Some people have combined their intellect, a moral compass worth admiring and a dedication to stopping grifting into a decent monetary career. As much as there is instant hatred towards a scientific expert able to get to the root of what is wrong with crank ideas, the monetized debunker must be hated even more.
Having a paid job working for Snopes, Reuters, Logically and other fact checking services isn’t too high profile. I imagine there’s a lot of vague hiding behind a computer without your name being known as the main source on an individual fact check. The fun debunkers are showman who can put the debunk on in front of a studio audience. And there’s no better showman than a magician for these debunking devious douchebag displays. Being a trickster themselves with an understanding of human nature and how to entertain by fooling.
More recent than the video to follow shortly is Penn and Teller’s show, Bullshit! Every episode was dedicated to a topic to be debunked and their stage presence translated into a taped show for broadcast worked well. Arguably, some topics were truly debatable and no actual truth was delivered, but mostly they hit on what is wrong with an idea that was wrong.
James Randi was a role model and influence on the magic careers of Penn and Teller. Note what he says about the excuses the psychic makes for failure once a simple and reasonable control is applied. There’s always an excuse for lack of performance.
Now one of the ongoing themes with gematria ringleaders is the constant search for new blood. Over the years I’ve seen several high school age students put on a pro gematria demonstration for a class project. Usually we find out about these when they post about how awesome it went and they got a standing ovation. And of course an Attaboy! from Zach.
In the past Zach has been famous for claiming success by picking both teams and rightfully claiming he picked the winner because of course if you pick both teams he’s got to be right on one of them. He also uses heavy amounts of reporting after the fact and just keeping the audience focused on more current events, like maybe the Bengals getting off to an unexpected hot start and creating a full season dialogue about them. And one of his undesired results is the Sports Gematria YouTube channel cataloguing video evidence of his failures.
His greatest weapon is his control of the audience. The psychic can perform his trick of blowing on the pages of the phone book while the audience has doubts or even outright belief in the fake ability. A hostile audience, fully aware of the trick, would be an entirely different story. What we need is a bright team of young minds willing to help their classmates out on an early understanding of misinformation grifting. You don’t even need to go into the anti science angle, just stick to sports.
Reporting after the fact on Zach’s failure is all well and good, even better would be clear video evidence ahead of time on genuine picks before the game is played. Picks made before a neutral audience instead of loaded with people clouded by confirmation bias.
So propose a challenge to Zach. If he disagrees to the proposed control, he is disgraced like the blowing on the phone book fake psychic. If he claims gematria isn’t used for predictions (a common backpeddle) he loses. Because why are you selling sports picks via Patreon subscriptions if you are claiming it doesn’t predict?
The control is - the upcoming NFL season will have an initial betting line well before the game is played. The games to be picked from are every game where the point spread is a certain number or less. A “close” game is expected, somewhere around a bookie line of 3 or 4 points would be good. He’s required to pick a winner from every single game. A clear winner, no wishy washy narrative for both teams stuff. And he’s required to provide video evidence ahead of time.
Now work on your showmanship. You will produce several different set of picks, ahead of time as well. And we’re going to keep track over multiple weeks to average out the sample size. The most correct picks is the winner.
Set #1 - All favorites, home team if even money
Set#2 - All underdogs, away team if even money
Set#3 - Picks from a family member or friend who used more standard knowledge like injury information, streaks, etc…. Like gematria it should include a brief narrative of the thought process.
Set#4 - Find a method to get a toddler to make random picks. Food should probably work. The green candy is the favorite, the yellow is the underdog. As long as the toddler is old enough to understand picking a hand that the adult has made into a random, unseen choice should be fine.
Set#5 - bearing in mind the oddness and joy of the thought of a toddler outpicking Zach, let your creative juices flow and make up your own theme.
The main point is that like our fake psychic friend, if presented with a reasonable challenge he simply is not going to go through with it. You’ll get the “they fixed it to make me look bad excuse” if he did. If he goes through with it and would win it’s not going to be a spectacular margin of victory, because he will get plenty wrong if he does go through with it.
If things go well you are on your way to becoming a professional debunker, hopefully because you proved a toddler can make picks just as good as a gematria pro or the toddler scared the gematria pro’s pants off.
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