“The truth lies in the middle” is a dumb aphorism.
The polarization of politics in the US has exactly one cause:
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It’s laughable to suggest that you can get to the truth by mixing up verifiable facts with bullshit.
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“An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded.”
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Exactly. Given that no reproducible results have ever been available, ESP and other paranormal research is done on faith alone. My proof of that is that someone has to believe the existence of something in order to study it, but belief not based on evidence is faith. Therefore, the “study” is a search for proof of a conclusion already reached, rather than the study of observed phenomena to clarify what the evidence means. That makes it a pseudoscience, by definition.
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I think it is OK in the personal sense of “you are not committing any crimes”, but I don’t think it is possible to study ESP in an intellectually honest fashion.
It reminds me of the legal adage “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table”
ESP doesn’t have the facts on its side. There is no documented evidence of events that need to be explained. And it doesn’t have theory (law) on its side: there is no mechanism for any of the claims that are consistent with everything else we know about biology, physics, and psychology. It’s all pounding the table.
So if you want to go do basic experimental research, go ahead. If you get results that aren’t explainable by known science (by anyone: not just you) then you can start looking for non-traditional explanations. Or if you can find two well supported theories that seem to be in conflict and try to find a theory that bridges them or an experiment where they would provide conflicting predictions. But as soon as you say you are researching ESP, you are presuming an outcome that has no basis in existing knowledge, and you are a fraud. You could be a deluded fraud or a con artist, but you aren’t doing legitimate research.
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Also laughable to think that you can reach a synthesis when one thesis’s advocates – be it American movement conservatives and/or woo peddlers – consistently and demonstrably deal with the other’s in bad faith if not outright fraud. As today’s SCOTUS confirmation shows, the Dem establishment has yet to learn that. Sadly, they’re not alone in their naivete.
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I’ll join the chorus of those who are disappointed that this article was posted to Boingboing. The author completely misunderstands Skepticism. The article contains exactly ZERO evidence; no quotes, no studies, just vague insinuations about being mean. If you have a complaint, show us the fucking evidence.
Yes, Bem supported stricter controls as his career progressed. What Randi demonstrated, was that anytime there was “evidence” of paranormal effect, if you tighten the protocol, the evidence disappears. The advocates of of Spiritualism have had 200 years to show the receipts and all they have produced is credulous self-deception, idiomotor effect, and p-hacking.
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I think what Horowitz is trying to say is that he is really upset that pseudoscientific woo peddlers can’t provide genuine scientifically valid evidence to support their claims. It sounds like he’s blaming James Randi for all the decades of extensive study in laboratories that failed to yield any factual basis for the wild claims of Extra Sensory Perception, ghosts, and “precognition” (I’m guessing that’s supposed to be like in the story The Minority Report, meaning basically foretelling future events), among many other fantastical notions. And so what if Randi was good at providing short, concise, statements that presented well in news reports? Being able to provide “sound bites” does not mean one is not a serious thinker or skeptic, even though Horowitz seems to suggest that with his comparison to “most researchers”.
People who want to believe unsupported claims tend to criticize skeptics. After all, if someone says “prove it” and you cannot, why not just say they’re a big old mean doody-head?
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Seems like this article is a joke, one that I don’t get. In other words, I am skeptical that it even purports to be true.
It certainly is far out of character for boingboing. Have you guys been hacked by Qanon?
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So the study of paranormal phenomena has been damaged by Randi? The damage to the field couldn’t possibly have been caused by the fraudsters he exposed?
This has got to be the bullshit-tiest article I can recall reading on BB in the 20+ years I’ve been visiting BB.
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I was a big fan of Wilson in my younger days. I still consider myself something of a fan, but I’m a lot less sympathetic to his tolerance for woo than I was as a college freshman. I gather from some of the things he wrote later in life that he himself dismissed some of the more outlandish ideas he’d entertained back in the '60s and '70s – I seem to recall him acknowledging, of his belief that he’d been receiving messages from Sirius, that he’d been doing a lot of LSD at the time and no longer believed this was likely to be the case – and I also think a literal reading of some of his work misses the point, that often his point is that the ideas he’s proposing, the patterns he recognizes, are significant because they’re patterns he’s created within his own mind, that the significance of these things is not inherent, it’s created by the human mind.
I also think that he was an apologist for people who really were straight-up crackpots. Wilhelm Reich did not deserve to have his books burned or to be sent to prison, but just because he was mistreated doesn’t mean his claims had merit.
I think Wilson made a category error there. He seemed to believe that, because Reich dealt in areas that were considered taboo, and because he was persecuted for it, that implied that his ideas must have had merit. But b does not follow from a. You can feel sympathy for what Reich was subjected to while still believing that he was delusional; there’s no contradiction between those two things.
As Arthur C Clark said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” I wouldn’t bet against that being true
You know, you probably picked the least relevant of Clarke’s Three Laws to quote in support of the point you’re trying to make.
Clarke’s Three Laws make a similar point about rejecting dogma and accepting that what may seem to be an ironclad law of the universe may turn out to be a misconception. But Clarke was an empiricist. He wouldn’t have rejected ESP or telekinesis if he’d seen solid, reproducible evidence that they existed – but neither would he take their existence on faith.
That’s not a contradiction of Randi’s approach at all; that is Randi’s approach. “Show me reproducible evidence of psychic phenomena in a controlled environment, and I’ll give you a million dollars.”
You can choose to believe that Randi rigged the game if you like, that he set terms that made it impossible for legitimate psychics to demonstrate their abilities. And maybe that’s so. Maybe someday I’ll see somebody demonstrate psychic phenomena under laboratory conditions that will convince me that I’ve been wrong all along and ESP really does exist.
But until I actually see such evidence, I’m going to go with Occam’s Razor and assume that the reason no one’s been able to demonstrate psychic abilities under laboratory conditions is that there’s no such thing as psychic abilities.
That’s empiricism. Be ready to reject dogmas about how the universe works when you’re presented with new information – but don’t assume something is true just because it contradicts those dogmas, either. Believe in evidence. Hypotheses must be tested.
That’s what skepticism is. There are people who use “skeptic” to mean exactly the opposite, to mean being credulous, accepting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories without evidence. I do believe that’s the premise of the article we’re responding to.
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I think it is important to separate out two kinds of scepticism.
- Scepticism against those who falsify evidence
- Scepticism against those spending time thinking about questions, which the bulk of available evidence suggests to be pointless.
The first is certainly valuable and prevents harm, and can be seen across a variety of fields (not only against peddlers of woo, but against Qanon, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the current replication crisis in many social sciences, and so on).
The second, however, seems to me to be much more questionable. If someone decides to dedicate his life to going around the countryside reporting: “Picked up rock A, found no fairies. Picked up rock B, found no fairies. Picked up rock C…”, he would not be doing much harm and maybe even delivering a little bit of value, which is probably more than can be said of (according to my entirely unscientific gut feeling) half of those employed in advertising and more than half in finance. Indeed, by looking in those places where most people no longer bother to look, this fairy researcher would have a non-trivial chance of actually uncovering something important - almost certainly not about fairies, though - just something that the consensus misses.
I do not really remember hearing about Randi prior to this article, but a brief bit of research now seems that he conflated both scepticisms and this article seems to mostly be arguing against the latter, which is okay in my book.
In other words, exposing people for faking evidence for fairies is good. Ridiculing and belittling those people who choose to search for evidence of fairies but do not fake any evidence is just feel-good self-righteousness. Rationally and empirically continuing to investigate unlikely and unpopular phenomena at worst wastes the investigators’ time but hurts no one else.
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but he did NOT say “any random concatenation of science words is an advanced technology”
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This is just not true. All kinds of societal harm can come from promoting nonsense. We see it all the time, from “alternative” medicine to the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon. The attitude you’re advocating can be deadly.
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Phew, what to say that already hasn’t been said. I’ll start with how this article jumps the shark by paragraph three:
He was to skepticism what Senator Joseph McCarthy was to anticommunism
You can stop right there. Because that’s about as big a load of hogwash as I’ve seen in any tirade in the last year, and I’ve read most of what Donnie the Dickweed has posted on his twitter feed. That’s literally the “Hunter Biden is El Chapo and eats little children” of takes about James Randi. It’s a terrible analogy and nonsensical.
I grew up in the 70’s and graduated from high school in the mid-80’s. Peddlers of psychic phenomena were a HUGE industry back then, and you couldn’t turn around without bashing your head on another book about all the great “mysteries of the mind” we were uncovering. ESP, telepathy, ghosts… people threw everything at the wall and hoped it would stick. The Psychic friends hotline was big for a reason, folks, and it wasn’t because it was a lonely hearts club hooking people up for hot dates. We were told about the secrets of Noah’s arc, the Loch Ness monster, bigfoot… and yes, these things are ALL related. All examples of how we “don’t know!” so much about the world around us and inside us.
We ALL wanted to believe in that stuff. Sure we did! Who WOULDN’T want to think “I can control people with my mind; I can levitate; I can read your thoughts; bigfoot is going to rip open my cabin in the woods and impregnate - um, never mind, that’s a more recent thing.” It all sounded wildly interesting, and when researchers started telling us “we only know what 10% of a brain does,” that became “we only use 10% of our brains” and that left 90% of our gray matter to go off acting like idiots.
But unfortunately for the peddlers of the grift, this stuff was researched. To. Death. Millions were spent on these studies. Those first scenes in Ghostbusters were literally based on the Duke program and Rhine’s research, which they funded for decades. And they stopped funding it why? Not because of James Randi. But because there was no evidence the phenomena actually existed, let alone a way to study it. They made (and still make) claims of success, but when others try to repeat their experiments, the success is not repeated (this is important; science not only requires you “prove” your theory, it requires that your proof be replicable; the results coming out of these labs are like the cold fusion results of the 90’s… false).
But research continues. The University of Edinburgh is still a thing and still going strong. There are classes in a West Georgia university. The stuff sticks because people DO want to believe in “magic.” It’s just that, on close examination following rigorous scientific examination, there never turns out to be any real “magic” with these things. The people purporting to be psychics and telepaths always fall back on pseudoscience claims as to why they failed the experiments. “There was no energy stimulus in the deck of cards; I cannot perform clairvoyance to your order.” There have always been skeptics since the earliest days of this research pointing out the fakery, beginning with the SPR back in the 19th century. James Randi wasn’t new.
The problem here is the same one that plagues the GOP and the Q cult. People want to believe in things that are bigger than they are. They want to believe in miracles, in secrets that only they and a few others share. They want to believe in magic. And that’s, actually, a fundamentally wonderful thing about us as a species, that we are always straining to expand our knowledge, to explore the mysteries and secrets of the universe. The problem is when we replace solid, reliable scientific study with dogma, fakery, and lies. When grifters start taking advantage of people’s desires to believe. When money is exchanging hands. When people are taken advantage of and used. Q and Woo are not that different, they only have different focuses and different intents.
Skeptics are important. Skeptics are the ones who promote scientifically rigorous tests. Skeptics keep those who are overly enthusiastic about proving a cherished theory in check. Because setting out to “prove” something you already believe in is a recipe for either getting tricked by clever fraudsters, or deluding yourself into seeing results that don’t actually exist. And that does little to advance our knowledge of reality or provide us with insights into the world.
The day a truly telekinetic person steps forward and reveals their power, I’ll be thrilled. Until then, I remain like James Randi did… a skeptic who will require a high level of proof before you’ve satisfied me that you’ve discovered something.
James Randi wasn’t perfect. As I maintain, no human being has ever been perfect with the soul exception of Fred Rogers. Randi was a curmudgeon, and maybe he didn’t understand climate research. So what? He was an EXPERT at understanding parapsychology and false peddlers of psychic phenomena. And that’s what he did, and what others will continue to do. Because we may want to believe in magic, but no one should use our desires and hopes and dreams to rip us off.
McCarthy set out to attack his political opponents and get his cherished legislation passed by drumming up a false communist threat to the country. He never actually found a single communist, though he accused many, many folks of being one. He was the charlatan in this story, the psychic who believed they knew “THE TRUTH,” and the one who was ultimately outed by skeptics like Margaret Chase Smith who were willing to put their reputations on the line to stop what they viewed as a grave misjustice being inflicted on their country. The person who wrote the article knew exactly what they were doing by associating McCarthy with Randi: attempting to create a false connection in the mind of readers in order to bolster their claims. It’s a moral equivalency fallacy, and only shows that the writer is once again peddling misdirection and fakery when the truth won’t support their claims.
Keep believing in magic, folks. And keep being skeptical. It’s the ONLY way to go through the world.
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Yoga, meditation, acupuncture, chiropractic, and EMDR are all things that have in my lifetime moved from pure fairie woo to scientifically proven as beneficial in some circumstances, even covered by health insurance. There is still plenty of woo in all these fields but the essences have been distilled enough to do repeatable scientific experiments and achieve measurable positive results.
All hail the grounded fairie chasers. And unicorn chasers.
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Interesting choice of topics…
- Yoga and meditation - yes, some proven benefits, but far far smaller than the astral projection woo that is claimed. And I know how far the claims for yoga can go, living as I do in its cradle…
- acupuncture - seriously? Even a study in the Journal of acupuncture and meridian science found that practicioners couldn’t agree on where acupuncture points actually are or how big they are. You’d think that’s foundational. The only way to reconcile those results is to either a) claim that the same human body will react differently based on which acupuncturist is looking at it or b) accept that acupuncture just doesn’t exist in the first place and it’s a whole bunch of hogwash.
- chiropractic - whatever works is found elsewhere. Whatever is unique doesn’t work when studied. Basically it’s a nice massage…
- EMDR - I honestly have never heard of this one, but from what I read, it’s at the best nonspecific stuff that’s poorly studied to begin with.
You know, you’d get somewhere if you stuck with mindfulness or meditation - at least there’s some proven effect there. But those others are still just pure fairie woo.
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The, in my opinion, clear and important difference between “investigating” and “promoting” is exactly what I was trying to argue for in my original post.
Rejecting unsubstantiated claims is valid. Preventing proponents of unsubstantiated claims from trying and trying and trying to substantiate them is not. In other words, “promoting” nonsense by falsifying evidence for it is harmful but “investigating” nonsense you hope to be true is not.
Of course, there are potential short-term risks that even the mere fact of the existence of investigations into nonsense will convince some people of the potential veracity of this nonsense, whereas a zero-tolerance censorship of all such investigations will leave such people blissfully unaware and accepting of the rational consensus. However, I find this problematic for two important reasons:
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The belief that “there are plenty of stupid people in this world who need to be restrained from their own worst instincts, but of course I, my friends, all of the people who agree with me are smart and do not fall into this category” is patronising and conceited. If one accepts that truth is elusive and that the pursuit of truth is more important than whatever set of ideas is currently accepted as most likely, then one must also always accept the possibility that in any disagreement it is they that are in error and not their opponent. To me, being self-sceptical is the heart of scepticism.
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Any self-appointed elite priesthood of truth-determiners and investigation-censors may well start out with their hearts in the right place and even yield some short-term benefits (“Let us minimise the support for anti-vaxxers and Nazis among the naive and simple-minded masses by preemptively shutting down any discussions of these ideas from now and for evermore. Of course, because of this preemptive ban, our future heirs will have to accept the evil of these ideas and continue to enforce this ban on faith alone.”). However, given human nature, the set of taboo ideas will very quickly balloon to include any and all ideas criticising or challenging the power of said priesthood. Historically, this pretty much happens ALL of the time.
Put otherwise, if you want to go fight for the pursuit truth as a rational and empiricist sceptic, you have to go into battle with one hand tied behind your back (and accept that you will lose more frequently than you otherwise would have) while your opponents have full use of both of theirs. Nevertheless, we retain the use of the one hand - we continue to demand evidence and refuse to accept unsubstantiated woo as equally likely to our own (hopefully more substantiated) beliefs.
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All of what you wrote is mostly true. But the argument made in the article was not “we are being stopped from investigating these things we believe in.” Because that’s clearly not the case, research continues and has for two centuries. It was, instead, “we’re not getting financed enough to do this work, and it’s all because of Randi.”
When people start saying they deserve money to finance things that have failed the burden of scientific proof for 200 years, it should be a warning flag. There have been decades of well-funded research that tried to prove the existence of psychic phenomena, and despite all of our hopes and dreams that it would be found… there has been no proof. This is the same conclusion we reached about alchemy and why we stopped funding that research. This is why no reputable university with its head on straight will fund flat-earth research. At some point, in the absence of any evidence for a theory, you move on. But some folks continue to still research those things on their own, and that’s fine. That’s their right, and it’s their money to spend.
Yes, feel free to count those fairies. Just don’t go into it expecting people owe you something to do it, especially if you can’t find them. Randi did not cause this problem. The lack of any actual scientific evidence did, along with the staggering amount of fraud in the parapsychology community. Maybe the author should work first to clean house of the charlatans and grifters before he begins demanding the public pay attention and pony up for his work.
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Not sure of the citation, but I remember someone saying that “science is the exploration of the unknown, not the explanation of the unexplored” when describing dry and wet skepticism. Wet skeptics being those that are willing to discuss ideas that are as you say esoteric vs dry skeptics who shift from burden of proof requirements (reasonable) to harassment.
