Growing Skepticism.

[Croydon Bob]

So areas like history, psychology and anthropology as well as consumer issues could just as well be served by applying skepticism as with topics like the paranormal.

It has always surprised me why we seem to concentrate on things like the paranormal and alt. med. I'm not saying they aren't worthwhile, but why are we so restrictive?

I'm not suggesting that we should be restrictive but it's somewhat inevitable that we are going to have to deal with, comment on, the biggest areas of nonsense out there.

Religion, alternative medicine, paranormal beliefs, etc, are the things that we are confronted with every day.

You mention history. We deal with History when dealing with woo about conspiracy theories, secret societies and religion. Should we be concentrating our skepticism on the smaller details (like one of my favourite subjects - Captain Bligh actually the good guy, Fletcher Christian - villain) when there are people out there claiming that the world wars were arranged by the Illuminati, that the Egyptian civilisation was ruled by aliens, etc.

You mention psychology. Many prominent skeptics are psychologists. It is a fundamental part of being skeptical about the paranormal. There are psychologists who have been responsible for false child abuse panics and alien abduction beliefs - we've been skeptical about them.

Anthropology is part of the reality/creationist debate. What aspect would you rather we concentrated on over the false belief in Genesis that millions of people have?

Consumer issues? I'm sceptical when an advert claims that new formula bog roll is 10% kinder to my bum. I'm sceptical when a man in a uniform turns up on my doorstep and says that he's from my energy supplier, but he doesn't know who my energy supplier is. But is that Skepticism? We already cover fake detection devices, chiropractic adverts, etc, what else should we be doing?

[Mulder]

I'm sceptical when a man in a uniform turns up on my doorstep and says that he's from my energy supplier, but he doesn't know who my energy supplier is. But is that Skepticism? We already cover fake detection devices, chiropractic adverts, etc, what else should we be doing?

I guess you could apply the method to almost any area where humans make decisions. Some obvious areas where logic is subservient to ambition include politics and many areas of company management. In such areas decisions are not clear cut because you are never going to get someone acting purely for the greater good. The kind of people who spend decades getting to a position of power are rarely acting out of altruism. The best one could hope for is to try to point out the likely catastrophic consequences of some decisions eg. the management of banks that led to the credit crunch or governments wasting huge amounts of money on failed computer projects. If people in positions of power only understood these risks, they probably wouldn't take a blind bit of notice. But we could always say 'I told you so'.

[Nukapai]

But the conference covers a wider variety of issues and approaches including skepticism, sociology, cultural research, neuroscience, psychology as well as parapsychology - so its not at all just about ghosts. Sounds to me like you would benefit a great deal from it Why not read the background info on the topics and speakers?



I think its fine to say an area does not interest you (which might pertain to one or two talks in a ten talk conference) - but it's a misrepresentation to automatically assume that the talks on ghosts will be woo. In fact - you really should take a closer look - there are talks on all sides.

Thanks for the info. I didn't have time to read background info on everything to do with the conference and relied on the summary I received in my inbox (which I admittedly just glanced at and thought "hmm, doesn't sound like my cup of tea").

Also, I didn't assume that the conference talks would be woo; perhaps I didn't express myself very well: I mean that I don't have enough room in my head/energy/interest to consider the paranormal-woo stuff in general (at least not for the time being).

I'm not attempting to critique something I haven't thoroughly investigated - if the conference covers more than I took its blurbs to mean, fair dos.

EDITED: Just to show you how the conference was advertised to forum members via email (which may explain why I thought that it was going to be all about ghosts and paranormal):

This is a quick message from the UK-Skeptics forum to announce the UK-Skeptics 2009 paranormal conference, which will take place at the beautiful (and supposedly haunted!) Muncaster Castle in the English Lake District on the weekend of the 18th-20th September 2009.

The aim of the conference is to take a balanced view of anomalous experiences from all perspectives (not only from skeptics) in the hope of increasing understanding of the issues and generating healthy debate in a friendly manner with those on all sides of the paranormal debate.

In order to achieve this, an excellent selection of internationally renowned speakers from several disciplines including neuroscience, social psychology, parapsychology, cinema studies and sociology have been invited to give their perspectives on anomalous experience.

[Admin]

I have time on my hands ... if there is anything you think could reasonably be delegated, I'm happy to help.

Music to my ears!

I'll PM you later.

[DrS]

Me and my big mouth!