You can prove this concept with mathematics. 1. Select an arbitrary NFL game being played in the first week of season. 2. Email a sufficiently large ( > 131

You can prove this concept with mathematics. 1. Select an arbitrary NFL game being played in the first week of season. 2. Email a sufficiently large ( > 131,072) group of people, telling half of them that Team A will win. Tell the other half people that team B will win. 3. The game will necessarily yield a loser. (To account for ties, tell your audience team N will not lose, instead of will win) 4. The emailed people who received the correct prediction become the remaining pool, and those that received the incorrect prediction are no longer involved in this exercise. 5. Repeat steps 1-4 for the first 16 of the 17 weeks of the NFL season, always retaining the half of the pool who received the correct prediction. 6. After the 16th game, since you started with a sufficiently large pool, you will have sent the correct predictions for all 16 games to a nonzero number of people. 7. This nonzero number of people, if they have paid attention, will be forced to believe that you can predict the winner of the 17th game, and will be willing to give you ridiculous amounts of money to obtain that 17th prediction. In their eyes, you can predict the future, but all you did was apply successive approximation, which is how many analog to digital converters work. The same tactic works in reverse, you simply need to keep the people paying attention to the incorrect predictions long enough. I'll leave the most recent example of this phenomenon as an exercise to the reader.