My favourite Bullshit Artists

Two of my favourite performers in the world are Penn & Teller. As I've written before, it's Teller's fault I'm in this line of work. Ever since I read an essay of his on The Cups & Balls in one of their books, magic has head a strange power over my mind. It's camped out in my brain and refuses to leave. Recently, The James Randi Educational Foundation uploaded an extended interview with Penn & Teller at The Amazing Meeting in 2012. While it's normally difficult to get me to sit through an entire YouTube video from beginning to end, I've been through this twice. While on stage, Teller doesn't talk and Penn talks like slightly upscale carney trash, in fact they are among the most profound thinkers in magic today. And in this interview, it shows!

I always struggle with the implications of building a career on deception. It's nice to know that someone else is thinking about these problems and it's useful for me to be able to draw on the thinking of those that have been thinking about it since before I was born.

So if you have an hour to spare, enjoy Penn & Teller, 38 years of Magic and Bullshit:

*May contain some inappropriate language and mature themes.

The Desert Island

What use would a magician have on a desert island? Someone posted a detailed thought experiment on a magic discussion forum, probably hoping to start a heated argument then sit back and watch the ad hominem attacks start flying.

The scenario was a bit more nuanced. Assume you were to be stranded on a desert island and could choose ten people to join you. These people would share the responsibility for survival. His contention was that a magician wouldn't make that list.

His conclusion: magicians didn't serve a useful purpose in the world.

While I agree that he should take people that aren't magicians (and therefore not me) with him to deserted islands, I think the conclusion is backwards. Because most of us don't live on desert islands and have no plans to wind up there. In fact magicians can exist and earn a living precisely because we are not struggling for survival. So the existence of magicians becomes, by contrast to the original conclusion, a celebration of our success as a species.

Reality Based Magic

What's in a title? A great deal of what I read about magic is disconnected from reality in some way, and not in the good way that magic is supposed to be separate from reality. It seems that most don't feel the need to ground what they believe firmly in the real world. Instead, they reason a priori. However, that kind of thinking is only valid if the starting premises are valid. And most often those premises are gut feelings and anecdotal observations which are cantilevered out well past the point of reliability.

My favourite example is the statement;

"People don't like card tricks."

Originally, I bought into this theory and made a conscious effort to start every performance with something which was not a card trick. The second piece was then often a card trick. Then I observed something which confused me tremendously: when the first trick was done and the cards came out of my pocket, someone would exclaim with excitement,

"Oooh, card tricks!"

It took a while for me to figure out why this was happening. It didn't happen often, but it happened far too often for those enthusiastic (and obviously very intelligent) people to be considered true outliers.

Now I have a theory. The "people hate card tricks" hypothesis seems to be based on a misapplication of Bayesian reasoning. The problem with anything (including card tricks) is something known as Sturgeon's Law which states that:

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Unfortunately, it appears that in the world today, nearly ninety percent of magic is card tricks, which is an invitation to Bayesian disaster. The dislike should have been attributed to the general ambient crappiness, and not to the actual card tricks.

What people really want to say is, "We dislike bad magic." However in terms of frequency, most of that boring magic will be card tricks, and so the cards wind up with most of the blame.

What can be done?

I'm reminded of the words of Richard Feynman:

If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it. It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is or how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, then it's wrong.

So we should try to challenge our ideas more often and always be on the lookout for deeper understanding. We should always be striving to create reality based magic.

I confess, I was also inspired by an aid to the Bush administration who referred to the scientific and secular lobby as "the reality based community".