"The name of the late Cambridge physicist was included in a 2015 email in which Epstein told Maxwell to offer a reward to any of Giuffre’s “friends acquaitonts [sic] family” who could prove false an allegation that Hawking had participated in an “underage orgy” in the Virgin Islands. Hawking, who died in 2018, has not been accused of a crime related to Epstein."
So you’re saying that a billionaire going to the island where billionaires rape kids and hanging out with the billionaire who rapes kids, was unlikely to be there raping kids? I think you might be offering too much grace.
Yeah don't get me wrong, I haven't read most of what Hawking himself is accused of, I'm just saying that mere mention or association isn't necessarily a smoking gun.
A - the person does have magic powers and uses them publicly. This person would ABSOLUTELY be inclined to get the prize.
B - the person does not have magic powers and is a fraud who pretends they do for show. This person would NOT be inclined to go for the prize (even though this describes every person who has tried).
C - the person does have magic powers but keeps them a secret from everyone. This is the case you seem to be referring to.
If someone had secret magic powers and never showed them to anyone, then that's fundamentally the exact same situation as a person who has no magic powers and never tries to pretend they do. Which defaults back to "magic doesn't exist."
As far I knew the prize was withdrawn cause last I knew of it there weren't taking any applications anymore for it. https://web.randi.org/home/jref-status Beyond that I do agree with you.
Most of the people who claim to have the powers just are very good at either hedging their bets at guessing or using vague enough terms, or they know how to cold read people. It's not hard to learn and people are amazed by it cause they don't realize they are willingly giving them the answer and the other person is just spouting it back at them or in telling them what they want to hear.
I like stage magic and illusions. I'd watch things like Penn and Teller fool us a lot. The other thing I liked, Breaking the Magician's Code: Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed. I just dig that sort of thing. I like the technical aspect of theater and stage.
I'd also watch Crossing Over with John Edward a lot..was more fascinated in the techniques he used to cold read people and how he guessed at something.
As far I knew the prize was withdrawn cause last I knew of it there weren't taking any applications anymore for it. https://web.randi.org/home/jref-status Beyond that I do agree with you.
Just as background information, the challenge was started as an attempt to get professional psychics, scammers one and all, to put up or shut up.
All the professionals, who are well aware they have no actual powers, refused to be tested. Instead the foundation was left dealing with a flood of deluded or mentally ill people who sincerely thought they had powers. Dealing with these folks was endless and exhausting work, so they ended the challenge.
Sorry, but this is the wrongest thing in Wrongville I've read so far today.
Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with the objective truth or falsehood of claims. We have literal centuries of evidence that advertising and marketing will absolutely use misleading or outright false claims in the form of marketing language, advertising copy, deceptive images, false testimonials, biased research, and more.
You can go back to Upton Sinclair talking about butchers spraying old meat with CO2 to make it look fresh. You can look at cigarette manufacturers running ads about how "healthy" and "refreshing" their products are. Should we talk about the thing that originally gave Coca Cola it's 'zing'?
None of those things changed because of capitalism. They changed in spite of it, because of governmental laws, regulations, and judicial rulings, all of which are either completely antiethical to capitalism (if you're a pure Adam Smith fan) or a necessary evil to be minimized as much as possible (if you're more of a laissez faire flavor of capitalist)
The only conclusion you can draw about the Randi prize going unclaimed under capitalism is that consumers don't care about the objective, scientific truth of these services being offered.
And that leads into your next claim, that these are all "predatory systems without merit". Here too, you seem to be applying a standard ("all services being offered must adhere to an objective standard of scientific poof") that simply doesn't exist in the marketplace for these products.
There's a whole category of products called "air fresheners". While we can objectively prove that they change the smell of a room, there is no James-Randi-standard for what "freshness" means, or why flowers or pine or lavender "smells fresher". This is a $2.5 billion market, flourishing under capitalism despite an obvious lack of objective definitions, standards, or evidence.
You may not like it, you may not agree with it, but we have centuries of evidence that these services aren't fraud, and that people aren't purchasing these services because they objectively believe that there is scientific proof of demonstrable ability. Instead, these services are offering something else, something intangible and irrational and in some cases emotional. Is it possible for arrangements to become predatory? Sure, just ask me about the service plan the car dealership tried to sell me. Will it always, or inevitably be so? No.
Your argument is both flawed, and represents a categorical error.
This is the closest to convincing me, but still does not. You are right, the Randi prize may be too low for those who could claim it. But, it has been consistently increased throughout time, so someone somewhere would seek the easy money. This prize existed before the internet, so sending out a worldwide memo to all supernaturals stating the need to ignore the prize is a slim chance of having occurred.
While some supernaturals may have amassed a fortune, not all would succeed at this.
So either, supernaturals are a small handful and in touch with each other and all have their needs and wants already met throughout the last fifty years, or supernaturals have no need for clothes or food or philanthropy.
The more likely solution to a small psychic cabal of successful capitalists shirking the prize due to it being not worth it is that they do not, and cannot exist.
Due to esoteric abilities being unavailable to humans, all systems propping up any belief are inherently predatory.
I'm not sure you actually read what I wrote, or understood it, because you aren't responding to any of the arguments I made.
It does not matter how much the Randi prize amount is! Under capitalism, the customers demanding these services do not care about the scientific evidence of said service, so proving it "true" by the Randi challenge is completely unnecessary for anyone providing these services.
someone somewhere would seek the easy money.
Nope. Again, you're making an error here. The James Randi prize is NOT "easy money". The easy money is them doing exactly what they're already doing, for people who will pay without all the extra steps the James Randi foundation demands.
Even if there weren't any paying customers, the Randi prize still isn't "easy money". The JRFF dictate the time, place, and conditions. They can require an applicant to travel to them, they don't pay for airfare or accommodations, and they set all the conditions for the test.
While some supernaturals may have amassed a fortune, not all would succeed at this.
But why would they ever bother, if the market places zero value on it? Why assume the costs of the attempt with zero control on the conditions of the trial, for a one-time payment that adds zero value to their existing services?
Again, we have centuries of evidence to draw on here. The only time any company ever paid to have their product tested for a standard is either when they were legally compelled to do so, or when customers were willing to pay a premium to do so. You don't get to name-check capitalism in your arguments and then ignore hundreds of years of capitalist market behavior.
So either, supernaturals are a small handful and in touch with each other and all have their needs and wants already met throughout the last fifty years, or supernaturals have no need for clothes or food or philanthropy. The more likely solution to a small psychic cabal of successful capitalists shirking the prize due to it being not worth it is that they do not, and cannot exist.
This is a false dilemma, and you should know better than to use such a cheap, obvious bit of rhetoric. People offering these services are doing the exact same thing that every other service-provider is doing: making a cost-benefit analysis, and choosing not to participate in unnecessary risks and costs.
The most likely explanation is that people offering these services are engaging in the same market-based rational decision-making process as every other business, and seeing no long-term merit or value, and only short-term expense with no guaranteed payout.
Due to esoteric abilities being unavailable to humans, all systems propping up any belief are inherently predatory.
Horseshit.
Not all humans are tall. Height is strongly correlated to success in basketball. Does that mean the NBA is inherently predatory?
Very few humans have great cheekbones and pleasing voices, and among them, very few are able to successfully learn acting skills. Does that mean that all TV and movies are inherently predatory?
Heck, not all human beings can learn to sing, and those who can often have very limited ranges. Does that mean all music, but especially things like opera singing, are inherently predatory?
If you want to make an argument, you have to do more than just state a conclusion. You need to demonstrate a series of true premises, and then state a conclusion that flows from those premises. You're not doing that here.
Is it possible that if I were a supernatural being, money would likely mean less to me? If I were some kind of wizard, I'd probably just use my wizardry to help make me money.
Is a million dollars worth all that money if I suddenly become like Frankenstein dodging angry mobs with pitchforks? Why not just go be a businessman that can read minds or whatever?
I've been watching Vampire The Masqureade playthroughs on YT lately and it reminds me of that. The masquerade part is the "hiding yourself from mortals" bit, it's IN the name.
They're vampires but the principal is the same. NOBODY outs themselves or even endangers it without quick reprisal. Likewise in the game people's powers absolutely aid them accrue wealth. Commanding people like in Dune, communicating with animals, the ability to make someone go mad, the ability to go invisible are all in VTM and all supernatural powers in other media so I mean even just those powers could be used to net you a LOT of resources.
If there were only one supernatural being, it would be plausible that that could have the self control to avoid detection. But if there are multiple, human nature is fallible and would be detected.
In that universe the supernaturals police themselves and put a great deal of effort into hiding themselves because they're afraid of being genocided by humans if outed. Their entire society/government etc essentially revolves around covering up leaks, hiding, punishing those who leak information etc.
Well actually VTM covers this. There is a governing body in most major cities called the Camarilla. It regulates the number of vampires allowed, breaches of the masquerade, threats to the community. If you threaten to break the masquerade, your fellow vampires just kill you.
In the game I was watching recently, there were only about 25 vampires in a whole a large east coast US city. With strict rules, enforcement and care, I could see this happening.
It's funny you mention this because hiding you're a vampire, controlling your hunger, managing your safety and secrecy is the majority of the game. So one can assume if mortals can imagine a system where this works, I'd imagine actual vampires with a REAL incentive to do so would be even more capable of handling this.
Why would a wizard care about money? He could use his magic to convince bezos to send him a cool million and no one would even notice.
This argument only works in that extremely narrow case, though:
Where the person has supernatural powers that can be used to make more than the prize money (and not, day, the power to levitate milk), and where the person is willing to exploit their power in an immortal way to extort or steal, and where the person has no emotional desire to prove that their powers exist.
It's just so incredibly niche compared to all of the millions of different ways that people claim to have supernatural powers.
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Well a secretive wizard isn't who OP is talking about. OP is specifically talking about predatory schemes. Ie, people who are explicitly making money for supernatural powers now. If these people who are already claiming supernatural powers and making money from them don't go claim the prize, what does that say about them?
Im just saying, evil Charles Xavier would absolutely be using a contest like this to abduct/drain powers from anyone who showed up to claim their money.
I dont believe in the supernatural in its entirety, but if I had super powers Id never have a need for a Million dollars so badly that id expose myself. Any power worth anything can make you more money by staying in the shadows.
A) $1,000,000 is probably nothing to them. Think about the kind of things they could potentially do. Even superpowers that seem useless could probably earn absurd amounts of money just because they'd be so unexpected.
B) The people who have them are probably already involved in some kind of secret organisation. The kinds of organisations that would really not want their members to go public.
C) Anyone who proved they had superpowers and wasn't involved with an organisation would spend the rest of their lives on the run from agencies that wanted to run tests on them. Or caught and spend the rest of their lives in a lab.
If people exist with supernatural powers, there's no incentive to go public, and definitely not for a relatively small amount of money.
If the system of spiritual xyz claims that it can demonstrate its power on demand then yes this could be true, but what if the tenets of said spirituality never claimed it could be demonstrated at will.
Some religions claim to have supernatural dreams or encounters. If they happen by chance then how would you demonstrate it by the empirical conditions laid out in the contest. Does that prove they dont happen though?
Also, what if said religion claims to have a supernatural event every 169 years when the such and such cosmos align, how could it be proven if it falls outside of Randi's time window (beginning in the 60s I wanna say?)
Proving something exists is hard, proving it doesnt exist is pretty darn hard, too
Exactly. A family member would have the occasional premonition in a dream, but of course not all dreams were premonitions. I like to think of it as similar to quantum mechanics, where the observer influences the outcome of the experiment.
James Randi set up the prize with the intention of disproving the supernatural. He and his successors could easily be rigging the judgment against anyone who actually demonstrated supernatural powers to maintain their thesis.
Setting up this kind of prize is a good way to convince yourself that supernatural forces aren't real, but it doesn't provide much in the way of reliable evidence for anyone else.
So for context I don’t believe in the paranormal in any capacity
That being said I think one of the tricky parts of testing abilities like this is that we’re assuming the results are clear and easily replicable.
Let’s go with psychics or people who appear to do cold reading to speak with the dead.
If someone was to commune with the literal dead from beyond the void, why should we assume the information they’re receiving is coming through clear as day like a 5G signal?
It probably would be abstract, muddy and unclear.
If such an ability existed (I don’t think it does)…a scientific study or ‘test’ for such an alleged ability is kind of impossible with our current understanding and technology.
Because were automatically putting the test into a box where if it can’t satisfy the conditions we’ve stipulated it has to conform too, it’s failed
If someone was to commune with the literal dead from beyond the void, why should we assume the information they’re receiving is coming through clear as day like a 5G signal?
This is true in all of science. When you say that some protein causes some phenotype in biology, for example, or that some region of space contains some astronomical phenomenon, usually this isn't based on a video of the protein in action or a clear recording of the phenomenon in space. You collect data, test it against your hypotheses, and isolate a signal.
After a couple of centuries of doing science in high gear, we've gotten pretty good at extracting signals from data. If the person communing with the dead is able to get any measurable amount of information from them, we'd be able to identity it. If not, they're effectively not communicating with the dead...
there's a lot of problems with basing your claim on this Randi test. first, there is the problem of language. people who speak English are likely the only ones who have the possibility of knowing about the test. second, there's publicity. I've been in the anglophone world my whole life and have never heard of this thing despite being interested in the paranormal for multiple decades. that means that the Lions share this people who might have such abilities wouldn't be likely to know about this prize at all in the first place.
it's fair to assume that such abilities are incredibly rare so by limiting it to the people who have heard of the prize and speak English, there's also a very very small chance of those people also having such abilities.
then there's the question of whether or not these abilities are the kind of thing you could even demonstrate to other people in the first place, say a person gets a very strong sense of foreboding whenever a crisis happens to someone theyre personally connected to, etc. so of the people who have heard of the test and speak English, a good chunk of them may not be the kind of thing that you can demonstrate to others empirically, further reducing the potential candidate pool.
then of the remaining candidates there's undoubtedly going to be a chunk of them who aren't willing to become famous, have life's circumstances that make it too difficult to travel for the test, or simply don't care about money such that they wouldn't be motivated to apply.
the test itself was also speculated by some to be impossible to pass. even if we assume it was consistently conducted in good faith, it did require 100% success rate. potentially of the people who spoke english, had access to paranormal abilities, whose abilities were demonstrable and were motivated to apply, that they were not 100% reliable or perhaps relied upon a manner of interpretation that led to inconsistency.
EDIT: for some back of the napkin guestimating, let's say 1b people speak English during the period of time that the test was running. of those will be generous and say 5% have heard of the test. that puts the number at 50m. if these abilities exist they are incredibly rare so we'll put it at one person per 100k. that brings us to 500 potential people who can apply for this test. we will again be generous and will say that 20% of them have the abilities that can be demonstrated to others, bringing the number down to 100. 30 of them might not want to face scrutiny, 10 of them might think the test is a trick, 20 might not care about money, and 10 of them might not have the ability to travel for whatever reason. that brings the number down to 30. if half of them aren't consistent and reproducible that brings the number down to 15, and from there we can assume that the skeptics on the judging panel would assume or makeup some rationalization for how they did it that excludes the paranormal, like how people do for regular magicians. realistically though the numbers would likely be much less generous than we've been here.
I believe you think what you are doing is some kind of logical process, but really it’s just totally unfounded speculation.
“We haven’t found evidence of supernatural abilities yet, because the only people who have them are non-English speaking anti-authority outsiders who ‘get a weird feeling’ when stuff is going to happen.”
I think humans definitely display some very unusual and interesting abilities. The problem is, is that these things, when real, are very random and therefore very difficult to test in a scientific setting. Like people getting premonitions or clocks stopping when people die. Kind of like ball lighting or some crazy rare natural phenomena. I personally have experienced some extremely interesting things through meditation and psychedelics that made me rethink the abilities of the mind. I have also seen a few true psychics (or really highly intuitive is a better term). And remember, true mystics are wise and dont feel the need to prove themselves and would not engage with such a challenge. However, I do agree most practicing and profiting in this field are charlatans.
You can believe something works without understanding how to measure it; I know there's gravity but I do not possess the ability to measure it, nor the skill set to break through the atmosphere, and that's essentially the problem with Randi's wager.
It's not true, the million dollar challenge was rescinded years ago. Even if it were true it would be a nonsequitur. You can't infer there are no supernatural powers simply because a prize has gone unclaimed. People aren't all inherently greedy, nor do they necessarily feel a need to prove anything. It could be argued that someone who has devoted their lives mastering some esoteric art would be less inclined to greed than the average person.
While I obviously don't believe in anything supernatural existing, I don't think this argument would sway anyone's opinion. They'd just claim that the people giving out the prize are in denial or otherwise refuse to pay the money despite the supernatural being real. Your entire argument lies on assuming the people giving out this prize are some all knowing objective truth deciders.
Have you considered that if you did have supernatural powers you could likely make more than a million dollars if you didn't expose yourself.
Like imagine that I could see the future, why would I claim Randi's $1million dollar prize when I could also win the $1.5 billion power-ball drawing on Saturday?
To me, the Fine-structure constant - Wikipedia might be the most magical and mysterious aspect of the universe (if it wasn't within a quadrillienth of one percent of what it is, life would not have been possible)
I used to be 100% where you’re at-Randi’s prize just sitting there felt like the ultimate mic drop. Then my grandma dragged me to this tiny Santería shop in Miami where an old lady read my coffee grounds and described, in scary detail, the exact layout of my apartment, down to the weird crack above the fridge I never told anyone about. No million bucks on the line, just a $20 donation and a cup of café. Still can’t explain it.
Thing is, the prize doesn’t really catch most folks who claim “gifts.” A lot of the curanderas, shamans, even the tarot reader at the street fair aren’t asserting X-Men powers; they’re offering ritual, story, and community. The placebo you brush off? There’s legit research showing those symbols and rites trigger measurable changes in stress hormones and immune response-Harvard med even ran a double-blind on “healing rituals” vs. nothing and saw faster post-op recovery. So yeah, some grifters exist (looking at you, $500 crystal water bottles), but dismissing the whole ecosystem feels like calling every therapist a fraud because a few TikTok life coaches suck.
Question: if we found out tomorrow the prize was secretly unwinnable-say the testing protocol excludes most claimed phenomena by design-would that change how you see these practices?
While I do not particularly believe that any spiritual powers exist, the Randi prize was revoked a decade ago. So, while it remained unclaimed for a good while, it no longer is a current means of proof, but rather, a historical one.
Technically, the discovery of something since the prize's revocation would not be disproven by the existence of the prize.
One could make a further argument about the 2007-onward period, wherein most people simply were not permitted to vie for the prize, but rather, only people with a major media presence and/or a reputable academic were allowed to try for it. Those restrictions meant that if someone outside that small group did have powers, the prize would be useless in finding them.
Note that the prize was vastly smaller until 1996.
This means that an unrestricted $1mil prize was available for only about a decade to be claimed.
I'm not really holding that magic is real, since I don't think it is likely to be, only that the Randi prize has some limits as a disproof, because the historical reality of a million dollar prize is far more limited than your post states.
Spirituality is more about personal religious (or religious-adjacent) beliefs and self-help/self-improvement. I'd tend to put witchcraft in that category too. It's not inherently more farcical or a scam than any other religious belief. If someone casts a spell and believes it works, I don't see it as any different to someone saying a prayer and believing God answered. So, a company selling altar candles for wiccans and a company selling prayer candles for Christians aren't really any different in terms of whether their commercial activity is a predatory practice.
Absolutely would, religion is a successfully promulgated skew of supposed supernatural occurrences. It’s worse than supernatural abilities as a human mind virus
fair point. I was about to argue that if you think religion is useful as a kind of self-medication for the inherent human consciousness need to build stories and explanations for everything, then supernatural stuff is only another form of that self-medication. Do you believe humans need this kind of medication? Do you think we might become hopeless nihilists without it? There is some evidence to suggest that’s what’s happening right now...
I would agree that those who are outspoken about their “abilities” are likely full of shit, but if there were true supernatural powers out there, they would be in hiding.
Humans do not like people who are different. There have been wars and persecution over the smallest things. A group of people with true supernatural powers would be forced into camps, or worse. It’s in the best interest of the person and their peers to keep quiet about their ability to avoid genocide. $1,000,000 isn’t worth the extinction of your people.
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While I think they’re predatory (my mom was paying someone a few hundred dollars every couple weeks to tell her to hold a stick and look at the moon), it may not be claimed because people think they have those powers and don’t want to be out in the open
The fact that it's unclaimed doesnt necessarily mean supernatural abilities arent possible- it just means its never been demonstrated in a way to win the prize. Ive literally never heard of it until now- there could be someone, somewhere who can read minds and just has never heard of this. I don't think so, but it's possible!
Supernatural abilities are unfalsifiable. You can't prove them with a scientific test. But does that mean they're meritless?
There are plenty of concepts that aren't scientific and can't be proven, but still have merit. You can't prove that my favourite colour is blue. But does that make it any less true? Would you say that my favourite colour does not exist, because it can't be proven scientifically?
Some more examples of concepts with merit that are unfalsifiable:
Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. You can't prove it to be true or false with any scientific test. BUT, it's a useful way of thinking about the world.
Love Languages. Again, nothing scientific about it. But it can be a way of thinking about your relationships with others, and how to improve those bond.
And so on. There are plenty of examples.
So what about spirituality? Obviously, nobody can prove that they can speak with the dead. But is it completely without merit? Is anyone who has ever bought a Ouija board a fool, or victim of a scam? I would argue no. On one hand, it can be fun even to just pretend that you're speaking with ghosts. The more real it feels, the more exciting it can be. Even if it's just purely for entertainment, that has some value. We read fictional stories for entertainment. Same idea.
But even when people do truly believe it, is that completely without merit? For some people, it can be a way of achieving closure on their feelings surrounding with a dead loved one. That's something they never would have gotten otherwise, and is surely worth something. Are there scam artists who prey off of people's feelings? Sure there are. But it doesn't have to be unethical. It can have merit.
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[deleted]
By this reasoning, the time travelers chose to avoid attending Stephen Hawking’s time traveler party
Well they would have known about his visits to Epstein’s island
Was he in the files or are you making a deeply unacceptable joke?
Hawking was in the emails.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/05/prince-andrew-clinton-hawking-what-do-the-epstein-documents-say-about-key-people
Word. Gross.
Thanks for the source, much appreciated!
Epstein had a special interest in the sciences and associated with (and donated to) a lot of them. I wouldn't necessarily assume impropriety
So you’re saying that a billionaire going to the island where billionaires rape kids and hanging out with the billionaire who rapes kids, was unlikely to be there raping kids? I think you might be offering too much grace.
Yeah don't get me wrong, I haven't read most of what Hawking himself is accused of, I'm just saying that mere mention or association isn't necessarily a smoking gun.
He was. He went to little St. James
Fair play then, go off
What powers do I need to stop you poisoning the well?
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I don't think you expressed any valid concern, you just outright claimed that the prize is a foul play becuse... reasons?
Let's consider 3 scenarios here.
A - the person does have magic powers and uses them publicly. This person would ABSOLUTELY be inclined to get the prize.
B - the person does not have magic powers and is a fraud who pretends they do for show. This person would NOT be inclined to go for the prize (even though this describes every person who has tried).
C - the person does have magic powers but keeps them a secret from everyone. This is the case you seem to be referring to.
If someone had secret magic powers and never showed them to anyone, then that's fundamentally the exact same situation as a person who has no magic powers and never tries to pretend they do. Which defaults back to "magic doesn't exist."
As far I knew the prize was withdrawn cause last I knew of it there weren't taking any applications anymore for it. https://web.randi.org/home/jref-status Beyond that I do agree with you.
Most of the people who claim to have the powers just are very good at either hedging their bets at guessing or using vague enough terms, or they know how to cold read people. It's not hard to learn and people are amazed by it cause they don't realize they are willingly giving them the answer and the other person is just spouting it back at them or in telling them what they want to hear.
I like stage magic and illusions. I'd watch things like Penn and Teller fool us a lot. The other thing I liked, Breaking the Magician's Code: Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed. I just dig that sort of thing. I like the technical aspect of theater and stage.
I'd also watch Crossing Over with John Edward a lot..was more fascinated in the techniques he used to cold read people and how he guessed at something.
Just as background information, the challenge was started as an attempt to get professional psychics, scammers one and all, to put up or shut up.
All the professionals, who are well aware they have no actual powers, refused to be tested. Instead the foundation was left dealing with a flood of deluded or mentally ill people who sincerely thought they had powers. Dealing with these folks was endless and exhausting work, so they ended the challenge.
Along those lines Darren Brown did a great series on how psychics manipulated or guided people, cherry picked their subjects and clips, etc.
Sorry, but this is the wrongest thing in Wrongville I've read so far today.
Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with the objective truth or falsehood of claims. We have literal centuries of evidence that advertising and marketing will absolutely use misleading or outright false claims in the form of marketing language, advertising copy, deceptive images, false testimonials, biased research, and more.
You can go back to Upton Sinclair talking about butchers spraying old meat with CO2 to make it look fresh. You can look at cigarette manufacturers running ads about how "healthy" and "refreshing" their products are. Should we talk about the thing that originally gave Coca Cola it's 'zing'?
None of those things changed because of capitalism. They changed in spite of it, because of governmental laws, regulations, and judicial rulings, all of which are either completely antiethical to capitalism (if you're a pure Adam Smith fan) or a necessary evil to be minimized as much as possible (if you're more of a laissez faire flavor of capitalist)
The only conclusion you can draw about the Randi prize going unclaimed under capitalism is that consumers don't care about the objective, scientific truth of these services being offered.
And that leads into your next claim, that these are all "predatory systems without merit". Here too, you seem to be applying a standard ("all services being offered must adhere to an objective standard of scientific poof") that simply doesn't exist in the marketplace for these products.
There's a whole category of products called "air fresheners". While we can objectively prove that they change the smell of a room, there is no James-Randi-standard for what "freshness" means, or why flowers or pine or lavender "smells fresher". This is a $2.5 billion market, flourishing under capitalism despite an obvious lack of objective definitions, standards, or evidence.
You may not like it, you may not agree with it, but we have centuries of evidence that these services aren't fraud, and that people aren't purchasing these services because they objectively believe that there is scientific proof of demonstrable ability. Instead, these services are offering something else, something intangible and irrational and in some cases emotional. Is it possible for arrangements to become predatory? Sure, just ask me about the service plan the car dealership tried to sell me. Will it always, or inevitably be so? No.
Your argument is both flawed, and represents a categorical error.
This is the closest to convincing me, but still does not. You are right, the Randi prize may be too low for those who could claim it. But, it has been consistently increased throughout time, so someone somewhere would seek the easy money. This prize existed before the internet, so sending out a worldwide memo to all supernaturals stating the need to ignore the prize is a slim chance of having occurred.
While some supernaturals may have amassed a fortune, not all would succeed at this.
So either, supernaturals are a small handful and in touch with each other and all have their needs and wants already met throughout the last fifty years, or supernaturals have no need for clothes or food or philanthropy. The more likely solution to a small psychic cabal of successful capitalists shirking the prize due to it being not worth it is that they do not, and cannot exist.
Due to esoteric abilities being unavailable to humans, all systems propping up any belief are inherently predatory.
I'm not sure you actually read what I wrote, or understood it, because you aren't responding to any of the arguments I made.
It does not matter how much the Randi prize amount is! Under capitalism, the customers demanding these services do not care about the scientific evidence of said service, so proving it "true" by the Randi challenge is completely unnecessary for anyone providing these services.
Nope. Again, you're making an error here. The James Randi prize is NOT "easy money". The easy money is them doing exactly what they're already doing, for people who will pay without all the extra steps the James Randi foundation demands.
Even if there weren't any paying customers, the Randi prize still isn't "easy money". The JRFF dictate the time, place, and conditions. They can require an applicant to travel to them, they don't pay for airfare or accommodations, and they set all the conditions for the test.
But why would they ever bother, if the market places zero value on it? Why assume the costs of the attempt with zero control on the conditions of the trial, for a one-time payment that adds zero value to their existing services?
Again, we have centuries of evidence to draw on here. The only time any company ever paid to have their product tested for a standard is either when they were legally compelled to do so, or when customers were willing to pay a premium to do so. You don't get to name-check capitalism in your arguments and then ignore hundreds of years of capitalist market behavior.
This is a false dilemma, and you should know better than to use such a cheap, obvious bit of rhetoric. People offering these services are doing the exact same thing that every other service-provider is doing: making a cost-benefit analysis, and choosing not to participate in unnecessary risks and costs.
The most likely explanation is that people offering these services are engaging in the same market-based rational decision-making process as every other business, and seeing no long-term merit or value, and only short-term expense with no guaranteed payout.
Horseshit.
Not all humans are tall. Height is strongly correlated to success in basketball. Does that mean the NBA is inherently predatory?
Very few humans have great cheekbones and pleasing voices, and among them, very few are able to successfully learn acting skills. Does that mean that all TV and movies are inherently predatory?
Heck, not all human beings can learn to sing, and those who can often have very limited ranges. Does that mean all music, but especially things like opera singing, are inherently predatory?
If you want to make an argument, you have to do more than just state a conclusion. You need to demonstrate a series of true premises, and then state a conclusion that flows from those premises. You're not doing that here.
Is it possible that if I were a supernatural being, money would likely mean less to me? If I were some kind of wizard, I'd probably just use my wizardry to help make me money.
Is a million dollars worth all that money if I suddenly become like Frankenstein dodging angry mobs with pitchforks? Why not just go be a businessman that can read minds or whatever?
I came into this thinking of course it’s not real and the fact that this prize went unclaimed proves it!
You immediately convinced me. I still firmly believe it’s all nonsense but this should get a delta.
Why would a wizard care about money? He could use his magic to convince bezos to send him a cool million and no one would even notice.
I've been watching Vampire The Masqureade playthroughs on YT lately and it reminds me of that. The masquerade part is the "hiding yourself from mortals" bit, it's IN the name.
They're vampires but the principal is the same. NOBODY outs themselves or even endangers it without quick reprisal. Likewise in the game people's powers absolutely aid them accrue wealth. Commanding people like in Dune, communicating with animals, the ability to make someone go mad, the ability to go invisible are all in VTM and all supernatural powers in other media so I mean even just those powers could be used to net you a LOT of resources.
If there were only one supernatural being, it would be plausible that that could have the self control to avoid detection. But if there are multiple, human nature is fallible and would be detected.
In that universe the supernaturals police themselves and put a great deal of effort into hiding themselves because they're afraid of being genocided by humans if outed. Their entire society/government etc essentially revolves around covering up leaks, hiding, punishing those who leak information etc.
Well actually VTM covers this. There is a governing body in most major cities called the Camarilla. It regulates the number of vampires allowed, breaches of the masquerade, threats to the community. If you threaten to break the masquerade, your fellow vampires just kill you.
In the game I was watching recently, there were only about 25 vampires in a whole a large east coast US city. With strict rules, enforcement and care, I could see this happening.
It's funny you mention this because hiding you're a vampire, controlling your hunger, managing your safety and secrecy is the majority of the game. So one can assume if mortals can imagine a system where this works, I'd imagine actual vampires with a REAL incentive to do so would be even more capable of handling this.
How can you be sure of that, given that they are not natural humans–they are supernatural?
This argument only works in that extremely narrow case, though:
Where the person has supernatural powers that can be used to make more than the prize money (and not, day, the power to levitate milk), and where the person is willing to exploit their power in an immortal way to extort or steal, and where the person has no emotional desire to prove that their powers exist.
It's just so incredibly niche compared to all of the millions of different ways that people claim to have supernatural powers.
There is nothing stopping you from giving this person a delta...
Can I? I’m not Op
Ye, go for it if ya want.
Everyone who claims they can speak to the dead, do magic etc. Are grifting people for money.
You have just invented the god of the gaps but for wizards.
Well a secretive wizard isn't who OP is talking about. OP is specifically talking about predatory schemes. Ie, people who are explicitly making money for supernatural powers now. If these people who are already claiming supernatural powers and making money from them don't go claim the prize, what does that say about them?
I am a spiritual being, and like all Fairies, I love shiny coins. I love a million dollars.
Given wizards are human, it seems unlikely that none of them would want fame and an easy million dollars, and it only takes one.
Im just saying, evil Charles Xavier would absolutely be using a contest like this to abduct/drain powers from anyone who showed up to claim their money.
I dont believe in the supernatural in its entirety, but if I had super powers Id never have a need for a Million dollars so badly that id expose myself. Any power worth anything can make you more money by staying in the shadows.
If people with supernatural powers existed:
A) $1,000,000 is probably nothing to them. Think about the kind of things they could potentially do. Even superpowers that seem useless could probably earn absurd amounts of money just because they'd be so unexpected.
B) The people who have them are probably already involved in some kind of secret organisation. The kinds of organisations that would really not want their members to go public.
C) Anyone who proved they had superpowers and wasn't involved with an organisation would spend the rest of their lives on the run from agencies that wanted to run tests on them. Or caught and spend the rest of their lives in a lab.
If people exist with supernatural powers, there's no incentive to go public, and definitely not for a relatively small amount of money.
If the system of spiritual xyz claims that it can demonstrate its power on demand then yes this could be true, but what if the tenets of said spirituality never claimed it could be demonstrated at will.
Some religions claim to have supernatural dreams or encounters. If they happen by chance then how would you demonstrate it by the empirical conditions laid out in the contest. Does that prove they dont happen though?
Also, what if said religion claims to have a supernatural event every 169 years when the such and such cosmos align, how could it be proven if it falls outside of Randi's time window (beginning in the 60s I wanna say?)
Proving something exists is hard, proving it doesnt exist is pretty darn hard, too
Proving something doesn't exist is much, much harder, if not impossible.
Exactly. A family member would have the occasional premonition in a dream, but of course not all dreams were premonitions. I like to think of it as similar to quantum mechanics, where the observer influences the outcome of the experiment.
James Randi set up the prize with the intention of disproving the supernatural. He and his successors could easily be rigging the judgment against anyone who actually demonstrated supernatural powers to maintain their thesis.
Setting up this kind of prize is a good way to convince yourself that supernatural forces aren't real, but it doesn't provide much in the way of reliable evidence for anyone else.
So for context I don’t believe in the paranormal in any capacity
That being said I think one of the tricky parts of testing abilities like this is that we’re assuming the results are clear and easily replicable.
Let’s go with psychics or people who appear to do cold reading to speak with the dead.
If someone was to commune with the literal dead from beyond the void, why should we assume the information they’re receiving is coming through clear as day like a 5G signal?
It probably would be abstract, muddy and unclear.
If such an ability existed (I don’t think it does)…a scientific study or ‘test’ for such an alleged ability is kind of impossible with our current understanding and technology.
Because were automatically putting the test into a box where if it can’t satisfy the conditions we’ve stipulated it has to conform too, it’s failed
This is true in all of science. When you say that some protein causes some phenotype in biology, for example, or that some region of space contains some astronomical phenomenon, usually this isn't based on a video of the protein in action or a clear recording of the phenomenon in space. You collect data, test it against your hypotheses, and isolate a signal.
After a couple of centuries of doing science in high gear, we've gotten pretty good at extracting signals from data. If the person communing with the dead is able to get any measurable amount of information from them, we'd be able to identity it. If not, they're effectively not communicating with the dead...
If it's so unclear that it's no better than chance then they are scammers even if they really did hear voices.
They would have to be way way clearer than that to even know who they are talking with in the first place.
there's a lot of problems with basing your claim on this Randi test. first, there is the problem of language. people who speak English are likely the only ones who have the possibility of knowing about the test. second, there's publicity. I've been in the anglophone world my whole life and have never heard of this thing despite being interested in the paranormal for multiple decades. that means that the Lions share this people who might have such abilities wouldn't be likely to know about this prize at all in the first place.
it's fair to assume that such abilities are incredibly rare so by limiting it to the people who have heard of the prize and speak English, there's also a very very small chance of those people also having such abilities.
then there's the question of whether or not these abilities are the kind of thing you could even demonstrate to other people in the first place, say a person gets a very strong sense of foreboding whenever a crisis happens to someone theyre personally connected to, etc. so of the people who have heard of the test and speak English, a good chunk of them may not be the kind of thing that you can demonstrate to others empirically, further reducing the potential candidate pool.
then of the remaining candidates there's undoubtedly going to be a chunk of them who aren't willing to become famous, have life's circumstances that make it too difficult to travel for the test, or simply don't care about money such that they wouldn't be motivated to apply.
the test itself was also speculated by some to be impossible to pass. even if we assume it was consistently conducted in good faith, it did require 100% success rate. potentially of the people who spoke english, had access to paranormal abilities, whose abilities were demonstrable and were motivated to apply, that they were not 100% reliable or perhaps relied upon a manner of interpretation that led to inconsistency.
EDIT: for some back of the napkin guestimating, let's say 1b people speak English during the period of time that the test was running. of those will be generous and say 5% have heard of the test. that puts the number at 50m. if these abilities exist they are incredibly rare so we'll put it at one person per 100k. that brings us to 500 potential people who can apply for this test. we will again be generous and will say that 20% of them have the abilities that can be demonstrated to others, bringing the number down to 100. 30 of them might not want to face scrutiny, 10 of them might think the test is a trick, 20 might not care about money, and 10 of them might not have the ability to travel for whatever reason. that brings the number down to 30. if half of them aren't consistent and reproducible that brings the number down to 15, and from there we can assume that the skeptics on the judging panel would assume or makeup some rationalization for how they did it that excludes the paranormal, like how people do for regular magicians. realistically though the numbers would likely be much less generous than we've been here.
I believe you think what you are doing is some kind of logical process, but really it’s just totally unfounded speculation.
“We haven’t found evidence of supernatural abilities yet, because the only people who have them are non-English speaking anti-authority outsiders who ‘get a weird feeling’ when stuff is going to happen.”
Ok.
🤷 hard atheism is just as unscientific as theism. the only honest answer is 'idk'
I’m not an atheist. I believe in FSM.
may his noodly appendage anoint us with his holy broth, r-amen
Maybe it’s a trap. Anyone who shows their powers gets disappeared to a government lab. Do they disclose when someone will make an attempt?
I think humans definitely display some very unusual and interesting abilities. The problem is, is that these things, when real, are very random and therefore very difficult to test in a scientific setting. Like people getting premonitions or clocks stopping when people die. Kind of like ball lighting or some crazy rare natural phenomena. I personally have experienced some extremely interesting things through meditation and psychedelics that made me rethink the abilities of the mind. I have also seen a few true psychics (or really highly intuitive is a better term). And remember, true mystics are wise and dont feel the need to prove themselves and would not engage with such a challenge. However, I do agree most practicing and profiting in this field are charlatans.
You can believe something works without understanding how to measure it; I know there's gravity but I do not possess the ability to measure it, nor the skill set to break through the atmosphere, and that's essentially the problem with Randi's wager.
"Due to this fact being true under capitalism"
It's not true, the million dollar challenge was rescinded years ago. Even if it were true it would be a nonsequitur. You can't infer there are no supernatural powers simply because a prize has gone unclaimed. People aren't all inherently greedy, nor do they necessarily feel a need to prove anything. It could be argued that someone who has devoted their lives mastering some esoteric art would be less inclined to greed than the average person.
Chris Angel has a net worth of $50 million, and he has amassed that by convincing people he has supernatural powers.
he doesn't have supernatural powers, he's a mindfreak!
While I obviously don't believe in anything supernatural existing, I don't think this argument would sway anyone's opinion. They'd just claim that the people giving out the prize are in denial or otherwise refuse to pay the money despite the supernatural being real. Your entire argument lies on assuming the people giving out this prize are some all knowing objective truth deciders.
Have you considered that if you did have supernatural powers you could likely make more than a million dollars if you didn't expose yourself.
Like imagine that I could see the future, why would I claim Randi's $1million dollar prize when I could also win the $1.5 billion power-ball drawing on Saturday?
To me, the Fine-structure constant - Wikipedia might be the most magical and mysterious aspect of the universe (if it wasn't within a quadrillienth of one percent of what it is, life would not have been possible)
I used to be 100% where you’re at-Randi’s prize just sitting there felt like the ultimate mic drop. Then my grandma dragged me to this tiny Santería shop in Miami where an old lady read my coffee grounds and described, in scary detail, the exact layout of my apartment, down to the weird crack above the fridge I never told anyone about. No million bucks on the line, just a $20 donation and a cup of café. Still can’t explain it.
Thing is, the prize doesn’t really catch most folks who claim “gifts.” A lot of the curanderas, shamans, even the tarot reader at the street fair aren’t asserting X-Men powers; they’re offering ritual, story, and community. The placebo you brush off? There’s legit research showing those symbols and rites trigger measurable changes in stress hormones and immune response-Harvard med even ran a double-blind on “healing rituals” vs. nothing and saw faster post-op recovery. So yeah, some grifters exist (looking at you, $500 crystal water bottles), but dismissing the whole ecosystem feels like calling every therapist a fraud because a few TikTok life coaches suck.
Question: if we found out tomorrow the prize was secretly unwinnable-say the testing protocol excludes most claimed phenomena by design-would that change how you see these practices?
While I do not particularly believe that any spiritual powers exist, the Randi prize was revoked a decade ago. So, while it remained unclaimed for a good while, it no longer is a current means of proof, but rather, a historical one.
Technically, the discovery of something since the prize's revocation would not be disproven by the existence of the prize.
One could make a further argument about the 2007-onward period, wherein most people simply were not permitted to vie for the prize, but rather, only people with a major media presence and/or a reputable academic were allowed to try for it. Those restrictions meant that if someone outside that small group did have powers, the prize would be useless in finding them.
Note that the prize was vastly smaller until 1996.
This means that an unrestricted $1mil prize was available for only about a decade to be claimed.
I'm not really holding that magic is real, since I don't think it is likely to be, only that the Randi prize has some limits as a disproof, because the historical reality of a million dollar prize is far more limited than your post states.
Spirituality is more about personal religious (or religious-adjacent) beliefs and self-help/self-improvement. I'd tend to put witchcraft in that category too. It's not inherently more farcical or a scam than any other religious belief. If someone casts a spell and believes it works, I don't see it as any different to someone saying a prayer and believing God answered. So, a company selling altar candles for wiccans and a company selling prayer candles for Christians aren't really any different in terms of whether their commercial activity is a predatory practice.
Tend to agree, but why wouldn’t you include any religion on this list too? Or do you believe in miracles?
Absolutely would, religion is a successfully promulgated skew of supposed supernatural occurrences. It’s worse than supernatural abilities as a human mind virus
fair point. I was about to argue that if you think religion is useful as a kind of self-medication for the inherent human consciousness need to build stories and explanations for everything, then supernatural stuff is only another form of that self-medication. Do you believe humans need this kind of medication? Do you think we might become hopeless nihilists without it? There is some evidence to suggest that’s what’s happening right now...
I just logged onto say Randi in urdu/hindi means "Whore" so I read you post as the "whore prize" is unclaimed.
randi is a liar and a fraud
I would agree that those who are outspoken about their “abilities” are likely full of shit, but if there were true supernatural powers out there, they would be in hiding.
Humans do not like people who are different. There have been wars and persecution over the smallest things. A group of people with true supernatural powers would be forced into camps, or worse. It’s in the best interest of the person and their peers to keep quiet about their ability to avoid genocide. $1,000,000 isn’t worth the extinction of your people.
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Thats the reason you don’t believe in magic?
While I think they’re predatory (my mom was paying someone a few hundred dollars every couple weeks to tell her to hold a stick and look at the moon), it may not be claimed because people think they have those powers and don’t want to be out in the open
The fact that it's unclaimed doesnt necessarily mean supernatural abilities arent possible- it just means its never been demonstrated in a way to win the prize. Ive literally never heard of it until now- there could be someone, somewhere who can read minds and just has never heard of this. I don't think so, but it's possible!
What if the only people with supernatural abilities are billionaires that don’t want to waste their time for chump change?
I guess you are right, but shouldnt we still hold open the possability that there will be such a thing as a black swan?
As well as religions, they also have some entertainment value.
Supernatural abilities are unfalsifiable. You can't prove them with a scientific test. But does that mean they're meritless?
There are plenty of concepts that aren't scientific and can't be proven, but still have merit. You can't prove that my favourite colour is blue. But does that make it any less true? Would you say that my favourite colour does not exist, because it can't be proven scientifically?
Some more examples of concepts with merit that are unfalsifiable:
Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. You can't prove it to be true or false with any scientific test. BUT, it's a useful way of thinking about the world.
Love Languages. Again, nothing scientific about it. But it can be a way of thinking about your relationships with others, and how to improve those bond.
And so on. There are plenty of examples.
So what about spirituality? Obviously, nobody can prove that they can speak with the dead. But is it completely without merit? Is anyone who has ever bought a Ouija board a fool, or victim of a scam? I would argue no. On one hand, it can be fun even to just pretend that you're speaking with ghosts. The more real it feels, the more exciting it can be. Even if it's just purely for entertainment, that has some value. We read fictional stories for entertainment. Same idea.
But even when people do truly believe it, is that completely without merit? For some people, it can be a way of achieving closure on their feelings surrounding with a dead loved one. That's something they never would have gotten otherwise, and is surely worth something. Are there scam artists who prey off of people's feelings? Sure there are. But it doesn't have to be unethical. It can have merit.
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