Tonight, at 10pm/9pm on ABC’s Primetime Nightline, there will be a show on psychic powers. The good news: they engaged the JREF, with James Randi and DJ Grothe, to contribute. The bad news: the teaser trailer doesn’t look skeptical at all, doesn’t mention the JREF, and seems to gush credulously over frauds. Obviously, this could go either of two ways: they’re going to string along the JREF, using them to put up the illusion of critical thinking, and end up putting on another pro-superstition show; or they’re leading along their audience, and are going to surprise them with a dash of hard, cold evidence and critical thinking.
I’m placing my bets. I guess we’ll have to tune in to see how it turns out.
Randi is good. He speaks concisely, with little room for creative editing, and has enough media pull that people generally don’t try using him. Of course, it’s possible they may have all but 15 seconds of the presentation giving the psychics the happy handshake, but maybe they’ll do the smart thing.
Final sentence: “Are psychic powers real? We may never know for sure, but one thing is certain: there will always be things that are unexplained by modern science.”
Hi, completely off topic – I’m a long-term follower of Pharyngula but when viewing this site in firefox the layouts all screwed up? Is there some setting or something I’m missing?
I’m sensing bad Juju here.
good morning all!
regarding, “we may never know for sure… there will always be things modern science can’t explain”
If something fails to have a concrete definition it can’t necessarily be explained by science anyway. Thats the problem with religion, of course it’s POSSIBLE that there’s…an omnipotent being out there that can do anything it wants, deceiving all the humans on earth and escaping detection by science. Of course he MAY have set all the laws of nature and fossils the way they are now (6000 years ago) and that he sits around in the sky (why haven’t any of the astronauts seen him) and laughs at us because we can’t test his existence, and all we have to go on are some centuries old stories about how he interacted with humans. And just because he thought it would be funny, he put a bunch of other stories about our existence out there to royally fucking confuse us (like don’t know our blastopore from our mouth confused).
But why would any rational person believe that? It’s dumb, it doesn’t advance science or society in any way, and in fact it just causes trouble.
(in my opinion all creationists and IDists shouldn’t be allowed to get flu shots, multiple types of cancer treatment, or use anti-biotics, because those therapies rely on (gasp!) evolution).
Anyhow, saying that there will always be things that modern science can’t explain is analogous to,”well Schrodingers cat may still be alive, or it may be dead, we’re not really sure”.
“There is a grandeur in this (athiest) view of life”! (how Darwin would say it were he still alive.)
sorry if this is too confusing of an argument, I’m still sleepy (and pissed that none of my bacterial transfections worked).
Speaking of uncritical reporting, NPR had a short mention of Ark Encounter this morning. Included a short quote from one of the arksters about how building the thing makes it clear just how plausible the story is. No mention of the tax breaks or any church-state separation issues. Pretty disappointing.
Yeah, because 500 construction workers who are building a boat using modern hardwoods with modern fasteners (including glue) and a steel reinforcing frame that isn’t designed to actually float or carry any living things through tsunami/hurricane conditions is just like one 800-year-old man and his family building a boat over a period of 100 years that’s designed to carry the mass of every living thing on the planet.
sigh…
I still stay once it’s built, we lock them all up in the boat with period foodstuffs and see how long they last before they are begging to be let out.
My guess is that this will basically turn out to be an advertisment for Jonathan Edwards and his shameless con-man ilk, with a few minutes of James Randi as the bad guy ruining everyone’s good time by telling them that their dead relatives no longer exist. That’s what the American audience wants to see, and ABC knows it.
I’m with Kevin in having problems. For days now, when I navigate (using Chrome) to http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula, it just shows the August 6th and older entries. To get here, I have to add the date the url.
I love the first comment on that page
Don’t need to be psychic to predict that.
You say you’re placing your bets, but I’m somewhat skeptical of that; by not announcing which way you place your bet, you’re very effectively hedging them.
abb3w@11
Sounds like you’ve learned from the “professionals” :)
ABC will probably, at best, report the phenomenon in a “fair and balanced” context. However, since this is pseudoscience, “fair and balanced” means “demonstrate that it could be wrong, but admit that it might not be”. By definition, this is supernatural. Natural science can only explain the natural world. Strictly by the definition, there will always be a “chance that it could work” or “no possible means to analyze it”, which means that will be the final note at the end of the show.
However, if the people creating the show dropped a pair of testicles and took a note from Penn and Teller, they’d have a damn fine show. Demonstrate hot/cold reading, point out that these so-called “psychics” give people lies and false hope, and you’re done.
Of course, if they were going to do that, they could just air that episode of Bullshit and bleep out the swears… that’s pretty much all you’d need to do.
What the heck happened to Primetime Nightline anyway? The last time I was channel surfing the topic was demonic psosession. WTF? Scientists are figuring how to create devices that people can control with their freaking minds, but we are still debating psychics and demon possession?
carovee@14
Network television now requires programming that:
a) appeals to the widest demographic (idiots)
b) employs people that work dirt cheap (pychics)
and
c) does not require quality writing (reality show contestants and psychics which live off a script in their own head.)
Sunday evening at TAM9, Banachek and Jami Ian Swiss talked about the filming of this segment of Nightline. Banachek did the actual on the screen testing, as the link back to the JREF page shows, and Jami help set up the test protocols. Both do professional magician/mentalist acts and both have a sense of the dramatic. If it makes it through the final editing, the demonstration of the testing results could provide some humor.
George
“Are psychic powers real? We may never know for sure, but one thing is certain: there will always be things that are unexplained by modern science.”
…and unexplained by anything else either.
What is that term for a sentence that is technically true in the most limited way but is just used to prop up bullshit?
The use of the term “modern science” (which to me just means “science that works and has enriched everyone’s life in countless ways, you’re welcome“), is a dead giveaway.
The first part is up on the Nightline website and it was surprisingly good. It was explicitly skeptical and will leave any viewer with the conclusion that psychics are bullshit.
Looks great!
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/psychic-detectives-put-test-14320969
ABC might also be drawing in credulous viewers, with the intention of introducing a skeptical evaluation after they’re watching.
That preview is great, maybe the show will be worthwhile. Though somehow I doubt it will stop a single person from believing in that bullshit. Look at that “PhD” who doesn’t even want to talk about how abusive it might be to take advantage of kids in that way.
@Kevin
If you have Adblock-Plus installed there’s some open spaces (at the top and right under the post), but otherwise this site should look pretty normal.
Except that the story is not plausible. Even if the Ark were the size of an ultra large crude carrier, it wouldn’t be big enough to carry all the critters needed.
@Timothy #9
Press the browser’s Reload button. This fixes it … until next time.
I’ve noticed this same problem in Chrome, as well as on a mobile device browser, and I think it has something to do with the web server’s HTTP headers. Specifically, there’s an HTTP header that deals with the expiry time of a page, and if it’s set wrong, your browser won’t bother to reload the page and will rely upon the cache.
I posted this OT on a previous thread along with some other constructive criticisms here.
My program guide says:”Speaking to psychic addicts who can’t make decisions without consulting a clairvoyant.”
We’ll see..
Oh noes, PZ! You have an add for http://www.quantumjumping.com on your blog. You’re promoting woo! ;-)
/@
If ads for woo are paying the bills here, doesn’t that mean it’s woo that is promoting PZ?
While reading some ancient (1968) Isaac Asimov non-fiction yesterday, I ran across a story he told about being invited to appear on TV with three astrologers (as the token scientist, no doubt). He thought about it for a bit, but decided to decline the invitation for this reason:
“The three practitioners would undoubtedly be experts at their own particular line of gobbledygook and could easily speak a gallon of nonsense while I was struggling with a half pint of reason.”
It’s hard to win these engagements when the other side gets to make shit up.
Not to mention the food and water and other necessities for all these critters. Think of how many tons of Purina® Pachyderm Feed you’d need for two each of two species of elephants, two species of hippopotami and five species of rhinoceros for a year.
The Nightline segment was actually pretty even-handed. In fairness, it was probably more skeptical than credulous. Banacheck and Randi were both shown in a good light, they were given two full segments, and one of the reporters was pretty skeptical too. A win for reason and evidence.
In between the “We just can’t know” and “science can’t answer all questions” bullshit, it did show some decent skepticism.
However, the fellow who interviewed Dubois was completely credulous, claiming “she knew about Amelia, my dead mother, whom one of my daughters is named for, and that’s not available on Google. ” As if there were no other sources available.
and, during the interview, he says Dubois mentioned “a rainbow”… and wouldn’t you know it, a double-rainbow appeared, visible from the driveway. And had it not been raining west of Dubious’ home, no doubt he would have seen an ad showing a rainbow, or a gay pride flag or who knows what, which would have been interpreted after the fact as a fulfilled prediction.
For those who missed it, the show is posted on ABCs website,
at : http://abcnews.go.com/nightline/beyondbelief
I gotta admit I was pretty impressed by the show. Maybe TV hs just lowered my standards, but I thought they were fairly skeptical without being insulting to the believers (who watch more TV).
I must also say that the program was more even-handed and skeptical than I had expected; except for the final segment with the correspondent’s dead mother and the rainbow. That part was pretty eyeroll-worthy.
To all that say that the size of the ark is the issue; the real problem is humidity levels and dew points. Said problem is akin to southern USAians saying that they had 100 degrees (F, naturally) with 100% humidity which would have a dew point higher than that of the human body…to clarify, you would drown.
Ugh, insufficient sentence. If the entire world was made up of water, the humidity level would naturally be higher than a human could stand. I guess that means that their survival was a “miracle” yes? We could call it so only if it really happened, which it didn’t.