What I've Learned From Skeptics Michael Shermer, Steven Novella, James Alcock and Jam

[Frador]

Originally Posted by alextsakiris

I went back and checked... you're wrong.

I checked, Here's the quote:

I've spoken to a lot of other animal communicators as well as parapsychologists, I have to say, and I understand their perspective. I understand how difficult it is to stand up to the skeptics, and I understand how, at a certain point people just say, "I want to get on with my life. I want to quit dealing with the James Randis of the world, and the Steve Novellas of the world, and the people who are just constantly denying all this stuff."

I guess you aren't specifically calling Dr. Novella a denier, you are just saying you understand those who do say this.

[David Bailey]

Well that is a neat quote, but it illustrates an important point that I raised in ψ-shy. When I listened to Dr. Jill Morstad's interview, I was struck by the fact that although she did not want to be associated with ψ-explanations, she offered no real alternatives, and she freely admitted that some of her colleagues communicated with animals at a distance.

If ψ ever becomes mainstream, it would not surprise me at all if we suddenly discover that a lot of people have been using it all along right under our noses!

David

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by davidsmith73

True, but I think it was easy to see that the methods SRI used were bad and especially easy for a magician like Randi to spot that Geller was taking advantage of the bad methodology. The Geller affair is a nice example of scientists being fooled by perhaps being too trusting.

It was lots of things, but not that, I think. Here are the facts as I remember them:

Uri Geller arrived on the scene doing a bunch of stunts. Most of them seemed to be not particularly sophisticated magic tricks. One major piece of originality was his spoon bending stuff -- again, most of it seemed rather transparent but occasionally he appeared to exceed what the skills he generally displayed would allow.

Some parapsychologists wondered if he might be a case of someone who found he could occasionally do something apparently psychic, found the attention rewarding and started using trickery to be able to succeed all the time. Skeptics prefer to keep their labels simplistic -- if anyone has ever pulled a penny from behind a child's ear they are "frauds" and, by definition, anything that they do is fraudulent whatever the controls or circumstance.

He was brought to Stanford by Putoff and Targ for some study. They allowed him to do some demos under moderately tight controls, which lead them to decide it was worth doing a single experiment under tight controls. This was done and the results were positive, though at a far lower rate than Geller's usual stage performances. The results were published in Nature.

Persei Diaconis, a well known magician, statistician and Skeptic announced that he had observed the Stanford experiments and that Geller was a transparent fraud. In fact, Diaconis had not observed the experiment, he had seen Geller do an informal show on the campus without controls and with neither Putoff nor Targ present, having nothing to do with the experiment.

Randi announced that the experimental protocol was easily evaded, and that Putoff and Targ were dupes. He has never revealed how this was done, never discussed changes in the controls that would fix things, in fact, never gave any indication that he actually knew anything about the experiment. He also never took up an offer to repeat the experiment with himself as the subject. No magician I know has made any concrete suggestions as to how the experimental controls could have been evaded -- and I've had detailed discussions with other magicians on just that subject -- with one exception.

Martin Gardner (math popularizer, philosopher, one time flim-flam artist, magican, and Skeptic) pointed out that if Putoff and Targ made one incredibly stupid error in conducting the experiment -- which they had not explicitly said that they had not -- then Geller could have peeked at the targets and gotten positive results. Since Geller did get positive results, he must have peeked at the targets and Putoff and Targ must have made the mistake Gardner accused them of. Therefore the conduct of the experiment had been shown to allow Geller to cheat.

To the Skeptical community, this was the end of the matter. Geller had been shown cheating during the Stanford experiment (which somehow tends to become multiple experiments in the Skeptical literature -- with Geller hoodwinking the poor foolish non-Skeptical scientists for months).

Actually Putoff and Targ presented video tapes of the actual experiments and the error that Gardner claimed must have been there was clearly not.

Geller clearly cheats. We know that now and I doubt that there was a serious parapsychologist at the time who didn't know it then. Experiments with such people is clearly less reliable than using large numbers of "ordinary" subjects -- you need to add the possibility that they have somehow managed to evade your controls to the evaluation.

However, Geller did take part in one experiment (as far as I know, the only controlled scientific experiment he has ever taken part in) and gotten positive results that has never been convincingly explained. You can (as in fact, I do) say that the probability is too high that he somehow cheated to put too much evidentiary weight on the experiment, but you cannot say that he has been demonstrated to have cheated during the experiment.

[davidsmith73]

Originally Posted by Topher Cooper

No magician I know has made any concrete suggestions as to how the experimental controls could have been evaded -- and I've had detailed discussions with other magicians on just that subject --

My impressions of the experimental controls come from viewing the video of Geller doing some experiments at SRI. One involved locating which metal container had water in it among a number of dummy containers. Preliminary trials involved Geller waving his hand over the containers where he could have potentially concealed a small magnet perhaps? The formal trials did not allow him to wave his hand over the containers but his hand was still allowed to get close to them to point to the one he thought was the target. I just thought that Geller might have devised some clever way of using trickery here. Is that unrealistic?