What the heck has happened to the media? Have they lost their minds?
Newsweek has an article online about a psychic who charges $10,000 per month to her clients. The article gushes all over her — she must have needed a towel after reading it — detailing her intuition, her successes, her clients.
But it forgets to mention one thing. A small thing, a minor detail, really: psychic powers don’t exist.
It really is that simple. If you have psychic powers, you’ve had years to show them to Randi, who would happily give you a check for one million dollars if you can prove it.
Or you could win the lottery ten times in a row. Your choice.
The Newsweek article is an embarrassment. It actually says this:
It’s impossible to objectively judge psychic powers.
Wow. I mean, wow. Of course it’s objectively possible to judge psychic powers. It’s trivially easy to do so. We have a whole field of mathematics called "statistics", and it can be used to judge quite well if someone is able to do better than random chance in a fair test. Have the psychic pick cards, random numbers, the flip of a coin, throws of dice, guess what word I’m thinking of. Then test this ability, say, 100 times. Statistics will give you a very clear view whether it was chance or not. Did they guess heads on the coin toss 50% of the time after 100 tosses? Bzzzzt. Did they guess it correctly more than 5 standard deviations away from the mean? Then you have something. Do it again. And again.
The article in Newsweek mentions none of this, and goes out of its way to paint a frilly substanceless picture of psychic nonsense. Maybe the woman involved honestly believes she has a power; she makes $50k a month which is strong incentive for her to believe it (though she says she has "intuition", and the article never quotes her as saying she’s psychic, though the author used the term many times). But if she’s right, Randi’ll give her a year’s salary in a few days. Sounds worth it to me.
As for Newsweek: feh. I have little trust for the mainstream media as it is, but for Newsweek now I have actual contempt.
Feh.
Tip o’ the turban to the several BABlogees who alerted me to this article.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Stopped paying attention to Noiseweek when they took seriously the idea of making dinosaurs from fossil DNA, in a fluff piece on “Jurassic Park”.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Sounds like they are preaching to the masses. I know so many people that think psychic powers are real. They believe that John Edward is the real thing. They believe. And when I try to explain how this stuff works, *I* get accused of ignoring evidence or dismissing it out of hand. Uh huh. Anecdotes are not data.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I’m so glad I killed my subscription to them months ago for an unrelated matter. My issue with them, I guess most media in the US, was the unambiguous unilateral Israeli bias. Newsweek just took it too far, and now, with this psychic load of garbage, I’m convinced all mainstream media is teetering on the brink of collapsing on its own incompetence and illogic. What about reason? What about true objectivity? Guess you can’t expect much of these morons when many of them still retain archaic religious views of omnipotent deities interfering through the course of their daily lives. Child-like minds can never objectively view reality.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Wasn’t there a speaker at TAM6 that was is writer at Newspeek? What does she have to say about this?
June 26th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
It ain’t just Newsweek folks. I was watching the History Cahnnel last night. See my blog on my comments about it. Ya gotta remember, with about a million TV channels running 24/7, programmers are running scared to find someting – ANYTHING – to put on. Same in the print media. If it sells, print it!
June 26th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
The weirdest part is if you read the article it sounds like she’s just a typical high-end corporate consultant. I couldn’t figure out if she even claims to actually have psychic powers.
I mean, the first paragraph describes how she identified a communication problem between two different departments at Seagate and fixed it, so it sounds like they got their money’s worth, but how does that demonstrate any psychic ability?
June 26th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Skeptic Magazine had an article last issue about why mainstream media gets it so terribly wrong.
I noticed it in Newsweek several years ago, in a two-page article about motorcycles. Now, granted, the topic was motorcycles, not world events or science. But having grown up on motorcycles and being an avid digester of all things two-wheeled, the many errors in this article were extremely obvious and sometimes absurd. What that did is it got me to thinking about the articles discussing medical science, or politics, international relations — topics I’m certainly no expert on. But if the magazine can get things so embarrassingly wrong on a topic like motorcycles, what is it misrepresenting, obscuring, and erroneously reporting on all those other topics?
Anyway, I’d be much more impressed — and much more likely to hire Miss Day, were I in the position to do so — if her good advice was based on logic, experience, a flexible and suitable methodology, and strong information-gathering than on psychic powers.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Maybe we could get some resources together and hire her to do the Randi challenge.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I agree that there are many scam artists out there, but dismissing psychic phenomena completely based on them is erroneous and, yes, non-scientific. Myself, three or four times over the years, I’ve had dreams of specific events, usually just mundane things actually, _before_ they happened, down to very specific details. I don’t know how to explain such things, but they do happen. What about quantum physics, for example? Have none of you ever considered that it might be able to help explain some of these things? The problem is, as in my case, they can’t be repeated and tested at will. But to blindly dismiss them is just wrong. There is much about the workings of the human mind that we don’t understand yet.
June 26th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Nitpick of a skeptical kind:
It’s impossible to categorically say psychic powers don’t exist. What you can say is that no one who’s *claimed* psychic powers has been able to demonstrate it under laboratory conditions.
Frankly, if I had psychic powers, I don’t know if I’d want to publicize it. What if I could make more money keeping it secret? What if I had precognition and knew no good would come of it? What if I had a deep contempt for pretenders? What if I just didn’t want to be treated like a freak? The fact that no one’s taken up Randi’s challenge does not necessarily mean no one has psychic powers.
However, the fact that no self-proclaimed psychic has done so is very significant. Very significant indeed.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Speaking of media gullibility, it looks like Google Ad Sense picked up on my recent off-the-cuff remark about running a car on water – I just saw this ad on your blog below this entry Phil:
http://www.runyourcarwithwater.com/?hop=watertt
Oy vey! Watch the videos, they’ve got that Denny Kline video again. I hate this guy.
He’s using the car battery for electrolysis of water, and burning the hydrogen and oxygen again to run his car. Yeah, I sure can’t see a problem with that.
But a new twist, he calls his car a gas/water “hybrid” this time, so he has an excuse for his car to have a gas tank, (he doesn’t even have to conceal it anymore like any self-respecting scam artist).
I guess we’re gonna see more and more of this brand of scam with the increasing oil prices. And the hippies who are already predisposed to misunderstanding the energy shuffling process in a hybrid are gonna lap it up.
They have three unrelated videos demonstrating the “power of water” – Denny Kline using electrolysis then burning the gases, Steve Meyers using electrolysis then using the gases in a fuel cell, and then some guy at a trade show selling fuel cells that “just run on water”, but for some unspecified reason you have to buy replacement cartridges that the water is put into each time.
I wonder if the guy at the trade show is running his big flat-screen and displays off the building power. I’ve been to a couple of trade shows, and a powered site costs more than an unpowered site. I guess he wouldn’t have to worry about that, because he could just plug in a couple of his fuel cells – I’m sure that would be cost effective right?
This concept at least, could be some chemical reaction that produces H2 gas which is converted by a fuel cell, but that’s hardly getting power from water as portrayed.
So they’ve basically posted any garbage – directly relevant to their product or not – to show that water can be used as a “power source”. It’s a perfect example of how the credibility the media imparts to this kind of garbage is spun into dollars for the scam artists.
Oh, and by the way, hurry – the DIY conversion “guide” they are selling on that site is only available for a limited time. I suspect that would be until they hear the police sirens approaching, grab their big bags of money and skip town like the salesman on the Ren & Stimpy show.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/75060/
June 26th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Paul Scott Anderson,
What you’ve just shared is called “anecdotal evidence”, and really it isn’t evidence at all. You’re asking us to simply trust your personal assessment of a memory of an occurrence that you backwards-related to a memory of a dream. Not at all reliable.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
We’re not blindly dismissing in Paul Anderson, what we’re saying is show me the evidence. OK, you’ve had personal experiences that make it seem like you’ve had psychic occurences, but the brain is a very interesting organ, and can lend itself to misunderstanding, hallucinations, whatever it may be. I’m sure what you experienced was significant to you, but without evidence, we have absolutely nothing. No psychic, esp, transcendental meditation, remote viewing or whatever else it may be has ever provided a shred of proof for existing.
Let me try to explain your experience within a frame of reality. Perhaps you had a dream that was quite vivid, and later, upon having an experience that was not the same, but similar, your brain convinced itself that you were experiencing a foretelling. It’s quite easy to do, and this phenomenon has been shown to occur. Our minds are complex things, and is it not possible that what you experienced was not a psychic event, but one distorted by the perception and computation of your brain? In Richard Dawkins’ Book “The God Delusion”, he mentions these occurances that we attribute to supernatural events, when in fact, our brains are just interpreting normal events in odd ways.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
When you’re a fraud what’s the incentive to try for $1,000,000 when you’re already getting $10,000 a month per client? The article states that she has 5 clients at a time: $50,000 every month.
My favorite bit from the article:
“She declines to identify most of her clients, and almost all who spoke to NEWSWEEK also requested anonymity out of concern for their reputations.”
But if she’s the real deal, then what’s the concern? Or are they superstitious idiots who know they’re being superstitious but do it anyway?
June 26th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Thinking about it some more, if I was a shareholder in the company, I would want to know upfront that my money was being used to pay for psychics.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
While we were at TAM my husband and I played a little black jack here and there. One of the dealers was convinced that 8 out of 10 of his dreams come true. He even claimed to have kept notebooks of his dreams with dates and details. I don’t think he was lying, I honestly think he thought he was having psychic experiences. The problem is, as Helioprogenus pointed out, is that the brain will find patterns where there may not be any and see similarities and make them fit into said dream.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Just look at the ads Google have put around this post – telepathy, telekinesis, biblical astronomy. Dearie me…
June 26th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
But she charges $10k a time, so it must be real. No one would pay that much for something that doesn’t exist. QED!
June 26th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Well, you looked at the Newsweek article, didn’t you, Phil? That’s all they wanted anyway! Just another reader.
However, I have a hard time understanding why psychics weren’t discredited long ago. I was reading James Randi’s Encyclopedia when I was at TAM, and I was surprised to learn even scientists in the 19th century were busy discrediting so-called psychics. There might have been some hope for the faithful about 100 years ago, but there’s a solid century, at least, of failed scientific experiments. The real question is why do people still fall for cold/hot reading?
June 26th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
You see if you do not believe in pyschics then their predictions will not come true, but if you have an open mind then you can see their predictions coming true all over the place. (some pseudoscience talk)
I think the reporter was told go see this pyschic and see what she does for companies, after they did this they went wrote their article and that was it.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I am reminded, at this point of something Larry Niven said. In fact, Wikipedia claims that it is his fifth law:
“Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.”
I am unwilling to utterly dismiss the existence of such, but I would expect them to have had some kind of impact by now. We would really only need one Magneto to prove the existence of these powers.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
“Our minds are complex things, and is it not possible that what you experienced was not a psychic event, but one distorted by the perception and computation of your brain? In Richard Dawkins’ Book “The God Delusion”, he mentions these occurances that we attribute to supernatural events, when in fact, our brains are just interpreting normal events in odd ways.”
This explains a bit about when I get deja vu.
I recall times when I could’ve sworn I took a certain test before, or that some events I experienced happened before.
I never attributed this to some psychic force, of course.
I did consider the possibility that events in our universe repeat themselves somehow. Sort of like how in that one episode of ST:TNG when the crew is caught in a temperol rift and starts to experience deja vu.
Of course, I didn’t take my guess seriously. And now it’s comforting to see a rational explaination exists.
BTW, the article on “Newsweek” reminds me of how in an episode of MST3K, “The UnEarthly”, the bots mock Joel when he mentions reading an article of “Newsweek”.
Seems they had the right idea.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
I hear that lame Ed Dames is a millionaire! How could anyone ever believe in this stuff? $50,000 per month? Someone said it was Noiseweek…
Ditto
June 26th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
@BadMA: You might find Martin Gardner’s book “Science: Good, Bad and Bogus” to be an illuminating (but dry) view into the history of attempts to legitimize psychic phenomena as objects of scientific inspection over the last century or so. One chapter in that book describes efforts regarding:
“In 1979, Wheeler spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), asking it to expel parapsychology, which had been admitted ten years earlier at the request of Margaret Mead. He called it a pseudoscience. His request was turned down, and the Parapsychological Association remained a member of the AAAS.”*
Micheal Shermer has also written extensively on the subject, for example, his book “Why People Believe in Weird Things”.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
June 26th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Brian Dunning discusses the dream precognition thing with a bit of statistical analysis in the free video Here Be Dragons. Well worth a look. Yeah, I know that for most people it is just a coincidence and your precog dream about your grandma dying at that very instant was the real deal. But have a look anyway.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
I knew you guys would act this way.
It’s because I’m old and I pay attention.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
jonny eh said:
“Wasn’t there a speaker at TAM6 that was is writer at Newspeek? What does she have to say about this?”
That was Sharon Begley. And her talk was pessimistic, which she announced it would be in a summary at the start. I doubt she is surprised about this.
George
June 26th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
This might annoy a few skeptics as well as believers but I am prepared to discount all psychic and religious phenomena out of hand until some real evidence is brought to the table. Re-hashing the same stories, or variations on the theme, ain’t evidence. No amount of special pleading about how we can’t prove something can’t exist will cut it. Pink unicorns in my fridge may exist but until you show some evidence that the existence of said unicorn can be inferred or exist I’m just not going to give you the time of day.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Nothing that this psychic did in the article was actually a “psychic” sounding event. Predicting that an animated film would bomb can be attributed to a sense of what is popular at the moment in pop culture. The idiotic reporter should have mentioned which film it was, because I bet it would then become obvious that she merely used common sense (which has become a scarce commodity in corporate circles, yuk yuk).
June 26th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Saying “psychic powers don’t exist” makes Fox Mulder turn over in his proverbial grave.
I think some people are so sick of the generically portrayed “psychic scam” that they may forget that there may in fact be people who have abilities along those lines. Obviously not to the extent of being able to clearly read minds and, of course, not well enough to pass any sort of test, but at the same time I can imagine that anyone with that sort of ability wouldn’t even begin to have the brain capacity to use and interpret it well enough to even remotely pass any sort of “test”. So while I believe such things may be possible simply based on how little we know about the brain’s abilities, I can also easily understand why there wouldn’t be anyone who could “prove” such an unknown sort of mental connection. So to say “Well obviously no one has the ability, or else they would’ve proven it by coming up with next week’s lottery numbers!” is just laughably ignorant.
I don’t believe any psychic that I see on TV or that anyone tells me about. I roll my eyes and curse the fact that not only do people make a living off of scamming others, but that idiots would be dumb enough to buy into a TV psychic. Believe me Phil, I’m as much of a skeptic as you are. But I won’t discount the possibilities of the unknown, especially given how little we know about so many things that could maybe be attributed to said “psychic powers”.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
The real test will be to see if Newsweek starts using the miraculous services they gave such a glowing review of. Somehow I doubt it.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
I’m not a believer in psychics, but citing Randi’s challenge as viable isn’t exactly fair. It’s always seemed to me that his challenge is designed to be impossible even if someone managed to have powers, since he decides the rules. Also, since he refuses to take all comers I don’t believe it can be taken seriously.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
James,
Its obvious you haven’t read the rules of the JREF Challenge. If you had you would know that BOTH parties agree to the “rules” before hand. One other thing you will find out is that it was only recently that it was decided to only allow “big name” phonies…excuse me, I mean personalities, since so many delusional crackpots were wasting the JREF’s time. Their stories can be read on the JREF blog, if you take the time to look.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Randi decides the rules based on objectivity and evidence. They are constrained rules, and may seem impossible, but they’re framed within the bounds of science and scientific principles. Any aberrant outlyers can be ruled out given rigorous framing. They only seem impossible because no supposedly supernatural occurances have ever been proven statistically viable. The probability of psychic powers is so infinitessimally small, that with great certainty, you can rule it out. You can still reserve possibilities, but they have been rigorously tested numerous times and failed.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
The creduluous author of the piece is:
Tony Dokoupil
td2158@columbia.edu
Send him your email assesments of his professionalism. Maybe we can shame him into thinking before writing.
Rich
June 26th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Viewer 3: What we do know about the brain is that it isn’t magic. We know a fair bit about basic physics (although I imagine our descendants would laugh at me for saying so), and there’s no plausible mechanism by which “psychic powers” would even operate. Much less is there any evidence of them in the real world.
So, although you’re right in the strict sense that these “powers” can’t be absolutely disproved, I feel very comfortable in dismissing them.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Hey, you guys can scoff all you want. But I know I’ve experienced veja-du. I mean I’ll go someplace I’ve never been before and this powerful feeling will settle over me and I’ll be like
“Whoa. I’ve never been here before”!
Then I’ll take pictures and stuff.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
JimB: You mean “deja-vu”?
June 26th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
To anyone who thinks coincidences like dreaming about something that happens the next day is impossible, calculating the probability of something like that happening by using the U.S. population and how many people one knows shows that it is a statistical certainty that something like that will happen in a U.S. population of 300,000,000, or for that matter, the world.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Uunh. No I don’t.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
The brain can do some phenomenal things — calculating the 13th root of a 200 digit number in 72 seconds, or remembering a sequence of hundreds of words heard once with 100% accuracy. Those things seem like magic to me. But Nemo is right, there’s no mechanism or medium for “psychic” powers.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
And I experience deja-vu every day at my crappy job. It’s overpowering: “Wait, it seems like I was just here doing this exact meaningless crap just yesterday…”
Yup.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Well, she’s only got until March 6, 2010 to apply I believe.
June 26th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
JimB,
Had to LOL. I know exactly what you mean. Veja-du is like a real trip man.
June 26th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
JimB:
You got me going there for a while
June 27th, 2008 at 12:28 am
JimB:
From Monty Python, right? “Vuja De”?
Nice one.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:02 am
I think it kinda sucks reading about a big-wig executive in a large corp such as Seagate turning to a psychic of all things, I mean, shouldn’t such a post be reserved for someone with a bit of brains?
Anyways, maybe this woman, besides being “psychic” actually got some decent human relations skills and that is what produces the results if any.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Paul Scott Anderson on the possibility of psychic phenomena: “What about quantum physics, for example?”
This falls in the category: We don’t understand X; I don’t understand quantum mechanics; therefore, quantum mechanics must explain X.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:28 am
Viewer 3 said:
> Saying “psychic powers don’t exist” makes Fox Mulder turn over in his proverbial grave.
Uh, since the fictional character Fox Mulder is appearing in a new movie this summer, I can’t find any way that he could be turning over in his grave. Sure, it’s a figure of speech, but it’s supposed to apply to dead people.
> I think some people are so sick of the generically portrayed “psychic scam” that they may forget that there may in fact be people who have abilities along those lines.
It is true the highly visible and the scam artists are who get all the attention. And thus they are the basis for most evaluation. But if there is any real ability buried in the population that is not getting brought out to public attention, it is pretty much useless for anything but making the person uncomfortable. Because if it were in any way useful, it would be being used, and thus brought to attention.
> Obviously not to the extent of being able to clearly read minds and, of course, not well enough to pass any sort of test, but at the same time I can imagine that anyone with that sort of ability wouldn’t even begin to have the brain capacity to use and interpret it well enough to even remotely pass any sort of “test”. So while I believe such things may be possible simply based on how little we know about the brain’s abilities, I can also easily understand why there wouldn’t be anyone who could “prove” such an unknown sort of mental connection. So to say “Well obviously no one has the ability, or else they would’ve proven it by coming up with next week’s lottery numbers!” is just laughably ignorant.
Again, most people who proclaim that these abilities exist do so based upon either the ridiculous examples of the scams, hoaxers, and fakes, or else they do so based upon sketchy evidence that has far more reasonable explanations available (like the explained example of dreaming of someone who then died, or thinking of someone just when the phone rings with them calling you). If there were genuine ability, one would think that the direct investigation into that effect would have turned up something more concrete than “I’m getting a J or M”.
Simply put, there is no existing known mechanism for how psychic powers could be real, and the proposed mechanisms offered contradict known things. Add to that the fact that the only positive evidence for it is unreliable and terminally weak, and there isn’t any reason to think it is real.
It is perfectly rational to not believe something is true until it is demonstrated as true.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:44 am
Pcychic powers … wow! And I studied quantum mechanics instead!
June 27th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Well call me a tad less scientific than some here, but I’d like to think there’s a little more than that to it. We may understand the brain physically and the basics on how it transmits and receives signals and handles information, but it’s not impossible that what you call “magic” may in fact be rooted in some sort of worldly forces that we don’t quite understand yet (you’re right, our descendants will indeed be laughing at us).
Of all the invisible forces and particles and excess dimensions that we have theories for but haven’t found ways to actually prove their existence, I have to believe that there are quite a few unknown, untestable forces that could carry such information straight to the physical receptors of the brain (or rather vice-versa), which would probably just interpret it as nothing more than a vague afterthought. Of course that would involve a new understanding of time itself, among a few dozen other scientific breakthroughs which will most likely never happen.
The point is, our “thoughts” are nothing more than stored/retrieved information and electrical signals. There are no known forces or mechanisms that can transmit or receive those signals to or from any brain, especially “magically” traversing the flows of time. The key word there being “known”.
I’d like to think that even though we have a decent grasp on what is and isn’t possible through all known science, that there are still forces that could influence the physical world through unknown means. I’d still never believe that anyone had any sort of psychic abilities unless it was scientifically proven; so don’t get me wrong, as much as I’d love all of the possible fantastic discoveries that could await us in the universe, I still firmly side with science in that I wouldn’t believe it until it was proven legitimately. I’d just prefer to look at the more fantastic possibilities, hence why I’d get stuck working on the X-Files before I was ever allowed to be a scientist. Which I’m fine with.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:12 am
In response to Irishman:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s any reason to believe in such abilities. I’ve seen the “mediums”, and I understand the psychology of it all and how it’s used in the grand “scheme” of things, with scheme being the key word. I know it’s a sham, and so do most people, and I feel sorry for those that fall for it.
As stated in my previous post (which I posted before seeing yours), in order for anything of the sort to actually “work” it would require a reworking of our understanding of many things, a series of breakthroughs that will most likely never come close to happening. The ultimate point of all of my rambling is that I, for one, would have a hard time ever saying (in bold letters) that “PSYCHIC POWERS DON’T EXIST, DUHHHHH!!”. I’d rather state the facts. And the fact is, that based on what we “know”, it does not seem possible. But compared to what we DON’T know, it’s very possible. How? Who knows. I sure don’t. But I live to see the day when science somehow brings these far-out concepts to light, because I love me some good ol’ breakthroughs-of-the-seemingly-impossible.
And finally… Thank you professor, I finally understand that “turning over in ones grave” does in fact apply to the deceased. I had hoped the “proverbial” would imply a situation where he was in fact dead, as it seemed like the perfect expression to use in the event that he was deceased. Maybe I used it wrong though, sorry about that.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:14 am
It ought to be completely uncontroversial that supernatural powers are useless. You may have psychics in your town, palm readers and so forth – I do – and they inhabit the cheapest premises available. If they could actually accomplish what they promise they could afford better accomodations.
We’ve been looking for practically useful supernatural phenomena for hundreds of years. At the outset of the scientific enterprise it wasn’t certain that prayer, or powdered dragon or whatever, would or wouldn’t have this or that effect. After a few hundred years of systematic experimentation, however, we’ve got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.
Friendly, helpful spirits, guardian angels are, unfortunately, not in evidence. Demonic electrons, in equal parts wave and particle, determinedly both here and not here, are comfortably reliable, in practice.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:20 am
Oh yeah, and the part where I used the term “laughably ignorant” was directed at people who I’ve seen on numerous occasion use similar quotes (“Well obviously no one has the ability, or else they would’ve proven it by coming up with next week’s lottery numbers!”) as an ignorant, unscientific method of “disproving” something. It’s like people who do not believe in the supernatural who, instead of pointing to scientific evidence, instead say “Well if ghosts were real, they’d come back and tell me stuff about the afterlife and Jesus and stuff!”
June 27th, 2008 at 2:39 am
It’s hard to use science when discussing faith. The psychic powers discussed has nothing to do with science only faith is involved. Believing in psychic powers is exactly the same as believing in god. Thing about that all ya believers out there.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:59 am
Both the “lottery” and “afterlife” objections seem valid to me, Viewer 3. You are falling into the classic trap for this kind of assertion, I am afraid. That of claiming the reality of the claim is really more complex than the standard objections allow.
Here is the easy answer: before you build a whole system and description of a “psychic world”, you need to prove its existence. And, I am sorry to say, you have very little to stand on there.
The same objection applies to theology…
June 27th, 2008 at 4:15 am
My computer can do a lot better than that, and no one supposes that it’s anything but a machine.* But people like to think they’re special.
The simplest demonstration that the brain isn’t magic is what happens to it when it’s damaged: it loses functionality, in very specific ways, depending on the injury. A spike through the head can change a person’s personality. That’s because cells — real, physical things — are killed, and neuronal connections are broken. There’s no mystical soul stuff there — or, if there is, it appears to be inseparable from the matter of the brain. Which leaves it as a hypothesis that lacks explanatory power; it should, thus, be discarded.
I realize you understand this, and were being rhetorical. But I post this for the more credulous.
* Those are actually really bad examples of “brain magic”, since they’re so clearly mechanical, while the human brain is capable of many things, less easily reduced to logical steps, that computers can’t touch… yet.
June 27th, 2008 at 4:45 am
*sigh* I feel like I have to nitpick at a fellow commenter here.
Viewer 3 commented on someone turning over in their ‘proverbial grave’. I don’t care that it was Fox Mulder he/she was talking about, just the use of the word ‘proverbial’.
Proverbial refers to a proverb. Not a colloqualism.
But again, I can be a real-big jerk. I don’t mean to be. Honest.
June 27th, 2008 at 4:46 am
dang…..spelling error.
Colloquialism.
June 27th, 2008 at 5:54 am
“I agree that there are many scam artists out there, but dismissing psychic phenomena completely based on them is erroneous and, yes, non-scientific. Myself, three or four times over the years, I’ve had dreams of specific events, usually just mundane things actually, _before_ they happened, down to very specific details. I don’t know how to explain such things, but they do happen.”
Paul Scott Andersonon, you obviously experience these things as real. I too have had such experiences. How does it happen? Well let us suppose you dreamt about a thousand different things. One of them comes true so you remember it very clearly, the rest get forgotten, which can turn coincidence into presience. Our brains also do a lot of modeling, we change reality to make it work for us (just go look at any illusions and you can see this quite clearly), so we can make matches in our memory that were not quite the match we thought they were.
How to test it. Well in your case it would be instructive if you wrote down your dreams every day for a year, then checked off all the ones that came true. What is important here is that you write them down before they come true, so you can compare the content after the event and not allow your memory to play tricks on what exactly the dream was. When yo do that you might find that some of the accurate detail evaporates.
June 27th, 2008 at 7:01 am
My word, is PP actually agreeing with Rush Limbaugh about the media. “Psychic powers?” Come on Phil Plaitt, don’t you have better things to waste time on?
June 27th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Some Canadian Skeptic said:
“Viewer 3 commented on someone turning over in their ‘proverbial grave’. I don’t care that it was Fox Mulder he/she was talking about, just the use of the word ‘proverbial’.
Proverbial refers to a proverb. Not a colloqualism.”
OR….
Maybe the poster was having a psychic vision of the future, and actually foresaw Fox Mulder in his grave, 50 years down the road!
Yeah, that’s it, that what it was, yeah, a psychic vision, yeah…
June 27th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Has the BABlogger written Newsweek with his concerens? Or is he venting to a friendly crowd merely to hear himself whine?
June 27th, 2008 at 7:24 am
If I had psychic powers, I wouldn’t take James Randi’s challenge. Instead, I’d wonder around, meet people, get into adventures and help people out.
I still might play the lottery from time to time to pay my way. But I’d make sure I used different aliases.
But I don’t think I’d tell many people about it.
June 27th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Wasn’t “veja-du” a George Carlin bit?
June 27th, 2008 at 7:36 am
In college, we once called Mistress Cleo for a goof.
The lady (it wasn’t Mistress Cleo) asked me what my name was.
I asked her why she didn’t already know — after all she was supposed to be expecting my call, being a psychic and all.
So I told her a fake name. Actually, a Hispanic surname, so she would think I was from Mexico. And a fake place (this was before caller ID) and she proceeded to tell me all about how my life in that town (I used El Paso, TX) was going to involve marrying an American and getting my citizenship. Little did her psychic powers help her in knowing that 1) I was lying and 2) that I was an American citizen and 3) that I was on the east coast. Some Mesmer, she.
We then proceeded to ask her for the winning lottery numbers for the next night. She of course did not know. She told us if she did know, she would enter them for herself.
I asked her why her psychic powers could not see into the future and see those numbers.
Mumbo jumbo and excuses galore after that. We were almost in stitches by the time we finished because we had done all that after a friend had told us that Mistress Cleo “had seen [her] future.”
People will believe in anything — Gods that live in the clouds, little green men that impregnate women, and that the Cubs will win the World Series.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:00 am
When I read that Newsweek article the other day, I was very embarrassed, and wrote a dissaproving note to the magazine.
I was going to post that note here, but then realized that I wouldn’t really be adding anything to what you good people have already said. So I think I won’t post it after all. Never mind.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Kevin White said:
It’s called the Insider’s Lament. The question is, if they get the stuff I know wrong, and the stuff you know wrong, and so on, what do they get right?
June 27th, 2008 at 8:23 am
The problem with “premonitions” is how do you demonstrate a causal relationship?
“I was thinking about PersonX and later found out he/she died right at that moment.” Well, how many times did you think about PersonX before that, and nothing significant happened at those moments?
“I had a dream about that just last night.” Again, how many times did you have dreams just like that one, that were “just dreams”?
http://cectic.com/145.html
On the other hand, to state “psychic powers don’t exist” flat-out is a bit strong for my taste. Lack of evidence of something’s existence is not the same as evidence of non-existence.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:35 am
@ Ken B
Ok… then I posit that Atlantis was populated by an advanced civilization with flying cars and telepathic abilities before being sunk to the sea-bottom by alien invaders. I know I’m being a bit snarky here, but I get really tired of that statement and its made all the time by the religious, creationists, psychic friends, etc… when did it become acceptible for intelligent persons to allow that in order to dismiss something as made-up or nonsense, the rational must provide evidence that “outlandish proposition x” doesn’t exist?
As Irishman already nicely put it earlier, “It is perfectly rational to not believe something is true until it is demonstrated as true.” You can’t just invent any premise, then put the burden of proof of its non-existence on everyone else. The burden of proof for any outlandish claim should stay squarely where it belongs: on the claimant.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Phil, you’re making the classic mistake of thinking that the purpose of the media is to educate people about what is true.
Bzzzzzzt. Wrong Answer!
The purpose is to sell product. Soap. Cars. Adult beverages. “Information.” Whatever.
Even this blog has ads. Makes me skeptical about *IT*….
June 27th, 2008 at 9:12 am
@ Gary
Although I understand that selling product is certainly a goal, I think the purpose of the journalistic, reputable news media, as newsweek would like to pass itself off as, is to provide accurate news and information to its readership. As newsweek even states itself in this article (see the bottom), it strives for “…relentless reporting with fairness and good judgment… Getting it right for our readers is our goal on every story, week in and week out.”
I think you could make the argument that this story fails in that stated goal. And I don’t have a problem with Phil making that argument.
I’m not saying I’m naive enough to believe that it isn’t the advertisement dollars and therefor the pandering to the lowest common denominator that really drives the content of a publication like Newsweek, but I firmly support the right to piss and moan about it.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:34 am
I just like watching people being shocked when a major media outlet demonstrates idiocy and wonder “what happened?”
Where have you people been? You’re all so focused on the bogeyman of Fox News, you missed the fact that it’s all gone to crap, and has been there for a long time, if not the whole time mass media has existed.
Eh… I got a hedge to trim. You folks have fun shaking your fists in the air. Maybe you can find a windmill or two.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:38 am
@ QD…
I hate it when you’re right… darnitall…
oh well… I still prefer tilting to bending over completely.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I have also had a whole bunch of psychic/precog experiences.
When I was doing a psychic test, I entered into an “empty” state, and the image being transmitted just flashed in my head.
It was a ladybug crawling on a blade of grass against a sky and grass background. I has never seen that picture before, but it turned out to be an exact match to the image being transmitted. And I felt it, the moment it happened.
What are the odds that this image, out of hundreds, should pop into my mind before I see it the first time? Maybe it only ever happens once per year. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen though.
If you have had that kind of experience a few times, it kind of sticks with you, even if you have a 100 misses before. Because you know you saw that f*cking image.
I am not trying to convince anyone btw, just explain why you can’t convince me.
Also, a note on epistemology: Science, and it’s methods are about what works and not about what exists and what doesn’t. (That way of thinking should have died out with the positivists.)
Just because something doesn’t beat chance, doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. It’s just not something *scientifically* useful.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Now I am not saying I don’t agree with your feelings about NEWSWEEK, actually I DO AGREE! I also will say I do not dis-agree that 98+% of people claiming to be “intuitive” and/or “psychic” are frauds or do not understand all the various dynamics that were/are at play.
But here is what I find a tad ‘ego’ and I do mean ‘ego’.
James Randi is some how the “end all for proving/dis-proving Psychic/Intuitive Powers”.
Who says that?
The $1,000,000.00?
I actually know people who are in the “Psychic World” that have never heard of the man. Believe it or not, that is possible and I know other’s that could care less about him and not out of ‘fear’ for they have nothing to fear from the man.
I also know a few people that applied for the $1,000,000.00 test and GOT TURNED DOWNED. What it came down too, they were not “big names” for him (James Randi) to “debunk”. Yes, they read the Webpage and met the online requirements – but what it apparently came down to is, they were not “BIG NAMES”. James Randi is NOT the “proof text” of the existence of or non-existence of Psychic/Intuitive powers. Believe it or not – nor is his $1,000,000.00. I just find that a tad – E G O .. to think he is the “END ALL. He isn’t.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Hey, I just read on an astronomy blog that the Mars Phoenix probe provided test results that show that the Martian soil has what it takes to support life. Anybody want to talk about that?
June 27th, 2008 at 9:46 am
@ E.D
Documented citation for said “psychic test” and its results, please? I’d love to see the published results. If this study was able to show even one single, documented case of pre-cognition in a scientific, controlled study, then I’d find that really fascinating. I haven’t seen anything of that sort yet… can you provide a link to this study you participated in?
June 27th, 2008 at 9:49 am
It’s not that hard to understand, gang. Newsweek (like everything else in America these days) is owned by a corporation. Corporations have ONE allegiance, and that is to the bottom line, which keeps the shareholders happy.
That’s it. Truth, fairness, patriotism, all are out the window; all that matters is the bottom line.
So if they think treating “psychics” as legitimate will sell magazines, that’s what they will do.
Welcome to America of the 21st century.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:52 am
CE seriously, are you being deliberately stupid? The entire point of my post was why that question is not relevant to me. Maybe it’s my English?
Listen, I am perfectly fine with you defining reality in scientific terms, I am not trying to change your mind.
I just thought I’d shed some light on why that wont suffice for some people.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:55 am
^^ QFT.
Science is a methodology–an outstanding, wonderful, amazing methodology–of pragmatically determining naturalistic causes for naturalistic effects. In terms of philosophical truth-value, however, it is not Truth nor Reality (or else it wouldn’t be a constantly evolving, occasionally wrong, system). Electrons could actually, in objective reality, be tiny little sky pixies and as long as they act like electrons are predicted to act then science doesn’t care; if they act differently, then science changes the model. Science does not reflect reality so much as it reflects our understanding of how reality works, based on our current state of ignorance concerning the evidence.
‘Course, one then gets into intellectual mendacity, but as we’re talking philosophy and not science (science is by definition naturalistic and by convention as mendacious as it can get away with) Occam can go take a flying leap.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:59 am
E.D
Excuse me? How does calling me deliberately stupid answer my question? You made a claim of displaying a pre-cognitive ability in a “psychic test”… I assumed it was a study of some sort… I asked for details and perhaps a link. Why do people who make outlandish claims always get offended whenever anyone asks for details of said claim?
If what you say is true, and you were able to display pre-cognitive abilities on command… even if it was only once, then it stands to reason that there must be other examples, and somewhere someone would have been able to document this behavior in a scientific study. So where is it? I was hoping you’d be able to point me to your “test” or study results so that I could look them over and maybe change my whole thought process on this matter.
Sorry… guess that makes me deliberately stupid. Or maybe it’s just my English.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:19 am
It should be,
NewsWeak
June 27th, 2008 at 10:31 am
CE: I’ll give it another go:
You can’t quantify experience, nor can you really share it. One has to accept that the world appears differently to different people and not try to hammer everyone into the same shape.
My reason for describing the test was not to try prove anything. I know full well that I can’t.
However, given that I have had such experiences you can see why I remain convinced of their existence even in the absence of scientific evidence?
In other words: As far as my life is concerned, my personal experience trumps science.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I hate to disagree, but there absolutly are psychic powers. Unfortunatly, the people I know who have them cant predict coin tosses, or lottery numbers, or anything of their choosing. They tend to predict mundane, or not so mundane occurences in the future, with exacting detail.
This of course is not what this lady in newsweek claims to do, she claims to be able to predict specified events.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Thanks for clearing that up. That explains a lot.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:50 am
How tragically inconvenient! That just sucks that the very nature of magic powers seems to have a block right at the point where it would do the holder of such powers any real good. Alas… such is the fickled nature of the mystically endowed.
So, OK… have one of these people you know… any one, give you a prediction of a mundane occurence in the future, of course with “exacting detail”… something that can’t be easily deduced like a newly married couple will have a baby within 18 month’s time (that’s not a prediction, it’s a stastically viable guess)… and let us know what it is. If and when it happens, I swear i will take back every word I’ve said here about pre-cognition and psychic powers being complete, invented, “I can’t accept that I’m not really special” hogwash.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:53 am
rrggh… “statistically viable” that should read…
heck, if they can tell me when I’ll be able to post a comment without multiple typos and spelling errors, I’ll go see a psychic right now!
June 27th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I still think that letting all these psychics run around is an incredible threat to national security. I the name of public safety, they should all be detained immediately and thoroughly interrogated until we’re certain that their powers can’t be used to harm our country.
Similarly, any God-fearing Christian should shun psychics and warn other Christians about them until their church can verify that the psychics’ powers don’t come from Satan.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Example:
You have bad headache and you go to the doctor. He gives you pills. The pills make the pain worse. You go back and complain, but the doctor says “no no, these are the pills for you, here is the data!”, and the data looks right. Your problem *should* be remedied by these pills.
Do you continue to take the pills? Does you trust in statistics trump really your personal experience?
I doubt it. Science is fallible, and continually improving, that’s the point of it. But from that also follows that one can’t at any given moment trust science to give a good representation of what ever issue is on the table. Science can actually only be trusted to the extent engineers have successfully exploited it.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:08 am
E.D
Counterexample:
You have a bad headache. There is a total lunar eclipse. Your headache gets better.
Do you then believe that a lunar eclipse is an effective cure for a headache?
Get real.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:17 am
E.D
Are you being deliberately stupid? If you go to a Dr. that gives you pain pills for a headache, and they don’t work, and he tells you to go away cause they should work… your Dr. is a QUACK and is likely the type who will visit a psychic to tell him what’s wrong with you.
No, you go to another Dr., who will run further tests, using the best techniques in medical science to ultimately discover the root of your problem and perscribe a remedy that will work for you.
Have you actually been to a Dr? Or do your powers or pre-cognition allow you to self-diagnose? Wait… sorry… that would fall into the same category as “guessing lottery numbers”. I forgot… magic just doesn’t work that way.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Celtic_Evolution,
last year, one person I know was compelled to drive 60 miles to a river, and say, this is where the baby will drown. His name is xxxx (I cant remember, first name only), and he has long black hair.
Three weeks later, the baby with that name and long black hair, drowned at that place during a flood.
You can’t ask this person about any particular event, but on a regular basis, she has experiences like this. Generaly about deaths. Yes, she has written them down, and they have occurred.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:24 am
You are missing the point, which is that you, in the example represent a statistical (and scientific) anomaly, which you, according to your previous argument would not accept, and instead shoehorn yourself into the bell curve.
But, since you are asking me to believe that science is infallible and perfect, we really have nothing more to discuss. Go read some Popper.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:25 am
No, no, no… Les… you don’t get to play the game that way. You don’t get to give me anecdotal stories about things that were predicted after they happened. That would be too easy to fudge… see? It may not be intentional… but it’s always very easy to assign things you experience a causal relationship with something you thought about or dreamed about prior.
So give us the next one she’s written down that hasn’t occurred yet… or heck… give me any ten of these “visions”… and we’ll see if they are truly predictive with “exacting detail”. If it happens on a “regular basis”, there should be plenty to sample from… no?
June 27th, 2008 at 11:30 am
I guess I won’t be able to convence you then. Another sort of example, going into a hotel room. She says, the bathroom will have black tile, the third tile from the left on the second row will be cracked on the left side.
Walk into the room, and there it is.
I have seen her “predictions” come true hundreds of times. I am convenced beyond any doubt.
I doesn’t work to ask about something, it just happens.
Given the 99.999 percent of charlitans, I can see why you would doubt.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:33 am
E.D
Find in any post here or anywhere else on this site where I have ever uttered the words “science is infallible and perfect”. Go ahead… I’ll wait…
Or can we just accept that you just made that up and move on?
It is YOU that is missing the point, and so I will say it to you only one last time… extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof to be considered “fact” or “real”. Since you have none… can provide none… can point to none, and seem to think that your own anecdotal personal mis-conception is proof enough for you… well then there’s no point in arguing any further. It’s clear to me that you believe yourself to be extraordinarily “special”… and “gifted”. You can’t point to any proof or evidence of this claim, but you believe it… and believe me, I know the impossibility of trying to convince someone who believes themself to be “special and gifted” that they are just ordinary, flesh and blood, non-magically empowered human beings (which, by the by, I think is pretty special enough on its own). It’s an exercise in futility, and I’m not going to spend any more time on it.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Les… again you come back to me with an example that has already happened. That’s really not evidence.
I don’t see why not. If her predictions have come true “hundreds of times” then it should be no problem for you to provide just a few examples of her recent predictions, with exacting detail, that should be easily verifiable once they come true.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Science and scientists are not infallible. But at least they are TRYING.
Unlike religious fundamentalists who want us all to just give up.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Hey guys, go easy on the psychics; at least on precognition. I have precognition: i.e. I know that I will die, I just don’t know when or how!
June 27th, 2008 at 11:44 am
No so. Lets say she says that there will be a bug that looks like a leaf crawling on her desk. Next day there it is. How do I prove to you that the bug is there? That it is the next day?
These are the more common types.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:44 am
@ Les
Actually this is a really bad example, and common to the “charlitans” you refer to. Can you say with absolute 100% certainty that she hasn’t actually been in this hotel room bathroom before? Seems to me that if I wanted to bilk people out of their money using my “psychic powers”, the easiest way to do it is to make mental notes of fairly mundane things, like the existence of a crack in a tile in a hotel room bathroom… then tell people about it as if it were just some random, mundane detail… they see it and think “holy crap… he was RIGHT! And since it was such a mundane little detail there’s no reason for him to be devceiving us about it”. I think that’d work pretty well, in fact.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Ummm… ok Les… but you also cited a really big deal incident… predicting the drowning infant. So are you saying that particular gift has left her?
June 27th, 2008 at 11:49 am
@CE
I was just going to point out the potential of prior real experience or of taking steps, unbeknownst to the “friend” or “viewer”, to ensure that the prediction comes true.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:54 am
@ Todd W
Yeah… that’s the tough thing about asking for proof of psychic abilities… it’s so easy to fudge… people make their entire livings off of deception and slight of hand. And are so good at it that people don’t question it.
This is the reason Randi’s requirements are so specific… it’s not to be intentianlly difficult just cause he can be… it’s to prevent fudging from people who practice deception for a living.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:55 am
CE:
The infallibility can be derived from your position that personal experience can’t trump science, and stating that the doctor will ultimately find a solution.
But, I guess I put too fine a point on it?
And for the record, I don’t think I’m special. I think it happens to everyone all the time. (Nice straw man btw.)
June 27th, 2008 at 11:58 am
@ED
I think you’re missing the point of what Celtic_Evolution is asking. You claimed you went through a psychic test in which an image was transmitted, and you received the image correctly. CE is not asking for your experience. He’s asking for the tangible things involved in the test, the written documentation that the test took place, what the observations were, and so on. He’s asking for some evidence that what you are claiming actually happened (i.e., that the test actually took place, that the image being transmitted was recorded, that your reception was recorded, a record of what you claim to have received, whether you and the sender had any contact at any point during the test, and so on).
The documentation of the test may or may not convince CE, but if you do not provide it, how can he make any opinion one way or another? He is asking for the evidence in order to broaden his world view and possibly change his stance on the phenomenon, if it exists. I see no reason to resort to calling him stupid and making all kinds of arguments as to why you won’t provide the evidence. If it such evidence of the test doesn’t exist, just say so.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
@ED
Regarding personal experience vs. science, just as science is not infallible, personal experience is not infallible, either. Humans rationalize a lot more than they realize they do. Also, memory works in odd ways. We may see something, take no conscious notice of it, but it’ll pop into mind later on. Because we have no conscious memory of having seen it before, we don’t make the connection that we did.
For example, I drop my keys in a field, near a fence. I didn’t consciously notice that I did so, but, later, after having spent a good deal of time trying to think what they heck happened to my keys, I take a nap and have a dream wherein I see my keys next to a specific fence post. When I wake, I go to that fence post and, voila! There my keys lie. Now, was it a psychic dream, or just accessing a memory I didn’t realize I had?
June 27th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
sorry for the double post…finger was a little too quick.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
err…nevermind….
June 27th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
The 1976 film Network grows increasingly relevant… We’ve got to get mad!
“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08
June 27th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
If I was going to call a psychic, shouldn’t they know that, and call me first? And I shouldn’t have to give them my phone number, because they should know (psychically) that too.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Todd:
I’m not going to spend time scanning in old papers and posting them somewhere he can get at them, and explain the protocol and so. We would just go through the motions of a debate and at the end we would be exactly where we are…probably anyway.
Thing is, I wasn’t trying to convince anyone, therefor the test protocol is beside the point.
My point was, once again, that people experience reality differently and that’s something one has to accept. It doesn’t matter how loud you shout that there is no elephant in the room, if the person you are talking to sees, smells and touches an elephant in the room.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Just a quick note on all the people saying that psychics should know who’s going to call, what the lottery numbers are going to be, etc., and this is something that James Randi has said before when others have made similar statements.
You cannot judge a psychic based on what you think/claim they should be able to do. Saying that a particular psychic is a fraud or whatever because they didn’t predict something you think they should be able to predict is a poor approach. Rather, psychics should be judged based on what they claim they can do.
Put it this way, you don’t say a medicine doesn’t work because it does nothing to treat pain, when the claimed indication is to treat nasal congestion.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I get so tired of the “strawman” claims that people seem to use as personal shields.
Possessing pre-cognitive, psychic abilities doesn’t make you special? They make movies and TV shows about people like that. If course it does. Give me a break.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
@ED
Agreed that people experience reality differently from others.
As to the paper, though, if such a study exists and is documented, I can see why CE is interested in seeing it. I’m actually curious about it, as well. If it was a quality study, then it may lead to CE (and others) changing their tune, if they read it objectively and are able to put their personal biases aside.
If the study turns out to be poorly designed, a discussion of its flaws is also educational and, again, if everyone involved is willing to look at things objectively, can lead to changes of opinion on the matter.
Either way, there is an opportunity for education of one kind or another if the study is made available.
If it is not already available in an electronic format, I can see how there may be an undue amount of extra work involved in making it available. Barring producing the actual documents, can you tell us where the study took place and who the principle investigators were?
June 27th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
You have bad headache and you go to the doctor. He gives you pills. The pills make the pain worse. You go back and complain, but the doctor says â??no no, these are the pills for you, here is the data!â??, and the data looks right. Your problem *should* be remedied by these pills.
Do you continue to take the pills? Does your trust in statistics trump really your personal experience?
I can see what you’re saying. I’ll give a personal example. My father is a physician. I had acne for years. I tried doxycycline, clearasil, washing a lot, washing never, using a different pillowcase every night, cutting out sugar, no exercise, vigorous exercise, etc. Nothing really solved the problem. I read about milk possibly being a cause of acne — hormones, iodine, milk sugar, whatever. I decided to try cutting out milk and most dairy, but first I spoke to my father about it. He told me there was no medical evidence to support milk as an instigator of acne, and he even spoke with a dermatologist friend.
I still cut out dairy and the change was dramatic. Within a week my skin was healing and improving dramatically, with no further instances after about ten days, and it lasted. And when I’d go back and have some Special K with milk or some ice cream or certain yoghurt, I’d wake up with a few whiteheads the next morning or develop a zit during the day. To this day I closely watch my dairy intake. I have ice cream every once in a while, and it INEVITABLY causes a couple of whiteheads.
So, medical science (including my own father) tells me there’s no link, but my own empirical evidence suggests a very strong causal relationship for me individually. Am I going to go back to drinking milk and eating ice cream as a dessert sometimes? Nope (the marginal cost of acne is greater than the marginal benefit of milk and ice cream). Medical science will probably establish the link in the future so that it becomes established.
That’s all. Just wanted to put that out there. I’m not defending psychic power beliefs, just stating that sometimes empirical evidence really can trump ESTABLISHED medical fact.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Without question, this is true… and if real, actual evidence of such abilities were confirmed, I would wet myself with excitement over the possibilities and would support learning as much about it as possible.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
@Kevin White
“Medical science will probably establish the link in the future so that it becomes established.”
Heh, so long as there’s money to be made in it or some other pressing interest in studying the connection. As it is, if it’s true, there is a lot of incentive to not study it (cut down on anti-acne med sales, dairy sales, etc.).
June 27th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Yeah… I actually didn’t like getting involved in the whole “taking a pain killer” example, because there are other factors that have nothing to do with any part of this conversation when you talk about the medical establishment in this country and the pharmaceutical companies, etc… REALLY no need to open that Pandora’s box… that can be a fight to the death for another day…
June 27th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Todd: It wasn’t a real scientific study. It happened in conjunction with a seminar at my college. The audience was a mix of believers and non believers.
The protocol was kind of broken, the whole thing was set up mostly for fun. A diversion from 6 hrs of powerpoint slides.
It was based around writing down words, and the images seem to have been picked to have obvious words in them, like a bike against a brick wall and nothing else. And the scoring was simply words that could be found in the picture versus words that couldn’t.
So, if I had just shut up after that ladybug image I would have scored 100%, sky, grass, ladybug. But naturally I was sort of blown away and “tried my luck” with remaining nine images, even though no images really popped into my head like with the first one.
So, you see, the score and the protocol does not really tell my story.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
@CE
Don’t blame you. I just finished up a graduate program in Regulatory Affairs for drugs, biologics and medical devices…
I scratch my head wondering again why I want to go work for one of these companies. Perhaps cause I think I might be able to make a slight difference?
June 27th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
@ED
Thank you for providing more details. So, was there a limited set of choices that the image could possibly be?
June 27th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
No, it was open ended. Ten envelopes picked out of a bunch, don’t know how many. One envelope is separated and clipped to a board. You list words that you think are depicted in the image in the envelope.
Another student takes the envelope and calculates the score.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
@ Todd W. and Celtic_Evolution
Agreed.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Well, then you must be hating constantly!
BWAH HA HA HA!
But, seriously, what I did I do? I’m religiously nonideological (hmm…) so what do I represent to you that you hate it when I’m right?
June 27th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
@ Todd W
Noble causes need noble people. You go for it.
June 27th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
@ED
Do you know how the images were chosen before they were placed into the envelopes? Were the participants involved, in any way at all, in suggesting images?
Just to make sure I understand correctly, there were, just for example, 30 images, each placed into an envelope. 1 image per envelope. 10 of these were then picked out. These 10 were then pinned up one by one. After each envelope is clipped up, the students write down words they feel might be depicted in the image.
Did each envelope have a number or other unique identifier so that they could be matched to students’ guesses?
June 27th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
@ QD
heh… I could have and should have more accurately stated “I hate it that you’re right about that particular statement.”
Better?
June 27th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Todd:
No, they were done one by one. Like this:
1. Subject enters.
2. Dude 1, shuffles a bunch of envelopes and takes out ten.
3. Dude 1, takes one of the envelopes from the ten and puts it on the board.
4. The subject writes a list of words on a paper.
5. Dude 2 take the envelope from the board and the paper from the subject.
6. Dude 2 calculates the score. (Writes the words into two columns on a new paper and then counts how many in each column.)
Repeat from step 3.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
@ED
Okay. Thanks for the procedure. Do you remember how the images were selected initially, before being placed in envelopes?
June 27th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Heh,
I used to work for Gabriel, the only one not embarrassed to admit he hired her. Luckily, the workshop with Laura Day was for the management staff and as I’ve heard it, the psychic mumbo-jumbo really had nothing to do with just getting people to talk, etc…
Of course, Gabriel also once gave all his employees a talk about Dr Emoto: http://www.emotoproject.org/english/home.html
June 27th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Todd:
No idea. But they all were pretty simple, an object with a background.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
@CE
You feel you have enough info about ED’s experience, or do you want more?
June 27th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Nope… I’m good… thanks for the explanation. It would have been nice to have seen the complete results on a curve… understand the baseline and percentage offset vs. random guess, etc… but I get the gist…
June 27th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Now, was that so painful?
June 27th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Not at all… and I think you know where I come down on that, and my thoughts on this particular expriment. I’ve seen it perfromed similarly in a psychology class many moons ago… it had a specific name… I’ll try to remember it and reference it if I can…
June 27th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
And just to be clear… my take on E.D and his pre-cognitive powers (and my feeling that he believes he is special because of them) were not simply based on his reference to this test… it was based on that plus his pre-qualifying statement in the initial post (emphasis mine):
“I have also had a whole bunch of psychic/precog experiences.”
My concentration on his “psychic test” was because that was the example he gave, and I thought there might be some data there that could be explored. There isn’t. The conversation took a downturn when he accused me of being “intentionally stupid”… at that point I’m gonna take him to task.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Some Canadian Skeptic:
Don’t worry, the fact that you went through the trouble of creating an entirely new post simply to correct a misspelling to salvage the “intellectual” reputation that you tried to establish for yourself in your previous post speaks for itself.
As for the other responses, I suppose that why I’d never make it in the stereotypical “scientific community”. Some are simply set in their it’s-not-possible-if-it-can’t-be-seen-and-studied ways. Which is fine. I suppose that’s what many would call “real science”. And that’s not bad at all- seems fairly rational to me.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
@CE
Understood. I was trying to salvage what was quickly descending into ad hom territory and bring it back to the central topic that started the arguments.
As it stands, yeah, the study as presented is inconclusive (not knowing how the images were selected or if participants could have been tipped off in some fashion to what the possibilities were beforehand or during, whether or not they realized it, as well as results consistent with or worse than chance). Also, because of the lack of info about how the images were selected, there could be a major flaw regarding blinding.
As to ED’s beliefs that he or she (hard to tell from your handle) has precog powers, again, there is no evidence to convince the rest of us (admittedly you weren’t trying to convince us), but I would say we concede that, at least for you, the powers are real, based on your experiences and current interpretation of those experiences.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
@ Viewer 3
I think you’re confusing what’s “possible” with what’s “real and factual”. Scientific process is all about taking what’s “possible” from the unknown and developing theories that are tested, refined, and sometimes rejected until the “possible” becomes “plausible” based on the preponderence of evidence.
I’m more than willing to accept that things like “psychic powers” are possible… but until someone provides real evidence for it, I simply file it away under the same category as “alien abductions” and “unicorns”. Might very well be possible… certainly not real based on any evidence we have so far.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Todd Wrote “but I would say we concede that, at least for you, the powers are real, based on your experiences and current interpretation of those experiences.”
Cheers! That’s all I ask. Actually, I just want to make people aware that for some it’s very real, and it may be for good reason. I.e I wasn’t bamboozled by some dude on TV or tarot card scam artist, which is a sort of a popular stereotype around here.
Also, I wouldn’t call it a power because it’s not very useful.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
@ED
Another thing that you will find commonly mentioned is self-deception, which is really just misinterpretation of the events.
At any rate, in this forum, it is impossible to discern whether your experience was real (in the broad, objective sense) or a case of self-deception. Either one is possible.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I’d like to meet some of her clients. I have a few bridges for sale.
Viewer3: “… I have to believe that there are quite a few unknown, untestable forces that could carry such information straight to the physical receptors of the brain.”
Now you’re talking about the unknown unknowns. But anything that happens can be tested. Suppose Mr X has “psychic powers”. That’s a bit general, so let’s narrow it down to “Mr X can tell what I’m thinking”. That’s easily tested. I even have a good experiment: Most people concentrate very hard when they’re opening a spin-dial combination lock. Even when you know the combination, you’re extemely focussed. All we have to do is bring Mr X and Subject Y to a safe, have the subject open the safe and ask Mr X for the combination.
Now maybe psychic powers are like golf: even Tiger Woods has a bad day. So Mr X might say that the time was not auspicious. Fine, run the test over a series of days. We’ll even pay Mr X an agreed-on fee for participating – but with the proviso that if he doesn’t demonstrate his gift, he forfeits the sum and has to pay all his expenses.
Now let’s look at another possibility: that there are some people with these gifts, and they realize full well that if word got out, they’d either be hounded to death by People Wanting to Know, or beaten to death by townspeople with pitchforks and torches. That theory doesn’t help. All it tells us is that “IF there are people …….”.
Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle tried very hard, and very long, to find any example of paranormal phenomena. They never did.
Every high-profile “psychic” has been exposed. Uri Geller, for one, but he seems to just keep rolling along, bending spoons all over the world.
Centipede: Good point: “Electrons could actually, in objective reality, be tiny little sky pixies and as long as they act like electrons are predicted to act ” In fact, they behave very much like little teeny particles when you do experiment A, and very much like teeny little waves when you do experiment B. To the designers of radios and such, the difference is academic, just so long as they aren’t caught violating Maxwell’s equations.
On the other hand, we’re supposed to be empiricists. If we see a guy lift a spaceship out of a swamp by wiggling his finger at it, we ought to be taking data and forming hypotheses. But to start formulating hypotheses about how someone MIGHT do that, seems a bit premature.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
@ZZMike
“If we see a guy lift a spaceship out of a swamp by wiggling his finger at it, we ought to be taking data and forming hypotheses. But to start formulating hypotheses about how someone MIGHT do that, seems a bit premature.”
It may be premature, but here’s my hypothesis. His wiggling his finger is a visual cue to the stage manager, who cues the stage crew to raise the spaceship. But then, this is coming from a theatre techie bias.
[/snark]
June 27th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
@Todd W.
Premature as right. I’d need to see some evidence for the existence of this so-called “stage manager” before considering the rest of it.
Next you’ll tell me the spaceship, the swamp, even the character wiggling his fingers all existed & were acting according to some magical “script” handed down from some on-high creator.
June 27th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
@Gary G
Wow! You must be psychic! That’s exactly what I was going to tell you next! I guess psychic powers are real after all.
June 28th, 2008 at 1:26 am
Oh.
Not really. It was more fun thinking I was some sort of iconic figure for some stranger I never met.
June 28th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Sheesh… the ego on some people! Get over yourself!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish today’s entry in my daily journal of “musings of Quiet Desperation”.
June 29th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Word for the ages.
If you publish, do recall that’s intellectual property, that is.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
[...] Newsweek embarasses itself Wow. I mean, wow. Of course it’s objectively possible to judge psychic powers. It’s trivially easy to do so. We have a whole field of mathematics called “statistics”, and it can be used to judge quite well if someone is able to do better than random chance in a fair test. [...]