Not really. The purpose is actually to have people demonstrate to have a special ability whilst filtering out anyone that by mistake, unknowingly or knowingly, or on purpose is actually doing something else which is already explainable and does not constitute a special ability.
Your wording suggests that it is only targeted at the meanspirited, but the ignorant are just as much candidate as well.
The thing is, that's not actually the case. The MDC was created specifically to target frauds, and that's who Randi has always gone after. It's been modified several times to try to prevent the ignorant and delusional from taking part so it can remain focussed on the frauds. It can serve as an educational tool for the ignorant incidentally, but that's not why it's actually there.
The contest is 'rigged' and impossible to win anyway, but in the legal sense, not a fraud in any way. It's rigged in the sense that science cannot prove anything is supernatural nor can science prove something isn't supernatural either. Neither side can prove its case.
This nonsense again? The MDC requires both parties to sign a legally binding contract. What "science" considers supernatural is irrelevant. All the matters is that the JREF agrees the claim is paranormal before the challenge takes place. Once the contract is signed, neither party can get out of it. If it turns out that everything is perfectly explainable scientifically afterwards, the JREF still has to pay out the million.
Only the truly deluded would submit to such a challenge, but these people are not the main problem. It's the people who know pseudoscience for what it is and bilk millions using it for fame and profit. You won't find those people taking any such challenge seriously.
But that's pretty much the whole point. The JREF waves a million dollars around that should be easy for them to take if they can do what they claim. When they refuse such an easy offer, the JREF can point out to the world that that looks rather suspicious.
If I were a popular psychic offered the challenge, I could flippantly say:
"Who needs your million dollars? I can make five times that much by simply continuing what I've been doing."
Sure, people come up with all kinds of excuses to avoid or explain away the MDC, just as they do for everything that shows them to be frauds. They have to, since the alternatives are either admitting they can't do what they claim, or actually taking the challenge and publicly demonstrating that they can't. There's never going to be any way around that, but the mere existence of excuses doesn't mean we shouldn't try at all.
Unfortunately, there's not too much Mr. Randi could say to answer that slur, except to concede that it is a valid point and becoming more so all the time.
Actually, that's a very easily answered claim. Aside from a few of the really big frauds, a million dollars is still a significant amount of money for anyone. Refusing to take a million dollars for less than a day's work is, as I say, rather suspicious if you can actually do as you claim. That's probably why we see this sort of excuse from believers all the time but never actually from the frauds themselves, since the frauds know just how silly it sounds to anyone not already brainwashed. They prefer to go with not needing money at all, the money not really being there, the challenge being a fraud, and so on.
The best science can do is occasionally demonstrate that we do not need to resort to a supernatural presumption for an explanation
Occasionally? Every claim that has ever been tested has turned out not to be supernatural. People used to believe that pretty much everything that ever happened was supernatural. The gods caused weather, made crops grow, brought fertility, wealth, governed the stars, and so on. Demons, fairies, and so on, caused mishaps and disease, and so on. Science has shown that all of these things have perfectly normal explanations. That's why the popular religions now have just a god of the gaps that never has any interaction with the real world - because everything that used be thought supernatural no longer is. I think we can definitely say it's a bit more than just "occasionally".
Since the rate at which irrationality propagates greatly outpaces the development of rationality
And yet the world today is significantly more rational than that of just 100 years ago.
I wonder if, in the final analysis, Mr. Randi really had any measurable impact on the problem outside of merely being praised for his well-meaning efforts.
That's a fair point. There's really not any way to measure the impact one particular project has had on such a long-standing, hugely diverse, global problem.
In the meantime, pseudoscience continues to flourish like the social cancer it is with every indication that will continue to do so indefinitely.
If in the days of P. T. Barnum there was sucker was born every minute, then today, there's one born every millisecond! Rationality just can't keep pace!
Except that pseudoscience is actually much less prevalent than it was before. Go back a couple of millennia and essentially
everything was pseudoscience. The ancient Greeks, for example, get a lot of credit as being the forefathers of science. But virtually everything they thought up was total bollocks since they never bothered to actually test it. And not just didn't think to test, but actively shunned the idea as something no pure thinker would ever stoop to. The only thing they were really good at was maths, since you actually can do that just by thinking. Pretty much everything else was little more than nonsensical pseudoscientific rambling.
Or look at medicine. Just 150 years ago, the man who discovered doctors should probably wash their hands was committed to an insane asylum because he contradicted the completely unsupported idea that all illness was caused by imbalance of humours and required bloodletting to cure. He promptly died of a disease that could have been prevented by hand washing. Proper clinical trials were only invented at a similar time because someone finally came with an idea so incredibly stupid that everyone knew it obviously couldn't do anything (homeopathy), yet somehow seemed as effective as most "real" treatments.
Sure, there's still plenty of nonsense around, but rationality has significantly
outpaced it so far. We will likely never completely eliminate pseudoscience and mysticism, but if we carry on the way we're going we'll manage a pretty good job of getting rid of the worst and most harmful instances.
