How can you post this “takedown” of the recently deceased Randi? If the author held these feelings so strongly, he could have published them while Randi was still alive and able to defend himself. Comparing Randi to Joseph McCarthy is really low.
This is really bad.
I never saw Randi as a pure skeptic, but someone who debunked charlatans. I understand how Randi’s work caused frustration for the author of this article in regards to it dampening academic research into woo-like concepts, but fraudsters were literally economically, and physically, causing harm to those they duped.
Yes, at the end of the day Randi proves to be an imperfect human. However, his work to expose scammers for what they really are, and teach others how to guard themselves from those scammers, is an important good that shouldn’t go un-celebrated.
As I understand it this has been a major issue in some areas of research, in that studies showing no effect or an effect which contradict the hypothesis disproportionately go missing.
Ben Goldacre and presumably many others have written on the subject.
edit: made words more better
Yes. This! It is much easier to be an atheist than an actual agnostic. One avoids an infinity of questions by being an atheist (or theist).
And, as noted elsewhere, Randi was no scientist, only a trained magician, very sure that woo was bullshit, and willing to challenge it as such, even when it was not fun. As a bonus, his fundamental position was completely falsifiable, even if you didn’t want to accept his terms to prove him wrong.
And for the BBS crew, thanks for airing the hatchet-work in a place where it will get a rigorous examination, before it appears on say, CNN. Or one of the Murdoch orifices.
That may be somewhat trueish for new crazy stuff. Researching ESP is just flogging a dead horse.
Like staring at goats amirite.
I think its reasonable to to be critical. No one should ever be put on a pedestal, and thus we should learn just as much from the flaws of our heroes as we should their successes. I’d be okay with that. But if someone is going to make definitives about someone’s life work, then make them have a point. Am I going to blame an old man near the end of his life for not being 100% up on the latest covid science, or fully understanding global climate change (when even very good sci-comm people make mistakes?) Nope. Am I going to think that someone should be more polite when dealing with those who are willing to play with other people’s lives? No. Randi had his targets, and yes he was a bulldog, but he was only human. Did Randi also want to see proof? Everyone I’ve ever heard comment on that fact has a first hand account of Randi wishing that one of them would at least have a new trick if not real powers. So yeah, after a lifetime of people baldly lying to his face I guess I’d be cranky too.
Are there problems in the skeptical community? Yes. Does it suffer from human biases and personalities and power plays? Seems very much yes. Are those criticisms? Yes, but we can also do better. We can make sure that we don’t take the words of one old white man at face value. We can all do better, because we all need to do better.
So am I kinda grumpy that this article took the tone it did? yeah. But from what I’ve heard of Randi, he didn’t care for tone. He would have responded to the facts as they were and probably responded with “if you don’t like it, do it better yourself” Which I kinda think is the lesson he spent his life trying to teach people.
You appear to be making the assumption that if someone chooses to do research within parapsychology, they’re automatically promoting an idea (which you don’t like), and therefore they shouldn’t be allowed to do that research, and/or they’re deliberately misrepresenting the data and the science.
Frankly I am also baffled by people saying that as research done so far hasn’t shown anything, there’s no reason to keep looking into these topics as they’re obviously fake. Wow really? Even with advances in technology and science and research methods…never research these things. The bias is patently obvious here.
So this is just another “god of the gaps” argument - you define observable effects we can’t explain yet as “magic”. What’s wrong with the term for observable effects we can’t explain that’s already used in the scientific community - “unknown”? It’s more accurate, by far.
Yup, gotta fire up the old grant application machine to restart that valuable research on alchemy, phrenology, astrology, lysenkoism, spontaneous generation, the humors, phlogiston, lamarckism, telegony, luminiferous aether, flood geology, chariots of the gods, and of course numerology. There’s gold in them thar hills I tells ya!
Hey, to be fair that goat DID die. Eventually.
Yes. In the real world, the two are inextricably linked.
No “allowed” about it. They’re of course free to do it if they wish. But they shouldn’t, and they should be prepared for justified opprobrium if they do.
In the vast majority of cases about which most of us are concerned in the current thread, this is in fact the case.
Yes, really.
You can pour all the effort you want into researching, with all the advances in technology and science and research methods at our disposal in the 21st century, how the person in the next room can know what card I’m looking at. This is absolutely worth looking into, once it has been established that the person in the next room does in fact reliably know what card I’m looking at.
The problem with ESP research right now is that we can’t reliably demonstrate the effects that are to be studied (which doesn’t require advanced research methods; it can be established very easily whether the person in the other room knows what card I’m looking at, with better accuracy than just guessing – or at any rate we can make it arbitrarily improbable that the person in the other room is just incredibly lucky at guessing), and haven’t been able to do that for some considerable time, in spite of concerted efforts to the contrary. To many reasonable people this would suggest that perhaps the effects don’t actually exist in the first place.
I know this isn’t really to the point of your comment but I think it’s a quite interesting thing: There is in fact something skeptics could do about it - and they do. They dont let you carry on gambling.
There is no organisation more skeptical when it comes to games of chance than casinos and if you win more than they think is reasonable, they won’t let you keep the money.
See for example:
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2016/1093.html
and the UKSC appeal:
AFAIK the problems with Randi are do with his libertarianism and soliciting sex or phone sex from underage boys…
okok, flogging a dead goat 
That’s a nice straw man you’ve built there, @poiman. One where skeptics don’t seek scientific evidence but rather just rubbish tash they don’t like and are anti-change and hate any mention of the “the weird, the occult, the esoteric”.
Were it true then you might have a point. However, the vast majoirty of skeptics love weird, esoteric stuff but just don’t feel the need to cloak it in supernatural explanations. They would rather look to science to explain such phenomena. They don’t criticise the weird, just weak approaches to investigating it.
I get it, but the examples that I’ve heard of where casinos stopped individuals from gambling all involved known exploits to card games (either card counting or something like the exploit in the case you linked to) or, in one unusual case, taking advantage of a code bug in slot machine software. I’ve not heard of anyone being banned from playing the roulette wheel or other games that are truly random, although I have no doubt that you’re correct that a casino would try to stop the person from keeping their winnings if they suspected that cheating occurred. They’d just have a much harder case for a game like roulette, and if they somehow won by legally proving that the person was clairvoyant then thats would surely provide some evidence for the anti-Randi crowd.
A truly clairvoyant person would be able to foresee that they’d get into trouble with the casino for winning too much at roulette, and structure their play in a way that avoids that trouble in the first place – or concentrate on horse races or the stock market instead.
