I only made it about 1/3 of the way through this before quitting and going to BBS. Looks like I made the right choice. Yet another of the million reasons to love the community here.
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I think it’s perfectly OK to study paranormal stuff like ESP.
And I think it’s OK to be skeptical of ESP as well-- that’s the point of studying it, basically all science should be ‘skeptical’: you test a hypothesis but you shouldn’t do so with the demand that the hypothesis must be true.
The problem he seems to have with Randi is that he made it much harder to study paranormal psychology. But that’s a small price to pay to hamstring con artists.
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Wow — I rarely see posts on BoingBoing get ratio’d so hard.
What a terrible take this is. I get that BoingBoing celebrates the bizarre and I hope we all find lots of fun in cryptids and Roswell and watching They Live, but this … well, I’d call it a hatchet-job, but that implies a lot more substance, so, this whatever it is … is not a Wonderful Thing.
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I do have to admire their ingenuity- making a living off of writing about something you have no evidence exists and has been disproven consistently.
That takes real skill. With that ability you could really make much more money in advertising.
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Careful now, there’s a whole lot of religious commentators you’re getting dangerously close to.
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This is awful. Take it down.
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The article is so bad if it were a comment it would be immediately flagged by the community and deleted by management. Calling James Randi the equivalent of Joseph McCarthy is beyond the pale. The entire article reeks of pent up bile, and feels like an article that has been years in the making just waiting to pounce on James Randi as soon as he died.
Randi inspired many of the current skeptics who the author claims we need. But I suspect the author doesn’t really want professional skeptics who debunk improbable psychic phenomena. You don’t have to look any further than his defense of Rupert Sheldrake’s nonsense to infer that.
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The problem with his problem is that Randi “made it harder to study” by hamstringing the con artists. Con artists, who were previously so significant in the field, are no longer given the benefit of the doubt that they’re acting in good faith, making it harder for them.
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2000 words to say:
Randi “destroyed” skepticism by being too skeptical.
Here’s a nice guy studying gobbledegook that can’t get funded because Randi was mean
Randi was skeptical of some of the more extreme early claims around global warming.
He doesn’t understand the financial statements of Randi’s foundation so there’s something grifty about it.
He has a book of woo coming out
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Mitch Horowitz? Really? Hardly an unbiased source.
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I don’t suppose this article will be pulled, but maybe have someone write the eulogy that James Randi actually deserves, for contrast.
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So I went to the linked article that clarified Randi’s position on Anthropogenic Global Warming, and I may be misreading this but does Randi think global warming is due to the heat created by burning fossil fuels?!
Yes, I’m aware of the massive release of energy – mostly heat – that we’ve produced by exhuming and burning oil, natural gas, and coal. We’ve also attacked forests and turned them into fuel by converting them into paper at further energy expense, paper that is also burned, in turn.
I hope I’m misreading this, I’ve never actually conceived of the idea that folks think global warming is due to the heat directly produced when you burn things.
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While we don’t have an issue with disagreeing with the article (as should be evident by the comments that remain), we’re not going to allow for direct insults to the site, this author, or other commenters to stand here any more than we would in any other topic.
If you disagree with the take of the article, fine, have at it. If you can’t do that respectfully, post elsewhere.
Thanks.
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Turns out, not an unreasonable thing to study – but your (likely) intuition that the carbon dioxide has a massively greater effect is correct. Here’s a relevant research article.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2015GL063514
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I love this article. I see it all the time – the tendency to “rage against woo” creates lazy thinking. Anything that smells like woo is woo, no trial given. Further, by seeking to shame-change believers, anti-woo crusaders actually calcify opposition to science. We should always be open to evidence, celebrate the weirdos and not let ourselves accept the groupthink. That’s how science creates change. Science doesn’t, however, have a message that people should adhere to.
These days, no one even takes a moment to consider the weird, the occult, the esoteric – people are scared and bark at it like dogs bark at strangers. Oh, magic exists, my dear people. It just isn’t what you think it is. But you’ll never know what it is until you stop defining it as “that which doesn’t exist”
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Randi acknowledges in the article that carbon emissions from all that burning are the main issue under discussion. If Randi’s to be faulted for anything he says, it’s that he’s taking a bit of a techno-utopian “humans are smart and we’ll think our way out of this manageable problem” approach. That is not the same thing as denying the existence of the problem of global warming, as the author disingenuously implies.
That’s done here all the time – Pesco’s articles on cryptids, other posts on RAW, Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, etc. Most of the readers take it all as amusing diversions and historical oddities rather than scientific facts, and the Authors who post about it aren’t using it as an occasion to smear anyone who doesn’t take it seriously as this guest author did.
That’s as rigorous and well-supported a statement as any that the “serious” researchers of the paranormal make.
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I think you forgot to mention Galileo.
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Still trying to figure out how this is a bad thing. If you can’t even demonstrate that a purported phenomenon exists then doesn’t it make sense that there ought to be a high bar for securing university funding to study it?
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Okay, well, magic “practioners” are themselves quite guilty of conveniently redefining what they mean by “magic” over and over until it’s logically impossible to even test.
You can’t claim “something exists” then when asked how to test for its existence throw up your hands and tell us “you have to believe it exists! Asking for proof kills it. Why are you so mean to me?”
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