Episode 39 of the Mindcast is up!
Download it here.
Show topics:
General Motors takes an environmental jump backwards with new incentive plan, more ethanol from your corn, new millipede with a record number of legs discovered, Red Jr nearing the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, figs are the earliest domesticated crop.
Genetically engineered cassava is gigantic - 150 percent bigger, chocolate threatened by disease, electric fish species diverging, new class of mutations discovered in sheep, strange reddish cells without DNA hypothesized as extra-terrestrials.
Interview with mentalist performer Adrian Saint, who claimed he used statistics to predict the Super Bowl.
Brought to you by Skatole.
Theme = Minority Report by John WIlliams.
You are going to want to listen to this one. I am reproducing my parting remarks about the interview below so that people could reference the text more easily. But please, don’t read them yet - listen to the show, and then come back for the kickoff. You’ve got to let me do my slight-of-mind.
Parting remarks:
And a thank you to The California Aggie for his cassette tape, and for allowing me to look through their archives. The clock ran down on the show, and I regret wasting time on some of my earlier questions, but I asked Adrian Saint after the show whether he thought I knew how he did the trick. Here’s what I recorded:
K: Did you think that I knew?
A: Knew what? (tone of playing dumb)
K: Or did you think that I thought it was the CD?
A: Well I never claimed to have predicted it, I just did it for publicity. It’s just that the Aggie (inaudible) misquoting stuff…
K: Well but that’s j… Well, but then in your guest opinion you stated that you did predict the Super Bowl.
A: “Prediction”… is a very, uh, it can be used in many different ways.
Apparently he had no idea that I knew how he did the trick going into the show. He admitted that he used the term “predict” in a deceptive way. In actuality, he did predict the super bowl. In the Aggie he was quoted as saying that the game would be a high-scoring game. It turned out not to be. What was on the tape was a post-diction, a recording made after the super bowl, and dubbed onto the tape inside of a modified stereo made to look ordinary. He did predict the super bowl, but he predicted it wrong.
He purposefully implied in his guest opinion, that he predicted it correctly. But he didn’t need to explain away the word “predict,” because he also falsely claimed that there were no hidden electronics. He falsely claimed that he uses statistics to make predictions. They are magic tricks, set up beforehand, to give the impression that he was reading the minds of the audiences. And many were convinced.
But it is strange that a person who passes himself as a mind-reader kept forgetting my name, even though I gave it to him many times and responded to him in the newspaper. It is strange that someone who claims to use statistics would not think it likely that he would be asked to explain his understanding of even elementary statistics concepts that he claims he uses. It is strange that someone once called “the best kept secret in Davis” has such a hard time keeping secrets - he thought that by changing the names of his magic discussion board accounts he could hide his history - where he described the tricks that he used. It is even more strange, to the point of absurdity, that someone who claimed to be able to predict a hotly debated super bowl game, could not predict the angry backlash he would receive from Davis citizens in the aftermath of his magic trick passed off as statistical insight.
And in response to someone calling him stupid online on the Davis Wiki, while logged in and his IP address saved, he wrote the following on the 20th of March, 2006, at 2:10 in the morning:
Don’t know who said this but this is funny. I am graduating in spring, so I can give a shit what people in Davis think of me. Stats Update since I predict the Super Bowl: written up in Aggie (i lost count) Sac Bee, Orange County Register, LA Times, Got offered a $50,000 job offer to work with the World Poker Tour (thanks to Sac Bee Article), got laid 5 times (yes you can get laid doing what I do if you know how to use it, and no the experimental class doesnt teach you how to get laid). Funny how people talk shit online, Hope everyone has a cool spring break, I be in Malibu with my twin and mentor entertaining Ray Romeno and Adam Sandler
–["AdrianSaint"]
The previous passage has not been edited for grammar, and at 2:23 the same day, he deleted it. Except for the bit about meeting his mentor, very little of the passage is probably even true. He probably didn’t realize that it was saved forever on the wiki, for everyone to see what he really thought about a city with one of the highest rates of advanced degrees in the world. A city that enjoyed his magic tricks and illusions, gave him emotional support for his planned career in stage magic, and a few people still went to his last show, months after the super bowl debacle.
And he tried to blame his own words on the Aggie. Why? Why bite off the hand that feeds you? Why gloat and say that he is laughing at everyone’s attempts to explain his trick, expecting that his actions and attitude will not follow him the rest of his life?
He has since deleted his declaration that he will win the lottery from his MySpace Blog. I wonder what was going through his head when I explained how stupid that was, or showed that he probably didn’t do better than a C in statistics? I wonder what was going on in his head during those thirteen minutes between when he wrote his derisive diatribe on the Davis Wiki and when he deleted it?
As a consequence of reading his writings on the internet, I have come to know several sides to him. I know that there is a side to him that worries about the future, one who wants to make it big and entertain people, but who does not want to wait to gain the experience that would get him there. Instead, he sought a shortcut - to lure a newspaper of student journalists, into thinking that he is not a magician. That may have been his greatest trick yet, and I am surprised that he has not tried to pass off the whole affair as a grand trick done on the media, but has instead insulted the Aggie, insulted Davis, and insulted anyone with a skeptical neuron in their brains.
Yes, in his guest opinion, he implied that we were being closed-minded by believing that he… was a magician. By doubting on a rational basis, by in fact, keeping our minds open to the possibility that we may not be able to figure out how a trick was done right away, that we were closed-minded?
The other side that I have learned about him, which he only alluded to in his rant on the wiki, was that he could care less what others thought about him, no matter how deeply he hurt them or manipulated them, down into his personal life. I shall not discuss the details, but I could hardly believe it when he tried to claim that mentalists had a responsibility to care about people. For someone who has yet to acquire the skill to make a career out of illusion, his prideful ego and callous disregard for others sticks out like a poorly concealed Ace of Spades. And for someone who has called himself a “professional liar” on a magic discussion board, he isn’t very good at lying. One wonders why he’s interested in mentalism at all.
Illusions are created to entertain, to inspire people to explore, and can even be used to test our own assumptions. I like to approach magic tricks as puzzles, because nature itself employs far more illusions than any magician has yet been able to conjure. Magicians protect their knowledge, because they fear losing the appeal if people can find out how their tricks were done. I don’t think that’s true, nor do I find it necessary to reveal all of his magic tricks to prove anything. However, in this case, where you have someone claiming statistical powers, I felt it necessary to explain the stereo trick itself. Some magicians themselves argue that the claims that mentalists make about statistics are little different from magicians that used to claim supernatural powers. Magicians like URI Geller, whom Adrian looks up to, although he didn’t mention Geller tonight.
And so now that I am posting this show on the web, I am starting the kickoff. Over the next few weeks I will tell the backstory of discovery and personal exploration that spanned the distance from February to June, concerning Adrian’s trick and my own realization about the fulfillment that the scientific path to discovery brings. Remember the cassette tape? It’s right here in front of me, with all the information I need to demonstrate how easy it can be to deceive people. But I bet that poor Amir Ghasri, which is Adrian’s real name, could predict back in January that this tape would end up in the hands of someone who has been called closed-minded before.
