Derek Ogilvie ?
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On Mon, 4/14/14, salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Are the TM-Sidhis nothing but Placebo Effect?
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, April 14, 2014, 11:34 AM
More below......
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...>
wrote :
From: salyavin808
<no_re...@yahoogroups.com>
To:
FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday,
April 14, 2014 8:48 AM
Subject: Re:
[FairfieldLife] Are the TM-Sidhis nothing but Placebo
Effect?
Some of the people Randi have had to put up with!
He had a guy who could turn pages of a book with his mind.
He'd sit with a book in front of him and the pages turn
without him touching them! I saw the film
even.
Randi asked
if him he could do it with a sheet of glass between him and
the book and he said of course he could. He couldn't
obviously, how anyone could be so deluded they weren't
aware they were just breathing on the pages is beyond me.
The human capacity for self-delusion must be near infinite.
Which is why believers can't be trusted to examine
themselves properly.
He's had harder subjects
than that though, telepaths and mind readers that turned out
not to be are common as muck, cold readers even if they
aren't aware that is what they are doing. Loads of them
still make a living even after they failed in the test Randi
set. "It was set up to fail" they claim
afterwards. Whereas before they were keen to demonstrate
their powers under conditions they themselves agreed to. To
keep their belief in their powers intact they scapegoat
Randi as unfair. Go figure.
It's the "When Prophecy Fails" syndrome
all over again. A prophecy fail makes the TBs believe in it
even more. Go figure. There is simply no accounting for
self-importance and an inability to say, "I was
wrong."
People
are willing to come up with so many twisted theories to
explain *their* mystical experience. And as far as I can
tell, all of this is driven by self-importance. They're
declaring "My experience was SPECIAL" (and of
course, silently saying "And so am I"), and
they're desperate for any way to "prove" it.
What such people are unable to cope with is someone hearing
about "their experience" and saying, "No,
it's not special at all, and neither are
you."
One of
the most interesting people that took on the Randi challenge
was a guy who thought he could talk to babies
telepathically.
UK's Channel 5 made a doc about him in their
"Extraordinary People" strand. The most
extraordinary thing to me was that anyone thought it was
possible in the first place, I mean babies don't have
thoughts and conceptualised desires, they don't even
have a language at that age!
None
of this has stopped the guy making a fortune out of his
"powers" he still fills halls up and down the
country with dopey women and their bawling kids where he
rather obviously cold-reads irrelevant crap about their
family lives and charges them a fortune to tell them things
they already know. It's no different than mediums
preying on the bereaved really. And credit where it's
due, he was very good at it.
Anyway, this guy took up James Randi on his offer and
went to claim his money. Randi interviewed him and they came
up with a test that would showcase his skills. Boy, was he
confident and he really
thought the money was his.
The look on his face when he came out of the
soundproof room to see how well he'd done and found out
he'd drawn a complete blank was priceless and he accused
Randi of cheating and setting him up to fail, but we all saw
it. There was no doubt without the parents to talk to he
couldn't do it.
So why was it called Extraordinary People and not
Extraordinary Failures? After his disappointment with Randi
the documentary makers took him to a
psychologist rather
more sympathetic to claims of this kind (you
can see the problem there) who did an EGG of him when he was
in his cold-reading trancey state and declared that he was
using his brain in a way that he'd never seen before.
And it was interesting but looked like he'd simply
started using another brain section for his trick, maybe one
that gets used in altered states?
Anyway, this was taken as confirmation that he really
did have a special supernatural skill even though it
completely ignored all the other evidence of cold-reading
and his failure at Randi's lab. To me it was a fine
cautionary tale about trusting sympathetic scientists* and
the willingness to believe.
The
guy still makes a living conning money out of gullible young
mothers and James Randi held on to his $ million.
*And
clueless documentary makers.
