 I'm about to read an essay written in Scientific American by science writer John Horgan. I want to clarify that while I find Horgan's viewpoint interesting and challenging, I also find much of it to be wrong-headed and ignorant. I'm creating a spoken word version of it to raise awareness of his criticism and give the YouTube community a chance to respond to it. To give you a bit of a context, John Horgan was an invited speaker at NEXUS, a group meeting of skeptical societies from the New York and New England area. The master of ceremonies, Jamie E. in Swiss, was, according to Horgan, antagonistic and didn't allow for a question and answer session. Horgan is writing this essay as a slightly shorter version of his talk, and I'll begin it now. I hate preaching to the converted. If you were Buddhists, I'd bash Buddhism. But you're skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism. I'm a science journalist. I don't celebrate science. I criticize it because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong. So I'm a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don't belong to skeptical societies. I don't hang out with people who self-identify as capital S skeptics or capital A atheists or capital R rationalists. When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber. Here's an example involving two idols of capital S skepticism. Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss recently wrote a book, A Universe From Nothing. He claims that physics is answering the old question, why is there something rather than nothing? Krauss' book doesn't come close to fulfilling the promise of its title, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the books afterward, if on the origin of species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see a universe from nothing as the equivalent from cosmology. Just to be clear, Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so foolish? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. He succumbs to what you might call the science delusion. The science delusion is common among capital S skeptics. You don't apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy, and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines, and genetically modified food. These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are what I call soft targets. That's because for the most part you're bashing people outside your tribe who ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted. Meanwhile you neglect what I call hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions. In the rest of this talk I'll give you examples of hard targets from physics, medicine, and biology. I'll wrap up with a rant about war, the hardest target of all. First, physics. For decades, physicists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Green, and Leonard Suskind have touted string and multiverse theories as our deepest descriptions of reality. Here's the problem. Strings and multiverses can't be experimentally detected. The theories aren't falsifiable, which makes them pseudoscientific like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis. Some string and multiverse, true believers like Sean Carroll, have argued that falsifiability should be discarded as a method for distinguishing science from pseudoscience. You're losing the game so you try to change the rules. Physicists are even promoting the idea that our universe is a simulation created by super-intelligent aliens. Last month Neil deGrasse Tyson said, the likelihood may be very high that we're living in a simulation. Again, this isn't science, it's a stoner thought experiment pretending to be science. So is the singularity, the idea that we're on the verge of digitizing our psyches and uploading them into computers where we can live forever. Some powerful people are believers, including Google's director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil. But the singularity is an apocalyptic cult with science substituted for God. When high-status scientists promote flaky ideas like the singularity and multiverse, they hurt science. They undermine its credibility on issues like global warming. Now let's take a look at medicine, not the soft target of alternative medicine, but the hard target of mainstream medicine. During the debate over Obamacare, we often heard that American medicine is the best in the world. That's a lie. The US spends much more on healthcare per capita than any other nation in the world. And yet we rank 34th in longevity. We're tied with Costa Rica, which spends one-tenth what we spend per capita. How could this happen? Perhaps because the healthcare industry prioritizes profits over health. Over the past half century, physicians and hospitals have introduced increasingly sophisticated expensive tests. They assure us that early detection of disease will lead to better health. But tests often do more harm than good. For every woman whose life has extended because a mammogram detected a tumor, up to 33 receive unnecessary treatment, including biopsies, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. For men diagnosed with prostate cancer after a PSA test, the ratio was 47 to 1. Popular data are emerging on colonoscopies and other tests. Europeans have lower cancer mortality rates than Americans, even though they smoke more and spend less on cancer care. Americans are over-tested, over-treated, and overcharged. If you want to learn more about this immense problem, read Overdiagnosed by Gilbert Welch, a courageous healthcare analyst at Dartmouth. His subtitle is Making People Sick in Pursuit of Health. Real healthcare suffers from similar problems. Over the last few decades, American psychiatry has morphed into a marketing branch of big pharma. I started critiquing medications for mental illness more than 20 years ago, pointing out that antidepressants like Prozac are scarcely more effective than placebo. In retrospect, my criticism was too mild. Psychiatric drugs help some people in the short term, but over time, in the aggregate, they make people sicker. Journalist Robert Whitaker reaches this conclusion in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. He documents the huge surge in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs since the late 1980s. The biggest increase has been among children. If the medications really work, rates of mental illness should decline, right? Instead, rates of mental disability have increased sharply, especially among children. Whitaker builds a strong case that medications are causing the epidemic. Given the flaws of mainstream medicine, can you blame people for turning to alternative medicine? Another hard target that needs your attention is behavioral genetics, which seeks the genes that make us tick. I call it gene-wiz science because the media and the public love it. Over the past several decades, geneticists have announced the discovery of genes for virtually every trait or disorder. We've had the God gene, gay gene, alcoholism gene, warrior gene, liberal gene, intelligence gene, schizophrenia gene, and on and on. None of these linkages of single genes to complex traits or disorders has been confirmed. None. But gene-wiz claims keep coming. Last year, The New York Times published two gene-wiz essays by Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist at Cornell Medical College. He claims that scientists have found a feel-good gene that makes you happy, and an infidelity gene that makes women cheat on their partners. The Times should be ashamed for publishing this nonsense. The biological theory that really drives me nuts is the deep-roots theory of war. According to the theory, lethal group violence is in our genes. Its roots reach back millions of years, all the way to our common ancestor with chimpanzees. The deep-roots theory is promoted by scientific heavy-hitters like Harvard's Steven Pinker, Richard Rangham, and Edward Wilson. Skeptic Michael Shermer tirelessly touts the theory, and the media love it because it involves lurid stories about bloodthirsty chimps and Stone Age humans. But the evidence is overwhelming that war was a cultural innovation, like agriculture, religion, or slavery, that emerged less than 12,000 years ago. I hate the deep-roots theory, not only because it's wrong, but also because it encourages fatalism toward war. War is our most urgent problem, more urgent than global warming, poverty, disease, or political oppression. War makes these and other problems worse, directly or indirectly, by diverting resources away from their solution. But war is a really hard target. Most people, most of you probably, dismiss world peace as a pipe dream. Perhaps you believe the deep-roots theory. If war is ancient and innate, it must also be inevitable, right? You might also think that religious fanaticism, and especially Muslim fanaticism, is the greatest threat to peace. That's the claim of religion bashers like Dawkins, Krauss, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, and the late great warmonger Christopher Hitchens. The United States, I submit, is the greatest threat to peace. Since 9-11, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have killed 370,000 people. This includes more than 210,000 civilians, many of them children. These are conservative estimates. Far from solving the problem of Muslim militancy, U.S. actions have made it worse. ISIS is a reaction to the anti-Muslim violence of the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. spends almost as much on what we disingenuously call defense as all other nations combined. And we are the leading innovator in and peddler of weapons. Barack Obama, who pledged to read, Barack Obama, who pledged to rid the world of nuclear weapons, has approved a $1 trillion plan to modernize our arsenal. The anti-war movement is terribly weak. Not a single genuine anti-war candidate ran in the presidential race, and that includes Bernie Sanders. Many Americans have embraced their nation's militarism. They flocked to see American Sniper, a film that celebrates a killer of women and children. In the last century, prominent scientists spoke out against U.S. militarism and called for the end to war. Scientists like Einstein, Linus Pauling, and the great skeptic, Carl Sagan, where are their successors? Noam Chomsky is still bashing U.S. imperialism, but he's almost 90. He needs help. Far from criticizing militarism, some scholars, like economist Tyler Cowan, claim war is beneficial because it spurs innovation. That's like arguing for the economic benefits of slavery. So, just to recap, I'm asking you skeptics to spend less time bashing soft targets, like homeopathy in Bigfoot, and more time bashing hard targets, like multiverses, cancer tests, psychiatric drugs, and war, the hardest target of all. I don't expect you to agree with my framing of these issues. All I ask is that you examine your own views skeptically and ask yourself this, shouldn't ending war be a moral imperative, like ending slavery or the subjugation of women? How can we not end war? That's the conclusion of the essay. Thank you for watching.