Saturday 26 September 2009

Skeptic Park 2 with Derren Brown

Last week the pointed bearded trickster, Derren Brown, generated a bit of a media storm with a few "Events". The centre piece of this was his prediction of the UK's National Lottery. There has been much speculation in the media and the blogsphere as to how he accomplished this feat, and so to set the record straight once and for all, Derren has agreed to talk to the Skeptic Park kids.


Part 1 Available here.

4 comments:

Neuroskeptic said...

But how did he do it?

Yogzotot said...

Well, choose for yourself - I suggest to use Occam's Razor...

(a) Wisdom of Crowds really works as presented by Derren - science is wrong!

(b) He really illegally swapped the balls as explained as another option on the show. Complicated and high risk.

(c) It was a camera trick (split screen), that they already used in one of the ads for the program.

Mhm...

Alice said...

Always sad when we can't ask all those people who were fiddling around with numbers and whatever they were doing . . . I'm sure there is something to the "wisdom of crowds", but in predicting lottery numbers? They might well predict the average of several lotteries, but on one single lottery any of whose numbers might be unusually high or low? The original idea came from a crowd guessing the weight of a cow; at least they all had something to look at.

I haven't yet seen any comment on the first two scenarios - when he gets a lady to feel around for a mouse, and then this lad to (feels faint) stamp on a possible knife. The latter struck me as horrifically immoral, I don't care if there was really a knife or not. DB went on at length about how scaring someone makes them more predictable but he didn't say how . . .

Nick Grant said...

Very good

I got so annoyed by the stunt and the non explanation but the wit such as this that it has spawned has been great.