The man who destroyed skepticism

[Mausium]

Reposted as per earlier guidance, removed all references to the site and author.

I expect parapsychologists to complain about Randi who blew holes in their claims, but we should be all the more careful about the media we consume in 2020.

We are hit with a barrage of reality-warping “influencers” that run charismatic cults, qanon, etc. Hiding malicious normies behind the veneer of new-age “quirk”.

I’m sure similar attacks would occur with Houdini, just as I wouldn’t ask Alex Jones’ opinions on journalism.

Of course parapsychologists loathe what Randi has done to their reputation. But it is funny that he is the target of Uri Gellar and the like, when they have failed to promote themselves otherwise and will continue to fail to fix their reputation on their lonesome.

Giving someone a fiery epitaph is energy best directed to actually proving the existence of the powers and magic beyond selling media that relies on The Secret based aspirational MLM-style “magic”.

That new-age belief is the core of American government now. Its appeal is known, the effects well studied on the populace. It will be interesting to one day find evidence of anything but manipulation of the populace for power and financial gain.

Until that point it’ll continue to be money and human effort thrown down a well, and please let us know when any of that changes.

Until then focus on… science? and not waiting until someone is dead to get the knives out, because Randi was well able to reply and did in his life. He is no longer stopping the field of parapsychology from proving itself, but I suspect that we will see nothing more now that the old man has stopped holding them back. Just as we have Trump bragging about releasing “the UFO documents” but we have no actual evidence of alien encounters today. The discussion of conspiracy is more useful than proving you have no hand to play.

That said, the “Skeptic movement” died when Elevatorgate showed the NAM to be a group of legitimate scientists and right-wing ideologues with some unsurprising overlap, and may it remain dead. Scientists remain science-ing and have moved to social justice blogging (because you can only argue with creationists so much) and the Dawkins branch have glomped onto Evangelicals to tackle Islam, their true enemy.

[Mausium]

To add on, I think the bigger thing holding parapsychology back in an academic sense is that it has been supplanted by “evo-psych”, modern grants from ideologically driven billionaires are less interested in that staler brand of cold war era paranoia than enforcing a specific brand of gender heirarchy.

If the idea that persons who can literally control reality, read minds, and know the future is unmarketable to every world military, public and private security agency, and corporation that thrives off of knowing what to come, under a strictly free market and unregulated society… sorry. The closest thing come to investment is in outright sham products like “bomb detecting dowsing rods” post-9/11.

There will be plenty of Joe Rogan Experience podcast promotions, as per the earlier Coast to Coast model*. They’ll never be out of some spotlight, but academia has moved on. The grants throughout the decades have been drained, and “research” has moved back to the usual group enlightenment models which rely on the idea of parapsychology but objectively inject NLP/hypnosis to muddy the waters.

I highly suggest the Showtime NXIVM doc, by the way. It’s little new with regards to these groups, but it’s still good to observe overlaps between the “secret knowledge” groups and the authoritarians that dominate the political landscape in this modern age.

*I grew up around parapsychology enthusiasts, at one point I listened to the shows, and it was very entertaining until these people became omnipresent. Not just Reagan seeing celebrity psychics, but persons using the same aspirational MLM tactics to gain followers and “run” governments by. The biggest government proponent of parapsychology that comes to mind is Pravda pushing their government-approved tabloid articles amidst charming local stories about children conjuring fireballs with mind power. But Russian influence is limited to credulous persons who believe in such matters, parapsychology has a definite purpose in mind control but that purpose is the Big Lie that lets all the rest in undigested, no different than Hillary Clinton and the Mole Children (a sweet band name!)

tl;dr- as with cold reading, parapsychology is both fraudulent in its stated claims and very very real in its effects on the populace. It provides for financial and political power over the subjects it is used upon. As with the pseudoskepticism promoted by Dawkins and the like, it is a tool to sideload ideology. It doesn’t exist for its own sake, it would fail to exist (as it holds no independent merits) without being promoted to sell you something. And it will continue to exist in this shell form so long as persons are receptive to its charms, as yet another form of “aspirational” capitalism.

[Anselm]

@Mausium

That said, the “Skeptic movement” died when Elevatorgate showed the NAM to be a group of legitimate scientists and right-wing ideologues with some unsurprising overlap, and may it remain dead.

I don’t think that is actually the case. “Elevatorgate” and a number of similar incidents have demonstrated that, like any reasonably sizeable aggregation of human beings, the “Skeptic movement” contains odious douchebags. While deplorable, this is only to be expected. But it doesn’t detract from the fact that there are many self-professed skeptics who are not “right-wing ideologues”, are doing great work promoting science and critical thinking to the general public, and deserve all the encouragement they can get.

[Mausium]

I don’t think you’re wrong, i was saying that the “skeptic” identity banner under which persons saw themselves unified was rightfully dismantled by a closer look and a pivot away from authorities/authoritarians and a look at how these men behaved even amongst themselves in conferences.

We saw the sexist, colonialist, and predatory sorts tell on themselves by their actions and the “sjws” they broke off from to attack. White male grievance identity was promoted as the infallible logicbro we see in the modern Youtube and podcast redpill set, the IDW, and the other scientists moved back to their science and the “IFLS” crowd further splintered the dazzle into technocratic/futurology cargo culting.

Skepticism as a necessary toolset for life still exists but the unified “skeptic” is dead and may he remain so.

To do the most good, we all have to “kill” our idols in our hearts and focus on the ends, not personality cults.

[inactivist]

@cannibalpeas

Thank you. People seem to use the word “science” to refer to some imagined sort of council of authority when it is, in fact, nothing more than a process .

I like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s simple explanation of the scientific method:

“Do whatever it takes to ensure you do not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is actually false or that something is false which is actually true.”

[mscibing]

@JonS

Tuatara?

Tuatara yes thanks. Learned about them yesterday from Wikipedia U.

[JonS]

Interesting critters. Their skin is … lovely.

Less lovely was watching and listening to one eat a bird.

[cannibalpeas]

Excellent quote. I would also add:

Accept that you already believe things that aren’t true and work to unearth and correct them.

[SheiffFatman]

@NightOwl

Armed with science, such people can dismiss anything that makes them psychologically uncomfortable as nothing but “woo”, “mysticism”, “magical thinking”, etc. – it’s a tool of their peculiar phobia.

But that’s not what happens. Lots of ideas that made people uncomfortable, including many scientists, have gone on to be established scientific theories, once the evidence for them was clear: heliocentrism, Darwinian evolution, continental drift, relativity, quantum mechanics. The last two in particular should prove that there is no idea, no matter how ridiculous on its face, that science will not adopt and embrace if the evidence supports it.

[LDoBe]

The popularity of String Theory proves that science can even embrace theories that have no supporting evidence and don’t make falsifiable predictions either.

(yes I am biased against string theory, thanks for noticing)

[teknocholer]

Dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity is what scientists do. They recognize that there are things we don’t know. That’s why they went into science.

[prooftheory]

While String Theory is studied and sometimes believed by scientists that doesn’t mean that it is science. Science doesn’t “embrace theories”.

[KathyPartdeux]

Is it not testable ever? Or not testable currently?

[prooftheory]

Will String Theory Finally Be Put to the Experimental Test?

[LDoBe]

A lot (all?) of the direct predictions of String Theory would require a cyclotron the diameter of Jupiter’s orbit. We’d have to be pretty close to a class 2 Kardashev civilization before building such a thing would be reasonable to consider. And we’re right now somewhere around a 0.6 Kardashev civ.

So, not testable currently and probably for at least another thousand years.

[SheiffFatman]

So possible in principle, then?

[KathyPartdeux]

I won’t hold off on retirement then.

The only hopes before such would then seem to be finding existing natural phenomena that could be used to test indirectly, wild changes in available measurement instruments or contact with an advanced civilization.

[LDoBe]

That’s about the size of it. String theory is really interesting, but it tends to bring in the anthropic principle and as far as I’m concerned that’s unacceptable.

At best you got: the universe appears to be the way it is to us because we evolved here in a universe that is able to support us. Tautology.

At worst, you get: the universe is the way it is because universes need to be able to support life. Untestable, we only got the one universe to go off of. Also it’s puddle-thinking. We evolved to survive in an inhospitable universe. The universe isn’t meant to accomodate us.

[KathyPartdeux]

You’re forgetting the super strong anthropic principle - the universe exists and is the way it is in order to make Kathy possible.

Apologies to Zaphod.

[teknocholer]

@KathyPartdeux

…the universe exists and is the way it is in order to make Kathy possible.

https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/warty_bliggens_the_toad.html

I seem to be on a Don Marquis kick this evening.