Psychic mediums

[Cyberman]

A fool and their money are soon parted.

More like "a fool and your money are soon partners".

[Gambit]

Mediums are more like parasites than vultures. I have the same experience as the OP, whenever I post James Randi videos showing psychics getting pwnd. Or, the typical response of "She knew things that only I would know," despite the rube having just been shown exactly how cold reading works.

[downbeatplumb]

My wife considers herself to be a psychic medium. I am convinced that she truly believes she is.
Although there are many who prey on people, Derek Acorah I'm looking at you, there are others who think it is real. I obviously don't, but I know that my wife is sincere in her beliefs. So to damn them ALL as parasites when they are just acting on what they believe is true is a little harsh.

[Gambit]

Fair point. Perhaps I should have said: Mediums who know they're full of shit are more like parasites.

[Cyberman]

"Kreed Kafer".

Then there was:





which appeared later in the evening, as part of a 'live' event, like this:

[Aractus]

When I saw this my jaw dropped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GCYqauLhCg

Since I can't view the complete episodes of "Britain's Psychic Challenge", I then relied on this article written by sceptics for further information.

The videos above show Diane Lazarus pulling off some impressive psychic feats, and in particular locating a man hidden in the woods, and boy hidden on a bay.

So first off, the woods. The area is states as being 675,000 sq ft, or 6.27 ha (0.0627 km2). That should give you an idea of just how pitifully small the area is, despite how large the dimensions sound in feet. If  it's a circle it has a radius of just 141 metres (/463.5 ft).

Nevertheless, Diane found the hidden man in the forest in just 7 minutes, when it took a trained soldier 20 minutes to achieve the same outcome. And although the test specified that the psychic contestants only had to arrive to within 15m of the man (which makes the chances of success from randomly sticking a pin the map 1 in 88), she appears to have gone pretty much straight to the man without any divergence or "chance" involved.

She then manages to repeat this impressive performance to locate a boy hidden on a huge expansive bay stated to span 180 degrees.

But is this test really as tough as it seems? The contestants have 30 minutes to find the boy - the same length of time given for the previous test. The bay may be huge, but there's a lot of sand where the boy cannot be hidden and thus the area for the boy to hide in is finite. The location of this test is Holkham Bay, and while the radius appears to be more like 700m as opposed to the 141m of the forest test, there's much more "dead space" where the boy wouldn't be hidden. So the search area is probably about the same as for the previous test. After all they don't want her to have to walk 20 minutes to get to the location. It could easily be down to luck, after all although she "goes straight in the right direction" she has a 50% chance of choosing the right direction from the starting position.

She also might have worked out the boy is more likely to be located closely to give the psychics a greater chance of success (and for television purposes). There are any number of ways for her to have worked this out, including the geometry of the first test. Furthermore, the camera crew and everyone else present knew the location of the boy (and the man in the first test), so she could have picked up on clues from the crew. This isn't to say that she cheated, but her abilities might be far more to do with picking up on real-world data than to do with psychic ability. Also, she failed most of the other tests given on the program - and failed them badly (aside from the matchmaking test which random chance alone provides a 1 in 120 chance of getting right).

To test for true psychic ability the chance of randomly guessing correct should be at least 1 in 1000 - if not even more difficult, and none of the tests in the programme matched that criteria. Furthermore they really have to be double-blind: no one on the set can know the answer. This is how the James Randi Educational Foundation's Million Dollar Challenge was designed. So even finding the man in the woods, and the boy in the bay only had "chance odds" of about 87:1, assuming that the man could have hidden anywhere (which of course he couldn't, so those "dead-zone" areas narrow the odds down even more), and they weren't double-blind either.

If she really wants to prove her psychic ability she should submit to a test that is truly designed to test her psychic abilities in finding a hidden person in a huge area where the chance of randomly locating the person is less than 1 in 1000.