General Musing

Recently I got into a discussion about astrology and was told that it was obvious that I’d never had a good astrological reading. I have difficulty dealing with people who choose to believe in pseudoscience, and have much in common with James Randi in this respect. Where he and I diverge is in our treatment of these fanatics, I tend to avoid them like the plague. The same holds for the people who suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia, the belief in the power of Friday the thirteenth.

Isaac Asimov writes in his introduction to the book that “[u]nder these circumstances, what crime is greater than that of deliberately misteaching the public about science, of deliberately misleading them, of defrauding them, of feeding and stimulating their ignorance?” Randi goes on to savagely ravage all the purveyors of trickery explaining that he seeks “to prove that ‘psychics’ use trickery by duplicating their wonders by trickery.” I believe that the main issue with this book is not that it is not written with the mainstream in mind, it is that the main stream media is more interested in spouting ridicules fiction and trickery rather than the truth, and the public eats it up. This is probably why politicians do so well.

I’m sure you had a nice day. And if you didn’t read Flim-Flam!

Image source: Amazon