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'If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.'   – Charles Hoy Fort

'My general expression is that all human beings who can do anything; and dogs that track unseen quarry, and homing pigeons, and bird-charming snakes, and caterpillars who transform into butterflies, are magicians. … Considering modern data, it is likely that many of the fakirs of the past, who are now known as saints, did, or to some degree did, perform the miracles that have been attributed to them. Miracles, or stunts, that were in accord with the dominant power of the period were fostered, and miracles that conflicted with, or that did not contribute to, the glory of the Church, were discouraged, or were savagely suppressed. There could be no development of mechanical, chemical, or electric miracles —
And that, in the succeeding age of Materialism — or call it the Industrial Era — there is the same state of subservience to a dominant, so that young men are trained to the glory of the job, and dream and invent in fields that are likely to interest stockholders, and are schooled into thinking that all magics, except their own industrial magics, are fakes, superstitions, or newspaper yarns. '   – Charles Hoy Fort

What Fort was saying, I think, is that so-called 'rational' people are often not rational at all. They're just following the general trend of thought. Good point.

Fort and I agree that real science means you start from the observation and work to the conclusion. Anybody who assumes he already knows the answer is wasting our time. Which is why the following set of Youtubes made me thoughtful about one such monumental waste of time: the professional de-bunker, if all he does is debunk. The professional debunker will, of course, be massively successful, for two reasons:

1. Many of the people he is debunking are, in fact, charlatans. He knows this, because they all pay their dues to the same con-man union.
2. The ones who aren't charlatans probably can't explain what they're doing, either. If he uses enough trickery of his own, he can make them look like fools in front of everybody, which makes him look good and feeds the general Schadenfreude. After all, his audience WANTS him to succeed, because they secretly love a bully.

I got to looking for some of these videos, not because I was particularly interested in spoonbending today, but because the other night, we watched a film called Red Lights. You don't have to have an opinion about the validity of psychic phenomena to enjoy the film: Cillian Murphy probably makes all the girls sigh, from his native Cork to Hollywood to Barcelona. Sigourney Weaver's superb, as usual, and Robert de Niro is Robert de Niro. The director, Rodrigo Cortes, reproduced a bit of staged 'research film' that tickled my memory. I figured the original was made about Uri Geller, so I went looking and found it – I was hoping for archive.org, but ended up with Youtube, sorry. I wanted to see if the original experimenters had used design as bad as the one in the film.

Nope. The good news is that Stanford's researchers designed experiments better than Spanish scifi filmmakers. That's a relief. (Mr Cortes' camera angles are much more artful than Stanford's, though, we'll give him that.) In the process, I stumbled across this Randi person – I usually avoid him – busy 'debunking' Geller as yet another bogus psychic.

Full disclosure: I don't watch psychic demonstrations, usually, and the last time I paid money to a psychic was in a Cologne pizzeria¹, so I don't know what kind of show Mr Geller puts on in public. I'm sure he tarts his tricks up a bit. After all, people paid good money to be there. Singers usually comb their hair, put on a clean shirt, and tune up their amplifiers before a concert, as well. But some of Geller's phenomena have been documented under laboratory conditions, as opposed to entertainment venues, so I was a bit surprised to run across what follows.

I thought a bit of analysis was in order, so here it is. I hope you enjoy the films.

STEP ONE: Watch the Dubunker in Action.

James (The 'Amazing') Randi 'Exposes' Uri Geller².

As we teach the children in Multiculturalism class, it's a good idea to deconstruct what you're watching. Ask:

• Who made this and why? What are they trying to prove?
• Who's getting something out of this, and what?

Mr Randi is the obvious beneficiary here. He gets to be an expert, he gets paid for talking, and he gets praise. The more famous the person is whom he's debunking, the greater his own fame. That has the bonus of letting the target do the work for you.

What do we get out of it? Admiration for Mr Randi, and reassurance that we don't have to think anymore today. Mr Randi's done it for us. Move along, nothing to see here.

Note the high points of the video:

• 'Nine out of ten people, when asked to draw something, will draw a house with smoke coming out of the chimney.'
  
  • Elektra's comment: 'That's at Caltech. Didn't anybody ask him for a reference? I mean, who did the experiment to see what people draw when you ask them to draw a picture? Where are the statistics?"
  • As we know, 87% of statistics are made up on the spur of the moment, to suit the speaker's purpose.
• 'I believe – from my position of expertise – that he is peeking.'
  
  • 'All of these things are really simple.' – If, of course, you are in 'a position of expertise'.

Thank you, Mr Randi. That beard, suit and tie have convinced us. You are a true expert. And all your statistics must be good.

Boring Scientists Watch Spoonbending

Now, the boring part: actual science. Prepare to snore here, because it will remind you unpleasantly of your Teaching Assistant in Organic Chemistry. However, this pain is necessary, unless you want Mr Randi to do ALL your thinking for you.

Back in the early 1970s, Stanford Research Institute investigated Uri Geller. To understand what they were trying to research, it is necessary to listen to the boilerplate. Here it is.

Okay, got that? They aren't trying to prove anything right away, but they're going to try to get controlled experiments running. There's a conspicuous lack of goat-staring hyperbole here. If you spot a flaw in their experimental design, you can make up one of your own. But it's not showmanship, it's data-collecting.

So what did they find out about Geller and remote viewing? They were surprised at how accurate he was.

Notice: Stanford sealed the drawings. No peeking through your fingers allowed. I give them good marks for experimental design here. That would mean that Mr Amazing Randi's claim that it was all a simple matter wouldn't make a lot of sense, but hey, Mr Amazing Randi doesn't care. He knows that showmanship is about the momentary effect. Nobody in that audience is going to say, 'Hey, wait, what about the Stanford experiments?' He's scored his point, and collected his fee.

• 'It is interesting that there is often a mirror effect.' Now, that's what they wanted to know. Wonder why that was?
• About 20% accurate? Interesting. That might not wow them in the aisles at the Odeon, but it might be significant if you wanted to find out what was really going on.
• Also, not a double-blind experiment. Possible hypothesis: mind-reading rather than remote viewing?

Why can he find water in a snuff tin, but not a ball bearing? Inquiring minds want to know. If you want to see the water experiments, click on the next video. If not, leave it. No ladies being sawn in half, no rabbits from hats. Nothing to see here, just a guy guessing right.

We can speculate about what they found out. It would be ill-advised at this point to build too many theories on these results, but they might be what academics call 'seminal': leading to new experiments. What Uri Geller and the Stanford scientists had in common was an interest in knowing more about how the world works.

As opposed to, say, getting onto one more chat show.

In the Cortes film, Sigourney Weaver plays a 'skeptic' who is not a skeptic. She demonstrates the flaw in this sort of pseudo-reasoning, because she works from the conclusion backwards: no psychic phenomena are real, therefore all psychics are charlatans, all the time. If their tricks can't be exposed, it's because we haven't figured out how they're doing it yet.

I thought the film was rather bogus on that count – I mean, everyone knows that's not how science works, right? And then I stumbled across Mr Randi. Now I know. Cortes understated the case. Sigourney Weaver sounded a lot more plausible than Randi does.

Of course, she had the benefit of genuine expertise. As an actor.