Wow, it’s pretty sad to think of someone’s obituary as beginning “Before turning the gun on himself…”
I think you’re overstating it a bit.
It was always a stupid premise. I’ll pay a million dollars to anyone who can convince me to my satisfaction on my terms that blah blah blah. It’s like someone asking for a cite. You give a cite. No, a credible site. You give a cite from the BBC. Not those liberal knee-jerkers, try again. You give a cite from the Heritage Foundation. That’s not how I read what they’re saying, give another.
Certainly not having a clue about how the Challenge works but nonetheless parrotting the usual woo meme without checking the facts would be stupid.
Not exactly. It’s like this:
Randi: Give me a cite.
Me: I’ll give you a cite that you’ve told me in written documents you won’t accept.
R: No, a credible cite. Read my web page to see what that entails.
M: I don’t think your rules for cites are fair.
R: Too bad, it’s my money, my rules.
M: Fine. If I give you a cite with x, y, and z features, will you accept it?
R: Change X to q, and I will.
M: All right, cite with q, y, and z features coming up!
R: Let’s see it . . . huh. That cite didn’t have q, y, OR z features.
M: Dammit, I told you I could give you x, y, and z features! That’s not fair!
Randi doesn’t change the rules constantly. He doesn’t even LOOK at the proffered cite until it will fit his rigorous rules. I’ve read a couple of the challenges start to finish, and the rules looked very fair, if very rigorous.
If there are occasions where you think Randi has moved the goalposts after agreeing to accept a cite with a particular form, or where Randi has asked for a cite without clearly delineating its form in advance, I’d be interested in seeing them; from everything I’ve seen, that’s not how he works.
Daniel
Daniel
I think it was a fascinating premise.
Some people claim they have paranormal abilities and charge recently bereaved people hundreds of dollars.
Some people claim they have paranormal abilities and are very confident (but don’t have a lot of money).
In both cases, it makes sense for Randi to offer a million for a simple demonstration.
The demonstration is agreed by both sides beforehand, based purely on what the applicant states they can do.
If a new ability is discovered, we all benefit.
If the paranormal fails, the person learns something. As Randi says, most dowsers are honest people who genuinely beleive they have a paranormal power. They are completely astonished when their powers fail in a scientific test.
Quite possible. What he does the other 99% of the time that he isn’t on the SDMB, he could be a nice cheerful guy who gives nary a thought to the topic.
Well, perhaps my assumptions about his offer are incorrect. I’m just naturally suspicious when the lawmaker is also the judge. Certainly, I understand the principle that it’s his money and therefore his rules. But there’s nothing scientific about that. I’m just as suspicious of oil company findings that global warming has nothing to do with them. Why can’t Randi offload the requirements portion of his challenge if he wants it to be credible beyond the my-ball/my-game threshold?
Let’s look at my original post.
Note that the first line is an attempt to continue this conversation in this BBQ Pit thread, not the original Great Debates thread. If I had wanted to continue hijacking that thread, I would have posted my response directly there. Now, I could have posted my response here without any link to it in the Great Debates thread at all, but that would have been entirely useless, right?
Now let’s look at the second line of my post. While the first line was a pretty big clue as to where one should continue what was a hijack of the original thread, the second line was a direct statement as to where responses should go.
Read this link , and you will find out how above-board the whole procedure really is.
That cite’s biased!
You’re absolutely right.
Now that we’ve heard the side of logic and reason, we should be willing to hear the other side.
Okay. Well, certainly that satisfies most issues I had with it, but one thing remains that bothers me a bit. Not about what he’s done, but about the potential for others to make of what he’s done. That’s where he says that no one has ever passed the initial or preliminary test. I can see where a person might take that out of context as some sort of evidence that the applicant failed somehow to prove his psychic power. However, Randi makes it clear that a key factor of the preliminary testing involves a “mutual agreement” between the parties. He then states plainly that “if no agreement can be reached, the application process is terminated, with no blame or fault attributed to either side”. (emphasis mine) Therefore, nothing whatsoever can be reasonably construed about any failures thus far since no preliminary tests have ever been conducted. In other words, although it is fair to say that no one has proved him wrong, it is equally fair to say that he has proved no one wrong as well. It’s a grand stalemate.
This confuses me. I am pretty sure that numerous preliminary tests have been conducted, especially with dowsers. No one has passed the test, but preliminary agreements have been reached.
Well, surely you realize that Randi believes he will never have to pay out that million dollars, since dowsing and ESP don’t work.
Of course he’s not trying to find people with genuine pyschic powers, since he believes such people don’t exist. So failure to pass the test doesn’t prove anything, just like seeing 100 black crows doesn’t prove all crows are black. But Randi can’t prove all crows are black, so instead he offers to pay a million dollars to someone who claims to have a white crow. This certainly doesn’t disprove the existance of white crows, but it makes it harder to understand why people who claim to have white crows haven’t made an easy million dollars.
You’re right. I should have said that most applicants are never tested. Not that none were. Still, the point remains that nothing can be concluded in any case where there was no test. Also, just because Mr. Smith failed at something, doesn’t mean that Mr. Jones will fail. Suppose, for example, the test were for the claim that a man can run a mile faster than four minutes. There could be even a large number of tests that all applicants fail. That’s the nature of induction. You really can’t draw a conclusion except by a sort of faith.
True enough. If you have some idle time, click on “Log of Applicants” in Czarcasm’s link. It will give you an idea of just how difficult it can be to establish an initial protocol.
In all likelihood, “offloading” the requirements would be forbidden by his insurance company or something like that.
I think it’s worth noting that, in practical terms, Randi’s beseiged by people who claim to have paranormal powers and who cannot even specifically verbalize what those powers are, are in many cases immune to any sort of logic, and quite frequently are simply incoherent. A typical Randi challenge is not a well structured explanation of “I can do X,” it’s something like this:
Peter Morris’s weird little semantic/obsessive misunderstanding is not the usual challenge - in fact, it’s quite atypical - and for that matter the more famous rejections are likely better than the average submission.
So why is Randi changing it? Well, I think it’s because Randi’s challenge has been an almost total and complete failure.
A lot of this discussion has been around the theme of “James Randi is a dick.” That’s likely true; if he’s not a dick, he sure doesn’t do a good job of convincing me otherwise through his writing. But it’s really quite irrelevant. If you were to replace him with someone who isn’t a dick, it would have no effect at all on the Challenge, the sort of people who apply, or its effectiveness in accomplishing the goals Randi set out for it. And whoever you asked to take it over might end up BECOMING a dick.
Bear in mind that the purpose of the challenge, really, is not to give away a million bucks; it’s to discredit con artists like Sylvia Browne and that evil woman who inspired “Medium” by throwing a paradox into the public eye; if these people are psychics, why won’t they take my million dollars? By doing that, Randi would promote logic and reason and make the general public more skeptical, which would be a good thing. If you’re very naive, you might think that would work; how can anyone believe in this sort of nonsense when this challenge goes unclaimed? But it’s failed to do that. The prominent con artists that people have actually heard of will not take the challenge, since they would fail anyway, and lose nothing by ignoring Randi. The public is not one iota more skeptical than it was the day the Challenge was started. Randi’s attempts to shame the big time con artists have failed; they are not at all shamed.
James Randi is well known on the SDMB and a part of the Internet community, but his public visibility is really not significant; he is, at best, a C-level celebrity. My family are all smart folks but I bet none of them except maybe my Mom, who has a memory like a steel trap for this sort of thing, would know who I was talking about if I said “Who’s James Randi?” And my family aren’t fools who believe in this nonsense - they just don’t know who he is, the same way you could name some Broadway star and I’d have no clue who you were talking about. The people who are fooled by John Edward and those other thieves don’t know who Randi is, don’t care, don’t understand what a fair test would or wouldn’t be, so on and so forth.
Randi’s challenge has not attracted Edward, Browne et al. - since they have nothing to gain and a lot more than a million bucks to lose by accepting a challenge they know full well they will fail - and HAS attracted the dregs of society - nutballs, losers, flakes, and Peter Morrises who have some sort of personal problem and could really use the money. Randi has discredited them by the score, but what the hell good does that do? Nobody knows who these people are; nothing is accomplished by discrediting them; they often do not even comprehend why they’ve been discredited. A million simoleons is sitting in escrow for no reason at all, when you get right down to it.
So, they’re trying something new.
Beautiful, beautiful post, RickJay. Thank you. Even here at the SDMB it seems like 90% of the people don’t comprehend the Randi Challenge at all and you nailed it perfectly. I hope that everyone involved in this discussion will read that post before continuing.
Heh, seems that the GD thread got chased into this one.
And indeed, that’s a very good post RickJay.
To answer the OP: Fans of Randi are not (in general) submitting him for sainthood. No one says he’s perfect, or that the challenge is perfect, or that he’s never made a mistake, or that he might not be caustic and dismissive.
Detractors of Randi, or at least one of them whose name rhymes with Eater Horace, on the other hand, are completely devoid of any connection to reality and have no sense of proportion.