Conversation Board - Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?

Mark Andrew

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #15 - Jul 1^st, 2009 at 1:12pm

StarryEyedNoOne wrote on Jun 30^th, 2009 at 9:52am:

Tons of people have TRIED to take his challenge, HE WONT LET THEM. I believe it's because the money isn't really there, or he's not serious about the challenge, because he's made up his mind and doesn't care about evidence. Victor Zammit in particular has been VERY vocal about Randi and his challenge, issuing one of his own and offering to let independent officials hold the money, etc., but Randi wont have anything to do with it.

Randi is NOT a skeptic - he's just as blinded by his own beliefs as any fundamentalist, because he isn't even willing to CONSIDER other evidence and information. He's totally brainwashed.

Looking at Randi's website and forum, it appears the money does exist. They have a forum where they track/monitor/discuss with potential candidates exactly what they claim to do, and how to set up a mutually agreed to set of parameters for the initial test.

However, at a glance, admittedly, what I did read of one of those forum posts suggests that the Randi-people encourage the tester to be in a relatively uncomfortable environment (where it's just him and the Randi people, none of his friends, or even third parties as witnesses) and apparently with what I believe to be unrealistic success rates as a goal to pass/fail the candidate.

I mean, from what I've been reading, on average, a psychic is only going to be on target around 30-40% of the time, yet the Randi folk seem to be pushing for something above 50%. I'm being generic with those numbers, so don't hold me to them, but it appeared, basically, to be that way from what I read.

Anyone else dared to venture to that website?

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Mark Andrew

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #16 - Jul 1^st, 2009 at 1:13pm

Beau wrote on Jun 30^th, 2009 at 11:22am:

An excellent book Rondele. I read it about a year ago and it is one of the main reasons I posted on this thread. Gary has a whole chapter devoted to Randi's inability to take him up on the bet.

Really? I COMPLETELY forgot about that! Unfortunately, I can't go look because I have loaned this book out to a friend of mine. I'd love to re-read that now that I have a better understanding of who James Randi is.

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Mark Andrew

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #17 - Jul 1^st, 2009 at 1:19pm

pedigree wrote on Jul 1^st, 2009 at 6:01am:

Mark Andrew wrote on Jun 29^th, 2009 at 1:33pm:

I tend to believe there are real psychics out there amongst many, many more fake ones.

With that said, why hasn't one of the real ones taken a stab at James Randi's offer of $1,000,000 to someone who can demonstrate their ability in a lab?

I have some thoughts of my own, but I want to hear from you first.

http://www.victorzammit.com/skeptics/challenge.html

subjective... everything is subjective, that is why it won't happen either way Wink

Haha!! NICE! I love that Mr. Zammit is doing that. That's awesome.

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pedigree

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #18 - Jul 2^nd, 2009 at 5:05am

rondele wrote on Jun 30^th, 2009 at 9:45am:

Hi Beau-

This thread has motivated me to re-read Gary Schwartz's book The Afterlife Experiments, subtitled Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death.

Schwartz approached this book from the point of view of a skeptic, and that was good because his experiments were highly controlled and designed to eliminate, as much as he could, the possibility of fraud or deception or coincidence.

It makes the outcome of his experiments all that much more compelling.

Bruce knows Gary and respects his methodology.

Book was published in 2002. John Edward and other well known mediums participated in the experiments. If you get a chance you might want to pick it up, fascinating reading.

R

Or if you want to watch it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFv5UcxQ7Xs&feature=related

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Mark Andrew

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #19 - Jul 2^nd, 2009 at 4:30pm

pedigree, thank you! Ever since reading the book I've wanted to see this. I'm still watching it now (I love having two monitors for one desktop

)

Mark Andrew wrote on Jul 1^st, 2009 at 1:08pm:

rondele wrote on Jun 30^th, 2009 at 9:45am:

Hi Beau-

This thread has motivated me to re-read Gary Schwartz's book The Afterlife Experiments, subtitled Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death.

Schwartz approached this book from the point of view of a skeptic, and that was good because his experiments were highly controlled and designed to eliminate, as much as he could, the possibility of fraud or deception or coincidence.

It makes the outcome of his experiments all that much more compelling.

Bruce knows Gary and respects his methodology.

Book was published in 2002. John Edward and other well known mediums participated in the experiments. If you get a chance you might want to pick it up, fascinating reading.

R

I'm glad you brought this up because I've been meaning to ask you all about it.

I read this book during the winter and enjoyed it.

I made the mistake (IMO because my faith is fragile and I was beaten down at the time in that regard) of reading some skeptic's website that attacks Schwartz and this book.

They claim that it's all bogus because of those studies back in the day where they gave a bunch of people personality tests and asked them to rate their results from 1 to 5, 5 being best.

The average result was over 4 out of 5. Turns out, the experiments merely made up a single, generic report based on horoscopes (or something like that).

That was the skeptic's response to what Schwartz was doing.

This bugged the crap out of me (from my admitted weakness of faith and my worry in that regard), but I want to know if what I eventually thought about makes sense to you guys:

Isn't this an apples to oranges comparison?

I mean I think cold readers could compare to that study in the sense of being generic and people seeing what they want to see and saying the reader is legit, but in Schwartz's book, they clearly had these mediums giving out SPECIFIC information that, generically speaking, WOULD NOT apply to the vast majority of people.

I recall things like "Did you ever consider raising cattle?" be asked by a medium to someone. And they were right. Now now many lay persons would score that as an accurate hit?

Or another that involved goats on a mountain? There were several times where, IMO, it couldn't have been a cold read without a VERY VERY LUCKY coincidence being the answer.

So to me, the skeptic's claims are misleading garbage. Especially once I read for myself what the "personality result" that those experimenters provided. It's ridiculously generic and covers all sorts of things that generally apply to nearly everyone.

The fact is, a lot of times mediums spit stuff out that, if they're faking, would be career suicide in terms of how risky it is. Unless it's real.

Thoughts?

Anybody?

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StarryEyedNoOne

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #20 - Jul 2^nd, 2009 at 5:04pm

I don't think that argument should have any effect whatsoever on whatever you have faith in. I've read that book, and you and i both know that the experiments have nothing to do with what the skeptic claimed - it sounds like he hasn't even read the book. The experiments were done in an environment that gave the psychics and sitters no contact to give clues or reactions, etc, and the accuracy was still pretty amazing.

If you're interested in this sort of evaluation of psychics and their accuracy, you might like to look at some of the books written by Joel Martin, a friend of George Anderson a psychic medium who has also been impressively accurate in his readings of people and contact with their relatives after death. Granted, this is not a scientific study, but more like a memoir of the author's experience. Joel talks about readings he's seen Anderson perform from an outsider's perspective, and how he was a skeptic but was eventually won over by Anderson's accuracy. I'm not sure if everyone will agree with me, but I find this book very interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/We-Dont-Die-Andersons-Conversations/dp/0425114511

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Mark Andrew

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #21 - Jul 2^nd, 2009 at 6:33pm

Yeah, I read that one. Liked it a lot. I was particularly fascinated by the part where they attached that machine to George and parts of his body actually registered something (forget if it was heat, electrical signals, or what) when he was claiming to psychically read the injuries/illness/ailments of people he didn't know.

I guess what I'm asking is do you think there's anyway that claim (regarding the 80+% of accuracy during the generic personality test) has any validity in "debunking" the hits/accuracy of the psychic tests or any medium, for that matter?

Are people really that generically accepting of a reading that they'll say yes as often as they can because they believe or want to believe?

I know I'm shooting it down myself, but I was reading both the book and that skeptic's article at a time when I was pretty fragile, and so it's continued to haunt me a little bit even though I *think* the skeptic's full of @(%).

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Lucy

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #22 - Jul 3^rd, 2009 at 8:56am

Not to be cynical, but remember that Semmelweiss had to kill off a few people by letting them get childbed fever in order to PROVE that anti-germ procedures like handwashing work. Of course, getting people to wash their hands enough in appropriate situations is still an issue today. (Don't worry, he collected enough "bad karma" to die of childbed fever himself, after he accidentally cut his hand. Well the karma bit is my idea of a bad joke, but he did die that way).

One of the issues here is really a philosophy of science kind of issue. What do you accept as proof? I don't think there is agreement on that.

Even so, I always wonder why the remote viewing stuff...ya know, the Stargate stuff and beyond...doesn't come up in these discussions.

I think many people think highly of George Anderson as a person of integrity. I have heard a couple first-hand accounts of sessions with him (he's expensive and booked way in advance so there aren't many) and the persons involved were deeply touched by the information. Whatever happens can be profound for an individual.

Proof of concept for things that have applications (radio waves for example) may be much different than that for things that are less applicable. Maybe this is something that doesn't have a general proof but will proceed one person at a time until some kind of new consensus is obtained. But I see the whole Randi thing as more of a question about how society works, how groups work, how beliefs work in groups of people, than as an issue about proving that ESP or whatever exists the way radio waves exist.

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Mark Andrew

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #23 - Jul 3^rd, 2009 at 1:46pm

On the subject of counter-skepticism (well, really not. More like counter-cynicism + closed mindedness), I had a good time reading through these last night and finding myself agreeing with pretty much everything said:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030202042318/survivalscience.org/debunk/ww/toc.shtm...

I'm going to head to YouTube to look for any videos of Uri Gellar doing his thing. I'll try to ignore all the debunking clips Roll Eyes

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Pat E.

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #24 - Jul 4^th, 2009 at 1:07am

Something that has always amazed/amused me is how quick our society is to accept as true what is published by scientists. When I was much younger, I worked in several different research labs of both varieties. One variety is collect a lot of data and decide what that tells us. The other variety is do something to things, like animals, usually based on a theory, and decide what that tells us. In both varieties, I saw things along the way that ought to have led the "scientist" to reject or at least question his results, yet he (always a he in my experience) acted as if those results were set in stone and either got a Ph.D. based on them or published them as definitive, final facts or both. I'm not saying all scientific papers are wrong or suffer from this fallacy of misplaced certainty, but I became as big a skeptic about the scientific process as anyone is about psychics or anything metaphysical.

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Lucy

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Re: Why no one has accepted James Randi's $1,000,000?
Reply #25 - Jul 4^th, 2009 at 11:43am

Pat

Exactly. Good questions, I think.

Te underlying question of what is the criteria for what is acceptable to relegated to the realm of social sciences. Are you at all familiar with the name Ludwig Fleck? He's mentioned on Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwik_Fleck
He was a scientists who wrote a book called
The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
Isn't that an interesting title? See, scientific facts aren't objective truth, but nobody wants to talk about the elelphant in the room. So they stick the real questions into the realm of social sciences.

Science lives out the old alchemists' rule:

The eye is more inclined to see what is behind it than what is in front of it.

What you describe is woven into the fabric of the way science works. To be fair, you need criteria for saying when some data is what might be called "outliers." The data points that just fall off the graph because they were just lousy data points. Lousy because the hand slipped when something wqs being transferred between vessels or (in the old days) boiled over too much. But there is much liberty taken in defining outliers. and as Malcolm Gladstone has argues symbllically, maybe the outliers are the most significant points! (to speak metaphorically).

I recall talking with a friend about something Herbert Benson had published. Hey, what is there not to like about the idea that meditating improves your heart? But to prove that scientifically is another thing. My friend scoffed at the idea Bnson's work had scentific merit. She had worked in a research lab in the same hospital where Benson worked at the time (the BI in Boston) and had seen him look at some data that gave results he did not agree with, and watched him can the data. Now, that's not how it is supposed to work. But I think it works like that across the board. The PhD types usually claim that the MD types are more likel;y to be guilty of that. Maybe , maybe not. But I would extend your ob servations to medical results. In fact, in the current debate on the US healthcare system, it occasionally comes to light that there are regional differences in diagnoses and in the treatments used. We think medicine is based on (good) science, and sometimes it is, but if it is based on science, then why are there these regional differences and do they indicate that everyone receives the same quality of health care, or not?

In addition, there is something rarely discussed openly in science that has to do with the way the grant money can be given out in what I will call an incestuous mode. Once a researcher is established, the grant money can flow. But how do you get established? A friend of mine told me about being a grad student in a lab where she was required to write for her own money. She told of grants written that were turned down. The advisor (a very established researcher) told people to reference certain papers, some of which did not directly apply to that topic. But the reviewers (who read the grant proposals and divvy up funding) had written those papers. So they were included in the proposal even though they didn't really apply. Hey, the grant got resubmitted and this time was funded! (I oversimplified a little but you get the picture). This is not to say that all grants are funded this way, but you can see that this happens too.

So if these things aren't talked about openly in regular science, how can we even get to the conceptual issues in things designed to study ESP?

My personal opinion is that what we pretend is objective reality is not really either objective or rock-solid. But it is difficult to know what to do next! Cheesy

It's a good time for a break to watch What the Bleep Do we Know?.
Popcorn, anyone?

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