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...