What is Reddit's opinion of Randi's Prize: What Sceptics Say about the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong and Why It Matters?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

If you're referring to Randi's fake, pseudoscientific, fraudulent "prize", forget it. It's been debunked.

• https://www.amazon.com/Randis-Prize-Sceptics-Paranormal-Matters/dp/1848764944

• http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/entry/journalists_book_randis_prize_exposes_how_skeptics_distort_evidence_for_par/

Sure. He's obviously a fraud. Many psychics are. Everyone knows that.

I'm more concerned about what everyone DOESN'T know which is the degree to which Randi himself is duplicitous and why his 'prize' is a bogus heap of steaming bullcrap.

There's a few great books on it and how and why Randi's stacked the deck. This is a good one:

http://www.amazon.com/Randis-Prize-Sceptics-Paranormal-Matters/dp/1848764944

And on Randi himself and his depredations everyone should read this recent Daily Telegraph article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11270453/James-Randi-debunking-the-king-of-the-debunkers.html

> My understanding is that all near-death-experience examinations that have tested for specific verifiable information (identifying geometric shapes placed prominently on top of cabinets, etc) have fallen flat.

This is both true and false. Those that have been tested for specific signs have failed - but on the other hand, only five such experimental procedures have been carried out, and only in one or two of them did they even have enough of a sample size to get a single OBE, so there's not yet any real data in that department. Currently, the AWARE project is under way which is a large multi-center study hoping to address this in a way more thorough manner than have been previously attempted.

On the other hand, studies by both Dr. Michael Sabom and Penny Sartori has found that OBEs during NDEs contain veridical information that control groups fail at in the otherwise same circumstances.

http://drpennysartori.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/obe-veridicality-research/

and

"Sabom had interviewed 32 patients who reported NDEs in which they seemed to be watching what was going on around their body. Most of these were cardiac patients who were undergoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) at the time of their NDE. Sabom then interviewed 25 "control" patients, "seasoned cardiac patients" who had not had an NDE during their previous cardiac-related crises, and asked them to describe a cardiac resuscitation procedure as if they were watching from a third-person perspective. Among all these patients, 80% of the "control" patients made at least one major error in their descriptions, whereas none of the NDE patients made any. Moreover, six of 32 NDE patients related accurate details of idiosyncratic or unexpected (to them) events during their resuscitation. For example, one man, who developed ventricular fibrillation in the coronary care unit, said (among many other things) that the nurse picked up "them shocker things" and "touched them together" and then "everybody moved back away from it [the defibrillator]". As Sabom explained, rubbing the defibrillator paddles together to lubricate them and standing back from the defibrillator to avoid being shocked are common procedures."

• Kelly, Edward F. & Emily (2006), Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, p. 389.

> I don't know much beyond that, but I find it curious that if there's so much documented evidence out there, that no one has grabbed it and used it to get that easy million dollars from Randi.

It's not at all that simple. Randi's committee is not accepting currently existing evidence in peer-reviewed journals, they want the experiments to be carried out while they are present. That alone refutes the relevance of his prize in this context, since flat-lining people is not (yet) legal for scientific experimentation. But if you really want to research Randi's participation in this field of investigation, I would recommend you this book to give some balance to the issue of his relevance.