Superstition Information Thread - Mediums, Psychics, Astrology etc.

In 1979, James S. McDonnell, board chairman of McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft and devotee of the paranormal, gave $500,000 to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, for the establishment of the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research.

Randi saw this as an opportunity to disprove the complaint of many parapsychologists that they were unable to do properly controlled experiments because of lack of funding.

Randi believed that funding was the least of their problems. In his view, the main obstacle to parapsychology was its “strong pro-psychic bias.” This bias blinds researchers to numerous flaws in their protocols, almost all of which are related to their naïveté regarding human deception and their inexperience at detecting such deception.

Harry Houdini

Houdini's training in magic allowed him to expose frauds who had successfully fooled many scientists and academics. He was a member of a Scientific American committee that offered a cash prize to any medium who could successfully demonstrate supernatural abilities. None were able to do so, and the prize was never collected.

The first to be tested was medium George Valentine of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. As his fame as a "ghostbuster" grew, Houdini took to attending séances in disguise, accompanied by a reporter and police officer. Possibly the most famous medium whom he debunked was Mina Crandon, also known as "Margery". [36]

Houdini chronicled his debunking exploits in his book, A Magician Among the Spirits. These activities cost Houdini the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Doyle, a firm believer in Spiritualism during his later years, refused to believe any of Houdini's exposés. Doyle came to believe that Houdini was a powerful spiritualist medium, and had performed many of his stunts by means of paranormal abilities and was using these abilities to block those of other mediums that he was 'debunking' (see Conan Doyle's The Edge of The Unknown, published in 1931)

Houdini was very close to his mother and when she died, he was devastated. One reason he wanted to expose this kind of deception was because he wanted to prevent people from taking advantage of grieving relatives.

Another reason was because there was big money involved in this kind of deception. In one case, Houdini said that $500,000 "changed hands upon the recognition of the fingerprints of a man who had died two years before."

Source

Because Houdini challenged these kinds of deceptions and proved that they were unreliable, he suggested that people should not believe everything they see.

In 1992, Browne was convicted of investment fraud and grand theft,[2] and has been involved in numerous controversies regarding her claims and predictions, with reports about her failed predictions and claims appearing in several newspapers.

In a 2010 interview, Linda Rossi, Browne's business manager, told KMOV-TV that Browne's business earns $3 million a year.

Pathological science is the process in science in which "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions".[1][2] The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory. Langmuir said a pathological science is an area of research that simply will not "go away" —long after it was given up on as 'false' by the majority of scientists in the field. He called pathological science "the science of things that aren't so". [3]

According to the Collins English Dictionary 10th Edition fraud can be defined as: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage".[1] In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud, but there have also been fraudulent "discoveries", e.g. in science, to gain prestige rather than immediate monetary gain.