I’m not a huge fan of Brown, either. He’s not a con man or charlatan, but he does deliberately push false explanations for his tricks that invoke pseudoscience. For example, that lottery prediction special where he promised he’d show exactly how he did the trick later, only to claim it was the “wisdom of the crowds” rather than what is proven video trickery. Or he’ll have entire specials that act like he’s not working as a magician, but actually showing real psychological phenomena.
If you know all this, then, sure, he challenges your understanding of truth and what you believe. But a whole lot of people actually fall for it, which I don’t really think a magician should do. You may not know how, but you should know that you’re being tricked.
I would like him a lot more if he’d come out and directly and clearly say that certain things were all still part of the trick. That would get people thinking about why they assumed it wasn’t.
When I was a child a friend of my father’s had privileges at the Magic Castle and we got to go. My memory is very vague about the details but a roving magician came up to our group and did an illusion where he was able to correctly determine a six or seven digit number that was chosen by a guest. He went by something like P.T. Bogus.
I was mesmerized and asked him how he did it. He asked me if I knew what his name meant and I didn’t. He explained that bogus meant fake and what he was doing was just a trick and that’s what magic was. He further explained that tricks were secrets and he wouldn’t reveal them.
The Skeptical Inquirer has overtly taken on a political bent in recent years, but characteristically in support of progressive causes (including the debunking of climate change denial). “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” is an anomaly.
I liked SI better when it focused on quackery, spirit world fakes and con men.
IMHO this article is worse than the Theranos one. The Thernos one admitted that she was a fraud who hurt people and deserved to go to prison, but offered a personalized view of her to try to make her more than a one dimensional cut out. (whether she really does have another side or whether the writer was yet another person who fell for her con is debatable.)
This one seems to basically be saying that Geller was a great guy and he doesn’t understand why anyone would ever want to criticize him.
This section made me want to gag.
The vitriol is a little hard to fathom. It’s true that Mr. Geller had a lucrative side hustle in the 1980s working for mining companies who thought his putative psychic powers could help them determine where to dig. In a 1986 Financial Times story, he said that his standard fee was 1 million pounds per assignment, $3 million in inflation-adjusted terms, and that 11 companies had retained him.
Mr. Geller’s track record as a prospector is not known, and he says he can’t remember. But he never went into faith healing, nor did he charge enough to leave many with a case of buyer’s remorse. He performed live shows and wrote books like “Use Your Psychic Powers to Have It All.”
So watching the Geller haters now is like watching people run into nursery schools shouting that there is no Santa Claus.
Sure he swindled mining companies out of millions of dollars and but all the rubes he swindled didn’t realize they’d been had. And while he lied and advanced the scourge of pseudoscience that has fed into the science skepticism that is the root of many of today’s problems, it was all in good fun.
I can’t remember whether it was MAD or National Lampoon that did a send-up of Geller: a guy who could make ice cubes melt by staring at them intensely.
I’m pretty sure that Santa Claus has never had a “lucrative side hustle” working for rich parents who want a bag of extra-special gifts for their kids hand-delivered down the chimney on Xmas eve.*
One bad side effect of hustlers like Geller is that more credulous people are deceived into thinking paranormal powers are real, so they lose $$$ to psychics and other scammers.
*I do pay an annual fee to Santa Claus LLC so that his reindeer flying over my house don’t crap all over the place.
James Randi had a television series titled James Randi: Psychic Investigator in which he would allow people to display their psychic abilities or, in every episode I saw, NOT display their psychic abilities. He would bend over backwards to accommodate them, and he was very polite to them before, during and after the attempt.
When I was in high school, a kid told the class that he and his brother had watched Kreskin on the Tonight Show perform a key-bending trick, with a twist. Kreskin had invited viewers at home to take part in the trick. He would use his telekinesis powers to bend a key in the viewers’ hands as they pressed on the key. The kid claimed that it worked: his brother’s key visibly bent. When it was pointed out that the Tonight Show was taped and broadcast hours later, he stood by his story. Apparently Kreskin’s telekinesis powers can also travel time.
Some people want to be lied to, and are embarrassed to admit they’ve been duped.
I’m not sure most of those can honestly be said to have tried. The entire point of the screening process was to ensure a person was making an unambiguous, falsifiable claim. Most charlatans are unwilling to do that.
What’s different about Geller was that his claims were pretty clear. They were just bullshit. It’s why he kept threatening to sue people. Geller understood that when you’re a professional con man, you NEVER admit anything, NEVER back down. If you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar, you look the cop straight in the eye and say someone put the cookie jar on your hand. There is something about being one hundred percent dedicated to never, ever dropping the kayfabe that fools some people.
Not the charlatans, no. There were a few though that had convinced themselves that they had some sort of ability, or their friends and loved ones convinced them of the same.
The big problem with Randi’s prize was, the people who knew they were con artists would never apply to the challenge, and the people who really believed they had powers were generally too scatter-brained to come up with a workable test. Some of these negotiations were publicly available at the time, and it was maddening seeing them twist and turn, constantly switching things around in mid-stream.
And in a least a few cases, after weeks, months or even years of negotiating a protocol for the test, some of them then just didn’t show up on the day of the test.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that a lot of the people who tried for the prize (whether con men or not) would claim that the presence of skeptics interfered with the exercise of their “powers”.
I first became interested in the skeptical movement in the early 70’s (right around 1973 - it really is taking longer than we thought) during my personal golden age of science fiction when I was a teenager. I read a bunch of science fiction stories centering around psychic phenomena including many by Heinlein who was unfortunately influential on me at that age.
However, I was also reading Scientific American at the time, and Martin Gardner had his mathematical puzzle column, in which he mentioned Randi and his debunking efforts. So I looked him up and read some of his stuff, which helped me put the fiction in perspective.
It depresses me that Gardner and Randi are dead but Geller is still being taken semi-seriously, in some quarters at least.
