 Superb. Okay, our next talk is called the Going Forward, The Perspective Mission of Skepticism. A nice easy subject, yes, with a five-word answer. Your moderator is Sharon Hill. Let me give you the haiku for this one. Sharon and Barbara, Daniel, Stephen, and Jamie. Nice basketball team. So please welcome your moderator, Sharon Hill. Testing. There we go. I said we've already had this panel backstage. We use lots of profanity and we, you know, support each other and everything. And so we're all nice and friendly now. We're all agreeable. So, yeah, sorry, disappointing. Okay. Going forward, the perspective mission of skepticism sounds dull, but I think we'll do okay. All right, so let me introduce my panel here today. We have Daniel Loxton, editor of Junior Skeptic, author of two in-depth essays about skepticism. Where do we go from here? And why is there a skeptical movement? I'm going to address her. Education consultant for JREF, and she's written extensively about the scope and methodology of science and skepticism. Jamie in Swiss, JREF senior fellow and longtime skeptical advocate and potster. And Stephen Novella, JREF senior fellow, doctor, educator, and one of the top skeptical communicators in the world. So welcome our panel. Thank you. We have an hour. We'll do some discussion. We hope to have about 15 minutes at the end about the questions as we're going through this. This is a huge topic, and it's been done in many respects before. There's plenty of literature on it. So the purpose of this panel is to share some new thoughts about what our panelists have reflected upon over the past years and the ideas that they have. And perhaps some of these ideas will resonate with you and some maybe not so much, but these panelists are leading thinkers and doers in skeptical activism. And I hope we could come up with some worthwhile information for new skeptics coming. This is their first hand. And who just have a taste of skepticism may not be aware of the nuances and the history, what skepticism has been and where it's going. And I think that people who have been here, everybody knows who these people are and will get their viewpoints. So let's start out with some foundation real quick. Let's lay the foundation, our nutshell version. When the John Q. Public hears about skeptical activism, they don't really understand what that entails. What's the skepticism thing? Steve, you want to start us off? Yeah, sure. So I have written about this a few times. So I have a quick PowerPoint of just job points of those key areas that I think define what I call scientific skepticism. I think Carl Sagan is the one who coined that term. It may predate him. So rationalism is multiple overlapping movements. Scientific skepticism is one part of that. That's what I do. That's what a lot of people here do. Not everyone though. Everyone has their own different take on exactly what areas they are passionate about. So these are the areas that define my personal activism. Are the slides up? Okay, so respect for knowledge and truth. These are the principles that we follow. Basically, skeptics value reality and what is true. We want to believe what is really, really true, not just what we want to believe. Philosophically, that follows methodological naturalism, which basically means you don't get to make shit up and you can't invoke magic or supernaturalism ad hoc to justify your beliefs or your conclusions. You have to follow some method that respects cause and effect. We promote science because let's face it, science is the bomb. Science is what works. Bitches. Science is the set of methods that actually work in terms of exploring empirical reality. We promote reason and critical thinking, not the exact same thing as science, although critical thinking is a tool of science, it is a thing unto itself. We understand the difference between science and pseudoscience. So what I've spoken up to this point, you could say about any general scientist, but a scientific skeptic also has to understand pseudoscience, both in general principle as well as the specifics of each topic. We definitely promote ideological freedom and free inquiry because without free exchange of ideas and free inquiry, the whole gig is off. What I like to call neuropsychological humility, which is basically a deep and intimate understanding of all the many, many ways in which our brains fool us, the flaws and biases in our thinking, our memories, our perceptions, unless you understand how easy it is for us to deceive ourselves and to be fooled by reality, you won't understand the need for all of the other things. And we also do consumer protection because that just happens to be a realm where you need all of these tools and so it's just a natural fit for our overall mission. So that's it. I think it's a good starting point for the general, you know, the basic scope of what I do, certainly, and I think a lot of my colleagues do. Does anybody have any, they're in a nutshell description or do we all agree with Steve, say I? What he said. Right, so let's, we've got the foundation. Let's go forward. Jamie, your mission, your audience, talk a little bit about that, start off with you. That's an easy one. Well, I think the world is filled with everything we are at. It is very easy to get information from the other side. The other side has open channel, unlimited access, a huge pipeline of anti-science, non-science, uncritical thinking. And so as far as the audience goes, the potential audience is the whole goddamn world. And the problem is that we are fighting to be heard. We are fighting to get our side out. Our side happens to be a pretty good and useful way of looking at the world. But the unfortunate reality is we have to fight to get it heard. How about the difference between you as a person, individual, and you representing an organization? I'm much nicer as a representative of the organization. You know, as a member of the organization, actually I think it's an important question. I'm very much a long time skeptical activist and what that means is that I've, among other things, helped to start two regional organizations, the National Capital Area Skeptics in 1987, New York City Skeptics 20 years later. And part of what you have to do, and I'm very much a promoter and supporter of local activism, for all sorts of reasons, and without giving a whole talk about that, I'll just say that besides all the obvious things a group can do as activists, whether they're writing letters or presenting talks or protesting or whatever they're doing or educating, I think a really key good reason for local activism is to find like-minded individuals and explore that social element. And I think that's powerful and I think that's really constructive. But when you're forming an organization, besides making those social connections, it's really important to think hard about what your mission is. Because you're not operating as an individual, it's fine to have opinions as an individual. And as an individual, you don't have expertise about everything. None of us has expertise about all of these subjects. That's another good reason to band together so that you can combine your expertise. But it's very important to think about what your mission is and what your mission isn't. Because without that clarified mission statement, you just end up in a mess and at counter purposes. And this has led to discussions, as we all know, in varying overlapping communities, for example, not to expand the discussion too early or too much, but as a local organization and as an organizational spokesman and as a public activist rather than a private individual, you need to understand something about the distinctions. For example, between overlapping philosophies like scientific skepticism as opposed to secular humanism as opposed to atheism. And First Timer is just coming here and we have so many new ones at TAM, which is absolutely fantastic. Often are not that familiar with that and want to know about that. I mean, I've given three talks on the record, they're all on YouTube just in the last year, about those subjects. And those distinctions are important. And they're also not just, you know, ad hoc. I had someone just four days ago post on my Facebook about how they're not coming here to TAM and they can't support JREF and it's over some of these mission issues like atheism and so forth. And some people here actually answered that. I didn't answer because all I would have said was that I thought he had made a good choice and that for his reasons and that I'm going to have a great time at TAM and I don't think I would have had a better time with him here. But the one thing in that discussion, if you will, was the notion that I've somehow by fiat randomly declared what the so-called mission is when in fact, as we know here and especially Daniel has recorded and I encourage everyone to read his work on this, there is a long intellectual history of what we're trying to accomplish and why. Why bother being a skeptical advocate has 35 years of organized skepticism made a difference or is it just a social club for ultra-rational, naturally critical people? Barb? You're going to be talking a bit about this in your talk? Yeah, I think I will be. Well, I could just say yes to the second one and be done with it. But I think that is actually part of it. Jamie mentioned the community, I think that's important and it has a great deal of value. But the short answer to the second one is well, irrationality kills people and it makes people spend their life savings. The long answer though is that it's important for everybody in everyday life. One thing that I do plan to talk about tomorrow is the fact that rationality actually leads us to our goals and being irrational lets other people decide for us what we want. It doesn't actually, it makes us give up our power to the people who understand how to manipulate us. That's really what rationality is. Rationality is avoiding, it's more than just avoiding biases and it's also avoiding the shortcuts and thinking that allow other people to manipulate us. So when we are not thinking critically and not thinking rationally and not looking at the world through a materialistic worldview, we're allowing other people to decide what we're going to get and we're not meeting our goals and that's as an individual and as a society. As a society, it's higher disease rates because of lower vaccine rates. As an individual, it might be paying more for something that you really, that you don't have to because you didn't take the time to think through what your alternatives were. So there are so many benefits to skepticism that I couldn't even begin to cover them in 30 seconds. I would have, I could write a whole book about it. And I think that we have made progress. There are plenty of examples, you know, the bomb dousing successes that we've managed to stop people from selling bomb dousers. We have managed you all sorts of things just by teaching, giving people good information, giving them alternative explanations for the evidence that they think supports some extraordinary claim and teaching them how to think critically for themselves. So skepticism, it's not the end-some game. You know, we don't just squash nonsense and make more rational people, but I've heard the skeptic refer to as either the garbage man, you know, taking out the trash or the policeman. Daniel, I think you've used some of those terms before. I have, although they're not original to me. One of the great lessons of my career has been that none of this is new. I mean, this stuff has been going on for a long time. When people reach for terms in which to talk about the utility of scientific skepticism, we often reach for these things about harm. Watch the harm like Tim Farley likes to ask. We look for occasions where skeptics have maybe prevented harm or brought justice to those who have been harmed. And I think those are really legitimate frames to look at this question through, but for me it's even more basic. You know, what is the utility in any research on any topic? Is it worth knowing stuff? And I think that when you consider that the overwhelming majority of humanity believes one or more paranormal things, I think that it is worth humanity's time to have a few specialists who look at those things, try to figure out if they're true, study and track them, and build up a rigorous scholarship around those things over a sustained period of time. And Daniel, you wrote about what skepticism can be and where we go from here. What were some of your ideas that you see really working now? Well, I wrote where do we go from here in 2007. It's available as a free PDF from the Skeptic Society. In the document I made the very basic argument that scientific skepticism in its most basic form to solve mysteries and inform the public what we have learned. It's sufficiently useful and sufficiently specialized, unique that it is worth doing in a sustained way. And I made that argument at that time because there seemed to be this sort of change in the air that at that time people were not yet talking about very much. A huge expansion in the base of the skeptical subculture and influx of new technologies and new ideas, a new urgency in some of our parallel rationalist movements, some of our cousins and other movements. And I was worried that scientific skepticism would be eclipsed, so the tradition I belong to would be lost somehow. But as the years have gone by, although I think I was to some extent right to worry, there has been some confusion in recent years, some speaking across purposes between people who have similar but not identical priorities. And there's even been a little bit of conflict about those things. But I think in another way that my concern was short-sighted. And my more recent piece released this year, why is there a skeptical movement? I traced back the history of this paranormal criticism stuff a couple of thousand years. It's been around for a long time. And there are people in this room right now who have been doing scientific skepticism, doing this work for 60 years. Not me, by the way. Sometimes it feels like it. But that work has been going on for a long time. It will continue to go on. I think in 500 years it will still be people who are trying to get to the bottom of these things. Whenever there are claims that sound too good to be true, some people try to get to the bottom of it. And here in this room we have a thousand people who care about investigation. Tam still cares about the tradition of Houdini. He still cares about the work of James Randi. Tam has not forgotten its investigative heart. Yeah, but as a movement, I think this sort of addresses your issue where to go from here. We can't lose our tradition, our history, our core. But we do have to adapt to the changing needs of society. You know what I'm saying? We need to keep addressing the same topics where we can't expand our repertoire. I think the skill set that we're promoting is timeless and universal. But how it gets applied is something that every generation is going to have to figure out for themselves. Every generation of skeptics has to figure out what are the key issues, where do we need to focus our efforts, what are our challenges, who are our opponents, who are our allies. But the skill set, you know, I think we're developing the skill set further and further and further, but that doesn't change. And that's, you know, when I went over my list, that's really what I'm talking about. That's the skill set of skepticism. And I think it's really tangential to the question of to what topics do we apply it, right? I mean, we all need to, we need to know, you know, how to think logically and the philosophical basis of our opinions, regardless of whether we decide to apply it only to Bigfoot or if we're going to apply it to, you know, to more social or political topics or whatever. It, right? So I think that, and when I see like, where do we go from here starting from 2013, my, you know, wet dream of where the skeptical movement should be going is I'd like to see us doing what we're doing, but in addition, I think that we would benefit from developing that body of knowledge and those skills that I've talked about into a real coherent academic discipline. Something that's respectable, that's scholarly, that's recognized within academia, and that has a much deeper influence on the rest of the intellectual world so that we don't, you know what, my fear is, is that we are relegated to the fringe. Not because of our methods, but because of the topics to which we apply them. Oh, you debunk UFOs, that's a fringe idea. So you're fringe. It's like, no, but I'm promoting science and science isn't fringe, but that's what happens. Science gets put on the fringe and that worries me and I'm still struggling with how we do our mission without relegating ourselves to the fringe. I think one of the challenges in that, that we're facing right now is, particularly those that don't come into the community from having a science background to begin with, having to ensure or educate those new people about the difference between that method and that skill set and the topics themselves. That it's very easy for human beings to conflate those because we do think in conclusion terms. We start with, this is what I already think, and then we start looking for the evidence that confirms it rather than either trying to falsify or opening our minds and considering the possibility that we're wrong. And so because that's our method, kind of default method as humans, of looking at claims, we tend to not really internalize that it's separate, that the skill set we're using and the methods that we're using really are a separate issue from the topics that we study. I mean, there may be, just looking at different science disciplines. Yes, there are lots of different methods in terms of the equipment they use and maybe some of the experimental designs are different, but there's a general scientific method. It's a very, very vague description, but it still has the same basic kind of philosophy behind it. I'm not sure about this. I'm not clear, Steve, about this notion of making it, of turning skepticism into an academic discipline for the very reason you mentioned, which is that the scientific method and science disciplines and disciplines within science, whether it's chemistry or physics or biology, are well-established and well-developed, and yet still, as you say, sometimes pushed to the fringe. So the point of accomplishing and making an academic discipline out of it is not in and of itself any kind of achievement in terms of getting the message out. And what we are, if anything, we're not scientists, we don't tend to be as skeptics. What we are is promoters, consumer advocates, I like to say, of the scientific method and the scientific worldview and, you know, we're not doing science, we are trying to explain and promote science. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, when I talk about skepticism as an academic discipline, that wouldn't be the entirety of scientific skepticism or the movement, it would be one additional piece that I think would serve our overall movement very well. So in such as there is a philosophy of science as an academic discipline, then it's philosophy of scientific skepticism. It's also the practice of scientific. There are people using scientific methods to study questions that probably psychologists and other scientists wouldn't be interested in. It's more bringing all of these things together and applying them in a certain way. So for example, you know, come to academia, I talk to, you know, non-sceptical academics all the time, they have no freaking idea what we do and why we do it, they don't get it. It's just complete disconnect. It's very disconcerting. Part of what they don't understand is the nature of pseudoscience. Or they think because they understand science, they therefore understand pseudoscience when they have no idea. They don't get it at all. And when you try to explain it to them, their eyes glaze over and they think, that's on the fringe, that's not something I need to worry about. And then they get blindsided by it and it totally bites them in the ass. And then they're like, how did this happen? Then they go into defense mode. One anecdote about this was a very accomplished, successful neurology researcher who studies coma who thought that he discovered that his patient who was comatose for 20 years was actually locked in and fully conscious because of facilitated communication. And this guy who was a world-recognized expert in neurology got completely blindsided by facilitated communication. And then when I explained it to him, he didn't get it. Eventually, he partly came around, but that was an education, a whole, in his body of knowledge because he wasn't a skeptic. He was a scientist but not a skeptic. So how do we bring skepticism in a respectable way to academia? One more thing. One other point to make on this is that I think we've made the most headway is in the UK where there are professorships of the public understanding of science. That's as close as we get to what we do being recognized as a legitimate endeavor. And it's a great step forward. We need to import that into the United States and we need to expand upon it. I mean, history is littered with the wreckage of scientific careers in which well-trained, well-qualified scientists who just didn't know what they were getting into ran up against the reefs of pseudoscience. It's not because they didn't know enough about science. It's because they didn't know enough about nonsense. The study of nonsense is itself a large topic. There is a lot to know. In that respect, Steve's dream of an academic skepticism is my dream too. I would love to have been able to go and get a degree in the same weird stuff that I study. I'm studying it professionally but I didn't have the benefit of any training for it. I could have used it. I had to turn to the semi-technical literature, and the skeptics movement in general has produced in a kind of emergent way but training would have been nice. It would have helped. I dream of a situation maybe like astronomy or paleontology or geology in July where there is both a core of trained academics and a very large population of serious amateur practitioners. That's the picture that I see when I look to the horizon. And just briefly, but Daniel in your older piece about where do we go, you talk explicitly about this idea that expertise in nonsense is part of the skeptics special arena and special area of expertise because scientists don't have that expertise. They don't spend time studying that. That speaks to mission because not only the skeptics have that development expertise but we are really the only social activism movement that addresses that specifically. There are lots of consumer advocacy organizations out there but they don't really address nonsense in this kind of and pseudoscience in this way that we do and this is yet another thing that distinguishes us from other sister movements like humanism or atheism or whatever where we may share some universal beliefs or philosophical beliefs about the world but they are not active in those areas. That is a special and important area of what we do as consumer advocates. This is a point that I made in the why is there a skeptical movement of this here. In the 1970s when skepticism came together as an organized project it had existed for centuries before that. Occasionally it had coalesced into something semi-organized but the movement that we know now was born in 1976 and when that happened there already were scientists and there already were historians of science there already were humanists, there already were atheists there already were science popularizers all these movements existed and yet there was work that was not being done and that's why skeptics organized was to deal specifically with the project of studying and informing the public about pseudoscientific and friend science claims. You know what I'm hearing here makes me think of a skepticism that is multi-disciplinary. Absolutely. Because what you're talking about, yes it's true that science in general did not look at these questions but there are scientists that do that are interested and it may not be part of their regular day job but in the field of psychology most psychology teachers teach pseudoscience because that's part of what we do is understand why people leave in it, how misconceptions are created, things like that so I think there's you know we've got so many different people from different backgrounds here and we all play a different role in what we do and we kind of all need each other it's very not multi-disciplinary but interdisciplinary you know we all bring different things to the table because this job actually requires there's a lot of different things it requires that we're able to communicate with the public which most scientists are not very good at that because it's not what they got into science to do. There are some that are good and there are some that are not and hopefully the ones that are good do it but we need to be able to communicate to the public that requires marketing it requires communication we need the expertise to actually be able to evaluate the information that we want to pass on in a way that makes sense and to make sure that it's accurate we need people from all backgrounds people who can recognize fraud and deceitful I don't know how to say it, the honest liar is just such a difficult thing for me to conceptualize but I'm trying to now say the opposite of that what's the opposite of the honest liar the deceitful liar well yeah yes the liar who does not admit to using lying as a method that's the point it's long though I can't say that every time I'm trying to say it but you get the point though we need magicians play this big role in skepticism because they bring to the table something that scientists never think to look for because we're not looking for fraud we're looking and you're not trained to detect it because as I like to say you don't get a bunch of microbes calling a meeting on a slide saying hey let's fool the big guy right so academic training in the world does not make anybody any better at detecting fraud and that's why you have the magician a little color it's sometimes being suggested that it was kind of a historical accident that those people who came together in the 1970s to form psychop first and eventually a global network of skeptical organizations so they came from so many backgrounds we had magicians we had philosophers we had journalists psychologists absolutely and it was not a historical accident it was a kind of conciliance jumping together of all these people from different backgrounds pursuing the same basic problem with different faces of the same problem and realizing that their expertise could complement each other and that their areas their specific areas of interest whether it was psych eggs or crack medicine these things had functional similarities they could be addressed as a set in some way not an accident but a a happy fusion yeah I hear a lot of building blocks and a lot of bricks that have been laid down in the past and here we are moving forward to the future I mean what's the road map what do we need to do now yeah that's a hard question it's a really hard question yeah I mean if we knew we'd be doing it yeah you know maybe we are doing it I don't know it's hard to know there's no road map to unmapped territory which is really what we're talking about so I'm always trying to not rest on what we've accomplished so far we can keep doing what we're doing and we're having success to some degree doing what we're doing and that's great but I'm always looking towards how do we take it to the next level what's the next step to try well for example you've used technological innovations I mean a skeptic movement has been really good at podcast apps we jumped on web 2.0 podcasting blogging it was like we were waiting for it I mean it was the perfect marriage to our grassroots kind of very intellectually driven movement and it gave us a real advantage because that medium really favors the person with the ideas and that's like what we have and we have these ideas out there so we took off as soon as that infrastructure was basically laid at our feet and we're still riding that wave but we got to look for that next wave because this is only going to take us so far now that Daniel is the one we're still writing books we're still publishing magazines is that reaching a new crowd well I I hope to always we were talking earlier about you asked what Jamie's audience was and my audience is whoever in the world can get any use for any period of time out of robust information about the paranormal or the pseudoscience you know those people are old and young they're people of faith they're non-believers they're people of all countries we all come across these ideas these claims that seem too good to be true and all of us have at some point in our life the need to find out and so you know I try to be available to that broad broad audience to the maximum degree and one of the ways I try to do that is by not selling a grand unified Daniel Loxtonism you know I'm a human being I'm complicated I've got a huge portfolio of beliefs and preferences and most of those I am not selling in my work I'm not selling a world view I'm just selling the most robust information I'm able to provide and Jamie you're reaching an audience that is maybe entertainment oriented and not necessarily scientific oriented what do you have planned for the future what's your outlook well what I think might be best what I'm most interested in in the skeptical moment may not be the thing that I directly am doing in the world but I think that education science education critical thinking education and getting that education to start earlier and as early as possible is a real priority for the movement everything we're doing I think is right and everything we're doing is what we're always going to be doing because there's a million leaks that we're always going to be trying to plug the holes in there's always going to be alternative medicine there's always going to be fraud and deliberate you know cons and scams there's always going to be pseudoscience so working on these things and trying to put out information and debunking which is a very important part of our role we haven't actually explicitly mentioned it's actually an important part of the role of skepticism for because it's part of the educational process by debunking you're offering an alternative explanation which happens to be the real explanation of how things work and so debunking is a key role another role that skeptics take that other movements don't but all of that does connect to the notion of what is critical thinking what are the methods of science you know my friend and longtime friend and colleague Chip Denman who's on the board at JREF used to teach a course at the University of Maryland in critical thinking and science it was a terrific, terrific class that I guest lectured in a number of times but the only thing wrong with it was a college freshman class when to me it should be a third grade class instead of teaching kids in high school to memorize the periodic table of the elements before they know if they're going to be chemists or not they should be learning what is the scientific method this is why and when the average person I get into a conversation and with educators too I had a meeting with a college educator who wanted to talk about creating a critical thinking course and I talked to her about mythbusters and getting kids to watch mythbusters we don't watch much television in our home but my kids have unlimited access to mythbusters if they're desperate to watch something they know they won't get a hard time for me if they just go to Netflix and turn on another mythbusters episode so that's not what I do personally but it is something I promote as a skeptic and it's something we're doing at JREF we have these terrific educational units Barbara's been key in and also Daniel other individuals we have these great units we have one or two more they're just about to come out and they're fantastic they're out are they out so what are the two latest ones we've actually got four that are new to the audience we have one on Paridolia one on visual illusions another one on cognitive biases and heuristics and one on power balance oh yes right the most recent one I saw was the power balance and these are absolutely fantastic useful teaching tools that we want to see in every school so yes I'm an entertainer I'm a communicator making said one horse laugh is worth 10,000 syllogisms I spent a lot of time reading syllogisms but my job includes horse laughs so I try and get up there and wave my arms and get people's attention and try and say a little something about how the universe works but in the end so much of it is after the fact for us we're trying to close the doors after the horses have been stolen when in fact the first and foremost most important thing we could possibly be doing is teaching people critical thinking from the ground up before we get to some questions does anyone want to add their last bits of wisdom something we didn't talk about or didn't touch on but where we go from here and ideas I think I wanted to add a little bit to what Jamie was saying and one that hasn't come up yet about the future in addition to everything that everyone else has said that problem of getting to the younger crowd one of the things that we have to remember is that when we're reaching for that younger crowd their development's in a different place and so we can put a little bit of the applied skepticism talking about what is and is not bunk but teaching them to critical I think starts with very very basic questions and probably the most basic questions aren't even related as much to science as they are to values but it's not the value that's important it's how you think about whether it's okay or not and that's moral reasoning basic basic philosophy questions for very young children is where I would be starting very young do we have resources? yeah actually there are some good books I've covered them in blog posts on Swift before but there's one called I can't remember the author's name there's one called philosophy for children that I really like that asks very basic questions and has follow up questions and the idea is to get kids talking about it in space so that they think about alternatives and they think about future consequences and they think about all things that maybe they are assuming about a question and they think about all the situations in which this might apply and realize that there isn't a simple answer to most of these questions but the other thing that hasn't come up is community we've talked about community and it's a little bit of a double-edged sword we're all here in part because we want to be together and be with people who are like minded and we have fun together and all of that and we want to rant and what is it disagree or agree loudly yes agree vehemently vehemently agree and but that creates a little bit of tribalism and sometimes that can get in the way I think we need to find ways to have an in-group that doesn't target other human beings as out-groups or maybe tries to minimize the conflicts between out-groups and still have that community together because I think we do need some tribalism we need to have our tribe it feels good and it's not a bad thing because it helps us work together but we need to control it too. You know you made me think of something Barb here which is in terms of early lessons magic is actually a great early lesson it doesn't always guarantee a rational outlook there are no shortage of whack jobs in the magic world who believe in a magical universe but nevertheless it gives a fighting chance to teach a very early lesson that says things are not always what they seem and my friend Danny Hillis a prominent technologist some of you may know among other things that's worked with the Clock of the Long Now project when his kids were growing up he hired a magician to come in and give them all magic lessons not because he wanted his kids to grow up to be magicians but because he thought it was a kind of a fundamental learning tool about how to think about the world I've taught my boys I have no desire for my boys so I wouldn't wish show business on my enemies kids much less my own I have no desire for my kids to grow up to be magicians but I've taught them a few magic tricks and what's involved in the performance of them and there were really big ah-has behind that that they recognized two weeks ago we have ten year old twins two weeks ago I brought the boys to the county fair and we went on rides and we ate toxic food and all of that but there was a big midway section with all the games and of course at first the boys want to play the games and they're crazily expensive these days so instead I took them on a tour with all of the Carney games and we just kind of went game by game and I quietly explained to them how each one worked and what the scam was and a couple of them that they could really clearly see and pick out themselves and then later we were having dinner at like a picnic table a bunch of group of people and some other people sat down and I was asking you know so what have you been doing what have you seen and you know I don't know right away one of my boys with his newfound knowledge well don't play that basketball game because you know that hoop is oval and they had so much fun though getting those ah-has right and getting sort of with it that we went through that you know the midway like twice and by the time we were done there was no question of you know how come you didn't give me money to play the game that was not the issue it was a lot more rewarding than taking home a goldfish they took home some real life lessons and wasn't it fun trying to figure it out for themselves first some although you know it's real I mean well my talk will be a little bit about this tomorrow you know you have to credit the con man and the corny games are pretty clever and you would have a hard time if I walked through that midway with you and said okay how is this faked you would have a hard time just you know just like I always you know I don't get paid the fool just the dumb slow students I get paid the fool smart people and so does the con artist and so does the midway game going to what Barbara was just saying about tribalism you know it is really fun to be among people who share your interests and I come out of town with a huge high you know it keeps me fueled up all year one of the ways that I try to steer away from kind of a tribal outlook though is just not to get too hung up on the label of skeptic skeptic as an identity speaking for myself personally I identify as a secular humanist and I happen to be an atheist that's a fairly small true fact about me skepticism is work that I do it's work I do professionally it's an activity that I pursue when I get up and when I come to town I'm most excited to talk to other people who are doing that same work and I mean I think almost everybody here is and some small or huge degree is pursuing that activity and it's the activity that I come in verb that I'm most excited about we only have about three minutes so I don't know if we can manage with any questions or not one quick question does anyone have a really good question preferably formed in a form of a haiku it's a sure one and it's a good one so when we get on the elevators to and from up and down the stairs we happen to be on with a non tam attendee and they ask so what's up with this fight the fakers thing what on earth do you tell me that was actually my first question I was going to ask so that is a really good question I was at the meal I was at dinner the other night with Chipp and Grace Denman and the waiter asked this and I wish I could Chipp are you handy where are you rather than rephrase George could you run see George run run George run would you just repeat what you said to the waiter because I thought it was great and I couldn't have done it myself well I doubt that I can repeat it exactly because I get asked a lot and it's always a little different each time because we are such a multifaceted group but I think I said something to the effect that we are pro-science we are encouraging people to look critically at unusual claims we sometimes look at the fringe stuff like ESP and UFO the central thing that unites us is critical thinking, promotion of science and wanting to examine things in a very critical rigorous way yeah evidence based thinking about the world I think that's pretty good and awesome haircuts one more quick one can you see a hand one quick one yes here we go it wasn't quick I suppose quick one here we go okay when we were talking about skepticism and what it is I didn't hear anything about open-mindedness even though I always hear skeptics talk about it regularly and paranormal people always talk about it where does open-mindedness fit in with skepticism in the future I think it's implicit in everything else that we were talking about open inquiry it's fundamental I agree and we also put out the fact that being open-minded is often used in the same way as having faith or whatever which is a way of dismissing any opinions that you don't agree with you don't agree with me because you're not open-minded or you're closed-minded so you try to avoid using it as a dismissive or denialist tool but functionally it just means that we're fair in our evaluation of evidence if you can prove anything with adequate evidence and logic in proportion to the evidence that's what being open-minded is but it's implicit to science and everything else we were talking about and that's right because Steve said so what he said I would just like to add that please make a little mark in your program our speakers here please go home and look them up on the web watch their YouTube talks read their blogs, read their written documents and really understand that they've done a lot of work in this field and I'd also plug the media guide to Skepticism which is on doubtfulnews.com which some of these people have helped me with as well, community document and great to hand out as a beginner document so I want to thank my panel very informative thank you very much and thanks everybody thank your panel one more time very nicely done, congrats