The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's nice to see that Randi is still able to see these people as human beings, rather than charlatans to be disproved. I was a big fan of his back when I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand and preaching Reason as the only god, and I took a sort of smug pleasure in watching him debunk psychics and mystics. But I realize now that that was just another form of dehumanization.
On an unrelated note, I recall an interview where Randi said he never took drugs because he sought to experience "the realest reality." That strikes me as very odd. Surely hallucinations are a part of reality, albeit a highly subjective part. I'm surprised that someone so involved with the paranormal would have no interest in studying the psychedelic experience.
Yeah, I had that problem too. Eventually I realized that I had never changed a single belief because I had been bullied or humiliated out of it. When I have changed my mind about something important, it has generally come through sympathetic conversation or long, slow realization. Often both.
As a rationalist, I had to admit that the be-a-giant-dick school of skepticism did not seem to be very productive, however satisfying I found it personally. Now I try to exercise a lot more compassion. It's hard, but but there's no way I'm going back.
What i have seen of Randi he seems to avoid this and look to educate rather than humiliate. The Penn and Teller show "Bullshit" ended up in a shaming of "fools" for certain episodes in the later series which was unfortunate.
I will say there are definitely people that deserve attacks. These are usually the career* psychics and deceivers who make money off the layman's beliefs; they certainly don't believe themselves.
*TV and large show types
It can never be a movement or a belief system because... it isn't. Skepticism is a practice of question-asking and open-minded interrogation, not a specific set of beliefs. Saying you're skeptical says nothing about what you actually think.
Secondly, when it tries to style itself as a Movement it starts taking on many of the characteristics of the religious ideologies is styles itself against. It becomes about converting the heathens and about demonstrating the superiority of the chosen via the in-your-face dickery you highlight.
It also begins to be subject to all the same socially reinforced cognitive biases that arise in religious, political, and academic orthodoxies and hierarchies. It starts to develop its own orthodoxy, and to only apply skeptical questioning to other peoples' ideas.
Take this for example:
http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/07/periodic-table-of-...
All of those things are not the same. Many of them are ill-defined. That sort of "table" smacks of religious orthodoxy. You can find similar tables and outlines of dangerous heathen beliefs in the literature of any other fundamentalist cult.
I was a big fan of his back when I was reading a lot of Ayn
Rand and preaching Reason as the only god
What triggered that change?
At the risk of sounding critical, I want to know how individuals consciously depart from their reason-driven worldviews to something driven by another agent. Emotion perhaps?
Please elaborate.
Further clinging to the validity of reason over all other experiences is a rigid mental position that prevents the acceptance of the full range of diversity and beauty in the human experience
It is more appropriate to see reason as tool that has uses in specific scenarios. Rather than some sort of metric for ultimate truth.
In fact, if anything, I think Reason ( or reason ) - as in the opposite of emotion and sentiment-driven - is a very good instrument to deal with the problems of the world.
It imbues a dose of balance to our thoughts and actions, both of which are sadly lacking in the highly emotion-driven decision-making of the modern world.
We are as much creatures of emotion now, as we have ever been.
Reason does not inform our decision making, as much as it should.
Pretentious naming is something it has the dubious honor of sharing with something for example Scientology ("but .. we're not a religion, it's all scientifical!" was what they started out with).
There are parallels in everything from geopolitics to literature: If you feel the need to be extra explicit about your name, it's should be a pretty big warning to everyone that there are issues with it.
The problem, of course, is absolutism in any form. In answer to your other question, what triggered the change for me was an interest in Buddhism/Taoism and taking a psychoactive substance (LSD) for the first time. I realized that reason is a tool, not a worldview, and it isn't always the right tool for the job. Specifically, it's often the wrong tool for interacting with other people, because it leads to this mindset where you're always judging everyone. If someone says something you don't agree with, they're no longer an equal. If they're homeless and begging for money, it's because they're lazy, or because of some societal factor. Analyzing people through that lens removes their humanity. Some people choose to live that way, but I no longer do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_C...
It's complicated.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of successful charlatans and frauds out there. But those ones aren't fools. It's those that worry me.
* Breatharians that recommend not eating.
* People that stare into the sun for energy.
* People that recommend 'natural' cures or other inanities rather than science based treatments.
* dowsers that take your money to wave around a stick.
Sure, spoon bending is silly. Going to Mexico to 'cure' your cancer against the advice of your doctor? It happens every day, and it is anything but silly. These are the people he targets, not just the Uri Geller's of the world.
This more reasonable side of the anti-GMO argument tends to get drowned out and dismissed when people see the pseudoscience 'natural' health arguments brought out front and center. It's pretty evident that arguments for restraint for reasons of long-term sustainability take a lot of effort to get any traction, especially when fighting profitability.
All this to say, the GMO debate, like everything in life, is not as simple as most people tend believe. It is something that should be proceeded with caution, but certainly continued. This I think is where I think the almost religious anti-GMO fervor really causes harm, in the same way anti embryonic stem cell research causes harm.
Move fast and break things is a great slogan when the systems you're moving are relatively simple and the consequences of breaking them are relatively minor. Global ecology is an extraordinarily complex system that we don't fully understand, and breaking it can cause real and life threatening damage to the people of the world. Not to mention the fact that reverting negative changes operates on the same time scale as the original negative change. If it happens that GMO breaks shit, you can't just submit a patch and have things working again in a couple hours.
Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not scientifically founded.
Here is a summary report on 10 years, 200 million euros of research in Europe:
"The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies."
ref.: A decade of EU-funded GMO research (2001 - 2010) http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/a_decade_of_eu-f...
Can you give any scientific references to support your "very real" concern?
They also have some very real concerns. It makes it all very complex to weed out who what to listen for and from who. The answer is probably that you should listen to arguments, not persons, and that you should begin with the arguments you find strongest.
(See for example Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma about medicine research.)
GMO might lie in a kind of nexus of overlapping fears; there are definitely others in there, too.
From that point of view it seems like a real luxury that we can now afford to waste brain cycles on stuff like global warming or GMOs. We've gone from worrying about threats that are actually visible NOW - getting hit by a car, getting eaten by a bear - to threats that somebody intuits might conceivably start to harm somebody at some point in the distant future if current trends continue in some specific predicted direction.
It's the social equivalent of an auto-immune disorder.
* "The State of the Science : Most of the evidence for the safety of genetically modified food crops comes from studies that only look at short-term effects … and from information provided by the same companies who sell those seeds." http://www.nymc.edu/sanewman/PDFs/GeneWatch_State_of_the%20S...
* Taleb: ''Wrong to say "the scientific method is based on evidence"; it is based on knowing how to deal with absence of evidence.'' ( https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/528646752124297216 )
* The Physics arXiv Blog: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/genetically-modifi...
* "The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)" http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
1. GeneWatch is an NGO. They don't have any scientific credibility.
2. Taleb is an economist of sorts, he has no scientific publications or credentials in biosciences. Also, twitter is not a very scientific reference.
3. and 4. Blogs and arXiv publications are not peer-reviewed, and they are not generally considered scientific publications. (Of course when an arXiv manuscript is submitted and accepted to a scientific journal, then it will be.)
Also about Taleb, he actually says "I, for my part, resist eating fruits not found in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean" [1], so his level of conservativeness seems to be to avoid any crop & food innovations younger than 1000 years.
[1] Quoted in: http://livepaola.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/nassim-nicholas-ta...
This is my point: In these matters people don't listen to the opinions of the actual scientists, but all kind of activists and preachers. Just like Randi said. You just demonstrated this.
I think it's just politics as usual, it's a way to not be dependent on US techs, just another way to do things differently.
Europe doesn't have the same kind of free speech and democracy too that relies on government image. Europe has more strict and more authoritative rulings, EU doesn't take risks like the US does. In US it's much more loose.
> The politicians just don't listen to the scientists
There's the same problem anywhere you go.
Also, they apparently funded "remote viewers" for intelligence operations.
This was done in part because it was believed that the Russians were doing this, and administrators didn't want a "remove viewing gap." But it was stopped because it was tried and didn't work. If anything the fact that the program was ended is a good sign.
Uri Geller for example did. There are still people today that refuse to accept that he's a fraud.
For those who want to know more about him, there's a recent documentary out: http://anhonestliar.com/wp/
It's a great example to me of how Kickstarter can really work. I was happy to help fund it. They raised circa $100k over the goal, and I'm sure that's because there were a lot of Randi fans like me who were happy to chip in. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/220588101/an-honest-lia...
Stream here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04ndsb3/storyville-201... (UK only but the tech savvy reader may be able to find it elsewhere)
Au contraire, it's the fluffiest of friendly journalism. "Alvarez told the agent he was deeply sorry for the trouble he had caused the real Alvarez — who he believed was dead but turned out to be a teacher’s aide living in the Bronx." but no reaction from the real Alvarez or any description of that trouble, which was considerable.
The asymmetry comes from the fact only skeptics have the tools to demolish beliefs. Believers, by definition, can only cling to them; once they try to test them and are willing to relinquish them, they become skeptics.