Psychic Bingo Again

Tonight, Thursday June 12, Larry King is hosting some more pretend psychics:

Psychic kids! Some see dead people, others have a sixth sense! Plus, John Edward and Char Margolis. It's gonna (sic) be a great show. They're predicting it! What do YOU want to ask them?

Well, I’d ask them how they have the nerve to keep playing this cold reading game as though they really were talking to dead people. But that’s just me. I’m not sure who these “psychic kids” are, but we’ve all seen John Edward and Char (“do you have a C?”) Margolis before, playing their cold reading guessing game. Last time they chickened out, but perhaps this time they will actually take some calls and pretend to be talking to dead people, so that we can play bingo.

Click here for the printable psychic bingo card:

The explanations for the squares can be found at the same John Edward / James van Praagh Bingo post from last year. Read the full explanations (and explain them to your woo friends who may be watching with you), to get the full benefit. Char doesn’t employ the exact same routine as van Praagh, but I think it’ll be close enough that I don’t need to change any of the squares. I expect Edward to be the same as usual.

Click the “Randomize” button for cards with different sequences. Or print the same card twice and see if Edward or Margolis gets bingo first. (My money’s on Edward.)

Thursday evening – Edited to add:

Well, the psychic show was called off. It was still advertised on CNN last night but had gone by sometime today. Apparently they wanted to cover four boy scouts who were killed by a tornado yesterday, instead. I don’t know what to think – if you can’t trust Larry King… Also, and this is really puzzling, why didn’t any of the psychics predict this? To quote Larry’s website yesterday, “It's gonna be a great show. They're predicting it!” Bzzt – wrong again, they missed, but thanks for playing.

We’ll get to play bingo one day though. I’m determined.

Comments

[Swiftsure]

It will be interesting to see whether the same thing happens as happened last year, when Edward and Van Praagh pulled out after word got around that Psychic Bingo was set to make complete fools of them.

I tried to organise a game of Psychic Bingo a few weeks ago when a local social club had a so-called psychic as the evening's entertainment. Needless to say, the idea was totally banned. I did, however make a lengthy list of the standard statements that psychics use, and I publicised the list to everyone who I knew would be coming along.

As expected, the psychic rattled off the usual Barnum statements and vague generalities that people think are specific to them. But predicting this and explaining to a number of people how these frauds work did not make any difference to any of the believers. The only concession I got was from one person who said, "OK, HE was rubbish, but the psychic I saw personally was exactly right about everything she said."

As you might also expect, people who attended the event have a completely distorted memory of exactly was said to them and others. So, I am busy transcribing the relevant sections from the audio recording I made at the time. It might be a futile exercise, but I am keen to see what reactions I get from people when I show them that their memories are not only fallible, but also - in some cases - completely confabulated to accommodate their beliefs.

As they say, a skeptic's work is never done.

[Tom Foss]

Bingo's fun and all, but I'd really like to play a game of Hangman with a psychic.

"I'm getting a J."
"Nope, that's another foot."
"I'm sensing water, it's near water."
"Um...right."

Swiftsure: that sounds like the way to go about it; you probably won't get many (if any) converts, but hopefully by showing how unreliable their memories are, and exposing the usual tricks, you'll at least get them thinking about it. Keep fighting the good fight.

[vjack]

Sorry to do this here, but I couldn't find an e-mail address. Could you do me a favor and update the link to Atheist Revolution in your blogroll? The new URL is http://www.atheistrev.com

Thanks!