The JREF Million-Dollar Challenge

The James Randi Educational Foundation at this year's The Amazing Meeting (TAM 7) conducted a preliminary test with dowser claimant Connie Sonne. The video of the test has 4 parts and is 40 minutes long altogether. I don't recommend watching the whole thing, it's fairly dull. More interesting is the press conference afterward, which also appears on YouTube. This test had the largest live audience in the long history of the million-dollar challenge so it's unusual mainly in the amount of visibility it has gotten. The other details of the test are fairly typical of Challenges.

• The claimant and the Foundation agreed on the rules in advance.
• The test as conducted was double-blind. Neither the claimant nor the tester knew the location of the card that was being sought.
• The claimant failed to move past the preliminary test.
• Before the test the claimant said the skeptical audience would not affect her powers.
• After the test the claimant said the skeptical audience affected her powers.
• Before the preliminary test the claimant did not subject her own abilities to a similar type of test. She didn't need to, because she knows they work.
• The outcome of this test did not change the claimant's belief in her own powers. There is no test that, if failed, would cause her to change her belief in her own powers.

Why is this important? To the extent that people's individual beliefs remain personal and private experiences, they may comfort people and help them gain insight into their own mind and their own life. It is not the role of skeptics to disabuse people of their own private beliefs, and James Randi does not demand that people give up their beliefs in their own supernatural powers unless they subject them to testing.

On the other hand, supernatural and pseudoscientific claims are often used for more public purposes. When a person asks you for your belief in an unusual claim, you should be skeptical unless there is good reason or evidence in favor of the claim. You should be particularly skeptical if the person is asking for your money through book or ticket sales. You should also be especially skeptical if your own experiences might predispose you to believe the claim. For example, if your son or daughter has died and someone says that they can connect you to the lost person you should be especially careful precisely because you might be particularly emotionally vulnerable.

The Million-Dollar Challenge is a useful tool not because it disproves the claims of honest believers like Connie Sonne. The Challenge is a useful tool because the professional hucksters won't come close to it. The John Edwards, Uri Gellers and Sylvia Brownes of the world know that they are putting on a show and that their supposed powers would fail any sort of controlled test. They often say that it would be wrong to accept a million dollars for demonstrating a power that should be used for the benefit of humanity, but if that were the case why do they accept salaries or royalties for what they do? If their powers were real they should earn a million dollars from an afternoon of work and donate it to a charity that works for the good of mankind.

Oh, and one final thing. If you're a detective and a psychic calls to say they have seen the location of a missing person in a vision, you should just hang up the phone and go back to doing serious detective work.