Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Penn & Teller - Masters Of Deception (Greg Bishop)

Taking the sometimes unscientific methods of CSICOP one step further, Penn & Teller (P&T) use their pay-TV pulpit to smear and denigrate those who dare to dabble in the fields of Ufology, cryptozoology, remote viewing, and other arcane areas. To be sure, there are many charlatans, liars, addle-headed believers and worse in these fields of inquiry, and P&T are right to point them out for ridicule.

These magicians have been deceiving people for most of their lives -- it's part of their act and they revel in it. The problem with this attitude is that P&T assume that anyone who is trying to promote or investigate subjects outside the realm of 19th century science is doing the same thing. Like the high-priests of CSICOP, their minds are made up before the study begins.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is hard for me to wrap my mind around the crypto stuff. For one its proponents are very vague. For a theory to have any real weight it might not have to be proven or disproven, but at least it needs some basis of investigation. The gross generalizations associated with the subject makes it more of an act of imagination than any kind of theory.

Stan