 Next up of course is the one and only Jamie Ian Swiss a little a little piece. We're not great He's calling credit the con man. Here's his haiku Jamie Ian Swiss. Sorry. We were setting up. I have no haiku Please welcome to the stage The one only Jamie Ian Swiss Thank you George. Good morning So to begin with I asked a friend of mine Amy Amy come on up Right over here, but to help me out as she doesn't know what we're Doing there's no pre-arrangement or whatever And I'm going to show you this little game begin by showing you this little game that we play on the streets of New York to welcome the visitors Don't get ahead of me So it's a little game played with now they've been playing this game for 150 years and nobody's won yet But hey, this could be your lucky day Now they used to play this game in the early days in the mid 19th century in You know posh surroundings much like these In the luxury railroad cars and Mississippi riverboats and things like that where gamblers hustlers con men came to fleece the wealthy Nice sounds like a board game And they played it with three cards a red card and you're gonna Pay attention to what we're doing here another red card and a black card the cards were bent a little bit Length wise to facilitate handling them on a hard surface Okay, and the idea was to Mix these cards around So that you could find the black card the idea was to find the black card. Okay now It was a simpler time a slower time. Were you able to follow the red the black card over here? You I mean, it's it's pretty easy, but again, it's the old days, right now By the turn of the turn of the century the game kind of fell away I'm pretty much vanished except for the you know dusty roadside carnivals and things like that until the year 1973 when the game came back To a place that at least one expert has called the Monty capital of the world my hometown New York City And they made a couple. No, I'm a real New Yorker sir. I don't care where you're from Sorry and And they made a couple of changes now gone with a posh surroundings They played the card on it and play the game now on a street corner on a stack of cardboard boxes, right? They also made a little change with the game itself because now they use a black card a red card and another black card and Thanks for paying attention and no save it up. I got a weak finish and and the game was often accompanied now by a Running commentary delivered in the colorful patois for which the region is so noted Ready Here's a game if you want to make money five and get your ten ten and gets a twenty twenty get your forty forty Get your eighty eighty get your mile lady, but she's too fat red card moves like a snake in the grass sometimes slow and Sometimes fast now. Did you see the red card fall over here? No, you got to trust me. I'm trying to explain the game to you Okay So okay, and could you do me a favor? I didn't tape this up. So could you just kind of steady that for me? Thank you don't Okay, no, I'm trying to explain to you how it works Okay Now a lot of people know that Monty is a hustle, but they don't know exactly how the hustle works for example I've a very I've very often heard it theorized that the money card the red card is never on the table And it goes away that all these cards would be the same because that card's black and that card's black and that Cards black and it's true. All these cards are exactly the same Except for this one this one is always there it's it's that's a that's a myth. It's always there. It's actually always there That's that much is that much is true now. I've seen some incredibly bold maneuvers You really you know they say this is a one and three chance It's actually a game of no chance the only way that you have a one and three chances if you close your eyes The moment you look no chance So Monty operator says it's a no guess. It's just a eye test But the fact of the matter is even here's an extreme example for demonstration purposes only let's say by pure chance I won't touch it again, right? Let's say by pure chance. You actually pick the right card You might kind of call this moron Monty And now accidentally or somehow you've pointed to the right card, right? Well, I actually see a Monty operator go No, it's not over there. It's over there. You know who you're gonna complain to right? so department of consumer affairs so Now today they play in Monty what they call Monty mobs and an important part of the game is the shills the Confederates and they're there For all kinds of psychological reasons and to help you to help to convince the mark the victims of the viewers Not only that the game is real. They're the people who win anytime you see somebody win They're playing with the house's money, but also they lose strategically as well Okay, now But because they play in mobs sometimes multiple games on the same block and then you've got wall men the security of the muscle and this and that There might be 12 14 people on the block. You literally take your life in your hands today I don't recommend you ever try this game at all. They're not gonna pay it and they might just hurt you They're just as soon hit you upside the head and take the wallet and run But nevertheless, I have taken them on the operator for money That year that the game came back to New York and I did it just so I could come here and tell you about it So here's the way it went down one hot night in August of 1973 on the corner of 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street New York's Greenwich Village. You ready? It's a simple little game where the cards go round all you got to see is where the red goes down put your green on The red and then us see if you're five gonna make you ten. I'll show you where it is He said I'll show you where it's not place your bet see what you got when I cross my hand I'm out of food. Oh, man. I just messed it up at the end. I'm gonna have to do it again. All right one more time I'll show you where it is as you said. I'll show you where it's not place your bet see what you got when I cross my hands I'm out of food some man now just then the shill stepped in and through 20 bucks on this card and lost And now I knew my moment. I went to throw my money down But the guy said no no you already seen one card it changes the odds I'll only take a $50 bet I threw my 50 down He thought I was gonna bet over here, but I knew the money operator had the red card Now Thanks now. I've seen this game played all around the world In London sometimes they put an umbrella or a big umbrella on the street played on the top of the umbrella I've seen it played in Paris where they use a red queen that called sure Shayla fem another game that I've played in the But one thing that's true all over the world is that the red card for whatever reason the black cards are always the loser Black cards lose red cards win now. We're not gonna play for any money here today Amy, but just to Just a little guess just you know just see how the feeling right of what it of what it's like to to play the game Just take a guess point to where you think the red card might be in the middle. Oh wait It's been Then you got to be careful with that some people could use that to cheat Okay, and that's three card money. The only way to play win is not to play. Thanks a lot. Thank you darling Give her a big hand for helping out So That is a brief and I hope entertaining demonstration of the old street con game known as the three card money Why do people still get taken in by this ancient swindle inch out HL making said that for every complex problem There's a solution that is neat plausible and wrong and So one simple answer to the question is that there's a secret slide of hand maneuver a switch that the operator is using in order to Deceive the player that's a fact, but it's not the answer to the question another possible answer is that people are stupid There's a sucker born every minute in the words of PT Barnum a man who was describing the folks He thought of as his potential clientele Now if my expertise in deception has taught me anything It's this that anyone can be fooled even an expert in deception all too often We blame the victims of street side short cons or even a grand Ponzi scheme But in the relationship of predator to prey do we give the tiger credit for his powerful muscles his claws his Fangs his stealthy approach or do we just fault the antelope for being too slow and stupid if the default position Is to blame the victim then we give no credit to the victimizer and we fail to credit the con man So today I want to share some of the real reasons almost everyone can be conned and demonstrate Why these answers should be of value and I think great importance to skeptics Now one answer is that over those 150 years of tossing Monty the professional con artists have finally home their skills And it's hard to imagine without actually seeing it as I have many many times on the street the breathtaking speed and ruthless Efficiency of the psychological warfare waged by the Monty mob the three-card Monty is in reality an elaborate theatrical Production with multiple actors each playing a key role and hooking the player not just intellectually Which reduced the game to a more and easily ignored puzzle, but rather Emotionally which turns that little puzzle into a personal drama The Monty operator is not really an expert in sleight of hand He might be good at what he does But he hasn't a fraction of the skills of even your amateur magician friend who shows you a new card trick Sigh ant card trick now and then over lunch, but like the professional magician The Monty operator is an expert in deception and psychological manipulation His game is not just a game of wits, but rather a game of ego It's not a gamble on the cards rather. It's his bet that he can gain the victim's confidence That's the origin of the con in con game and lead him to put his money down on what seems like a sure thing Now as it happens I too am a specialist in deception my skills of deception Psychological physical mechanical are most visibly applied to the creation of entertaining and artistic illusions for the pleasure of my audience But I'm also deeply interested in many kinds of deception that are far less benign from con games to cheating and gambling to fraudulent Psychic claims and much more now my expertise is narrow, but it's deep As Randy likes to say we know how to fool people and we know how to recognize how and when people are being fooled And I'm going to take on a brief tour of some of these interests now and the lessons I think they hold for skeptics I've done some work in the field of casino security And I also present demonstrations and performances of the skills of the card cheats and casino hustlers And the fact is that among these kinds of gaming cheats often boldness is the greatest asset the professional hustler possesses Like most criminals he doesn't really think he's going to get caught He's willing to hazard tremendous risk risks that would seem lunacy to most of us I've had the chance to view countless hours of eye-in-the-sky video footage from the security cameras And I can tell you that significant sleight of hand technical skill although it does exist and I have occasionally seen it But in fact, it's a rarity most card cheats are just fearless hand-fisted clowns But the but the professional cheat who is much more readily found in social games by the way rather than in casino games He must like the street scam grifter also gained the confidence of his victors You know the guy who comes to your weekly poker game who never wins really big but always seems to win steadily and rarely lose as much and who might also be the friendly helpful guy who took your wife to the dentist when a Car was in the shop or came by to feed the cats, you know He could also be the perfect guy to be cheating just enough at your game And maybe a half a dozen other regular games You don't know about to be quietly making a very comfortable steady living at your expense with the help of a few select card cheating moves and At the casino, it's often a seemingly slow player The guy who doesn't quite fully know the rules of the game or the apparently drunk player Who's getting the dealer's attention while the real mechanic is pulling cards from the bottom or dice switch or whatever At the other end of the table again, the psychology is a key part of the secret Now I want to spend too much time talking about cheating and gambling while we're here in a casino And I promise I won't touch the cards in the poker tournament tonight Except my own So let's move on to another kind of scam artist 88 years after Charles Ponzi created the financial scam that bears his name today And for which he went to prison twice Bernard Madoff better known as Bernie was arrested on December 7th 2008 for operating the biggest Ponzi scheme in history having built his victims out of an estimated 65 Billion dollars enough to fund an American war in Afghanistan for a full year Since pleading guilty in 09 Madoff is currently serving a hundred and fifty years sentenced the maximum allowable term for his crimes Although much still remains unknown or is yet not publicly explained about the details of Madoff's crimes We now believe he was engaged in his systematic thievery since 1991 he was arrested in 2008 How could Bernie Madoff have operated successfully for so long and still have been bringing in new investors that his victims Literally within days of his self-planned arrest Recall that the sleight of hand maneuver that switches two cards in the Monty game is a useless device without the psychology the theater All right without the emotional confidence the operator instills in the mark the same was true of Bernie Madoff Whose victims number in the thousands from elderly widows to major international banking institutions The phony monthly statements that Madoff and his co-conspirators can cock it and sent out printed on dot matrix printers Was part of the trick of Madoff scam, but it's not what made the scam work any more than the Monty man's sleight of hand switch Bernie Madoff's greed and pathology would have gotten him nowhere without the psychology of in his case What's known as an affinity scheme a deadly game that built trust based on tribalism creating desire based on the perception of exclusivity Built confidence with those primitive monthly statements mail to widows and financial titans alike that detail the stocks and securities They own when in fact they own nothing of the sort Madoff actively solicited business on an ongoing and aggressive basis Making his investments funds seen all the more attractive not only by way of its apparent safety and Steady seemingly conservative profitability, but also because of the carefully manufactured and maintained illusion of exclusivity by turning away The occasional investor with apparent arrogance and disregard. I don't need your money He was famously known to declare publicly particularly to prospects with too many questions Madoff actually helped to build his myth and by so doing built the desirability of his fund Bernie Madoff is a criminal a con man a predator Associate path and an expert deceiver who worked hard to maintain his deceptions Credit the con man my point is this and when dealing with professionals be it a magician Monty man or Madoff It would be a mistake to blame the victim of a card trick a con game a billion dollar Ponzi scheme to blame the victim Offers no useful insight and teaches us a little about what's actually occurred Yet the immediate aftermath of the Madoff affair There was no shortage of voices ready to blame the victims of Madoff's predation's New York Times business columnist Joe No, Sarah addressed the Madoff case for the first time on March 13th 2009 almost three months to the day after Madoff's arrest with a piece that topped with this headline Madoff had accomplices his victims Six long weeks later as more and more information was coming out on June 29th No, Sarah's still was with that approach his headline now was Madoff victims get over it Eventually though even though Sarah became sympathetic to the victims as the tragedies of their individual stories became more and more public and Horrifying people losing their entire retirement people who were expecting comfortable retirement who now couldn't afford medical care and more Many more like that So there's two key lessons to be drawn from Madoff disaster apart from the failed responsibilities of the SEC and regulators Lesson one is this Anyone can be fooled the moment you think you can't you're lining up to be someone's next victim And lesson two is that before we blame the victim we must first and always credit the con man Let's talk about something a little closer to home for skeptics namely psychics and psychic fraud I recently blogged about an article that appeared in the June 6th edition of the Broward Palm Beach New Times with the headline how modern fortune tellers pull off their scams in which reporter Kyle Swenson recounts Detailed and horrifying stories of four devastated victims of fortune telling scam artists. I recognize I recommend this piece The victims all women include a 27 year old woman of Indian descent who grew up in England a Married 42 year old Indian woman with a master's degree and applied economics not the stereotype of a psychic victim a Divorcee in her early 60s and a young 19 year old woman as well All were experiencing struggles in their lives at the time were emotionally vulnerable when they exposed themselves to heartless predators ready to take advantage of Wounded prey Again the emotional component is necessary in order to explain and understand how otherwise rational people can suddenly and unexpectedly become entrapped by professional con artists who possess an arsenal of finely honed tools of Psychological manipulation in the case of the 20 see your 27 year old woman quoting from the article here quote in swift succession She had lost her job and her four-year marriage snapped then in the course of three years after meeting the psychic quote She remorgant remorgasur house took out loans barred from the family closed quote and ended up handing over a hundred and forty $40,000 over a three-year period before simply running out of resources and all the other victims recount similar tales Now these stories may seem incredible, but they are far from uncommon Storefront psychics look at every new client as a potential golden goose to bleed drive to bleed dry over the long brutally Patient hall the only rare aspects of these stories is that these victims went public and also that the cases were prosecuted Victims are usually too humiliated to admit such losses. They have difficulty understanding themselves Much less explaining to others how they ever got in so deep and for so long Florida psychic rose marks is set to go to trial next month for her part and an alleged $25 million scam over some 20 years with various targets that included taking romance novelist Jude Devereaux for some claimed $17 million over a 20-year period And Devereaux hasn't told the details of her story yet But we know that she experienced the death of her son eight-year-old son. I think a divorce so on During that time along with the skills of the victimizers the psychological mechanism known as cognitive dissonance also provides an important part of the answer Once people make a commitment of belief and of money They will justify that commitment as being wise and sensible making it increasingly difficult to face the possibility of having made a Terrible mistake. That's why people end up handing over even more money in the hopes and faith that their investment will pay off to justify The form of relief from the struggles and pains that sent them seeking help in the first place It's a vicious cycle that a cold-blooded con artist knows how to skillfully maintain and feed off of as Carol Tavers who's spoken here at TAM several times but isn't here this year as Carol writes in her superb book mistakes We're made but not by me quote the ability to reduce dissonance helps us in countless ways Preserving our beliefs our confidence decisions self-esteem and well-being but Disability can get us into big trouble people will pursue self-destructive courses of action to protect the wisdom of Initial decisions close quote So as we begin to try and unpack the mystery of how someone's hands has someone hands her personal fortune over to a phony psychic We first have to credit the con man But then we also have to look at the con man's tools which in turn our skills of manipulating their workings of Human psychology and that leads you to look at important psychological mechanisms like cognitive dissonance Which is a remarkable phenomenon that thanks to its own workings few of us really want to admit how much it can influence our own behavior And Michael Shermer and his excellent book why people believe weird things writes quote in my opinion most believers and miracles Monsters and mysteries are not hoaxers Flim flam artists or lunatics most are normal people whose normal thinking has gone wrong in some way Exactly so how does that happen how and why does our thinking so readily go wrong and often so far at that? Well one potential element one potent element I should say pardon me is magical thinking we humans have evolved as pattern-seeking animals Possessing a unique cognitive ability that enables us to draw connections to learn from experience to identify Cause and effect we make judgments every day that in the larger scheme of things service Well, particularly when we were social hunter-gatherers on the grasslands of Africa Sherma writes that quote humans evolved the ability to seek and find connections between Things and events in the environment snakes with rattles should be avoided and those who made the first connections The best connections left behind the most offspring We are their descendants the problem is that causal thinking is not infallible. We make connections Whether they are there or not Close quote magicians thrive on this evolutionarily Programmed tendency Sherma goes on to dub our central processor this pattern-seeking brain He calls it the belief engine and he theorizes that quote under certain conditions It leads to magical thinking under different circumstances Leads to scientific thinking and he adds that natural selection is resulting the fact that quote the belief engine is a useful mechanism for Survival not just for learning about dangerous and potentially lethal environments, but in reducing anxiety About that environment through magical thinking pointing out that there is a there is psychological evidence that magical thinking reduces anxiety in uncertain environments, right the Jock the professional, you know Ball player who's got that lucky charm of that lucky routine reducing anxiety in uncertain environments We think magically because we have to think causally We have magical thinking and superstitions it because we need critical thinking and pattern finding the two cannot be separated This is still Sherma talking because we need Sorry, the two cannot be separated magical thinking is a necessary byproduct of the evolved mechanism of causal thinking Believers in UFOs alien abductions ESP psychic phenomena their thinking has gone wrong But he adds optimistically and accurately that fortunately there is an abundance of evidence that the belief engine is malleable critical thinking can be taught Skepticism is learnable close quote and And indeed It has to be learnable because it's certainly not a natural way for humans to think In an excellent and provocative book published in 1995 uncommon sense the heretical nature of science by Alan Cromer The author explained that far from being natural scientific thinking goes so far against the grain of conventional human thought That if it hadn't been discovered in Greece it might never have been discovered at all Cromer presents the argument that science represents a radically new and different way of thinking a way that is completely unnatural to the biologically evolved species known as homo sapiens the entire duration of our species existence on the earth is a little more than a blink Inevolutionary time when you consider the fact that dinosaurs were here for 350 million years Whereas if you include early even if you include early hominids like australopithecines or not yet human We've been here what a tiny fraction six seven million years, and then it's not until the Greeks just 2,000 years ago that the scientific method is Conceived and then the era of modern scientific thought and method really dates back to Galileo 400 years ago, and that's not even a blink in a geologic time It's barely measurable and yet it contains most of our significant accomplishments as humans from discovering the origins of the Universe to the germ theory of disease the landing men on the moon as a species We've only just begun to learn to think scientifically and as individuals We each have to learn how we each have to be taught how we won't just come to it on our own Left to our own devices. We're still just magical thinkers trying to survive in the African Plains We could be dancing for rain for another thousand years just because after a long drought one ended after an evening's dance party Now there's a conventional trope about people supposedly wanting to be seen though people want to be fooled I think this is nonsense rather There's there are aspects of the way our brains evolve that can as a side effect lead us to be deceived Safely by magicians dangerously by advertisers and politicians all but fatally by con men and sociopaths And there's one more important facet in this mix and that is the role played by trust Human beings have evolved to be trusting beings. It makes sense To want to believe people we've evolved to disbelieve that people are capable of lying directly to our faces Because the alternative an ever-vigilant extreme of caution and protectiveness is Contrary to being an effective social animal a human animal that's constantly wary relentlessly on guard quick to protect itself It gets any risk of deception would be a very untrusting being and that's not a being that will find it very easy to develop Constructive relationships and function well socially with peers with colleagues with family and society Even the organize and engage in group hunting of giant mammals in the Pleistocene era to do these things We must be willing to trust despite the associated risks Now one important of evolutionary protection We have against deceivers is our built-in in-group out-group programming which kicks in at a very early age in higher mammals Right after we've learned to recognize immediate family and friends and then everyone else is an outsider But that's a sloppy and imprecise sort of generalized hope for the best protection It doesn't account for individuals who are willing to operate maliciously from within the group It doesn't protect you from Bernie Madoff who ruthlessly relied upon in-group status to manipulate his victims And as Carol Tavers has pointed out to me cognitive dissonance is pre-wired to protect us from the times when we will inevitably be fooled Which typically produces dissonance. How could I have been so stupid and which we immediately strive to reduce? I wasn't stupid. Let me mortgage my house and give the guy another hundred grand. I'll show you how smart I was Which people actually did for Madoff The victims cognitive dissonance helps the con man in his ongoing predations while his own dissonance His own dissonance helps him think he's not such a bad guy while he's doing it So I confess I think it's foolish to talk about people's desire to be deceived Just as any of us can be fooled all of us engage in self deception as well But ultimately it's for a higher purpose for the benefits it delivers us and dealing with ourselves With other people and the inherent dissonance of this world Nobody wants to be fooled except at the magic show But fooled we all shall be and it cannot happen without trust and the ability to trust even when the cost means being occasionally Victimized is central and essential in human life in society So sure try not to be fooled, but don't be so hard on yourself when it does happen So what's my message today? Well some who've been around the skeptic block for a while. I think this is Jamie's don't be a dick speech Not so I believe in calling bullshit on bullshit. I don't believe in so-called framing I believe you should tell the truth as you see it I believe there's room for every conceivable way of communicating skepticism And I do not believe there is any one right way. I believe in the soft self for some and the hard self for others I believe in persuasion as well as polemics I believe we need warriors as well as diplomats and if you don't think James Randi spent his career as a warrior You haven't paying attention for the last 40 years In my experience Randy has always been empathic towards victims and believers and even shut eyes He's unfailingly polite to those elements that we as skeptics so often encounter He saved his warrior weapons not for the victims, but for the victimizers and that's an important difference I guess what I want to say here is there's a difference between a tobacco company and a smoker Tobacco companies willfully concealed and distorted scientific information in order to promote their profits and poison They deserve to be called out challenge prosecuted in every conceivable manner So to me before you focus your laser sight and put your finger on the verbal trigger I just ask that you pause and ask yourself. Am I talking to a smoker or to a tobacco company to a victim or a victimizer James McCormick whose company ATSC manufactured the phony bomb detection technology warranted prosecution at its 10-year prison sentence Thanks partly to the work of James Randy was the first public voice to call attention to that deadly fraud James Van Prague John Edward Sylvia Brown and their oak deserve our scorn and our Confrontations the manufacturers of homeopathic remedies warrant our debunkings and our demonstrations But those who fall prey to these skilled and powerful and well-financed predators deserve not just the facts as we know them But also our empathy it does no one any good to label those victims of psychic fraud is merely stupid or gullible It doesn't help them. It doesn't help protect their next potential victim And isn't that our true goal as skeptics? Now Thank you Now is there a clear dividing line? No, there isn't as skeptics we confront issues that are complex and as messy as the spectrum of human behavior itself When a homeopathic user becomes a debater or a promoter active promoter of the useless product he wastes money on What's the best response? I don't pretend to always know but for us as skeptics the simple fact that we're right Or even that the science is on our side is not enough to change anyone's mind Much less to change the world speaking purely for myself. I don't generally debate these issues with individual consumers or believers I'll state the science in brief and simple terms offer an informative reference or a useful book title and then move on What's the point of an argument? I know how cognitive dissonance works I don't have a magic set of wire cutters and it's gonna let me go in and disarm that circuit board in our heads I'm fighting millions of years of evolution Does all this sound messy unclear? Wait, it gets worse What if I told you that even Sylvia Brown and John Edward and James Von Prog might actually believe that they have some psychic ability and More significantly believe that no matter what their techniques and methods might be even if deliberately deceptive Nonetheless, they think they're actually helping people The fact of the matter is by the way as I talk about might just in my brand new honest liar video That just went up on YouTube that was posted this week No real-life villain ever looks in the mirror and declares mirror mirror on the wall Who is the most villainous villain of all to die to die to die? The truth is far more complicated Because that scene only happens in the movies and it happens in the movies because it simplifies the story It simplifies our world It actually gives us hope that we can be safe from monsters because they're so obvious and brilliant in their evil But in fact Hannibal Lecter is scary in a fun kind of way because he's also a comforting fiction The terrifying reality lies in the banality of evil has brought to life and pathetic losers like son of Sam killer David Berkowitz or Mark David Chapman who murdered John Lennon But the messy part of all this means that while we can speculate on the mindset of professional Greek vampires like Sylvia Brown Or spoonbender turned motivational speaker Yuri Geller We can't really know for certain what's in their minds and hearts and so we must first make our moral decisions Purely by judging their behavior not their imagined or theorized intentions I believe that professional mediums hurt people prey on their victims vulnerabilities and Worsen their lives and if the selective feedback they get from their supporters along with the psychological workings of cognitive dissonance Means that they believe their own bullshit. I don't care I don't care if tobacco executives are homeopathic remedy dealers believe their own bad thinking and bad science They all deserve to be called out for making the world a worse place and damaging people's lives but What does that tell us about how to talk to the intermediary the guy who sells homeopathic remedies and thinks they work Isn't he responsible shouldn't he be called out and confronted? How do we talk to the believer the consumer or the shut-eye died in the wool? Loyalist do we simply show them our sympathy and nothing else and keep quiet good question? What am I Yoda what I'm saying is pick your battles and try and distinguish between Victimizers and victims and try to understand how the victim got that way and drawing again from Carol Tavris on cognitive dissonance She cautions that quote the unbending need to be right inevitably produces self-righteousness when confidence and convictions are unleavened by humility By an acceptance of fallibility People can easily cross the line from healthy self-assurance to arrogance close quote and That's a worthwhile cautionary notice for every skeptic So putting tactics aside now whether you're inclined towards confrontation condemnation consideration or conciliation My real message today is about what skeptics need to know Scientific skepticism is about educating and informing the public about promoting science and critical thinking and advocating the scientific world view And also about the bunking for purposes of educating and also to confront fraud and service consumer advocates and protectors These are the core purposes of scientific skepticism as we discussed on the panel yesterday But before we can educate others We must also educate ourselves at every skeptic who thinks the explanation of a successful psychic scam or crackpot alternative medicine Pitch is to just declare another sucker getting what he deserves for his stupidity is wrong That doesn't just reveal a lack of empathy more significantly. It reveals a lack of expertise It's easy to understand that transcendental meditation will never teach people to float because we understand physics and biology But it's not so easy to understand why people give up their lives to a dangerous cult and think that bouncing on their buttocks is a transitional step the human flight If you want to talk to people about getting conned and it's your Responsibility to inform yourself about why people get conned the literature is out there. It's excellent It makes for great and provocative reading. I just reread Michael Schumer's why people believe weird things It's a basic text for skeptics It's a basic text for living life as a human being and trying to navigate the hazards of the world You should demon call Sagan's demon haunted world as as great a fundamental text if you will that skeptics could possibly have You haven't read it you should If you haven't read Carol Tavis's mistakes were made but not by me or you haven't read up on the phenomenon of how cognitive dissonance works You'll never understand why people insist on tossing good money after bad Whether it's to a storefront psychic a street side scam artist or the birdie made out to the world Some years ago a friend of mine a professional Professional magician fell victim to a con right in the heart of New York City No less the con man did not pray on my friend's greed. He prayed on his kindness With an ancient scam called the pigeon drop actually a variation called the Jamaican tourist if you ask me in the barge night Well, I'll tell you the story in more detail. It's quite amazing The con man prayed on my friend's morality on his empathy and desire to help a person who was apparently in trouble My magician friend got taken for the contents of his wallet that day But is he just another sucker another idiot who deserves what he got or should we be grateful for people like him on the Planet people whose compassion for a stranger in trouble ends up costing them some cash We give money to the homeless because of our humanity and if there's a rick's that once in a while We're filling the cup of a man who's not only who's only pretending to be blind But is actually watching us drop a dollar in how bad is that really? consider the alternative The theme of our conference this year is fighting the fakers Blaming victims gets us nowhere in that fight and even fighting fakers gets us nowhere without an understanding of how and why Their schemes actually work so Don't blame the victim credit the con man credit magical thinking credit cognitive dissonance and the desire to see ourselves as smart Kind and compassionate none of us is immune to these forces and before you harshly judge a victim of a psychic scam or a pseudo Scientific alternative medicine claim remember the magician's most important lesson Everyone can be fooled Thanks a lot Jamie Dean Swiss loves the general excellent