 Welcome, everyone. This will be a fun discussion about the future of skepticism, and I suppose while it's featuring people whose opinions, I think, are informed, even if they're not all in agreement about some of these issues, and I want you to hear these opinions, I suppose first we should define a bit what we mean by skepticism. So for the purposes of this conversation, skepticism is at once the approach to claims that we prize, the approach that we prize to certain unfounded claims, and also the growing worldwide movement of folks who are working at the grassroots and in other areas to advance that approach to claims. Now quick intro to the panelists so we can get into the discussion. There is Jamie Ian-Swiss, whom you all know, longtime contributor to the JREF, advisor to the organization. There's Tim Farley, JREF fellow and someone who leads the way when it comes to online skepticism. He does sceptools.com and whatstheharm.net. There's Reid Esaw, co-founder of Skepticamp, which are informal community-based skeptic conferences at the local level, really not just all around the United States now, but all around the world. And there's Barb Drescher. She serves on the James Randi Educational Foundation's Educational Advisory Panel. And she has taught at Cal State Northridge. She has studied, she focuses on perception, critical thinking, and attention. So panel first off, and let's start with Jamie, Jamie, you've been involved with skepticism for decades, more than I think anyone else of us in this discussion, and so given your experience in this with national capital area skeptics, Bay Area skeptics, New York City skeptics, yeah, apologies, do you see this stuff we're all part of, the movement aspect, do you see it growing? And I guess maybe is it even a movement or are we complimenting ourselves when we talk in those sorts of terms? I think we have unmistakable, incontrovertible evidence that it's a movement, both a movement and a growing movement. I think there might have been a time when we wondered if it was a movement or we were hoping that it was a movement. Certainly in the early days of PsyCOP we were kind of hoping it was a movement, whatever that movement might be. But I think there's a JRF tally now of over 200 skeptic organizations activities, if you count skeptics in the pub, meetup groups, et cetera, and that's excluding humanist and atheist groups, over 200. When PsyCOP was born there was PsyCOP. So I think it's unmistakably growing, I think that's terrific, I'm all for local skeptic activism for all sorts of reasons. I think it's an undeniable trend. Anybody else? You think this is necessarily growing as a worldwide movement? We use that phrase a lot. Sorry, I'm not used to using a microphone. I've seen everything growing as well as retreating in some respects. In my experience as a meetup organizer I saw a lot of people signing up for the meetups but they immediately became inactive. So the numbers at meetup while they are growing overestimate the actual number of people that are involved. And so I'd say for any given set of numbers be skeptical and take a close look at that. I'm sure that's true and especially for something like meetups and I think it demonstrates the difference between what organizing is and sort of gathering. Because a meetup very often doesn't, no one puts in any more to it than having a little coffee get together at their home or, and that's a nice thing about skeptics in the pub is that it's kind of easy, you already have a pick a place to do it and then you go and do it and it's fun and social and I think that's really good. But with a meetup, someone has to take charge, someone has to maintain, someone has to organize and sometimes people don't realize that until they have to the fact and that's the difference between a meetup and a real organization. Is that either realize sooner or later that you need infrastructure, you need to be doing things, you need to be doing outreach, you need to be running lectures or whatever it is, that's what creates an organization. What I'm hearing I think highlights the dichotomy between activism and identification. There's a difference between claiming an ideology which I think we kind of do, we share an ideology and a way of thinking and being invested in whether or not other people share that or maybe preventing the harm that some of the things that we fight do and there's a difference there. So they may sign up for those types of groups because they want that identification or they want to express that they identify and aren't necessarily able to kind of work that into their lives as a priority. I did a census last year and I recently redid it of skeptic podcasts because I was interested in how many were out there and podcasts are at least a definable thing that you can find because there's iTunes and places where they get aggregated and podcasts also have a defined beginning which was April May of 2005 when there were two and now there are 96 and about 30 have gone by the wayside and so there was a huge, huge growth in the years in between, slow growth at first and then a huge explosion in 2008, 2008, 2009 and for some reason I'm noticing a little bit of a leveling off right now where it's hovering around 95, 96 for the last year or so and I don't know if that means anything but certainly 96 skeptic podcasts and that's as Jamie said where he was leaving out the humanist groups I left out all the atheist podcasts I was focusing just on the ones that had significant science content just for sheer trying to keep the scope down of what I had to measure and they also found that there were about 10 languages, most of them obviously are in English but a bunch of other languages represented which is very encouraging. So if we look out at this audience at the amazing meeting 2012 I think it's relevant to this conversation to realize there's something like 21 countries represented in this audience there's 46 states, all but four states and what that suggests to me is that whatever TAM is it's reaching out to a lot of folks especially when you consider the factor that just right around 50% of the people who are here this year are at TAM for the first time and that's pretty consistent over the years and in that sense I consider TAM sort of an outreach vehicle. If you look at the history of the organized skeptics movement you see that it didn't really start out with a group of skeptics in the back room sort of plotting and planning to create a worldwide movement instead a group of public intellectuals and authors and scientists and critics looked around in the mid 70s and said I don't really like the... well in the 60s the organizations weren't founded in the 60s there were public intellectuals who were speaking out but the sort of organized skeptical movement in the 70s few few folks got together and said we want to do something about that nonsense what are we going to do so James Randy, Paul Kurtz, Isaac Asimov, a list of folks said well what we should do is publish magazines and and write things and speak in the media but out of that came this growing network of grassroots groups so all of us are involved with skepticism in in one sense at the national level. We're involved with national organizations we are leading national efforts etc. Most of us are involved at the local level which came first for you local or national? For me it was national I think there was a local organization in Atlanta and it kind of petered out and then I came to TAM and so I got involved here first and then we started up a new vocal organization. For me it started out with a new Denver skeptics group which had replaced didn't replace it came a few years after a Rocky Mountain skeptics which had been in Colorado for decades before and we started as a social group and that's experimenting with the skeptic camp open events and that's how we had gotten started locally but the skeptic camp eventually became an international phenomenon. For me I guess it's sort of simultaneous but that if I count teaching which is a big part of it it was just me it wasn't you know like I organized with another group of people but I've taught skepticism for a lot longer than I've been involved in the organizations and what they do so even before you self-identified as a actually no because that goes back to high school I was approached by one of those you know the Bay Area skeptics which was only a couple of years old at the time and that's how I learned what skeptic was so I think when I started teaching I just that seemed like what needed to be taught at the time so I was always teaching it. For me it was it was local and I'm glad it was and I gave me a I think a different perspective perhaps and if it had happened from the top down for me I was a Psycop supporter at a distance I read Skeptical Inquirer and so on but it was in 1985 and I was in Washington DC as a resident performer at a club there I met Chip and Grace Denman we found out right away we had magic in common we had Psycop and Skeptical Inquirer in common we were kind of amazed that there were no skeptic organizations in Washington DC we thought that maybe the nation's capital could benefit from such a thing a little rationality you know and two years later we were still sort of complaining about the fact that no one had done it and then one day had dawned on us oh it's probably gonna have to be us and we Chip and Grace and I with the help of the late Phil Klass one of the great warriors skeptics from Psycop who was in the area also started the National Capital area skeptics so we've rehearsed a bit about the history of this organized worldwide skeptics movement as it's growing but recently so I've been involved in this what 15 years and I feel like it's changed a lot and it's changed more in the last few years than it has in the longer span of my involvement before that so let's explore the various ways skepticism as something we're doing not as something not as a position we have but the activism part of it how that's changing so Tim you've really led the way in identifying and cultivating approaches for advancing skepticism even outside of the the groups people might go to once a month yeah there's a lot of really exciting things going on in the internet because it seems like one of the fundamental things that we could be doing is trying to reach out to essentially the customers of our competitors right it's the customers of psychics the customers of homeopaths because a lot of these people don't know what they're getting into we've had people show up at our Atlantis skeptics in the pub and get upset that we were saying bad things about homeopathy and then we said oh have you never heard the explanation and we explained it to them and they were shocked so sometimes simple things like that can can reach people and so I've been making my specialty studying ways that we can get skeptical information in front of people using the internet and there's a lot of interesting things going on in terms of marketing local marketing like ways that businesses put themselves on the internet so they show up in Google Maps and things like that and the way websites are rated and blocked because there's so many hackers and all this other scams and stuff on the internet and I've been doing things through my blog where I teach skeptics how to use these tools to get a skeptical message out there so for instance using the web of trust tool to put a negative rating on sites that are selling pseudoscience and crap so that if the person happens to have that tool installed on their computer they'll get a big warning on their screen they may have to dig a little deeper to find out why that warning is there but at least it'll stop them for a moment and say hey somebody thinks this is bad maybe I should look further I think of myself as taking activism in a new direction or at least in a non-traditional direction my emphasis or my focus with the skeptic camp events is not outreach which a lot of people might think open events outreach the skeptic camp events are focused principally on knowledge sharing and skill development for skeptics for the 95% of us in this room to become better skeptics and so it's well ultimately skeptic camp can feed things like the harm reduction and other forms of activism the principle the principle the activist goal for skeptic camp is to make us better skeptics so read when you look at how a lot of the national organizations first supported local outfits local groups subscriber databases you know they were mailed in a geographic region and said hey you guys subscribe to this magazine you care about these issues you want to meet everybody this is before meet-up before the internet you know get together and will help foster a group said some of these national organizations psychop I'm thinking of primarily contrast that in turn with your model in terms of how you get a new skeptic camp is it all people who are already self identified and then they just sort of do it on on their own or well skeptic camp is ultimately based upon a conference model a wildly successful conference model from the tech community called bar camp these are organized in an ad hoc fashion the first bar camp took place in 2005 and was organized in two weeks by a bunch of people and they had like turned out of 200 people and they just and the conference was basically giving talks to one another and so to actually assemble the skeptic camp it doesn't organizations can support the skeptic camp but ultimately the skeptic camp comes together driven by social media like like meet-up and Facebook and Twitter and that's what gets everybody together and anyone can do a skeptic camp skeptic camp dot org at anyone can plug in and we were just in Madrid a couple months ago and they had the month before had their first skeptic camp so this is something going on all around the world but your emphasis is it's for skeptics it's not reaching out and engaging with our cultural competitors that's great that's that's right that's it's a I'd considered a prerequisite to activism once you master the skills of skepticism by all means step into a role of activism but focus on those skills beforehand so how do we as a movement that's not really widely professionalized I mean there there's a couple dozen of us might work draw a little paycheck doing this sort of stuff but most of us it's a labor of love you know all of you have other full-time jobs and still find the energy to do everything that you're doing so how do we figure out in a movement that's not professionalized to that degree to care about quality control or is the option hey we're open to all comers we're interested in fun topics and let's get together and socialize and they might have religion or the paranormal over here over here we have skepticism for the skeptic camp events these are uncurated events which means that anyone can do a talk and as long as it's somewhat related to science and skepticism and so you get a full you get a wide diversity of talks that are being given and occasionally have to deal with misinformation of speakers that get up and are deliberately misrepresenting the truth or inadvertently misrepresenting the truth and so for skeptic camp the the principle method of quality control that we have is to simply raise your hand during a talk and ask a question and the speakers is compelled to deal with that deal with that question as a collaborative forum of quality control let's skeptic that's skepticism by doing right where they're learning skepticism by doing it right there at skeptic camp we had that happen in Atlanta skeptic camp last year we had one of our presenters who's a regular in the in the group basically came in and was presenting a conspiracy theory that she believed in and it was kind of entertaining to watch the chat because there were people watching a live stream and the people in the chat just kind of went a little bit berserk and we made sure that during the Q&A we pushed back real hard on her that she didn't have her evidence in in a row and and she didn't she hadn't done her homework on this particular theory and hopefully that came across yeah it's what I when I'm hearing here is finding really interesting because that's exactly how academics works that's exactly how science works there's no you know overlord of science who decides what is and is not good science there is a culture and everybody gets to say and the researcher who's being criticized has to take that criticism accept it and improve their research or it won't be accepted by the community and I think that's one of the reasons why we see so much of what people call infighting on the internet because there's so many grassroots people involved and there and everybody's kind of fighting for control of the content and something's gonna probably win out you know stuff gets sifted and it goes in waves and just like science does and that's how we work things out but that's how human beings work things out because we we don't have the overlord of skepticism either no except so the optimism inherent in public debate is that if you do good public debate the best ideas for either side the the very best ideas went out now maybe that's sort of a faith claim because there's something called rhetoric and you can deceive people with your words and all that stuff too but it seems to me that the the skeptic camp model is sort of different than the low the local group skeptic organization model at least in the sense that the local groups I've been part of they have monthly lectures people come in your you get informed about something interesting and then you go socialize yeah you can think of skeptic camp is being as opposed to the formal education of a skeptics or the structured education of a skeptics toolbox skeptic camp would be similar but it's peer-based education it's us it's us learning sharing what we know and learning from each other what one of the things that I emphasize in almost every talk that I give is for skeptics that because we do need there's so much nonsense out there we need as many people as possible to push back especially on the local level but you need to do your homework so one of the things that I emphasize is specialization if you're doing stuff on the internet and you have a website or whatever it is that you're doing pick a pick a topic pick a subtopic because we've got a lot of stuff going on in skepticism you know everything from UFOs to Bigfoot to denialism to alt mad there's so much stuff that I know I can't keep up with it all so I recommend that on a lot of skeptics who want to do stuff online pick a slice and then just dig deep and read the books and read the articles and make sure you know everything there is to know about that slice of skepticism and then find where you're needed online and make make your knowledge of an example who comes to mind is Susan Gerbeck and right you want to explain yeah I could get involved one of the tools that I push my blog is called Skeptools and because I was trying to push people try to use the tools that are out there on the internet to advance skepticism and one of the things that I talked about early on like three years ago was Wikipedia getting on Wikipedia and and making sure there's skeptical content and the content that relates to our topics is good and there's a lot of reasons to do that and Susan saw that and saw a presentation that I gave on a J ref cruise actually and took it to heart and she made that her specialty and so she's got a whole blog just devoted to Wikipedia and she organizes people to edit stuff on Wikipedia and she's working on a new project now and relating to translating stuff into other languages on Wikipedia and so that's that's exactly what I mean is you know just just dive in there and find your area and that way you can focus on it and learn all there is to know. I agree and Tim both make excellent points about the need for this kind of training within and expertise within and I think it's these are important arguments for example for why one of the valuable roles of J ref is to serve as resource and support for local skepticism I think that's a I think that's a powerful role for the organization among other services provided but I also think at the same time that that need for expertise and to know what we're talking about before we talk about it should not be considered a discouragement to local activism because invariably what happens with local activism is people want to get involved and people want to do something and they don't and not everybody has the expertise well that's true and you can't wait around until you have enough expertise or enough experts especially on the local level to have experts on every subject you do need to reach out before you open your mouth absolutely but the desire to do something the willingness to put out that energy and effort to do something to gather people to put on a monthly public lecture when we started at NCAS we almost immediately began a lecture series that pretty quickly after the first by the second year I think was up to 10 lectures a month free lectures a month and we've done that ever since and New York City skeptics one of the first things we did with New York City skeptics as well and we do other things but those you know fundamental basic things of a regular lecture of a skeptic in the pub more sociable thing you don't have to be expert to do those things you just have to have a willingness and a desire and a maybe a passion about the about the cause so what I love about these resources I'm a fan of both we've I love what's a harm and we've been we've used supported skeptic camp efforts with New York City skeptics I love all that and and we do need more of that to provide that expertise for skeptics to educate ourselves and equip ourselves but there's no substitute and even expertise is not a substitute for hey I want to do something god damn it this is true but you have to be able to recognize the what you what you reasonably should be able to do as a non expert and and where you need to consult somebody who is an expert and with the the skeptic movement as big as it is and the people that are involved we have somebody for just about any question that you would want somebody you just need to reach out to them because most most people are pretty responsive so in this part of those this discussion as we're exploring the future of skepticism we're really talking about the lay of the land right now and I hear everyone on the panel drawing a distinction between working to educate folks from a skeptical point of view about various topics and activism to make a difference activism to change something obviously educating folks changes things too but it seems to me that was the distinction that you were drawing and Simon scene comes to mind and the chiropractic campaign in the UK where grassroots groups local groups pub groups etc all sort of from the bottom up coordinated a campaign that was activist in nature not educating people the general public as much about chiropractic as it was pushing back against chiropractic right and it had great effect do you think there are similar opportunities for folks who self-identify a skeptics who are plugged into the movement but aren't going to be experts in an area like Tim just suggested not everyone wants to carve out an expertise or a niche field and stake his or her claim on that you know not everyone wants to do the homework on the history what a big foot lore right so are there similar opportunities here for us I think you know some people are great designers can design logos or or you know it tends a good example of someone whose technical expertise is so invaluable to the community that it wouldn't matter if he didn't know anything about skepticism which he clearly does he offers us it's gold right and you don't necessarily have to even have a great understanding of how scientific studies work as long as you recognize what you do and don't know and you use the strengths that you have in ways that help you're helping and you're you're making a difference some of it can be a huge difference and that was a good example the Simon sync thing one of the ways that they pushed back on the chiropractors is they they knew you know just from experience that a lot of the chiropractors were making claims that were not legal under British law on the regular advertising regulations on their websites and so a couple of people led by something mainly by Simon Perry went out and they went to every single chiropractic website in the UK and scores you know just went over every piece of text that was on there and got copies of it all and found where the language was wrong and they filed hundreds and hundreds of complaints with the chiropractors own regulator and just made this this paperwork nightmare for them in response to them making a nightmare for Simon and what they did to follow up on that is it happens that Simon Perry has a software company and he had his guys build a tool called fish barrel that plugs into your web browser and helps automate that process so instead of having to to sit there and laboriously copy all this information down it with a little bit of knowledge of what phrases you're looking for and what things they're not supposed to say you can go in there with the tool and literally just market in your web browser click a button and it'll take you right to the complaint form for your country and you fill out the complaint tell them who you are and it files and this doesn't work that great in the US because our agencies aren't as responsive but in the UK it's an awesome thing and they they literally every week there's announcements that oh we made we made this chiropractor take this office site and we made this herbalist take this off their site and they're one by one scrubbing all this crap off the internet but it takes a lot of people doing that because there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these websites so we need people to jump in and help out and so that example suggests that you don't need to be an expert in chiropractic you don't have to have written the book Simon Singh wrote instead you just have to be willing to put in some time yeah so just like the SETI project right you not everyone needs to be an astronomer to help search for extraterrestrial intelligence this is new technology allowing anyone who cares about the issues to plug in get involved and be active do you think that will only grow with time or is it really just an empty playing field that it's up to us to end you know poke around find these new opportunities I I think it's growing I you know every every time I look I find new things out there that potentially could be used in this way and we're starting to see folks actually building tools that are more specifically designed for this sort of thing there's a guy here who built a tool called we're butter and I'm noticing a lot of activity amongst the kind of digital end of the newspaper industry in the U.S. where they're concerned that their industry is you know dying and they will try and look toward the future and one aspect of that that they're trying to attack is how do you how do you fact check when there is no editor for blogs or you know or Twitter or anything and you just have all this random information out there is there any way to know what's true and what's not so people are trying to figure out ways to build automated fact checking tools or automated tools that will identify suspect phraseology and websites and stuff like that so there's a lot of a lot of that stuff is still in development and probably a lot of it won't go anywhere but it's interesting it's really interesting I think the Simon Singh chiropractic is a very interesting case and a very encouraging one for the value of the skeptic community you asked E.J. about you posed a distinction between education and activism right in my experience education is a really strong service to be provided by organized by local groups along with socializing which is I think a very valid and primary purpose for local organization and activism is hard for local groups it doesn't mean local groups can't do it there's there's plenty of good examples but it's also difficult for local groups to get get the presses attention and then depending on the size of the community they're in to have all the resources you need to really make an impact with a particular campaign so activism I think was more the role of national groups right that had a better better tools to get at the media and things like that but well in the last 35 years there aren't many examples of national skeptic organizations issuing national campaigns that had measurable impact right but they could support particular I mean look at Randy for many years had the support of Psycop until he didn't but had the support of Psycop in some of his sort of big steps right big attack of course Psycop began with a petition about astrology right so that was that was activism right the very first thing Psycop ever did that created Psycop but the Simon Sink case is a really good good example I think maybe the most dramatic example we we've ever had to date about just the service the value of the simple size and spread of skepticism it wasn't a movement that was it was done by a particular group no particular skeptic group but you know I I was talking to Simon about this last year and I said you know I don't want to be putting words in your mouth I'm going out and saying certain things about this I've been talking to you since all this began you know but do you agree or disagree it seems to me that a lot of your success with this was really wouldn't have happened without the skeptic world because even though other people piled on including the scientific community the scientific community was late to the table compared to the skeptics right I think that the the noise that the skeptic community created made it sort of safe for the scientific communities to step up and and get a sense of outrage about what was going on and Simon absolutely agreed with that that the skeptics were the first ones on the line to come to his defense and act and be active and do things and I think we're gonna we have other examples you know the the bomb detectors or it's a similar thing not so much organized where you point to a national organization or a particular local organization but the sheer numbers of skeptics getting behind a cause that they care about made a difference so in the the conversation we're having about the future of skepticism not once did any of us mention atheism or the future of atheism I think most of us are atheists or skeptics of God or something good 60 something percent high 60 percent of the people in this audience use the word atheist to self describe and of those who don't they probably are sort of skeptical of God although it should be said there are a number of Christians self-identified in the audience and and people who have other sorts of religious beliefs if you look at the last year since last time there's been something like 26 regional or national skeptic or allied big events like conferences people registered for there was the reason rally that reportedly had something like 16,000 people or more attend that event so if we're talking about the future of skepticism is that going to be alongside and separate from this larger thing that also seems to be growing is it like a niche in that or is it is it of a piece nobody wants to try this one first I would say the larger rationalist movement yeah I would point to Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit which enumerated the various tools of skepticism that's that scientists use professionally that have practical value to us all as one of our core assets what's one of our distinguishing features that we have in scientific skepticism and I would say so long as we are praising that sort of scientific skepticism we we stand apart we're unique within that larger larger movement I wouldn't I would just change the language and say not within that larger movement I don't it may all be a rationalist movement in a sense because we all promote critical thinking or at least we claim to but I think that skepticism is more about the thinking in the evaluation of evidence and it is about drawing conclusions and becoming you know emotional about how other people draw their conclusions or where they're where they're at with their conclusions I think we're more about what does this evidence mean you know and and what can we say about the world because of this evidence and it coming up actually the key difference I think is alternative explanations that's really what skeptics do and if you look at even in Randy's history what Randy has always done was provide an alternative explanation for something that looked like magic or the supernatural and that's scientific that's what science does it provides alternative explanations and eliminates theories until you only have a few left and you still hold that tentatively because it might be wrong until something better comes along but it's all about providing alternatives not saying this is true but maybe that the claim you're making may not be true because it could be this instead I'm gonna talk more about this tomorrow morning so stay tuned but you know I think that both both aspects of these movements however they relate however they overlap whichever is a subset of the other and I agree with Barber it's really that the skeptic movement has the sort of the broader view and approach and atheism is compatible with that for many but not all atheist activists each piece of that puzzle has benefited from the other and benefited tremendously from the recent growth and at the same time that recent growth has also created certain confusions and conflicts and I think that's I think that's an estate of being clarified and while some of that clarification is causing I think some undue conflict in some ways that's not constructive I think in the end that clarity hopefully will continue will help will contribute to the continuing success of all of those pieces realize more and work for more what we have in common then arguing about what the differences are but there are differences and they should be clarified so along with the proliferation of national and regional events all over the country people can really and maybe this is not just in the larger rationalist movement or an atheism or in skepticism but it seems like it's a middle-class thing to do today these days to just go to a conference right that's more of a thing now than I think it is right right there's sort of a there's a subculture of people who put on events for other people to consume and some some of these events revolve around hobbies or interests or other passions etc and so and maybe the growth of the rationalist events are part and parcel to that but there's also been a growth of other skeptic products like the podcast and the blogs and it seems like there's a an easier entry now to be or to begin being an opinion sharer if not an opinion leader then there's ever been it used to be there used to be sort of a higher bar to higher hurdle to pass and that's one of the hopes of the internet right that it's more egalitarian more democratic that anyone can put their stuff out there and then the best ideas win but what are the downsides of that if there are any the best side best ideas don't always win if you're talking about numbers it depends on what you mean by win I think in the end you know that the cream it does kind of rise in a sense but it doesn't necessarily mean that your numbers are bigger numbers aren't necessarily success to me it may look like that democracy is messy and every time democracy takes a step egalitarian doesn't take a step it's messier and people complain about the mess you know it seems it seems almost a moot point to me because it's a marketplace of ideas and there is no nobody's gonna be putting out the test for you know what do you have to pass what license they have to get in order to speak up and I just think that you know it's a nature of information technology which is has a profound effect on all kinds of worlds and I come out of the magic world has been transformed culturally and artistically by information technology because we survive for centuries on secrecy and a lot of that secrecy is gone but look at publishing you know it used to be that you had to have some good ideas in your head before you got a book deal before you get a book out because of all the expense of publishing a book but now it's much easier to self-publish so there's a lot there's a lot more lousy books but that doesn't necessarily interfere with the opportunity for there to be good books so it's a new and changing world yes but on the other hand we have what's the harm and skeptic camp and all of these fantastic resources that are easily accessed now that we didn't have before now if I'm facing a skeptic conversation about something I actually don't know the answer to oh if only there was a device oh yeah I can get to the skeptic dictionary you know that's that's bookmarked so well yeah and this is the whole thing on the internet in terms of there's a lot been written about the filter bubble and how people everything's filtered now even your Google results depends on who you are and who your friends are and so people tend to sort of get stuck in a bubble of the things they already access and how are we a skeptics going to penetrate that bubble and how are we gonna as skeptics detect when maybe we're stuck in a bubble and missing out on something and so there are a lot of people trying to figure out ways to deal with that through the technology building you know filtering tools or tools that ways to read content on the internet that that aren't so standardized so you're not stuck in the same sources over and over but it is an interesting problem I would just add that it's a it's a particular problem for interesting challenge for and lesson for skeptics because in an age of information what is needed is skills of selection right that's what we ought to be that's what the world needs to be teaching I mean I wish my kids you know how to first or second a third grade class about how to judge good information for bad information not just in the skeptic in our skeptic sense but in the larger world sense right judge good information for bad information because the internet is full of both and that's supposed to be skeptics per view so I mean I think that's a very interesting lesson and challenge for us so as we've begun exploring the future of skepticism we've talked a bit about the history we've talked about the lay of the land now these various ways that skepticism has changed recently and suggests trends for change going forward let's end our discussion with each of you making a skeptics prediction about the future of skepticism so Jamie well considering my line of work I haven't healer a sealed prediction so you want you were saying five years look ahead okay so open this in five years and we'll see how in case you're impatient I thought you might I know you DJ you're so impatient it says it says I having a clue but I do think that the Simon sing chiropractic case the dowsing the dowsing bomb detection cases I think these are really good optimistic indicators of the impact and success that we can look toward as increasing possibilities as a result of skeptic activism as a result of you all being here and going home and doing what you're doing on the ground those are cases where it's not like as I said it's not one local group it's not one particular big national organization it is the world and community of skepticism raising their voices when the opportunity occurs and having an undeniable impact and I hope and I think we will see more of that yeah I agree with that I'm very always very excited when I come to Tim and I see so many folks here because you know every one of you is it can make a difference because of the internet technologies I mentioned before that I've noticed the leveling off in the number of podcasts and I don't know if that is mean something will remains to be seen maybe we've just we've saturated and gotten our podcast and you know a hundred podcasts that's that's a lot of material and it's a lot of healthy that's a healthy community right there so that's a good sign I think that the future is figuring out these things like the filter bubble and and figuring out ways to get better information in front of people using these internet tools and there's a lot of opportunities out there and we talked about crowdsourcing in my workshop yesterday and I think that's that's the future is everybody helping out not just you know not just the national orgs do their thing and get with the media but everybody else needs to be out there on the internet and when the next Simon Singh needs you to raise your voice you need to be ready to raise your voice or if you you know there's a psychic who lives in your town and no one else has noticed them you need to be the one that notices them so that the rest of us can raise our voices in defense of you so it's all a big part of the same thing inspired by Tim I've been keeping metrics on the growth of skeptic camp over the last several years and so I've hard numbers in which I'm going to stake my reputation upon I estimate or at present we just hit our 50th 50th skeptic camp internationally took place in Fort Collins Colorado a small campus town two different languages English and Spanish for the skeptic camps and in five countries so far I estimate that by July 2017 when Tam occurs here we'll see it in five different languages ten countries and a total of 200 skeptic camps so four times where we are right now by 2017 July 2017 there we go well I rack my brain because this is a perfect opportunity for some great jokes but I'm not that funny so I'm gonna try to deliver somebody else's climate change deniers will cause a ruckus at 1015 which will be held here at the South Point Hotel casino in Seaport all of the jokes I did try to come up with had something to do with baldness so I thought you know maybe advances in baldness treatments would finally make it able for us to tell apart some of the skeptics five years will be up here on stage giving Georgia haircut yes or maybe George would be the only one we could actually find in the crowd but I do have one that I I think that we're headed to the peak when it comes to vaccines I actually see I see a turn around and it may be more to do with the return of illnesses than with our efforts but we're there with the right information when people get scared so we have to take some credit for that and I think in five years we're going to turn the tables on that to a point where it's no longer a skeptical issue it's going to be more of one of awareness than of fear because there are you know there are some diseases where we're under vaccinated simply because people aren't aware they need to be vaccinated things like pertussis and then that probably has more to do with it at this point than fear but I think we're going to hit that I think we're going to turn the tables on that I think the fear is going to start going the other direction so both of skeptic camp popping the info bubble vaccines the vaccine denialism solved and you don't know ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking our panelists for this exploration on the future