Author: MoZarD
Company: LiteOS

Latest Skepticality podcast "Ian Rowland"
Ian I see that your  "Skeptism is a waste of time" essay
.ianrowland.com/TheVault/JohnEdward1.html is covered extensively in the latest Skepticality  063 podcast essay. http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticality/063_skepticality.mp3

Which is a remarkable coincidence as I just been analysing your essay for the last  couple of days

Your ideas were surprising so I checked the net for something discussing them then I found this new  podcast. It  doesn't actually mention your page, but covers the same issues. 

Ian you've been doing a great service, then you write something like that. The argument is like saying "most people will always say 'it's OK to beat your wife', So we shouldn't do anything about it ... and by the way I have prosecuted 15 wife beaters this year"

or saying "politicians will always be corrupt, so we should do nothing. 

On close analysis I think your arguments don't stack up. I think you should look again. There is one good argument you were maybe thinking of, but didn't make is "there is no point in being Anti-. Stop banging on : 'You're wrong,  You're wrong ! again & again .. " being Anti doesn't make people see the light; rather it switches them  off."

True, but leading by positive example as you do and education :"Look proper science is cool ! We test your medicines properly and we save lives, so people are living longer and longer as opposed to the countries where people go to the voodoo man. Man look at how much money we save by not buying quack medicines." does reach people. 

Re - the  break-in at you office. Unfortunately we can't do anything about it.  As of course the police have been around for 300 years and we still have thieves and robbers. So last month the police were  disbanded. Just like you say in your article Skeptics should be.

Skeptics need to be around constantly just like the police. 
"Damm I  would have got away with it, if hadn't been for you pesky skeptics !"
Look how ever week Sooby Doo gave kids the scam busting message as the ghosts turned out never to be ghosts.
 
"Can't be Rational with the Irrational"
Barry have you heard of this Ian Rowland  guy. Seems like a great guy he's doing great work educating the public about junk thinking, then below he writes  the Skeptic movement is a waste of time . He's a skeptic who demonstrates, that he is a better medium than the mediums. and wrote the book Cold Reading as advertised in the skeptics magazine. He makes some good points in his golden rules. But ultimately his argument doesn't stand up. He generalises using the word "people", instead of "some people", or "many people",  as if the case is lost. What counts is the belief system of key people like law-makers.

"Skepticism  it's pointless. Everything I learned in those 20 years can be distilled into a few golden rules. These should be carved in stone, and that stone should be dropped on the head of anyone who thinks they can successfully campaign against the spread of pseudo-science and psychic fables".
I disagree with him straight away. The glass is more than half full not half empty. In the UK and Oz people are pretty sceptical. Like how many people would say everything the government says. When a paranormal show gets a UK audience of 6 million the newspapers would bang on about it. But that is still only 10% of the population. So the non-skeptic voice is bigger than the numbers. Maybe the healthly skeptic number 35% or 40%. If no one made a fuss there would be less self education and maybe numbers would be 10% lower. 

The skeptics do do a valuable service. When  that new wonder potion comes out the journalists know to ring that guy from the skeptics. 

Without the skeptical movement the Big Herbal Remedy corporation would get  a much bigger slice of NHS budget spent on their product. Meaning less money spent on proven treatments ultimately meaning more deaths. So skeptics save lives.
GR1: for most people, most of the time, rationality isn't very high on the agenda.
Everyone uses rationality all the time. They rationalise they should buy lottery tickets cos they think they stand a good chance of winning. It's their standard of thinking  and maths that's the problem.
GR2: we teach many subjects in our schools, but not how to think and reason well. Therefore many people cannot, and cannot realise they cannot. And nobody thanks you for telling them. even if we don't teach there is quite a high level of skeptical awareness in the culture. People do think they are being rational.
GR3: people adopt the most convenient set of beliefs consistent with their needs, wants and fears at the time. If 'psychic ability' fits the need, it gets integrated with the belief set.
He mean's some people, but it's the key people that matter.
GR4: "you can't rationally argue out what wasn't rationally argued in." This is a quote, I believe from George Bernard Shaw but I am not certain. 
GR5: 'Psychic powers are real' is a media-friendly message and plays well. 'Psychic powers are about as real as the Pope's wife's crack habit' is not and does not. Yes, but how bigger would be the effect without Skeptics to shout "fake" ? It can be taken as a publicity opportunity for Skepticism. What about counter shows like Penn & Teller's Bullshit or Mythbusters or indeed Geller getting caught on his own show ?

The problem is clearly not with Skeptics, but with the morals of media professionals. The public  already  know "don't believe what you read in the newspaper"  The recent BBC scandals have shown that  TV  has a culture of disrespect for truth and honest methos.  I was astounded last year when I asked Richard Wiseman about Braniac fakery and he refused to criticise. Seemingly working with media has imbibed him with the philosophy " but that's how TV works" 

GR6: It is nonsense to say psychic powers 'are' or 'are not' real. They are as real as you want them to be. Believers slice the evidence one way, skeptics slice it differently. No your "reality" might be different to my "reality", but my reality works when it comes to the testing. In your reality you can walk 100m on hot coal .. OK show me.  Money talks ! The police spend their money chasing real clues not on psychics.
Add it all up, and we can safely say: belief in psychic stuff has always been with us, and is likely to flourish in the fertile soil of uncritical mass media attention. There is no way of combatting this.
Tosh, Rowland himself participates in education. And we can say that it low educated countries real money is spent on psychic stuff. So it not a black and white issue where it's on or off, but we can push up the the influence of rationalism

He  misunderstandsb and slags off CSICOP, but doesn't talk about the success of JREF   CSICOP and porcine aeronautics…
Case in point. 1976 saw the birth of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. A short, snappy, memorable title if I'm a duck's backside. uh ??? joke for "Psychic Policeman" surely ? name now is CSI so not to turn scientists off cos of the word paranormal 
........
........ The Golden Rules remain, fixed and untarnished, defying every voice of sanity, reason or scepticism to so much as scratch them.
So what?
Does this matter? Many think not. I've encountered people and media professionals aplenty who think it's all good, harmless fun. The strongest case skeptics have could be termed the 'social contamination' argument. It goes something like this: pseudo-science and the psychic circus spread junk thinking. We live in a democracy. More junk thinking equals dumber collective decisions equals a diminished quality of life and quality of society.
This is not the kind of rallying cry that gets the adrenalin pumping. 
Off the top of my head I can't think of an event in a western country where "psychic circus", has costs lives or millions of dollars. Except for the case of the little Nigerian boy who was ritually killed cos the spirits said so. A hypothetical case, junk science gets popular then your father can't have the chemotherapy he needs ,cos the  government has spent 500 million, on the new homeopathy wing .. he dies

In my experience, most people simply feel there are more important things to worry about. In any case, even if the skeptics have a good cause and good arguments, it's a free country and people will carry on believing. The Golden Rules ensure it.

Here he uses "most people" will always believe. What a crap argument would you say "most people will always beat their wives, so we should do nothing about it" ? Also like I said before it's the key people that matter. Skeptics organisations have succeeded in ensuring government money is not spent on Junk science etc. And Junk science costs lives.

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