 What's the harm, harm? Tell me what's the harm? Tim Farley gonna look at your website all night long gonna see the ways that all the wood can cause damage to me and you What's the harm, harm? Tell me what's the harm? Tim Farley gonna look at your website all night long gonna see the ways that all the wood can cause damage to me and you Please welcome to the stage Tim Farley As usual, George I am Tim Farley There we go. And I want to talk to you about skepticism online, skepticism on the internet. That intersection has been my specialty since I got involved in this thing for a couple years now. And I think there are some interesting things going on with some interesting new tools that are coming into effect and being released. And my hope is that I can inspire you, all of you, to make contributions using these tools to skepticism online. And most of these, you can do it from the comfort of your own home, just using the internet. And you may be surprised how easy it can be. It's an interesting coincidence that my talk is on Sunday because the thing that got me involved in skepticism was TAM 5. And in particular, the paper presentations on Sunday of TAM 5. That was five and a half years ago here in Las Vegas. And I decided I wanted to get involved in skepticism and I wanted to do it on the internet. And that's because that's my specialty. I have skills in that area that I can apply. But now, I think in 2012, every skeptic can be involved on the internet. It doesn't require special skills. It doesn't matter whether you're a computer expert or not. All of us can make a contribution. Now, I don't think I need to belabor the point that the internet is important in 2012 and show you a lot of stupid graphs. But we all know that people get their news. They get their entertainment. They get their groceries sometimes. They get everything from the internet. And that means they also get their pseudoscience. They get their paranormal. They get their quackery. And they get their scams from the internet also. And it's up to us, the skeptics, you people, and me to try to intercept them when they're going to get that stuff and help them out and stop them from buying things that are going to get them into trouble. And that's all about what's the harm was about, is recognizing that problem. We need to get in the way before they get themselves into trouble. And we are doing that. There are hundreds of skeptic websites and blogs and podcasts taking on all aspects of the paranormal and so on. And new ones are being created all the time. I mentioned in the Friday panel that I did a census of skeptic podcasts. And this is an actual graph of the numbers. And at the time of TM5, which was the beginning of 2007, there were 16 podcasts that regularly contain skeptical information. And now for the last year or so, you can see it's kind of leveling off. There's over 95, 95, 96. And similar growth has been seen in blogs and other websites. And I don't have exact numbers on all of that to share, but I can tell you that the number of websites and blogs is easily north of 750. And back at that time in 2007, if you wanted to get involved in skepticism online, the natural way was to create a website or a blog or a podcast. And it's still a great way to do it if you've got a good idea. And we still need new people to do that. But there's other ways to get involved in skepticism online right now. And some of these newer methods, while they might not be as visible or as we make you as famous as having a blog or a podcast, they actually have considerably wider reach. You can affect more people using these techniques. I'm talking about ways that skeptics can reach vast, even TV-sized audiences and larger, sometimes with as little as a mouse click. And that's if we are paying attention and we take the time to do it. And a lot of these things need people to cooperate and do it together for it to have an effect. But before we get into that, let's look at some of those skeptic resources that are out there already. There's a lot of awesome resources out there. There's things like Doubtful News, which is a news aggregator site that gathers up all those news stories that skeptics are always reacting to in one place. So you can find them in the latest UFO and alt-med and vaccine denial stories. They're all right there in one place. There's the Oh No podcast that we heard about earlier, which does an idea that I think it's kind of amazing to me nobody was doing it before of actually going out and getting involved in the things that we talk about in skepticism instead of just talking about them. If I can self-plug here a little bit, there's the Today in Skeptic History iPhone app, which the JREF put out about a year ago just before TAM last year. I researched all the info there. And you can have the history of skepticism and get a daily update right there in your pocket from your iPhone. And there's lots of other projects. And most of these projects I'm mentioning started in the last year, year and a half, two years. They're all relatively new projects. There's Skeptic Dictionaries for Kids, which retargets the information in Skeptic Dictionaries so that kids can understand it and deal with it. In South Africa, there's a site called Quackdown that creates a database trying to basically collect all in one place all the ridiculous claims that are being made about health products and quackery and whatnot. And they release the code for their website as open source. Those of you that are developers will appreciate that. In the UK, there's a thing called the Nightingale Collaboration where they're organizing skeptics through a website to file complaints against quacks in an organized fashion. And then there's a blog called Skepticism and Ethics, which is an interesting angle approaching what are the ethics of skepticism. And there's more. There's Project Barnum. There's Susan Gerbick's Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia. There's a site about vaccination that's very slick and good called Immunized for Good. There's podcasts like Cognitive Dissonance, Desert Air, Skeptics Guide to Government. There's all these different projects out there. And to underline how many different projects there are out there on the internet, there's even one that just catalogs all the other ones. It's called Skeptics on the Net. And it's a great site to go to if you're looking for something and you think maybe somebody did it already. And the need for that catalog points to one problem that I see, which is that sometimes we don't know what's available to us out there. We're not making, taking advantage of what's already out there. And just to underscore that, let me get a show of hands of all those sites and iPhone apps and stuff that I just mentioned. How many of you, at least one of those, you had never heard of before this weekend? Yeah, see? A lot of them, and none of them were started last week. They're all relatively new, but they've been around. We need to be aware of these things so that we know if somebody comes to us and says, hey, I wish there was a podcast for X, we'll have that answer. We need to get out and expand our horizons, tell a friend, and we need to cross-promote our projects with each other. Now, most of those things that I mentioned were websites or blogs or podcasts, that sort of thing. But a really exciting thing that I've noticed in the last year or two is the creation of skeptical tools. These are pieces of software, or sometimes they're websites or a combination of websites, but they're designed to do a skeptic job. One of them is a tool called Fish Barrow that Simon Perry built, and it is a piece of software that plugs into your web browser, and it's an assistant so that when you're filing complaints with the regulatory agencies like FDA, ASA, MHRA, it works in several countries. It helps you collect the information you need to report that quack for making a claim and automate punching it into the form and filling in your personal data, say, here, I'm citizen, whatever, and I live here, here's my complaint. That's a fantastic tool that helps people regulate quacks, right? I showed you one smartphone app, which was the one I helped build, but there's several others. There's the Creationist Claims Index, which has the claims that creationists are made. There's Skeptical Science, which is the same thing, but for climate change, and then there's Skeptics Dictionary, has an iPhone app too. These are fantastic blobs of data that you can have right in your pocket. So if you're in a bar and somebody starts to make some crazy climate change claim, and maybe you haven't heard that claim before, you can pull this app out and look it up and find out what the truth is and tell that person why they're wrong. Another browser plugin similar to Fishbarrel is something called Rebutter. Some of you probably met the guy who built it, who's here at TAM, and it has a huge potential, because what it can do is you're looking at an alt-med website and Rebutter can tell you whether or not a skeptical blogger has already rebutted the information on that website, and you can, a couple of clicks, go right to the debunking article. But it needs people to feed it information. I'm really pleased with all this activity, and these are just a few examples. This is all a realization of what I talked about on Sunday, again, at TAM 6 when I gave a presentation called Building Internet Tools for Skeptics. It was all about let's go build some tools that will solve skeptical problems, and here they are, people are building them. We need more tools like this. If you're a software developer, we have any skills, let's do that, but we need people wielding these tools. We need people to be the army that's using these tools as weapons against the quacks and against the psychics. None of them do any good unless there's skeptics out there using these tools every day. And that brings me to another problem, which I blame on this t-shirt. Science, it works, bitches. I don't really blame it on the shirt, but I like the shirt. But it's basically a fun version of this quote by Stephen Hawking. Science will win because it works. Those are powerful quotes, and those are powerful rally points, but we have to be careful with them because I feel like if we get too tied in with these quotes, we run afoul of what's called the just world hypothesis. That's a psychological phenomenon where your mind wants the world to make sense. Because if the worlds make sense, of course science is going to win eventually, right? But just world is a cognitive bias, right? It's the same cognitive bias that results in victim blaming, which of course, what's the harm has a whole issue, there's a whole issue there with not blaming the victim, feeling sorry for the victims, helping the victims out. So we need to not fall prey to that cognitive bias. If we believe too much that science will win, we may delude ourselves into thinking that it doesn't need our help. I'm gonna counter that with another, talking about just world complacency. Here's another quote that I will counter it with. I'm the great philosopher Han Solo, great kid, don't get cocky. We need to not get cocky, right? We need to not say, hey, look, we're right, we're the scientists, we're gonna win this battle and forget that we need to be pushing our information out there, we need to get our information out there. And I see this sometimes when I talk about things like SEO and online marketing techniques to skeptic webmasters. Some skeptics argue a little bit with me that they say that, well, it doesn't seem fair that we're using these techniques. Wouldn't it be nice if the skeptic and believer sites were equally visible in Google and then we could win in a fair fight? And I don't understand this argument at all, I really don't. Our opponents are doing everything they can to push nonsense on the general public. We heard this morning about the Discovery Institute that has a multimillion dollar budget to lobby and advertise and otherwise promote irrational ideas to the general public. So we need everything we can get. We don't have those multimillion dollar budgets. I mean, the JREF is a great organization but it does not have the budget that the Discovery Institute has. So we need to use techniques and a lot of the stuff that you can do on the internet is free. And I'm not talking about illegal or unethical techniques, trickery or hacking or anything like that. I'm not even talking about the manipulation or the manipulative language that Penn railed about yesterday in his talk. I'm talking about proven techniques that web professionals use to make their content more visible, more palatable. I'm talking about better writing to make your points clear. I'm talking about good graphic design on your website. I'm talking about search engine optimization which is a technical thing you can do to make your site more visible on Google. And here's a quote from George Washington which is a similar quote, truth will ultimately prevail. But the end of the quote is where there is pains taken to bring it to light. We need to take those pains on the internet. We need to make that effort. And when I say we, who am I talking about? Am I talking about the JRAF or the Skeptic Society or Center for Inquiry? No, I'm talking about you and me and him. I'm talking about us on the internet. Most of these projects that I was mentioned today were not built by national organizations. They were built by individuals who said, hey, we should have this tool just like what's the harm? I thought it was a good idea, so I built it. They were built by people like you, people like Simon Perry and Sharon Hill and Alan Hennis, people like Susan Gerbeck and Eric Weiss, people like Haley Stevens and Shane Greenup and Amy Davis Roth. They all built projects on the internet. None of them asked permission to do it. None of them had multimillion dollar budgets or marketing departments. They just went out and did it and they built great things on the internet to solve problems. And there's thousands of other skeptics like them and we need all of you to help too. Some of these folks are here at TAM. I wanna see more of your faces up there. Any one of you could build a project using online tools and often it's absolutely free. Now you may say, okay, that's great, TAM, but I'm not a webmaster and I'm not a software developer and I don't have the skills necessary to do that and I may not have the time to learn those skills. Well, first of all, I think you might be overestimating how hard it is to be a webmaster. It's not that hard. But hang on, keep listening. I've got some stuff I'm gonna tell you about that's perfect opportunity for a non-technical skeptic who can really get involved on the internet. Now one of the reasons I think we need this is we're missing opportunities. And let me tell you a story about one. In 2009, because there were some incidents in professional sports in the United States, the US Congress was lobbied to amend the Dietary Supplement Law in the United States and that's a law called D'Shea and you've probably heard about it already, at least once or twice this weekend. It's a terrible law. It allows people to sell anything and call it a remedy and skeptics complain about it all the time. In February 2010, Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain introduced a bill to fix this law and put some regulation, some teeth into it so that things could be taken off the market. And this bill had the backing of major organizations like the NFL, Major League Baseball, Consumer Reports and all the organizations that you see here. And the effort was called Supplement Safety Now. They had a website, they issued press releases, the bill was introduced and so skeptics were dancing in the streets, right? We had a big party and we started rallying behind the bill. Well, not exactly. I bet many of you don't even remember this and probably none of you have been to this website. It took me a while to find the website when I was preparing these slides. I've been able to find exactly three skeptic blog posts, none of them on the national organization sites, about this. And remember I said there were over 700 skeptic websites and out of those three blog posts, only one of them actually said, write your congressman. That's terrible. And of course, immediately the alt med people on the internet went bananas over this thing. They all wrote their congresspeople and went to thomas.gov where you interact with bills. And here were some of the headlines. Don't let them gut D'Shea. It must be overhauled or scrapped. Just type McCain D'Shea in a Google. You can find thousands of these articles. These people went berserk. And we didn't respond to them. We missed this opportunity. Now I was curious as to why we missed this opportunity. So I went back and looked through the social media history and to see what was going on that week. And it turned out that very same week was the week that Andrew Wakefield's paper was retracted in the Lancet. So we were all focused on this and we missed this other thing. Let me talk to you about another thing which is wasted efforts. There's a lot of wasted effort online. When I was looking up what was going on that week, another thing I found was that would illustrate that point was the very same day one prominent atheist blogger invited his readers to bomb a poll. If you're not familiar, bombing a poll is when a blogger invites all his readers to go off to some website and vote in a poll so they can influence the results. And these are unscientific electronic polls and we see them all the time. And of course they're nonsense. They're meaningless. Even the sites that run them know they're meaningless. It's just a bid for interactivity so you'll vote in the poll and come back the next day. So what's the point in bombing them? Well there is no point. It's a colossal waste of time and effort. And I tried to look at how much effort it was but I went back to that 2010 poll and of course it's gone, right? No one cares. That site didn't care about the result of the poll so they took it down after it was gone. So let's look at a poll from this year. There was one this February and it was about travel destinations to take your kid and this was the top result when the bloggers noticed it. The Creation Museum was the number one result. In the blog and they went and tried to bomb that poll. There were six different blog posts, five Tumblr posts and I don't know how many social media posts and it looks to me like about 10,000 votes were cast by bloggers trying to change this result. Let's see what they did. Here was the result at the end. Whoops, wrong error. Here's the result at the end. They didn't do anything. They moved the US Space and Rocket Center up to two. That's it. Creation Museum was still number one and it didn't matter because the website said that it didn't matter what the result was. They were just looking for suggestions. They had said that up front. So 10,000 votes, let's be super conservative. Let's say 3,000 of those votes were actually the bloggers and let's say maybe it takes a minute because they were coming back each day and re-voting. So 3,000 votes at a minute each. That's 3,000 minutes. That's 50 hours of work. 50 hours of work that was thrown away trying to bomb a poll and they didn't even bomb the poll. It was a waste. It's a huge waste. Now you say, okay, wait a minute, Tim. That's 50 hours of work but it's split up in a little minutes all over the place amongst a hundred different people. How can we recover that and do anything with it? Well you can and it's through crowdsourcing. This is the thing we were talking about in my workshop on Thursday. It's the thing that's been enabled by the internet where thousands of people come together to work on a project together and they each do a tiny little bit of work and the result is huge. This is what Pamela Gay was talking about when she mentioned Moon Mappers in her talk. That's a crowdsourced science project but I wanna tell you about crowdsourced skeptical projects. And they're perfect for what we were talking about which is not every skeptic has the time that necessary to maintain a blog. It's time consuming, let me tell you. I often don't have time to update my blog and I feel bad about it. But these projects you can do two minutes worth of work one day and five minutes the next day and it actually makes a difference. And it makes better use of our most valuable resource which is time. We need to channel the time. So let me give you an example. Here's another web browser plugin called Web of Trust. It was built by a company in Europe and it's designed to help people avoid scams and websites that are dishonest or have privacy violations and stuff like that. And it's crowdsourced. People vote on the websites. You go and you say, I had a bad customer experience on this website. I don't like it. And if enough people vote, it gets a rating. Here's what it looks like if you look up Jim Humble who sells that crazy MMS bleach crap that tries to get people to treat their Crohn's disease with it. See those little red circles after the results? That's Web of Trust saying don't go here. Because people voted down not only his site but all the other sites that were selling it. And it's all about trustworthiness, right? Do you trust a web store? Well, do you trust a psychic? I don't trust a psychic. Let's go vote in these things. And what's great is if you actually click on those links you get this screen comes up in your browser. Giant warning saying you shouldn't go to this website. 30 million people have this software installed in their browser. That's 30 million people that skeptics can reach. That's way more people than you're gonna get at your blog, I'll tell you that. And skeptics did that. And the thing is is that Facebook uses this to rate outside links. So they have 900 million people. It's not quite as drastic a warning, but it's still a warning. The other project is Wikipedia that we've talked about a bit this weekend. I looked at Wikipedia, a lot of people are skeptical of Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is the top rated link for many skeptical topics. And I looked at the traffic of it versus what's the harm and even my top rated pages that rank very highly in Google, Wikipedia beats me five to 18 to 50 times the traffic. So we should be paying attention to those people. You may hate Wikipedia, but people are reading it. And we owe it to them to fix those results. But one of the things is that when you edit Wikipedia it has side effects. Google introduced this new thing called Knowledge Graph. And when you look up Sally Morgan the psychic you get this result. And look who's in the lower right corner of the result. And that's because skeptics were, and also Simon Singh there, who did a lot of skeptical stuff about Sally Morgan. That's because skeptics are editing Wikipedia. Another thing relating to Simon Singh and Sally Morgan that was a big hoo-ha with Sally Morgan last fall. And Simon decided to decide whether or not her show had suffered. And he realized that the ticket site for her show had a way that people could rate the show. And the ratings were right there on the site. So he went and scraped the ratings off the site and built a graph. And you can see that the acceptance or the people liking her show went way down after the controversy. Now that's not a scientific result, but it's interesting. Here's another thing that people did at home. Just using internet tools. There's this psychic in Ireland right now. This happened like two weeks ago. This is psychic Wayne. And he is on TV all the time. And they have all these other psychics in the lower third of the screen. And a blogger named Alan Rice noticed, you know those pictures in the bottom third of the screen look kind of odd. Some of them are a little weird and some of them look familiar. So he used a tool to let you search for images. And lo and behold, look at that psychic in the lower right. That is a stock photo from istockphoto.com. And he put that out on Twitter and a bunch of other skeptics went looking too. And they found 25 of those psychics are all stock photos or photos stolen off of Facebook. And that went right into the news. That the TV networks were backing off. There's a bunch of other stuff. And I'm running out of time. But there's a question and answer site called Skeptic Stack Exchange. And you can go and answer a question. And I answered this question. What formal education does Elron Hubbard have? And I put some information in there from the recent articles about Scientology. And that's the number one result in Google for that query. And I didn't have to do any SEO. I didn't have to build a website. I just answered the question and did the homework. And so those are all fantastic ways that without building a website you can contribute little bits at a time and make a very real difference. And there's new ways coming. These are some of the logos of some tools that are in the works. Hypothesis is a huge one. Truth goggles, a lot of these are being built by the newspaper industry to do fact checking. But we need skeptics to get involved in these projects when they come out and make sure that the Woomeisters don't push them in the wrong direction. So let me summarize what I've been talking about here. I think that we need to spread out. We need to not get all focused on Wakefield or whatever the topic of the day is. We need to pay attention what's going on so we notice the psychic wanes. So we notice the psychic sallies when these things happen. And stop wasting your time online. Stop doing things like bombing polls and getting any huge arguments and 15 page comment threads. That doesn't make a difference. A difference with as little as a mouse flick if you're doing Web of Trust. One click can make a difference and change that icon from green to red and put that giant warning on 30 million screens. And you can make that difference but you've gotta aim your mouse wisely and you've gotta aim it skeptically. So let's go do that. Let's be the crowd. Let's go crowdsource from skepticism on the internet. I'm Tim Farley. I blog at sceptools.com and you can reach me as Krelnik on Twitter and Facebook. I can help you out. Tim Farley, Tim Farley, Tim Farley.