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John Edward - psychic or what?

Doesn't JE use the old "head and chest" technique as well? Where he claims he's saying pain in the chest or the head? Nevermind that the majority of deaths occur in the head and the chest. Another one of those things that you can make sound specific, but it's not.

My fiancee, a big psychic fan, was telling me of how she was stunned that a psychic knew about "a man in her life in a uniform." She had just broken up with a college baseball player.

I tried to point out to her that he didn't specify what TYPE of uniform. It could have been a sports uniform, military uniform, police officer, firefighter, a pilot, a welder, a wal-mart greeter...who doesn't know a man in a uniform? Yet she continually calls this an unbelievable hit.

What's even crazier, she told me she was stunned about how much the psychic knew about the ex boyfriend. For starters, the fact that he was an ex. To this day I'm certain that her response to "I see a man in your life in a uniform" was probably "yeah I dated a guy in a uniform" or even "I dated a baseball player." Yet she finds it crazy that the psychic knew that they were broken up...
 
Robin1 said:
The issue of John Edward sometimes appearing like he is cold reading has been brought up many times here as well as in the thread "Proof of Life After Death!!"
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Robin I have replied to you about the Mayflower "hit" in the proof of life thread but it is awaiting moderation so I will briefly repeat it here.

a)In his blog Michael Prescott is only repeating what he seen in a tv programme and he says he is paraphrasing what was said.
b)Even if his blog reports accurately what was in the programme it is television made for entertainment. The programme is heavily edited. Like all such programmes it is edited to make it entertaining to increase their viewing figures. At least one audience member has claimed that editing has changed a miss into a hit.
c)Even if MP did accurately report what he saw and the clip was shown unedited that still doesn't prove JE gained the information from talking to dead people. There are many other ways he could have found out. For instance one audience member has claimed that JE employees listen in to conversations during the long period before the programme is recorded.

What I'm saying is that the information in Michael Prescott's blog can only be sited as proof if you set a very low bar for what you believe constitutes proof.
 
Robin1 said:
The issue of John Edward sometimes appearing like he is cold reading has been brought up many times here . . .
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He appears to do that because that's what he's doing.

He's been shown to do that; you choose to ignore that and follow you bias.

That's it.
 
Everyone is bringing up excellent points, but they have all been brought up before. Regarding interpreting a hit, I have specifically asked about the Mayflower thing before, too. What would be considered a miss for two people and sudden impact? What would be considered a miss regarding Mayflower? Apparently, not much.

Then there is a point I have not noticed until now. Robin claims two contradictory things simultaneously. First, JE can't tell us specific, meaningful phrases like "The secret banking account number is 12344" because he only gets impressions that must be interpreted. Second, she says JE knew of two friends who got shot on Mayflower Avenue. They cannot both be true.
 
Monza said:
If the spirit could show a moving van in order to identify the street, why wouldn't the spirit just show a street sign?
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And for that matter, if the spirit wanted to show a visual image to communicate the word "Mayflower," why would it choose a moving van rather than the much better-known and more easily-identifiable image of the Mayflower ship itself?
 
Pixel42 said:
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She can't. For one thing Edward refuses to allow his performances to be recorded. For another I can think of no way to calculate (2) reliably, and I doubt Robin will be able to either. This sort of investigation would be very difficult for even a trained scientist to do.

There is a much much easier way for a trained scientist (and Robin and everybody else) to find out if John Edward is genuine, but he refuses to do that (submit to testing in a controlled environment) as well.
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Not only that, But a video of a call in show he did which he did not have control over the editing of, was on youtube, has now been taken down by J.E Media.

It is no coincidence that it exposed very brightly how broad and vague his "hits are"

This video however: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx0Jt2jnLOQ shows a rather embarrassing performance by John.
 
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Shilling for John Edward makes me mad. Hey, undecided person with problems in your life, go give a con man hundreds of dollars to make you feel better. One would be better served buying booze with that money.
 
Resume said:
You need to stop posting the highlighted as it is untrue. You continue to fall for the same trick over and over, then make excuses for your credulity.
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Robin seems to be one of those people who assume that just because she knows what cold reading and confirmation bias are she is immune to them. Which is a bit like assuming that once you know what breathing entails you stop breathing.
 
I have posted how it does not reflect well on Robin for her to ignore/misrepresent posts about counter-arguments, e.g. the Prescott article.

It is more than that, though. When we show that Prescott contradicts himself repeatedly in two major ways:

1. He says you can't use an edited television show to judge John Edward but then Prescott does exactly that, and

2. His own admittedly imprecise transcript has JE saying "X" followed by the subject saying "Y", then Prescott asks how JE knew "Y"

Robin ignores it, repeatedly.

This is not really an inability to see truth. It is a refusal to do so. Robin does not address these things because she cannot address these things, and if she acknowledges that they even exist she will have to address their implication, i.e. that JE cannot really converse with the dead. Hence, she continues to ignore them.

As always, I could be wrong, but the evidence is more strongly in my favor than it is in favor of JE's authenticity.
 
Quinn said:
Let's take that claim at face value and assume it's true, and that JE didn't somehow get that information surreptitiously. Given that, there are two possibilities:

1) A spirit told him.

2) He made a lucky guess.

How lucky is lucky? Let's say it's about a 1 in 1000 shot. But JE gives readings to thousands of people. If he takes a 1 in 1000 shot with all of them, he will hit with a few of them. And for those "lucky" few, everything about the experience will be 100% indistinguishable from how it would have been if the info had come from a spirit.

Given those conditions, the question becomes: How do you go about distinguishing which of those two possibilities is actually the case -- whether a spirit told him, or whether you're simply one of the lucky few?




Robin, you're obviously a bright and sincere person, and some things you've posted can be chalked up to a difference in values and opinions. I mention that so that you'll understand that I recognize and accept it when I say this: what you've said in the above quote is simply, empirically, objectively, verifiably wrong. It is the wrongest thing I have ever seen you post. It is as wrong as wrong can possibly be. It is so wrong that on a scale of 1 to wrong, you would need to recalibrate the boundaries in order to accurately depict just how deeply, utterly, agonizingly wrong it is. While people have said things that were equally wrong, no statement uttered by anyone has actually been more wrong than that one.

Put simply, if you think you can replace the mathematics of probability with common sense, then that shows that you don't know enough about either probabilities or common sense to make that proclamation, because no one who does would ever say such a thing. Anyone who looks into the subject with any amount of curiosity will quickly find many examples where common sense leads you to a conclusion that is perfectly reasonable, intuitive, unsurprising, and (yet again) 100% wrong.

The reason I point this out so emphatically is that it seems to be, while not the only factor, at least a major contributing factor in your belief. And if it turns out that one of the major contributing factors in your belief is entirely wrong, that's probably worth re-examining.
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Quoting for Robin1. This is big. They built a small town called Las Vegas on the lack of people's common sense view vs statistics.
 
Garrette said:
No, no, no. One must assume this else one is close-minded. Or one has not read all if Robin's blog, all of this thread, all of the moderated thread, and all of Dr. Alexander's book.
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Thousands of years of no proof of the various heavens promised by various religions. Fake psychics ( sorry for the tautology) and Robin and Dr. Alexander's stories will not change the situation.
 
dafydd said:
Thousands of years of no proof of the various heavens promised by various religions. Fake psychics ( sorry for the tautology) and Robin and Dr. Alexander's stories will not change the situation.
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See? Close-minded.
 
Garrette said:
See? Close-minded.
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Nope, open to evidence. That's what skepticism is, but Robin doesn't seem to understand this. The day that a psychic passes on a clear message from a murder victim that enables the police to catch the murderer is the day that I will believe. The spirits of the dead seem far more keen on passing on vague waffle via the psychic. If my late wife got in touch with me via a medium then I'm sure she would have more to say than commenting on my new oven.
 
dafydd said:
Nope, open to evidence. That's what skepticism is, but Robin doesn't seem to understand this. The day that a psychic passes on a clear message from a murder victim that enables the police to catch the murderer is the day that I will believe. The spirits of the dead seem far more keen on passing on vague waffle via the psychic. If my late wife got in touch with me via a medium then I'm sure she would have more to say than commenting on my new oven.
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Did you read the thread? Before you say yes, make sure you have re-read it, too, along with Robin's blog including all the comments (even the ones that are contradictory as well as those that are irrelevant). The logic is irrefutable.

P.S. I know all about confirmation bias is so that won't help you. Plus I know that numbers get very large.

P.P.S. Apologies for the tone of this post. I am tired and trying to amuse myself.
 
Robin, years ago when I lived in Wales I used to go to the local Spiritualist church. Once a month they would have a traveling medium. All cold readers, and all very good at it. They would go into a trance, supposedly, and throw things out. A couple of hits over the evening and they were a big hit with the believers. I used to smuggle a cassette recorder in and when listening to the tape it was obvious what was going on, but the faithful never noticed it. I was there one evening and the medium asked if there was anyone with a son. A son who's name began with M. Two hundred marks in the audience, a safe bet. I knew somebody called Mike at the time and his mother was there and she piped up. The medium said that Mike was in danger because she saw a hawk hovering over his head. Three months later Mike was in a van up in the wilds of the Brecon Beacons. The van overturned, nobody was seriously injured, just cuts and bruises. When a local garage recovered the van three days later there was a dead hawk lying nearby on the mountain. A hawk in the wilds of Wales, what are the chances of that? This was big news in the church. Mike sustained one bruise on his cheek during the accident. Deadly danger. Of course this was proof the medium's amazing powers, the misses of the evening were disregarded. You have to laugh.
 
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Garrette said:
Did you read the thread? Before you say yes, make sure you have re-read it, too, along with Robin's blog including all the comments (even the ones that are contradictory as well as those that are irrelevant). The logic is irrefutable.

P.S. I know all about confirmation bias is so that won't help you. Plus I know that numbers get very large.

P.P.S. Apologies for the tone of this post. I am tired and trying to amuse myself.
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I don't need any help. No need for an apology, no offense taken.
 
carlitos said:
Quoting for Robin1. This is big. They built a small town called Las Vegas on the lack of people's common sense view vs statistics.
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A lot of statistical theory is counterintuitive. Apparently Robin's intuition is the single exception, being a more reliable guide to reality than the proven findings of a whole field of mathematics.
 
Pixel42 said:
A lot of statistical theory is counterintuitive. Apparently Robin's intuition is the single exception, being a more reliable guide to reality than the proven findings of a whole field of mathematics.
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Yup. She is also the only person who can judge an alleged medium's or psychic's genuineness based on common sense alone without fear of being wrong.

As I have said repeatedly, and I mean it seriously and exactly as I say it, Robin's entire argument boils down to her belief that she, and she alone, cannot be fooled.
 
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