http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html
1.1 How long has this Challenge been open?
The Challenge was first introduced in 1964 when James Randi offered
1,000 to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal powers in a controlled test. The prize has since grown to One Million Dollars.
1.2 How many people have applied for the Challenge?
Between 1964 and 1982, Randi declared that over 650 people had applied. Between 1997 and 2005, there had been a total of 360 official, notarized applications. New applications for the Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge continue to be received every month.
1.3 Has anyone ever passed the preliminary test?
No.
1.4 Has anyone taken a formal test?
Yes. However, the vast majority of applicants and claimants for the Million Dollar Challenge have not taken a formal test, because none of them have passed the preliminary phase of the Challenge.
![1,000 of his own money to the first person who could offer proof of the paranormal. During a live radio panel discussion, James Randi was challenged by a parapsychologist to "put [his] money where [his] mouth is", and Randi responded by offering to pay](http://theskepticalzone.fr/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-ec92d1d7fdf8658bb2bb4d7995abaab6_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
1,000 to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal powers in a controlled test. The prize has since grown to One Million Dollars.I would generally think in light of this, paranormal phenomenon are mostly non-existent. I have a lot of skilled gambling friends (some have made millions) and the question of prayer or paranormal phenomenon occasionally comes up when they consider it as a possible angle to make more money. The consensus is that no skilled gambler made money using the paranormal or prayers.
Nevertheless, there are surprisingly modest numbers of Christians who are skilled gamblers who use mathematics to extract advantage in the gambling world. Perhaps the most known names are Doyle Brunson (became a Christian after miraculous healing) and Kevin Blackwood, the others are anonymous for good reasons.
It doesn’t seem that miracles follow any formula, but it seems there are events way out of expectation which some could call miraculous, imho. There was some paranormal phenomenon in my family. I don’t like to talk about it too much because it was creepy. Materialism was in many ways a safer place to be psychologically for me, and hence my interest in science rather than seances, but I think there is a sinister spiritual realm out there for sure which generally eludes the scientific method.
If there is an active spiritual realm out there, it is taking great pains to elude James Randi’s challenge, otherwise James Randi is right, there is no paranormal realm. Analogously, if there is an Intelligent Designer, like paranormal phenomenon, He is avoiding direct means of communicating His existence and has chosen to leave designs and remain mostly out of notice ever since the act of creating the designs. If the Intelligent Designer communicated through the heavens as in the account of Moses, we might not be having the debates we’re having…
I think highly of James Randi’s challenge and for its exposure of many charlatans. I think most religious beliefs are rooted in superstition, coincidence, irrationality and gullibility. I especially saw the casinos profiting from these human weaknesses, and I admit I indirectly profited by other people’s gullibility since I preyed on the casinos who preyed on the gullible.
That said, neither can I run away from personal experience or observation. I briefly met astronaut Charles Duke when he spoke at Campus Crusade for Christ. He walked on the moon, was an Annapolis Naval Academy and MIT Engineering graduate. He was a skilled fighter pilot and then found fame and fortune before becoming a Christian. After his conversion, he testifies of having his prayer for a blind girl answered by when her sight was restored. He probably wouldn’t pass the James Randi challenge either, but neither, given Duke’s career accomplishments, does he have much incentive to be making up fanciful stories, especially in an increasingly anti-Christian climate.
The most successful gamblers I know hate superstition and use of intuition, they love cold hard numbers and rationality. But still, many of the highly successful professional gambler’s I know are split over whether they believe in the paranormal or not. It seems this question is something all their high powered math cannot conclusively answer given the little evidence we have in hand.
Precious!
I don’t think you really do “get it”, OMagain. If you (the general you) commit such blatant, egregious errors concerning things that are easily checked out – that I even provided links to or which exist on this very site (DNA_Jock) – and you (the general you) insist on even after corrected – what does that say about your capacity to look over any evidence or information objectively when it contradicts your a ideological commitments?
PSI is unconfirmed by science and this is highlighted by its compete absence in engineering and technology.
What would you know about looking over any evidence, when evidence does not form part of your belief forming process?
In any case, I can equally ask the same of you. I have informed you over and over that I do not act as if there is an objective morality. This contradicts your ideological commitments, and so you ignore it.
Likewise my question about ‘fair dice’.
What error was that, by the way? Please, remind the audience what error you have spent so many words “correcting”?
Well, now you’ve met WJM, who once bent a teaspoon during a psychokinetic party.
Science!
William:
Of course it’s evidence!
Magicians can easily perform this trick. By your excruciatingly bad logic, that isn’t evidence for the hypothesis that Dynamo is faking it.
Have you ever asked yourself that question?
We seem to have inspired another silly OP at Uncommon Descent:
WJM:
I suppose if a magician assures me that his tricks are — well — tricks, and I believe him, it shows my gullibility and anti-paranormal bias.
WJM, you haven’t told me yet what you think of the Beischel & Schwartz 2007 study. You cited it yourself as a counterexample to my claim that stricter controls killed positive results in psi experiments. You argued (wrongly) that it used a highly improved “quintuply blind” protocol and yet produced a highly significant positive result (“81% hits”). I posted a link to the published description of the experiment (in a pseudoscientific journal). Would you care to have a look at it and tell us if you can see any methodological flaws? Would you, after examining the results, still maintain that they were “far beyond chance”?
I wouldn’t mind joining the discussion at UD, but I’m no longer welcome there.
Bending a spoon with your hands does not strike me as paranormal. Now if WJM can bend one of my soup spoons, I’ll embrace his philosophy and call him a demigod.
I’ll even let him hold it. I’ll wear a blindfold.
I’ve had them for 40 years and none have bent yet. One of them fell in the disposer, and the result was a new disposer. But physical construction should not be a hinderance to someone with mind powers.
Piotr Gasiorowski,
He’s done this before, and run off to UD after exchanges here. The last one was on “non materialistic science” or whatever. Their giveashit was the same level as ours, they didn’t.
As KeithS has pointed out, WJM is remarkable in that he writes batshit crazy woo woo (books, even) and then distances himself from them later, only to repeat with some other batshit crazy woo. Unable to learn, he cannot free himself from his cycle of tard by claiming his big boy pants.
William, you ignorant slut. You have posted your drivel on a forum where most of us can’t respond.
You wouldn’t know confirmation bias if it jumped out of your closet and bit you.
The reason for tight protocols and independent replication of experiments is to reduce the possibility of confirmation bias.
You are just humiliating yourself in public.
So why not drop the whining and just propose an experimental protocol? Something we could negotiate and agree on?
ID isn’t about making a positive case, its about trying to create doubt.
I doubt that some of them can breathe without a respirator.
Ignorant? I’d say that he knows exactly what he is doing.
He wants to make a case for the paranormal. And for that, he needs a highly gullible audience. So he has gone to where he can find that audience.
It’s from Saturday Night Live. Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. Meant in fun.
I don’t see a lot of UD regulars jumping in to defend William.
Perhaps the association of paranormal with witchcraft is in their minds.
William@UD
So it seems it was that, not the video thing.
The funny thing is that William has reported that he went to a spoon bending party, and lo! Spoons were bent. Presumably in the magic way, otherwise weird party.
So if it happens there is video of said party, in what way would it be different, substantially, to the video in question here? You’d look at it, see people bending spoons. And presumably William would say that, yes, spoons were being bent in a Uri Geller fashion.
So, it’s not the case that there could not be video that proves spoon bending demonstrates PSI powers, it’s just this particular one does not.
Presumably you said all of those things as you believe that there is something PSI going on (notwithstanding your earlier disclaimer)? Whatever you might say, here you are saying that you can lift heavy chairs with people in them and that spoons can be bent in the Uri Geller style at spoon bending parties?
So if a video was taken of spoon bending at a spoon bending party you were at and had recommended other people go to, that you’d then turn around and call that “not convincing evidence” too?
What about a video of people being lifted by fingertips? Here you are recommending that people try it, presumably because you believe there is something PSI going on.
So, by the transitive property of something or other, if I present a video of the fingertip lift on what basis are you saying it’s not evidence for PSI?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pq6x087sk4
Why does the lady on the left hold her back after the light as a feather lift?
I am gaining weight on popcorn as I wait for someone at UD to support William’s underlying premise, which is that paranormal phenomena are real and are being “Expelled.”
So far, Joe G has helpfully chimed in by saying macroevolution would suffer the same fate as paranormal phenomena if subjected to Randi’s strict protocols. I can only assume he is saying that both are bogus and that Randi’s criterion are valid.
You can count on Joe to get right to the heart of things.
UD is a place for people who accept the evidence of common ancestry for Darwin’s Finches (not all do, but certainly many do) to come up with as many ad hoc excuses as they can to avoid the evidence of common ancestry of all vertebrate life, of all metazoans, despite the fact that the evidence is of exactly the same kind (whether morphology, or, for extant life, DNA, etc.) and there is nothing to indicate a break or difference that would call into question treating the evidence similarly (not all deny evolution, but those who don’t insist that design steps in without any of the apparent leaps expected from design appearing). Of course, the fossil record is generally in accordance with unintelligent evolution as well, while leaving evidence vastly different from that of any design strategy observed in part or in whole, so that’s even more evidence for “macroevolution” over what they typically call the “microevolution” of Darwin’s Finches.
UD is also where Murray writes of the “confirmation bias” of those who question the slight and generally doubtful evidence of psi phenomena, while he also denies the evidence of common descent of all life sans the input of a “Designer” that fails to distinguish itself from normal evolutionary processes. Oh yes, where’s the consistency?
People who won’t acknowledge that the evidence in life and in fossils fails to indicate distinguishable Design, and who deny that the evidence is consistent with unintelligent evolutionary processes–when the evidence doesn’t differ noticeably from what they accept as due to unintelligent descent with modification–tell us that not accepting slight and doubtful evidence for woo that seems inconsistent with well-established physics happens to be a matter of confirmation bias. It’s so obvious, don’t you know?
Of course, clearly the greatest confirmation bias rests with those who think that resorting to unestablished causation that seems inconsistent with established causes, without significant pause or doubt, is reasonable. It isn’t so much a matter of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (a pretty unclear claim itself), it’s that establishing a whole other realm of causation that thus far has never been pinned down requires some clear and good evidence. One present-day flying priest whose magical exploits withstand scrutiny would tell us that there almost certainly is an unknown set of causes (or whatever you might call them) that we’ve missed thus far.
For myself, I’m not about to deny the paranormal outright, but I’m also not going to waste much time delving into purported statistical “effects” that rise above (or possibly sink below) expectations of established processes. So I doubt, and wait for some evidence half as good as the evidence for woo-free evolution that we have at present. It would not have to be as established as common descent with modification (without the revolutionary effects that come from known design, on occasion) is, but it certainly has to be better than the claptrap of ID “evidence.” So far, I don’t really see that “evidence for” psi or for ID is really worth much time considering, at least not past the point where it’s clear that anything that can be twisted “into their favor” is thrown at us, without any clear evidence for the phenomena claimed.
Glen Davidson
WJM it takes a really big man to have his woo get decimated on an open discussion board then run away to a heavily censored site and post the same woo. A really big man to then attack and insult his critics on the same heavily censored board where those critics are banned and can’t respond. A giant of a man.
William is not getting a lot of love at UD. Joe G and Mung have “agreed” with William by suggesting evilution be subjected to the same standards.
The irony is thick.
William is going on about psychic dogs. I followed a google search to Randi’s take on animals.
http://www.skepticblog.org/2009/01/05/animal-telepathy/
It’s a fun read, and not at all what you’d expect if you read William’s account of Randi.
I’ve had two cats travel indeterminant distances to get home. One was left in the care of friends while we traveled. He wound up not at our house, but at my mother-in-law’s — a place he’d never been.
Another cat — an abyssinian — was catnapped by persons unknown. He was gone for five months I’d go out at night and call him. hoping he might be in the neighborhood. A couple of times I “saw” him in the dark, but I assume it was wishful thinking.
Then one night I saw him again and assumed it was the usual hallucination, but he remained. He was very sick and weak, and died a few weeks later. Actually both cats died soon after their journey.
Oh, I know it’s mean, but I burst out laughing when I saw this.
You guys, you guys …
Neil Rickert said:
It’s just amazing to me how I can explicitly state exactly what my argument is about (what is it, 3 times now, including my post at UD?) and you and the others here still don’t get it.
We get it William. We just don’t care.
You live in a fog of credulity. It is quite within the financial means of paranormal believers to design good protocols and do good research. So why do you make excuses for them?
ETA:
And what is the figging point of doing sloppy research?
As it should be!
The current murder rampage in Africa against suspected witches, totally sponsored and fanned by USAian creationist sects, should make anyone hesitate before they jump on the “psi power is real and it’s really magic” wagon.
I figure many of the denizens at UD are supporters of the moral duty of witch-burning, but they would be paranoid that the mob will come for them one day if they talk about anything more “powerful” than spoon-bending.
It’s the same gross stupidity that gets fundamentalist christians riled up about celebrating Halloween. God forbid you should accidentally call up a real demon by decorating your yard with decorations of ghosts and witches. Or in some parts of the christian world, god help you if that’s merely what your neighbors fear you are trying to do.
On the other hand, maybe the UDers are not leaping to W’s side because they’re as tired of his schtick as everyone else. 🙂
I think a belief system that is Bayesian or Laplacian is warrented. Based on this, I can heavily discount WJM to ‘nonsense’, as should he himself.
O’rly?
I see you have posted some comments but I must have missed the one with the argument.
So…not to the IDiots at UD?
I think they’ll assume it all the same, though.
Glen Davidson
the thrust of the argument is that Randi is mean and won’t roll over.
ETA:
Perhaps William could demonstrate his mind powers by willing us to agree with him.
petrushka,
I see what you mean. Murray quotes Randi:
Imagine the result of a controlled experiment where Mr Kolodzey is prevented from getting food smuggled in by associates. It’s really mean of Randi to prevent this happening. 🙂
ETA link
Think about it from their perspective. If you just throw out all of the scientific standards and protocols, ID could “prove its case” with “looks designed,” and it would be time to oust all of those bigots who insist on good evidence.
Anyone who doesn’t let just anything go, no matter how vulnerable to fraud it makes the trial, is a mean hyperskeptic with a confirmation bias that insists on meaningful controls.
Glen Davidson
Getting back to animal telepathy, I think in this day of nanny cams (*my son has two in his apartment, it would be a trivial expense to record the behavior of pets while their owners are away.
A bunch of raw data could be produced at virtually no cost. I suspect some software could be developed to analyze the recordings for events that indicate a pet anticipating its owner’s arrival.
Or perhaps some simple tracking device could record the pet’s movements toward and away from the door.
Or would this scare away the oogie boogies?
Alan Fox,
If it’s just water in and water out, Mr Kolodzey violates the 2LOT.
We get it.
The paranormal happens when the experimental method is poor and the observers are gullible. If we tighten up the experimental design to exclude possible bias, then the effect either disappears or becomes so weak at to not be worth investigating.
Many of us would like to see clear evidence of paranormal effects that don’t go away when you look closely. It would make science more interesting. But it seems unlikely that such clear evidence will ever show up.
William, at UD:
Hardly. There is a possibility of error or fraud in any scientific study, so if I were using that reasoning, I would have to conclude that all studies are fraudulent or in error. I am not making that silly mistake.
Instead, I’m doing something more intelligent and less William-like: I’m weighing two possibilities against each other and picking the one that is more likely to be true:
1. Psi is real, but it just so happens that its effects are indistinguishable from those that would have been produced by fraud or error, and they disappear when the experimental design is improved to reduce the likelihood of fraud or error.
2. Psi isn’t real, and the effects in question are due to fraud or error.
Objective, intelligent observers can see that #2 is far more likely to be true, just as they can see that #2 below is more likely to be true:
1. Perpetual motion machines are possible; it’s just that the effects are indistinguishable from those that would have been produced by fraud or error, and they disappear when the experimental design is improved to reduce the likelihood of fraud or error.
2. Perpetual motion is impossible, the 2LoT remains true, and the “perpetual motion” results are due to fraud or error.
Think, William.
From the Wikipedia entry for an Australian woman, Jasmuheen (nee Ellen Greve), a leading proponent of the “breatharian” movement:
As someone else pointed out, it’s strange (or maybe not) how many of these alleged phenomena simply disappear when tested under properly-controlled conditions. It must be something to do with the bad vibes given off by skeptics.
I wonder if WJM saw the sci-fi / comedy film “Mystery Men” about a batch of B-list superheroes? One of the characters, Invisible Boy, can’t use his power of self-invisibility when anyone is watching. WJM probably thought it was a documentary. 🙂
I always think.of Invisible Boy when William posts. It’s one of movidom’s great plot twists when he is able to use his power.
I’m sorry, but I jumped into this late and I’m just too damned lazy to read through all the comments so I apologize if my question has already been answered.
Why do they have to advertise Psychic Fairs?
Because the paying customers are muggles.
Beating a dead horse: I still see no support for paranormal at UD. A few anti-evolution posts, but nothing supporting psychic woo.
A while back, OMagain said:
Exposing the confirmation bias and gullibility of materialists here is not just a “semantic” issue and, IMO, it is not the “least relevant”; it is the first thing that must be addressed and is the most important. If one cannot see past their own selectively hyperskeptical confirmation bias and personal ideology-friendly gullibility, there’s simply no way for them to ever judge any argument or evidence objectively.
I mean, you guys cannot even read straightforward declarative sentences about things you ideologically disagree with, without entirely misunderstanding and subverting the meaning of those statements in favor of your worldview. It’s astonishing to watch how over-the-top and bizarre your mischaracterizations are.
When you write one of those, please do let us all know.
You don’t think FSCO is real, you just think that people think it’s real.
You don’t claim PSI is real, you just think that there is research into it.
You won’t say if you think a die can be fair or not.
Whine, cry, piss, moan, soil diaper.
Anything but design and carry out good research.
Just like ID.
But Barry has already weighed in, only to blame a poster from another, unrelated thread for the fact that Barry had to be rude to him and call him names (he calls it “correction”). This blatantly confirms that the UDites don’t care for the topic and would like to change it.
‘spoon bending party’
William, people are so afraid of death and uncertainty that they will flock to almost any kind of woo if the purveyor is charismatic. You have to be smart enough to realize that ALL the world’s religions — Mormonism, Adventism, JW, Islam, christian Science, Scientology, Hinduism, Christianity — cannot simultaneously true, and yet billions of people adhere to them. Some will kill for them.
Among secularists, we have homeopathic medicine, cold fusion, UFOs, the EM drive, and of course, the paranormal.
Skepticism and the insistence on tight experimental protocols and independent replication is the standard for science because people want to be fooled. they pay money to be fooled.
Psi is one of those rare fields of research that doesn’t cost anything. there’s no expensive equipment required. No elaborate buildings or machinery necessary. All that’s necessary is a few people willing to do experiments right. Just honest, tight, well designed, high-school science fair level research.
So in all the decades since Rhine, why the fuck hasn’t anyone done any?
Don’t forget “go to heavily censored board where no scientifically knowledgeable people can post and lie about how those people couldn’t rebut your woo”.