Search results for ""Author Kendrick Frazier""

James Randi leaves a towering legacy as an internationally known magician, escape artist, and devoted investigator of the paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims that have captured the thinking of the public for generations. From ESP and psychokinesis, psychic detectives, levitation, psychic surgery, and even UFOs and astrology, Randi dedicated his life to exposing frauds and swindlers. Forty years after the original publication of his landmark book, Flim-Flam! remains a classic, with insights that are still relevant today – and perhaps even more so. In this timeless and timely book, Randi famously explores and exposes outrageous deceptions that plague our minds and media. Unafraid to call researchers to account for their failures and impostures, Randi tells us that we have been badly served by scientists who have failed to follow the procedures required by their training and traditions. Mr. Randi provides readers with a compelling and convincing document that will startle and enlighten all who continue to seek out the truth.

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In this enlightening and entertaining book, author and Skeptical Inquirer editor Kendrick Frazier takes readers on a journey to the contentious boundary zone between science and its antagonists: pseudoscience (pretend science) and anti-science (open hostility to science). Pseudoscience romps in the shadows of science but takes on the guise of science to excite, sell, mislead, and deceive the public. Anti-science denigrates, even denies, findings of science for ideological ends. In this dangerous age of misinformation (and dis-information), we need science’s remarkable truth-seeking tools more than ever to help counter society’s crazier impulses in which opinion, beliefs, and lies trump facts, evidence, and truth.In one sense, Shadows of Science is Frazier’s love letter to science, one of humanity’s greatest inventions, one we should exalt for its unique ability to find provisional truths about nature. In congenial prose he reports on recent discoveries and describes how science works and how its error-correcting mechanisms lead eventually to new knowledge. He tells the stories of some of our champions of science and reason. He describes the little-appreciated values of science, how it embraces uncertainty and humility, and its emphasis on fact-based observation and experiment. Pseudoscience adopts some of science’s language and has a beguiling appeal, but there the similarities end. Frazier has professionally reported on frontier scientific discoveries and observed and exposed the pretensions and dangers of pseudoscience and anti-science his entire career. Here he shares his experiences, his knowledge and insights, and his love and passion for our ability to learn what’s real about the natural world—and to identify and expose fake science, pretend science, and anti-science in all their multifarious forms.

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