It should come as no surprise that many great magicians are also skeptics. Harry Houdini was a skeptic. James Randi is a skeptic. Penn and Teller are skeptics. And a more recent and popular example is Criss Angel Mindfreak. Magicians tend to be skeptical because they know how easily it is to fool people. (Similarly, psychologists tend to be skeptical because they know how easily people can fool themselves.) To them, a psychic is simply a dishonest magician.
Derren Brown is an English magician and mentalist, and he is part of the great tradition of skeptical magicians. Watch: he’s really good.
I shall begin this by saying we should all be careful of thinking that we know what is going on. I’ve heard that magicians often have a much easier time fooling people with more education. This is because people with more education tend to think they can figure out the tricks, when really they’re no better than anyone else. Therefore, it’s best if I admit right away that I have no clue how Derren Brown does it.
But watching the above video, I was rather dismayed. I still don’t understand how he did it, even after he explained it. I’m not convinced that he’s doing this the way he says he is. Just because he drops a bunch of hints doesn’t guarantee that the person will think he wanted a BMX bike. I know I didn’t want a BMX by the end of the video. I guess he could have thoroughly pre-screened the person, or shown the single successful attempt out of many failed ones. But still, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had simply dropped a bunch of subliminal hints to make it look like that’s how he does it, while using some entirely different trick.
Of course, the Youtubers are claiming that his method is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), which I really don’t believe. Derren Brown is actually critical of NLP, and has never claimed to use it (see Straight Dope). More generally, I think NLP is New Age bunk. On the other hand, something like hypnosis is much more plausible to me, since it’s empirically a real phenomenon. Many of Derren’s tricks look like they could be hypnosis, not that I know how to recognize it.
That was a single example where Derren Brown explained his trick. Usually, he doesn’t bother explaining (see more examples here, here, and here). It’s maddening. Derren says he mixes “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” and the only things he doesn’t use are actors and stooges. But I cannot figure out for any single trick whether he’s using some crazy psychology, some crazy conjuring, or a combination of both. I guess Derren intended it to be ambiguous. But because it’s ambiguous, there are so many unanswered questions. Obviously, the tricks don’t attest to anything supernatural, but do they attest to any naturalistic amazingness? Or are they the kind of tricks you’d slap your face over? Do the tricks require conscious knowledge of the performer? Or is it like cold reading, in that the performer can fool even himself into thinking he’s psychic?
A while back I expressed my dismay over the lack of science majors and scientists in the US Congress. However, if such science majors were like Louisiana Governor (and GOP Vice Presidential prospect) Bobby Jindal, it would probably be best if we had as few of them as possible. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Jindal - who graduated with honors in Biology and Public Policy from the prestigious Brown University - implies that he believes that Intelligent Design is among the “best thinking” and that “the world has a purpose and wasn’t created by ‘accident’”. You can see the segment below -
On the issues, Jindal fits the ideal for the Christian conservative - he is against abortion in all cases including rape, is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, and has a 100% lifetime rating from the National Right to Life Committee - so it is very likely that he earnestly believes what he is saying rather than trying to pander. On the other hand, being a convert from Hinduism to Christianity, brown-skinned, and having the legal name “Piyush Jindal” may push away some on the far right. In any case, an interesting dynamic…
I don’t have anything prepared during finals week, but this was just too hilarious to pass up. First there was Bibleman, the fundamentalist Christian superhero. Now meet Ultimate Christian Wrestling, the fundamentalist Christian wrestling federation.
Seriously though - I may not be any connoisseur of wrestling, but these people are pretty good; they even have the chairs-and-ladders-being-used-as-weapons thing down:
Now all we need is a fake plot with a powerful and amoral wrestling industry mogul to turn this into a man-drama.
Best Website-University of California Los Angeles -Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists. Check out their great site.
Roy Natian of the group said of the website:
“The guiding principle behind the site is this: Function, Function, Function. The site has to be easy to use and to update. In planning ahead for BASS’s future, I wanted to make sure that we had a solid infrastructure. By making the site require minimal maintenance, I’m allowing future BASSiers to focus on more important facets of the running of BASS (such as planning educational events). An added benefit of having the site be easily updateable is that the site actually gets updated!”
Thanks to Joe, for pushing me to make the BASS website in a blog form, Robin for posting so much, thanks to the future posters of this blog, and thanks to Wordpress for making such an awesome blogging software!
Next stop: BASS will work on winning the other awards!
First, a short introduction is in order. My name is Miller. I’m a physics student at UCLA, and a member of BASS. I’m not closeted or anything, I just prefer pseudonymity. I have my own active blog, “Skeptic’s Play“, but I will occasionally contribute to this one. As a blogger, I am probably self-absorbed, and will shamelessly plug my blog often. The following essay has been cross-posted on my blog.
There’s an article in the latest issue of Skeptic Magazine called “A Climate of Belief” by Patrick Frank. It says that the case for Global Warming being caused by CO2 is severely hurt by the fact that computer models of the climate are uncertain. At first, I thought it had raised a fairly good objection, at least good enough that I, mostly clueless about climate science, would have no idea how to refute it. But it turns out that the article fails at basic statistics.
If you have been following the news, you no doubt would have heard by now of Cyclone Nargis hitting Myanmar (also known as Burma) and the ruling military junta’s piss-poor disaster relief initiatives that makes FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina look like a shining moment in the Bush Administration’s history. It is estimated as of today that 155,000 people are dead and that number is certain to rise given the complete lack of food or medical aid and the completely unwillingness of the government to aid its own people. Apparently the regime is more concerned that foreign journalists and aid workers might report back the horrors of living in one of the least-developed countries in the world under a retrograde military regime; The callousness with which the regime is handling the situation hearkens back to how the 2007 and 1988 pro-democracy protests were brutally suppressed and is very different from China’s transparent and rapid response to it’s own major disaster in the Beichuan region.
But these instances do not constitute the only time the military junta has screwed over its own people. Of all the megalomaniacs, it is perhaps only General Ne Win and his successors who relied heavily on astrology and other superstition to chart out national policy…
BASS is a UCLA student group that promotes science, reason, and freethought. We think science rocks and you should think so too.
Weekly meetings are on Wednesdays in Ackerman 2410 from 8-10pm.
