Amazing Randi's podcast
Justin sez, "A podcast by Skeptic of the Century James Randi, discussing his career as a magician, a skeptic and some of the interesting friends he's met along the way.
Most recent two-part episode features Randi's memories of his million dollar challenge and why he's decided to shutter it in two years."
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Here's a link to a long thread started Feb 22 on The Daily Grail called "The Myth of the Million Dollar Challenge":
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge#comment-31855
Good link Roger. No surprise. I was having an exchange with one of the Amazing Randi's minions at JREF once about the challenge--no, I was not applying.
I am left with the impression that people at JREF and CSICOP aren't all that objective.
I think the problem is they don't acknowledge how limiting their protocols are. And while they might be useful in debunking Uri Gellar, faith healers and such (real tough), they do little to explain, for example, what forces were at work when my wife awoke at 4 a.m. to announce her aunt had just died, several hours before we got the phone call. Someone at JREF might explain the event as it being mere coincidence. My wife just happened to have a dream of her aunts death at the exact same time she died, and if you look at the totality of such events over the course of any given person's like, there are likely to be such coincidences.
Really? Have they worked out the probabilities? There is no point as this event could never be replicated in laboratory conditions with proper controls, as though any event that could not be replicated under their conditions should be summarily dismissed.
Don't get me wrong. I think those people with booths at the psychic fairs are complete wackos. I simply feel this sort of skepticism is almost cult-like, especially when you consider how many law suits Randi has launched against people; that's not to mention the outrageous statements Randi had made, like blaming a scientist's suicide on Gellar. It's not unlike Scientology.
I'm a skeptic and die hard athiest and ALWAYS disliked Randi. I thought the million dollar claim was more about his self-promotion and the advancement of his opinions then persuing any sort of science. Unsuprising considering that James Randi isn't a scientist. I don't think the Randi challenge was a metric for anything what so ever with the sole exception of making James Randi look like he was advocating his ideas.
Whose money did Randi ever take?
The people that were entertained by his performances....oh wait, when was the last time Randi did a little magic show?
How much of the money from the JREF is going to pay his rent I wonder? My disingenuous monitor just went off.
make your case, evidence?
Hello, Yankadian (#2). One way to narrow the probabilities regarding your wife's prediction would be to put it in context: How often had she made similar predictions that hadn't proven true? I.e., was there a file drawer effect? If she hadn't, that makes her prediction more remarkable.
I've had three "hits" in my life similar to your wife's (not quite as amazing though), which I announced to others at the time (before confirmation). What helps to validate them to me as authentic is that I don’t habitually get premonitions of any notable strength. For instance, I rarely have a hunch about who's calling when the phone rings, etc. So there's no file drawer effect in operation with me.
What also makes them extraordinary to me was the intense emotion that accompanied two of them, and the strange feeling of uncanny certainty I had about all three. These were nothing like the insignificant twinges I sometimes get when watching a baseball game about whether the batter will hit the next pitch.
My belief about those who scoff at psi is that they haven't ever been in what I call "the foothills of intuition," and that Keats called "negative capability," which he defined as: "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Negative capability could be thought of as a floodlight (broad but unfocused), and ordinary “positive capability” as a searchlight (a narrow beam).
I remember about 15 years ago when I was talking to someone of the “nothing-but,” or reductionist, stripe it struck me with great force that he was an utter stranger to this mental mode, which I had thought was quite common. Therefore (I inferred), he could only think that people with psi talents were deranged and/or making it up. But I think that a “floodlight perspective” is necessary to provide a context for our normal state of internal cognitive chatter. We need it for balance—and for reasonableness.
@7
I wonder if you had Randi alone if he would confirm your experience. Due to the overwhelming preponderance of outright cynical fraud and too-willing credibility, I think he tends too far in his public capacity.
I think a lot of the discussion here is one of the reasons the challenge is being shutdown. The discussion centers around Randi and not enough around fakers it's trying to reveal.
Just to clear up some misconceptions:
a) "their protocols" the challenge has no set protocols. It is up to the challenger to submit a protocol. the foundation and the challenger will then negotiate from that point to form a protocol suitable to both sides. in the initial test the foundation usually pushes for a blind, but not necessarily a double-blind test.
b) Randi is not a scientist. Duh. Randi isn't involved in setting up protocols, administering or even observing (unless requested by the challenger) tests. Real scientists are involved in that part. He just runs the foundation that offers the money.
c)"they do little to explain, for example, what forces were at work when ..." The intent of the challenge is not to explain or disprove anything. It is for the challenger to prove their claims. Before you can even speculate that a force exists that require explaining you have to prove the force causes repeatedly observable phenomenon.
One you produce a repeatedly observable phenomenon then work can begin on explaining with known forces, and if that doesn't work then you go to unknown forces.
The challenge doesn't care what forces supposedly are at work. THey just want you to prove you have an observable phenomenon that removes as many of the universes known forces (or psychological affects) as possible explanations.
d) the amount of money Randi makes from the foundation. Why does this matter to the challenge? I could see where a potential donor might want to know this, but all a challenger has to know is the million dollars is available (they can prove this) if they win.
Cool I've been looking for new podcasts since the quality of the TWIT shows has been going downhill.
@9 Thank goodness there was someone getting Randi's back.
@2 Was your wife's aunt sick? old? There is a huge difference in odds between predicting an elderly relatives expected death and predicting the untimely death of a young relative.
In order to establish any kind of extraordinary phenomenon (something that breaks the current scientific understanding of the world) extraordinary evidence needs to be provided. A single unreproducible coincidence is not the extraordinary evidence needed.
...extraordinary evidence needs to be provided.
And you get to make the rules because...?
@11 (Vellon)--You wrote:
"Was your wife's aunt sick? old? There is a huge difference in odds between predicting an elderly relatives expected death and predicting the untimely death of a young relative."
Sure, but she said the aunt had just died, a claim that was validated. And she awoke from a sleep to say it. That’s pretty extraordinary. (Unless she did that sort of thing regularly, in which case a hit was bound to happen eventually.)
You wrote:
"A single unreproducible coincidence is not the extraordinary evidence needed."
Sure, this case isn't proof--no single instance could be--but it's suggestive evidence. Add a few thousand similar cases, and the suggestion gets stronger. It calls for investigation—and funding. If positive results are obtained from such endeavors, this anecdotal evidence could be invoked in its support. Certainly, if there were no anecdotal evidence, but lab evidence were produced, the absence of supporting real-world (anecdotal) evidence would count strongly against it. It would bolster the argument that the effect was a mere lab-artifact. So, if anecdotal evidence counts for something in one side of the scale, it counts for something on the other side.
You wrote:
"In order to establish any kind of extraordinary phenomenon (something that breaks the current scientific understanding of the world) extraordinary evidence needs to be provided."
Sure, a high bar for proof is necessary. But "current scientific understanding of the world" has often been invoked to rule out anomalies that later proved to be correct, so has no godlike authority. Further, as Stephen Braude wrote in The Gold Leaf Lady, p. 154, "It’s easy to rattle off long lists of phenomena we’ve ascertained to be genuine before we had—or at least settled on—a theory as to why or how they occurred. It's completely obvious that we can know that something is the case without knowing why it's the case. ... Think for example of lightning, thunder, heat, rain ...."
Here’s what A.J. Nock wrote on this matter (Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, p. 288):
“As I see it, there is small choice among the miracles in this world, for no one has the faintest idea of how, still less why, the order of nature came to be arranged as it is…. “Natural law” accounts for nothing, for natural law means not a thing in the world but the registration of mankind’s experience. [The problem of induction.] Not long ago I read a fine exhibition of intellectual integrity by a physicist lecturing on magnetic attraction. He told his students that he could describe the phenomena, put them in order, state the problem they present and perhaps carry it a step or two backward, but as for the final “reason of the thing,” the best he could say was that the magnet pulls on the steel because God wants it to.
“’All things keep continually running into mystery,’ said St. Thomas of Aquin, seven hundred years ago. In matters where the mystery is more or less sensational or apparently irregular, … and where any hypothesis about it is as hard to disprove as it is to prove …, my agnostic French strain keeps me content to have no hypothesis whatever. Like Mr. Jefferson, I have always been content to ‘repose my head on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should be forced to use it.’”
It's kind of a false dilemma to imply that there's no alternative between providing proof and dismissing the evidence. I think a middle position is justified: taking the matter seriously, and encouraging investigation, while suspending belief/disbelief, or at least not insisting on either.
That's the position informed opinion has taken with regard to another anomaly that seemingly defies scientific laws (though not as radically): ball lightning. Its existence is acknowledged, although the evidence is mostly anecdotal (some from scientists, to be sure), plus a few photos. It's in a sort of limbo, where its mechanism awaits elucidation. Science is content to rest its head on the pillow of ignorance as to the cause, rather than irritably reaching after the reason of the thing.
#13 - Bing!
Randi appointed people that would back his own ideas to the JREF. That isn't science, it is skewing a process to advance your opinions. Science is and should be open minded (but not empty headed). Science should never say absolutely "no" to anything, as theories evolve and change and are discovered. That is the problem with dogmatists, there is no change or growth.
I think the "anti-psi" skeptics are willing to change their minds if shown proof
And the rest of us don't care whether they believe it or not. Uri Geller and the Amazing Kreskin aside, it's a one-sided fight. Actually more like a barking dog. Or an inexplicable, high-pitched ringing sound.