The Global Consciousness Project

I'm not sure whether there's any realistic possibility of getting the discussion back on track, but perhaps it's worth reposting the description of the project from my initial post.

It began as a kind of sequel to the microPK experiments conducted at the PEAR lab at Princeton. It consists of a worldwide network of several dozen random number generators. Essentially the idea behind it was that at the time of significant events - typically, events that engaged the attention of the whole world - the random number generators would exhibit unusual behaviour. Different measures of unusual behaviour were used at different times, but the commonest signified that the numbers produced by the different generators would tend to correlate with one another.

The network still exists, and continues to generate numbers. It has a Facebook page, where the latest post examines its response to Hurricane Irma:
https://www.facebook.com/EGGproject/
 
But for evidential purposes, the significant data are those produced by the "Registry of Formal Hypotheses and Specifications". According to the organisers of the project, for each of a sequence of 513 events in the period 1998-2015, a statistical hypothesis was specified before the data were examined, and was then tested. In subsequent analysis about a dozen of these events were excluded because the hypotheses were poorly defined, or not defined before any of the data were seen, but for the 500 classified as "rigorously defined", the cumulative Z value was 7.31, corresponding to a p value of 1.333 x 10^-13.
http://global-mind.org/results.html

As far as I'm aware, that result remains totally unexplained by sceptics. The hypotheses were stated to be pre-specified - that is, specified before the data were examined. The specification wasn't just a vague hypothesis - it was a specific statistical test that would yield a definite Z value for the event. And it was stated that all the pre-specified events would be included, so there would be no "publication bias" in the results.

Perhaps it's also worth reminding people that Peter Bancel's interpretation of what was going on changed quite radically over time. His most recent conclusions - which were published after the conclusion of the "Formal Hypothesis" series - can be read here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...xploration
And the accompanying reference material is here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...al_details