> It's nice to see that Randi is still able to see these people as human beings, rather than charlatans to be disproved. [...] I took a sort of smug pleasure in watching him debunk psychics and mystics. But I realize now that that was just another form of dehumanization.
Yeah, I had that problem too. Eventually I realized that I had never changed a single belief because I had been bullied or humiliated out of it. When I have changed my mind about something important, it has generally come through sympathetic conversation or long, slow realization. Often both.
As a rationalist, I had to admit that the be-a-giant-dick school of skepticism did not seem to be very productive, however satisfying I found it personally. Now I try to exercise a lot more compassion. It's hard, but but there's no way I'm going back.
I agree completely that if you are a rationalist it is a waste of effort to throw someones beliefs back in their face, often they don't truly believe themselves anyway if you have a proper conversation.
What i have seen of Randi he seems to avoid this and look to educate rather than humiliate. The Penn and Teller show "Bullshit" ended up in a shaming of "fools" for certain episodes in the later series which was unfortunate.
I will say there are definitely people that deserve attacks. These are usually the career* psychics and deceivers who make money off the layman's beliefs; they certainly don't believe themselves.
The practice of skepticism -- lower-case S -- is generally a good thing. Skepticism goes off the rails when the S gets capitalized and it tries to style itself as a Movement(tm).
It can never be a movement or a belief system because... it isn't. Skepticism is a practice of question-asking and open-minded interrogation, not a specific set of beliefs. Saying you're skeptical says nothing about what you actually think.
Secondly, when it tries to style itself as a Movement it starts taking on many of the characteristics of the religious ideologies is styles itself against. It becomes about converting the heathens and about demonstrating the superiority of the chosen via the in-your-face dickery you highlight.
It also begins to be subject to all the same socially reinforced cognitive biases that arise in religious, political, and academic orthodoxies and hierarchies. It starts to develop its own orthodoxy, and to only apply skeptical questioning to other peoples' ideas.
All of those things are not the same. Many of them are ill-defined. That sort of "table" smacks of religious orthodoxy. You can find similar tables and outlines of dangerous heathen beliefs in the literature of any other fundamentalist cult.
Yeah, I had that problem too. Eventually I realized that I had never changed a single belief because I had been bullied or humiliated out of it. When I have changed my mind about something important, it has generally come through sympathetic conversation or long, slow realization. Often both.
As a rationalist, I had to admit that the be-a-giant-dick school of skepticism did not seem to be very productive, however satisfying I found it personally. Now I try to exercise a lot more compassion. It's hard, but but there's no way I'm going back.