More woo from the NYT

I’ve banged on over the years about how the New York Times is soft on woo—this includes religion—as has Greg Mayer (see references here). The paper still has a weekly religion column, “Believing“, written by a nonbelieving ex-Mormon, albeit a writer extraordinarily sympathetic to faith.  There is no “nonbelieving” column, nor anything about why people reject faith.  In the introduction linked just above, author Lauren Jackson says that the paper’s readers were the impetus for this column:

Earlier this year, we published a series of articles about how people experience religion and spirituality now. In response, thousands of you told us you wanted more: You wanted us to expand our reporting on how ancient ideas are appearing in our very modern lives. You wanted a space for both believers and nonbelievers to share their stories. You wanted, above all, for us to take the subject seriously.

In other words, readers had a “woo-shaped” hole in their being.

The paeans to faith demanded by readers extended to faith in woo. After all, belief in woo—dowsing, mediums, astrology, reincarnation, facilitated communication, and so on—are, like religion, belief in unsubstantiated phenomena that is based on faith.  This is what the NYT readers want, perhaps as a palliative in these parlous times.

Now the NYT has done it again, in an essay by Senior Opinion editor Sarah Wildman. Greg, who has taught a popular course on “Science and Pseudoscience” at the University of  Wisconsin-Parkside, called the piece to my attention, and, sure enough, it’s a type specimen of faith.

The title says it all: mediums, who pass on messages from dead to living people, “may be on to something.”  Unfortunately, tests of mediums over the years show that there’s nothing to it save duplicity (including some mediums who have bought into the idea that they really can talk to the dead) and credulousness.  James Randi’s “million dollar challenge”, which ran from 1964 to 2015, offered a cool million bucks to anybody who could demonstrate paranormal powers under Randi’s rules designed to rule out fraud.  Thousands of people applied, but nobody passed the tests, including a medium.

Click on the screenshot to read the latest osculation of woo; you can also read it for free at this archived site.

There are two forms of “reading” that mediums use: “hot” and “cold”. In “hot” readings, the “psychic” finds out stuff about the client, her relatives, and her life in advance, and then spits it back during a session, claiming it came from the dead. From Wikipedia:

Hot reading is a technique used when giving a psychic reading in stage magic performances, or in other contexts. In hot reading, the reader uses information about the person receiving the reading (for example, from background research or overhearing a conversation) which the receiver is not aware that the reader already knows. Hot reading is commonly used in conjunction with cold reading (where no previously gathered information is used) and can explain how a psychic reader can get a specific claimed “hit” of accurate information

In “cold” readings, the psychic doesn’t know about the subject in advance, but uses a number of cues to confect a message that seems real:. From Wikipedia:

Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums.  Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. during a line of questioning. Cold readings commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not. The reader then emphasizes and reinforces any accurate connections while quickly moving on from missed guesses. Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Barnum effect and due to confirmation biases within people.

Neither of these are mentioned by Wildman in her article, nor does she talk about successful efforts to debunk mediums. This lacuna is expanded more because Wildman seems confused about her point. In places she states or implies that messages are really coming from the dead or the beyond, conveying “inexplicably specific knowledge.” In other places, though, she emphasizes that people’s belief that they’ve somehow sensed the presence of the dead, or contacted the dead, is simply a wonderful palliative for their grief; but she doesn’t state explicitly that what they’ve sensed is real.

This mixing of soothing faith and reality makes the whole article a mess.  Nevertheless, both kinds of belief are harmful (see below).

I’ll give some quotes. First, one that mixes both theses (bolding is Wildman’s):

. . . in recent years, researchers have spent considerable, serious effort to examine the psychological impact of perceiving a lost loved one after their passing, and the positive role that can play in what grief therapists describe as our ongoing relationship to those we have lost. Contact, for lack of a better word, can be sensory, auditory, visual, a sense of presence, or smell. It can be spontaneous, reached through meditation or directed therapy or even, sometimes, through mediums who, like this one, offer inexplicably specific knowledge. References to such experiences extend just about as far back in literature as the written word and are not limited by geography, or culture.

Some studies put the proportion of people who have perceived the presence or signs of their lost loved ones at around 60 percent. Sympathetic psychologists call these sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased or even “after-death communication.” (Others — perhaps less sympathetic — call them “bereavement hallucinations.”) The therapists I spoke to for this essay aren’t trying to determine the veracity of the supernatural. They are trying to learn how perceiving the presence of the lost can lift the bereaved from their darkest spaces.

In study after study, the sensation of contact with a deceased loved one plays a rather remarkable role in alleviating grief. In one recently published review of 14 psychological studies across seven countries, spanning over 1,900 participants, researchers found that a majority of those who reported experiencing the sensation of their lost loved one had had some sort of “emotionally restorative experiences that contributed to coping with their grief.” That doesn’t surprise me. It is bleak finality that leaves the griever reeling.

Note that she mixes the “inexplicably specific knowledge” (yes, inexplicable), with the palliative properties of simply perceiving signs from the dead or of the dead. Later in the piece she adduces more “evidence” that mediums are trawling up something inexplicable.

Here’s the one mention of doubt, but it expresses an anti-scientific attitude:

The study of these occurrences and their impact on grief has long been prejudiced by exactly what you’d expect: the surety of scientists and skeptics that all of it — mediums, sensations, signs — might be about as real as a dime-store Ouija board, a 19th-century séance or, worse, a momentary psychotic episode. William James, the philosopher and psychologist, who was himself sympathetic to the idea, published a study of mentally healthy individuals in 1890 and noted the peculiar insistence of the “hallucinations of the sane.” Sigmund Freud once called it “hallucinatory wishful psychosis.”

Oh, those cold, nasty scientists who are sure that psychic phenomena are delusions! How vicious they are to dispel comforting illusions! But I don’t think scientists have ever denied that mediums may be able to mitigate grief. Of course they do—that’s why mediums are in business! Scientists are concerned not with the psychological effect of mediums so much as with whether they are really doing what they say they’re doing.

Here is Wildman is on the frequency and therapeutic value of having experiences of the dead:

Nevertheless, researchers have long recognized how widespread the experience is. In 1971, Dr. William Dewi Rees conducted a study of 227 widows and 66 widowers in Wales in which nearly half — half! — reported what was referred to as “hallucinations” of their lost spouse. Most of them had told no one. Dr. Rees noted the episodes were considered “normal and helpful,” and nodded to the similar experience of widows in Japan.

Again, we’re not denying that people dream about, long for, and even experience the presence and feelings of the dead, just as we don’t deny that people have experiences of God. The question is this: do such experiences show real communication with dead people and that God exists?

Towards the end, Wildman becomes more and more invested in the reality of psychic contact with the dead:

In conversation, Mr. Ginsberg told me that, though he suspects a large percentage of mediums can’t offer what they promise, he has had too many inexplicable experiences not to believe in some form of continued communication with his daughter, both through mediums and on his own. It makes her loss a bit easier to carry.

After Mr. Ginsberg told me about a number of inexplicable occurrences, I offered him one of mine. Once I was sitting in a coffee shop, describing to a friend the lack of resolution I felt over Orli’s untimely death [Orli was Wildman’s daughter who died at 14]. When I got up, the song lyric playing as I entered the bathroom was “Find a way to make some peace / with how the story ends.” It was a song by the Midnight that I had never heard. It felt like magic.

I told several of the researchers I spoke to about instances like this that feel peculiarly transcendent.

To me it would feel like a coincidence, and these coincidences happen all the time.  Wildman has undoubtedly often grieved the loss of and thought about her daughter. How many different songs must she have heard before, during, or after such times? What are the chances she would find one at least vaguely relevant to her grief? Different kinds of songs are heard by grieving people, but they report only the ones that feel “transcendent.”

Finally, here’s the kicker meant to show that something weird and numinous is going on. Here’s what Wildman says after she had calls with the well known medium Laura Lynne Jackson and her press person. The “prediction” apparently comes from Jackson herself:

Oy! Orli had a stuffed anteater, not an armadillo. This is a classic example of how readers dupe their clients (and sometimes themselves). First, the medium asks a generic question, and, upon receiving the answer, feeds the answer  directly back to the client as though it was conveyed by the spirits, and not  just moments earlier by the client; Wildman just laps up this classic cold reading move. Then, when she hears about an armadillo, Wildman falls prey to what students of readings call “free interpretation”: she finds a way to turn a mention of one thing into a mention of something else, converting a psychic “miss” into a psychic “hit”. How far off from an anteater would an animal have to be before it was not considered a sign from the spirits? Would an elephant fit the bill, as it too has a long snout?

All we have here is the kind of coincidence that many of us have experienced. Or perhaps Ms. Wildman’s old friend knew about Orli’s stuffed animal and was sending a belt buckle in that knowledge. Who knows? What is clear is that closing the essay in this way suggests that Wildman was receiving the psychic “sign” predicted by the medium.

You might ask, sensibly, “What is the harm of making people feel good by telling them stuff about their dead loved ones, even if that stuff is made up or ‘cold read'”?

You know the answer. There are two palpable harms. The first is that people pay good money to psychics. Jackson doesn’t given prices on her site, but her waiting list is years and years long. But it’s big business. As the AP notes,

“The psychic services industry — which encompasses various specialties such as astrology, palm-reading, psychic readings and fortunetelling — generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and employed 105,000 people, according to market research firm IBIS World.”

Since there’s no proof these people are doing anything that’s really psychic, though they may be soothing people, this is a form of therapy in numinous clothing.

The second harm is that, like religion, belief in the reality of psychic stuff weakens our skepticism, making us more liable to believe other unsubstantiated stuff, conspiracy theories, and other claims without evidence (“the election was stolen”).  Now I am not going to be the one to tell a dying relative that she’s not going to heaven, nor would I cast a cold eye on a psychic reading that soothed a widower.

But with this article, the NYT is buttressing the reality of psychic phenomena, and buttressing it with the imprimatur of America’s most authoritative newspaper.  The piece is irresponsible, as was the editor who let it go by. Once again the Paper of Record is meeting America’s demand for woo when it should be dispelling that woo with facts. Will there be an op-ed arguing that mediums are fraudulent? I doubt it.

Randi exposed many of the techniques of mediums and other psychics in the classic PBS Nova film, “Secrets of the Psychics”; it is well worth watching.