>he hates to see them lose, he said. “They’re always rationalizing,” Randi told me as we walked to dinner at the casino steakhouse. “There are always reasons prevailing why they can’t do it. They call it the resilience of the duped. It’s with intense regret that you watch them go down the tubes.”
It's nice to see that Randi is still able to see these people as human beings, rather than charlatans to be disproved. I was a big fan of his back when I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand and preaching Reason as the only god, and I took a sort of smug pleasure in watching him debunk psychics and mystics. But I realize now that that was just another form of dehumanization.
On an unrelated note, I recall an interview where Randi said he never took drugs because he sought to experience "the realest reality." That strikes me as very odd. Surely hallucinations are a part of reality, albeit a highly subjective part. I'm surprised that someone so involved with the paranormal would have no interest in studying the psychedelic experience.
> It's nice to see that Randi is still able to see these people as human beings, rather than charlatans to be disproved. [...] I took a sort of smug pleasure in watching him debunk psychics and mystics. But I realize now that that was just another form of dehumanization.
Yeah, I had that problem too. Eventually I realized that I had never changed a single belief because I had been bullied or humiliated out of it. When I have changed my mind about something important, it has generally come through sympathetic conversation or long, slow realization. Often both.
As a rationalist, I had to admit that the be-a-giant-dick school of skepticism did not seem to be very productive, however satisfying I found it personally. Now I try to exercise a lot more compassion. It's hard, but but there's no way I'm going back.
I agree completely that if you are a rationalist it is a waste of effort to throw someones beliefs back in their face, often they don't truly believe themselves anyway if you have a proper conversation.
What i have seen of Randi he seems to avoid this and look to educate rather than humiliate. The Penn and Teller show "Bullshit" ended up in a shaming of "fools" for certain episodes in the later series which was unfortunate.
I will say there are definitely people that deserve attacks. These are usually the career* psychics and deceivers who make money off the layman's beliefs; they certainly don't believe themselves.
The practice of skepticism -- lower-case S -- is generally a good thing. Skepticism goes off the rails when the S gets capitalized and it tries to style itself as a Movement(tm).
It can never be a movement or a belief system because... it isn't. Skepticism is a practice of question-asking and open-minded interrogation, not a specific set of beliefs. Saying you're skeptical says nothing about what you actually think.
Secondly, when it tries to style itself as a Movement it starts taking on many of the characteristics of the religious ideologies is styles itself against. It becomes about converting the heathens and about demonstrating the superiority of the chosen via the in-your-face dickery you highlight.
It also begins to be subject to all the same socially reinforced cognitive biases that arise in religious, political, and academic orthodoxies and hierarchies. It starts to develop its own orthodoxy, and to only apply skeptical questioning to other peoples' ideas.
All of those things are not the same. Many of them are ill-defined. That sort of "table" smacks of religious orthodoxy. You can find similar tables and outlines of dangerous heathen beliefs in the literature of any other fundamentalist cult.
I was a big fan of his back when I was reading a lot of Ayn
Rand and preaching Reason as the only god
Could you share how you've come to see things differently than through the lens of reason, since then?
What triggered that change?
At the risk of sounding critical, I want to know how individuals consciously depart from their reason-driven worldviews to something driven by another agent. Emotion perhaps?
Getting off topic. But conceptual reasoning is arbitrarily defined based on other experiences and self-refential so not inherently epistimologically valid. To privilege it over other forms of knowledge and human experience in all situations is paradoxical even within a worldview that is based on reason.
Further clinging to the validity of reason over all other experiences is a rigid mental position that prevents the acceptance of the full range of diversity and beauty in the human experience
It is more appropriate to see reason as tool that has uses in specific scenarios. Rather than some sort of metric for ultimate truth.
People frequently mistake their own prejudices and preconceptions for fact, their intellectual habits for reason, and their observations for objective reality. Combine that with a certainty that 'pure reason' leads one to the best possible decisions, and one can become quite foolish while believing oneself to be wise.
He started "Reason" with uppercase R and used verb "preaching", this means that he probably tried to express some sort of irony and he doesn't really consider Ayn Rand's worldview "reason-driven".
I am neither a detractor of Ayn Rand's worldview nor do I think her views are exclusively molded by reason.
In fact, if anything, I think Reason ( or reason ) - as in the opposite of emotion and sentiment-driven - is a very good instrument to deal with the problems of the world.
It imbues a dose of balance to our thoughts and actions, both of which are sadly lacking in the highly emotion-driven decision-making of the modern world.
We are as much creatures of emotion now, as we have ever been.
Reason does not inform our decision making, as much as it should.
I would agree that the average person is too sentiment-driven. Rational thought is unquestionably beneficial in many circumstances. But I take issue with the absolutist position that reason is always the best tool for the job. When I subscribed to that way of thinking, I was more interested in winning the argument than being compassionate. I saw the world in black-and-white terms, and I was proud of it.
The problem, of course, is absolutism in any form. In answer to your other question, what triggered the change for me was an interest in Buddhism/Taoism and taking a psychoactive substance (LSD) for the first time. I realized that reason is a tool, not a worldview, and it isn't always the right tool for the job. Specifically, it's often the wrong tool for interacting with other people, because it leads to this mindset where you're always judging everyone. If someone says something you don't agree with, they're no longer an equal. If they're homeless and begging for money, it's because they're lazy, or because of some societal factor. Analyzing people through that lens removes their humanity. Some people choose to live that way, but I no longer do.
Pretentious naming is something it has the dubious honor of sharing with something for example Scientology ("but .. we're not a religion, it's all scientifical!" was what they started out with).
There are parallels in everything from geopolitics to literature: If you feel the need to be extra explicit about your name, it's should be a pretty big warning to everyone that there are issues with it.
I like Randi and I went to see his presentation when he came to my college campus years ago. I've never felt in much danger from the types of spoon-benders and various charlatans he targets, though. Maybe I'm just naive, but somehow I can't imagine those types of folks gaining an appreciable number of followers, even if never formally debunked.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of successful charlatans and frauds out there. But those ones aren't fools. It's those that worry me.
Part of the reason these folks aren't popular these days is because of Randi. There was a giant wave of paranormal enthusiasm in the 1970s. Skepticism and debunking are the vaccine that helps keep the disease from becoming an epidemic.
GMO food is effectively forbidden in Europe, even though the scientific consensus is that GMO crops are no more dangerous than non-GMO crops. The politicians just don't listen to the scientists.
While I agree that GMO crops are no more dangerous from a human health perspective, there is a very real concern that the rapid introduction of entirely new varieties of crop, that under cultivation would take hundreds or thousands of years to develop and introduce, can have negative and unforeseen ecological effects.
This more reasonable side of the anti-GMO argument tends to get drowned out and dismissed when people see the pseudoscience 'natural' health arguments brought out front and center. It's pretty evident that arguments for restraint for reasons of long-term sustainability take a lot of effort to get any traction, especially when fighting profitability.
All this to say, the GMO debate, like everything in life, is not as simple as most people tend believe. It is something that should be proceeded with caution, but certainly continued. This I think is where I think the almost religious anti-GMO fervor really causes harm, in the same way anti embryonic stem cell research causes harm.
Move fast and break things is a great slogan when the systems you're moving are relatively simple and the consequences of breaking them are relatively minor. Global ecology is an extraordinarily complex system that we don't fully understand, and breaking it can cause real and life threatening damage to the people of the world. Not to mention the fact that reverting negative changes operates on the same time scale as the original negative change. If it happens that GMO breaks shit, you can't just submit a patch and have things working again in a couple hours.
Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not scientifically founded.
Here is a summary report on 10 years, 200 million euros of research in Europe:
"The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies."
> Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not scientifically founded.
They also have some very real concerns. It makes it all very complex to weed out who what to listen for and from who. The answer is probably that you should listen to arguments, not persons, and that you should begin with the arguments you find strongest.
(See for example Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma about medicine research.)
When I see good people getting energized over something like GMO, I just feel kind of disappointed that that energy isn't going to a cause worth supporting. The fear of eating tainted food seems to be a sort of primal fear or archetype and I think the GMO issue taps directly into this. True, the concerns around GMO mostly involve things like remote ecological ramifications, not literal poisoning; but the fact that GMO is in the food supply (or could be) seems to raise the emotional temperature 100x. At any given time, there are people suffering because they can't afford to eat any food -- that concerns me more than the risks from GMO.
GMO might lie in a kind of nexus of overlapping fears; there are definitely others in there, too.
In my more cynical moments I think there is some sort of Conservation of Worry law. Human society is designed by evolution to be worried about stuff. If you render irrelevant all the more traditional threats such as starving or getting eaten by a lion, people just focus the same amount of worry on ever-smaller threats.
From that point of view it seems like a real luxury that we can now afford to waste brain cycles on stuff like global warming or GMOs. We've gone from worrying about threats that are actually visible NOW - getting hit by a car, getting eaten by a bear - to threats that somebody intuits might conceivably start to harm somebody at some point in the distant future if current trends continue in some specific predicted direction.
It's the social equivalent of an auto-immune disorder.
>even though the scientific consensus is that GMO crops are no more dangerous than non-GMO crops.
* "The State of the Science :
Most of the evidence for the safety of genetically modified food crops comes from studies that only look at short-term effects … and from information provided by the same
companies who sell those seeds."
http://www.nymc.edu/sanewman/PDFs/GeneWatch_State_of_the%20S...
1. GeneWatch is an NGO. They don't have any scientific credibility.
2. Taleb is an economist of sorts, he has no scientific publications or credentials in biosciences. Also, twitter is not a very scientific reference.
3. and 4. Blogs and arXiv publications are not peer-reviewed, and they are not generally considered scientific publications. (Of course when an arXiv manuscript is submitted and accepted to a scientific journal, then it will be.)
Also about Taleb, he actually says "I, for my part, resist eating fruits not found in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean" [1], so his level of conservativeness seems to be to avoid any crop & food innovations younger than 1000 years.
This is my point: In these matters people don't listen to the opinions of the actual scientists, but all kind of activists and preachers. Just like Randi said. You just demonstrated this.
I think it's more complex than that. Europe don't want to be a victim of lobbies and predatory companies, and doesn't want to try to regulate something that's complex enough already.
I think it's just politics as usual, it's a way to not be dependent on US techs, just another way to do things differently.
Europe doesn't have the same kind of free speech and democracy too that relies on government image. Europe has more strict and more authoritative rulings, EU doesn't take risks like the US does. In US it's much more loose.
> The politicians just don't listen to the scientists
* Psychics that tell parents their missing child is in heaven and happy. Do I have to enumerate the problems this has?
* Breatharians that recommend not eating.
* People that stare into the sun for energy.
* People that recommend 'natural' cures or other inanities rather than science based treatments.
* dowsers that take your money to wave around a stick.
Sure, spoon bending is silly. Going to Mexico to 'cure' your cancer against the advice of your doctor? It happens every day, and it is anything but silly. These are the people he targets, not just the Uri Geller's of the world.
It would be nice to believe that, but from time to time they have had the ear of Congress. There were, apparently, believers among them who thought we could build 'thought shields' against missiles.
Also, they apparently funded "remote viewers" for intelligence operations.
>they apparently funded "remote viewers" for intelligence operations.
This was done in part because it was believed that the Russians were doing this, and administrators didn't want a "remove viewing gap." But it was stopped because it was tried and didn't work. If anything the fact that the program was ended is a good sign.
Actually it was Nancy Reagan who employed the astrologer. Supposedly he approved travel dates for Reagan. I've always believed, though I can't prove it, that his assassination attempt so rattled his wife that the President went along with the whole astrologer recommendations to humor her.
Interesting. Are these people so confident that they are willing to risk they lives searching for mines or did they somehow done it from a safe distance?
The Iraqi government spent $85m on bogus bomb detectors that were just dowsing rods in a fancy box. Nobody at the interior ministry bothered to do any testing, or even to take the devices apart - they contained no electronics that could possibly have detected anything. Several other governments have purchased similar devices.
I believe 'dowsing for bombs' is a reference to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22380368. In which case the perpetrators sold the kits to governments/agencies i.e. third parties were being exposed to the bombs.
It makes me so happy to see him getting this deserved attention while he's still around to enjoy it. 20-odd years ago I was lucky enough to see him perform and speak and he was indeed amazing.
It's a great example to me of how Kickstarter can really work. I was happy to help fund it. They raised circa $100k over the goal, and I'm sure that's because there were a lot of Randi fans like me who were happy to chip in. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/220588101/an-honest-lia...
I'm surprised they didn't mention it in the article but BBC just released a great doc about Randi. It covers all the same stuff in this article but goes into a lot more detail, showing many of his confrontations with Geller, Popoff, etc.
It's just a reference to the style in which roadside attractions, circus show performers, and fortune tellers are billed. The Amazing Randi was the man's stage name so it comes together for a clever title.
I see the cleverness in the title; I also see that it's most obvious, and literal, interpretation is one of putting down his skepticism. Before reading the article, I thought it was going to be about how James Randi is too skeptical.
Au contraire, it's the fluffiest of friendly journalism. "Alvarez told the agent he was deeply sorry for the trouble he had caused the real Alvarez — who he believed was dead but turned out to be a teacher’s aide living in the Bronx." but no reaction from the real Alvarez or any description of that trouble, which was considerable.
That's a known failure mode of the human mind. It's common to everyone.
The asymmetry comes from the fact only skeptics have the tools to demolish beliefs. Believers, by definition, can only cling to them; once they try to test them and are willing to relinquish them, they become skeptics.
It's nice to see that Randi is still able to see these people as human beings, rather than charlatans to be disproved. I was a big fan of his back when I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand and preaching Reason as the only god, and I took a sort of smug pleasure in watching him debunk psychics and mystics. But I realize now that that was just another form of dehumanization.
On an unrelated note, I recall an interview where Randi said he never took drugs because he sought to experience "the realest reality." That strikes me as very odd. Surely hallucinations are a part of reality, albeit a highly subjective part. I'm surprised that someone so involved with the paranormal would have no interest in studying the psychedelic experience.