Tag: James Randi

“Prebunking” the Times’ rehabilitation of Uri Geller

July 12, 2023 • 11:20 am

by Greg Mayer

When I wrote Jerry about the New York Times declaration of victory on behalf of the con artist Uri Geller, I predicted that there would be a response from the Center for Inquiry, and maybe Michael Shermer as well. And sure enough, former CFI vice president D.J. Grothe, as Jerry has already noted, has responded, as has the CFI itself, and, as anticipated, so has Michael Shermer. I’ll get to those, but by far the best response came from data scientist Mark Palko, who responded three years ago! Talk about clairvoyance!

How did Palko do this? The Times has been recycling the same story about Geller for years; Palko took apart a previous instance of it. In 2014, the Times published a piece by Adam Higginbotham with the same tale of how Geller rose to success and fame after Johnny Carson, aided by James Randi, failed to expose him as a fraud on the Tonight Show in 1973. Palko takes it apart this way:

It’s a great tale except that there’s little reason to believe it actually happened that way. Start with the fact that Geller seems to be the main source, which should have raised some red flags for Higginbotham.

For the latest Times article, Geller is again the main source.

The 2014 article claimed that Geller’s abject failure on Carson’s show led to a booking on the Merv Griffin Show; did it?

Palko:

How about the appearance on the Merv Griffith [sic] Show? Wasn’t he invited shortly after the Carson debacle? Not exactly. He was invited back.

Geller was on Griffin about two weeks before he bombed on Carson; they invited him back to Griffin two weeks later.

And did Geller’s fame take off after his Carson failure? Palko checks the data:

If anything, it looks like Randi’s debunking of Geller starting with the Tonight Show and culminating with 1975’s The Magic of Uri Geller [a book by Randi] was what brought the charlatan down.

Palko caps off his remarkable “prebunking” thus:

Journalists love people-are-stupid narratives, but, while I believe cognitive dissonance is real, I think the lesson here is not “To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real”, and is instead that we should all be more skeptical of simplistic and overused pop psychology.

I have shown the video of Geller’s appearance on Carson to nearly two decades of undergraduate students in a course on “Science and Pseudoscience”; I don’t think any of them were impressed by Geller’s psychic abilities. What it is is a master class in what is known as “escape from refutation”.

The CFI reports on the “Rehabbing of Uri Geller” in yesterday’s edition of its “Morning Heresy” newsletter.  It begins by saying “it’s officially time to start worrying about the New York Times“– something Jerry and I have been saying for years now!– and goes on, describing the Times piece as

… a lengthy – and progressively more maddening – hagiography of Uri Geller. If there is ever a museum dedicated to fawning, nonsensical historical revisionism, this article deserves its own wing.

It finishes with an excerpt from letter sent to the Times by James Underdown, CFI Investigations Group Founder:

And herein lies the downside to human deep-fakes like spoon benders and faith healers. They paint a picture of a world that doesn’t exist, then fill it with gullible followers. What results is a populace that scoffs at science, ignores medicine, and believes their own eyes at a magic show.”

And finally, Michael Shermer’s take.

Addendum: Greg asked me (he’s doing field work) to add this to the post:

Mark Palko just sent me this piece by Mark Evanier. 
Palko says that Evanier is well connected in the magic community. Note that he disagrees with Grothe’s acceptance that a lot of magicians now embrace Geller. He writes instead:
The sheer reaction to the piece suggests that the embrace is not as widespread as the reporter claims. The professional magicians I know have always kind of regarded the guy as someone who got very rich and famous duping people with the kind of magic most of them could do when they were thirteen — and probably do it better.

h/t Mark Palko, Andrew Gelman

More on dowsing

November 5, 2009 • 1:10 am

by Greg Mayer

Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait also has a post on the Iraqi bomb dowsing: When Antiscience Kills: Dowsing Edition. Here are some videos by James Randi showing how dowsing works. The first is about someone who wanted to claim Randi’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.

The second is a clip from Randi’s wonderful film, Secrets of the Psychics. In this clip, Randi attempts to test dowsing at a Russian alternative “medicine” clinic; the dowsing part runs from about 1:50 to 7:30. (The whole film is great and a hoot– see, as just one highlight, Johnny Carson’s total pwnage of Uri Geller on the Tonight Show, or Randi’s outing of the still active televangelical fraud, Peter Popoff. Apparently no longer available as VHS or DVD, Randi has posted the entire film on Youtube.)

Pseudoscience in the news

November 4, 2009 • 11:34 am

by Greg Mayer

Although they’re a little bit off the usual topics here, two items in today’s New York Times caught my attention. First, there’s an article by Rod Norland on the use of dowsing rods (!!!!) by Iraqi police and military to detect explosives. The Iraqis have spent tens of millions of dollars on these dowsing rods, called the ADE 651.

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, said the center had “tested several devices in this category, and none have ever performed better than random chance.”

The Justice Department has warned against buying a variety of products that claim to detect explosives at a distance with a portable device. Normal remote explosives detection machinery, often employed in airports, weighs tons and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ADE 651’s clients are mostly in developing countries; no major country’s military or police force is a customer, according to the manufacturer.

Dowsing is a well known and well debunked form of pseudoscience, so it was going the extra mile for the Sandia Lab to test more such devices, yet, the Iraqis still swear by them. James “The Amazing” Randi offered a million dollars to the English manufacturer of the device if it passed a fair experimental test, but with the money they are making off the Iraqis, they have no monetary incentive to have the device tested. The Times reporter even ran a couple of small tests on the device (bringing licensed weapons past a checkpoint; trying the device himself), and of course it didn’t work, but this did not shake the Iraqi general’s faith. It’s often claimed that pseudoscientific beliefs are harmless, but here’s a case where, according to the Times, suicide bombers were able to get past a dowsing checkpoint and kill 155 people in an attack last month.

In another example of how pseudoscience hurts real people, a second article in the Times, by John Schwartz, records how a deputy sheriff in Texas is using “dog-scent lineups” to put people in jail. As is well known, eyewitness testimony is a very problematic source of evidence (see also the work of Elizabeth Loftus), and lineups have their own particular problems (as the Times has noticed before [summary– full article no longer online]). But “nosewitness testimony”, by a dog, presents further complications.

The police told Mr. Bickham they had tied him to a triple homicide through a dog-scent lineup, in which dogs choose a suspect’s smell out of a group. The dogs are exposed to the scent from items found at crime scene, and are then walked by a series of containers with samples swabbed from a suspect and from others not involved in the crime. If the dog finds a can with a matching scent, it signals — stiffening, barking or giving some other alert its handler recognizes….

Mr. Bickham spent eight months in jail after being identified in a scent lineup by Deputy Pikett’s dogs, until another man confessed to the killings.

The Times article records other such cases, including one in which the dog-scent lineup evidence was contradicted by DNA evidence. A British canine police unit expert who watched video of the dog-scent lineups, stated

“If it was not for the fact that this is a serious matter, I could have been watching a comedy.”

Both these stories remind me of previous pseudoscientific fads that have swept over small (or in the Iraqi case, large but not very knowledgeable) police departments in the past: “fuel stabilizers” and other alleged devices that “align the fuel molecules” to save gas, and satanic ritual abuse.