From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Thu Nov 06 1997 - 21:57:47 MST
> I have seen Randi in person. He is very intelligent and a great showman.
> His method of debunking, however, is not any more scientific than the psuedo-
> scientists. Most of Randi's debunking logic goes like this:
>
> 1. Someone "demonstrates" something unusual.
> 2. Randi fakes demonstration that looks like the same thing.
> 3. Since Randi's demonstration is fake, he claims he debunked the original
> demonstration.
That's not quite right: (A) Charlatan claims to have some ability, or
that some phenomenon exists. (B) Charlatan performs a demonstration
that he claims proves this phenomenon. (C) Randi arranges to perform
the same demonstration by trickery.
(C) does not prove, nor does Randi claim it proves, that (A) is false,
or that the Charlatan used trickery to perform (B). It /does/ prove,
however, that demonstration (B) is not sufficient proof of claim (A).
Randi is also quite willing to show, in detail, a number of
demonstrations that he is completely incapable of faking. Since
there are many such unfakable demonstrations, and every known
demonstration of psychic phenomena is in the fakable set, that
alone--while not proof--is strong statistical evidence that the
phenomena are in fact faked.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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