but these failed to confirm it.”
And then a photo from the article by Frostenberg and Uman in which it is written in black and white that the experiments they conducted supported the conclusion that there is truth in the “Biblical Code”!
Here we are, the Hebrew Wikipedia cannot be trusted on such charged subjects. After being puzzled by such blatant bias in Wikipedia, I went to the article in question (the link to which is found in the same Wikipedia entry), and then it became clear to me that the section you photographed in your book is an appendix by Harold Gantz to the document by Frostenberg and Uman and does not represent their opinion.
Frostenberg and Uman, after also examining the study they added as an appendix from which you took a photo and after conducting their own experiments, came to exactly the same conclusion written in Wikipedia.
I am attaching a link to the document here. Already in the abstract on the first page, one can see the words of Frostenberg and Uman themselves, who claim that the two tests they performed failed to confirm the validity of the code:

Click to access dp364.pdf

In any case, it’s a bit ironic that in trying to demonstrate the bias of scientific information, you yourself fell into the same trap.
Nevertheless, I greatly appreciate you, and so I assume that this mistake (which is not critical or relevant to the body of your arguments throughout the book) was made accidentally.
Again, I apologize for the length of this on a really minor issue. It’s just a point that occurred to me while reading and I thought you might be interested in giving it your all.


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מיכי Staff answered 3 years ago
How did I fall into the same trap myself? Maybe I was wrong, but where do you see bias here?

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אריאל replied 3 years ago

You tried to portray Wikipedia as biased and misinformed while using misinformation yourself.
Again, this is not really critical because I am also convinced that this was a mistake and not intentional

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