Nathan for You and Psychics

I really enjoy the show Nathan For You for many reasons, it's funny, creative and different from anything else I've watched. Yet, I think why I really enjoy it so much is that Nathan has the ability to draw attention to the ridiculousness of everyday people, as he shows that it takes very little to reveal the strangeness that exists within all of us. Getting a musician to play a smoke detector as a musical instrument to skirt international shipping laws, having a large man offset his weight through the use of balloons so that he can go horseback riding, meeting people who would camp overnight and solve endless riddles for an $11 gas refund and, in the same episode, having the gas station owner talk about the benefits of drinking the urine of the young.

What is happening could be described as a suspect business version of the Milgram Experiment where people are pushed or are willing to do things that they wouldn't normally do because someone is asking them in such a way that it seems that their personal responsibility towards the end result is diminished.With that, Nathan's seriousness isn't a secondary feature of the show, but a necessary quality. That seriousness is his lab coat that, along with the cameras, creates the situation where his ideas can be followed.

Yet, once and a while, as was the case with the gas station owner, there isn't a need to push or diminish personal responsibility as the weirdness openly existed in the people and not the situation created. While that is true of some individuals, an entire profession shows that same quality. The absurdity of the psychic is not below the surface, but inherent in the position. In the 'normal' businessman/businesswoman it is the strange business proposition that has to create a novel situation where Nathan can press his determination and seriousness to create the absurd. In the case of the psychic, the absurd is always there, and while his strange idea accentuates the absurdity, it doesn't have to create it.

Nathan has three episodes where psychics are involved and each demonstrates the absurdity of the psychic.

1. The Ghost Realtor 
The idea: A realtor could take advantage of the 50% of people who believe in ghosts by guaranteeing that the houses that they sell are ghost free.

Notable quotes: Psychic - "You know what an incubus is? It's a ghost that will have sex with someone until they die." Realtor - "Wow, that's like what I experienced when I was in Switzerland."

Exorcist - "Do you have any health issues? Are you constantly getting sick, do you have headache bothering you all the time?"
Nathan - "I do have one thing but it's kinda personal, it's uh..hemorrhoids."
Exorcist - "Yeah, that's demonic. Oh yeah. So how do you say that again? I do not say this name very often. Ham-ar-oids?"

Nathan - "Can it [exorcism] help with penis size?"
Exorcist - "Yeah, you see if it's demonic yeah I can cast out the demons from that. I don't have say for the thing to you know to increase your size or whatever."
Exorcist than places his hand on Nathan's head - "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ I command all of you demons, if there is a demon there..um..you know..um affecting this mans penis, male organs, making it smaller, whatever, if there is any demon there lodged in his penis right now, COME OUT IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST, come out."

The Take away: Don't be surprised to find emails about exorcisms for penis enlargement in your junk folder.

2. A Celebration (It's a clip episode where he catches up with people from old episodes):

The idea: Just catching up with the Ghost Realtor (She really embraced the Ghost Realtor branding and became the Ghost Realtor)

Notable quotes: The new psychic – "So I’m known as a psychic medium, but I’m also clairsentient so I feel my angles and I’m clairvoyant so I can see. I’m also clairaudient so most of the time I hear, I hear voices and I also do financial advising."

Ghost Realtor – "Do you want to ask a question?"
Nathan – "For Ron?" (the previous, now deceased, psychic)
New Psychic – "Yes"
*I skipped a couple less interesting questions*
Nathan  - "umm…I know on the show that he worked on the OJ trial, now that he’s on the other side does he have any clearer info on maybe who the real killer was?"
New Psychic – "He does but I don’t. I’m not getting a name or anything like that right now."
Nathan – "He knows who the killer is?"
New Psychic – "Yeah, yes."
Nathan – "Was it OJ?"
New Psychic – "This isn’t coming from Ron, it’s coming from me and that answer is yes."
Nathan – "But Ron’s not telling you that?"
New Psychic – "Every time I present him with that he steps back"
Nathan – "Who's telling you then?"
New Psychic – "My own connection with my own spirit guides"

The Take away: The possibilities have been narrowed down to either OJ did or did not kill Nichole Brown and Ron Goldman, thanks to Ron and the new psychic.


3. Miss Maria Garcia

The idea: That instead of advertising in a general way that you're an accurate psychic, instead pick out an extremely popular name and create individualized, targeted advertising that is in actuality not individualized at all.

Notable quotes: Psychic - "I've placed ads before and I haven't see a lot of return from them."

A person named Maria Garcia calls and the Psychic calls her back with Nathan there to schedule an appointment.
Maria - "Hello?"
Psychic - "Hello, is this Maria Garcia?"
Maria - "Yes"
Psychic - "My name is Dora, I'm a psychic"
Maria - "Hi"
Psychic - "Hi"
Nathan - *Whispers to the Psychic* - "Say you had a vision about her."
Psychic - "Ok"
Psychic - "I had a vision about you."
Nathan - *whispers again* 'and it was a strong vision'
Maria- "Oh"
Psychic - "And it was a really strong vision and it came to me in a dream."

The Take away: If a person generates and ensures the predictions that a physic makes happen, then the psychic was correct.


The multiple psychics and the exorcist on the show were each funny to watch and listen to independent of the situation Nathan created, they simply needed only screen time.

Nathan doesn't have to be a skeptic or even take a skeptical stance to make a skeptical point, as the only real difference between his show and a show like the Lond Island Medium is that Nathan isn't a true believer and the footage isn't being cut in a way that points out the hits and ignores the misses.
When much of mysticism is unpacked and shown in a way that doesn't accentuate or build up what is going on it is really effective in showing how underwhelming and silly it all looks. It is the difference between expectation vs reality.




If that second burger, the reality of psychics, was shown more consistently in the way that Nathan shows it then psychics would be a lot less appealing in general. Without showbiz magic, the real magic of psychics is a couple of stale tricks that sandwich a wrinkled fraud layered in cheese.





This highlights the effectiveness of the approach in it takes away the Us/Them conflict, as Nathan is more of a supportive neutral and the format of comedy is more disarming than any formal type of investigation would be. For those reasons, Nathan For You might be the best source of psychic skepticism I've seen on TV.

I'd be really interested to hear what someone with a strong belief in psychics thought of those episodes. Maybe my view is different in being a skeptic and the psychics on the show don't look as bad or as silly as I think they do, or maybe they would pull a Lamar Keene and conclude that those psychics were bad those weren't typical .psychics.

World Cup Review: A Look at Paul the Prognosticating Octopus and the Jubulani Ball

Before I dive into some talk about the World Cup, I'd just like to briefly announce that I am proud to have Thoughts Explained join the Atheist Blogroll, to which a link is now permanently added to my sidebar. The Atheist Blogroll is a community building service on which many blogs with subject matter like this one can be found. If you have a blog that would like to be a part of this community then visit Mojoey, at the Deep Thoughts  blog to get the information needed to join. I encourage you to explore and join the community.

That being said I'll get right into the great spectacle that was the World Cup, but this isn't a sports blog, so I'm going to talk about the two related subjects that really interested me, the Jabulani Ball and Paul the Octopus. These two topics are interesting for individual reasons. The Jabulani Ball is interesting because of its relation to physics and expectations, while Paul the Octopus is interesting though probability and psychic power. 

I'll start with the Jabulani Ball because of the number of complaints that were made about it.  Keepers through-out the tournament have complained about the ball. Englands keeper let in a howler of a goal against the USA in opening game and the players blamed it on the movement of the ball.

Despite the criticism Adidas says that the ball is the culmination of years of scientific excellence, made with bonded 3-D panels. It is also touted as the roundest ball ever and by, "Being towards the higher end of the allowed [weight] scale means the flight will be truer and more predictable making keepers happy, but also rewarding accuracy for strikers."

So why then does the ball fly in an exactly opposite manner? This freekick by Diego Forlan is an example of that as it shows the ball moving back and forth as it moves toward the goal (Sorry about the music in that video, but it was the best one I could find of the balls flightpath).After the goal the keeper motions with his hands that he was fooled by the movement of the ball by moving his hands back and forth in a motion to his teammates. There is also more too this than some video evidence and the comments of the players who used the ball. Scientists have actually shown the the 'roundest ball ever' is too round. It is too round because when the foot hits the ball, the ball ends up with a tendency not to spin. Further problems of perfection exist in the internal stitching of the ball. The internal stitching causes no impurities on the balls surface to create a regular motion. 

This all adds up to the ball not flying in a predictable motion like a football spiral, but rather like a baseball pitcher throwing an unhittable knuckle-ball. That video of the knuckle-ball is great because you can actually see the laces of the ball and how the ball is not spinning at all, all this from the master of the knuckle-ball Tim Wakefield.  The lack of spin causes the ball not only to dip and dive, but move side to side and in an erratic manner making impossible for the pitcher to control and the hitter to know where the ball is going to go. When Adidas was thinking about making a perfectly round ball without any stitching they were making a ball made to knuckle, this was a huge oversight by them. Adding to the problems people had with reffing, was a ball that was made almost perfectly horrible for soccer.

From the unpredictable comes the one thing that did seem know the future, Paul the Prognosticating Octopus. Going 8 for 8 in the final stages of the Wold Cup and 10-12 total Paul did seem to know about what the result of future matches were going to be and has even went on to become the inspiration for an application that makes yes or no choices on the Iphone, and that isn't his only opportunity as he is said to be able to make millions. Yet, he is near the end of his life span and has retired from predicting anything further.

Yet how remarkable is Paul? I can say that he did better than I did, but how hard would it be to go 8 for 8 in guessing something that only has 2 outcomes. The answer is that the chance of going 8 for 8 is one in 256, which isn't that hard to do. So if different animals each make one of the possible 256 outcomes than one has to be right, which really wouldn't be too big a job for any one person with a farm to do. Each person could have their very own animal soccer predictor that always gets the answer right, so long as they did it in streaks of 8, when you start getting higher the odds really raise at a dramatic level (For instance if you wanted to try this in streaks of 12 instead of 8 you would need 4096 animals to ensure that you had one that had the correct outcome).

In doing research for this post, I came across a blog post from Propter Hoc entitled 'Flipping Our Coin'. Which does a great job at talking about probability and coin flips. It points out that any ordering of coin flips would still be 1 of 256 and that people only take into account patterns that are special as interesting because they are poor judgment makers of probability. When someone gets all the predictions right or all wrong then something miraculous has happened, but when they get a few wrong and a few right then, it seems to be ordinary. The problem is that getting a specific set of 4 wrongs and 4 rights is just as likely as getting all of them wrong or right, but we only attribute meaning to the latter.

Paul is a lucky mollusk (Great ween album), because we see his predictions as special, and not any of the other 256 possibilities.

Thanks for reading,

-the moral skeptic