THE ORB HAS SPOKEN: The Crowd Declares Magic Real, and a Century of Skeptics Is Left Holding a Bent Spoon

Dim the lamps and lay down the cards, darlings. The question is the oldest one in my tent: is magic real? Within a day of trading opening, the crowd has answered, and the Tower card came up the right way round. Magic is real, says the crowd. Somewhere a skeptic just dropped his monocle into his tea.

Before we light the candles, here's what the record shows, and it isn't kind to my trade. The magician and skeptic James Randi wrote in his encyclopedia of occult claims that no paranormal or supernatural claim had ever held up under proper testing. A 1988 panel commissioned by the US National Research Council found no scientific justification for telepathy, extrasensory perception or mind over matter, after a research record stretching back about a hundred and thirty years. The 'ectoplasm' that mediums once oozed on cue turned out to be ordinary material, and some of it was cheesecloth or gauze. Psychic spoon bending can be done by any trained conjurer with misdirection or a spoon weakened in advance.

And yet the orb glows. On the opinion markets at Morfi, where people put money behind what they believe, "Yes" leads at 82% consensus and "No" trails at 18%. That's the crowd's conviction, not a headcount, built by 21 traders who have put $61,976 behind their hunches. The market lets you back supernatural reality, illusion and fraud, or misunderstood natural phenomena. In a straight fight between believing and doubting, believing is ahead, a hundred years of debunking notwithstanding.

This is opinion from behind the velvet curtain. I don't think the crowd has lost its mind. I think it voted for wonder. Look at what the scientists themselves admit: researchers writing in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describe how stage magicians manipulate attention and awareness so well that neuroscientists borrow their tricks to study perception. If a card trick can fool the most sophisticated organ in the known universe, then something worth calling magic is happening, even if it lives in your skull and not in the stars. The crowd may be backing "Yes" for the wrong reason and still be onto something. But a fortune teller should own her omens, so here's mine: ask the crowd to bend a spoon and the spoon stays straight.

What to watch next: this market is barely a day old. If the skeptics wake up and bring their cheesecloth evidence, "No" could close the gap fast, and I'll be watching to see whether 'misunderstood natural phenomena' gets enough backers to split the believers. The cards are shuffled but nobody has dealt the final hand. Join the market on Morfi, put your conviction where your crystal ball is, and show the orb which way you lean.