About Skeptical Activism and Cheating Psychics

So, as I just posted over on the SGU Blog, my thinky meats are still mushy from TAM5.5, so I’m letting an SGU listener have the floor. I got this note while I was in Florida, and was so ridiculously pleased that I shared the story with the 50 people in our podcasting & blogging seminar Friday as an example of how to do something positive for skepticism and drive traffic to your site. Click through to be equally pleased for a fellow skeptic.

After Heath Ledger died, I thought I’d check to see if Nikki, Psychic to the Stars, had predicted his death. I checked her website (http://www.psychicnikki.com/predictions.html) and, amazingly, she had. Given that none of her earlier predictions ever mentioned Heath, and that there was nothing particularly adverse in his background that would suggest an early death, this seemed to me to be a major hit by a psychic.

However, I recently gave a talk at one of my neighborhood clubs about why people believe weird things. I thought it would be fun to end with a reading of some psychic predictions for 2008. So, in my research, I copied Nikki’s predictions to a file. This was the day before he died. Guess what – no Heath Ledger. Looks like Nikki “postdicted” his death. She also added Barrack Obama’s name to the “Death Watch/Health Watch” list.

So, is this a case where she just forgot to put Ledger’s name down, and his death happened to remind her to updater her website?

I think not, be cause she also DELETED her prediction that Angelina Jolie would be nominated for an Oscar AFTER the Oscar nominations came out.

Details can be found at my blog.

Thanks for all your great work.
The skepTick

And that, my friends, is how it’s done. Go visit his blog, people. Good job, skepTick! Spoooooon.