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Dale Burnet, Braedon Martin, Emily Gofton and Kyle Hajnal

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1. The topic of James Randi that was most surprising was that as an illusionist himself, later went on to debunk classic pseudoscience. Randi made a career and foundation of skepticism about profound subjects such as faith healing and magicians. Educating others of how certain belief systems can be harmful and easily debunked by questioning and testing their theories.
2. The topic of Covid-19 and the relevance of staying sceptical of treatments. James Randi made a career out of skepticism and criticising the types of treatments pseudoscience would make such as homeopathy and faith healing. The whole world is being affected by covid but only a few deciding that vaccines for example are not an effective treatment can put many lives in jeopardy. Randi used his platform to debunk common homeopathy and anti-vaccine myths because of the danger in beliefs.
3. The most interesting topic to us was Physic surgery because it seems like such an obvious harmful and debunkable treatment that really doesn't provide any benefit except maybe a placebo effect for extreme believers. It is a treatment noticeably motivated by money to “remove” tumours using fake blood and animal organs to simulate a true surgery without any benefit.
4. Skepticism is important especially when it comes to the medical community of pseudoscience. Treatments that can potentially do more harm than good as well as falsely advertise a method of treatment that cannot be proven to actually work.
5. Ideology which can be related to faith healing is the most harmful because it promotes a treatment that can be harmful especially if it is being decided by a parents or guardian, lives can be at risk by choosing faith as a treatment instead of factual science.  People that perform faith healing tend to do so because it is a way of their lifestyle and ideology without questioning it. It is a very socially and culturally influenced belief system. The least harmful pseudoscience belief would be patternicity because it is a natural instinct to want to find more meaning to something that could be meaningless. It is a hopeful way of belief and often does not put lives at risk unlike ideology.
6. Important knowledge that we believe should be passed on is allowing yourself to have different beliefs but questioning what the intentions and system as a whole to determine if it is a harmful belief or not. It is important to research methods especially if they are controversial because the risk can be greater than the outcome.

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Description:

In the Video they talk about Uri Geller who was a self-proclaimed spoon bender, telepath, and remote viewer who feuded with James Randi. Geller was so convincing that he became famous around the world for his “abilities” he was even apart of the US governments remote viewing focused stargate project. James Randi, who was a magician and escape artist, dedicated his life to proving pseudoscience abilities like Geller’s to be fake and raising awareness to deceitful acts like Gellers. Randi was able to indirectly embarrass Geller while he was performing on the Tonight Show with Jonny Carson. When the shows producers reached out to Randi for suggestions on how to prevent any trickery from taking place he told them to use their own props and not to let Geller near them until the show starts. When asked to perform during the show Geller made up excuses to explain why he might not be successful such as, he needs to be in the right mood and the time constraint of the show might make it difficult for him to demonstrate his abilities. By the end of the show Uri Geller did not demonstrate any of his abilities. But It was not enough to expose the telepath as a fraud, and he continued to be guests on shows such as the merv griffin show. James Randi later published a book trying to expose Geller. Their rivalry continued for decades. Geller later commented saying that James Randy was responsible for some of his success saying he was “my most influential and important publicist”.

Connection:

A connection for this video would be appeal to authority because by having Uri Geller on a talk show with a famous host and introducing him as a telepath you are priming the audience to be bias toward believing he is the real deal. Another connection for this video is skepticism and the critical thinking done by the production crew of the tonight show as well as James Randi.

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The Telekinetic Magician Vs. The Skeptic: The Infamous Uri Geller & James Randi Feud

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Description:

This website talks about how James Randi’s hatred of tricking people led to him becoming a “prototype for modern day skeptic magicians”. Randi said that he was inspired to do his work due to an experience he had while he was a teenager, he walked into a church while the preacher was pretending to read the audiences minds but through critical thinking and skepticism he saw through the scam. He said that “seeing people believe it made him angry” and he saw people getting emotionally disturbed because they thought that he really had supernatural abilities. Randi interrupted the performance, walked up on the stage, and told the audience how the preacher was performing the trick. The preacher’s wife called the police and he spent 4 hours in a cell and while he was there, he decided he wanted to eventually have a credible platform to be able to debunk fake fortune tellers and people who stage similar scams.

Connection:

This article shows how religious beliefs, and people in positions of leadership can prevent victims from thinking critically or skeptically about the situation and instead will accept whatever they are told as the truth because why would someone you trust lie to you.

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James Randi hated tricking people. Sure, as The Amazing Randi, he pulled off amazing escape acts and sleight of hand maneuvers faster than you could see - but it was all in service of proving that he wasn't magical in any sense of the word. He hated tricking people so much he made a career out of debunking so-called psychics, faith healers, and fortune tellers of all sorts.

Randi died on Tuesday, at the age of 92, due to "age-related causes," according to the James Randi Educational Foundation.

A prototype for such modern day skeptic magicians as Penn & Teller, Randi was inspired to do his work by walking into a church one day as a teenager. The preacher at the front was performing a trick where he pretended to read the minds of people in the audience. Randi saw through the scam, but told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1987 that seeing people believe it made him angry.

"I saw people there weeping real tears and getting very emotionally disturbed and believing that this man had supernatural powers," he said.

So he walked up on stage, interrupted the performance, and showed the audience the workings of the trick. The preacher's wife called the police, and Randi spent the next four hours in a cell, stewing.

"I made up my mind during the four hours that there would come a day that I would have the prestige, the knowledge, the platform on which to stand to denounce these people, if they were fake," said Randi.

That "if" was an important aspect of his career. Randi didn't live in absolutes, never saying that magic, or faith healing, or fortune telling wasn't real. But rather that its peddlers weren't actually doing any of those things.

He famously went after the so-called psychic Uri Geller, who'd made a name for himself in the 1970s performing "psychokinetic" tricks on TV such as bending metal forks and such. There's an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (where Randi was a frequent guest), where Geller comes on to show his "powers." What Geller didn't know was that Randi had hopped on the phone with the show's props person, and told him how to prepare the props to fumble Geller's tricks. Randi told the story in a 2014 documentary about his life titled, An Honest Liar. What followed was a painfully awkward segment (obviously, stoked a bit by Carson), that ended with Geller giving up, saying he simply didn't "feel strong" that night.

In remembering Randi on Twitter, magician Penn Jillette called him a hero, mentor, and friend.

Another picture from the last day I spent with Randi. I talked to him a couple times after this. My inspiration, my hero, my mentor, my friend. I will talk to him the rest of my life and my memory of him will answer. I didn't absorb enough wisdom, but I absorbed a lot. pic.twitter.com/8oerQO59m9
- Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) October 22, 2020

"I can't do real magic," said Randi in the 1987 Fresh Air interview. "I think there's more magic in the opening of a morning glory than anything I or any charlatans in history has ever done, is doing, or will ever do."

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'Amazing' Escape Artist, Magician, And Skeptic James Randi Dead At 92

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James Randi hated tricking people. Sure, as The Amazing Randi, he pulled off amazing escape acts and sleight of hand maneuvers faster than you could see - but it was all in service of proving that he wasn't magical in any sense of the word.

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Description:

This photo shows a book written by James Randi. In this book he talks about his hatred for faith healers and describes how they use tricks and religion to convince their clients and audience that they have healing powers given to them by god.

Connection:

James Randi used critical thinking and his knowledge from his years as a magician to debunk the faith healers discussed in his book and talked about the how they use religious belief to appeal to their audience and make them more trusting.

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Description

This picture of James Randi is from one of his infamous record-breaking feats. James Randi survived being encased in a block of ice for fifty-five minutes. This picture could have been taken before or after the performance.

Connection

This picture connects to critical thinking and skepticism because it requires to you analyze the image and data to determine if his actions were real or a trick. Why did he encase himself in ice? How did he do it? How could he survive that long in ice? How did he not get hypothermia? These questions and many others are what goes through one’s head upon analyzing this image. You can apply Skepticism to this image to determine how it was possible for him to achieve this feat, not develop hypothermia, and if he was even encased in ice at all. Also, I believe this picture connects to the Unexplained because the tricks to this magic are unknown to the viewer which will enable them to draw logical or illogical conclusions.

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Website description

This is the official James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) website. This website details everything there is you need to know about the JREF. The JREF was founded by James Randi in 1996 to help people understand and combat pseudo-scientific and paranormal claims. The website has information on James Randi’s life, news items referencing James Randi and the JREF, and educational material on critical thinking.

Connection

This website connects to the course content because it has a lot of information about critical thinking and James Randi’s experiences with pseudoscience and the paranormal. The website directly connects with Skepticism because the foundation is geared towards helping people defend themselves against pseudo-scientific and paranormal claims. The website includes many educational materials on critical thinking to help people better understand extraordinary claims and increase their skepticism. I believe this website could also connect to the pseudoscience watchlist Often appeals to emotion and Convinces by faith and belief because someone will be more inclined to read and learn about critical thinking if they had a bad experience with a pseudo-scientific or paranormal claim. Also, someone that has a firm faith or belief will be more inclined to not belief the evidence that appears on this website.

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JREF: James Randi Educational Foundation

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Video Description

This video is a TED talk where James Randi talks about various irrational beliefs. James starts the session by taking a full bottle, thirty-two tablets of Calm Forte which is a homeopathy sleeping pill. Then, he goes on to talk about how magicians depend on people making assumptions to which he is correct as the audience assumed the beard trimmer that he was holding was a microphone and the glasses he was wearing were real when they did not have any lenses. James Randi spends most of the TED talk speaking about paranormal believes focusing the most on mediums. He targets Sylvia Browne intensely. He debunks homeopathy using the sleeping pills he ingested as an example which had no effect on him whatsoever.  James Randi finishes the lecture encouraging people to look at his website and foundation, the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Connection

In this video James Randi addresses popular beliefs among pseudoscience and the paranormal. It connects to the lecture content in many ways. Firstly, the video connects to the pseudoscience watchlist Results can’t be reproduced or verified because he addresses Sylvia Browne and his challenge towards her to test her psychic abilities, but she never performed the test. Also, this part of the video connects to the Reasons for belief Emotional Connection because mediumship is very entwined with the emotions of the one getting the reading which causes them to be more inclined to believe what they are being told. Another connection for this part of the video is the ESP ability Mediumship because James focuses this ability and its potential harm it can cause to people. This video directly connects to the medical pseudoscience homeopathy as James Randi starts the lecture by ingesting thirty-two tablets of homeopathic sleeping pills. Then, he continues the lecture for ten minutes before addressing the fact that the medicine does not work. He finishes the lecture several minutes later and showed no signs or symptoms throughout the entire session.

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This is a photo of James Randi faking a psychic surgery in 1991. Psychic surgery is the act of non-surgery in which a person pretends to operate on a person with their bare hands. Using fake blood and animal organs they ‘remove’ tumors. The person's fate is unchanged.

Connection:

Psychic surgery is a pseudoscience that James Randi has debunked. It is still practiced around the world to make money literally pretending to help people. It's clear to see this is pseudoscience as it involves money for results that cant be verified while playing on people's emotions, faith and belief. One of the reasons people believe in this is its simplicity. Sick people get psychic surgery and some of them survive if the original illness was not that severe. People seeing this are experiencing confirmation bias. They are not thinking about all the people who still die of illnesses they didn't get properly treated. The fact that people are magically doing surgery with their hands is a clear sign of some mystical energy. This is an easy red flag for anyone to see. Psychic surgery does not stand up to simple skepticism.

http://skepdic.com/psurgery.html

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This is an article looking at James Randi and his position in the skeptical community. He is revered by skeptics and feared by those who make money through their paranormal powers. It tells how Randi is almost like a messiah to skeptics and suggests what they will do when he dies. He has changed many people's lives by making them into skeptics.

Connection:

This article is interesting because it is written in such a way as to compare skeptics at a convention for skeptics to a cult with James Randi as its leader. There people are not tricked though, they are following the truth they find through the scientific method. I wanted to write about how we could discern red flags and reasons for belief as to why these people treat Randi like a messiah but it doesn't apply here assuming everyone is truly a skeptic. One of Randi’s critics says most people are religious and that Randi and his skeptics are a very small minority. This is the critic confusing Skepticism with an ideology. Suggesting that ideology is a red flag against skeptics is very clearly ignorance on their part.

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As I have said in previous articles, decades ago I had to abandon my intended career as a university teacher of philosophy, and instead went on to become a science journalist for German TV. During this period I became part of a group called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal ( CSICOP). The founding members included scientists, academics, and science writers such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, and many others, all of whom I got to meet personally - together with many other equally fascinating personalities.

One of te most memorable was James ("The Amazing") Randi, to whom I owe much of my skeptical background. The picture is taken from the James Randi Educational Foundation. Martin Gardner was the other major influence.

Randi is a stage magician who made it his life's mission to challenge mystical, paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Following his activities and reading his books led me to the conclusion that we skeptics must not use physics professors or psychologists to test paranormal phenomena - they are particularly easy to fool. We must always use professional stage magicians. I implemented this as a guiding principal for the CSICOP's German chapter.

During those founding years I visited Randi a few times at his home in New Jersey. He always received me graciously, and spent a lot of time teaching and testing me. I learned a lot - but equally important: I had a loads of fun with him. Randi would show me tricks, or videos of himself or other magicians performing seemingly impossible stunts, and challenge me to explain how they were done. I will give you a first example (with more to come later).

One of the early tricks Randi played on me involved five ESP or "Zener" cards, the kind used to conduct experiments for extrasensory perception (ESP) or clairvoyance. What he did was to give me the cards, instructing me to put one of them, secretly, into a manila envelope and seal it. Then, after performing some mind-reading gestures, he correctly identified the card I had sealed.

As a smart skeptic I leapt into action. I carefully examined the cards for irregularities, and the manila envelope for any kind of transparency. I chose a random envelope from the stack he had in a drawer, went into the bathroom, switched off the light and placed one of the ESP cards into the envelope. I did this under my polo shirt, without looking at which one I had picked. I put the remaining four cards into a second envelope and stuck that in my belt, under my shirt. I emerged from the bathroom and placed the envelope with the single card on the table. After the obligatory clairvoyant gestures, but without touching the envelope, Randi correctly identified the card it contained.

I was completely mystified. I asked him for another try, but Randi told me I needed to think. "You must try to reconstruct exactly what happened - not keep asking the subject to do it again and again." In fact this is usually not possible with psychics in the field. You get one chance and must work things out by pure observation and reason.

I spent quite some time doing what he told me, but could not come up with a plausible solution. It really looked like ESP, like magic. Later that day, after I had done a fair bit of grovelling, Randi showed me how he had done it. This was a great concession, since it was a trick he had never revealed to his audience. Now, over forty years later, I suppose it is okay to tell you the secret.

Randi's ESP cards had little magnetic strips embedded in them, in different places depending on the card. The dining table we were seated around was made of wood, and it has narrow groves in the surface. Into these groves, on the side I was sitting, he had dusted some very fine iron filings. When I put the envelope on the table, with the flap side up, he said: "No, the other way around." I turned it over - an action I did not register and immediately forgot, especially since he had shut his eyes, tilted his head upwards and begun doing the mentalist stuff. He had, however, seen at a glance a few specs of iron dust in a specific spot on the envelope, and that told him what it contained.

This is Randi using exactly the same cards he tricked me with in a stage performance. Here I'm assuming he had iron dust in the pen and sprinkled it over the envelope. That's how clever he was.
More articles on my student days with the great magician, rationalist and critical debunker will follow soon. Those were such great times.
Randi currently lives in Fort Lauderdale and has been battling cancer for ten years. Watch this interview with the amazing survivor, cheerfully delivered, with lucid intelligence and mischievous humour - all at the age of 82, after his first bout of chemo. Since then Randi has not been lying around, resting. He has been recording, one lecture after another, on Big Think and elsewhere. There are literally hundreds of videos on YouTube, all extremely worthwhile. They are instructive, eloquent and always highly entertaining. You could do worse than spend a few hours watching.

Related articles by Frederic Friedel

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As I have said in previous articles, decades ago I had to abandon my intended career as a university teacher of philosophy, and instead went on to become a science journalist for German TV. During this period I became part of a group called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal ( CSICOP).

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This is a video in which James Randi shows off his ESP abilities. Or rather its him showing how easy it is to be tricked into thinking that he has ESP abilities using Zener cards. He defies the odds and correctly guesses cards randomly selected by another person. While admitting that he has no powers he was still able to guess correctly and which orientation 2 cards were placed into a sealed envelope.

Connection:

This video is connected to perception and observation. In most of what James Randi does he is educating people on being able to see through the illusions, or the magic. He presents a simple magic trick that can possibly be explained several ways but he never explains exactly how he does it. Because of this he deliberately creates mystery, which is one of the items on the pseudoscience watch list. Many people who say they have special powers use this mystery to gain power over others and take their money. Randi is a skeptic and presents this trick as a proposition to the crowd, what are the odds of him knowing the correct cards? He throws out some red herrings asking which math people are using, and if they have considered all the variables. He rapidly offers ideas and adds more and more layers to consider but in the end its all red hearings. The odds of him being correct are 100% since the entire exercise is pre planned by him. He wants the audience to stay skeptical because after all this was all an illusion, there is no reason to believe he has special powers because the entire scenario is designed to create mystery for the audience. Much like most people promoting special powers or magical abilities.

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Recorded: 2000 Location: California IT Lecture: Chasing the Chimera