James Randi comes clean

January 16, 2008

In the latest James Randi newsletter, Randi talks a little about the death of the One Million Dollar Challenge (which we discussed here). A lot of us have suspected that Randi’s challenge was not in good faith. And in his announcement, Randi says:

The purpose of the challenge has always been to provide an arguing basis for skeptics to point that the claimants just won’t accept the confrontation.

The so-called “added advantage” was that the Challenge served to convince amateurs that “they might be looking at the world through a fuzzy lens.” But the primary purpose was to be something skeptics could point at and say “so, why won’t anyone take Randi up on his offer?”

This might explain the arbitrary limitations, multi-year bureaucratic nonsense, and gag-order style rules (all described by Michael Prescott in 2006) that make it difficult to proceed to final test even without failing a demonstration. [ Newsletter: The Announcement ]

Randi’s reason for ending the test, he says, is not lack of money but:

We support the JREF through private gifts, bequests, sales of books and videos, and lecture fees. The burden of the challenge is the work and time required to handle the long-drawn-out negotiations with persons who – frankly – are frequently not resident in a real world. I say that in an understanding tone, since it’s evident that they do not see the need for comprehensive and carefully-designed testing procedures, and we’ve had to walk them through the process of developing a view of how Nature actually works, and how they may have misunderstood that complicated process. [ Newsletter: The Announcement ]

The management of this particular tar pit just got to be too much.

Posted in Deep Weirdness