From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Nov 07 1997 - 03:59:26 MST
At 10:45 AM 11/6/97 -0500, Estacado wrote:
> Before you get hypnotized by pseudoscience
Hypnotised? Didn't you notice the somewhat... sceptical... tone to my post?
>and, in some cases,
>outright lies I would read _Flim Flam_ by James Randi.
Mr Randi is a fun guy, with his heart in the right place (and of course
I've read FLIM FLAM), but while he's an excellent prestidigitator he's
pretty awful at add-ups. My book THE LOTTO EFFECT spends a page or two
pulling apart his feeble attempts to mock a standard parapsychology paper.
He got elementary probabilities wrong. Some time back I found Mr Randi's
email @ and sent him a copy of this passage. He kindly responded, but
ducked and evaded the matter of his errors. In essence, he bitched and
moaned at my boringly insisting on talking about *that* kind of minor
detail, since his great achievement had been to show that Geller (Geller?
who's talking about Geller here?!) was a scamster. Wow! Perhaps he also
proved that the earth is not flat. I was not impressed.
Damien Broderick
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