Day: November 26, 2025

  • How To Prove That You Are Psychic

    How To Prove That You Are Psychic

    Throughout history, many people have claimed to be able to perform amazing feats that defy science and logic. Such claims continue today in many different flavors. There are claims of dowsing, psychic spoon bending, telekinesis, miracle healing, telepathy, x-ray vision, contacting the dead, electricity detection, cloud moving, and much, much more. When a person claims to have amazing abilities, usually one of two things happen. The person’s story is laughed off or ignored by the public, or they are seen as legitimate, gain a significant following, and make lots of money from public demonstrations of their powers. Both scenarios have an interesting common element: A deliberate exclusion of science. Many news reports that cover alleged psychics, for instance, maintain a skeptical tone but avoid mentioning the fact that psychic powers have not been proven to exist. On the opposite end of the public belief spectrum, people who fully believe in the reality of superpowers brush aside little things like the laws of physics and are always ready with an explanation of how their favorite psychic is not obligated to prove that their powers are real. This phenomenon of silence on the intersection of science and superpowers begs the question of how a person with superpowers could scientifically prove them to be real.

    Luckily, we don’t have to speculate about this topic. There is a clear pathway for an individual with psychic or paranormal powers to prove themselves and gain scientific acceptance of the existence of their abilities. If you are such an individual, read on for a list of dos and don’ts that will help you on your quest for scientific acceptance.

    Do work with experts to investigate your ability

    One of the harshest realities of proving the existence of superpowers is that public acceptance means nothing. Large numbers of people routinely fall for fake psychics, political propaganda, and Nigerian prince emails. The number of people who believe in your powers does not constitute strong evidence in your favor. What you actually need is the acceptance of experts who have education and experience in a field of study that is closely related to your claims. Willingness to have an expert test your powers will earn you goodwill with the scientific community, and participating in an experiment designed by someone with knowledge of the workings of science increases the likelihood of acceptance of your powers if you pass the test. If you are telekinetic or psychic, go find a physicist or psychologist and ask them about testing your powers. If you can alter the brightness of a lightbulb, approach an expert in electricity. If you have the power to make someone urinate with your mind (yes, a person has claimed to have this ability), ask a doctor or medical researcher. Expertise comes in many forms; professional magicians are a frequently overlooked group of experts on superpowers. Since magicians make their living by fooling people, they are experts in distraction, deception, and performing the seemingly impossible on command. If you can demonstrate an ability that a magician cannot replicate with magic tricks, it greatly lessens the likelihood of fraud on your part.

    Now, most individual scientists and magicians have busy schedules and may not be available to test your claims. However, there are a few professional groups that hold contests or challenges related to unusual abilities (Wikipedia Contributors 2025). Generally, the way the challenges work is that if someone is able to demonstrate superpowers under scientific testing conditions and passes both a preliminary demonstration and a final test, they will win scientific recognition of their ability and a monetary prize. One of the most prominent is held by the Center for Inquiry Investigations Group. The CFIIG’s Paranormal Challenge invites people with superpowers to participate in a two-part test of their abilities and offers a $500,000 prize to winners (Kreidler 2012). (A smaller $5,000 amount is also available to anyone who refers a winner to the CFIIG.) To accept the challenge, an applicant simply fills out an online application. Once the application is received, the CFIIG contacts the applicant to ask for further details and negotiate a testing protocol that both parties can agree on.

    Don’t refuse to be tested by skeptics

    The inverse of the first piece of advice is obvious, and yet it is frequently ignored. Don’t refuse tests of your powers! Science relies on repeated testing to prove the existence of any particular phenomenon, so anything that cannot be tested will not be accepted by science. This is a fact that most public psychic mediums choose to ignore. (James Randi, a famous magician, once offered a million-dollar prize to psychics who could prove their powers to him, but the most famous psychics of his day, including Uri Geller and Sylvia Browne, never took up the challenge [Higginbotham 2014].) Since a person who publicly claims to have amazing powers has nothing to lose and much to gain by getting tested, refusal makes one look suspicious at best and intentionally deceptive at worst.

    Here’s a quick primer on how an experiment works. The gold standard for many areas of science is replicable experiments that are both controlled and double blinded. A “control” in an experiment is a factor that is kept the same throughout the test; it helps establish that the test procedure is working properly. (You may remember the “C” bar on a COVID-19 at-home test, which signaled that the test was invalid if it did not appear.) In addition, the use of experimental controls helps reduce the effects of chance and any variables other than the one being tested. For example, in a test of the ability to move clouds across the sky, a participant would focus on a single cloud and move it to a certain part of the sky or near a particular landmark that had been decided on before the start of the test. The researchers could keep track of the wind speed and weather at the location of the cloud mover and schedule the test for a date when low winds and no significant changes in weather are forecasted.

    A double blinded experiment is one in which neither the participant nor the researcher knows crucial information about the condition or treatment that the participant receives until after the test ends. Blinding is very important in scientific research, as there are many areas of study in which the expectations of the people involved can bias results and reduce the accuracy of experiments, including paranormal research. For a person who claims to be able to predict future events, such as knowing the next playing card in a deck, an example of double blinding would be measures to keep the deck hidden and random. The researcher could replace old cards and shuffle the deck before each trial, then remove a new card from the deck and present it to the participant facedown on a table. The participant would then predict the card’s number and suit without having any information about it. Because the researcher would also be unable to see the card, they would not be able to accidentally give away any hints via body language, facial expressions, or other gestures. Furthermore, the constant replacement of cards and reshuffling of the deck would mean that the participant would not be able to make guesses that were informed by the knowledge of which cards had already appeared. In a scenario like this one, correct predictions are much more likely to be due to a genuine paranormal skill than in a situation in which, say, the cards weren’t replaced and the participant could have made accurate predictions via card counting.

    Finally, all established facts in science must be replicable. This criterion is simple: If an experiment produces certain results, and someone else later runs the same experiment with the same protocol, it should produce similar results to the original. Groups of studies are more reliable than single ones, since the effects of chance and poor experimental design become diluted as the topic is studied more. Moreover, the replication of results by people who are unconnected to the original researcher reduces the likelihood of experimenter bias. Replicability is why many paranormal contests ask participants to successfully complete two tests to win. If a participant is able to demonstrate a superpower multiple times on demand in well-designed experiments, researchers can be significantly more confident in deeming the results to be truly due to the claimed power and not a statistical fluke.

    Demonstrating a willingness to complete scientific tests includes not refusing controls, blinds, or repeats. The actions of one applicant to the CFIIG Paranormal Challenge, Toni M., provide an excellent example of what not to do when creating test protocol and performing demonstrations. Toni initially suggested that the CFIIG should simply take her at her word that she could perform miracle healings, exorcise demons, and speak to the dead. When informed that testimony was not sufficient and that she needed to be tested, she responded, “OK so this means no lol thank you i guess [errors in original text]” (Underdown 2022). Months later, after reapplying, negotiating, and receiving suggestions for test protocol, Toni reversed course and agreed to a demonstration in which she would determine the birth dates of eight dead people from photographs. All parties agreed that she only needed to determine months and days of birth, not years. However, she failed to show up for the preliminary demonstration three times, resulting in weeks of delays. When Toni finally attended, she told CFIIG personnel that she was confident in her abilities and would be able to correctly identify each birth date, but turned out to be incorrect on all eight people. If you are ever within reach of scientific acceptance of your powers, don’t reject rigorous testing or fail to keep your appointments. Such behavior will draw the suspicion of the people who are investigating your ability, make you look lazy and entitled, and give the impression that you want to be given scientific acceptance without having to put in the work to provide evidence.

    Do create a specific claim that can be tested in a practical manner

    A frequent problem relating to the scientific acceptance of unusual abilities is that the claim cannot be tested. There are a number of pitfalls that can make a claim untestable. Sometimes a person has a claim that is very vague. (“I can send thoughts to people.” Can you send words, images, or both? How lengthy or complex can they be? Do you need to sit close to a person, or can you send them thoughts from a distance?) Once in a while, a claim is unfalsifiable, meaning that it is so arbitrary and expansive that it can never be proven wrong under any circumstances. (“I am capable of remote viewing – describing a given location that I have never seen with my eyes.” In these cases, even the most vague and common details can count as a hit, such as the statement that one can see grass, trees, and fields of crops when challenged to describe a particular farm.) Occasionally, a claimed superpower is not tested because an experiment would be too dangerous for participants. (According to Jim Underdown, one of the main investigators for the CFIIG, a man once tried to enter the Paranormal Challenge with the claim that he could stop bullets with his mind. Underdown’s legal consultant immediately nixed the test [Center for Inquiry 2024].)

    To avoid these issues, work with researchers to craft a specific claim about a single ability. If you have more than one power, they can each be tested in separate experiments. Think about the questions that you might be asked. If you can predict the future, what kinds of events can you predict? If you can move objects with your mind, how far? If you can sense electricity, do you see, hear, feel, or smell it? Does your ability work under any circumstances, or do you need certain conditions to use it? How much time does it generally take for you to get results? Do you need particular items or other participants for a demonstration? Answering these questions can both help you learn more about your powers and aid in creating a test that you are sure is both fair and a good demonstration.

    Don’t ignore the realities of mental illness

    On the CFIIG’s Paranormal Challenge application webpage, there is a section labeled “Please Read Before Applying.” It includes a video and few paragraphs for people who apply to the challenge with the claim of telepathy. Here is the most important excerpt.

    “If your telepathic claim involves hearing voices that those around you don’t hear, reading other people’s thoughts, or believing others can hear your thoughts, please consider the following:

    What you are experiencing is consistent with recognized illnesses of the mind that are known to cause symptoms like what you are experiencing. Conditions like schizophrenia and other disorders are not paranormal ability, they are chemical imbalances in the brain, and there may be treatment available to help you.” (CFIIG 2012)

    This warning touches on an important issue that is relevant to the scientific testing of psychic abilities: mental health. Although the majority of paranormal believers and people who believe they have unusual powers are not mentally ill, there are specific alleged abilities that include symptoms of mental illness. If you (or someone you know who claims to have such abilities) experience these symptoms, it’s important to get checked by a licensed professional, even if only to check off an alternative explanation for your powers.

    The presence of mental illness also has significant implications for certain social dynamics in situations where unusual abilities are involved. There are cases where a person is both mentally ill and is encouraged in their belief of their powers by the people around them, raising the possibility of abuse and exploitation. The CFIIG once tested a young man named Phillip L. who claimed that he had clairaudience, the ability to hear sounds from very far away and even through soundproof barriers (Kreidler 2011). Phillip participated in a preliminary demonstration in which he attempted to listen in on words and phrases that were spoken by a person in a room a floor above him. After he proved unable to tell what they were saying, the CFIIG interviewed him and discovered that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that his parents and church had directed him to stop taking his medication. This scenario is extremely concerning. Instead of supporting him and encouraging him to stay in treatment, Phillip’s community likely misled or pressured him into the belief that he was clairaudient, which is unlikely to help him and could cause him significant harm. At best, this was a misguided attempt at using religion to erase a real and serious medical condition. At worst, Phillip’s parents were focused on earning monetary benefits from his “powers,” either by receiving the $5,000 referral award or by controlling the way Phillip spent his own prize money. If you are ever in such a situation, recognize the red flags and get out!

    Despite the problematic nature of mental illness in testing superpowers, the CFIIG has a rule that they will not refuse to test a person due to mental illness (or any altered state of mind, including intoxication)(Center for Inquiry 2024). After all, if psychic powers or paranormal abilities truly do exist, there is no reason why a person could not have a mental illness in addition to such an ability, and it is not the CFIIG’s place to give unsolicited diagnoses. Nonetheless, anyone who believes they have a superpower or knows someone who does should know the relevant facts and be prepared to rule out mental health as an explanation.

    Do remain open to scientific and alternative explanations for your powers

    Not every amazing power will turn out to be real. In fact, to this day, no one has ever successfully demonstrated such an ability under scientific testing conditions. Therefore, the odds of your particular power being a genuine paranormal ability are very low. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that you should be willing to explore alternative hypotheses.

    Sometimes, a proposed superpower is actually an ordinary human ability or a byproduct of known physics. The CFIIG once received an application from a Jon G., who claimed to be able to “circumvent Newton’s Laws of Motion” (Underdown 2020). As evidence, Jon sent in a video showing a glass top that spins counterclockwise, then stops, turns clockwise, and then reverses again and spins counterclockwise once more. The video surprised CFIIG personnel, and they asked Jon to add controls and brainstormed various ways of cheating, but these measures did not affect the top’s motion in repeated experiments. Finally, they called in some physics experts, who told them that a slight tilt in the table and an irregular top shape would produce the effect. The CFIIG was able to create a top of their own and replicate the three turns, demonstrating that the effect that Jon observed was unlikely to be due to any superpowers on his part.

    Another possible explanation for many superpowers is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a psychological phenomenon in which a person believes they are much more skilled or competent than they actually are (Wikipedia Contributors 2025). The amusing event that inspired the original research on this topic was a series of 1995 bank robberies. Two men named McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Johnson robbed two Pittsburgh banks at gunpoint, and for some reason, they didn’t seem to take any measures to hide their faces or disguise themselves. They were caught relatively quickly due to the fact that their faces were visible on security camera footage. When asked for an explanation for their apparent lack of precautions, the men claimed that they had covered their faces with lemon juice to make themselves invisible to cameras and were shocked when they saw photos of themselves that had been taken from the camera footage. Wheeler said that he had even tested their theory by putting lemon juice on his face and photographing himself and claimed that he hadn’t appeared in the resulting photo. (This result probably occurred due to bad film or user error.) The fact that the robbers were willing to bet their freedom on the paranormal properties of lemon juice demonstrates how easy it is to become overconfident in oneself, no matter how outlandish or nonsensical one’s ideas are.

    There are a host of other physics, psychological, and statistical nuances that produce results similar to many alleged psychic powers, too many to list here. However, they all demonstrate the same facts: That our perception, memory, and reasoning are flawed, and that it is entirely possible for ordinary people to believe that they have supernatural powers or have witnessed an unexplainable event when nothing out of the ordinary actually happened. These phenomena have fooled countless individuals, from Nobel Prize winners and powerful heads of state to average Joes. It’s perfectly plausible that you may have been tricked as well, and that doesn’t mean you are unintelligent or not observant; it just means that you are human.

    Don’t make excuses for failure

    One last piece of advice: If your abilities are tested and fail, don’t try to make excuses or ask for extra opportunities. Agreeing to a test means confirming that you believe you are capable of successfully completing the tasks involved. Success in a test provides evidence that your powers are real, and failure is evidence against their existence. If you refuse to admit this fact in the event of failure, your claims become unfalsifiable and you will not gain scientific acceptance.

    The case of Natasha Demkina illustrates this fact well. Hailed by believers as “the girl with X-ray eyes,” the 17-year-old claimed to be able to see inside peoples’ bodies well enough to identify organs and make medical diagnoses (Hyman 2005). She alleged that she could see through a person’s clothing (though not through cloth screens, for some reason) and diagnose via photographs as well as in person. There were plenty of people willing to offer anecdotal evidence in her favor, but she did not participate in any formal tests until the Discovery Channel became interested in making a program about her story.

    Natasha was tested in 2005 by the Center for Inquiry, the CFIIG’s parent organization, as part of the material for the television program. The issue in Natasha’s claim (and any claim involving medical diagnoses) was that it’s possible to know a person’s medical information via means other than X-ray vision. As a result, the test included measures to prevent the following phenomena:

    • Good Luck and the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: It’s easy to claim high accuracy when only your best results are reported. Natasha had given diagnoses for so many people by the time she agreed to be tested that she had a high probability of being surprisingly accurate in at least a few cases just by luck. Her supporters then argued that her powers were real by publicizing those “accurate” cases and downplaying or ignoring instances in which she turned out to be wrong. To prevent this fallacy from coming into play during the test, the CFI personnel simply kept track of all of her stated diagnoses, whether they were accurate or not.
    • Post Hoc Hypotheses: An experiment rarely yields relevant information if a specific hypothesis and test criteria aren’t constructed beforehand. A major issue in the testimony in favor of Natasha’s ability was that no one ever took the time to craft hard rules for what counted as “accurate” diagnoses and what counted as “inaccurate” ones. This failure meant that Natasha could make any reasonably likely diagnosis and clients and supporters would decide after the fact that everything she said was correct. If Natasha told a person that they had a health issue in an area of the body where they were suffering or that they had previously experienced difficulty with, they would claim that she successfully detected a problem that they knew all along was a significant health issue. If Natasha told them that they had a disease or injury in a part of the body that they had not had problems with, on the other hand, she would be credited with discovering a brand new health issue that had mysteriously escaped the notice of both the client and their doctor. The CFIIG’s test dodged this issue by settling on specific test criteria for clear-cut medical issues, and they enlisted test volunteers who had known internal medical conditions. Natasha agreed that she would view the volunteers and write down her diagnoses for the absence or alteration of organs, since such conditions were easy to verify. (The test was even made easier because the CFIIG gave her test papers asking for certain organs: Heart, skull, esophagus, lung, hip, appendix, and one control volunteer with no changes to any of these body parts. Each paper included an anatomical diagram in addition to a written prompt.) In addition, all parties agreed on the bar for success beforehand. If Natasha was able to successfully identify the organ status of five or more of the seven volunteers, the test would be considered evidence in favor of her claimed superpower.
    • Cueing and Reinforcing Feedback: When hearing about Natasha from her supporters, one can easily fall into the trap of assuming that her readings were made in a vacuum and that her accurate diagnoses “just can’t be explained” by anything other than a genuine psychic power. In reality, Natasha frequently interacted with her clients, and those interactions included both verbal exchanges and nonverbal communication such as eye movements, facial expressions, and body language. This context posed a major challenge, because any communication, no matter how subtle, could give Natasha clues about a person’s health. If they asked her to look at their heart, for example, she would easily be able to diagnose a heart problem by simply guessing common issues associated with that organ. Furthermore, a person’s appearance and the nonverbal information they communicated (unconscious on the part of the communicator and sometimes even the receiver) were also likely to make a difference in diagnosis. Limping, posture, breathing, and many other actions all hint at the state of a person’s health, and an interested expression or a nod would indicate that Natasha’s predictions were close. Even the situation would have given Natasha information; after all, most people who came to see her did so because they were already sick or injured. To eliminate the effect of cues and feedback, the volunteers were given opaque glasses to wear to obscure their eye movements. They were also instructed not to speak to Natasha and to stand still and keep their hands at their sides or in their pockets during the test. As a further control measure, the test was double blinded, so that the personnel who conducted the test were ignorant of each volunteer’s medical conditions and could not give any cues to Natasha or to her interpreters.

    Natasha seemed to do everything correctly. She and her supporters negotiated with the CFIIG and developed a test protocol that everyone agreed on. The CFIIG was satisfied with the scientific rigor of the test, Natasha confirmed that it was within her power to complete and pass it, and the Discovery channel was happy to get a scientific demonstration on video. On the day of the test, Natasha showed up early. She asked clarifying questions about the organs she was going to look for and spoke up for herself in an instance where she was uncomfortable with the testing environment. She took as much time as she needed to make predictions that she felt certain were accurate.

    Ultimately, she correctly identified the people with metal staples from a heart surgery, part of a lung removed, a hip replacement, and no medical conditions, but these four correct predictions fell below the test’s threshold of 5/7 accuracy. In addition, Natasha failed to correctly identify the people with a metal plate in their head, a shortened esophagus, and a missing appendix. All of those conditions should have been extremely obvious and easy to spot if she truly had the ability to see their organs. After learning that she had failed, she asked the test personnel for permission to diagnose them in the hopes of getting an extra chance to prove her powers (Skolnick 2005). When one tester, Andrew Skolnick, consented, she informed him that he had problems in an astonishing eleven different organs and body parts! Skolnick did not have any of these conditions, and amazingly, despite the massive number of his organs that Natasha claimed were diseased, she missed all seven of the medical issues that Skolnick truly had been diagnosed with.

    Despite the reasonable test measures, Natasha’s supporters immediately began complaining. The test had been too hard; the winning grade was too restrictive; the CFIIG had intentionally manipulated the protocol to discredit Natasha and prevent her from winning! Natasha herself claimed that four out of seven was close enough and that the test should have been declared a success. The CFIIG responded to these grievances by noting that Natasha and her supporters had co-written the test protocol and agreed that she was capable of passing the test under scientific conditions. Furthermore, since people were relying on Natasha’s diagnoses to make real-life medical decisions (and paying her their real-life money in the process), didn’t she have a responsibility to disclose to her clients the fact that her accuracy was barely higher than 50%? Incorrect medical diagnoses can cause serious harm; people may deal with unnecessary stress and fear, take superfluous medication with unwanted side effects, and undergo invasive tests and even surgeries that they don’t need to. Natasha’s publicly claimed accuracy rates were close to 100%, which no doubt attracted clients and led many people to believe in her powers. Those people had the right to know that her powers had not been proven and weren’t as accurate as they thought.

    The complaints also induced the CFIIG to take a closer look at the volunteers whose conditions had been correctly identified and at the test as a whole. On further inspection, the appearance of multiple volunteers whose status had been accurately predicted by Natasha could have served as clues as to their health status. The man with the staples in his heart was the oldest volunteer and looked the most ill out of everyone in the group. In contrast, the volunteer who Natasha correctly identified as having no medical issues was the youngest and looked the healthiest. Furthermore, Natasha and her interpreters and supporters had ignored protocol on multiple occasions during the test. As a result of their early arrival, they had been able to view two of the volunteers walking into the building via a flight of stairs, which could have given Natasha clues to whether either of those people had the hip replacement. Later, during the test, Natasha’s interpreter Svetlana Skarbo announced in front of the volunteers (in English) that Natasha was looking for the person with part of a lung removed. This act increased the possibility of that volunteer giving cues to Natasha, since they would now have known that Natasha was looking for them at that time. Finally, Skarbo broke the rules again by pulling out her cell phone and sending messages during the test despite the protocol’s ban on use of electronic devices in the testing room.

    The results of this second look at the test are devastating to the case for Natasha’s powers. The fact remains that Natasha did not pass the test, and now it seems that her accurate diagnoses were not made with the aid of any supernatural abilities. Furthermore, a person very close to Natasha may have tried to cheat by communicating with outside parties as Natasha was deciding on the diagnoses. If Natasha really had X-ray vision, she shouldn’t have needed clues from a person’s appearance or behavior to diagnose them, and would have given correct diagnoses for all seven volunteers. Her complete failure even when given an extra attempt under much looser conditions is the icing on the cake. The most likely conclusion, considering the evidence, is that Natasha either has no superpowers, or her powers are so weak that her diagnoses are no more accurate than a coin flip. In either case, it was disingenuous for her and her supporters to claim near-perfect accuracy with medical diagnoses, and makes the fact that she charged money for her readings look like an outright scam. The irony of all this is that the CFIIG wouldn’t have reexamined the test or allowed her to attempt to diagnose their people if Natasha and her supporters hadn’t tried to force acceptance of her claims despite her failure.

    Ultimately, scientific testing of psychic powers is a complicated venture, but a necessary one. Public claims of paranormal abilities currently encourage a wide variety of anti-scientific beliefs and discourage critical thinking and requests for solid evidence. This atmosphere allows people to be taken advantage of by paranormal scams, expensive “psychic” demonstrations, and medical misinformation. Scientific testing of such abilities helps clear the air and establish whether they truly work or not, while demonstrating the principles behind science and showing how facts are tested in the real world. It’s also possible, though not very likely, that there are a few people in the world with genuinely extraordinary abilities. Their existence would be extremely important for science, and experts from a wide variety of fields would be able to learn a lot by testing them and exploring how their powers worked. If this is the case, we can only hope that one of these individuals plucks up the courage to seek scientific acceptance. Will it be you?

    References:

    Center for Inquiry. (2024, August 9). Sci vs. Psi: Testing Superpowers | Jim Underdown on Skeptical Inquirer Presents. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0139t6nEvs

    Higginbotham, A. (2014, November 7). The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/magazine/the-unbelievable-skepticism-of-the-amazing-randi.html

    Hyman, R. (2005, May). Testing Natasha. Skeptical Inquirer. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2005/05/testing-natasha/

    Kreidler, M. (2011, February). Phillip Lee | CFI Investigations Group. Cfiig.org. https://cfiig.org/phillip-lee/

    Kreidler, M. (2012, April 8). The CFIIG Paranormal Challenge | CFI Investigations Group. Cfiig.org. https://cfiig.org/paranormal-challenge/

    Underdown, J. (2022, August 26). Deciphering the Dead | CFI Investigations Group. Cfiig.org. https://cfiig.org/deciphering-the-dead/

    ‌Underdown, J. (2020, September 15). Top Physics | CFI Investigations Group. Cfiig.org. https://cfiig.org/top-physics/

    Wikipedia Contributors. (2025, August 17). 1995 Greater Pittsburgh bank robberies. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation.

    Wikipedia Contributors. (2025, May 22). List of prizes for evidence of the paranormal. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation.

  • Don’t Fall for the Galileo Gambit

    Don’t Fall for the Galileo Gambit

    Image Credit: Galileo gambit. (2018). RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galileo_gambit

    Lots of new ideas are introduced to science all the time. Many of these ideas are accurate and make great contributions to our body of knowledge. At the same time, many don’t hold up to scrutiny and are rejected by the scientific mainstream. Discarding inaccurate ideas is a normal part of the scientific method, and it happens all the time. However, the promoters of a rejected idea don’t always want to admit that their idea is a bad one, and they feel the need to come up with reasons for why their idea is special, no matter how poor the evidence in its favor or how many qualified experts disagree with it.

    Enter the Galileo Gambit, a rhetorical device whose entire purpose is the promotion of rejected ideas (RationalWiki 2018). When an idea promoter uses it, you can expect them to say something like this:

    “Scientists won’t accept the fact that I have proof that the earth is flat! Well, they laughed at Galileo too, and look how that turned out for them!”

    The clear implication is that science as an institution is dogmatic and closed-minded. Scientists won’t accept firm evidence in favor of a belief you hold, but this means you are probably right! All great scientific discoveries were initially rejected, but over time, the enlightened public and a brave few intellectuals came around to the correct way of thinking and forced those stubborn scientists to accept the truth!

    Arguments that rely on the Galileo Gambit most often use Galileo as an example of the oppressed discoverer of revolutionary information, hence the name, but other famous historical figures may also be used. Ignaz Semmelweis, who advocated for doctors to wash their hands before delivering babies, is also a favorite name drop, since his ideas were not accepted until after his death (RationalWiki 2018). In addition, promoters may refer to Pasteur, Einstein, Mendel, and anyone else whose work was not recognized immediately upon publication or faced even mild critique or disapproval from the scientific community.

    The basic idea behind the Galileo Gambit seems reasonable at first, especially since people who use it are often able to recite long lists of persecuted geniuses such as the above figures. However, there are serious flaws in this type of argument, and it acts as a smoke screen to distract you from the fact that the “persecuted” idea is probably too weak to speak for itself. Here are five reasons, in order of increasing severity, for why you should not take a Galileo Gambit argument at face value.

    1. A Misplaced Persecution Complex

    Before we get into the logical and scientific minutiae, there’s something relevant to discuss about the circumstances of Galileo’s story: He wasn’t persecuted by scientists. Despite the fact that the Galileo Gambit is used to complain about science and its practitioners, Galileo’s big conflict was actually with the Catholic Church (RationalWiki 2018, Wikipedia Contributors 2019).

    The dispute that became known as the Galileo Affair started when Galileo published a book called The Starry Messenger in 1610, which gave details of observations he had made while studying the solar system through telescopes. Some of this data, such as the phases of Venus, provided support for heliocentrism, the idea that the sun is located at the center of the solar system and the planets, including Earth, revolve around it. Heliocentrism had first been proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus, but Galileo was its most open promoter.

    At the time, the official church doctrine on the subject supported geocentrism, a model that held that Earth was located at a fixed point in the center of the universe and that the sun, stars, and other planets revolved around it. This view was based on the opinions of ancient Greek philosophers and a literal reading of the Bible. The Roman Inquisition, after hearing about The Starry Messenger and Galileo’s private debates with church officials on the topic, declared in 1616 that heliocentrism was heretical. Galileo was ordered not to continue promoting his ideas and evidence, and a ban was set on heliocentric books. However, he defied the ban in 1632 by publishing a new book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, that was clearly in favor of heliocentrism. As a result, Galileo was tried the following year for suspicion of heresy and sentenced to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life.

    In contrast, most contemporary scientists agreed with Galileo’s claims once they had the chance to look through their own telescopes and see what he had seen. Even scientists with religious affiliations, such as a group of Jesuit astronomers, accepted that his observations were strong evidence for heliocentrism. Criticism from the scientific community tended to discuss minor points or express small caveats in approval of the conclusions that Galileo had drawn from his work. For instance, an astronomer named Christopher Clavius responded that he didn’t believe there could be mountains on the moon, a critique unrelated to heliocentrism (Wikipedia Contributors 2019).

    This is a minor but important point to consider when weighing the merits of the Galileo Gambit. What institution is the user arguing against, and how well does it really fit the charge of being hostile to new ideas? Religion tends to change slowly, if at all, so the argument that people unreasonably rejected Galileo’s ideas can be applied to the actions of religious leaders in this situation. It does not, however, apply to science, which is constantly changing, highly democratic, and accepting of many new ideas.

    1. Even Galileo Wasn’t Right About Everything

    One idea that Galileo promoted around the time of the heliocentrism debate was his belief that ocean tides were caused by Earth’s motion (Wikipedia Contributors 2019). This made sense to him, but it later turned out to be completely false; tides are actually caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Galileo also believed in astrology and created horoscopes as a side job, and he refused to accept Kepler’s evidence that planetary orbits have the shape of ellipses, instead believing that they were circles (New York Times 2025, Gardner 1957). Galileo held and promoted a great number of ideas, but he is known primarily for heliocentrism today.

    Plenty of other prominent scientists have promoted bad ideas. In fact, there is a well-known phenomenon in which inaccurate or pseudoscientific hypotheses are supported by Nobel Prize winners! “Nobel Disease” (AKA “Nobelitis”) is something like an inverse impostor syndrome (Felton 2025). Instead of feeling insecure in their achievements and worrying that they are frauds, the awarding of a Nobel Prize seems to encourage prizewinners to consider themselves experts on a wide variety of topics, including areas they have no experience or training in and are therefore not qualified to issue advice on. Nobel Disease has led otherwise intelligent figures to endorse a significant range of inaccurate ideas with effects ranging from the scary (eugenics, lobotomies, and AIDS denialism) to the bizarre (astrology, parapsychology, and the belief that Vitamin C will prevent all diseases) to the amusing (one prizewinner believed that he had been visited by a talking raccoon riding a motorcycle).

    These faults are not exclusive to Galileo or to Nobel Prize recipients, but they demonstrate an important fact about the nature of science: No individual person has all the answers or is correct all the time, so science cannot rely on the opinions of a single person or even a group of authorities. By upholding a few people as misunderstood geniuses, the Galileo Gambit fails to recognize that these people won acceptance of their ideas because they were able to support said ideas with quality evidence. The fact that a person was right before has no bearing on the accuracy of whatever new idea they are promoting, hence each new idea must be proven just as old ideas were. The claim that all of a person’s ideas must be 100% accurate because they are an expert or because they were correct in the past is an argument from authority and fails a basic reality check.

    1. Failure to Distinguish Between Valid and Invalid Criticism

    A significant problem with the Galileo Gambit lies not in its theoretical premise or qualities, but in how people use it in practice. In theory, scientists are just as capable as any other group of engaging in persecution of ideas that they dislike or people that they enjoy having power over. In the real world, however, most ideas that science rejects are rejected due to valid scientific criticism, and there is a clear difference between criticism and persecution.

    When an idea is proposed (to science, the general public, or both), it will face plenty of arguments against it. In general, science-based criticism by people knowledgeable about a subject is valid, while criticism motivated by ideology or bias is not. The case of Einstein’s proposal of relativity is great at illustrating the difference, especially since Einstein is often held up as an example of someone who promoted a revolutionary idea and attracted criticism from scientists despite being right. Here’s what happened: Einstein proposed his theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity in 1905 and 1915, respectively, and they were not immediately accepted and incorporated into the field of physics (Wikipedia Contributors 2019). The early relativity deniers even included three scientists who had won Nobel prizes in physics. Sounds like a clear-cut case of evil scientists rejecting the ideas of a genius because he challenged their knowledge, right? However, this narrative falls apart when one considers that two of those three Nobel prize winners were Nazis and the third had won his prize in an area of physics that had nothing to do with relativity (Hansson, 2017). These critiques, though made by scientists, were clearly not scientific because they were probably motivated by antisemitic ideology (Einstein was Jewish) and compromised by a lack of expertise in the specific subject area. So although Einstein can be described as a persecuted genius, much of the criticism he received was unscientific, and hence not supportive of the Galileo Gambit. In addition, after an early period of disagreement and debate, the vast majority of scientists were won over to Special Relativity by the 1920s and General Relativity by the 1960s (Wikipedia Contributors 2019). There are no major physicists today who are relativity deniers.

    Despite there being a clear delineation between valid and invalid criticism, and despite scientific and professional criticism being valid, users of the Galileo Gambit indiscriminately reject all criticism regardless of its merits. This is exactly the wrong way to approach disagreement; if someone issues a reasonable critique of your idea, you need to address that critique by revising or even discarding the idea. It’s perfectly fine to ignore criticism that takes the form of personal attacks, illogical complaints, or denialism, or criticism that is made by an unqualified person, but brushing aside serious issues with your idea won’t help get it accepted and will instead work against you. It’s much more difficult to persuade people that your idea has merit if you refuse to address obvious problems!

    One more point: It’s worth noting that an idea promoter’s personality or manner of promotion may invite criticism, and thus discourage people from accepting the idea because they find the promoter repugnant rather than because of persecution or objections to the idea itself. Galileo was genuinely persecuted, but he also had a habit of insulting people who disagreed with him, and he alienated powerful figures who might have been willing to help him in his conflict with the Inquisition. A new pope, Urban VIII, had been elected after Galileo’s first trial and was initially sympathetic to him, even granting him limited permission to publish heliocentrist works, but their relationship crashed and burned upon the publication of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Wikipedia Contributors 2019). The Pope pressured Galileo to include the church’s position in the book, which was written in the format of a fictional debate between a heliocentrist character, a mediator character, and a geocentrist character. The premise sounds neutral and inoffensive, but Galileo consistently portrayed the heliocentrist character as intelligent and heroic and the mediator as wise and fair, while the clownish geocentrist was given the name “Simpleton.” Throughout the book, the heliocentrist arguments are hailed as the best and most rational, while Simpleton’s arguments are all portrayed as stupid and ape the Pope’s position on the heliocentrism/geocentrism debate. This mocking led Pope Urban to believe that Galileo was caricaturing him, and he reacted poorly, banning the Dialogue and not offering support for Galileo during his heresy trial. Galileo would probably have been in trouble regardless of how he presented his argument, but he could have written the book in a less provocative manner. What if the Dialogue had resembled a real debate, in which well-reasoned arguments and solid evidence are supposed to lead to a win, rather than having an incompetent opponent? What if Galileo had crafted a plot in which the geocentrist character is won over by the strength of the evidence for heliocentrism? What if all the characters had considered the religious arguments for geocentrism, thought them through, and then calmly decided that such arguments were insufficient or that acceptance of heliocentrism did not conflict with being a good Christian?

    Sometimes, respectfully communicating one’s ideas is enough to avoid criticism of them, and criticism is a crucial component of the Galileo Gambit. Indeed, criticism is the part of the Galileo Gambit is supposed to prove the user’s correctness. If the promoters of inaccurate ideas did not make their arguments in an arrogant or provocative manner, might they face as much criticism as they do? And if they face no criticism, how could they argue that being persecuted makes them correct? This leads us to the next issue.

    1. Hypocrisy and Double Standards

    In the world of the Galileo Gambit, any idea with mainstream acceptance must be wrong if opposed by a minority idea, including ideas that were previously persecuted, disbelieved, or ignored but ultimately won people over. This means that whether an idea is “right” is based on the number of people who believe it, not how strong the evidence is in its favor, whether it can stand up to testing, or how closely it matches real-world observations. The logical endpoint of this premise is a world where “reality” is constantly in flux, as ideas gain acceptance by a majority of people, only to magically become wrong the instant a smaller group of people or even a single person decides to think something different. Needless to say, this isn’t how the world works.

    In addition to this obvious pitfall, users of the Galileo Gambit often apply a heavy double standard to any conflicts between their ideas and ideas accepted by science. Since the Galileo Gambit is based on the premise that any resistance to an idea is proof that it is correct, surely that means that facing no criticism means an idea is wrong? Nope! If an idea is not criticized by scientific authorities (generally due to scientists considering the idea to be so obviously inadequate that it’s not worth the time and effort it would take them to debunk it), the promoter will claim that this also proves them correct. In other words, there is no scenario in which the promoter will admit that he or she may be wrong. Harsh criticism and no criticism at all are made to appear equally supportive of the idea’s veracity.

    The inverse of such a gaping logical hole appears in the promoter’s treatment of mainstream science, especially fields or facts that oppose their own treasured ideas. Since their idea (by their logic) is unfalsifiable and therefore can never be disproved under any circumstances, it follows that whatever scientific evidence contradicts it will always be inadequate and is automatically inferior to what the promoter thinks. The promoter dismisses science out of hand and treats it as if it has no way to prove itself – the same unfair attitude that the promoter accuses scientists of holding!

    The situation worsens the more this hypocrisy is interrogated. Users of the Galileo Gambit charge scientists with engaging in persecution and controlling what ideas are accepted by the general public, but apparently it’s perfectly reasonable for them to do the same thing. After all, most people who promote pseudoscientific ideas via appeals to the public are not doing so because ordinary people can validate the scientific aspects of their claims. Rather, these idea promoters are engaging in a cynical attempt to win support of their ideas without having to actually prove themselves correct, because they know ordinary people are more likely to fall for fallacious claims and rhetorical dodges than experts are. If someone tries the Galileo Gambit on you, keep in mind that they’re insulting your intelligence!

    Furthermore, by the standards of these idea promoters, scientists face more persecution than the promoters do. In addition to being under metaphorical fire by every Galileo Gambit user under the sun attempting to force public acceptance of their quack ideas, scientists and scientific ideas have faced a disturbing number of attacks from many corners of society, especially in recent years. Anti-science influencers, companies selling bogus supplements and unproven drugs, and even governments peddling pseudoscientific policy all work to undermine science, misrepresent its positions, and deny its benefits to the people who could benefit from it most. During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists who participated in good-faith efforts to find treatments and vaccines and communicate the science behind them to the public were rewarded with online harassment, bullying from popular politicians, and even death threats (Nogrady 2021). Some scientists required bodyguards to protect them from physical attacks from people who didn’t accept the science behind disease and inoculation. These actions go far beyond the debunking, dismissal, and refusal to publish that users of the Galileo Gambit complain about. Again, according to the gambit, the greater resistance an idea faces, the more correct it is likely to be. Thus, by users’ own logic, scientific ideas are the correct ones, because scientists face much more persecution than people who promote vaccine conspiracies, flat Earth theories, and climate change denialism. Yet no matter how often the news runs stories on the prevalence of science denialism or the risks faced by scientists when taking an action as simple as publicly claiming that science is real, anyone who uses the gambit will maintain no matter what that the suffering of science promoters is invalid and that pseudoscience promoters, conspiracy theorists, and misinformation peddlers are the real victims.

    1. Reliance On the Association Fallacy

    The book in my hand is a story about an action hero and its cover is blue; therefore, all blue books must have action hero protagonists. That restaurant has great food and amazing customer service, so all restaurants in the same chain must be of similar quality. My neighbor likes to garden and is mean to me, so all people who have a gardening hobby must be jerks.

    What is wrong with the above statements?

    If you said, ”the logic they use,” you are correct! At its core, the Galileo Gambit relies on faulty logic, specifically a flaw known as the Association Fallacy. The structure of the fallacy goes like this (RationalWiki 2018):

    A is X and Y. (Galileo was persecuted, and he was right.)

    B is X. (I am persecuted.)

    Therefore, B is Y. (I am right.)

    The fallacy lies in assuming that the fact that two things are alike in one way means they are the same in all ways. Translated to the Galileo Gambit, it invites the user to assume that they are correct solely because they resemble, in a single way, a famous historical figure who turned out to be correct. The problem, of course, is that similarity in one way does not guarantee that two things will be alike in any other respect. Two people who like to garden may have similar personalities, but given that humans are so diverse and that everyone has unique experiences, worldviews, and environments, the odds that you could pick two gardeners at random and discover that both of them hate you are small. In the same way, people who claim persecution in an attempt to identify themselves with Galileo cannot rely on that statement alone. To truly be like Galileo, they must also prove themselves correct as he did, with scientific evidence. This second criterion reveals the fatal flaw of the Galileo Gambit: users are desperate to be considered scientific and identify themselves with Galileo to further this goal, but the entire purpose of deploying the Galileo Gambit is to conceal the fact that they cannot produce any scientific evidence in their favor.

    What about people who really did resemble Galileo in both ways? How did Semmelweis, Einstein, and others who were both persecuted and correct react to the news of their rejection by the establishment? Such individuals are rare to begin with; after all, despite the claims of the Galileo Gambit, science doesn’t usually reject worthy ideas. From the examples we have, though, it seems that when someone knows that they have an important idea that needs to be shared with the world and is being unfairly held back, their first course of action is to . . . not compare themselves to Galileo. When faced with a setback, true persecuted geniuses continue to argue the merits of their work based on the evidence they have collected, because they know their evidence is strong enough to merit consideration. They don’t need to rely on the Galileo Gambit to get their views accepted.

    Consider Semmelweis’ story. In the 1840s, he began keeping statistics on the incidence of puerperal fever, a devastating infection contracted by women who had just given birth (RationalWiki 2023, Zoltán 2019). Semmelweis observed that new mothers contracted the fever and died at a much greater rate when they gave birth while attended by doctors and medical students than when they gave birth in the presence of midwives, and he kept detailed records on many cases. His breakthrough came after a friend attended an autopsy of a woman who had died of puerperal fever, cut his hand on a surgical instrument, and died of an identical disease. Semmelweis theorized that doctors were transmitting small particles that caused illness to the women they examined from the corpses they autopsied and suggested that doctors wash their hands prior to assisting with the births. (In this time period, doctors frequently performed autopsies and then attended births soon afterward.) He began washing his hands before delivering babies and required that his subordinates also do so, while continuing to keep track of the health of each mother in his hospitals. Soon, infection and mortality rates plummeted in multiple maternity wards that Semmelweis oversaw, and they remained high in hospitals that did not require hand washing. However, upon hearing about Semmelweis’ data and experiences, other doctors refused to believe his ideas or follow his advice. They didn’t want to believe that their hands could be dirty and acted as if Semmelweis had personally insulted them. Despite the rejection, he continued to argue for antiseptic practices based on his evidence, which was genuinely strong. Semmelweis fought for handwashing until his death (caused by an infection), and he did not do so by using the Galileo Gambit. Within a few decades, the state of medicine began to change, and other scientists and doctors who had been inspired by him began to promote the germ theory of disease and advocate for hygienic practices in health care. Today, Semmelweis is remembered as a pioneer of medical statistics.

    Semmelweis’ example can be seen as a template for how things really go when a worthy idea is rejected by the establishment. In the first place, such worthy ideas are based on solid scientific evidence, and their proponents have made a good-faith effort to request scientific acceptance and display how well they fit observed phenomena in the real world. Generally, the rejection of an accurate idea happens as a result of non-scientific attitudes or the state of a field that is just starting to become scientific. The promoter may feel discouraged by the setback, but he or she almost never copes by attacking science or indulging their delusions of grandeur. Instead, they emphasize the merits of the evidence for their hypothesis, ask for additional consideration, and continue to engage with science and the scientific community.

    References:

    Bhatia, A., Paris, F., & Taylor, R. (2025, September 7). Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date. Nytimes.com; The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/upshot/zodiac-signs.html

    Felton, J. (2025, August). What Is “Nobel Disease”, And Why Do So Many Prizewinners Go On To Develop It? IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/what-is-nobel-disease-and-why-do-so-many-prizewinners-go-on-to-develop-it-80240

    Galileo gambit. (2018). RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galileo_gambit

    Gardner, M. (1957). Fads & Fallacies in the name of Science : the curious theories of modern pseudoscientists and the strange, amusing and alarming cults that surround them. A study in human gullibility. Dover.

    Hansson, S. O. (2017). Science denial as a form of pseudoscience. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 63, 39–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.05.002

    Ignaz Semmelweis. (2023). RationalWiki. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

    ‌Nogrady, B. (2021). “I hope you die”: how the COVID pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists. Nature, 598(7880), 250–253. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02741-x

    Sternberg, R. J., Roediger, H. L., & Halpern, D. F. (2007). Critical thinking in psychology. Cambridge University Press.

    Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, March 6). Galileo affair. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

    Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, March 3). Theory of relativity. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity

    Zoltán, I. (2019). Ignaz Semmelweis | Biography & Facts. In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ignaz-Semmelweis