Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Wizardly Wednesday gets skeptical


Here's the Amazing Randi, one of the rare real-world examples of a Wizard of Science.

9 comments:

  1. If I went to one of his lectures, I'd definitely try to hit him before he could get a spell off.

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  2. Randi Rocks! Totally bested the evil cleric Popoff!

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    1. Does he actually have any levels in cleric? I thought he was just an old-school thief.

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  3. The Recursion King10:20 AM

    A wizard of science? Not really. Just because he can pull a rabbit out of a hat has skewed his mind into only one way of thinking: that all mysteries are misdirection and trickery. His million dollar challenge is the greatest example of the flaw in his thinking: if any psychic could produce phenomena at will and thereby 'prove' it, it would instantly become the domain of study (and therefore scientific) and so be explained away ... the prize would still stand. He knows this, of course and he knows how (for example) prophetic dreams arrive unbidden. So he's pulling one further stunt, one final trick for the public, one he thinks nobody can see through.

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    1. Nope, the prize doesn't work that way: "the protocol is never altered once the applicant agrees to it. In fact, we ask the applicant to design the test." http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html

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    2. The Recursion King9:48 AM

      Don't be daft, if the applicant designed the task it would have been passed every time. Think about it. The applicant does not control the test at all, for there would be no point in that and it would hardly be considered 'scientific' if that were the case. The truth is that James Randi has an agenda: he wishes to rid the world of what he sees as 'paranormal nonsense' and wishes to 'hold media organizations accountable for promoting dangerous nonsense'. In other words, he's not actually interested in the truth, however strange and mysterious it turns out to be.

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  4. Anonymous6:54 PM

    Debunkers like the Amazing Randi and Michael Shermer are pseudo-skeptics. They're just as mentally inflexible and dogmatic as any religious fundamentalist.

    I've also noticed that these types also tend to misappropriate and fetishize the term "science". Science is a method of discovering and interpreting data, not a belief system with Michale Shermer as pope.

    Here's a link that I came across that expresses my opinions of professional "skeptics" pretty well.

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  5. Anonymous6:56 PM

    HERE's the link I meant to include on the previous post

    http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=143832

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  6. LOL, delightful!

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