The end of the magic world’s 50-year grudge
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
His claims are his act. Magicians and mentalists all know his act is being in character all the time. Quite a few of them don't like that, and regularly speak out against it. But there is nobody in that circle thinking "well, maybe he actually does have ESP!" like there was during Randi's day.
There is a reason Uri hangs around with magicians and mentalists, and not psychics. He doesn't have psychic powers and doesn't actually lump himself into that category, except as the character we all know of him.
In other news, Teller can actually speak! Consider the similarities, as even though we all know he can speak, he still doesn't go out of character when he is with Penn. We suspend our disbelief knowing that he actually can speak (and many of us have heard him) yet doesn't in that character.
Similarly, [don't read this paragraph if you don't like spoilers] Derren Brown always pretends to explain his mentalism effects. Although his explanations are plausible, and sometimes true for effects where he leaves huge parts unexplained, his explanations are nearly never exactly what he actually did. For example, the Red BMX Bicycle episode - it was straight forward billet work. All the encoding of words was for the TV audience. In "the biz" it is called Dual Reality - the participant and the audience are reacting to slightly different observations.
1. Teller openly and unequivocally breaks character. He will describe (out loud) how and why he does mime for his stage persona. Uri Geller is never this candid.
2. Teller’s stage lie does not meaningfully change people’s understanding of the world. There are definitely people who don’t talk. If someone mistakes Teller to be in this category, not really a huge deal. No one has proven to be able to do the things Uri Geller claims.
I think Derren Brown has more believers than Geller for his mentalist acts, incorporates "dark demonic forces" and in general messes far more with the minds of his audience. Yet hardly any pushback from Penn and Teller.
Regarding the billet work: Yes, he also goes in shopping malls and "guesses" the correct amount of coins people have in their wallets. The easiest explanation is that he pickpockets them, counts the cash, puts the wallet back and then approaches his target.
In contrast, Geller has tried to bamboozle the world that he is genuinely psychic, and has other ‘abilities’ and is simply a huckster.
I’m not sure why it would be strange in this instance that one gets pushback from rationalists and one does not.
I find this particularly nasty and in bad taste:
"In 1992, Geller was asked to investigate the kidnapping of Hungarian model Helga Farkas. He predicted she would be found in good health, but she was never found and is widely believed to have been murdered."
He also has made a good bunch of frivolous lawsuits, even asking for millions of dollars, to people who said that he was doing tricks and there was no magic involved.
Of course, psychics don't have psychic powers either -- so I doubt that's the reason he eschews their company (or more likely, they eschew his).
Randi had no issues with magicians, had no issues with lying on stage. That's literally the job of a magician or illusionist. He had issues with people claiming these things were anything but tricks.
And as to Randi trying to ride on Geller's coattails. Fuck. That. Noise. Randi began performing the year Geller was born and was known and respected by the time Geller started doing his bit. The man toured with Alice Cooper. He was touring with Cooper the year Geller went on Johnny Carson. Carson, who was an amateur magician himself, reached out to Randi to set up tests Geller couldn't pass.
Because Geller was claiming supernatural powers.
The entire article reads like a puff piece. The only reason Randi's grudge with Geller has ended is because Randi is dead.
> There's no such thing as magic, there's no such thing as a supernatural. And I don't care if it's a sick kid or a healthy adult, you do not lie. I never ever want to leave someone believing that magic is real. That would be morally wrong.
As for magic, I despise people that claim magic isn't real. The world is made of magic and it's all around us. When you lose the ability to recognize the magic of reality you die a little inside and the world becomes a little bit less bright. The fact that the term magic gets hijacked to mean something negative and harmful is bullshit, and it should be reclaimed.
I love your interpretation of the importance of magic in maintaining our sense of wonder in the world.
Does Gandalf not know what he is doing when he casts his spells?
Sure, and if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bicycle.
I think the two categories you describe are orthogonal - rational people are open to the potential of alien life forms, but, similarly, would deny the possibility of 'magical beasts'.
(Depending on what 'magical beasts' might actually entail - your second paragraph seems to re-purpose the word to something closer to fascinating, if I'm reading that right. Though in context it feels more like supernatural than merely wondrous.)
I came to this conclusion after being raised in a religion that discounted and discredited any explanation of how the world came into existence outside of simply saying it was created by god. As I learned about science I realized that to believe god created the universe by the wave of a hand was to rob the universe of it’s beauty.
I realize that some overlap can exist between these ideas but in general, that is not the norm.
People say “Magic is just a psychological phenomenon” as though that is somehow reducing its power or purpose. Creating magic is a big part of many people’s jobs. That said, one of my favorite books is by the first president of the Royal Society, titled “Mathematicall Magick”. It deals with Natural Magick — a concept that helped transition the Renaissance to the scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
What Penn means here is that there is no such thing as a superpower to mentally bend metal. Tricks exist, experiencing magic exists, but there is no wizardry involved.
A mundane example is architectural decoration, which can change the surrounding neighborhood vibe in a palpable way—but good luck trying to define and validate a physical model of how that psychological phenomenon takes place. Being open to a bit of magic doesn’t mean turning off rationality or believing in Uri Geller. But it might mean believing in charisma and vibes, even if they evade rational modeling. Music, for instance, is filled with magic. And people often like to be enchanted!
Of course I’m not going to try to define ‘art’ any time soon…
I strenuously disagree with this attitude and agree with James Randi that chilling out about what is actually, literally true is a dangerous step. When this mushy mentality sets in, bad people will find a way to use this to their advantage.
This is especially true in our era of competing narratives, misinformation, and deepfakes.
> If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this “if” — he is the author of a benign charade
This isn’t a benign charade.
That's especially why Gellar doesn't really seem all that important. All he really does is claim some magic tricks are "real", and on the harmful-bullshit-scale it probably rates pretty low.
I think it's because Geller's claims are small enough to not be obvious BS to everyone, yet they are obvious BS to most people.
My heuristics for telling what people really believe are observing what they laugh at and observing what they get offended by. Nobody laugh or get offended by something they consider to be nonsense. Nobody would get offended if you disputed their belief in gravity. Nobody would laugh if you joked about something imaginary with no basis in reality. But I do believe if you made the right joke about transubstantiation then people would laugh, because they don't really believe it. Same for spoon bending or crystals etc.
Does it need mentioning? Were you not aware of this? Or do you think that maybe I left it out because offending people because of their religion is counterproductive in discussions like these?
https://groovyhistory.com/amazing-randi-uri-geller-tonight-s...
If you want to bend spoons as a magic trick, there are at least ten YouTube videos on how to do it.
So the NYT didn't "fall for" anything. The point is that at the end of the day he successfully tapped into people's desire to be duped and turned it into wealth and renown, whereas his naysayers spent a lot of time and energy but never really landed a knockout. Speaking as an admirer of Randi (and Martin Gardner and others) back in the day, I think that it ended up a win-win. Geller the hustler got to retire off of fleecing stupid mining companies, whereas the good guys got to write book after book that helped mainstream skeptical inquiry. And lots of curious kids took up the honest craft of magic.
I find it galling.
When one of the Davids does magic, we know what they mean. Geller's behavior is fraud. It is neither civil nor fair to the readership of a serious newspaper to hold back.
That's these days. Prior to then he was a complete charlatan. An entertaining one, mind you.
This is the sort of thing the NY Times has been pushing lately, which seems to be obviously some sort of weird re-writing of history for several topics. It's not the mainstream topics, but it is enough to raise up alarm bells and wonder what's pushing this. All of the articles on Netflix "The Bear" falls on the same thing, and they're pushed as front page news/promotions.
I do like a top word-game, and NYTimes is the pinnical. But, it seems like they're obviously pushing something, not sure what. I don't think all major news sites are like that, but maybe they are.
The second is that the core audience for the New York Times is rich Manhattan assholes, and there's sort of a bread-and-butter Times article that's basically "Hey, this rich asshole who makes the world a worse place every second he continues to draw breath is actually a complex nuanced person for reasons we will not adequately explain, so maybe you, Rich Manhattan Asshole, also have redeeming qualities and you should feel better about yourself and keep buying our newspaper".
Might this not be a way to get people to accept the reality that the view of reality to which we have been exposed since birth is asymptotically approaching 100% phony, e.g. euphemism, puffery, imaginative vacuity and partial truths at best, paid-for praise, publicity, fraud, BS, deceit, whole cloth hokum and honey-fugling the norm, with every successful persona, product, purveyor and position diligently designed and manifested to be taken up by a specific audience, and to thrive among the myths already held dear by that audience? The NY Times is a media company that has reinvented itself to survive, dedicated to the proposition that survival is the sine qua non of meaning. The facts are not as important as the meaning, and the modern thoughtful reader, particularly the sophisticated reader of the NY Times, engages the text, imagining and constructing their own meaning. Facts are the new adverbs -- to be used cautiously and sparingly, more for distraction or inspiration than for navigation or inference.
Think of it as fodder for tiresome brunchers to annoy their companions with.
“I was reading this article about Uri Geller, and it turns out that few people know spoon bending was really part of the deep essence of his magic act…”
(I too prefer WaPo, and LA Times - also a west coaster.)
The "skeptics couldn't debunk him" (ignoring Randi and plenty of others), and by that we mean, "The real point is Mr. Geller is an entertainer" who "challenges our relationship to the truth".
Weird that he "is less dogmatic about claims to otherworldly gifts now" given that the "skeptics couldn't debunk him" and the "anti-Geller brigade laid down its arms."
But really, aren't deep fakes much worse? I mean, not that Geller was bad.
You could lump-sum them into the dollar store variety, that are not as thick and sturdy as expensive ones, but look reasonably the same.
This isn’t a glib comparison, as it gets to the heart of what is so wrong with letting public figures slide by with the excuse that they shouldn’t be taken literally. I can attest that many close relatives of mine literally believe the 2020 election was stolen b/c Trump says so. And as for Geller, he’s nothing special as a magician — his blurring of the actually true line is the very essence of his undering appeal.
I’ve seen a lot of great illusionists who never claimed to be doing real magic, and they were no less entertaining or mystifying. We don’t need to give up on respecting truth to enjoy a bit of fantasy.
Or, going back a lot further, Paul Daniels, who did the same kind of thing Penn and Teller did on his TV show decades earlier, where he'd show you a trick, then show you it slowly, then show you how to do it, then show you the same trick with a twist you'd never figure out - real magic :-D
He actually wrote a computer game in the 1980s where you had to learn to do some close-up magic tricks in real life in order to solve the in-game puzzles.
The real magic is showing people exactly how the trick is done, and *still* fooling them with it.
This seems pretty conclusive to me
He kept a straight face, and maybe even believed it a bit himself.
His efforts now to stay newsworthy doing things like moving the Ever Given are obviously tongue-in-cheek and funny.
There has never been any "debunking" needed because he's subject to the same physics as the rest of us. Of course he's not really bending stuff with his mind! People were just more ready to believe he had some special exception, and he ran with it.
Randi's obsession and anger (reflected here a little?) seems as old-fashioned and silly as Geller's spoon-bending antics.
You can say "oh but isn't this harmless", but it's not really. Critical thinking isn't just a thing you can turn off and on. Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" deals with this really well.
The word for him is “charlatan”, not “performer”.
It's hard to overstate how poisonous Uri Geller and other charlatans were. I won't be able to find it but when I was younger I had a collection of essays from prominent physicists discussing different aspects of mathematics, quantum theory, etc. and one of the articles mentioned Uri Geller by name, talking about how the human brain could access quantum physics directly, using Uri Geller as an example. Apparently James Randi had to defend from a libel suit from Uri Geller for debunking the "magic" acts.
James. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
> It's hard to overstate how poisonous Uri Geller and other charlatans were.
Still are.
He wasn't a faith healer and only scammed businesses out of millions of pounds, so why should we consider him a bad guy?
edit I forgot about his history scamming the CIA into thinking he could be a super spy, as told in "The Men Who Stare at Goats."
If they're acting in an ad, I assume so.
But I don’t think Matt Damon was lying when he portrayed Jason Bourne; nobody was under the impression that Bourne is a real person. They even put “Matt Damon” on the screen at the beginning so nobody is confused.
Similarly, if I say to you “This is nonsense: Water does not exist” was I lying as I spoke the last four words? Context is kinda important I think.
The same is true for a magician’s illusions. The act is a lie. They don’t tell you that when they pull your card from the deck, because that ruins the entertainment, but the saying “a magician never reveals their secrets” exists because we know they’re lying to us.
Compare to a con artist, who relies on the audience believing the act. It’s that, IMO, that makes them liars.
I don’t make a value judgment about lying. I’m just saying lying implies deceit. In your hypothetical scenario there is deceit, so there is the lie. I don’t think most actors or magicians are deceitful.
It's entertainment.
Uri was flat out lying, and refused to break character, basically turning him into a charlatan.
I never watched WWF, now WWE, because I couldn't see any use for rooting for any one of them, since the matches are far more about the super-human "stunts" than about anyone in particular winning. Given how manufactured the fights were, whoever the winner was, was a moot point anyway.
There is a similarity here for sure. Imagine if Hulk Hogan claimed all his moves were genuine hard core painful moves, and not carefully rehearsed to merely look painful.
Since you mentioned him specifically, I'd suggest you Google "Hulk Hogan Richard Belzer"
I have no knowledge of wrestling except for vague cultural osmosis, but I found this video makes a very compelling case that it is a modern form of live theater, and regardless of its low-brow connotations should be understood and respected as such. Essentially: WWE is modern day Shakespeare, not a sport.
But you could appreciate it as a skilled live stunt act. Because it is genuinely dangerous. The moves must have been rehearsed, but the performers do get seriously hurt if they don't execute the act precisely in front of the audience
This is important, because if we are to make a sweeping statement that lying is wrong, then we need to make sure we are clear on what is and what isn't a lie.
I say all sorts of outrageous things to my children, but I'm not lying to them because I don't expect them to believe me -- and they don't. In an analogous way, magic shows are not lying because the deceit is part of the premise. Telling a knock knock joke when you're not actually a banana (or whatever) is similarly not a lie.
I taught my kids otherwise.
I found that lying is no more intrinsically bad than truth telling is intrinsically good. Both truth and lies commonly enable terrible harms.
Like pretty much everything, it depends. Consideration is a much better policy than honesty.
> lying is bad, especially when done for profit.
This so often ends up in a bad place that I'll likely flag it as problematic - even before I have complete information. But that's because of reality & history, not an arbitrary rule.
> To clarify, are you advocating for the use of white lies in situations where the truth would do greater harm?
I'm not advocating for truth or lies but for outcomes. Based on this, I think trying to qualify lies is the wrong place to focus.
One reason I'll lie is to convey more useful information. Lets say I have a mild ailment that weird and not easily explained. It's impacting my productivity. People who are impacted need a brief explanation. They don't need a rabbit hole or an organ recital or a reason to lose their lunch. I'll lie. I'll say I have a different ailment, one that signals my limitations and closes the subject.
Other reasons I might lie. To avoid a situation where a truth will cause someone pointless pain. To avoid an immediate bad outcome for someone - that a truth would cause now but would work well later. The deciding factor in play in these two is consideration. Their well being is better served thru consideration than by a rigid rule.
> Or are you promoting lying to larger degrees?
I am promoting consideration for others over a rule that is rigid by it's nature.
Looking at the other side, I will sometimes tell the truth where it isn't well received. Q: Can you keep a secret? A:No.
<sigh> Logic and rationality demand the removal of that "if", and Uri Geller's bullshit deserves no civility. Fairness demands he present actual evidence or shut the hell up.
And we wonder why so many people don't believe in scientific explanations of phenomena.
You got anything better?