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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, how did the NYT fall for that? Geller was shown to be a fraud decades ago.

If you want to bend spoons as a magic trick, there are at least ten YouTube videos on how to do it.

Uri actually sold an autographed DVD set showing how he would do things if he didn't have ESP. That may or may not remind you of OJ's book... exactly the same idea. Which is to say, at least among his contemporaries, he makes it obvious it is all tongue in cheek.

That's these days. Prior to then he was a complete charlatan. An entertaining one, mind you.

Much like a stage magician, the NYT produces content that they know their audience is desperately willing to believe.

I don't think the writers thought Geller wasn't a fraud. They verge close to saying so repeatedly, comparing his work to deepfakes, quoting him as admitting, “Doesn’t matter how I do it, whether it’s real or not,” holding back only due to "civility and fairness," etc.

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.

Why is the NYT so willing to be complicit to his fraudulence? Or at least, trying to sell the reader on the idea that being charmed by a fraud is acceptable?

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.

It also promotes a lenient relationship to the truth. It promotes bullshitting: Who cares what's true as long as he/she is entertaining? If such a stance becomes broadly accepted, eventually bullshitters become president.

they did not “fall for” anything. the article is very careful to never say that geller is capable of anything unexplainable. what they are doing here is a reframe: “hey, let’s just not call him a fraud anymore, okay? it’s more fun that way.”

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