Medium to the Stars?

[Garrette]

>Someone who has never heard of "Criminal Minds," and who didn't know the score of the last Super Bowl, is lecturing us on how American television works.

Don't send me attempted ridicule, and you won't have to deal with my going a little far.

Should we tally the insults both in quality and quantity and see who has slung more?

 

[Garrette]

I don't claim the Caputo Macklemore reading was impressive.

It was a Henry Macklemore reading. And, yes, you have claimed it impressive; you did so in the post just before this one.

For impressive, I copied instead a small part of transcripts I have on John Edward's readings. He's been around a lot longer than Henry, and he's easier to quantify based on the type of reading he does. Plus, I documented Edwards, I have not done that with Henry. I posted the Edwards stuff earlier today, and you can tell me how it is done.

Again, I will not play whack a mole with you. Stick with Henry. He's the one you started with, the one you repeatedly claim must be legitimate, and the one you repeatedly refuse to show a video that is the impressive one.

Now if you're ready to admit that you were wrong in your assessment about Henry, I'll be happy to move on to Edward.

 

[Garrette]

And if you decide to acknowledge that you were wrong about Henry and we move on to Edward, you'll have to provide an actual transcript. What you posted is not remotely a transcript; it is cherry-picked statements, some of which have been discussed at length on this forum. The one that stands out most to me is the drinking milk straight from the cow one. Not impressive at all.

 

[Garrette]

Last bit before waiting for Frank to respond: Even though the Macklemore reading was almost certainly a hot reading, it didn't have to be. All of that could be done with a cold reading of a celebrity even if Henry really didn't know it was going to be Macklemore. Read my dissection of it and notice where the generalities are and when the specifics come and the outs Henry leaves himself.

 

[Frank McLaughlin]

I'll play along and pretend Henry does communicate with dead. If Henry can really talk to the dead, how about solving some open murder investigations or clearing up missing persons cases?

Henry tells people that their dear departed family members enjoyed making turquoise jewelry or some other mundane thing. Wouldn't it be fantastic to watch Henry/dear departed/ghosts actually name the person that killed them. Something like Henry saying "The coroner said I had a stroke, but guess what! Remember my chef friend Kim? Remember that rare blow fish sushi he served me? He poisoned me!

Now that would be a cold reading.

(1) Maybe Henry has identified missing persons. That's a difficult area to go to because, what if you are wrong? That would be horrible, and how can you be sure you are right? There is no verification. Maybe you are mislead. The person on the other side who is telling you they are Aunt Myrtle, is instead someone doing something malicious.

(2) Maybe dead people don't know where a missing person is anymore than you do. Because I'm dead, it does not follow that I'm omniscient.

(3) You will note in a reading Henry might bring in two people. What about everyone else? I've got 50 dead relatives and friends, but maybe they are not available, don't want to make the effort, have incarnated back on earth, entered the Christian Heaven. Maybe they are focused elsewhere, and don't care about things on earth, which are trivial. Who knows?

(4) Dead people don't communicate (I presume) by moving vocal cords to vibrate air against an ear drum. Presumably, they have no body. Theresa calls them "spirit."

How do you communicate to Henry that you died in Costa Rica? Much info I suspect is hard to get across.

(5) Maybe once I"m dead, I see that things exist as they should be and I have no need or desire to start doing police work. Hard to believe that what is important to you during your time on earth will carry much interest once you have left. Some are willing I guess to talk to people on earth if it benefits them. Not important to them however.

Keep in mind I have no idea exactly what is going on. Is Henry really talking to dead people? Maybe there is another explanation. And if not, how is he and Edward doing what they do?

 

[Frank McLaughlin]

And if you decide to acknowledge that you were wrong about Henry and we move on to Edward, you'll have to provide an actual transcript. What you posted is not remotely a transcript; it is cherry-picked statements, some of which have been discussed at length on this forum. The one that stands out most to me is the drinking milk straight from the cow one. Not impressive at all.

It would be pretty hard for me to acknowledge I'm wrong about Henry when no one has presented any evidence for that.

The statements are cherry-picked, yes. That has no bearing on my claim unless we decide that Edward didn't really say that and the NY Times reporter made it up. I do not have an official transcript. How could I unless I went to a session and recorded it.

 

[Frank McLaughlin]

Last bit before waiting for Frank to respond: Even though the Macklemore reading was almost certainly a hot reading, it didn't have to be. All of that could be done with a cold reading of a celebrity even if Henry really didn't know it was going to be Macklemore. Read my dissection of it and notice where the generalities are and when the specifics come and the outs Henry leaves himself.

If all that could be done with a cold reading, why don't you show me a cold reading that is good or at least one not comically bad?

How good Henry is isn't dependent on any one reading. Your logic here is ridiculous. As for a cold reading, Henry wasn't looking at Macklemore for most of the tape. Derren by contrast was staring at this audience looking for clues, and he was fishing. Henry was not.

As for hot reading, you are accusing a lot of people of fraud, which is certainly possible. But that does not explain the many times Henry identifies information that was only known to the subject he is reading. The three people involved were certainly impressed.

 

[JayUtah]

It is, actually, given that (1) I did it before I watched the Macklemore video and (2) Macklemore said it couldn't be done.

The disparity between what people think can be done and what they can actually do (either as individuals or as a species) is, in my estimation, the core of magical art. With physical magic, sometimes our perception of form, space, and time are simply wrong. Magicians learn specific ways in which they're wrong, or can be fooled. They play on our spatial assumptions: I was fooled by Penn & Teller, in their presence, by being foolish enough to assume that if there was a screw head at the junction of two slats, there was a screw behind it that went all the way through.

And then there are people who work hard to be extremely slender, extremely flexible, or to tolerate astonishing amounts of pain, or who -- as individuals -- develop some physical trait that far exceeds the normal person. Thus in this case our expectations for the general population remain valid, but they are violated for just that one case. Indeed that person is very special, but not necessarily in the way suggested by the story he wraps around his special ability.

Human memory seems to be a good bit of stock in trade for the mentalist. We don't bat an eye when actors on the stage recite hours of dialogue without consulting a script. Nor when individual musicians rattle off from memory intricate piano pieces containing thousands of notes. Yet when someone memorizes where each of 52 cards has been hidden on a set -- yes, there's a technique for doing this -- we're suddenly agog. The mentalist tells the rube he's hidden the same card on the set that he's now going to have the rube pull from a shuffled, ungimmicked deck. "Hm, the nine of spades," thinks the magician to himself. "Nine of spades, 'spine of Hades.'" Then he tells the rube, "Go over to that bookshelf and get the copy of Dante's Inferno. Tell me what you find inside the front cover." Well, duh, it's the nine of spades he pre-placed, and remembered its position with a simple rhyme.

Tyler Henry may indeed be a very remarkable person, indeed perhaps even singular. He could, for example, have an exceptional memory for details that his team of researchers serve up for each guest. More so that I or someone else could possibly keep straight. That would make him able to perform impressive feats of supposed insight, that he can then attribute to ghost-whispering. And that would be a legitimate skill I would be willing to pay to witness.

Except when he says he's going to use this nonsense to help the grieving parents of juvenile suicide, that's where I draw the line. That's grief vampirism, the scourge of what otherwise could be an honest living.

Option 1: The laws of physics are not as we know them, and something that has repeatedly failed when tested under laboratory conditions is now suddenly true.

Option 2: Television shows and television star hopefuls are shady in what they are doing and how they present it.

Frank McLaughlin: Option 1, of course.

I tried to bring up parsimony earlier, to no avail. Here we have lots of people who fake these sorts of readings. Some are passable fakes and others are very good fakes -- they admit to being fakes. There are books and workshops you can consult to learn the techniques, and people to help you practice them. The psychological and analytical principles behind them have been adapted to other areas of human interaction, such as police interrogation, where no hint of necromancy is either present or required. Yet for some reason the notion of parsimony goes out the window when some people want to talk about necromancy. For them the easiest explanation is talking to the dead.

Early books on magic tell how to construct an apparatus that, when employed by a practiced artisan and two flexible assistants can produce observations apparently explained by having sawn a woman in half non-fatally. And then, naturally, restoring her whole again. Once you've been told the secret of this trick, you subsequently look for how the trick is done when you see it again. And so the challenge for modern magicians is to do it in a way that precludes all the ways people become accustomed to seeing through the trick. This requires magicians to become more and more clever, even shifting strategies altogether from clumsy, barely-hidden compartments to, say, mirrors that create the illusion of empty space.

But at no time does the magician ever contemplate actually sawing the woman in half.

When we get to necromancy, the true believers acknowledge some semblance of the various techniques employed. Then they insist that despite the fact that magic (including mentalism) is an ever-evolving field, always one or two steps ahead of the rubes, it must really involve talking to dead people, because the one clunky trick he's thinking of obviously hasn't been applied here. The true believers are always so eager to give the benefit of the doubt to the claim of true necromancy. "Well yeah, Tom and Dick used tricks, but Harry really is sawing a lady in half!" Parsimony is the only real victim of that scenario.

Revised claim: Tyler Henry might be wrong sometimes, but it doesn't prove anything.

Not from the cherry-picked sample of a program produced and edited by his friends, it doesn't. Our own resident fortune-teller, PartSkeptic, refused to keep a tally of his hits and misses, but still insisted he and his Tarot cards could make meaningful predictions about the future. Naturally his skeptical interlocutors here kept track for him. Despite his feeling that he was generally right more than he was wrong, he was statistically quite wrong.

But yeah, back to the topic, you don't get to praise a medium and extol proof of the afterlife on the basis of his win-loss record unless he actually has a win-loss record that significantly exceeds chance.

 

[JayUtah]

As for hot reading, you are accusing a lot of people of fraud...

No. You are accusing your critics of making heinous accusations with poor evidence, when they are in fact making reasonable accusations with sufficient evidence. The accusation that someone using hot-reading instead of actually talking to the dead is simply characterizing the exercise as the same way such feats have been accomplished by others in the past, fully admitted-to -- and in some cases conclusively proven -- by their practitioners.

Your argument needs to get past simply shaming your critics.

"He doesn't really saw the lady in half."
"What?? Of course he does! Look for yourself! You're accusing him of fraud, you horrible person, you."

 

[bytewizard]

(4) Dead people don't communicate (I presume) by moving vocal cords to vibrate air against an ear drum. Presumably, they have no body. Theresa calls them "spirit."

How do you communicate to Henry that you died in Costa Rica? Much info I suspect is hard to get across.

"your mother kept a giant bowl of buttons on a shelf in her bedroom closet" was easy to get across, but "your mother was killed by Frank Jones" is too difficult?

 

[Garrette]

(1) Maybe Henry has identified missing persons. That's a difficult area to go to because, what if you are wrong? That would be horrible, and how can you be sure you are right? There is no verification. Maybe you are mislead. The person on the other side who is telling you they are Aunt Myrtle, is instead someone doing something malicious.

(2) Maybe dead people don't know where a missing person is anymore than you do. Because I'm dead, it does not follow that I'm omniscient.

(3) You will note in a reading Henry might bring in two people. What about everyone else? I've got 50 dead relatives and friends, but maybe they are not available, don't want to make the effort, have incarnated back on earth, entered the Christian Heaven. Maybe they are focused elsewhere, and don't care about things on earth, which are trivial. Who knows?

(4) Dead people don't communicate (I presume) by moving vocal cords to vibrate air against an ear drum. Presumably, they have no body. Theresa calls them "spirit."

How do you communicate to Henry that you died in Costa Rica? Much info I suspect is hard to get across.

(5) Maybe once I"m dead, I see that things exist as they should be and I have no need or desire to start doing police work. Hard to believe that what is important to you during your time on earth will carry much interest once you have left. Some are willing I guess to talk to people on earth if it benefits them. Not important to them however.

Keep in mind I have no idea exactly what is going on. Is Henry really talking to dead people? Maybe there is another explanation. And if not, how is he and Edward doing what they do?

MY paraphrase: "Sure, it's not all that impressive, but since I can think of reasons why it isn't it really is."

It would be pretty hard for me to acknowledge I'm wrong about Henry when no one has presented any evidence for that.

Yes, I have. You choose to ignore it.

The statements are cherry-picked, yes. That has no bearing on my claim unless we decide that Edward didn't really say that and the NY Times reporter made it up. I do not have an official transcript. How could I unless I went to a session and recorded it.

You called it a transcript; don't blame me when I point out it isn't a transcript.

If I'm remembering past discussions here correctly, you got that from a Michael Prescott essay on his website. It fell apart under scrutiny.

And if you do not understand why cherry picked statements are not proof then you are unqualified to make your assessments about mediumship on yet another front.

If all that could be done with a cold reading, why don't you show me a cold reading that is good or at least one not comically bad?

Quite a humorous request from someone who refuses to pick a Henry reading and say "This is a good one that I stand by."

Do that first since it's the topic of the thread, and we'll stop playing whack a mole. Until then, as I've said, you are simply tacitly admitting with every post that you have no evidence for your claim.

How good Henry is isn't dependent on any one reading. Your logic here is ridiculous.

Excellent! We're making progress. How many is it dependent on? Of course to answer that you will have to reveal your work with statistics on how many hits out of how many total statements are significant. And that's just the start because you'll first have to define what a hit is (or several degrees of a hit).

You've done this, yes?

As for a cold reading, Henry wasn't looking at Macklemore for most of the tape.

First, it's a ridiculous claim indicating yet again how little you know.

Second, it's a claim you cannot possibly make given that the camera is not even on Henry for a majority of the time, especially when Macklemore is speaking and that is precisely when Henry would be looking at him, even if not obviously.

You have even run out of the straws you are attempting to grasp.

Derren by contrast was staring at this audience looking for clues, and he was fishing. Henry was not.

You didn't even read what I wrote, did you? Henry not only fished, he asked questions before he fed the answer back as if he had originated it, and he gave contradictory responses so he could go down whichever path Macklemore confirmed.

As for hot reading, you are accusing a lot of people of fraud, which is certainly possible. But that does not explain the many times Henry identifies information that was only known to the subject he is reading. The three people involved were certainly impressed.

Their being impressed means nothing, as you have so ably demonstrated with you musical anecdote. As to what Henry could not possibly have known, please enlighten me exactly which ones they are. Remember that you brought up Macklemore and said it was impressive, and Macklemore said it couldn't have been Googled. Macklemore was wrong.

 

[Garrette]

No. You are accusing your critics of making heinous accusations with poor evidence, when they are in fact making reasonable accusations with sufficient evidence. The accusation that someone using hot-reading instead of actually talking to the dead is simply characterizing the exercise as the same way such feats have been accomplished by others in the past, fully admitted-to -- and in some cases conclusively proven -- by their practitioners.

Your argument needs to get past simply shaming your critics.

"He doesn't really saw the lady in half."
"What?? Of course he does! Look for yourself! You're accusing him of fraud, you horrible person, you."

To be fair to Frank, I have actually used the word "fraud" in connection with Henry, but only in connection with Henry.

If I were being completely scientific, I would revise it to say that what Henry does is indistinguishable from what people without paranormal abilities can do and further how he presents it is indistinguishable from my personal definition of moral fraud.

 

[Garrette]

The disparity between what people think can be done and what they can actually do (either as individuals or as a species) is, in my estimation, the core of magical art. With physical magic, sometimes our perception of form, space, and time are simply wrong. Magicians learn specific ways in which they're wrong, or can be fooled. They play on our spatial assumptions: I was fooled by Penn & Teller, in their presence, by being foolish enough to assume that if there was a screw head at the junction of two slats, there was a screw behind it that went all the way through.

---snip---

I am actually a very knowledgeable magician and mentalist, and I do not exaggerate when I say that my library of books and effects exceeds that of many professionals I know. I've also said that since I am both a poor performer myself and since I do not do this as a profession, I will never know enough to actually be considered expert. Were I in academia I'd say I had my PhD but had done no original research or publications.

I say that to sound less pretentious when I say the following, which I remind myself of when I am fooled by magicians and when someone asks me how something was done:

Don't ask how the magician did X. Ask how the magician appeared to do X.

 

[Axxman300]

The point was that you can't decide that "you can't trust what is on TV" as an argument against Henry (who is on TV). Henry's show could be manipulated, but so could the news.

And that's wrong. Henry's show is not on the same level as cable news. It is entertainment, and not held to any standard beyond getting ratings.

He was comparing (I assume) Henry to some FBI drama. My point, and maybe I need to type slower to be more clear, is that there are shows on TV that are trustworthy (CNBC) and some that are fraudulent (Fox News).

Technically neither CNBC or Fox News are entertainment. We're talking entertainment you claim is real.

E! falls in the middle--they don't do aliens or bigfoot-

E! is short for Entertainment. They don't fall between CNBC and Fox News, they fall between Comedy Central and the Cartoon Network.

And they would do aliens and bigfoot in a heartbeat if one of the Kardashians decided they wanted to hunt for them.

-and you can evaluate Henry or Sean Hannity on the merit, not on where it appears. Fox recently ran a story "Hunters Claim Bigfoot Sightings in Utah." They run a ton of UFO stories.

Again, you're not helping your case.

Most of the cable shows that can't get on the major channels run Ghosts, Bigfoot, Aliens, Stichen, Atlantis all the time. Nat Geo channel did a story on flat earth that reached no conclusion, but presented their side. You can watch on YouTube.

They also run their own versions of hack psychics and medium shows too. How are they different?

The argument that Henry isn't valid because he is on E! doesn't work for me.

I didn't say he was invalid because he's on E!, he's invalid because mediums are all fakes, and nobody can talk to spirits...so that's why he's invalid...

 

[Axxman300]

To be fair to Frank, I have actually used the word "fraud" in connection with Henry, but only in connection with Henry.

If I were being completely scientific, I would revise it to say that what Henry does is indistinguishable from what people without paranormal abilities can do and further how he presents it is indistinguishable from my personal definition of moral fraud.

THIS^

 

[JayUtah]

To be fair to Frank, I have actually used the word "fraud" in connection with Henry, but only in connection with Henry.

If I were being completely scientific, I would revise it to say that what Henry does is indistinguishable from what people without paranormal abilities can do and further how he presents it is indistinguishable from my personal definition of moral fraud.

That is completely rational. In contrast, I maintain a particular footing on this point because Frank has said that the fraud he thinks we are alleging is severe enough to release members of the production company from non-disclosure agreements, and further severe enough to compel at least one of them to come forward. He has insinuated that since none have, the fraud he says we allege does not exist. When I point out to him that only legally cognizable fraud will void an NDA, he retreats and says he's not talking about the legal definition of fraud. He wants to equivocate and use an informal, common-sensically moral definition of fraud, but he still thinks this is enough to make an NDA immaterial.

In a similar sense of fairness, I am entirely comfortable calling Henry a fraud, as long as it's understood that I'm not accusing him or his production company of perpetrating the tort of fraud as recognized by relevant legal jurisdictions. I'm also using "fraud" in the sense of personal moral standards. And that has bugger all to do with a non-disclosure agreement or the general conscionability of presenting fake necromancy as entertainment.

 

[carlitos]

I just can’t get past why he wouldn’t admit to being wrong and rather double down and lie about something as simple as the odds on the Super Bowl of this year, only a month ago. Anyone reading this can literally check for themselves in 30 seconds to see that it is a lie. There is a Latin phrase for how I treat the rest of what this poster says: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

 

[Frank McLaughlin]

and further severe enough to compel at least one of them to come forward. He has insinuated that since none have, the fraud he says we allege does not exist.

No. The fraud could exist, and if it does, it will eventually come out. The guy is reading perhaps 25 people a week--most of whom are not signing NDA's--and if it is fraud as significant as you suggest, it will come out.

Anonymously if need be or with no regard for the NDA. Get caught leaking in the White House, and you face loss of security clearance and perhaps jail time---the information comes out regardless.

I can disclose improper information gathering at my firm, or my opinion of their business practices, and my NDA has no meaning. I can't release code or customer lists or a prop methodology. An NDA isn't stopping anyone, and that's assuming the celebrities sign. That hasn't been established.

>retreats and says he's not talking about the legal definition of fraud.

I have no idea there is a separate definition of fraud, and you say I "retreat" because I use a word as defined in a dictionary. Really, the level you go to to try and score a point.

>When I point out to him that only legally cognizable fraud will void an NDA

Once again you isolate and mis-state my arguments. First no one pays attention to an NDA if you are exposing something, happens all the time, and second, Henry's company isn't going to take anyone to court over an NDA because to do so would ruin Henry whether he is real or fake, and if he is fake, he'd be exposed all through Hollywood. Third, the people who have readings are gushing afterword so the NDA is meaningless. There is nothing to expose. Fourth, it is easy enough to leak information anonymously. There are Christian groups that would love to take Henry down. Fifth, an NDA keeps you from disclosing trade secrets, not your displeasure with the reading or your revelation that he did something inappropriate without your permission.

Stormy Daniels signed an NDA. Truth came out. Boy George was dissatisfied with his reading. Truth came out.

I think it is evident in Henry's manner, behavior and effect on other people that he is not engaged in fraud. Whether he is effective, we can debate. That he is sincere, and well-intentioned of that there is no doubt. I believe it to be self-evident.

 

[Frank McLaughlin]

I just can’t get past why he wouldn’t admit to being wrong and rather double down and lie about something as simple as the odds on the Super Bowl of this year, only a month ago. Anyone reading this can literally check for themselves in 30 seconds to see that it is a lie. There is a Latin phrase for how I treat the rest of what this poster says: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

The odds were 8.5, later became 8.0. I got in at 8.5. I lost $50.

Edited by zooterkin: 

<SNIP>
Edited for rule 0 and rule 12.

 

[Frank McLaughlin]

And that's wrong. Henry's show is not on the same level as cable news. It is entertainment, and not held to any standard beyond getting ratings.

You are entitled to your opinion. I disagree.

Technically neither CNBC or Fox News are entertainment. We're talking entertainment you claim is real.

Or we are talking a serious show that you claim is entertainment.

I didn't say he was invalid because he's on E!, he's invalid because mediums are all fakes, and nobody can talk to spirits...so that's why he's invalid

That is your limited experience. I get that. I trolled flat earth for a few months. It was fascinating to watch a person with no clue, so sure of themselves.