Sceptics Undoubted - Blog, April 4, 2006

Geoffrey Hamilton

April 4, 2006

A program on Discovery called The Girl with X-ray Eyes was a perfect chance to test the self-appointed cops of the sceptic world CSICOPS, but it never happened. In this one hour documentary we are instead subjected to some shoddy science by smug condescending CSICOPS club members against a seventeen year old russian girl, Natasha Demkina, who was only wishing to prove once and for all that she can 'see' illnesses in people.

This girl calls her gift her 'medical sight' and claims no other unusual abilities. Her method is simple and has been the same since she began at 11 years old. She talks to the ailing people who come to her and then describes what she 'sees'. Generally she is looking for existing maladies like diseases, but can find locations of knitted bones from previous fractures. Her technique, however it's done or not done, is frequently verified by patients and subsequent events. My concern is not with her abilities, or lack thereof, but with CSICOPS and their ilk.

The CSICOPS crew, Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman, asked her to change her normal practises in several different ways. First she could not talk to the seven test subjects. They all wore glasses so there could be no eye contact and all were present together at the same time. Her usual method of concentrating on one person and using every indication at her disposal, as a doctor does, was not allowed. She was given multiple choices and told what medical facts to look for then she was to match fact to subject. These facts also were not diseases, but harmed or altered body parts, not her normal area of concern.

A doctor tested comparatively outside his normal practices would also flop on the first (and twentieth) go-round. CSICOPS had no desire for Natasha to have a chance to practice the new method, they acted as if they expected her to perform perfectly the first time round.

The following is what they asked her to 'see' according to one participant, Andrew A. Skolnick, "The target conditions were: a removed appendix, a removed lower section of the esophagus, metal staples left in the chest after surgery; an artificial hip joint; a surgically removed upper section of the left lung; and a metal plate covering a removed section of the skull." In addition one subject had no problem.

Her claim to 'see' problems was taken literally (it is obviously a word used for lack of a better term) and they made 'seeing' her only test as though she actually claimed she had X-rays coming out of her eyes. This begins a whole cornucopia of errors by CSICOPS.

CSICOPS's experiment on Natasha included an arbitrary goal to indicate proof of her abilities based only on odds making (in this case five out of seven correct matches). There was no control case, no statistically significant data, no idea what indicated utter failure, no room for seeing the ambiguous in the experiment's game and no tough rules to guarantee CSICOPS acceptance of the results if they were positive.

In the end the girl selected four of seven, not five out of seven. CSICOPS suddenly pronounced her a fraud and sent her home with the patronizing advise not to harm people with her 'medical sight', but, instead, to get a real doctor's skills at school. With all the bravado of an Augustus the God, CSICOPS was able to once again defend all conventional beliefs - which is the sole reason for its existence. However, in addition to their basic errors in science and their biases against unconventional ideas, there are general errors that allow CSICOPS to continue in its hogwash ways .

CSICOPS members forget that all experiments are inconsistent. Nothing is repeated perfectly or is identical to something else no matter how often one tries to make it, and this is especially true in science. How can they expect one small test like Natasha's to uncover enough data for a probability estimate and to make any conclusion valid?

Next, everyone needs practice when playing a new game. Natasha had never played that experiment game before - ever. Doing their game, for her, was like playing cards with arms tied behind her back. Four out of seven is not a failure at all, and until they find a doctor or regular Joe who can do as well, it is, on the face of it, significant enough that she scored so high. Yet they ignored it and showed that they feared conducting a follow up or a repetition of the experiment.

Finally, she could have just made a mistake. Being a psychic would not stop her from being human. One case of misidentifying a friend in a crowd does not make someone blind. Yet CSICOPS would have you believe the misidentification of one case constitutes proof that Natasha is blind.

The 'Joes' at CSICOPS who call themselves sceptics are not willing to enter into the same test-tube into which they subject others. Sagan's illogical free pass to his buddies at CSICOPS which says extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence only make sense from an anthropological point of view, as in 'Look at the sods who use every political trick in the book to maintain their paradigm. Their enemies are going to need to use those same tricks in order to overturn it.' In other words Segan and CSICOPS are referring to power, making ideological war and all that's fair about war.

All claims need the same level of proof and all sceptics are required to evenly spread doubt towards all subjects, including themselves. Anything less is erroneous. To actively create anything less is the hogwash we have today called CSICOPS.

GRH

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