Skepticblog

Llamas! I mean, sheep. I used to know a lot about these critters, back in the 1990s when I took this picture.

I was saddened last weekend to miss Dragon*Con’s Skeptrack in Atlanta—usually a highlight of my year—due to family and professional obligations. I knew months in advance that I wouldn’t be able to go, but there were a number of panels on topics close to my heart (on the scope of skepticism, its history, and its future) in which I would have loved to participate. (Luckily, I was able to watch some of those streaming live, completely for free—something some of you may wish to note for next year.)

But for my family and I, there was a major silver lining: the 144th Saanich Fair! Western Canada’s longest running agricultural fair, the Saanich Fair has been a tradition in my family since—well, since about the 110th Saanich Fair. There’s a special kind of life satisfaction that can only arise when you gaze in wonder upon prize pumpkins and blue ribbon pies. It casts a powerful nostalgic spell. The scents of hay, dust, and manure. The cooing rows of fancy pigeons, each more Darwinian than the last. Teams of draft horses. Supporting the Lions Club through the delicious means of volunteer-sold midway hotdogs. Hearing the screams of teenagers spun, flipped, shaken, and dangled upside down for no good reason. It’s all so familiar and magical—the pleasure of being transported back to childhood (especially now that I have a child of my own to share it with).

But that sense of time travel is an illusion. Which brings me to my topic for today: the fading of expertise.

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Image by Daniel Loxton with Jim W. W. Smith. © 2011. All Rights Reserved.

Finally! After a year (and more) of work and months of anticipation, I’m able to reveal my newest children’s book: Ankylosaur Attack, from Kids Can Press.

Illustrated by the Junior Skeptic art team of yours truly with Jim W. W. Smith, Ankylosaur Attack is a full-color hardcover storybook about a day in the life of a dinosaur. It’s intended for my youngest audience yet: ages four and up. (It’s approved by my own five-year old, whose discerning taste in dinosaurs is unparalleled.)

Ankylosaur Attack is in stock now at Amazon.com and available for pre-order at Amazon.ca. (The official release date is September 1, 2011. Skeptic.com and most other major North American booksellers will have it in stock in the coming days.)

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The James Randi Educational Foundation’s recent The Amazing Meeting 9 conference came at a sensitive moment, right on the tail of an online shake-up in which the atheist and skeptical communities were forced to confront the interconnected issues of respectful discourse and sexism in a more serious way than they had in recent memory. (For a fascinating discussion of this debate and the “chilly climate” problem, please check out Jennifer Ouellette’s Scientific American post, “Is It Cold in Here?”)

Commendably, the JREF had already taken important steps to make TAM even more welcoming to women—steps which were both bold and sensible. To begin with, TAM9’s line-up of world-class speakers included as many women as men. This achievement was rewarded with a record-setting level of gender balance among attendees, with JREF President D.J. Grothe announcing that fully 40% of TAM9 attendees were women. Further, in keeping with the standards of larger, more established popular culture conventions, the JREF developed a Code of Conduct for the safety and enjoyment of all participants.

With all this going on, it was widely anticipated that TAM’s “Diversity in Skepticism” panel might take some interesting twists.

It did—but not in the direction anyone was expecting.

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I’m sitting here with my first coffee, on my first morning home from The Amazing Meeting 9 conference in Las Vegas—in many ways, the pivot point for the skeptical movement (at least in North America).

As usual, I came home with a lot to think about.

It was a conference that spoke to many of the recurring themes of my own work. Notably, many speeches explicitly tackled the practical aspects of effective, empathetic communication—and especially, the ways in which effective activism depends on well-considered messaging. I would go so far as to call that DBAD-related discussion of communication the theme of this year’s TAM: touching people emotionally, understanding their stories, telling the stories of science and skepticism in ways that people can hear and support.

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Go to video for Daniel Loxton's Keynote Address at LogiCON 2011. (Photo by Mark Iocchelli)

I’m pleased to announce (on Canada Day, donchaknow!) the release of my 2011 Keynote speech from Edmonton’s LogiCon, in both audio and video formats. The audio version is presented on the Canadian broadcast radio program Skeptically Speaking (preceded by my conversation with host Desiree Schell). The video version (handheld video, in four parts) appears courtesy of the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society (the hosts of LogiCon).

It’s a very personal speech, which uses my own life and family as an illustration of its theme: ”While every human deserves scientific literacy, it’s not something we’re born with. It’s something we must be taught.”

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Watch Phil Plait's 2010 "DBAD" speech (on Vimeo)

“The Amazing Meeting 9″ conference — organized skepticism’s biggest, broadest, and most important meeting of the minds — is almost upon us. It seems a good moment to look back at the most widely discussed presentation at last year’s TAM: astronomer Phil Plait’s “Don’t be a Dick” speech (video) calling for less name-calling¹ and more civility in skeptical outreach:

The best idea ever thought of in the history of humanity is useless unless someone communicates it. It will die in the test tube. And in our case, what we’re communicating here to people is not necessarily something they want to hear. And so, our demeanor — how we deliver this message — takes on crucial, crucial importance.

As some readers may know, Plait’s “DBAD” speech touched off an online firestorm that smolders to this day.

I explore the ethics of skepticism quite often² (it’s one of the main reasons I blog in addition to writing books and Skeptic magazine articles) but today I’d like to look at something simpler and more concrete. Let’s explore a straightforward historical question:

Was Plait’s call for civility something new for skepticism?

It happens that the answer is, “No, not even a little bit.” (Please note: this is a long article, running over 4500 words.)

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Skeptical pioneer Isaac Asimov (a founder of CSICOP, now called CSI) produced such a staggering library of books (over 500!) that his multiple autobiographies were merely punctuation. I have three Asimov autobiographies in the Junior Skeptic library. Sometimes, just for fun, I pull one down at random, flip it open, and read the first two pages my eye happens to fall upon. Each time I do this, I inevitably

1. read something funny;
2. learn something interesting;
3. and feel a blog post spring ready-made to mind.

This certainly happened when I read Asimov’s tale of his personal experience of psychic premonition or divine intervention — in the form of a literal poke on the shoulder.¹

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As most of you will have heard, Christian radio mogul Harold Camping’s predicted “Rapture” came and went on May 21st without so much as a trumpet sounding. This failure of prophecy unfolded to a clamour of Tweets and parties from the nonbelievers’ side of the aisle. There’s something undeniably funny about a confident prediction unfulfilled, and Camping’s prediction couldn’t have been much more confident: “We know without any shadow of a doubt it is going to happen.”

Still, personally, I had a hard time enjoying the circus. It seemed ghoulish to crack wise when so many hopes and dreams — and lives — hung in the balance. Belief, as we skeptics know all too well, cuts across lines. Beliefs unite the clever and the dull, the young and the old, the righteous and the wicked. Camping’s fear-mongering meant good people sold homes, quit jobs, broke up families, or spent the college money on apocalyptic billboards. I worried especially about the kids lying awake that week waiting for the end of the world, just as I worry about the kids suffering artificial, unnecessary terror over 2012.

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I’m excited to announce that Skeptic.com is going forward with a Fall 2011 sequel to our popular “Skeptics Mix Tape 2009″ — and to reveal the curator for the sequel, Desiree Schell (of Skeptically Speaking fame).

The Skeptics Mix Tape is a light-hearted outreach project that gives away selected songs of science and skepticism — what Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy hailed as “Music to appreciate reality to!”  — completely free. This use of the songs is donated by the artists, and the Skeptics Society charges nothing.

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Renmark North School, Grade 2, 1956. South Australia. Photo provided by Bonnie Poulter

[This week, I'd like to share a story excerpted from my recent LogiCON keynote. The speech is a bit on the personal side, as I'm sure you'll be able to tell. Much of it has to do with my own childhood. —Daniel]

My father has always been a wonderful storyteller.

When my brothers and I were little, my Dad would tuck us into our beds, “bristle” our cheeks with his stubble, and tell us stories or poems. We loved Australian bush poetry (we must have heard “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” and “The Man From Ironbark” a thousand times), but our favorites were tales of his own childhood, growing up poor on the edge of the desert in South Australia. His Tom Sawyer-like childhood sounded magical to us: racing horses bareback over red sand, plucking oranges from the trees of his family’s tiny fruit farm, catching yabbies in the hidden backwaters of the River Murray.

Many of these stories had a subversive edge to them, I realize now. Many were direct lessons in skepticism.

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