 Good morning everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. My name is Bob Blaskowitz. I am a writing instructor at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. Welcome to the skepticism across the curriculum workshop and by workshop I mean highly interactive panel about skepticism and critical thinking in academia. While three-quarters of us up here are English teachers, which is kind of interesting for an across-the-curriculum panel. We actually have a rather wide variety of subjects under our belt. Eve Siebert is also an instructor at University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. She specializes in medieval literature with an emphasis in Old English and Middle English, but she also has her chops in Old Norse if so you can bring her your Old Norse questions to her she'll be able to help you out. And Shakespeare and she's also taught classes in Arthurian literature and Chaucer. I'm also at Eau Claire. I wrote my dissertation on World War II veterans narratives both fiction and memoir. I test in 20th century American lit. I've taught classes in science fiction, cold war literature and film, and themed writing classes in conspiracy theory and other extraordinary claims. I even spent a little bit of time working on American mosaic art, which is a weird thing for an English major to do. Miranda Hale teaches both literature and writing as an instructor at North Idaho College and as a public figure she writes about the intersection of rhetoric and activism on behalf of critical thinking. And Peter Bogosian is an instructor in philosophy from Portland State University who specializes in critical thinking and moral philosophy. He teaches courses in critical thinking in science and pseudoscience, the philosophy of education and atheism. Add to this diversity of expertise the fact that there's no single way of being an academic. One member of a department may focus on the teaching, another one may be focusing on a research, another one may be an administrator. There are all sorts of areas where critical thinking can be brought to bear in the academic life. So a question for you. How many people here are teachers? Oh my God, you are so my people. So how many at the college level say? Okay, how many people are at the high school level? Phenomenal? Great school, all right. Kindergarten, yeah. Baby Einstein, no. Oh no, oh no, we don't do that here. So the the topic of the conference, several topics, Fighting the Fakers is going to be kind of a controlling theme that runs through what we're doing. But we're going to come at this from a lot of different perspectives. I'd like to start with some of the stuff that I've done with, you know, in my teaching. During a summer session a couple of years ago, a promising student athlete came to my writing class and he excitedly announced that they had discovered Noah's Ark. Oh God. I don't remember what I had planned for that day. But what happened actually changed, and it's funny how this happens in, you know, your life can go in a completely different direction based on just one student's perception. We spent the rest of the class looking, okay, so have they found Noah's Ark? As it turned out, scientists hadn't. Instead, a self-styled Indiana Jonesy fellow named Bob Cornuke, working out of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute, had reported that he'd found something very interesting. On a mountain in Iran, suggesting that it might, just might, be Noah's Ark. Indeed, he had discovered and misidentified what one geologist called an oxidized sedentary rock. You know, you can, you can see other ways. But that kind of, you know, shows you what belief can do to your perception. This didn't prevent, even though he'd misidentified it, this didn't prevent him from going on national news media to trumpet his find. In hindsight, this fortune episode, I can see that this episode changed the trajectory of my career. The pseudosciences like biblical archaeology, cryptozoology, ghost hunting, as well as a large variety of other claims turn out to be a very useful tool for teaching critical thinking and research skills. By extraordinary claim, I'm referring to claims that if they prove true, I have the capacity to fundamentally transform our perception of the world, our fellow citizens, or even of ourselves. For instance, let's imagine that under strictly controlled conditions that someone is able to demonstrate telekinesis. You know that they're going to be handing out Nobel Prizes, right? If a secret cabal of juice has been, oh that's my telekinesis slide, and it's hilarious. If a secret cabal of juice has been running the world for the last several thousand years, we're going to have to revise our history books beyond the wildest dreams of any Texas school board. So students make great mistakes, sometimes they're really fun. I once had a student write anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was bad, especially for the Jews. I mean, you can't, not wrong technically, but in some ways it is. I know Eve, you once had a student, this is the best, had a student turn in a paper that said, Bale Wolf is an anonymous medieval poem written in the 18th century by Robert Cotton. It's sunrise, it's sunset, it's creation, it's destruction, it's just, it's poetry in balance, you know? But by far the most useful mistake that a student of mine ever made came in a writing class about conspiracy theories. Three of my classes collaborated on a conspiracy theory wiki. This was about three years ago, maybe two or three years ago. And each student was responsible for writing an article on one major conspiracy theory topic, one article for the wiki. In an early draft of one of their articles, a highly fluent ESL speaker, an exchange student, when discussing the relevant history behind conspiracies relating to the Federal Reserve Bank's role in the new, in the coming New World Order, he started his discussion with two quotes. The first came from Benjamin Franklin. The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution. The second relevant statement my student used came from Jefferson. I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies if the American people ever allow private banks to control the issues of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent, their fathers conquered. From a rhetorical and persuasive standpoint, these quotations have the immense authority of the founding fathers. When I asked my classes about the authority that these quotes carried, the consensus was, yeah, that's, they're pretty good evidence, because after all, hadn't they come from the mouths of the founding fathers? Well, no they hadn't. As an international student, my writer, he had no reason to doubt that the establishment of the central bank was not the cause of the revolution, but as an Americanist, I had never heard this. Maybe I missed that day of third grade. So I've looked into it and I found that the quote from Benjamin Franklin, well, we frequently cited as being in his autobiography appears in no addition. And God bless, in a big secular way, God bless Google books. They really make these searches so much easier now. Numerous variants of this quote exist, some more 18th century-ish than others. But the unusual amount of textual disagreements suggest no common primary source. Indeed, regarding this quotation, I could find no reference more authoritative than Wiki quote, where numerous versions were gathered. Let me see. The origin of the second quote was interesting as well, because we can show fairly conclusively that it's basically impossible for Jefferson to have ever made this statement. According to Susie Platt, I believe she works at the Library of Congress. The economic term inflation didn't appear in Webster's dictionary until 1864. Indeed, the earliest example of that usage in the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED, dates from 12 years after Jefferson's death. Now, you know, I'm willing to give 10 to 20 years before something shows up in the OED. But still, when you look at the earliest such use of the word deflation, it doesn't appear until the 1920s. So it just can't be. Now, had my student or any student, for that matter, encountered these quotations out in the wild, they would have had little reason or opportunity to question them. A quick Lexus-Nexus Academic Search confirms that both quotes have found their way into the mainstream press. And a web search shows that they're repeated endlessly as conclusive proof that the Founding Fathers would have frowned on the Federal Reserve. Now, the potential lessons in the classroom that stem from this single fortuitous mistake, it was a great teaching day. They're numerous. They hinted at the immense learning potential presented by badly, badly flawed arguments. We could start by talking about authority versus the appearance of authority. We can talk about the ethical use of sources and the responsibility of an author to check them for accuracy. We might refer to the persuasive effect of an author's character, not only that of the Founding Fathers, but also in terms of the damage done to the credibility of an author who reprints spurious quotes. We could look at the differences between primary and secondary sources. We might bring up the sources on an overhead. This is what we did in class and show students the techniques by which scholars' research claims. We might explore why these quotes had become so widespread among anti-federal reserve writers, why so few of them had detected the dubious provenance of the statement before, and what that tells us about audiences and how they think in general. We could look at the difference between the intentional and unintentional misuse of quotes politically and practically. How does grounding arguments in misinformation harm the cause of genuinely concerned activists? How does this make real problems harder to solve? Then we might imagine hypothetical scenarios. What would happen? What would the effect be if this had shown up on a Sunday morning talk show a week that we're talking about regulating the financial sector? It seems clear to me, then, that teaching extraordinary claims and in teaching flawed arguments can be very, very useful. The nine points that suggest themselves to me by the students' misuse of quotes, or use of bad quotes, touched on disciplines as wide-ranging in psychology, philosophy and ethics, rhetoric, library science, history, sociology, political science, media studies and communication. No topic in theory lies outside of the reach of the critical tools available to skeptics, and often being a skeptic means being able to comfortably navigate several areas of expertise at once, even if you're not formally trained in all of those areas. You shouldn't, I mean, to know where to look for good information. Consider, for instance, one of my favorite shows of all time, Ancient Aliens. God, I love that show in such a bad way. It's true. I have an ancient alien's problem. I ended up on the show, actually, kind of inadvertently. I asked a question to Eric Von Dain again during a massive conference that they had in Minneapolis last year, and then suddenly on my Twitter feed over during Nexus, people started saying, oh, did I just see you on Ancient Aliens? I'm like, no, you did. Well, yeah, you did. That was kind of funny. But anyway, Ancient Aliens has become an indispensable part of my teaching because of the sheer variety of topics that allows my students to explore. The episode I use most is one called the Da Vinci conspiracy, which is about whether or not Leonardo Da Vinci was perhaps visited by aliens and either given special knowledge or maybe fell through a time portal, whatever the hell that is, and saw the future, right? Most of the questions that episode poses if they're even meaningful questions at all. Most of them do have have answers. For instance, the show begins by touching on one of Leonardo's earliest commissions, this Medusa painted on a wooden shield. Actually, this is Caravaggio's. Leonardo's is lost to history. Caravaggio may have seen Leonardo's, but anyway, why asks the narrator, when most prominent artists of the day were painting images from the Judeo-Christian Bible, would Leonardo have chosen to pick a mythical Greek monster, one that many ancient astronaut theorists believe may have been based on an extraterrestrial creature? Yeah. And then they leave the question at that. They don't waste a thought trying to answer it. And they just keep on blowing by. Well, you know, let's slow down. This is I'm sorry. They're really Yeah, totally. So, you know, we we unpack it. And when you're looking at these conspiracy theories, not only are there a lot of claims, there are a lot of assumptions that are unstated there. And all of those are fair game and teaching students to recognize the unstated assumptions actually clarifies a lot. So, we could sit down in brainstorm reasons why, you know, he might have painted this image is that when you take this image and when you take students in the library, you come across a number of explanations that are entirely reasonable. That, you know, it's not particularly surprising that this would exist because, you know, the fact that most artists were painting religious themes doesn't mean that there's anything strange in and of itself about, you know, painting a classical theme. The Medusa, according to the original source of the story was painted for a private country gentleman, a country gentleman as it was put, it was put not the church. So that that goes away of explaining it. The powerful patrons like the Medici were important to the Renaissance. Painting a Medusa on a shield is actually a reference to the story itself, where Perseus was able to slay the Medusa without turning to stone because it was reflected in his shield. And indeed, revisiting classical themes is an important characteristic of Renaissance art. And it's no mystery, nor even really notable that Leonardo or any other artists depicted the Medusa. Both Salini and Caravaggio depicted the Medusa. Ancient Aliens, no big whoop. So just one rather silly question. It gives you an excuse to send students out and do to do research and topics in early modern history, art history and mythology, and maybe even a little art appreciation along the way, right? I found that conspiracy theories are extremely useful topics. And I'll wrap this up and move on to Eve. Every assertion needs to be checked and double checked every assumption because there is nothing that a conspiracy theorist can't get wrong. And it's usually in several fields of expertise simultaneously. And it's, you know, conspiracy theories turn out to be something like research boot camp, you know, identifying claims and identifying premises and then going out and finding the best information. It's a wonderful way to expose students to a lot of stuff at once. Lastly, I bring these into the classroom. Because I think it's important that students encounter extraordinary claims in a controlled environment of in a critical academic environment rather than out in the wild. I would much rather, I mean, I have my students read the protocols of the elders of Zion, or at least they read, you know, two students will read the first protocol and then two will read, we kind of do a, because who wants to make their students read the entire protocols of Zion, really. But I'd rather have them encounter that with somebody who is an authority and in an environment of critical discussion than out on the web where they might find it to be persuasive on its own. So and with that, Eve Siebert, as Bob said, I'm a medievalist, but today I'm going to talk about some sorry, I'm going to talk about some crazy modern writer, Shakespeare. Anyone heard of him? Okay, although if you want to know about Leif Erickson discovering Bigfoot, I'm your woman. Spoiler alert, he didn't. But anyone who has taught a Shakespeare class or a Brit lit survey or any literature class that involves Shakespeare in any way has probably heard the question, did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? The idea that someone other than William Shakespeare work was the primary author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare is widespread. PBS's front line devoted at least three programs to the idea that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare to, to the Earl of Oxford, 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward Devere, and one to Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare denialism has also achieved or received sympathetic treatment in the New York Times and on NPR. The case for the Earl of Oxford was presented in a major motion picture called anonymous by Roland Emmerich, known for other historic works, such as Independence Day. The film was not successful, but Sony Pictures, an association with a group called Young Minds Inspired, sent out a study guide to college and high school teachers. All over the United States, unsolicited, just sent it out. There are two different ones, one for high school, one for college. The first program objective listed is to encourage critical thinking by challenging students to examine the theories about the authorship of Shakespeare, authorship of Shakespeare's works and to formulate their own opinions, which sounds pretty good. Critical thinking, that's good, we like critical thinking, yay. Students forming their own opinions based on critical thinking and evidence and then supporting their opinions, that's good. However, that's not actually what the study guide is doing at all. It's pushing students toward the conclusion that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Although the authors claim that seeing anonymous is not necessary, two of the three student activities actually involve, wait for it, seeing anonymous is like before seeing anonymous, then after seeing anonymous. And the last page of the thing is a giant poster for anonymous. And then one of the, absolutely, it is marketing material and also propaganda for a particular point of view. Part of the high school assignment that does not involve watching anonymous includes the following writing assignment. Use the information on this sheet to research the theory that William Shakespeare Stratford upon Avon was not the author of the Shakespeare plays, then write a persuasive essay supporting your position. They might as well encourage critical thinking by challenging students to examine the theory of evolution critically, and then formulate their own opinions based on a brochure produced by the Discovery Institute. It's pretty much the that level of objectivity. Even without the silly study guide film advertisement, a significant number of teachers actually perpetuate the idea that someone other than Shakespeare was the primary author of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare authorship coalition has produced an online petition called the declaration of reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare. There's a special section for academic signatories. There are few prominent scholars of early modern literature who have signed, put it mildly, what we call light totes understatement for effect. There are, however, quite a significant number of English teachers who have signed. Many of them are high school teachers or junior college teachers. And the fact is that high school teachers and junior college English teachers are going to reach more students than eminent Shakespeareans who have endowed chairs at Ivy League schools. In addition to that, two universities, Brunel University in London and Concordia University in Oregon, have Shakespeare authorship programs. Brunel offers an MA in Shakespeare authorship studies, William Leahy, or Leahy, I'm not sure. The convener of the authorship studies program at Brunel is one of the very few Shakespearean scholars who has signed the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. And he's publicly scoffed at the idea that Shakespeare could possibly have written Shakespeare. Concordia Shakespeare authorship research center doesn't grant degrees, but it seems to have quite substantial loads of money and resources. And it puts on big conferences. Their primary goal is to determine who the Shakespeare writer was and explore why he wrote anonymously and pseudonymously, which seems to beg the question a little bit, because it's kind of assuming that one particular person definitely wasn't the Shakespeare writer. You know, the writer called Shakespeare. However, although you can't receive a degree in authorship studies from Concordia, you can and you might want to write this down. You can become an associate scholar for a mere $125 annually, or wait for it. This is even better. For you can become a life scholar for $10,000. Although you do have to have at least a bachelor's degree or be enrolled in college or be enrolled in high school. I don't know how many high school students are going. Yes, I know what I'm going to do with that extra $10,000 I have lying around. Yeah, I'm going to be a life scholar. So, what is the evidence against Shakespeare? I'm going to pause a moment. If there are any of these points, you'd like me to go over in a little bit more detail. Well, number three, as you can really, number three is very ambiguous. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm being naughty. Of course, Shakespeare deniers do cite evidence. So, here is the real the evidence. Now, there are 80 candidates for Shakespeare. That's not including Shakespeare or his actual collaborators. So, obviously, I can't go through the arguments for everyone. But there are some common themes. The argument from ignorance is hugely popular. So, Shakespeare deniers and others often say, Well, we don't know much about Shakespeare. And this isn't actually really true. We know more about Shakespeare than we do about most other Elizabethan or Jacobean authors, or playwrights anyway. But most of what we know has to do with business dealings or legal matters, which isn't really that exciting. It is, however, the type of document that is likely to survive. Because, you know, official legal documents. So, Shakespeare deniers like to turn what we don't know about Shakespeare around into positive claims. So, Supreme Court, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, for instance, wondered. And, of course, who is a better expert on Shakespeare? Your Supreme Court justices. That's where you want to go for all your Shakespeare needs. But he wondered, Where are all the books? You can't be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home. He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries. He never was shown to be present at any major event. The coronation of King James or any of that stuff. He actually might be wrong about the last two. There is a letter that was written to Shakespeare. And he quite possibly was at the ceremonies for the coronation. The Kingsmen who had just been created the Kingsmen. The company received lengths of red velvet, presumably so they could wear the Kings livery in the processions around the coronation. But regardless, Shakespeare didn't mention his books in his will. Well, therefore, he must not have had any books. You know, Doth. There are no references to him traveling abroad. Therefore, he couldn't possibly have traveled abroad. There are no student records for the Stratford Grammar School before 1700. Therefore, Shakespeare didn't go to the Grammar School nor did anyone else before 1700, despite the fact that it had existed for several hundred years by that point. And you know, as far as I know, there's no evidence that any of the Shakespeare candidates ever traveled to an enchanted island. And yet, somehow, the Tempest exists. I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens. It's aliens, yeah. Totally aliens. So, all the arguments from ignorance tend to put Shakespeare in on the defensive. As you just come back with one thing after another. Well, what about this? Well, what about this other thing we don't know about? And there are sensible answers to all of them, but that really doesn't matter. You can't relax certain information. And all you can say based on the fact that we lack certain information is that we lack certain information. We don't know. We don't have definite proof. Shakespeare didn't mention his books in his will. There was a lot of stuff that he probably owned that he didn't mention as well. So that doesn't mean he didn't have books or beard-trimming implements. It just means that he didn't specifically mention them. So no one is justified in making positive claims based on that lack of information. The appeal to authority and appeal to numbers go together nicely. The creationists have the Discovery Institute's dissent from Darwin petition. Truthers have architects and engineers for 9-11 truth the petition. And Shakespeare's Shakespeare deniers have, as I mentioned, the declaration of reasonable doubt. And they do like legalistic terms like that. The appeal to numbers appears in the form of the total number of people have signed the declaration, which last time I looked, which was I think last week, was 2,616, which is, you know, a significant proportion of the Shakespeare reading public the world over. But the declaration also has sections on past doubters. So they mentioned Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson. They're also notable signatories that include Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylons, who are both in Anonymous and Michael York, for instance. And academic signatories, as I mentioned, people who are well known or have some sort of authority in some field, apparently. Of course the academic signatories, you become an academic signatory by choosing to be an academic signatory, and you don't really have to prove your credentials. But the purpose for the notable signatories, the academic signatories, is pretty clear. While Shakespeare deniers distrust academic Shakespeareans automatically, because they have a vested interest in the status quo, big Shakespeare, where, as we all know, the big money is. All that textual scholarship. But they will, of course, happily tout any academic or famous person who, you know, does agree with them. This psychiatrist agrees with us. Signant Freud, by the way, is another number one, the former doubters. So these famous names seem to lend gravitas, but they're simply an appeal to authority unless they can produce good evidence to support their beliefs and they really can't. At hominem, it's odd, but Shakespeare deniers seem to genuinely hate Shakespeare, just hate him. It's not good enough that he didn't write the plays and the poems. They loathe him. So they depict him as semi-literate, grubby, greedy, nasty little middle-class person, horrible middle-class person, who is only interested in business. Again, that relates to the fact that most of the documents we have are related to business. The fact that's the only information we have doesn't mean he was only interested in business, but regardless, even if it were true, even if he were everything, except illiterate, even if he were most of the things the Shakespeare deniers accused him of, that doesn't mean he wasn't also a talented writer. We do, by the way, know enough about the Earl Luxor to say that he was a genuinely vile person, including, you know, having stabbed an undercook. It was only a servant, so that doesn't hardly count. Plus, he did say the cook ran onto his sword while he was holding it, so it wasn't really murder. I swear, officer, I was just, I was cleaning the sword and it went off. But anyway, his horribleness is not the reason we can say he did not write the works of Shakespeare. We can say that because the evidence fairly clearly suggests that he didn't write the works of Shakespeare. Now the next three points, well aside from nitpicking, seem kind of silly and they go together and they get into kind of weird conspiracy land. So several of Shakespeare's works were published in his lifetime under his name. You might think that might be some sort of evidence for something, because many times his name was hyphenated. Anyway, I know you think it seems silly, but actually it's extremely silly. The hyphen is supposed to indicate that the name is a pseudonym, not a real name, because I have no idea, but that's what it's supposed to indicate. It actually probably has to do with the exigencies of printing at the time that printers didn't want to put a k and a long s, you know, one of the s's that looks like f's, together because that could cause damage to the type. So they would like often separate it either with an e or with a hyphen or both. So Shakespeare often came out as Shakespeare or hyphenated. The spelling of Shakespeare's name is another red herring. He spelled his name different ways in his six signatures, well the six signatures that we survive and everyone kind of agrees are his signatures. Other people also spelled his name differently, so Shakespeare deniers make a distinction between Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford upon Avon, the son of a lover, the horrible nasty middle class person, and Shakespeare, the pseudonym used by the real author, whoever he or she happened to be, or the alien. Spelling, however, was not standardized in Shakespeare's day. Here, for instance, I know that's very nice. That is Walter Raleigh's signature. He spelled his name here a, or sorry, R-A-W-L-E-Y, Raleigh. Makes perfect sense. Also just keep in mind the handwriting. This is another Raleigh signature, R-A-L-E-G-H. So Raleigh couldn't spell his name, therefore Raleigh was a literate, presumably. So this is not strange at all. Christopher Marlowe's his only signature. He spelled his name Marley. You may also note the handwriting in these documents. The second Raleigh's using a talak hand, which is what was very familiar to us. The writing is kind of messy, though, and the first document, the writing secretary hand, which we no longer use and haven't used for a long time, so it's very hard to read. Shakespeare deniers claim that Shakespeare's writing was so bad, here are the signatures, that he was barely literate. Well, he wrote in secretary hand. It's not really that much worse than Raleigh's, and honestly, if bad handwriting is a sign of a literacy, I'm a brain damage newt, and somehow managed to get a PhD in English. It's amazing. So Cypher's codes. People have been looking at Cypher's for a very long time. It started with Francis Bacon as the author. In doing so, ultimately, people have proven definitively that every single candidate wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare. So the problem with Cypher's and codes is that if you look hard enough you're going to find whatever it is you want. So the same is true of the biographical arguments. Most of the arguments for a particular candidate depend on cherry picking details of that person's life, and matching them to details of the plays or poems. The problem is you can match some details to some of the poems for everyone, but they don't, they can't all have written Shakespeare. The evidence for Shakespeare's authorship is very strong. Although it's not here, this slide seems to have disappeared, but there is that mountain of references to Shakespeare as the author during his lifetime and within a decade or so after his death. All the stuff published under his name, for instance. And there is also the poetic evidence. His writing doesn't match any of the other candidates at all. Certainly particularly the Earl Oxford. It's closer to Christopher Marlowe, but Christopher Marlowe was so totally dead. And even then it doesn't match. That's because Shakespeare killed him. Yeah, that's exactly true in anonymous Shakespeare murdered Marlowe. So the evidence for Shakespeare is very strong. Any scholarly, complete works of William Shakespeare, they will go through all the documents relating to his authorship. So the, oh I do want to mention, for a long time Shakespeareans just sort of ignored the controversy because it's silly. But then it perpetuates and it gets into more classrooms. So recently people have been addressing it. James Shapiro wrote, contested Will, who wrote Shakespeare. Then Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust wrote a free ebook, Shakespeare Bites Back, and edited a collection called Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Evidence, Argument, Controversy, which deals with the authorship question from a wide number of angles. They've also staged some publicity stunts and many other things. There's a Wikipedia editor who makes sure the Shakespeare authorship page stays fact-based. So all good things that there isn't more of an effort to combat bad reasoning. But in conclusion I want to mention something that happened a few days ago. Derek Cullenduno of Skepticality mentioned on Facebook that he'd gotten into a discussion with the Shakespeare Denier. In the comments that followed one person said, who the heck cares? He didn't say heck. And I've seen that attitude from skeptics before and it kind of bothers me. One might as well ask who the heck cares about the evolution and controversy. It matters because it's important that good critical thinking skills are taught in schools in all fields. It matters when fallacies are presented as evidence. It matters when inaccurate information is passed on. It matters when a skewed perspective of research and authority are presented. And it matters as much when it happens in an English classroom as when it happens in a biology classroom. Thank you. We can leave Eve's up there if we want to. You can advance the advance the slide to blank if you want. I don't know how to do that. Right arrow. Yep. Alrighty. Is this working? Okay. I don't have any ancient aliens or anything too exciting like that unfortunately. But we had we had Bob's entertainment already so I primarily teach rhetoric which is argumentative. It's a subset of persuasion and argumentative writing. The thing is within argumentative writing a lot of times students will have issues with knowing how or you can have some sort of resistance and we see this I think in the real world too whether we're skeptical activists or whatever it may be a lot of people have such deeply held beliefs that are based on emotion and not rationality whatever sort of beliefs those may be and thus when we ask them to support them with evidence they will not be pleased with that necessarily or be defensive or say just because you know why why should I believe this claim well just because I think it well the thing is what is useful about teaching critical thinking and argumentative writing in the classroom is that we can teach those skills that we can apply anywhere and one of the first skills I think is knowing how to that you not only that you have to support your sources but to find quality sources and we've talked about that a little more to already. Bob mentioned well actually Bob and you both mentioned the fact that you can't cite someone you know the argument from authority just because a you know really famous great person said something it doesn't mean they were actually an expert in that field so we can't necessarily support it with that the one of my main and this is not not like I made this up or anything it's been around forever but one of my think one of my primary things that I think is the most important is the idea of teaching how to think not what to think and that can be very tricky not just for teachers but for any of us because we often will have very strong opinions and it is difficult not to have those opinions especially on certain issues this doesn't mean that we can't argue for a point but when we're when I am in the classroom it is important to me to teach not necessarily to say here's the conclusion that you need to come to that can get a little bit into the pre-rationalizing things where we already have an argument in mind and then we go and support it and we find these students will find whatever they want to find in order to support that but if we talk about the importance of making evidence-based decisions then we get to the point where the quality of the evidence is important is very important the idea too of that can be tricky is when we talk about critical reading and that's when we read a text whatever it may be and I think you know I like to make everything as relevant as possible not only to educators but outside of the classroom because although we which is awesome we have a lot of teachers here today we want to make sure that we can apply at least it's important you know I think to apply a lot of these skills outside of the classroom because no matter what we do especially because if we're all here unless you're just here for bacon and donuts you're probably a tame to you know talk about skepticism you care about at least some facets of it and you're involved in something so we can all apply these skills I think you know not necessarily a specific like go learn how to research the academic databases but we can learn things about how to promote critical thinking and promote not to question people on making claims that they have no support for whatsoever whether they'd be really wacky claims that you know we that obviously have no support for or if they just be claims that people want to get away with without having to support them and a lot of that for me I teach sort of the second required class an English class at a community college so students have to take it and so we I get a lot of students that are not happy to be there um so we end up with a lot of um you know they're bored they don't want to be there and a lot of times um we will have to I will have to turn I don't always eventually I don't make them run their topics by me you know we write about that they write about controversial issues and I'll say okay go ahead and choose this controversial issue you think you can write on you know but sometimes the topics are very broad and we have to narrow it but sometimes I have to because I had a student who wanted to base his controversial paper on proving that the book of Mormon is real and that every word is true I know and um I and I didn't know what to do with this hardly because I didn't want to you know we it's obviously our first reaction like if we came across that person might be to laugh at that um we want to you know rise above that and be better and but obviously in the professional situation too I can't just go wait what um I don't know I think the shaming students is is an undervalued teaching technique but I try not to shame I know I know you shame all your students but so you know the student came to me and said this and I said well you know because I make my students use academic databases so they don't just go online and go to some random site in some ranty blog or something and support try to support their sessions with ranty blog or Facebook or something but so I would explain to this student that beyond you know his belief in the book his more his um belief in Mormonism was strong enough that he did not want he was very resentful and almost angry at the fact that I said you're not going to be able to find sources you know and to prove the book of Mormon um because it is based on a belief system this I'm not singling out the book of Mormon I'm singling out not you know religious texts or anything for which there is no actual outside evidence that doesn't you know because this required belief so the student was mad and um you know decided to write the paper anyway um and found some wacky scholars um out there and Bob and Eve have mentioned some wacky scholars so far and sometimes unfortunately those wacky scholars can get some of their articles into legitimate academic databases I don't know how they do it but they do it a lot of times they'll have like a phd it's from like not a real university but it says phd I believe someone like Ken Ham has a creed some creationists have that you know where it's clown college clown college has phd's even um so that you know we um because they have you know the three letters after their name well they can get in the academic database and the student can say well here's a real source I found it in the right place well that gets into um deciding what kind of sources are quality sources and that's important I think to not obviously not just in that student's case and that was extreme let's say um as you can imagine most I mean most of my students don't come and say I'm going to prove the fact that you know ex-religious text is real um but I never had a student come up uh with a to use the bible as supporting evidence yes I get that all the time to be honest and it's partially because I teach in Idaho and that sounds awful but it's true I don't live in Washington state and it's a very conservative college so I have to you know adapt my my curriculum to that to a certain extent no I just happen to say you know it's my only experience with that you know is teaching there oh I get the bible as evidence all the time I've gone to the point where I will say as long as you get your six other sources from legitimate databases go ahead and cite the bible um because I'm not going to look at it as real evidence but I just get tired of you know explaining to them why they can't use the bible um you know I can try but eventually I want to bang my head against the wall so um that's not it's not just because you know we have to be able to find things for which the evidence is not just assumptions and that we can trust the author and not just trust them as you know they're not sleazy um but they don't have a preset argument in mind obviously if we have a text like that or if we attack have a text from a Shakespeare denialist or um are there argumentative articles on ancient aliens that you can find databases I don't know databases yeah because they cover yeah popular right so if there are things like that where the it's you know you're they're just proving something they already want to prove that is a problem so we have what my job is partially is to teach critical reading and evaluation of claims so I teach students a lot of times they will have a difficulty let's say we're reading a very famous author or a very well respected author um not god or Joseph Smith but um they will have trouble saying I don't really want to tear apart this article because this is a really great author and I you know a lot of times these are dead authors I'm like they're so their feelings aren't going to get hurt um but at the same time they don't have that confidence to do it you know so I will say no you have to do this because it will teach you to you know most likely you will find they will find that these claims are legitimate and are supported if they are from good scholars good writers so names they won't um the tricky thing is then something that students will um you know so we we do the are these trustworthy ones can we trust this author are they using good sources to support their own arguments but then I get into the point where I teach students to apply that same skepticism to their own ideas their own assertions and their own claims that's where it can get tricky and that's where we can get a little students can get a little testy because um no matter what their belief may be even if it's not a wacky belief students will have had that belief for so long and have never been questioned on it that they think well okay why should I have to support it ever this is what I think so when so what I teach I have the my first classes this is the first time that students of many of my students have written argumentative papers a lot of students don't do that in high school various high schools so they are not pleased um and I'm making it sound like my students are all really surly and challenging but you know most of them aren't a lot of times it's just difficult for them so we go through the research process not only you know how to find sources but why you can't just go to google type in your search term and find the first thing that comes up and no matter what it may be but why we have to go to authoritative quality sources um and one thing that I focus on a lot is what I like to call the hypothetical audience because a lot of times when we teach I don't know you may have experienced this or taught this yourself will tell a student right right you know this is the audience you're writing for well it it's hard to get them to believe that sometimes because they know that they're just writing for their teacher as Bob and even knows writing instructors but for the most part they're either if they're gonna do a in-group class you know discussions with the paper and peer views of each other that there's that if not they're writing for us and trying to get a good grade um so I like to talk about the hypothetical audience though and is imagining an audience that could read it imagination to me though is not enough because if we just imagine audience it can be anybody you know you could think of whoever you want to fantasize about reading your paper that's not very exciting fantasy but if it you know it's it's writer porn you know it is writer porn that's a good one Bob um but the hypothetical audience I like to think of as a skeptical audience so an audience that would not you know come at you and shout in your face but that would not take on just at your word what you're saying so um this can be something we have to teach though and um I think that this is um not only an important thing within the classroom but important thing for any of us because we all have um audiences let's say whatever it may be I like to think of that as a very broad term so whether you write online whether you are just trying to communicate to your students with whomever you may be trying to communicate to you have an audience and to practice for that a lot of times it is important I believe to do the hypothetical thing to imagine that audience as challenging us so that way I think we can go through think of our claims think are they valid claims um what would a person who doesn't believe this and what would a person who doesn't agree with me what would they come back at me with and that way ideally we can say okay here's what they might come back at me with so I'm going to have to adjust this part of my claim this part of my argument where I'm going to have to support it more we don't have to give all the opposing um arguments or claims validity but we you know we have to say well this this is a skeptical audience and so not just imagining an audience where everybody is cheering you on this goes back to my my uh my favorite little guy that wanted to prove the book of Mormon um you know he's my little character today I call little character but he was like 55 um so because when you teach community college most a lot of my students are older than me so that can be kind of an usual thing too um so we get this thing you know and that is one of the situations where it's very difficult to imagine a hypothetical audience because that requires challenging those beliefs and that there's going to be resistance to that and it's going to be very difficult we're running out of time okay sorry and I know that peter will be right talking about thinking of challenging someone who you know coming up with you and challenging the corrective mechanism correct is your term right so okay I'll finish this up the idea of uh someone that was that will question you and that will come back at you um again not necessarily uh in a hostile way so um one last thing here um like I said I think it's important to make sure that everything that we talk about in here is uh important not only to students and teachers but to every one of us in here because I think we all have something we can share um that doesn't mean we're all experts nor should we ever claim to be experts because not everyone's an expert as we know and um some people are the exact opposite of that and are trying to trick us and you know trick our students or you know whatever it may be so we don't want that but the idea that we can all uh democrat the democratization of knowledge we all have something we can do we can go out there share with an audience but we don't want to pretend we're experts and we don't want other people to pretend that so we want to question that and we want to question ourselves um no matter what we do so ourselves each other take that out there whatever you may do and practice our skepticism in that manner and I will I will shut up now so thank you guys can everybody hear me okay all right thanks so the theme of the conference is fighting the fakers and I'm going to suggest that we fight the fakers by having a conceptual shift in the way that we think about universities and colleges and that conceptual shift is from knowledge production institutions and knowledge reproduction institutions to reason and rationality incubation chambers so i'll suggest three things three techniques that i use one is a pedagogical technique which is skype which i've started using in the last year and the other two are community partnerships and internships so the the first thing that i've done that i found incredibly helpful and uh i see some people in the audience and bob doesn't even know this yet but i'm going to volunteer him for this i i give my students in the syllabus specific reading assignments that i find online and they read those so i try to construct a syllabus in a curriculum that that's basically free or under five dollars is my rule and then i skype in people and the students get to ask questions so it's completely participatory i don't record those at all because one of the reasons is because i teach science and pseudoscience and i teach atheism and new atheism and a lot of students are afraid that their employers will find the transcripts or that their parents will find out sorry to say that but that that really is the truth so i've had uh dj well atheism in particular is is problematic for a lot of people so i've had dj grotty come in and he spoke to my science pseudoscience class i've had who's here today is john loftis who's come in and spoken to my new atheism class about his books i've had guy p harrison come in and at the imagine no religion three conference i solicited um victor stanger and a few other folks so it's extremely useful technique that helps students uh not not only understand the material but actually get to ask questions of people so that they can engage in some meaningful way so that's the first thing i do towards that end of using the institution using the institution as a vehicle one thing that's been incredibly useful and then i've gotten a lot of personal fulfillment out of this is i partnered with the portland state university partnered with the richard dockins foundation for reason in science to have not only a community partnership but internships one of the the internships we work with shan faircloth and one of the things we did was we place students in a position when shan and the dockins foundation needed help or they needed research or they needed some kind of assistance about a paper what have you uh i selected students then they submitted a resume and we looked at the resume one of the things one of the things that this does is that this gives people an opportunity students an opportunity who want to pursue studies and reason rationality public understanding of science it gives them an opportunity to pursue that the other thing that it does is it forms relationships with our organizations and these relationships are vital they should never this this movement what we're doing in here it should never be about one person it shouldn't be about randy or dj or or or richard it's much bigger than that and the way that we can facilitate that is by creating people i got this idea from i've been reading a lot of christian literature it's damaged me but some really interesting i got this idea from uh some christian literature i've been reading in which they take people and they nurture them and then they basically push them out and help them flourish and help them help other people to flourish it's a wonderful idea and we can do we can uh we can have antithetical content but this a similar process in our classrooms we can find those students who want advanced reason and rationality we can help facilitate them we can write letters for them and then we can help them get into graduate school or go into some type of community activism also i've worked very closely with so those are the national organizations that we've worked with and with michael sherman the skeptic we're going to create another partnership but i've worked i would encourage you to work locally i'm very involved in cfi and cfi portland has an extremely active uh a group and we put on lectures and shows and we our students go in to support those and we have lecturers actually physically come into the classroom so that's been very useful um i want to speak to that third point a little more about what that community partnership looks like one of the things that i've used for the community partnership is we've taken the james randy educational foundation literature and videos and we've used them uh we've used them as as a way to study there's a wonderful little video of of a guy who believes he can talk to babies anybody seen it it's great he goes in for the million he goes in for the million dollar challenge the baby he's a baby whisper some such nonsense um although i have to say you know the shakespeare denial i i that i i learned something new today i'd never even conceived of shakespeare denialism but but evidently the the it's like the horse in allison wonderland that rides off furiously in all directions there's so much nonsense it it's just a never-ending cascade and again bringing it back to this idea of fighting the fakers we can think about our classrooms as ways to nurture our students who they can go out there and advance rationality so those community partnerships are essential let me break that down and tell you what it would look like so the james randy educational foundation provided us with some material and we use a portland state university we use something called d2l it's basically you can upload videos and files etc to there i've dispensed with that here's what i use and i'm not saying that in your classrooms you should use this but vast majority of people are educators i use a thumb drive i require that's the only thing in most of my classes i require is one little thumb drive and i put the content on the thumb drive and then i have a little factory on the first day so uh and i cannot possibly tell you how appreciative students are that they don't have to buy a book or that they don't have to pay for anything so we'll get uh and the james randy educational foundations provides that material for free so we'll make a little factory we'll line people up with their laptops on the first day and then i'll give i have three thumb drives i'll give it to the first three people and it is about 20 minutes of total chaos but after that it's smooth sailing so here's what that looks like broken down so for the template for the science and pseudoscience class students will learn how to conduct a test and they'll learn how to conduct a test with people who want to fake them out and that would be me so i'll make some extraordinary claim i'll do some trivial simple little trick and then we'll run over some thought experiments as we work through both the written material and the visual material so they'll see for themselves what james randy does when he conducts the test but even beyond providing the material one of the things that these community partnerships do is it gives students a resource it gives students an outlet as it is now we have so many people who already have those churches and mosques on on corners but they don't really have a place to go when they want to either discharge their impulses towards community activism or they want to just learn more about the subject so the community partnerships are a way to facilitate our students learning by again coming back to this idea of using the university as a rationality incubation chamber so when i look at my students every single person in my class not only has a possibility to cast off delusions that's not enough we need to take it to the next level and then what the next level is is by teaching them to teach other people to disabuse people of either faulty epistemologies you know ways to think through problems and giving them outlets that they can they can use you know you the other thing you do i haven't done this myself but you can use i have a colleague who does this you can actually have a even more than a partnership with the organizations but you can have them write up a paper like you can incorporate that right into the curriculum in terms of a writing assignment again i haven't done that but that's a possibility i think that the focus of a change in thinking is vital for us because right now the universities not only are they not doing what we want to do but they're taking people further into nonsense we're so afraid to call people out on bad ideas we're so afraid that a combination of political correctness and the nonsense of post-modernism has made it incredibly difficult not only to call out bad ideas but it's complicated by other things people have very basic confusions in academia my colleagues in particular have very basic confusions about what it means to criticize an idea versus what it means to make a criticism of a person which that's just a little bit of a plug for my talk on sunday i hope you can make my talk on sunday my talk is about authenticity so just a quick review we can use skype in our classrooms and if anybody's interested if you college or university teacher and you teach a subject you can try it out though those cameras cost 200 dollars you can email me at pgb at pdx.edu pgb at pdx.edu if you want me to speak to your class to have them watch a video or something i've written i'm happy to to speak with them that's the first thing second thing is the internships where you could talk to both national organizations and i just saw a dj here and i just saw folks who i know elizabeth cornwall is here from the dockins foundation and local groups and then you can use community partnerships both to get the content for your classes and to give students a way to further their studies and rationality and to help them help others become more reasonable and more rational thanks with the time that we have left we are we're very lucky to have so many educators here we've kind of talked about how we try to promote critical thinking in the classroom we'd really love to hear what you folks are doing i will say one other thing right before we get to the the the conversational part is that the jref now has these teaching modules about a variety of of extraordinary claims educators they have a limited number but they have enough for the educators who are here so if you want to go over no there are there are a lot of them a bit yeah you have like this is the coddingly fairies you have one on esp power balance bands that's a brand spanking new one and the other thing that the jref has been doing recently and i want to encourage you guys to you know get in contact with yeah get in contact with me as i've been compiling essays by educators who are using these topics in their classrooms over the last year we've had an education series that we've been running that like to pick it up in the fall and i would love it if you would contribute something yeah there will be eventually right so yeah and back there and see if we can get the mic out there i don't know if we have what about use that mic okay michael booker jefferson college i teach philosophy i think part of the problem that we need to look at is to actually dig into the k through particularly the k through six curriculum i was trying to figure out some of the mindsets that i was dealing with and i finally researched a particular thing called blooms taxonomy which has only been around for 50 years it's horrible it was so easy to destroy because there's no empirical basis for it blooms taxonomy what it goes into something called higher order thinking skills and that's what it gets used in and here's where it shows up in i've got a boy who's in sixth grade they're told in the textbooks in sixth grade fifth grade fourth grade to opine about things for which they have no information that is a good thing for them to have opinions about things for which they have no data and i'm trying to help my son with his homework and i know where this is coming from and there's nothing in the book there's maybe a sentence or at best a paragraph and they're supposed to show higher order thinking by saying something for which there is no information there's a democratization of truth that they come to the colleges with that says every opinion's a good opinion basically what it is is you mirror whatever you think the book is trying to tell you and you don't actually think it through and you certainly don't worry about credibility of sources that's way too far out you know it it seems to me that when you're when you're talking about educating young children and just getting them started on on on writing this is something that we do at the upper level as well as that we start off with writing about yourself because it's what you know and being able to yeah i mean before you do argument you have to be able to to to write about your life experience and use language in an effective way um having something i can i could easily see coming up with materials that would give students a little bit of information look look look what we have here we have this information about dowsing that's one of the the modules they have out there now write it you know read it and now write something about it what do you know now um i mean i can easily see that um what what age are the j ref modules for are they for a variety i believe that they are infinitely adaptable so yeah so for for any level yeah you could conceivably do it but you know they they look really good for high school and and younger i mean i think a lot of the lessons that sucker comes out of the womb give them one of those yeah yeah but um i forgot what i was going to say so thanks you're welcome no i'm i'm i just a lost cause oh we're good so this is being recorded um i just really have more of a comment um the other gentleman mentioned k through six little k through 12 in the united states now for english has a common core standards and part of the common core standards is making evidence-based claims and close reading of text now i'm a science teacher my friend i think she stepped out we're both science teachers eighth grade and we're using a lot of the j ref modules which is good in adapting it to eighth grade and we're also looking into more critical reading on skepticism and science and skepticism and using the whole common core curriculum and some of the guidelines with making evidence-based claims so it is all coming together and i think you guys at the university level will see hopefully improvement in your students as they go through k through 12 with evidence-based claims and close reading and things like that so hopefully the united states is actually doing something right hi my name is uh dan eisenberg from new york i do some um adult um uh jewish and biblical education so this might um do deal with some of the things you deal with where people uh have strong beliefs and now your chat your chat don't want to be challenged but at the same time the adults that i'm dealing with they happen they're adults i'm not with children where they're they're gonna cry it's at a um at uh two synagogues and um i've done some volunteer work at uh you know other organizations oh definitely i've i've been challenging my parents starting challenging my teachers and i'm just a challenge all together so uh but my my what i what i wanted to say is that i don't think that it's it's binary that we have to that as educators right away we have to shove it down their throat that all your beliefs are if they're not um if they're not if not evidence-based then you know come to tam next year that there's that there's a possibility that we can start with baby steps of course of course i'm being jocular for just so uh it's part of my rude personality so um so i'm saying so i'll i'll start with um if uh we're covering something in the bible particular chapter and then we'll say let's look at the archaeology and let's evidence so try to look at evidence evidence-based and then when it is a uh when something is a challenge to a medieval rabbinic source okay now what do we do with it we have a sandal that they dug up and then we have this person who never visited uh palestine at the time so to say okay so now we have to we have to choose do we look at the do we look at the archaeology and again archaeology is my students hate that right but but i'm saying archaeology isn't chemistry i i come from medical background but i'd say uh it's archaeology is not is not uh a uh where you can say uh that sandal is definitely from the late iron age two period yeah so no not aliens um how could humans have built shoes like this right but but again but again challenging them but not to the point of okay now we have to throw out everything but starting with bite-sized pieces and then from those bite-sized pieces it's sort of like a guided um exploration for them to continue for them to make the choice it's it it seems like it's never going to be just a you're never going to just bash a bash belief out of someone and i'm not even sure that's what we should be trying not at all why take away belief if some if that's something that in terms of religious if that's something that that gives them support gives them reasons to wake up in the morning as a as a writing teacher i would be freaking ecstatic if i could get my my creationist students of who i have many um if they could write like william paley by the time they got out of my class i would be like a freaking rock star you know rock star well so um you know who who write with with clarity and condition that and maybe this is one question for the panel um to what degree should a teacher be an activist what do you mean by an activist uh in terms of when we talk about what we're doing with um skeptical at at how do you say um should we be advocating um skepticism in the classroom explicitly or should we be doing it implicitly or um should we be uh to to what degree i almost did a circular thing oh well advocacy isn't advocacy so so my my talk somewhat my talk will be about that but i i think the one question that we should ask ourselves is we can reverse engineer the question by by asking what's the purpose of an education you know what's the purpose of a k-12 education what's the purpose for college education once we can answer that question then we can we can direct our kind of cognitive wherewithal and resources i mean i i have an answer for myself to the question and if somebody possesses a way of thinking about the world that's unreliable then i think that in in my field not if i was an accountant but in my field i teach critical thinking science and pseudo science it's about the process that one uses and not the conclusions that one holds and so i don't again i'm just strictly speaking myself i never try to change anybody's belief it's about trying to help people to develop more reliable ways of knowing the world and more reliable ways to solve problems and they'll come to their own beliefs but i think oftentimes we're held back by a fear of a fear of offending people or all of these other cultural problems that contemporary academia suffers from postmodernism we got into that last year on our panel i agree um it's you don't want so well okay sometimes you do want to say no hold me up at the bad put the water down but yeah but um unless you're talking about the play i hear that's very good um but but then we're sort of doing argument for authority ourselves it's just so it is as i believe you said encouraging them in certain ways of thinking and and to look at the evidence for themselves and to to guide them to how to find good sources not necessarily sources the degree with me but or them but uh yeah and and look for differing opinions on on topics