Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  Oh please, no one takes Serios seriously. It's like taking Geller seriously.
~~ Paul |
Your right Paul -- or at least no one takes Serios seriously who is credible (and taking Serios seriously is proof that one is not credible). After all, Randi has said that he could easily reproduce everything that Serios has done under the same conditions any time he feels like it, and that should end the matter, it being completely irrelevant that Randi has never "felt like it" in all the decades since he first made the claim. More importantly, Serios has done stuff that if it were real would constitute evidence of phenomena that we
know absolutely and with certainty cannot be true -- it makes no sense to accept as evidence anything that would constitute evidence to something we don't believe in, after all. The mere fact that nobody has ever been able to do more than a rough approximation of Serios's demonstrations under very much looser conditions (and while sober), and that no one has actually been able to demonstrate Serios cheating, despite multiple sessions under tight laboratory conditions with trained magicians and hours and hours of video tape to examine is completely irrelevant.
<Sarcasm mode off>
I tend to distrust really outstanding subjects like Serios. The more spectacular the results, the more motivation to find a way of cleverly cheating, and the more the experiment depends on the single person.
In all the films I've seen of him working though, I have never seen anything that looks like a magician: no really questionable moves, few moves that are innocent but which might be clever opportunities, generally cooperative and never seemingly anxious to control angles or procedures. On the other hand, he is clearly and unmistakably a person with severe personality problems -- and not just his drinking. I would, just guessing, say that he would probably today be diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome or even high functioning autism.
Randi has frequently reproduced vaguely similar results, but only vaguely, and only under loose conditions, while acting very much like a magician (of course, he always seems to act like he is ready to steal your underwear, even when he is just having a casual conversation).
Persi Diaconis (a top-notch magician, and Stanford statistician) claims to have once spotted Serios in cheating, but the method claimed would not have worked under the laboratory conditions that Serios worked under, despite the results being highly consistent in appearance. I have great admiration for both Diaconis's legerdemain and his statistical research, but as a Skeptic he has appeared on several occasions to allow the "greater truth" to take precedence over the actual details of what has occurred.
So, was Serios for real? Can't say for sure. Does "no one take him seriously"? Lots of people do. All I can say is that he has all the characteristics that would make for a lousy magician, but he gets results that would make him one of the best in the world (though he only does a single trick).