For three months, clairvoyants, psychics, and fortune tellers in Prague – and Czechia – have had the opportunity to win $4,000 in a very easy way. Just arrive to the Nový Smíchov mall, paranormally look through the safe box over there, see what's inside (or be a prophet or soothsayer and predict the objects that would be written in this blog post), and write the correct answer – "a toothbrush, a [restaurant] bill, and a walnut [marble would be tolerated]" – to a web form.
Socialite, sponsor, and trader Václav Dejčmar (who co-hosted my black hole talk in Prague-Barrandov in January) contributed the money and the toothbrush. Leoš Kyša, the vice-chairman of Sisyphus (the Czech counterpart of CSICOP; the name is chosen because the fight against paranormal beliefs looks like a fight against windmills) added the bill, and Jakub Kroulík from Deceitful Players (falesni-hraci.cz), a gang of playful skeptics who have learned to do everything that psychics can do, added the walnut.
You know, many psychics and fortune tellers have to work hard and get $10 from one client. You need to repeat it many times to earn $4,000. So the safe box could be handy.
Hundreds (360) of psychic wannabes (EN) – and perhaps some people who hoped to be lucky (or to be hiding some amazing abilities they haven't fully realized yet) – have submitted their guesses about the three objects. A sword, a book, a tablet; ATM card; black stone; black casino token; keys, telephone, nothing; socks, watch, coin. You may imagine – something like one thousand of random objects appear in the list. No one came close to the truth.
And it was so easy: just say "toothbrush, bill, walnut". ;-)
The challenge was a part of a more general, greater Paranormal Challenge. A person with paranormal abilities may win $40,000 (one million crowns) if he or she agrees with the organizers about a protocol that guarantees that the probability of success by chance is smaller than 1-in-100,000, or something like that.
Those things sound like fun to those of us who have no doubts that it's strictly impossible for a human being to correctly guess the content of a safe box. But a very close relative of mine reacted angrily. ;-) The organizers of the challenges are some unbelieving Thomases and the true psychics have no reason to deal with them!
It's much better for the psychics to deal with 400 or 4,000 clients and get $10 from each than to write three words and get the same money in a minute. ;-)
Well, more seriously, this challenge doesn't really prove that there aren't any psychics. Dejčmar himself may be a psychic, for example, and he has silently earned his money by reading from the crystal ball. ;-) But what this challenge does prove is that all the people who are making their living by collecting $10 or so from their clients by making prophesies using tarot cards and dozens of similar protocols (one example) are fraudsters.
Of course, I know numerous people – well, mostly female but not only female – who believe in these crazy things. This belief must be an important foundation of their spiritual balance and they are clearly ready to add an arbitrarily unlikely extra belief in order to defend the basic claim.
If you think about the world in the scientific way like I do, you just can't comprehend it. The truth is always superior – it's valuable by itself but it's ultimately practically useful, too – and if one has some truly powerful evidence that indicates that a proposition is true and its negation is false, it simply has to affect the opinion of a rational person.
There are many fundamental differences between the spiritual/religious/superstitious view on the world, and the scientific one. They also share some similarities.
A truly scientific soul is ultimately "disinterested" in questions that sound meaningless from a scientific viewpoint, and the "antireligious warriors" share a lot with the theists. I was reminded about these matters when I saw Don Page's guest blog at Sean Carroll's blog.
Don Page is a believer and Sean Carroll is an aggressive atheist. But when you look at their views in detail, they are extremely close, especially when you get to crazy things such as the Boltzmann Brains that both of them believe.
In both cases, the are incapable of seeing the overwhelming and sharp evidence – pretty much rock-solid proofs – that their opinion that we may very well be Boltzmann Brains are simply wrong. They are unable to see such things because their completely wrong dogmas (God has to exist; high-entropy states are always preferred at every moment etc.) are infinitely more important for them than any finite amount of evidence, so they just can't learn an iota about certain aspects of the inner workings of the Universe.
Socialite, sponsor, and trader Václav Dejčmar (who co-hosted my black hole talk in Prague-Barrandov in January) contributed the money and the toothbrush. Leoš Kyša, the vice-chairman of Sisyphus (the Czech counterpart of CSICOP; the name is chosen because the fight against paranormal beliefs looks like a fight against windmills) added the bill, and Jakub Kroulík from Deceitful Players (falesni-hraci.cz), a gang of playful skeptics who have learned to do everything that psychics can do, added the walnut.
You know, many psychics and fortune tellers have to work hard and get $10 from one client. You need to repeat it many times to earn $4,000. So the safe box could be handy.
Hundreds (360) of psychic wannabes (EN) – and perhaps some people who hoped to be lucky (or to be hiding some amazing abilities they haven't fully realized yet) – have submitted their guesses about the three objects. A sword, a book, a tablet; ATM card; black stone; black casino token; keys, telephone, nothing; socks, watch, coin. You may imagine – something like one thousand of random objects appear in the list. No one came close to the truth.
And it was so easy: just say "toothbrush, bill, walnut". ;-)
The challenge was a part of a more general, greater Paranormal Challenge. A person with paranormal abilities may win $40,000 (one million crowns) if he or she agrees with the organizers about a protocol that guarantees that the probability of success by chance is smaller than 1-in-100,000, or something like that.
Those things sound like fun to those of us who have no doubts that it's strictly impossible for a human being to correctly guess the content of a safe box. But a very close relative of mine reacted angrily. ;-) The organizers of the challenges are some unbelieving Thomases and the true psychics have no reason to deal with them!
It's much better for the psychics to deal with 400 or 4,000 clients and get $10 from each than to write three words and get the same money in a minute. ;-)
Well, more seriously, this challenge doesn't really prove that there aren't any psychics. Dejčmar himself may be a psychic, for example, and he has silently earned his money by reading from the crystal ball. ;-) But what this challenge does prove is that all the people who are making their living by collecting $10 or so from their clients by making prophesies using tarot cards and dozens of similar protocols (one example) are fraudsters.
Of course, I know numerous people – well, mostly female but not only female – who believe in these crazy things. This belief must be an important foundation of their spiritual balance and they are clearly ready to add an arbitrarily unlikely extra belief in order to defend the basic claim.
If you think about the world in the scientific way like I do, you just can't comprehend it. The truth is always superior – it's valuable by itself but it's ultimately practically useful, too – and if one has some truly powerful evidence that indicates that a proposition is true and its negation is false, it simply has to affect the opinion of a rational person.
There are many fundamental differences between the spiritual/religious/superstitious view on the world, and the scientific one. They also share some similarities.
A truly scientific soul is ultimately "disinterested" in questions that sound meaningless from a scientific viewpoint, and the "antireligious warriors" share a lot with the theists. I was reminded about these matters when I saw Don Page's guest blog at Sean Carroll's blog.
Don Page is a believer and Sean Carroll is an aggressive atheist. But when you look at their views in detail, they are extremely close, especially when you get to crazy things such as the Boltzmann Brains that both of them believe.
In both cases, the are incapable of seeing the overwhelming and sharp evidence – pretty much rock-solid proofs – that their opinion that we may very well be Boltzmann Brains are simply wrong. They are unable to see such things because their completely wrong dogmas (God has to exist; high-entropy states are always preferred at every moment etc.) are infinitely more important for them than any finite amount of evidence, so they just can't learn an iota about certain aspects of the inner workings of the Universe.
No clairvoyants win a Prague contest
Reviewed by DAL
on
March 21, 2015
Rating:
Reviewed by DAL
on
March 21, 2015
Rating:
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