TAM 8 has come and gone. Over 1300 people came from all around the world to be a part of the largest and most widely known convention of skeptics and freethinkers in fabulous (and bloody hot) Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Amazing Meeting, or TAM, is held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada, every July for the past few years. TAM 8 was held, for the second time, at the South Point hotel and casino, off the main strip of Vegas. The previous TAM at South Point held approximately 1100 people, the first time that TAM managed to bring over 1000 attendees. With over 1300, TAM 8 easily managed to break the previous year’s record and set the bar higher for TAM 9 sometime next year.
This years speakers included James Randi, Richard Dawkins, CFI’s Paul Kurtz, the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, Mythbuster’s Adam Savage, Skeptic Society’s Michael Shermer, Simon Singh, Joe Nickell, Banachek, Secular Coalition of America’s Sam Faircloth, Skeptic Toolbox’s Ray Hyman, Richard Saunders, Barry Karr, Paul Provenza, and the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcasters. This list is just a fraction of the full number of people that spoke at TAM.
As my fifth TAM and eight event with the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), the organization that created TAM, I must say that TAM 8 was one of the best events I have ever had the privilege to attend.
Phil Plait’s speech about how being an aggressive skeptic will lead to believers in the paranormal becoming more ingrained the paranormal was quite moving. His speech can be easily summarized with the quote “Don’t be a dick”. While this may be common sense, to some it does not seem that way. In my years as a member of the skeptical movement, I have come across a few very vocal and aggressive skeptics. These people may well do more harm to the cause than good, calling the believers of the paranormal idiots and fools for believing. While this may make the skeptic feel better, the point of Phil’s speech was that insulting the believer only causes them to become more defensive and ingrained in their beliefs.
However, TAM 8 had one great blemish upon its otherwise clean hide. That blemish was the “demonstration” on Sunday night that involved self-described psychic Anita Ikonen demonstrating her supposed powers to the audience at the same time showing how a participant in the Million Dollar Challenge was tested. After a little over an hour of Banachek interviewing a number of people involved in the Million Dollar Challenge, including Randi, JREF President D.J. Grothe, and Allison Smith, Anita was brought on stage along with five others, one of which was missing a kidney. Anita proceeded to stare at the backs of each of the five participants for six minutes each, attempting to determine which was missing a kidney. She failed.
This demonstration was laden with problems. First was that the target participant who was missing a kidney, had let that fact be known on the JREF’s public forums about a year previous. In addition to that, one of the non targets was a rather well known podcaster that had suffered a major stroke just a few years previous. Anita chose the podcaster that had suffered a stroke as being the one missing his kidney. While she failed at her assigned task to chose the person that was missing a kidney, the fact that the person she chose had suffered from a major stroke will allow her to make the excuse that his physical health problems overwhelmed her psychic senses, which would turn her miss into a hit and strengthen her belief in her abilities.
Anita’s presence at this demonstration also raised a number of questions as to why it seemed like the JREF was giving her an unofficial test. Anita Ikonen had already been tested by the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) of the Center For Inquiry. Based in Los Angeles, the IIG tested Anita’s abilities for their $50,000 dollar challenge about eight months before her TAM 8 appearance. Here, she also attempted to find which person in a group was missing a kidney, and here too she failed.
With all do respect to the JREF, choosing to bring Anita in as a demonstrator was a mistake. Since the demonstration was not a test, any person could have done the same that she did to show how the JREF was to conduct tests on real claimants for the Million Dollar Challenge. Rather than bring in a psychic for an effectively unofficial test, the JREF could have asked a member to act as a psychic and attempt to guess which participant was missing a kidney, using all the same protocol that had been in effect for Anita’s demonstration. The end result would have been the same, a basic demonstration of a Million Dollar Challenge test, without the need to bring in a fake psychic that had a history with the IIG and some of its members, resulting in slight splitting between certain members of the IIG and the JREF.
