Psychic Award Revamped – Another Point for the Sake of Reason

13Jan07

Skeptic Revamps $1M Psychic Prize. Now the regular run-of-the-mill cranks aren’t allowed to show off their incredible bullshit skills any more. James Randi’s Million Dollar Challenge gets revamped. The rules are revised to prevent totally unknown people from entering.

“We can’t waste the hundreds of hours that we spend every year on the nutcases out there — people who say they can fly by flapping their arms,” says Randi. “We have three file drawers jam-packed with those collections…. There are over 300 claims that we have handled in detail.”

The challenge is designed to test paranormal claims – psychics, mind readers, you name it. Obviously there’s a need for this, because frauds are still luring lots of money from superstitious people. As would be expected, 100% of the participants have failed. Not a single one of the purported psychics, mind readers, and so on have demonstrated beyond doubt that their skills are genuine.

With the old rules, anyone could claim the prize. Any unknown, untested crazy could try, as long as they agreed on the terms with the foundation. Lots of people didn’t even get as far as the preliminary test because they disagreed on terms. With the new rules, the preliminary test can be dropped, but you have to appear in media, and get an academic to endorse you (and no, your uncle doesn’t count). When you manage this, you get to try.

But, as if this wasn’t enough, it gets even better. The foundation is going to start pointing fingers at high-profiled people who claim to have paranormal abilities:

The foundation will launch this public-shaming initiative with a list of four targets, including self-proclaimed medium John Edward, and daytime talk show darling Sylvia Browne, who claims she can tell the future and see angels.

This is certainly needed. Needless to say, if any of these people could actually prove their silly claims, there’s going to be a lot more than a million dollars waiting for them. If someone managed to prove paranormal abilities, a whole new field of science would spring up over night and our fundamental understanding of reality would be shaken even harder than what Einstein and quantum mechanics ever managed to do. Anyone who could prove something like this would gain instant world fame. There are those who say that science has an agenda to prevent this sort of claims from being taken seriously, because if that happens scientists would lose reputation, grants and jobs. This is all wrong. If something like this could be proven, we’d instantly be living in a golden age. Humanity and science would probably benefit much more if these silly claims turned out to be true. But alas, they’re not.

But things aren’t all roses. Many of these people may have serious mental or neurological disorders. If we start taking this seriously, they might never get the chance to receive proper treatment.

What a psychiatrist might interpret as a warning sign for schizophrenia, the James Randi Educational Foundation is obliged to take seriously. After all, who’s to say that random objects teleporting into existence is any more unlikely than Uri Geller telekinetically bending a spoon? But at some point, the process becomes distasteful.

“If we get them to go to a challenge and they lose, we’re exposing someone who had serious mental illness,” says Wagg. “That doesn’t do us any good, and it doesn’t do them any good. It doesn’t prove anything.”

Unfortunately, otherwise reasonable people who find the claims of purported psychics to be ridiculous and silly still fail to see that their beloved Jesus or other prophets are just as silly. Religion makes lots more money than these psychics can ever hope to do (unless, as I pointed out above, they prove their claims beyond doubt), yet few people seem to react. I mean, come on, walking on water? Bringing people back from death? Turning water to wine? Don’t these amazing skills sound extremely similar to those of psychics? Here’s what Sylvia Browne can do, according to Wikipedia:

Browne says she knows what it is like in Heaven. [...] Browne declares that she can see angels and that they look similar to depictions in paintings, but have different traits depending on their “phylum”. Her grand-daughter who is purportedly psychic claims to have witnessed the angels that Browne states come around humans. She also once claimed on Montel to be able to tell people the time and method of their death, and will reveal it if a person wants to know; she claims most people simply do not want to know.

Jesus totally beats that, doesn’t he? Hopefully, the revised challenge will get the message across. These people are nothing but frauds who take advantage of superstitious laymen.

Filed under: bullshit arguments, religion, superstition   |  Closed