The Science of Weird Shit | Chris French
May 2, 2024 - 7:00 pm EDTThe Latest
How To Tackle Misinformation and Enhance the Scientific Temperament of Our Society
April 24, 2024We live in strangely dichotomous times where our society continues to make scientific progress by leaps and bounds—the mRNA vaccines (Barbier et al. 2022), the James Webb Space Telescope (Witze 2022), artificial intelligence (Wallis 2019) being the recent crowning scientific achievements—but...
Looking for the Bright Side of the AI Apocalypse
Volume 48, No. 3May/June 2024
Rumors of impending artificial intelligence (AI) doom got you down? Take heart, there may be light at the end of this tunnel—and not all of it from the headlight of a self-driving locomotive. No, sorry, you can’t be sure that a precocious bundle of algorithms won’t take your job (Cao...
Analyzing Conspiracies through Folklore, Epidemiology, and Artificial Intelligence
Volume 48, No. 3May/June 2024
Digital disinformation is becoming a widely recognized threat—especially to public health—with unprecedented amounts of misinformation available online. In his first advisory, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (2021) issued a stark warning that “Health misinformation is a serious threat to public...
Videos
Is the Planet Full? What We Need to Know about Overpopulation | Peter Uetz
Watch the recording nowDoes Coffee Cause Cancer? Myths about the Food We Eat | Dr. Christopher Labos
Watch the recording nowThe Psychology of Misinformation and Its Remedies | David Myers
Watch the recording nowThe UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See | Brian Dunning
Watch the recording nowScience Education: What We Get Wrong and How to Do It Better | Carl Wieman
Watch the recording nowHate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right | Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Watch the recording nowWeird Earth: Strange Ideas about Our Planet | Donald Prothero
Watch the recording nowThe Ideological Subversion of Biology | Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja
Watch the recording nowWe are all skeptics
Skepticism is a part of everyday common sense we all use; it is also a key component of scientific thinking. It helps lead to fact-based judgments about what is real and what is not. It allows you to see for yourself which claims you’ve heard stand up to tests of evidence and which do not.
A Look to the Past
The Psychic Defective Revisited: Years Later, Sylvia Browne’s Accuracy Remains Dismal
Volume 37, No. 5September / October 2013
This article originally appeared in the September / October 2013 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. Subscribe today and read this entire issue. You will also gain access to our full archive, dating back to 1976. An update of our “Psychic Defective” analysis examines developments in eleven cases...
I Was Wrong (and I Bet You Were Too)
July 9, 2019For me, one of the great pleasures of skepticism is finding out I was wrong about something. Rather than feeling guilty about my error, I feel proud that I have learned something and have a better understanding of reality. When skeptics encounter a questionable claim, they do some fact-checking....