You might have seen an obituary (or dozens) lamenting the loss of a stage magician named the “Amazing Randi”. He died recently at the age of 92 with the “Randi Prize” supposedly unclaimed — I will get into that later in this blog post. Let me introduce you to the Randi world through the eyes of a psychic scientist. He was born in 1928 and had a pretty good career as a stage magician who claimed to see the future by determining the winner of sports games. He lamented that the gullibility of his audience disturbed him to the point that he gave up the future-reading gig and went into escape artistry. According to an article written about Randi, he never got over just how easily people could be duped and made it his life’s work to debunk psychic charlatans. I can wholeheartedly agree that people who scam other people out of their money giving them false hope or comfort should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But Randi did not stop there. He went after highly regarded and respected physicists Puthoff and Targ in his book “Flim Flam” stating that he had a guy on the inside watching their experiments with Ingo Swann. Randi took his scepticism to an all-or-nothing level enticing followers such as Carl Sagan and other scientific illuminaries to open his CSICOP group. He dogged famous spoon-bender Uri Geller claiming that every attempt he made at spoon bending was an illusion, not psychokinesis. This led to very expensive lawsuits that used up much of Randi’s MacArthur funding and caused his removal from CSICOP. Eventually, he offered $1000 to anyone who could prove to him that what they could do was, in fact, due to psychic ability and not some kind of prestidigitation or ledgerdomain. The money values increased to $10,000 and then $1,000,000, known as the “Randi Prize” by popular culture. You will hear skeptics say: “Psychic ability can’t exist because no one won the Randi prize.” Well, that ain’t the whole story.
Randi had been known to say that psychic ability doesn’t exist, therefore, no one could possibly prove to him that effects are due to psychic ability. He claimed that people were either self-deluded or were using illusory skills a la Penn and Teller. Given that extreme bias, he developed requirements that were above and beyond what psychics, even great psychics, were capable of achieving. For example, if a baseball player was playing a game in front of major league scouts and hit a .400 average for the game, it would be considered an amazing achievement. Statistically, that is 400 hits out of 1000 pitches, lower than a 50/50 chance. However, baseball scouts know that a higher hit rate is very, very rare and that the average hit rate hovers around .300. The same is true for psychic ability. After a century of study, a hit-rate of 60% is considered good. Randi wanted 80% or better hit rates for any psychic that attempted his challenge. Even if that psychic was on a roll, Randi was so biased that he would negate any findings. I have also looked at the “Randi Prize” contract and noted that the burden of proof and costs were on the psychic with Randi often the only judge of whether the contestant was successful or not. Regardless of the high and moving goal posts, several psychics did apply to the challenge and wrote about their experiences. Later, the contract would prevent any psychic from claiming success if they were, indeed, successful. He was allowed to lambaste any and all comers.
Parapsychologists were put in an awful position of trying to show valid science to an increasingly skeptical and derisive crowd. Randi went so far as to insert magicians into ESP studies to show how credulous the researchers were to illusion. On the positive side, the researchers employed magicians to examine their research process to look for any possibility of cheating making their research much tighter and better controlled than other soft sciences. Some current researchers such as Lloyd Auerbach are card-carrying members of Mentalist societies so they know how cold-reading and other skills are employed by magicians. Charlatans were not new to the Psychical society at the turn of the twentieth century. Spiritualism was at an all-time high and people were easy pickings, including scientists. However, rigorous controls were placed to prevent the use of wires and mechanisms when parapsychologists studied the legitimate mediums of the day. Unfortunately, materialist and dogmatic skeptics, like Randi, decided that all of them were fakes and parapsychologists were blind. To this day, the study of anomalous phenomena is derided as a fringe study worthless to any other field. My hope is with this funeral, science progresses.