Why did no one ever win the Randi Million Dollar Challenge?

Questioning intentions without evidence is akin to the very skepticism you criticize. It's important to focus on the evidence and testing process rather than presuming bias.

I already noted the evidence of pseudo-skeptic dishonesty above.

For me skepticism starts with common sense. These "humanist" and "rational" organizations are dedicated to convincing people of a certain belief system, and it seems their prizes were based on the original idea by Randi.

The idea that they'd just let someone have this money and admit their reason for being was false is naive. Seems more likely that they'd use the same tactics Prescott criticized JREF for using.

On the flip-side in my first post [in this thread] I noted that I'm not personally convinced by Bengson's psychic healing because the training program seems cobbled together and even arguably designed in such a way it never works but you blame yourself after spending money on the materials.

All to say that just because I accept there is Psi & Survival doesn't mean I'm all in for every claim someone possesses abilities such as mediumship or psychic healing. It just means, for me, that the lack of someone winning prize money put forth by the very people who've dedicated themselves to spreading denial of Psi & Survival is not a real standard.

Prize challenges are designed to encourage proponents of paranormal phenomena to demonstrate their claims under controlled conditions. The fact that these prizes remain unclaimed suggests that, when subjected to rigorous testing, these phenomena don't manifest as claimed.

These prize challenges are completely and utterly worthless.

These challenges are so often designed with really bad presumptions about what "proof" should look like, and even if a psychic actually provides evidence, it's still pointless, because it cannot count as scientific evidence, because these prize challenges are not designed with any kind of scientific rigour. They're completely up to the whims of these skeptic groups.

Why would anyone consider signing up for something weighed so heavily against them?

These prize challenges are completely and utterly worthless.

These challenges are so often designed with really bad presumptions about what "proof" should look like, and even if a psychic actually provides evidence, it's still pointless, because it cannot count as scientific evidence, because these prize challenges are not designed with any kind of scientific rigour. They're completely up to the whims of these skeptic groups.

Why would anyone consider signing up for something weighed so heavily against them?

Using presumed bias as an excuse to avoid these challenges smacks of intellectual cowardice. If a phenomenon is genuine, it should withstand scrutiny. Hiding behind criticisms of the tests, without actually engaging with them, is an easy way out of having one's beliefs challenged.

This mode of selective skepticism is a slippery slope. By dismissing rigorous tests and only adhering to evidence that aligns with one's preconceived beliefs, one essentially opens the door to believing in any and every fanciful tale. It becomes less about seeking the truth and more about confirming biases. When we cherry-pick what to believe based on comfort rather than evidence, we're no different than those who blindly accept myths and fairy tales that merely reinforce their existing worldview. True intellectual honesty demands a willingness to challenge and scrutinize our own beliefs just as rigorously as we would others'.

The only other reason I can come up with for why someone would not attempt winning the prize is ...

Personally I've always considered Randi somewhat of a nonentity, I can't see why any serious person would have wanted to go anywhere near him or be tainted by association.

I have no doubt that there were in the past genuine psychics and mediums, like Leonora Piper, Gladys Osborne Leonard, and D.D. Home, since this has been shown by psychical researchers, but does all of this mean that there are no genuine psychics or mediums alive that has stable and reliable paranormal abilities? My question for everyone at Psiencequest is: What do you think?

Psychics and mediumship is not an area where I can claim any particular knowledge. Of course over the years I've absorbed a considerable amount though the contributions and links shared on this or earlier forums.

Psychic phenomena in general I do consider to be commonplace, so much so that it may pass unnoticed.

This is where the likes of Randi and organisations which promote the dismissal of all psychic experience as delusional, do society a disservice. We have on the one hand some traditional religions which may claim an exclusive right over such things and on the other a large strand of society which claims there is nothing to be seen in any case. Where is the ordinary person to turn in such a case, when they find themselves having some unexplainable phenomena occur in their own lives?

Using presumed bias as an excuse to avoid these challenges smacks of intellectual cowardice. If a phenomenon is genuine, it should withstand scrutiny. Hiding behind criticisms of the tests, without actually engaging with them, is an easy way out of having one's beliefs challenged.

This mode of selective skepticism is a slippery slope. By dismissing rigorous tests and only adhering to evidence that aligns with one's preconceived beliefs, one essentially opens the door to believing in any and every fanciful tale. It becomes less about seeking the truth and more about confirming biases. When we cherry-pick what to believe based on comfort rather than evidence, we're no different than those who blindly accept myths and fairy tales that merely reinforce their existing worldview. True intellectual honesty demands a willingness to challenge and scrutinize our own beliefs just as rigorously as we would others'.

It's amusing you talk about avoiding challenges when skeptics have dismissed everyone from philosophers to Nobel winning scientists who don't toe the party line of atheist-materialism.

I don't think anyone here is against rigorous testing, just go back to Skeptiko and the massive amount of criticism from proponents on the poorly done research on telepathy in autistic children or the issues people had with that odd cult infiltrating paranormal research organizations.

I've personally even criticized a lot of Intelligent Design stuff here and on Skeptiko, though I've also come to have more respect for some of the ID work after debating/discussing with people on this site.

I don't think any serious person would accept that a political party would by default have an unbiased investigation of their rival(s), and the pseudo-skeptics seem just as fanatical to me. We already can see JREF had all sorts of loopholes and biases, so not sure why we'd trust these other organizations to not follow in those footsteps.

I would love for Bigelow to work with the people he had as judges for his Essay contest to develop a genuine methodology to go along with a prize. It may come to pass that no medium can have so many good hits they win, though to me the takeaway would be nobody should spend lots of money on mediums rather than mediumship being absolutely false.

Sadly I think this is akin to saying Creationism is true because Satan put those fossils in the ground.

Also the idea that this world offers learning opportunities seems quite wrong, or at best only partially true.

The great difficulty in rigorously testing for paranormal abilities in a scientific manner is well known - the phenomena in major effect sizes are in fact rare in the population, usually impossible to duplicate and demonstrate at will under laboratory instrumented conditions because they are spontaneous and unpredictable (like NDEs), and are subject to confabulating and confusing meta-phenomena like experimenter effect. Furthermore, they are accordingly very resistant to attempts to make money off them by technological applications. It very much seems as if they are intended to be this way, a marginal phenomenon intended to merely hint at the true spirituality of man, while ordinary life is almost invariably dominated by materialistic causes and mechanisms. A world where the two primary and separate realms of existence, material and spiritual, are permitted and designed to have a very limited intersection.

Why should this be, rather than a world where telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, communication with the dead, deep NDEs, etc. etc. are commonplace, and there is accordingly a general acceptance of the spiritual nature of man, and where spiritual/paranormal phenomena are readily controllable so as to enable them to be a key part of the economy? Is the actual situation, the drastic "tuning down" of these phenomena, just the random luck of the draw as to the fundamental nature of our existence, or is it along the lines of some sort of conspiracy theory?

This situation is a sort of "fine tuning" for human doubt of the spiritual, and demands a teleological explanation - deliberate design by spiritual forces beyond our ken. The reasons for this form of fine tuned design are entirely speculative, but it's existence is not.

The great difficulty in rigorously testing for paranormal abilities in a scientific manner is well known - the phenomena in major effect sizes are in fact rare in the population, usually impossible to duplicate and demonstrate at will under laboratory instrumented conditions because they are spontaneous and unpredictable (like NDEs), and are subject to confabulating and confusing meta-phenomena like experimenter effect. Furthermore, they are accordingly very resistant to attempts to make money off them by technological applications. It very much seems as if they are intended to be this way, a marginal phenomenon intended to merely hint at the true spirituality of man, while ordinary life is almost invariably dominated by materialistic causes and mechanisms.

Why should this be, rather than a world where telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, communication with the dead, deep NDEs, etc. etc. are commonplace, and there is accordingly a general acceptance of the spiritual nature of man? Is this situation just the random luck of the draw as to the fundamental nature of our existence, or is it along the lines of some sort of conspiracy theory?

This situation is a sort of "fine tuning" for human doubt of the spiritual, and demands a teleological explanation - deliberate design by spiritual forces beyond our ken. The reasons for this fine tuned design are entirely speculative.

I think it would be a mistake to think of the "flaky" nature of the paranormal as some kind of proof of design. There could be other reasons for the observed indeterminism. We know that set & setting are important to Psi phenomena, which includes emotional states.

If all causality is mental (the Volitional Theory of Causation) then as the Scholastics would say "Chance" is when one free willed entity (embodied or spirit) interferes with the [goals] of other agents. This doesn't by necessity require design.

There could also be a natural indeterminism that effects these phenomena, or myriad causal factors we simply don't know about that would account for the discrepancies.

I would think that the very last thing anyone who had truely found such understanding would be motivated by, is attempting to convince some firmly unbelieving peasant, in exchange for a handful of printed paper.

My research suggests Sony ESPR definitely seems to have found the very edges of such an ability in children, but couldn't understand how to do anything commercial with it... and the story quickly dropped out of sight...

The Gospel of Thomas suggests something... it also dropped out of sight...

There appears to be literally no way of experiencing it, other than by searching for it oneself...

I suppose it's the mental equivalent, of physically inventing a wheel and a bicycle and learning to ride it, or inventing an aircraft and learning to fly it, when there is literally no analog available of what one is trying to do... just some vague hints... and a endless array of charlatans, and blind men who will drag you into a hole with them.

If touching it is anything like my childhood STE, my apparitional experience of 2007, or my experience in the Kitchen in 2021... it's overwhelmingly beyond anything one might try and imagine... and it's also perfectly capable of causing one to slam the door firmly shut because of it's terrifying nature... no matter how prepared one naively believes they are... we always fear what we don't understand.

Perhaps better to stick with the animals in the middle of the flock... and repeat to oneself that there is nothing to see... than expose oneself to what might lie beyond the mental security of the group...

There are more links here than I've been able to completely read through at the moment. So I hope what I'm going to offer isn't covered in resources linked to previously.

Essentially there's strong evidence that Randi stacked the deck against paranormal claimants, to render impossible or simply avoid from the start any demonstration of genuine psi ability. Physicist Richard Bierman offered one of the best and clearest testimonies highlighting this, which very much suggests that Randi deliberately kept out those seeking the prize who could successfully give the evidence allegedly sought: https://skepticalaboutskeptics.org/inves...ndi-prize/. 

Another case is covered in Graham Watkins' obituary for Randi, which is indicative of Randi's willingness to actively interfere with and bully claimants to prevent a situation from arising that would force him to pay up:

>[Randi's] prize was never awarded to anyone, was restricted to “public figures” in 2007, and discontinued in 2015. That it was never awarded is hardly surprising (McLuhan, 2010), considering the conditions under which the tests were conducted. A good example can be found in Randi’s treatment of Natalya Lulova, a ten-year-old girl who apparently could read when totally blindfolded. In preliminary tests she did well and seemed poised to claim the prize. But Randi got personally involved, almost encasing the girl’s head in tape and insisting that she perform over and over (while accusing her of cheating and making odd comments about her facial anatomy) until she no longer could perform (Komissarov, 2004).

I see that Michael Prescott's blog has been linked to, and one can find there, IIRC, a lot of additional material showing not only that Randi was thoroughly ideological and dishonest, but, if that weren't enough, a vicious and malevolent little freak to boot. For info on a particularly bizarre and disturbing episode in his life, read the following: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.paranorm...oOwnCN_lQJ. This is an individual who seemingly was never interested in advancing scientific knowledge, but in self-promotion, which was intimately tied to his uncompromising debunker image, and so shouldn't be trusted on anything. Even his attacks on Uri Geller seem to have been primarily motivated by his burning envy over Uri being a tall, handsome, and very talented magician, where Randi was a short, bald mediocrity, never having been regarded as a noteworthy magician.

Re: @sbu's points, the question naturally must be asked why in the parapsychological domain, but nowhere else, scientific matters are expected to be settled through the winning of cash prizes or the failure to do so. It's a plain fact that the accumulated evidence for psi is as good as or stronger than the evidence for a number of "normal" effects in experimental psychology and medicine that aren't seen as particularly controversial. Psi proponents often repeat the admission by the skeptic Richard Wiseman that the evidence for psi from Ganzfeld research would be seen as good enough to establish the reality of the effect in other areas of science (but, for him, because psi is so "extraordinary," that evidence isn't good enough). What do these cash prizes do other than divert attention from these things? If the claim is that if real, psi would be demonstrable on command, it can be noted in reply that many phenomena in behavioral and clinical science are only established by statistically aggregating many attempts to elicit an effect. This is inarguably true with respect to the efficacy of probably most medications, which frequently fail to achieve the desired results in individual cases.

I'll just add my 2 cents on this subject but if I get drawn in too far I tend to lose my cool when it comes to skeptics in general and Randi in particular. Apologies if I missed the fact that these have been linked earlier in the thread.

On Randi, this is still probably the best take-down I've read over the years:

https://www.dailygrail.com/2008/02/the-m...challenge/

And this is a rare critical mainstream media article about The Amazing One:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film...nkers.html

On the general difficulty of replicating psychic phenomena in the hostile environment of a Skeptic's "lab", I submit that the answer is in the question: it is a hostile environment. Firstly, these phenomena are not well understood, almost impossible to reproduce at will and the evidence bar is set so high in these tests that it would be truly amazing to find any positive results.

As for skeptics being fair - I just don't believe it. Back in the 1980's, Arthur Koestler - an intellectual who had a genuine interest in parapsychology - bequeathed a fund to set up a research unit at Edinburg University. What happened? It was hijacked by prominent skeptics, namely Caroline Watt and the well-known media skeptic and her partner at the time, Richard Wiseman (by the way, ask Rupert Sheldrake whether he thinks Wiseman is honest or fair). Of course they failed to find any evidence showing paranormal effects - what a surprise. Or you can visit the pages of the previously (and still known as) CSICOP and judge for yourself how fair they have been over the years. When you consider this quote from the founder of CSICOP, you can start to appreciate how the cards might be stacked against any fair and equitable treatment of the paranormal:

[Paul] Kurtz believed that skeptics and secular humanists have a duty to propagate a materialistic world-view. “It is incumbent on us to defend the naturalistic interpretation of reality, a materialistic not a spiritual-paranormal account. We need generalists of science to sum up what science tells us about the human condition in a Universe without purpose or design, yet who have the ability to awaken wonder and excitement about the scientific quest itself.”