Yes, psychics are often happy to make strong, definite, testable claims about their abilities, especially in advertisements. But when someone actually tries to pin their claims down, they almost invariably start the waffling Alex is talking about. Paranormal claimants are the kings of the ad-hoc explanation.

You can side-step this whole problem by just looking at psychics' results, though. Do they win lotteries? Do they find kidnapped children? Do they tell us what the moons of Neptune look like before we've sent a probe there? They certainly try to do all of those things, but they do not seem to achieve better than chance results.

I mean, every psychic, regardless of their application, knows how their process works. A psychic ability gives them the information. Now, this is an unsatisfactory answer if you don't believe in psychic powers, but otherwise, it's perfectly valid. Suppose that somebody asked how you were able to talk to Aunt Sally when she's on another continent, and you told them you used the telephone. That'd be perfectly satisfactory, even though it's no more enlightening. You could go into technical detail about how the data is transmitted, but you don't need to do so. We can take "I use a telephone" as your explaination for your ability to communicate with Aunt Sally over huge distances. Likewise we can take "it uses psychic powers" as the psychic's answer for how they can receive secret information, without going into any technical detail about how the underlying psychic power does its thing.

The part that gives psychics problems is deciding just what their powers do. If someone wants to know what, exactly, my special long-distance-telephone ability does, I can explain that it lets me communicate with others at a great distance so long as they are awake, standing near their own telephone, and paying attention. And that's something you can objectively test me on, with no understanding of how the phone itself works. My distance-speaking ability can be proven.

Psychics don't have any clue what their ability does. Sometimes, their ability lets them know that the body is next to some water. Sometimes it turns out that it lets them know the environment is wet. Or they're crying. There's water in there somewhere. Or the opposite of water. Or it's the answer on Tuesdays and the opposite of the answer on Thursdays. How do you test them when they're not even sure what their ability does, and it might actually do the opposite of what they tell you it does?

The uncertainty in what their psychic powers do, rather than any uncertainty in how they work, is the issue.

Maybe the test took that into consideration. I don't know, as in grand Internet tradition I didn't read any of the links.

Randi should have had ten married men psychically read by Ms. Putt and then had their wives pick the right description. I don't know if it would have been scientifically valid, but it would have be an atomic laff riot.