Sunday, 19th of December, 2004

The most interesting people turn up on LiveJournal! Great to have Wendy Grossman, a folk-singer-turned-professional-Skeptic, on my friends list. I’ve been reading her in the New Scientist for years, and she’s very entertaining.

Recently she was asked to challenge a particularly psycho psychic in a televised meeting,which she gives a full account of on her journal. But, skeptics being a clever bunch, she and three others who were also paid to go head-to-head with the guy have discovered that it was a spoof, for a new BBC comedy show - presumably a la Chris Morris’s Brass Eye only stupider. I’m now wondering:
a) whether the skeptics involved will try and at least publicise this a fair bit so that the general public would know about the uncovering before the show was aired (apparently the producer, or whomever he was, was fairly shocked when she rang up and innocently asked “so is it for Marc Wootton’s new project?”)
b) whether the program in question will have the gall to run the skeptics-vs-psychic segment now that they were so quickly uncovered.

If anyone’s thinking to themselves “well dammit, if he was a fake psychic, isn’t the egg on the skeptics’ faces for not uncovering him?”, Grossman’s own accounts have plenty to say on that matter, but basically the point is that they were there to show the psychic up as fake, not to show up the show as fake, so they weren’t looking for signs that the psychic was a fake fake psychic… And indeed there are plenty of unbalanced people in the world, many of whom are convinced that they’re psychic (or at least believe in the supernatural), so it wasn’t too far out to believe this guy was just mad.
The fact is that when they all (there’s a fifth skeptic involved too!) looked at it after the emotional encounter, they suspected something, and uncovered the truth pretty quickly.

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