An unedited version of this article by Mitch Horowitz is linked below.
Scourge of psychics James Randi was no skeptic; our culture is poorer as a result
He was to skepticism what Senator Joseph McCarthy was to anticommunism — a showman, a bully, and, ultimately, the very thing he claimed to fight against: a fraud.
in the early 1970s, the MacArthur-winning Randi announced his intention of exposing phony faith healers and grifter psychics
making it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media. Indeed, Randi ultimately cheapened an important debate over how or whether extra-physical mentality can be studied under scientifically rigorous conditions and evaluated by serious people.
between the 1930s and 1960s, Duke University housed a highly regarded center for the study of ESP, founded by researchers J.B. and Louisa Rhine.
many college textbooks brand ESP research a pseudoscience, often citing Randi's work as the source of that opinion, so the topic is shunned by most academics and journalists who cover them.
Randi made his name, and influenced today's professional skeptics, by smearing the work of serious researchers, such as Rhine, who, in founding the original parapsychological lab at Duke with his wife and co-researcher Louisa, labored intensively — and in a scientifically conservative manner that reverse-mirrored Randi's work—to devise research protocols for testing psychical phenomena.
when Rhine's lab opened, it was standard practice in the behavioral and life sciences to discount experiments with null or negative results. But Rhine was one of the first academic researchers to recognize this common practice as a problem, and then to explicitly reject it. By 1940, with the publication of Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, Rhine's lab took a leading role in reporting all results, positive and negative, ahead of the curve of other researchers.
Another notable contemporary was sociologist Marcello Truzzi — a self-described "constructive skeptic" — who criticized Randi's methods in the paper linked earlier. Truzzi coined the maxim popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
When criticizing the parapsychological research of University of Arizona psychology professor Gary E. Schwartz, for example, Randi repeatedly accused the researcher of believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, and taunted him with the Trump-worthy sobriquet "Gullible Gary." Randi showed no compunction about brutalizing reputations and ignoring complexities.
his public rebuttal to Cambridge University biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance" proposes that "memory is inherent in nature." The biologist has written that "morphic fields of social groups connect together members of the group even when they are many miles apart, and provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance. They help provide an explanation for telepathy." To this Randi retorted: "We at JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation] have tested these claims. They fail."
Yet Sheldrake complained that Randi ignored his requests to see the test data. Reporter Will Storr of Britain's The Telegraph followed up with Randi and received a series of dog-ate-my-homework excuses — until the reporter realized that the Amazing Randi was either misleading him about the existence of tests, or was proffering an incredibly byzantine (and inconsistent) backstory that the results "got washed away in a flood." Unbelievable as Randi's responses were, he continued running down the biologist in public. This is what sociologist Truzzi dubbed "pseudoskepticism": rejection absent investigation.
Amid Randi's persistent and questionable media dings, academics began to recoil. John G. Kruth, executive director of the Rhine lab, experienced the chill firsthand in the 1980s. "As the old guard began to age out of the field," he said, "there were very few opportunities for new researchers to study parapsychology … younger students typically had to travel abroad or design their own study programs."
"To date, Randi's million-dollar prize has not been awarded, but according to Chris Carter, author of Parapsychology and the Skeptics, Randi backs off from any serious challenge. 'I always have an out,' he has been quoted as saying."
So I asked him how a decision was made, was there a committee and who was on it? …He replied, "If someone claims they can fly by flapping their arms, the results don't need any 'decision.' What 'committee'? Why would a committee be required? I don't understand the question."
