Last night I was watching an episode of 1 vs 100 that MythTV had recorded and was greeted by famed “psychic” Allison Dubois on the show. Many people know her as the supposed inspiration for the TV show “Medium”.
She was in the mob and given her “abilities” I expected to have to wait for a long time for her to miss a question. She was out on the second question. She did last one question longer than Dr. Ruth though.
They allowed her to come back in so she could win some more money for her “charity” when the next contestant came out. This time she was a little better and lasted until the 5th or 6th question. Still not that great of a showing in my opinion for someone that can supposedly see the future, read minds or whatever the hell she claims to do.
Pauline tried to cop out for her and say that she probably didn’t want to use the gift on the show. Why not? She was playing for some charity. What better reason than to win money to help a charity? Is her psychic gift limited to only a few usages? If so it doesn’t seem like she would be wasting it on one-on-one phone readings for money, when she could use it once and win tons on the show.
This isn’t the only time that 1 vs. 100 has had psychics on. Another time they had like six of them in the mob. They were all out within 3 questions, if I remember correctly. Not a very good showing for these supposed psychics. I guess it is hard to cold read a multiple choice question that you have to answer without being able to see anyones thoughts on it.
What would be a better show is one where you have a pit of hungry Nile crocodiles on the bottom, and a “pyshic” standing on a plank suspended atop it. Psychic is asked a question – wrong answers open up the trapdoor.
I guarantee you that this would end the psychic-demic; unless of course one of them wanted to get in the last word and start by saying “…I predict I shall be eaten by crocodiles tonight…”
I love it. Pitch it to the networks and I will back you however I can. 🙂
There’s a really great blog entry I ran across the other day (it was on Reddit) that provides a great argument to use against people who believe in psychics. It’s at http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/03/how_do_you_prov.html – the analogy the author makes is that proving psychic powers are real is like proving photography exists to a blind man.
Man that is a great read. Thanks for linking to that.