Stephen Law

Piling Up the Anecdotes   (chapter & of my book Believing Bullshit available UK here (US amazon.com here ) [below is the original, uncorrected text]). New Scientist interview with me about the book here . An anecdote involves the recounting of a short story or episode, supposedly true, and often testimonial in nature. There’s nothing wrong with anecdotes per se —they can usefully be used to spice up a dinner party conversation, provoke a discussion or illustrate a point. I’ve told a few in my time. However, alarm bells should start ringing whenever anecdotes are supposed to provide significant evidence in support of a claim, particularly a supernatural claim. Here are a few examples: I know I’m psychic. For example, last week I was thinking about Aunt Sue, whom I hadn’t talked to for ages, when the phone rang. And it was her. Prayer clearly works. I prayed for Mark, John, Karen, and Rita and they all got better. I have no doubt that ghosts are ...

Chris French tests psychic Shirley Ghostman. Chris is pretty cool. He obviously realizes what's going on about halfway through final bit. Wootton interviewed elsewhere : Qu. What inspired you to create Shirley Ghostman? Wootton: A close friend lost someone dear and I went to see a psychic with them. Shirley came as a result of me witnessing what was going on. When you’re not the focus of the psychic’s attention, it’s very easy to see the truth of what they’re up to and it really got my back up. I became quite angry and couldn’t believe these charlatans go round ripping people off. I went to see a couple of the more famous psychics do their live performances. You have to admire their showmanship but it’s not fair to prey on people. Qu. Why did you call him Shirley? Any boy called Shirley must have been picked on at school and we wanted to give the character an unfortunate backstory because a lot of the celebrity psychics have had pretty depressing upbringings. That’s why they reinv...

Genuine or hot/cold reader (and selective editing)? You can probably guess what I think. Derren Brown recently said in passing it's a shame we cannot imprison psychic fakes and charlatans like in the old days. Let's bring those days back, I say. The "Luke" example at 3min 30 secs looks to me like a really excellent bit of cold reading. Worth replaying to see exactly what she does... Here's some hot reading... Thanks to Skeptic's Dictionary - which provides excellent resources on hot and cold reading.

Incidentally, following on from previous post, I just checked out psychic Sally Morgan's amazing video of her identifying, while blindfolded, the famous owner of a jacket at the Hard Rock Cafe London "vault" (where they keep several prized rock and roll relics: jackets, guitars, etc.). Sally fondles the jacket and gradually figures out - he's was an artist, he's dead. "I am seeing Paul McCartney." "I can see the Dakota building in New York - it's John Lennon!" Even Sally is amazed at her astonishing ability. "Isn't that unbelievable? I can't believe I've done that!" Well, maybe she went to visit the Cafe vault the previous week - entry free - and saw Lennon's jacket there, a prized possession, hanging in a case. Then when she runs her hands all over it in this clip, she quickly figures out which of the exhibits it is. This is just embarrassing crap. Go here to see the jacket. I have already commented on Sally M...

Sally Morgan, the gifted psychic who appears in her own TV show (her website here offers live readings by one of her "hand picked psychics" for £1.50 per minute - note the disclaimer "entertainment purposes only") could easily pick up over two million dollars in prize money. On TV, Sally can provide quite astonishing bits of information. I was particularly impressed with the way she could pair six or seven dogs with their owners, without any prior knowledge of either. Yet, despite the fact that Sally, and countless other spectacularly gifted psychics, demonstrate these abilities, very very few submit themselves to scientific scrutiny. None whatsoever have ever passed James Randi's (magician and psychic debunker) $1,000,000 challenge . The challenge is simple: demonstrate your occult power under proper scientific scrutiny, and win. The form of the test is to be determined by an independent scientific body, to be approved by both the Randi organization and also ...

Incidentally, talking of psychic powers, not everyone who shows an amazing ability is necessarily deliberately deceiving others (though most are). Funnily enough I discovered this myself, doing a silly card trick with two friends. My first friend and I set up a "mind-reading" situation where he would ask the colour of the next card and I would guess. The clue was he'd say "right" or "ok" depending on whether it was black or red. We appeared to start doing it just mucking around, when we had in fact carefully rehearsed. We made sure we included a few mistakes to add credibility. We were curious to see how long it would take before our other friends rumbled us. One other friend was amazed, so we tested her. And she found she could do it too. She got more and more excited as she got card after card right - apparently using her own "psychic powers". She was subliminally reading the same clues, of course. Her disappointment on discovering how she ...

Sally is a psychic. She communicates with your dead relatives, who are standing right next to you. I watched a bit of two of her shows (ITV2 Wed 11pm) a few weeks back. She had a rather cynical TV presenter celeb on, and proceeded to tell him all sorts of details about his life, including that he was about to sign up for a big new tv deal, that he had a flat in Brighton and was thinking of buying another, etc. How did she do it? Most of this information was not, I guess, Google-able. The TV celeb was certainly amazed. So was comedienne Rhonna Cameron, who got a reading on a different episode. Rhonna was very sceptical, but ended up getting tearful as Sally scored hit after hit, even being able to say she had two dogs that had died, being able to name dead relatives, the dogs, all of whom were supposedly right there in the room, etc. etc. I'd be very interested to get more information on Sally Morgan's techniques. I believe that psychics do pool info about clients, but these pe...

Anonymous asked how to respond to someone who is very much into psychics like the U.S. Doreen Virtue. Should we humour them? Probably depends on the individual. By far the best person to talk to is Tony Youens, who has a website here . I actually asked Tony to write a piece for THINK on psychics, which you can read here . Hope it helps. I also recommend you get your friend to read this . When we launched THINK at Borders Bookstore in London, I advertized the event as involving philosophical discussion of psychic stuff and presented Tony as a genuine psychic. He did some nice stuff - spoon bending, telepathy, etc. and some audience members were taken in. At the end, we revealed the truth, and some people got very upset. In fact one insisted Tony really was psychic - he just didn't realize it.