CSI is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, associated with the Center for Inquiry, promoting secular humanism and scientific rationalism. My wife and I attended its 50th Anniversary conference in Buffalo.
We’d been to the previous one in October ’24 — I called it “an island of reason in a sea of madness.” Today’s world is yet more challenging. A Candle in the Dark subtitled a Carl Sagan book. A fitting characterization for this gathering.
CFI head Robyn Blumner’s opening address was a keynote clarion call. Invoking the Enlightenment as the wellspring for Humanity’s fantastic progress over recent centuries. With America, founded upon its ideals, in the forefront, vaunting science and reason. Now rejected by so many of our people, disconnected from those precepts, or even believing they’d failed. Plunging us back into a more primitive, darker mentality.
This perspective underlay an astonishing parade of presentations over several days. I’ll just hit a few highlights.
A star was Bill Nye, “the Science Guy.” He had a repeated scientific message: Vote!
Mary Roach has authored major books talking science. Interviewed by fellow writer Richard Wiseman with delicious droll wit. One topic was hiccups — assertedly (and thus relevant to Roach’s book Bonk) curable by sex. Or, if unavailable, by self-treatment.
Wiseman also asked her about tattoos. His Brit pronunciation of the word became a repeated conference laugh-line. (Though this was called “much tattoo about nothing.”) Secular humanist skeptics are not a dour lot.
Also discussed was Roach’s penis bone collection. And three people claiming ability to predict the future whose failure when tested surprised them.
Stuart Vyse spoke about the history of the “Burned Over District,” an early 1800s epidemic, in this region, of religionism run amok. Including Mormonism, the invention of practiced con man Joseph Smith, with a whopper about ancient writings on nonexistent golden plates, showing there’s no religious bunk too preposterous to attract believers.
More generally, Vyse noted the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy” — shoot first, then draw a bullseye around the bullet hole. A technique which scientific frauds and their ilk often employ.
Jim Alcock, discussing CSI’s own history, said that at its 1976 start, we were awash in a “zoo of irrationality,” pseudoscience, and paranormal claims, with scant pushback. Then we seemed to be winning the war, with at least some nonsense manifestations quashed. Yet today we see not just pseudo-science recrudescing but anti-science, rejecting the very idea of science as the way to understand reality. Here America is something of a global outlier, being more steeped in religion than other advanced societies. And while religion once widely strove to accommodate to science (the Catholic Church recanted its condemnation of Galileo — in 1992!), America’s Evangelical right does not.
One big problem is science itself infiltrated by what are really its enemies, making it hard for people to know which are which. Exemplified by the anti-vax movement, grounded in outright scientific fraud. And Alcock mentioned “journal snatching” — reputable science publications bought out to be made vehicles for junk science.
Eugenie Scott elaborated on what we’re up against. The word “tireless” is over-used, but I was gratified by the opportunity to tell her how I’ve long admired her heroic efforts to promote real science education. And to say, moments later, the same to Bertha Vazquez.
Hearing Eugenie expound upon the efforts of some to put across their frauds, I was struck anew by this thought: imagine if such prodigious intelligences, talents, and capabilities were instead put to honest ends! Surely people so skilled at their shtick could find legitimate success.
Another hero was Leo Igwe. Spotting him, I handed him something I’d printed out — his lengthy comment on my first 2008 blog post! Which surprised me then, not knowing who he was, or how he’d found my little blog. Later I learned of Leo’s tireless (yes) efforts in Nigeria combating witch hunts. A real thing, accused witches being horribly persecuted. His talk said we shouldn’t romanticize primitive beliefs with “noble savage” notions, legitimizing pseudo-science.
Michael Mann, a top climate researcher (and fellow serious numismatist, I learned chatting with him at lunch) spoke of “science under siege.” Encountering not merely skepticism toward climate science but pseudo-skepticism — what’s really denialism and weaponized dishonest anti-science disinformation.
Plain dishonesty is a core characteristic of the other side in all this stuff. Some things asserted during this conference might have been debated — but I detected not a single word spoken dishonestly.
A panel talked of reality itself under siege. Quoting E.O. Wilson that we have paleolithic brains, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. Too often not helping us but exploited to fool us. Aided by the Dunning-Kruger effect — lack of knowledge causing not epistemic humility, but people overrating their knowledge.
Humans actually evolved with a default of trusting what we see and hear. Needful for the success of our ancestral social groups. Which also goes along the grain — it’s easier for the brain to simply accept incoming information — harder work to subject it to skeptical scrutiny. And with smartphones we’re doing less of that kind of mental work, instead making us like sponges absorbing whatever comes at us. Metastasized by AI — we let technology do our thinking for us.
Dr. Peter Hotez elaborated on the anti-vax movement’s misguided harm. Another hero, a vaccine expert, constantly on TV during the Covid crisis. Hundreds of thousands died needlessly because they didn’t heed him and refused vaccination. He explained that anti-vaxxers are not just politically but financially motivated, being part of another huge societal phenomenon: the “wellness” influencer industry, a half trillion dollar one, selling products that biomedical scientist Andrea Love called “snake oil.”
Her hard-hitting presentation on the harmful scam of “organic food” merits separate treatment, stay tuned.
Rina Raphael, too, sought to explain America’s difficult relationship with reality, calling us a nation of dreamers. Tracing it back to Luther, who said everyone can access God. America’s Puritans took it up a notch, with apocalyptic magical thinking. Then postmodernism and “radical relativism” opened the floodgates to believing whatever one likes.
Ronald Lindsay discussed what it means to live as a secular skeptic. We’re not closed-minded joyless scolds. And it’s not a “faith” in science, like any other. Science is not a set of beliefs but a method for finding truth. Pragmatic application of scientific principles gave us airplanes. Religion flew them into buildings.
Lindsay explained that if we’re part of God’s plan, in which we had no say, that drains our lives of meaning. We create meaning for ourselves. (I’d add: grounded in reality, not falsehood.)
We also had a psychic act by Banachek — well, prefaced by a declaration that this is what a psychic would be like if there were such a thing — which there isn’t. He later discussed “Project Alpha” where he and another “psychic” performer revealed publicly, to great consternation, that they were frauds, just doing trickery. And I was thinking, “Duh? Wasn’t that obvious??”
My own go-to heuristic, so universally useful, is Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation, with the fewest necessary assumptions, is the likeliest. Like when a friend touted a UFO abduction story, ostensibly highly credible. But Occam’s Razor gave me the answer: it simply never happened.*
* See more detail about this: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/ufo-abductions-and-americas-reality-crisis/
