Doesn’t he, Max? ISTM that that is pretty much exactly what he does do.
Randi requires that you show your power with 100% accuracy 4 times out of 5. If you can only do it 1 time in 100 he won’t test you.
Cite?
From what I understand, the tests are based solely on whatever you claim you can do.
Randi doesn’t do the testing, by the way.
Except Randi, like Diogenes, evidently believes such powers cannot exist. I believe that such powers are impossible to determine.
Yes, know. Those who take the test still have to be able to perform on cue. Didn’t mean to imply that the JREF operates like “Beat the Clock”.
Dreams are just one example. I’ve also had strong feelings of intuition (e.g.: which way to turn at an intersection in an unfamiliar area) which Dio would probably dismiss as “coincidence”.
What would even be coincidental about it?
Nothing, other than the fact that they’re nearly always right.
Try turning left then. You might have better luck. 
In the interest of efficiency, can we just get to the part where some people start calling Randi a big mean ol’ poopyhead, rather than wait until the thread train-wrecks on the fifth page?
I’m not a psychic, but I predict that’s how it’ll turn out.
First of all, I have no idea where you got this 4 out of 5 business.
Secondly, how accurate you’ll need to be depends on how accurate you CLAIM you can be. If you say “I can call a coin flip every single time”, then YOU are the one making the claim, and it’s perfectly reasonable for him to demand that you do so, say, 50 times in a row. Or, 40 out of 50 would probably do, maybe 3 separate trials. But remember, that’s if YOU say that you can do it every time.
If, on the other hand, you say something like “when someone is holding a hand of 5 random playing cards, every once in a while, I can figure out exactly what it is”, then you and he would have to negotiate… if you claimed that you could do that around once in every 100 tries, then he’d demand that you do a large number of tries, maybe 5000, in which you’d expect to get it right around 50 times. There is no hard and fast rule as like 4 out of 5 or anything.
And, again, how else would you suggest the challenge be structured?
Cite?
I agree. I also believe they’re VERY unlikely to exist.
That’s a fairly nebulous claim, although not totally untestable. If you can clarify and quantify it sufficiently, I’m sure Randi would be happy to test it.
Those odds are way too easy. I think Randi would reject them. There are only 52 cards in a standard deck, after all. So guessing them 1 in 100 is not very impressive.
However, I don’t see any real need for ‘on demand’ stuff. If you say your dreams can predict the future, then all you need to do is make some coherant predicitons that can be verified easily. You can tell Randi that it takes a few months to get up some predicitions and I rather doubt he’d mind. Especially since such a test can be run through email.
Of course, any such predicitons would have to be impressive and not centered around the dreamer.
There’s absolutely nothing like this in the challenge. The rules and procedures are tailored to the specific claim.
Obviously the odds of chance will vary according to the phenomena being tested.
It is very important to note that those rules are designed by both parties:[ul][li]so that chance can be ruled out as the cause, andcheating is unlikely.[/ul][/li]How could a test be fairer?
It is also important to know that for the test to proceed, the testing body is satisfied with the conditions, and so is the claimant. Let me say that again: the claimant agrees to the conditions and is 100% confident that he can perform exactly as claimed under them. After all, he initially claimed he has done the same thing lots of times, and he is just going to do it again. On demand. That’s his claim, not Randi’s. JREF just puts the money where his mouth is.
Unfortunately, professional skeptics give skepticism a bad name. Randi is definitely not objective; he sees lack of proof as proof to the contrary as evidenced in the tone of his writings. Skepdic.com is embarrassingly unobjective and outright wrong in some cases. I believe I’ve proven so in past threads about aromatherapy. Militant skeptics are just like fanatics, they just deal with the anxiety of the unknown in different ways. The former completely denies it and the latter completely embraces it. Contrary to what others have said, I think that Randi definitely has an interest in seeing his prize unclaimed. It’s not his money that’s at stake–it’s his ego integrity.
I do wish I could trust him to administer a test that wasn’t unnecessarily prohibitive because if he did, he’d most likely get the same results. Of course 99.9% of anyone claiming to be psychic is either simply intuiting, lying, or deluding themselves. I certainly don’t need a monthly magazine to show me the fallacy in the arguments of those claiming to have “powers.” It’s pretty fricking obvious. The universe has already been proven to be a hell of a lot weirder than one postulated with the additional existence of paranormal phenomenom. It can’t get any weirder than 26 dimensions, non-locality, black holes where time stops at a point with infinite density, and light somehow “knowing” how many slits there are in the screen.
No exact cite but I agree with KidCharlemagne.
It could be tested, if I was capable of having such moments whenever I want. As I’ve said, if I could do that I’d be getting rich off some lottery.
I’m getting it from Randi’s own accounts of the tests he’s performed, and the challenges he’s issued. Always, he sets the rules for the challenge, and demands a high success rate in a short series. In most of his own accounts of his tests, the target to beat is either 4 out of 5 or else 8 out of 10.
I’d be very curious to see these accounts if you know where they are on the web. It would go along way towards getting over the disagreements as to whether or not his tests are fair.
What kind of tests are you talking about? 80% might not be unreasonable for some tests, especially if that’s what the applicant claims he or she can do.
You seem to have misunderstood the situation.
In order to take the test someone has to state that they are 100% confident they can suceed. Yeah, right.
But what if someone doesn’t like the test onb offer? Where does Randi ever promise that he will adjust the test to make it acceptable? Many people have complained of trying to negotiate a test with Randi and finding him totally inflexible. You have got to accept the conditions he demands AND say you like them. And if you don’t like them, don’t take the test.
Randi has never promised to offer a fair test to all applicants. He just says that anyone who actually takes the test must say it’s fair. And there is a world of difference between the two.
Sure, I’ll dig a couple out and post them shortly.
No, that is not true. I just went over the rules of the test, and I don’t see anything about someone’s personal level of “confidence.”
I DO see that they have to be able to state clearly and unambiguously what it is they’re able to do.
Who are these “many people,” and what was it they wanted Randi to agree to? Do you know any of them? Can you provide actual evidence?
My suspicious is that a lot of people would like to take a “test” that has no clear definition of what it is they claim to be able to do, and no real agreement as to what constitutes a successful test. But if you have evidence to the contrary, by all means show it to us.
Bu my amazing psychic powers tell me no such evidence will be forthcoming.
If you’ll note, I said a “hand of 5 playing cards”. If I pick 5 playing cards out of a deck at random, and you can guess all 5 of them 1 time out of 100, that’s VERY impressive, and definitely testable.
The trouble with that is that it lacks precision. I suspect a lot of hostility that testees have towards Randi is that if he’s potentially going to be awarding $1,000,000 to someone, he wants a VERY precise and unambiguous definition of what’s going to happen. Predicting the future is sometimes not very hard. I mean, Bricker predicted that Bush was going to win. Does that make him psychic?
To be rigorously testable, the predictions would have to be along the lines of “what card WILL I draw from this deck” or “what sequence of heads and tails WILL come up” or something like that, which is not the kind of precognitive dreams most people claim to have.