 You're not supposed to excuse yourself before a talk, but I'm gonna do it anyway because I like breaking convention. I actually wrote something. I normally do these things off the cuff, but what I wanna talk about is very important to me and I wanna make sure I speak very carefully because a lot of the times when I talk about or write about these topics, I get misinterpreted and I'm tired of it and so I've actually printed this out so I apologize that I'm not actually going to be maintaining a lot of by contact which is fine because I can't really see you anyway but I will be looking down a lot and I apologize for that, but there you go. For those of you who are new and for those of you who've been here for a while, come to more than one time, I typically talk about astronomy, space and science and the way they're twisted and distorted by anti-scientists, by pseudo-scientists. And for all the years that I've been doing active skepticism, I've never actually stood up here and talked about what it means to be an active skeptic, to do skepticism, about how we practice this art of ours. It's not really necessarily a science skepticism, it can, there's some art to it. And I've not discussed skeptics ourselves and so over the past couple of months, I've been thinking about this a lot. I read a lot of blogs, I read the bulletin boards and all of that and honestly, there's been some alarming developments in the way skepticism is being done and perhaps not overall but in some specific places, the tone of what we're doing is decaying. And instead of relying on the merits of the arguments, which is what critical thinking is really all about, what about evidence-based reasoning is about, it seems that vitriol and venom are on the rise and I'm unhappy about that and I wanna talk about it. So let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question here. How many of you here today used to believe in something, used to, past tense, whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to. I mean, I imagine, yeah. Not everybody's born a skeptic, right? A lot of you are raising your hand. I'd even say most of you from what I can tell. Now, let me ask you a second question. Second question is, how many of you no longer believe in those things and you became a skeptic? Because somebody got in your face screaming and called you an idiot, brain damaged and a retard. Okay? Yeah. Right. One of the things that we like to say is skeptics and a lot of our aphorisms are correct in general but incorrect in detail is that the plural of anecdote is not data, right? One anecdote is an anecdote. But you know what data is? It's a lot of anecdotes put together and right now there are 1,300 people in this audience. You're self-selected mostly as skeptics, overwhelmingly. That's not an anecdote, okay? That's data. You're self-selected as skeptics and yet very few of you raised your hands and the ones who did I think on the second question were mostly joking about it. I think this is important. I think this is something I want you to keep in your mind while I'm talking here. Skepticism is hard, okay? Skepticism is in many ways a self-annihilating message, okay, how do you convince someone they're not thinking clearly when they're not thinking clearly, right? And it's worse because as Michael Shermer talked about this morning and as most of us already know, our brain is not wired for skeptical thinking. It's wired for faith. And so what we're trying to say to people is difficult for them and studies have shown that people who lose their faith tend to replace it with something else with a different type of belief. If you start off religious and you lose your faith in God, you'll replace that with something else, some other non-evidence-based reasoning. An excellent example of this, and I'm sorry it's another anecdote, is Julia Sweeney, we all know her, I hope. And her brilliant one-woman story letting go of God. And now she started off a true believer and ended up a skeptic and a critical thinker. But that's actually a rare case. It doesn't happen like that. And I may mention her again later because I think her case is actually very important. It gets worse. Studies have actually shown that when you debunk a misconception, you actually wound up reinforcing it later. So when somebody comes in and says, I think that, I don't know, the full moon on the horizon is because of the atmospheric effects of acting like a lens. And you say, oh no, no, no, it's an illusion, it's this and this and this and this. And a year later you say, what causes the moon illusion? They'll say, you know, I heard it was an atmospheric effect. And so actually debunking reinforces the things we're trying to debunk. It's irritating, actually. And it puts a damper on trying to show people why they're wrong. And it just keeps getting worse. The message we're trying to convey is hard all by its lonesome. And it's even worse when we're trying to peddle this idea when you think about what we're actually saying of no magic, no afterlife, no higher moral authoritative father figure, no security, and no happy ever after, okay? This is a tough sell. And in many cases, people will prefer magic over science and they will prefer fantasy over reality. Santa Claus is more fun than getting presents from your parents, right? And the Tooth Fairy is more exciting than knowing that it's just your parents putting money under your pillow. And I'm sorry, it's a spoiler alert there. Now, look, for those of you who know me, and like Pamela, I'm a science evangelist. I do this because I have a passion for it. I know how amazing and how awesome black holes and supernovae and spiral galaxies are. And I know, as a scientist, or at least one who used to do science, I know about the imagination, the creativity, the sense of wonder, and the deep profound beauty of science. I understand that and I know it. But not everybody else does. The generic person out there, someone not in our group, they tend to hear the message that science is hard and that it's boring. And worse, skeptics and scientists, we tend to be thought of as being stuffy and stilted and a social, if not downright evil and sociopathics. Atheists eat babies, don't you know, right? So it's a tough sell. And also, how do believers think of themselves? Many times their self-identity is wrapped up in their belief. And one of the most important things people use to define themselves is their, for example, their religion or their belief. They might say, you know, I'm a UFO person or whatever. It doesn't matter what the belief is. Not only that, our society stresses faith. How many movies have, as their final message, something about faith? How many books and how many TV shows? The doubt in the movie is downplayed. The person who is doubting is shown as ineffectual, even bad. And the belief is the highest ideal. I mean, come on, clap if you want Tinkerbell to live, right? So, congratulations. A Coddingly fairy is still alive because of you. So with all of this stacked against us, and this is a lot of stuff stacked against us, why in the hell would you want to make it harder to deliver that message? The odds of us making any progress in society are very low. And it's borne out by the data. Religion is still a huge influencing factor in the world, and that's 200 plus years after the Enlightenment. That's a long time. More beliefs are waning, okay? I have to admit I wrote this speech several days ago, but I think this is quite funny. What I wrote here is that many beliefs are waning. You don't hear much from Moonhook's believers anymore. But a lot of them, but look, but they're out there, right? They're out there. We are making progress, for example. In the UK, Simon Singh, love that man, love his hair. You know, with chiropractic in the UK, we're making a lot of progress, but when you really think about it, they were the ones who shot themselves in the foot. They were the ones who sued Simon. Simon was just writing an article about them, and he was absolutely right, especially in his word choice. But they shot themselves in the foot. We weren't even holding that gun, okay? They were the ones that made fools of themselves and all the fallout of what happened after that. On a brighter note, homeopathy may be diluting itself out of existence in the UK, but in that case, and in that case, it is doctors and skeptics who are fighting it, so that's good. We are making some progress. But you know what? The skeptics are still out there bilking people out of money. Alternative medicine is still keeping people away from real medicine. The anti-vaxxers are just as strong as ever. They're getting more of a foothold. Even though Andrew Wakefield has been humiliated and shown to be wrong, he's writing books, he's touring the country, he's on TV all the time, and maybe because of this, but certainly in some regions, pertussis is on the rise, and polio is coming back. Polio is seen to be coming back. Now, I'm not trying to make a list of our failures. I'm not up here to bring doom and gloom to everybody here. And I'm not even trying to target our next campaigns. I'm not saying what we should be talking about. I'm simply pointing out that this stuff is hard. It is an uphill battle. And while we're peddling as hard as we can, we're not moving up that hill very much. And to be honest, in some cases, I'm not even sure we're facing in the right direction. Let me ask you this, and this is just rhetorical. What is the goal of the skeptical, critical thinking movement? Now, the answer may be different for everyone. And for somebody, it might be the abolishment of quack medicine. It might be the eventual removal of all religious influence in life. You might have some specific examples. And sometimes, I wonder, are these reasonable goals? Can we really remove specific examples of pseudoscience? And they usually disappear over their own time. But can that really be done? I'm not sure. Like I said earlier, our brains don't work that way. You remove one bit of this sort of thing, and then something else just comes in to fill the space. Now, I'm also of the teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime sort of thought. My goal is not to get rid of anti-science per se. It's to help people walk away from it themselves, to teach them how to think, and to give them the ability to use reason when thinking something through. And in, oh, thank you. It gets better. Now, I think that the overarching goal of the movement that we're a part of is to attain a rational, reasonable world. And not one without emotion, not one without passion. That's a fallacy that we're like, that clearly we experience love and joy like everyone else. It's just a world that likes reality the way it is. In other words, teach a man to reason and he'll think for a lifetime. Of course, oh, I can wait for these smattering applause. Thank you. You know, there are narrow goals as well. Sometimes we need to keep creationists out of the classroom. We need to stop fundamentalists from trying to amend the Constitution. And we need to prevent faith-based bigotry or the alt-meddlers, as I like to call them, from spreading diseases. In some cases, that means specific debunking and that's okay. That has to happen. You have to debunk certain things or else they'll just keep going. So by showing, and again, again, wrote this several days ago, by showing people, for example, optical illusions and that the eye is easily fooled, that, and I can say that's why shadows point different directions in Apollo pictures and maybe they can understand that what they see isn't the way things really are. Your brain can be fooled. And people can learn to generalize from specifics given time and repetition and practice. It takes practice to think like this. Specific bunk is worth debunking, I guess is what I'm saying, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here. Old hands at this game and you're out there. You know what logical fallacies are. You know about the different types of biases and the different things that go wrong in our brain. And you know what methods of logic to use and you know where to get good data. I'm not gonna worry about that. And if you're new here and you're new to this type of skeptical movement, talk to your neighbors, right? That's what the bars in the casino are for. Talk about what we're doing here and I think you'll like it. So I'm not here to talk about the actual toolbox of critical thinking. I'm here to talk about shop safety, I suppose. Everyone knows a hammer is for pounding nails but not everyone knows how to wield that hammer. You don't swing wildly and you don't use all your strength because you might pound in the nail but you're also going to destroy the wall. And sometimes a focused movement is more effective. Smaller swings that are aimed well. It takes more swings to accomplish your goal but in the end you have a nail in the wood with minimal damage to that wood. Well, all right, thank you. Look, you give it your all or just let it wait. It's okay. I'm not that invested in the applause, it's okay. How do we attain that goal, the more rational, reasonable world? And I'm gonna stress that word real, world. Because there in lies the root of what I'm trying to talk about. Right now in this movement, in this movement of ours, there's a lot of discussion about this topic and I should say discussion because a lot of this discussion is not terribly productive. A lot of it involves name calling, a lot of it involves insults and there's entrenched belief masking itself, I think, as rational thought. People strongly believe in skepticism so much, they're not willing to question it themselves, not willing to question their own stance. And I could give you specific examples of myself as well. I'm not gonna do that right now but what I see is that hubris is running rampant and that egos are just out of check and sometimes logic in those situations is left by the wayside. I could go into specifics, I'm not going to, you can find these for yourself, you probably know where to look. For example, there's this argument about atheism versus accommodationism, you can go there, you will find quite a bit of bitter, acrimonious and irrational arguments on those discussions. I certainly have my opinion on that argument and I assure you they are strong ones. But again, specifics aren't my point here. What I'm more concerned with is our demeanor, the way we do this. Remember, the odds are against us. There are more of them than there are of us and our brains are not wired for what we do. It's taken a lot of practice. As the old saying goes, it takes, it's hard to reason someone out of a position, they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. And look, we have to admit that our reputation amongst the majority of the population is not exactly stellar, right? So where does this leave us? How do we attain that goal of a rational, reasonable, enlightened society? And the key is obvious, to me at least, it's communication, right? The best idea ever thought of in the history of humanity is useless unless someone communicates that it will die in the test tube. And in our case, what we're communicating here to people is not something they necessarily want to hear. So our demeanor, how we deliver this message, takes on crucial, crucial importance. So again, I ask you to remind you, how many of you lost your faith, your belief because someone called you an idiot, right? I suspect that most of you, like me, you lost your beliefs gradually. It didn't happen overnight. I didn't wake up one day and decide to disbelieve or it just happened. It took a while, months, years, I don't know, to be honest, I don't remember, but it wasn't overnight. And it wasn't because someone insulted me or got in my face. We saw Randy on those clips earlier today and I'm not sure exactly about the timing when he did the psychic surgery, but I remember watching that and laughing and laughing and thinking that that was awesome, that that's a terrific way to do it, to make people laugh and to tell them it's a trick and you engage them and it's funny. And that really helped me become an active skeptic and to do what I do today. And that was 20 years ago. I mean, I really started thinking about my own beliefs. I was a huge, I've mentioned this many times in previous times, UFOs and out-of-body experiences in the Bermuda Triangle, I was huge into that stuff. And you know what, now look where I am, right? I used to be a believer in all of that, but today I write a skeptical blog. I've written a skeptical book and for a year, I was the president of one of the premier skeptical organizations on the planet. You may have heard of it. And I suppose you could call me a skeptical success story. I didn't seek out to do this, but I guess the way I did it worked and it resonated with some people and I'm really glad about that. But if someone had told me when I was 13 years old that my belief in UFOs was stupid and that I was an idiot and that stuff clearly isn't true, where would I be sitting right now? Wouldn't be here. The insults when we do insult people and it happens, they fly for a lot of reasons and I suspect that frustration is one of them. Active skeptics like me, like everyone out there who's been doing this for a long time, we've been fighting irrationality for years and it gets frustrating when the same arguments come up over and over again, long debunked tropes that are clearly wrong and yet they're thrown at us again and again and again. And then you know what happens is that the pseudo-scientists change their argument slightly and it's enough to maybe fool the public or fool the media, it doesn't fool us, but you know that happens. Pardon me, intelligent design. Little palette cleanser there. Anger, right? Anger is a natural reaction and it's a natural reaction when someone yells at us and when they frustrate us and when they hurt us. But anger, I read this in a book, Mary Roach, you probably heard of her. She's got a new book coming out and there's a line in it that says, anger seeks a victim and I thought that was beautiful. Anger searches for a victim. We have to be careful not to personalize that anger too much. Now look, anger is good, it's needed, it's a motivator. It gets you out of bed sometimes and I speak from personal experience, I get angry. But it's also a loaded weapon and we need to be exceedingly careful where we aim that weapon. It's too tempting to want results right now. I want to change somebody's mind while I'm talking to them, while I'm face to face with it. It's human nature to want that, to want instant gratification and to win an argument. And anger and frustration can catalyze that. But how many of you play chess? I'm guessing a lot of you are dweebs, you play chess, I play chess. How often do you sacrifice a piece for the greater goal? You can have your queen at the end of the game when your opponent checkmates you, but you've lost, okay? You have lost the game. It doesn't help. Another analogy, I love this one too, a pedestrian has the right of way while crossing a street. And certainly if you walk off a sidewalk when a car is coming, you're technically in the right. You're also roadkill, all right? When you're dealing with someone who disagrees with you on some matter, what is your goal? What is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Insulting at them, excuse me, just insulting them, yelling at them, calling them brain damaged or morons or baby rapers may make you feel good. That's been used by the way. It may make you feel good. It may help you vent. It may help you release frustration. It may rally the troops. It may even foment people to help you and to take action. And let's be honest, it may allow you to feel smug and superior at least in that moment. But is your goal to score a cheap point or is your goal to win the damn game? It's not terribly controversial. Thank you. It's not terribly controversial to say that when somebody is being attacked and insulted, they tend to get defensive, right? They're not in the best position to be either rational or self-introspective. It's gonna be very difficult to change their mind when you're doing that. Now I know for sure that when my wife catches me doing something stupid, which is all the time, my brain reacts. It knee jerks, right? I try to come up with an excuse. And you know, I have to take a deep breath before responding because my immediate response is to downplay my stupidity. And really in reality that only compounds it. It only makes it worse. Happily for me, 20 years of being an act of skeptic and 15 years of concurrent marriage have really taught me pretty well in that regard. Not to do that. It's still my instinct and I try not to do it. And you know, I'll admit I'm still learning how to do this at my tender age. It takes a lifetime to learn how not to do that. The thing is not everyone has learned that. It's no surprise, I think you will agree, that in the skeptic movement we have our share of people who are a bit short in the politeness department. And I am seeing this being actively discussed on the blogs right now. And I'm very glad to see this discussion. You can go to any number of blogs. Even yesterday I saw a new blog post about someone concerned about the demeanor of skeptics. And I've been considering writing about this topic for a long time and talking about it at TAM for quite some time. And that's because I've been watching the discourse between skeptics and between skeptics and believers to generate a childish behavior that is frankly appalling. It's appalling. Taking the low road doesn't help. It doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make you look good. And it doesn't change anyone's minds. What is the goal of what you're trying to do? And don't confuse taking the high road with being weak and being passionless. It's quite the opposite. I've struggled with this myself. And I found it takes substantial strength and magnifies my passion. If anyone wants to argue my strength and my passion, bring it, okay? I'm ready for you. In times of war, we need warriors. But this isn't a war. You might try to say it is, but it's not a war. We aren't trying to kill an enemy. We're trying to persuade other humans. And in times like that, we don't need warriors. What we need are diplomats. So after all this. Thank you. So after all this, I think I can sum up my points like this. First, always ask yourself what your goal is. When I was a kid, there was a commercial about going on diets, a sign you could put on your refrigerator that says, is this trip necessary? Is this argument necessary? What is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Before you blog, before you leave a comment, before you engage a pseudoscientist, before you raise your hand, before you send that email, ask yourself, is this going to help? Is this going to allow me to achieve my goal? And you also need to ask yourself, will this impede me from achieving that goal? Is this just to make me feel better? Or am I trying to change the world? And second, and not to put too fine a point on it, don't be a dick. Now, I'm not the first person to say this. Will Wheaton uses it as his motto on his blog. I think that's maybe even where I first heard it spoken so succinctly. I know there are a series of videos coming out called Don't Be A Dick. They're wonderful. You can find them on, I know Rebecca's been posting them on Skepchick. I actually wrote this before I saw the first one, so I'm not stealing from them. Think of it as brilliant minds coming to a similar convergent evolution. But seriously, okay, don't, don't be a dick. All being a dick does is score cheap points. It does not win the hearts and minds of people everywhere. And honestly, winning those hearts and minds, that's our goal. And I asked you two questions at the beginning when I stood up here in the first place. And the first one was if you used to believe in something. And the second one is if you lost that belief because someone was a dick to you. My goal, my personal goal, is to have everyone in the world raise their hand when they're asked that first question. And the other part of that goal is to never even have to ask the second one. Thank you very much. Well, the question I'm going to ask and will ultimately be, and don't you agree, because kind of as the, for the last bunch of years, kind of the semi-official non-atheist of the J-Ref, I refuse to talk religion with skeptics anymore. And I think that there's another area we have to be careful also. And I say this as a former democratic candidate for the United States Congress. Skepticism is not partisan. You can be a conservative and think early gallers and ass. You can be a conservative and think that people shouldn't be, have their memories raped and their money stolen by Sylvia Brown. So again, getting to the big tent motion that I said in my introduction, along lots of dimensions, political, theological, emotional, which university's the best. I think we ought to have a big tent. And don't you agree? And by the way, where did you get your undergraduate education? Well, I dropped out of college my first year from the University of Chicago. Let that be a lesson to you. But it was, in fact, the University of Michigan, but I believe I went to Thomas Jefferson's University for my PhD, so that's a longstanding thing with Hal and myself. But in fact, Hal, I do agree. We need to be more inclusive. It's just that simple. Excluding people is not a good idea. Excluding people is a worse idea when they outnumber you 10,000 to one, okay? When the rampaging horde is running down the hill and you're standing there with your scabbard, it's not, yelling at them and calling them idiots is not gonna slow them down at all. We need to be more inclusive. I'm gonna take one extra minute. I wasn't sure if I'd have time to talk about this, but I feel I must. One of the things I love to do is give public lectures. And I've been giving bad astronomy lectures to various places. And recently I've been invited to governor schools where they take several hundred of the best and brightest high school kids and they house them and feed them for the summer for a few weeks. And it's tremendous. These are go-getter kids. They have to apply to get this. They're not necessarily the smartest kids, not necessarily, although they are in the upper echelon, but they're go-getters. They wanna do this. They want to learn, they're eager for it. And so I go there and show them how to stand an egg on end on the first day of spring and that sort of thing. And I've done it for three years in Arkansas, which you think would be a stronghold for fundamentalist religion, but I've actually never had a problem there. This week, and I mean the day before Tam started on Wednesday, I was in West Virginia where I was doing this again. And I was doing a classroom talk and I was just talking about different things. And a young lady in the front row, it was very intimate. They were right there, she was sitting right there. She has a notepad open and she says, I'm a young earth creationist. And what about, and then she started talking to me about the moon receding from the earth and how that shows the earth can't be four and a half million years old. Now, my reaction could have been, you're an idiot. My reaction could have been, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Your religion is ridiculous and has been responsible for killing millions of people. I could have done any of that stuff, all right? Now, don't get me wrong. Creationism, young earth creationism is baloney. I don't back off from saying that. It is absolutely wrong. If I had said it even that way, I would have alienated this young woman. What I said instead was, ah, you're not realizing that the recession rate of the moon actually changes over time. You can't simply extrapolate it backwards. And if you do, you get the wrong answer. In fact, if you do it more carefully, you see that the earth can be billions of years old. And she immediately said, well, I read about dinosaur DNA and launching something else and I said, I'm not a biologist. I don't do squishy science. So you're gonna need to talk to, I love calling it that. I just, I don't know why I love that. You're gonna need to talk to a biologist. And she kept coming up and I said, you know what? Look, what you need to do is understand that. She told me, she went to the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis and I said, look, I've seen these guys. They do use a lot of outdated astronomy in their astronomy. I'm not qualified to talk about these other topics. And what you need to do is find outside sources. You need to go out and see what other people are saying and see where the evidence takes you. And I said, it's okay for you to believe in what you wanna believe. I'm not gonna try to change your mind for that. But I think you need to look at the evidence and see where that points before you make unequivocal statements about scientific evidence. And we kept going and there were other questions. We talked about aliens in 2012 and all the stuff you think. By the end of that class, she was laughing. She was having a good time. She came up to me afterwards and thanked me and we chatted about it for a while and the teachers came up to me later and they were so glad that I handled it that way. And it was an experiment on my part. I hadn't really done anything like that before, not quite like that at least. And you know what? It's an anecdote. This is one example, but it worked. And I just, just bet it'll work all the time, all the time. Dr. Phil Plates.