At 12:39 AM 11/9/2009, William Beaty wrote:
If an odd phenomenon needs investigation, then
science is the way to go. But if debunkers claim
to be "investigating" an odd phenomenon, yet
they're secretly certain that the phenomenon
isn't real ...then they're not just debunkers. They're pseudoscientists.
What? The Amazing Randi is a pseudoscientist? What a shock!
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=amazing+randi&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=I3_5SuzRLZGplAfv9bzHDQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCoQqwQwAw#
People who spend their lives "investigating the
paranormal" must think there is value in this.
"Hanging upside down in a straight jacket"?
"Walking among blue-footed boobies"? Sounds appropriate to me!
Investigating deception and the techniques of
deception is fine, investigating self-deception
gets much dicier, because we are, ourselves, selves.
http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-08-26/news/the-demystifying-adventures-of-the-amazing-randi/1
So, psychic takes up Randi's million-dollar
challenge, to identify which envelope a card is in.
"You lose," the announcer says. Who is he? He's a
magician, Banachek. An expert in fooling people,
who has been working with Randi for more than thirty years.
I'm not big on "psychic powers" as such. But I do
know this: a skilled magician would be perfectly
capable of switching one card for another in full
view of an audience. If, indeed, that's how the
trick was done. If you really wanted to test the
psychic, you wouldn't have a magician as the supervisor of the test!
Was the test genuine? Maybe. All I can say is
that there is no proof that it was.. And that's
what Randi actually says about psychic phenomena.
Sometimes. Sometimes he says it's all bogus.
Whichever one fits the illusion he's creating at
the moment. $200,000 a year salary from the Randi
Foundation, and it looks like he's having fun as well. Not bad.
Uri Geller sounds like he's having more fun,
though. Probably making more money, too. Nice quote from Geller:
"Randi is my best unpaid publicist," Geller says
in a phone call from his home in London. "If I
had to get a calculator and see how much a
high-priced Madison Avenue entertainment
publicist would cost, I'd have to say that I got
around $10 million worth of free publicity from skeptics."
Geller speaks with an old-world show-business
charisma not unlike Randi's. Under other
circumstances, the two might have even become
friends, but to Randi, Geller has crossed an
ethical line he never came clean about his tricks.
Geller doesn't see it that way. "Without the
skeptics, I wouldn't be Uri Geller," he says.
"They made me. They created me. They kept the
aura, the legend, the mystery, the mysticism
around Uri Geller. I owe them bouquets of flowers
for keeping my career alive. If they wanted to
finish me off over three decades ago, all they
had to do is not talk about me. They should have shut up."
Randi, of course, has offered to test Geller and
to give him $1 million if he can prove his
claims. But Geller has always declined, saying
anything that would quiet skeptics and by
extension make him less controversial would
hurt his career. "If someone wants to stay in the
business of being a psychic," he says, "they
should simply ignore the skeptics."
I'm not ready yet, but, looking ahead, do you
think I could get Robert Park to denounce my Kitchen Fusion kits?
(Too bad it's not fission, Kitchen Fission would
be a great name. I suppose I could dope the cell
with uranium and look for some extra neutrons.)
