Flim-Flam! by James Randi – 3 Stars

Last week, you will recall, I took a look at Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things. This is a very similar book, perhaps a bit heavier on the hows than the whys but all in all covering similar territory. James Randi and Michael Shermer operate in similar circles, after all; while Shermer runs Skeptic magazine, Randi’s “thing” is the James Randi Educational Foundation and he actually writes an article for Shermer’s publication called “Twas Brillig…”. With the recent passing of Martin Gardner, Randi is now recognized as the elder statesman of the skeptical movement.

So all that being said, how worth it is this book, given that the Shermer book exists? I think it’s a lot of fun. In researching this review I found another review on the thing which states, in part, that this stuff is surprisingly undated. I, um, can’t quite agree with that. One of the big ticket items this book tackles is biorhythms. Remember biorhythms? That whole idea that we run in 23, 28, and 33 day cycles and when those cycles cross over each other you can get into accidents and so on? About 90% of what I remember of this phenomenon was from the Nintendo game Bases Loaded. Anyway, if you needed them to be debunked, they’re in here. Also dowsing, Erik von Daniken (of Chariots of the Gods? fame) and a whole host of other things that you probably do not know about unless you are a big fan of re-runs of In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy.

I guess that where these items are not quite dated is that while the substance of the woo-woo that people believe in has changed, the style of the beliefs has not. Back then, there was a distressing number of scientists, many with advanced degrees, pedigrees, and reputations to put on the line, who believed in psychic powers enough to allow themselves to be deceived by charlatans. It sounds harsh, but that’s exactly what it was. Until Randi embarrassed one foundation by planting spoon-bending teenagers into a “psi” experiment (which happened just a couple years after this book), a lot of these people flat-out would not accept that such parlor tricks were influencing their results. Some even went so far as to claim that the negative aura of truth-seekers like Randi were making these men fail in controlled experiments!

Nowadays you don’t see quite the same emphasis on “parapsychology”, although I think a case can be made that now instead we’ve got a whole big load of non-climateologists claiming that global warming is hogwash. That’s a bit of specious link though. A much closer link is the general level of credulity people have towards people who make flat-out bizarre claims. Just this past week the podcast Monster Talk had a self-styled witch on whose primary piece of evidence for supernatural beings, it seemed, was that the people that she spoke to weren’t inclined to lie or make things up. I doubt this aspect of humanity is going away any time soon so we may as well be aware of it.

All in all, though, I think this is a better book now about the history of skepticism than it is about how to be a “proper” skeptic in this day and age. Skepticism is about the process rather than the result, of course, so books like this are always important in their own right, but if you’re looking for a takedown of the anti-vax movement or Bigfoot, this is not the place to find it. Also, Randi is a funny guy and very  good at what he does, but this book is also written from the perspective of a person who has been around “flim flam” for an awful long time and so, to a recently deconverted “New Ager”, his attitude may seem off-putting. If you’re new to skepticism, this probably isn’t the best first book for you, or second book or third book for that matter. It’s a good book to have in your library eventually though.