Why has no one won any of the other non-Randi prizes?

Beyond that, I dislike this either-or idea of winning a cash prize according to particular judges. If Bigelow were to do a prize I'd expect to be able to get a score of some kind to let us know whether there was any potential talent there or just outright fraud/delusion.

What do you think about the contest from 1947 that I mentions at the end of the first post in this thread? That one was arranged by psychical researchers instead of pseudo-skeptics, and the Research Officer of the Society for Psychical Research was acting as the judge of it. They reported in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research about the mediums that chose to take part in the contest, and whether or not they produced any genuine phenomena. It seems to have been something along the lines of what you are asking for.

What do you think about the contest from 1947 that I mentions at the end of the first post in this thread? That one was arranged by psychical researchers instead of pseudo-skeptics, and the Research Officer of the Society for Psychical Research was acting as the judge of it. They reported in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research about the mediums that chose to take part in the contest, and whether or not they produced any genuine phenomena. It seems to have been something along the lines of what you are asking for.

I would prefer a completely neutral set of judges or an objectively agreed on set of rules that are not interpretable by biased people.

What do you think about the contest from 1947 that I mentions at the end of the first post in this thread? That one was arranged by psychical researchers instead of pseudo-skeptics, and the Research Officer of the Society for Psychical Research was acting as the judge of it. They reported in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research about the mediums that chose to take part in the contest, and whether or not they produced any genuine phenomena. It seems to have been something along the lines of what you are asking for.

If single experiment fails to confirm QM, do we throw [QM] out?

To me all these prizes can do, at best, is tell us whether any medium can perform reliably enough to win a cash prize under certain conditions.

Also I think it's too easy an out to claim these phenomena *must* act in such a manner as to satisfy these criteria. For example a "sensitive" my friends and I visited didn't give me any impressive results but my friends were quite convinced things that were told to them were genuine and not available online. 

Even if such data was available I was the one who bought the tickets for them and they repaid me in cash, so there wasn't a way for the sensitive to research them that I could think of. Among my friends [one] of them got a ring from their mom and she didn't tell him the story - which lined up with what the sensitive told him - behind it until after.

If I had gone in alone I'd have thought she was a charlatan, but her results for others did seem to be impressive.

Obviously to anyone reading this here I could be making this up, or maybe I missed some trick. But when you add up the accounts across history it just seems to me you reach a point of wilful denial. Which is fine, everyone is entitled to their opinion on Survival, but at the least IMO one has to say something interesting is going...

My understand of Ockham’s razor is that it has to apply to all the facts. Even then it’s a probability assessment. Even if  that was the case here, we’d be assuming fraud was simpler than the psychic explanation. I’m not sure that’s necessarily true.

Hi Wanderer, to add a touch of sarcasm, it seems that the other debaters here have already established that if any competition fails to prove the existence of claimed paranormal abilities, it must be because the competition is unfair. It couldn't possibly be because the claimed paranormal abilities don't exist. Long live Occam's razor.

It doesn't need to be that they were all unfair. Some experiments achieve predicted results and others do not even when the phenomena of interest definitely exist. The real question is: what is it about these cash prize contests that should lead us to think that they have a special, decisive evidential status relative to the countless experiments conducted in this area, which have achieved positive results even, at times, when skeptics conducted them, such as here and here? Wanderer highlights an unsuccessful SPR contest, which, given the very many SPR investigations that reached negative conclusions about the presence of paranormal effects in the cases studied, isn't exactly a surprise. Does it have the unique power to tip the balance against all the positive evidence the SPR amassed for some not at all obvious reason? Truly I just don't get what the argument is supposed to be with this. If someone had won the SPR's contest, or even Randi's Prize for that matter, would skeptics have fallen on their faces and declared psi to be real, or would they have insisted "something went wrong somehow" and devised elaborate explanations about how the fraud "must have" happened? It's not as if ad hoc efforts to deal with unwanted results are exclusive to one side of this debate.

Let's take this example. If this had happened in an SPR contest, it seems money would've been forked over. (A different investigator than Osty, associated with the SPR, even went on to replicate the findings, as the article explains.) Does the lack of payment of money somehow make the findings matter less?

I am reminded of the Sheldrake experiments with the dog, Jaytee. Sheldrake was so convinced of his experimental methodology that he allowed the media skeptic, Richard Wiseman the use of all of his equipment and encouraged him to repeat his experiments. This Wiseman did and then triumphantly declared that he had debunked Sheldrakes conclusions. When Sheldrake pressed Wiseman to publish his results they turned out to be almost exactly the same as those Sheldrake had published. Wiseman, however, put his own spin on the results in order to make his case for debunking. This is a story straight out of the Randi playbook.

To quote Sheldrake:

In other words Wiseman replicated my own results.

I was astonished to hear that in the summer of 1996 Wiseman went to a series of conferences, including the World Skeptics Congress, announcing that he had refuted the "psychic pet" phenomenon. He said Jaytee had failed his tests because he had gone to the window before Pam set off to come home. In September 1996, I met Wiseman and pointed out that his data showed the same pattern as my own, and that far from refuting the effect I had observed, his results confirmed it. I gave him copies of graphs showing my own data and the data from the experiments that he and Smith conducted with Jaytee. But he ignored these facts.

Wiseman reiterated his negative conclusions in a paper in the British Journal of Psychology, coauthored with Smith and Julie Milton, in August, 1998.

This paper was announced in a press release entitled "Mystic dog fails to give scientists a lead," together with a quote from Wiseman: "A lot of people think their pet might have psychic abilities but when we put it to the test, what's going on is normal not paranormal."

I am reminded of the Sheldrake experiments with the dog, Jaytee. Sheldrake was so convinced of his experimental methodology that he allowed the media skeptic, Richard Wiseman the use of all of his equipment and encouraged him to repeat his experiments. This Wiseman did and then triumphantly declared that he had debunked Sheldrakes conclusions. When Sheldrake pressed Wiseman to publish his results they turned out to be almost exactly the same as those Sheldrake had published. Wiseman, however, put his own spin on the results in order to make his case for debunking. This is a story straight out of the Randi playbook.

I guess Wiseman lying about the results of replication is a bit better than Randi lying about having done the tests at all...

Another reason, in my life experience, is that these prizes are not only unrealistic expectation scams, but they are simply an amount that isn't worth the time or effort.

When we can locate terrorists at $5 million a pop, why would I waste my time trancing for some hateful skeptic that is entirely bent on disproving things?

If they are serious about it, they would have to camp out at my place and wait for things to be 'right' and as soon as they are 'right' they would have to accept what presents itself, and not demand a specific result, or some specific thing. I don't reach into a bag of tricks and pull out what you want me to pull out.

As an example, you can't specify what future event I will see, and exactly when, or who it involves. I specify that during the event, as far as I can, which isn't always the case. So how are you going to make a test for that? Are you going to actually pay me when I get the facts right and it is possibly next week, next year? Who will sit on that and wait to confirm it? Are you going to collect all the predictions out there and pay the people who get things right? No, that's not what these places want, they want you to dance to their own drum like a bear on a chain.

I can't specify what kind of information I will get, or from where, or about whom. It could be the camera guy, and then you will say that the camera guy and I are doing this together to split the money, or any of the many other ways you have jilted all of us out of money or success in the past. Fool me once... etc.

When Sean repeatedly gave accurate facts about a photo of a total stranger, put in his hand at the reading, everyone demanded perfection and 100% accuracy, and he missed on 2 out of 10 statements. So because he got those wrong, everyone wants to call it all a hoax and crap all over Sean as a fraud. If you knew Sean personally, you would know that is not even part of his nature. Did you pay Sean for that? Nope, it wasn't good enough, wasn't accurate enough. So Sean went on and got a terrorist located, and got paid huge money for it, and these silly skeptic games are then no longer of interest, and nobody cares about what these people want or think.

The biggest issues of the US Government testing and training days were lack of repeat on demand events, and lack of accuracy. Not that things didn't happen, and not that they didn't get accurate data often enough to keep the project going for so long.
The problem was that it wouldn't dance for them, when they wanted, how they wanted, and they couldn't control it or the outcome. 

Make a program that pays for accurate outcomes of any kind, accurate data of any kind, or demonstrations of any kind that are obviously Psi, and they will be paying and paying. The problem is ALWAYS that these places want Psi phenomena to dance in the eye of a needle, on demand, to the tune they demand, and exactly as they describe and prescribe.

We have Ariel Farias currently tipping tables in Buenos Aires, and they ran out of funds to continue studying him. How about these blowhards take that money and invest it in some real study of some real phenomena? Here they have someone that would pass all of their tests, working at a factory in Buenos Aires, teaching martial arts, that would love to see some money for his efforts. 

So, who is the one not chasing after the real Psi data and the real performers, and showing zero interest in going there? Those who are holding the money have no interest in actually paying anything to anyone.

I would also add that the FBI, CIA, and multiple detectives that the public should trust to be truthful and factual, have all used Psi data to help them or to solve crimes.
Even the late President Carter reported that they used a psychic to locate an aircraft, successfully. Are they going to pay out for all of these events? Don't they accept the statements and facts of law enforcement and the US Government or the President? If not, why not? 

President Jimmy Carter revealed that during his administration, the CIA successfully used a California psychic in a trance to locate a downed twin-engine plane in the Central African Republic. After satellite searches failed, the psychic provided accurate latitude and longitude coordinates.  Despite his skepticism, Carter acknowledged the successful, verified outcome of this specific intelligence operation. 

Are these places with prizes going to award this psychic any money? How much verification do you think they need or want then?

I call BS on all of these scammers and the fake prizes.

I'll throw this out as an explanation: subjects and skeptics alike haven't heard of the other prizes. Randi's was the only such prize I'd ever seen any buzz about before finding this thread. Have any of these even tried for the same level of publicity?