On Jan 22, 2015, Ian Rowland wrote:

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On Jan 15, 2015, CThomas wrote:
But if any of those people sued magicians for expressing skepticism over the fact that their claims were real...

I'm not here to defend Uri Geller, because that's not my job and in any case Uri doesn't need me to speak for him. The contribution I _can_ make is to correct factual errors, like this one. It's a very old error which seems to persist no matter how many times it is corrected.

Uri Geller has never sued anyone for being skeptical about him or for suggesting that he doesn't have psychic powers. He's not that silly or legally misguided, and he knows such a matter could never be resolved by resorting to the law courts. He has sued people for other things, such as slander or defamation -- e.g. a well-known critic once gave an interview and described Uri as 'a social disease'. To compare someone to a social disease (e.g. akin to a venereal disease or an STD) is defamatory. Uri had young children at the time. He knew one day they would grow up and read old articles about him. Did he want his kids growing up and seeing their father likened to an STD, and what's more seeing that he did nothing about it? No. Would you? So he sued. And he won... although only token damages were awarded in this case.

As a sidenote, calling someone names is juvenile and has nothing to do with good skepticism. Good skepticism would be saying 'We contend that the spoon-bending effect is a trick, not a manifestation of psyching ability, and here's the evidence and data to support our contention'.

It seems that whenever people discuss Uri, they seem largely unconcerned about factual accuracy. The same thing happened on a recent Facebook thread where it was said that, at the Genii convention a couple of years back, Juan Tamariz refused to share a stage with Uri on ethical grounds. Nice story, but untrue. Richard Kaufman pointed out that it didn't happen, and could not have happened because the two were never involved in the convention at the same time.

By all means be skeptical about Uri, but it is good to stick to facts, not myths. He has never sued anyone for being skeptical about him or saying he doesn't have psychic powers.

On Jan 22, 2015, CThomas wrote:
If my understanding along these lines is factually wrong, then by all means let me know.

On Jan 22, 2015, CThomas wrote:
if I say something wrong I will admit it and apologize.

On Jan 22, 2015, Ian Rowland wrote:

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On Jan 22, 2015, CThomas wrote:
if I say something wrong I will admit it and apologize.

Me too! I am open to correction on anything I wrote before. I do happen to know a lot about both Geller and Randi. I've followed the careers of both men since the 70s. I know them both personally, as friends, and I've also worked with both of them professionally. I'm just stating what I know, or at least _think_ I know, to be the facts! If someone comes along with some cite or document showing I'm wrong, I'll happily admit my error. But I'm pretty sure about this. Uri is shrewd enough to know that he can't sue someone for suggesting he's not actually psychic.

On Jan 22, 2015, Joe Atmore wrote:
Bottom line is that everyone is still spelling his name correctly as we approach page 6. And CT you're right. I can't possibly speak with any authority

On Jan 22, 2015, Ian Rowland wrote:

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On Jan 22, 2015, CThomas wrote:
if I say something wrong I will admit it and apologize.

Me too! I am open to correction on anything I wrote before. I do happen to know a lot about both Geller and Randi. I've followed the careers of both men since the 70s. I know them both personally, as friends, and I've also worked with both of them professionally. I'm just stating what I know, or at least _think_ I know, to be the facts! If someone comes along with some cite or document showing I'm wrong, I'll happily admit my error. But I'm pretty sure about this. Uri is shrewd enough to know that he can't sue someone for suggesting he's not actually psychic.

On Jan 22, 2015, CThomas wrote:
Bob, if Geller achieved positive results in these tests, is there some plausible third possibility other than either (a) having genuine powers or (b) trickery? Not necessarily disagreeing with you here, but what exactly would that be?

Randi's take on this series of experiments is withering. He skewers Targ and Puthoff as "bunglers." He reports that their experiments were conducted in a chaotic atmosphere conducive to cheating. He says that a hole in the wall of Geller's isolation room enabled him to spy on the scientists during their ESP experiments. He says that Targ and Puthoff falsified the results of the tests by omitting failed experiments that would have lowered Geller's averages to the level of chance. Further, he says that the scoring of Geller's performances was mishandled, generating higher scores than Geller deserved.

The question naturally arises: How does Randi know all this, since, as he admits, "I've never even set foot on the sacred grounds of SRI [Stanford Research Institute, where the experiments were conducted"? He explains that he was given inside information by "an individual" who claimed to represent dozens of SRI scientists. This group, which worked in secret and even adopted a code name (Broomhilda), passed the information to Randi.

Unfortunately, Randi never names this individual or any other members of the Broomhilda group. He says that "Broomhilda verified for me much of the information that I had been holding on to for years," but where did he get this earlier information in the first place? "That data," he says, "now moved from the status of hearsay to documented fact." But documented is hardly a term applicable to either the initial information, which is never specified, or the Broomhilda information, which came from an anonymous source. He adds, "Additional facts were elicited during conversations and correspondence with individuals. Many of these persons were not aware of Broomhilda and were acting on their own. Their completely independent input supported Broomhilda's charges. Taken together," he concludes, "the information from all sources amounted to quite an indictment."

Maybe so, but it's an indictment that would never hold up in court. The reader is expected to take Randi's word that his unidentified sources are trustworthy - and that the sources themselves are well-informed about experimental procedures they may or may not have witnessed.

Thus when Randi alleges that "hundreds of [failed] experiments that were done by SRI ... were never reported," we must take the statement on faith, as it is unsupported by any documentation. Similarly, when Randi says definitively, "All the other tests [i.e., the successful ones] lacked proper controls and were useless," we search in vain for any footnote to back up this assertion.

A posting www.psicounsel.com/ I found on a message board sums up the situation nicely: "Claims of poor scientific method leveled at the experimenters have been shown to be mainly unsubstantiated personal opinion and second-hand 'Chinese Whispers.'" (Chinese Whispers is the British equivalent of the American game, 'Telephone'.) It might be worth adding that critics of paranormal phenomena, like Randi, are forever decrying any reliance on "anecdotal evidence," which is precisely what the bulk of Randi's argument consists of.