Dr Steve Novella has responded to this topic.
Quote:
Response from Dr Steve Novella .....
2) Randi's testing. Again - this is not presented as laboratory research. It is simply testing claims made by psychics, dowsers, etc. It is they who are making the claims, and they agree to the protocol, including the threshold for what is positive. In the preliminary test the threshold is not 1/1000, as is claimed. We used a 1-5% threshold for ours. But of course, you can't give a million bucks to 1/20 people on average who make a claim. The final test has to be statistically rigorous. |
Frankly, I do not believe this When Ted Dace asked Randi the requirement for passing the preliminary, 1000 to 1 odds were quoted. Do you have 1-5% anywhere in writing from Randi, or does the bar move arbitrarily up and down? If Randi had done anywhere near the 'plentiful and bountiful' number of cases implied on your programme, with pass requirement odds as low as 1 in 20, some of those 600 (or more?) applicants would have passed. Of course they could not pass the preliminary because they were not actually tested, apart from the few, extremely few.
This JREF challenge is not science, it is clearly political and biased, a technique to influence public opinion. Therefore, why shouldn't true skeptics also reason the possiblility applicants judged to have the least chance of success were the ones JREF preferred to do preliminary tests upon?