George Anderson is a former switchboard operator who at one
point switched to a career as a medium.
As a medium he has, indeed, experienced a modicum of success with books like We
Don’t Die, We Are Not Forgotten, Our Children Forever and Lessons from the Light: Extraordinary
Messages of Comfort and Hope from the Other Side and so on. The books
provide self-help tips and vague, comforting messages targeted in particular at
people in difficult life situations, but no evidence of actual psychic
abilities or the existence of an afterlife. He has also had his own ABC special
featuring celebrities who wanted to contact the dead, and his readings and
channelings come across as helplessly inane to those who know the first things about how cold readings,
subjective validation,
and confirmation bias work. Unfortunately, Anderson’s target audience does not.
Indeed, Anderson’s sessions have been noted as being so
helplessly inane that it may strike one as suprising how even convinced fans
could ever believe that he had any special powers whatsoever; a good
description (and a recording of a whole session) can be found here (but cognitive biases are powerful stuff).
According to himself “[r]esearchers in the field of science, afterlife studies and spirituality
[interesting mix] have called George ‘Astonishing,’ ‘The Gold Standard by which
all mediums are measured,’ and ‘A Stradivarius among mediums.’”
Diagnosis:
Once again, it is pretty hard to believe that Anderson is being entirely
honest; insofar as he is, he sure has a rare ability to reinterpret
overwhelming evidence that he has no psychic abilities as evidence that he does.
The fact that he is promoted the way he is by people who really should know
better, is more along the lines of disgusting.
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