[ggm]

This kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.

Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argumentative, many of his ideas like panspermia have turned out to have elements of plausibility in them (like the cometary origins of water)

[TheOtherHobbes]

I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials.

And Dawkins never had much of a research career.

My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.

There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.

So skepticism turned into this kind of knockabout point-scoring media circus noise. And in the end the sneering and self-congratulatory condescension actually helped entrench modern conspiranoia instead of deflating it.

[ggm]

Randi was very good at debunking other tricksters. That bootstrapped a lot of respect.

[JuniperMesos]

> I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials.

Engaging with someone's ideas isn't the same thing as throwing yourself behind that person. There are a number of public writers associated with rationalism (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander probably being the most famous), but the social scene isn't defined by following them as leaders or thinking their ideas are correct.

> My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.

The skeptics didn't think the paranormal was an easy target they were punching down at, they thought it was a corrosive, poltically-powerful, and immoral force in US poltics that was leading towards bad ends. Also what you call the paranormal they call "institutional Christianity in US poltics" - even that choice of words has poltical valence.

> There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.

I think this is you personally simply having a somewhat different set of poltical concerns than the skeptics did (in part because time has passed since their heyday, and the landscape of American poltics has shifted some), and wanting them to care about exactly what you are about and not about what they cared about, without wanting to claim that their object-level concerns were necessarily wrong.

[pdonis]

> Dawkins never had much of a research career.

Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.

Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.

[nialv7]

> Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.

and that's without talking about all the problematic views held by him...