$100K Challenge Update

The last time I wrote my newsletter, I wrote about the NZ Skeptics $100K challenge. We'd just launched it, in conjunction with the NZARH (New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists), who are putting up half of the prize money.

We put out a press release which got a little interest, though not as much as we'd hoped. One media organisation was interested in doing a TV piece on it, but it unfortunately fell through when their legal department wanted to contact our challengers to give them “right of reply”. I guess it got too hard.

Last week I talked to Stuff journalist Virginia Fallon, who wrote a great feature piece about our challenge.

Psychic follow-up

She tried to follow up with the three people we've challenged - alleged psychic Kelvin Cruickshank, moon man Ken Ring, and naturopath Kirsten Taylor. Kelvin Cruickshank was uncontactable (you'd think he'd have seen it coming) but the other two provided some interesting comments on the challenge.

Moon-man follow-up

Ken Ring, in his usual confident manner claimed he'd already provided evidence that he'd won. In his email response to us, he sent a PDF with various screenshots of supposedly successful predictions.

What it actually contained was screenshots of claims of predicting the major Christchurch earthquake after the first one had occurred, and warnings of future quakes - which are certainly likely after such a major quake. He links to a now (assumed) defunct Twitter account.

The first major quake in Christchurch occurred on September 4th 2010. Ken was on a radio show the day before and made the comment: “you'll be reading about floods and winds and earthquakes and snow over the next week or so, particularly the South Island”. This is hardly the level of extreme warning that would be expected were Ken actually able to accurately predict earthquakes - with the September 4th quake being magnitude 7.1, centred on Darfield, about 35km from the outskirts of Christchurch.

A few days later, he tweeted out a warning of a major quake on 20th March 2011. Actually, a quake did occur that day, but it wasn't the most significant. The major one, magnitude 6.3, which resulted in the deaths of 185 people occurred on February 22nd.

Ken reckoned, on February 14th, that there was a “Potential earthquake time for the planet between 15th - 25th, especially 18th for Christchurch +/- 3 days”. February 22nd, only 1 day beyond his +/- 3 days - that's a hit, right?! Only if you get lucky, or cherry pick your data or are subject to confirmation bias.

As Alison Campbell astutely commented back in 2011:

“The problem is though, that such vaguely worded 'predictions', with their lack of precision, are so wide open that they lend themselves to confirmation bias.”

Then Ken trumpeted his ability to predict the weather, with claims that he'd predicted the devastating flooding in Hawke's Bay back in February this year.

Actually, no. Here's Ken's predictions for the week back in February, courtesy of the excellent Ken Ring Weather Check twitter account:

Hawke's Bay, for international readers, is the lime green bit where he predicted 50mm of rain. As a result of Cyclone Gabrielle, Hawke's Bay got 560mm of rain.

But, all of this misses the point of the challenge, which is to work with the person with the claimed ability to design a fair test in advance which they can then complete to determine whether they're able to perform as claimed.

Ken seems to be willing to attempt to rewrite history to suit his failed predictions or to attempt to bend vaguely worded and interpreted claims to fit.

As of Sunday evening, it appears that Ken's not happy about us challenging him.

Naturopath follow-up

Next up is the naturopath Kirsten Taylor, who is the CEO of the SleepDrops company. Her company makes a product which is claimed to be able to improve your sleep (though not directly, because that would constitute a medical claim) by placing a few drops of a homeopathic concentration of some herbs under your tongue every night for a few months.

In my communications with her support people, they claimed to have clinical research, but they weren't going to share it with an unrelated party. I find this pretty astounding, as every product I've ever seen that has actually done clinical trials, is keen to prominently feature that in their marketing.

“HI Craig, Thank you very much for your invitation.

However as we have already worked very hard in developing our clinical trial protocols to meet both local and international standards we will be proceeding with our own initiatives and politely declining your invitation.

You may have an understanding of the level of investment and time that has gone into this.

Regards

Sophia”

And…

“Hello Craig, you will be aware that Clinical trial protocols are considered intellectual property and are assets to a company. As such we will most certainly not be disclosing them to any unrelated parties.”

Requests for their clinical research were initially directed to a page on their website about the “science” that supports their claims. From what I can see there, it's not their own research, but links to a bunch of studies relating to the ingredients used in their products. Doubtless, not in homeopathic concentrations either.

From the Stuff article, it seems SleepDrops are blaming the pandemic on their inability to complete the research, and putting up a smokescreen:

“The company is looking to reinvigorate the trial and has been developing a second one in agreement with one of the “world's largest sleep technology companies to accurately measure sleep of trial participants before and during intervention”.

Finer details of these protocols are yet to be finalised.”

Of course, all of this is putting the cart before the horse. Why are they selling these products if they've not first demonstrated them to be effective?

It seems SleepDrops has a pretty big marketing budget. Now that I've googled them, ads for their product are popping up everywhere for me!

But, if they're so confident in the effectiveness of their product, surely they'd be happy to do a test with us and take that cash off us!

So, as we predicted none of those challenged actually agreed to work with us to develop a fair test of their abilities.

The important point for us in this is that it's our intention to only challenge people who are “profiting” from their claims (whether in a monetary sense or perhaps for fame and fortune). We're not going to be challenging random people who claim to be psychic if they're not making public claims about their abilities.

But, we do have a page on our website that allows people to make suggestions for who to challenge. Unsurprisingly, we've had contact from somebody who claims to be psychic and has begun harassing us on our Facebook page.

This person has a website, to which she's posted us links. The content of the website is a little strange, in that it features pictures of her wearing clothing specifically tailored to expose the entirety of her breasts. Each to their own, I guess.

Anyway, as this person doesn't seem to have a public persona, we won't be taking up her request to challenge her (and, as her Facebook account seemed to be set up specifically for the purposes of harassing us (no followers or friends), we've blocked her from posting on our page).

So, our challenge is open indefinitely. Maybe one day we'll find somebody who is willing to work with us to develop an effective testing protocol. Until then, we invite everybody to wonder why these people won't take our test!