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Are all mediums con artists then?

Interesting Ian said:
Eh?? Hang on a sec, you're allowed to say bollocks but I'm not allowed to say s***load??
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'Bollocks' tends to circumvent American-based forum censoring software. I think 'wanker' gets through too.

Yeah, I can always sing. But I need to be in a certain emotion state of mind to really sing well. Certain songs that is. This is very obvious Ashley.
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Okay, so you can always demonstrate the ability to sing. But to varying levels of ability.

What is obvious is how this analogy then completely fails to be in any way appropriate to demonstrating psychic ability. Which cannot be consistently demonstrated at all.

If psychic ability were real then people would probably have it to varying abilities - the ones who weren't very good psychics should still be able to demonstrate its existence as an ability above chance.

Yet nobody can, so your analogy doesn't work.

ETA: removing a v and an apostrophe
 
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Ashles said:
'Bollocks' tends to circumvent American-based forum censoring software. I think 'wanker' gets through too.
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Yes, Lisa has just confirmed this to me, but that calling somebody a wanker and saying someone talks bollocks might contravene the civility rule. So I'd better not call you a wanker and say you talk bollocks. I would hate to break this civility rule. Politeness costs nothing and makes debate that much more pleasant for all concerned.

Okay, so you can always demonstrate the ability to sing. But to varying levels of ability.

What is obvious is how this analogy then completely fails to be in any way appropriate to demonstrating psychic ability. Which cannot be consistently demonstrated at all.
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Neither can me singing well. I have to feel for the music, identify with the emotions expressed. Become one with it.

If psychic ability were real then people would probably have it to varying abilities - the ones who weren't very good psychics should still be able to demonstrate its existence as an ability above chance.
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So many assertions, yet so little reasoning :(. There's absolutely nothing wrong with supposing it comes and goes and is inherently capricious. Denying this gets us nowhere. Now don't be such a wa . . . . umm, I mean I think you may wish to consider your position here if I may be so bold to say.
 
Ian and his very old (and weak) arguments regarding PSI abilities. When o when is he going to learn? No Ian, calling other people argument "rubbish" does not make them false. Someday you will understand. I hope.
 
Interesting Ian said:
Neither can me singing well. I have to feel for the music, identify with the emotions expressed. Become one with it.
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But, you CAN always produce a vocal effect that can be readily identified as singing, even if the singing is of variable quality from time to time. Not so with alleged psi effects.
 
Interesting Ian said:
Certainly that's one hypothesis yes. But there have been readings which were manifestly obvious were not merely cold reading, but where every single skeptic on here emphatically disagreed with me. The one or two other non-skeptics agreed with me though.
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I'd like to see more specific examples. Recall that cold reading, or even hot reading, is not just shots in the dark. There is no 'coincidence' in cold reading. It's a strategic whittling-away from the most likely to less likely matching.

P&T have a fun trick that I copied from one of their books: trick photography of a patron vegetable. You have to stick a transparency in a Polaroid camera, so the transparency is already made. It's a cartoon of St. Carl the Carrot.

You take the photo first, and then get them to 'come to an understanding' of what their patron saint is. No matter what they think originally, you can convince them it's a carrot.

Ask them what their favourite vegetable is. 99% of the time, they'll say carrot. It's not a coincidence, it's just the way people are.

For that 1% who say 'celery', have a pen and paper ready. Tell them that the way to tell what their patron vegetable is, is to fish its name out of a mix of vegetables.

Say "ceeeleryyy" as you write down 'carrot' on a scrap of paper. Get them to name ten more favourite vegetables, making sure that 'carrot' is one of them. Always write 'carrot' on the paper scraps. Then, toss them in a bowl, and pull out 'carrot'. You have complete control.




Interesting Ian said:
I was absolutely astounded what people can lay at the door of coincidence. Skeptics seem to have a very poor understanding of how improbable some events are.
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I think this argument goes both ways. There is a lot of confusion about statistics, so people develop reasoning errors around what is or isn't the definition of coincidence.

For example, I just calculated that the odds of a particular event that just happened at this desk are one 8.06x10(67). Does that mean that it requires supernatural explanation?


Another problem is mediums' habit of using terrible vagueness: 'near' 'knew' 'something to do with' 'the letter m or n or s'... this makes the mark invent the connection.

You go in hoping to talk to your dead wife, but end up getting stock tips from the janitor at a job you held for three months in the '80s. Or at least you think so, since he's the only Pedro or Peter or Rizzo you have ever known.
 
Interesting Ian said:
So many assertions, yet so little reasoning :(. There's absolutely nothing wrong with supposing it comes and goes and is inherently capricious.
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Dare I respond... So many assertions, yet so little reasoning.

Can't you simply admit that you want to believe?

Even if an ability comes and goes, if it exists at all it should therefore demonstrate results above chance.

If it doesn't demonstrate results above chance, then what possible reason could anyone have for believing it existed other than pure wishful thinking?

Ian, do you believe anyone has the ability to contact the dead or predict the future? If so who, and what are your resons for believing that?
 
People can't seem to decide whether there was cheating going on in this programme, whether they gained the information from psychological cues, or whether they just said stuff which was bound to have a good chance of getting a fit and thereby looking more impressive than it actually is.

So which is it? If it was all just some sort of cheating going on then it's a pretty sorry state of affairs that even with such cheating they still can't do any better than cold reading!

Or perhaps people would like to say all 3 were involved but with differing tests. That is to say cheating was occurring in one test (or more), there were psychological cues in other tests, and the rest of the tests was just basically guesswork. I suspect they would do, and this just confirms to me that people just fish around for any normal explanation and try to convince themselves that this must be the answer.

The trouble is that such explaining away can always be applied no matter how tight the experiments may be. This is not to say that such criticisms do not have merit. They certainly do. When I was watching the programmes I was constantly thinking to myself that they could have made this or that test much more tight. I think I am aware of all the pitfalls. Certainly all those that people mention on here. And I can't imagine that such testing would be particular satisfying from the goal of scientifically establishing these phenomena exist. But for all that, assuming cheating wasn't taking place, I think that any rational and fair minded person is compelled to come to the conclusion that something paranormal was occurring on some of these tests for some of the psychics. Nobody has said anything to cast the least bit of doubt on this conclusion. They simply keep repeating things that I already fully understand. There again it's been like that for the past 4 years on here ever since my very first post {shrugs}
 
Ian?

Just show whatever evidence you have of paranormal phenomena.

Any evidence. Of any paranormal phenomena.

Put down your pint, and show us your evidence.
 
Good morning Ian.
Interesting Ian said:
Nobody has said anything to cast the least bit of doubt on this conclusion. They simply keep repeating things that I already fully understand. There again it's been like that for the past 4 years on here ever since my very first post {shrugs}
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First off I have to state that I have not seen the show that you are disscussing. From reading your comments, I get the impression that there was something demonstrated in the show that you feel can not be explained by anything other than paranormal explainations. Is that fair to say?
If I'm on the right track here, would you please point to what it was that could not have been accomplished without the use of some paranormal ability.
JPK
 
Sorry to briefly interupt, but is there a difference in meaning between skeptic and sceptic? Thanks.
 
Kochanski said:
Yes, KellyJ for the sake of your sanity don't go there. It involves too much time and only results in severe headaches for anyone with a functioning brain.
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I bet Ian doesn't spend all that much money on Advils... ;)
 
KellyJ said:
No worries on that front. I have not the time nor inclination.
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In recent years the word skepticism has been misappropriated by those who adhere to a particular interpretation of reality -- basically the way that modern science, or at least modern scientists, conceive it. Any putative phenomenon which does not fit into that conceptual scheme is presumed by these people not to exist, and any evidence suggesting otherwise is put down to various errors of one type of another, or fraud.

So most people today who label themselves "skeptics" are not at all similar to the original definition of the word. Read the webpage below by the sceptic (in the original sense of the word) Marcello Truzzi (who sadly is now dead):

http://www.anomalist.com/commentaries/pseudo.html

Now he calls such modern day "skeptics" as pseudo-skeptics. However I feel that 's maybe a bit unkind to these modern day "skeptics", and they object to being called pseudo-skeptics anyway. So basically I think it is rather a good idea to use the English spelling of the word (i.e sceptic) to refer to scepticism in the original sense of the word, and to use the word "skepticism" to refer to those people who Marcello Truzzi describes as pseudo-skeptics.

I think it's catching on because there's quite a few people been on here asking what the distinction is between these 2 spellings. As I hope you now realise, skepticism has very little to do with scepticism.
 
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