James Randi has passed away, aged 92. I remember seeing his "Secrets of the Psychics" PBS Nova special as a teenager. It had a profound impact on my and my journey to becoming a scientist. Randi taught us all that the easiest person to fool is ourselves. He gave no quarter to anyone espousing mumbo-jumbo, regardless of the number of kinds of degrees they had. He even held that scientists are often most easily tricked by charlatanry. As scientists we can expect the universe to be honest with us (even if it doesn't always show us all its secrets), but we tend to operate on the assumption that our colleagues are behaving honestly—something that is true, for the most part. But we aren't necessarily more gifted than anyone else when it comes to spotting fakers and tricksters. Watch Randi at his best, showing us how we fool ourselves with horoscopes:
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Martin d brazeauPalaeontologist, fieldworker, sometimes phylogenetic programmer. Transplanted Canadian in UK. All views are my own. How to pronounce my name? Rhymes with "bureau" or "chateau". He/him/his. Archives
December 2022
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