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Someone on the Poly Weekly forums asked if those of us who are atheist have our atheism affect our polyamory, and that sparked a Poly Weekly discussion topic.
It was an interesting discussion, but there were a few points I did not have time or opportunity to make, so I'm going to make them here.
One of the problems with the argument "the 'experts' just KNEW that the world was flat, so we shouldn't trust that the 'experts' KNOW anything they claim to know today" (besides the fact that the flat-earth hypothesis is a myth) is that the "experts" being brought up are usually "experts" before we developed the scientific method. It was also mentioned in passing how surprising it was that "we used to believe" that smoking was healthy. That's not true either. The use of the slang term "coffin nail" to refer to cigarettes dates as far back as the 1880s. What we see in the fictional universe of Mad Men was a time in our history when the Advertising industry told everyone a lie to sell a product that had very little in the way of actual scientific data one way or the other (although it was *believed* by many to be harmful, we just didn't have scientific data to support that conclusion prior to the development of the scientific method). The advertising industry is notorious for skewing, biasing, fudging, and outright lying to sell products and always has been. But thankfully, we now have agencies in place to investigate fraudulent claims and hold those committing the fraud accountable (although, like any human endeavor, it is not perfect).
It is true that "experts" are human and therfore make mistakes, and we do not know anything with 100% but ... well, Greta Christina has an entire blog post about that, so let me just point you there:
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/01/the-100-solutio.html
AND
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/04/professor_brain.html
Another problem with the argument is that, when we *do* find something that is flawed or incorrect, we are not usually swapping out chunks of theorys 1:1. Usually, the overall theory remains accepted, and it's only certain details about it that get refined, and the amount of information we have recently discovered is actually being ADDED to our body of knowledge, not necessarily replacing it evenly.
For example, using the argument that learning something new that contradicts existing theories, one could say that the Theory of Relativity basically "disproved" Newtonian gravity. But it also explained why Newton's equations worked. i.e.- Newton's laws work perfectly for the world in which we live, and can be used to make accurate predictions in environments where you aren't dealing with extreme speeds or extreme masses. In those situations Newtonian gravity no longer makes accurate predictions. Relativity explains both Newtonian gravity and also works in the more extreme situations. This is an example of adding to our existing knowledge. A new scientific theory only gets accepted once it is proven to work AND it covers all the same things the theory it is replacing covers. So we didn't just throw out Newton's Theory of Gravity because we discovered something new that contradicted it. We added to our understanding of the world by adding Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which confirmed Newton's Theory for a set of conditions, plus covered a few things that Newton's Theory didn't cover.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis#Evaluating_hypotheses
...under a well-crafted, well-controlled experiment, a lack of falsification does count as verification, since such an experiment ranges over the full scope of possibilities in the problem domain. Should we ever discover some place where gravity did not function, and rain fell upward, this would not falsify our current theory of gravity (which, on this view, has been verified by innumerable well-formed experiments in the past) – it would rather suggest an expansion of our theory to encompass some new force or previously undiscovered interaction of forces. In other words, our initial theory as it stands is verified but incomplete.
Of course, we don't know EVERYTHING, and what usually makes the news are those topics that are on the frontier of science, where we particularly don't know everything about that topic. But, then again, those topics are not typically stated with reasonable certainty either precisely because they are so new and they haven't stood up to the same tests of time and rigorous investigation that other ideas have. We are aware of, and admit, that different ideas have different amounts of certainty, it's not an all or nothing dichotomy. It's not "we either know this for sure or we don't know it at all", rather it's "we're about 98% certain this is true" or "this conclusion has only a 48% chance of being true" (OK, that's not the language used, I'm paraphrasing for laymen). In other words, we can be pretty damn sure that something is true and we can also find something interesting that might be true but that needs more research.
As Richard Dawkins says, "there are no cultural relativists at 30,000 feet". What that means is that we can safely say that we KNOW that we're in an airplane and we KNOW how to make an airplane fly. If you want to get all solipsistic and insist that we can't KNOW for 100%, you can say that, but these are things we know with a high enough degree of certainty, with a probability close enough to 100%, that we can behave AS IF it's 100%.
Of course planes crash, but those are mechanical failures, which we ALSO know about, not flaws in the knowledge of how planes fly. When a plane crashes, we don't look at the engine and say "well that's strange, we had no idea that a torn fuel line would result in loss of fuel and subsequently a crash. That was totally unpredictable and totally against all that we know of mechanized flight". We might not immediately know what the problem is, but when the problem is discovered, its result fits quite squarely in with our understanding of how planes work. In other words, we might not immediately know that the fuel line had a hole in it, but when we discover it, loss of fuel is exactly what we'd expect from a hole in the fuel line.
We can predict with an extremely high degree of certainty what will make a plane fly and what will make it fall out of the sky and what, specifically, will happen when any individual component fails during flight. When we step onto that plane, we are betting with our lives that a handful of scientists really did KNOW their numbers, and the concept of reality being subjective and we all have our own "reality" based on what "makes sense to us" does not apply. If that were true, then anyone who thinks that heavier-than-air flight just doesn't make sense would be able to get on a plane and that plane wouldn't fly because his "reality" is different from mine, and in his "reality", heavier-than-air flight doesn't "feel right" to him. But the reality is that the plane flies regardless of our personal, subjective, feelings or even individual understanding of plane mechanics. This reality exists outside of us, it is empirical, and it exists whether any person wants to believe in it or not. And empirical truths are something that we can "know", with a reasonable degree of certainty, and those that we do claim to "know" are extremely unlikely to be proven wrong by future research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Pedagogical_definition
So to say that everyone has his or her own "reality" is not true at all. There are objective and empirical truths, and it is possible to KNOW them. 100% certainty is not required, we can be certain ENOUGH with the scientific method as our process for learning the world around us and for reducing the effects of human bias. What I FEEL is not a good indicator for what actually IS because of all the crazy things our brains do to trick us(1). I can FEEL attacked, but that doesn't mean anyone necessarily attacked me. And we can have empirical evidence and observations that are not subject to our personal perceptions (like outside observers, a video camera, even a rational analysis, in the "attacked" example) that can confirm how well our "feelings" actually match reality.
http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/14thFFoCPt2.html
There are an awful lot of individual subjects to look at skeptically, or to ask how skepticism and rational inquiry play a part in decision-making processes or in everyday life, far more than I could possibly cover in a single journal post, or even several. There are some great podcasts that cover exactly these kinds of topics, from what the scientific method is, to how it's used, to specific topics that are evaluated. These podcasts do a much better job of explaining what I tried to say here, because they can go into so much more depth and nuance over time and over a series of episodes than I can get in this single post. They're also more entertaining to listen to than I am to be read.
All of the following recommendations can be downloaded through iTunes, although I am providing links to websites for convenience of those who do not use iTunes or have iPods. It is not necessary to have either to listen to podcasts, but installing iTunes (free) will allow you to subscribe to a podcast, which will download each new episode automatically to your computer, to be listened to at your leisure. Individual names are linked to their Twitter accounts, most of which I also follow.
I STRONGLY recommend listening to Skeptoid, which is kind of like Snopes in that it takes a look at specific topics in pop culture and investigates the myth or reality behind the legend. These are particularly great because the episodes are only about 15 minutes long. The host, Brian Dunning, has also started a video podcast of the same topics, called In Fact, which is appropriate for use in the classroom and great for visual learners, like me.
Next, take a listen to The Skeptics Guide To The Universe, which is a panel of 5-6 people with various science-y type jobs and backgrounds, as they discuss current news items & pop culture. This is a GREAT way to learn how the scientific method is used in practice, in every day life. The Skeptics' Guide 5x5 (on the same page) is five minutes with 5 people on topics that aren't covered in the longer show.
I also recommend Point of Inquiry, which is more of an interview show with DJ Grothe who does a fantastic job of playing "Devil's Advocate". He talks to leaders of the scientific community, authors, philosophers, and pop culture members of the media who support rational and skeptical inquiry and asks them the hardball questions, often the questions of the opposition, but without coming off as belligerent or rude or antagonistic (something I have yet to learn). He really gets to the meat of the matter. DJ has recently gone on to become President of the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation), and will be hosting a new podcast called For Good Reason. I recommend going back through the PoI archives to listen to old episodes, since DJ is worth the effort & won't be hosting PoI any longer. I'm not sure who will be taking over, but I'm sure he'll be just as great, if different.
Mr. Deity is a deliciously sarcastic, snarky video podcast that pokes fun at Christianity specifically, using biting humor to illustrate the logical fallacies and circular reasoning so often found in religious beliefs. My absolute favorite character is the Devil. Watch it, and you'll understand why, especially when you get to the Magic episodes.
For a more practical, day-to-day what's-the-harm look at non-scientific beliefs, listen to Quackcast with Mark Crislip. He is an infectious disease doctor and he also uses snark and ridicule, along with actual scientific research, to investigate the claims made by alt-medicine. This is a great podcast for seeing exactly what harm can befall someone for not using rational inquiry and critical thinking and substituting that with magical thinking.
Also visit What's The Harm, a website that highlights exactly what's the harm with just letting people have their wacky beliefs, live and let live, if they don't do it to me then leave it alone. Problem is that it's so often live and let die, and they *do* do it to me, but What's The Harm will cover all that in detail.
I have yet to listen to these following podcasts (or I've listened to one or two episodes only), but they all come highly recommended by the same people who first turned me on to the podcasts I recommended above. They are all on my list to start listening once I've caught up on all the others in my queue: Skepticality, Reasonable Doubt, The Naked Scientists, The Non-Prophets (out of Austin, Texas), and The Skeptic Zone (out of Australia) with the AWESOME Richard Saunders & Dr. Rachie (of the recent Shorty Awards incident).
1. I strongly recommend reading books like "How We Know What Isn't So" and "Why People Believe Weird Things" and "How To Think Straight" and "How to Think About Weird Things" and "Demon Haunted World" and "How We Believe" for a better understanding of why what we "feel" isn't a good enough reason to believe it is so and why it is so important to use critical thinking and the scientific method to sort out reality from subjective perception.
I also recommend visiting my YouTube Channel for Awesome Science Stuff and good Atheism videos.
It was an interesting discussion, but there were a few points I did not have time or opportunity to make, so I'm going to make them here.
One of the problems with the argument "the 'experts' just KNEW that the world was flat, so we shouldn't trust that the 'experts' KNOW anything they claim to know today" (besides the fact that the flat-earth hypothesis is a myth) is that the "experts" being brought up are usually "experts" before we developed the scientific method. It was also mentioned in passing how surprising it was that "we used to believe" that smoking was healthy. That's not true either. The use of the slang term "coffin nail" to refer to cigarettes dates as far back as the 1880s. What we see in the fictional universe of Mad Men was a time in our history when the Advertising industry told everyone a lie to sell a product that had very little in the way of actual scientific data one way or the other (although it was *believed* by many to be harmful, we just didn't have scientific data to support that conclusion prior to the development of the scientific method). The advertising industry is notorious for skewing, biasing, fudging, and outright lying to sell products and always has been. But thankfully, we now have agencies in place to investigate fraudulent claims and hold those committing the fraud accountable (although, like any human endeavor, it is not perfect).
It is true that "experts" are human and therfore make mistakes, and we do not know anything with 100% but ... well, Greta Christina has an entire blog post about that, so let me just point you there:
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/01/the-100-solutio.html
One: You can never be 100% certain that you're right about anything.
Two: Therefore, all ideas are equally likely to be true, and equally valid.
(Three: Therefore, my idea is right. But I think it's pretty obvious why that one's wrong, so I'm not going to bother shooting that particularly slow fish in that particularly small barrel.)
Okay. First of all, Two does not follow from One. Yes, it's true, we can never be 100% sure of anything (except perhaps our own existence). The history of knowledge is full of mis-steps and false assumptions... and besides, everything we see and experience could all be an illusion. We could all be in the Matrix, or something.
But the fact that we can't be 100% sure of any idea doesn't mean that all ideas are equally likely or unlikely.
The fact that we can't have 100% certainty doesn't mean that we can't assess which ideas are more or less likely. We can't know for 100% certain that the earth orbits the sun -- it could all be some horrible Satanic deception, or space aliens playing a practical joke -- but we can be pretty darned sure that it's very likely indeed. And we can't be 100% sure that Bertrand Russell's china teapot isn't orbiting the sun -- maybe it's too small to be seen by our telescopes, or maybe it's an intelligent teapot and is playing a cheeky game of hide and seek -- but we can be pretty darned sure that it almost certainly isn't.
And of course our beliefs are influenced by our preconceptions and assumptions, biases we can never completely filter out. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. That's the whole point of the scientific method. Everything about it -- control groups, double-blinding, placebo controls, peer review, transparent methodology, the expectation of replicability, all of it -- is an open acknowledgment that scientists are just as prone to seeing what they want and expect to see as everyone else. It's an open acknowledgment that scientists are fallible... and that they therefore need to try to screen out fallacy, as much as they can. These techniques don't eliminate uncertainty -- but they reduce it, and by a fair amount. They give us a significantly better chance that our theories might be right. They can’t give us absolute truth, but they can give us a pretty good approximation of the truth... an approximation that gets better and better over time.
Two: Therefore, all ideas are equally likely to be true, and equally valid.
(Three: Therefore, my idea is right. But I think it's pretty obvious why that one's wrong, so I'm not going to bother shooting that particularly slow fish in that particularly small barrel.)
Okay. First of all, Two does not follow from One. Yes, it's true, we can never be 100% sure of anything (except perhaps our own existence). The history of knowledge is full of mis-steps and false assumptions... and besides, everything we see and experience could all be an illusion. We could all be in the Matrix, or something.
But the fact that we can't be 100% sure of any idea doesn't mean that all ideas are equally likely or unlikely.
The fact that we can't have 100% certainty doesn't mean that we can't assess which ideas are more or less likely. We can't know for 100% certain that the earth orbits the sun -- it could all be some horrible Satanic deception, or space aliens playing a practical joke -- but we can be pretty darned sure that it's very likely indeed. And we can't be 100% sure that Bertrand Russell's china teapot isn't orbiting the sun -- maybe it's too small to be seen by our telescopes, or maybe it's an intelligent teapot and is playing a cheeky game of hide and seek -- but we can be pretty darned sure that it almost certainly isn't.
And of course our beliefs are influenced by our preconceptions and assumptions, biases we can never completely filter out. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. That's the whole point of the scientific method. Everything about it -- control groups, double-blinding, placebo controls, peer review, transparent methodology, the expectation of replicability, all of it -- is an open acknowledgment that scientists are just as prone to seeing what they want and expect to see as everyone else. It's an open acknowledgment that scientists are fallible... and that they therefore need to try to screen out fallacy, as much as they can. These techniques don't eliminate uncertainty -- but they reduce it, and by a fair amount. They give us a significantly better chance that our theories might be right. They can’t give us absolute truth, but they can give us a pretty good approximation of the truth... an approximation that gets better and better over time.
AND
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/04/professor_brain.html
Science keeps changing -- so how can we trust it? One of the problems is that people who distrust or dismiss science often say things like Layne did, that "history is also littered with disproved and discredited science" -- and that this somehow discredits science.
But people who value science don't see this as a sign of science's failure. On the contrary -- we see it as a sign of its success, of science working exactly the way it's supposed to. When enough evidence comes along that contradicts a theory, that theory gets discarded and replaced by a better one. A theory is only as good as the most recent results.
Now, obviously, there's a limit to this "most recent result" thing. As a science professor of mine once pointed out, if one of his students got a result that the density of helium and the density of lead were identical, that professor would not be rushing off to publish the results in "Science." He would, instead, be checking to see whether that student had turned on their scale.
That's where the whole "extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence" thing comes in. If a theory has stood up for decades or centuries, if it's explained all the evidence so far and done a good job of predicting new evidence, then one anomalous result won't be enough to make everyone question the theory. And it shouldn't. Anomalous results happen too often -- and they too often turn out to be explainable by something in the "they forgot to turn on their scale" department. A really solid theory that's held up for a long time needs a metric shitload of evidence for it to be discarded and replaced.
And here's the thing: Of course it's true that scientific theories have been discarded and replaced. But they've consistently been replaced with other scientific theories, other naturalistic explanations of the world. This is the point I was making in The Unexplained, The Unproven, and The Unlikely -- not that naturalistic theories never get replaced, but that they never get replaced by supernatural ones. (Not ones that are supported by mountains carefully collected, carefully controlled, peer-reviewed, replicated, etc. evidence, anyway.)
Anyway, this problem still doesn't contradict the central assertion -- that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.
But people who value science don't see this as a sign of science's failure. On the contrary -- we see it as a sign of its success, of science working exactly the way it's supposed to. When enough evidence comes along that contradicts a theory, that theory gets discarded and replaced by a better one. A theory is only as good as the most recent results.
Now, obviously, there's a limit to this "most recent result" thing. As a science professor of mine once pointed out, if one of his students got a result that the density of helium and the density of lead were identical, that professor would not be rushing off to publish the results in "Science." He would, instead, be checking to see whether that student had turned on their scale.
That's where the whole "extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence" thing comes in. If a theory has stood up for decades or centuries, if it's explained all the evidence so far and done a good job of predicting new evidence, then one anomalous result won't be enough to make everyone question the theory. And it shouldn't. Anomalous results happen too often -- and they too often turn out to be explainable by something in the "they forgot to turn on their scale" department. A really solid theory that's held up for a long time needs a metric shitload of evidence for it to be discarded and replaced.
And here's the thing: Of course it's true that scientific theories have been discarded and replaced. But they've consistently been replaced with other scientific theories, other naturalistic explanations of the world. This is the point I was making in The Unexplained, The Unproven, and The Unlikely -- not that naturalistic theories never get replaced, but that they never get replaced by supernatural ones. (Not ones that are supported by mountains carefully collected, carefully controlled, peer-reviewed, replicated, etc. evidence, anyway.)
Anyway, this problem still doesn't contradict the central assertion -- that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.
Another problem with the argument is that, when we *do* find something that is flawed or incorrect, we are not usually swapping out chunks of theorys 1:1. Usually, the overall theory remains accepted, and it's only certain details about it that get refined, and the amount of information we have recently discovered is actually being ADDED to our body of knowledge, not necessarily replacing it evenly.
For example, using the argument that learning something new that contradicts existing theories, one could say that the Theory of Relativity basically "disproved" Newtonian gravity. But it also explained why Newton's equations worked. i.e.- Newton's laws work perfectly for the world in which we live, and can be used to make accurate predictions in environments where you aren't dealing with extreme speeds or extreme masses. In those situations Newtonian gravity no longer makes accurate predictions. Relativity explains both Newtonian gravity and also works in the more extreme situations. This is an example of adding to our existing knowledge. A new scientific theory only gets accepted once it is proven to work AND it covers all the same things the theory it is replacing covers. So we didn't just throw out Newton's Theory of Gravity because we discovered something new that contradicted it. We added to our understanding of the world by adding Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which confirmed Newton's Theory for a set of conditions, plus covered a few things that Newton's Theory didn't cover.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis#Evaluating_hypotheses
...under a well-crafted, well-controlled experiment, a lack of falsification does count as verification, since such an experiment ranges over the full scope of possibilities in the problem domain. Should we ever discover some place where gravity did not function, and rain fell upward, this would not falsify our current theory of gravity (which, on this view, has been verified by innumerable well-formed experiments in the past) – it would rather suggest an expansion of our theory to encompass some new force or previously undiscovered interaction of forces. In other words, our initial theory as it stands is verified but incomplete.
As Richard Dawkins says, "there are no cultural relativists at 30,000 feet". What that means is that we can safely say that we KNOW that we're in an airplane and we KNOW how to make an airplane fly. If you want to get all solipsistic and insist that we can't KNOW for 100%, you can say that, but these are things we know with a high enough degree of certainty, with a probability close enough to 100%, that we can behave AS IF it's 100%.
Of course planes crash, but those are mechanical failures, which we ALSO know about, not flaws in the knowledge of how planes fly. When a plane crashes, we don't look at the engine and say "well that's strange, we had no idea that a torn fuel line would result in loss of fuel and subsequently a crash. That was totally unpredictable and totally against all that we know of mechanized flight". We might not immediately know what the problem is, but when the problem is discovered, its result fits quite squarely in with our understanding of how planes work. In other words, we might not immediately know that the fuel line had a hole in it, but when we discover it, loss of fuel is exactly what we'd expect from a hole in the fuel line.
We can predict with an extremely high degree of certainty what will make a plane fly and what will make it fall out of the sky and what, specifically, will happen when any individual component fails during flight. When we step onto that plane, we are betting with our lives that a handful of scientists really did KNOW their numbers, and the concept of reality being subjective and we all have our own "reality" based on what "makes sense to us" does not apply. If that were true, then anyone who thinks that heavier-than-air flight just doesn't make sense would be able to get on a plane and that plane wouldn't fly because his "reality" is different from mine, and in his "reality", heavier-than-air flight doesn't "feel right" to him. But the reality is that the plane flies regardless of our personal, subjective, feelings or even individual understanding of plane mechanics. This reality exists outside of us, it is empirical, and it exists whether any person wants to believe in it or not. And empirical truths are something that we can "know", with a reasonable degree of certainty, and those that we do claim to "know" are extremely unlikely to be proven wrong by future research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Pedagogical_definition
Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena, ... A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.
So to say that everyone has his or her own "reality" is not true at all. There are objective and empirical truths, and it is possible to KNOW them. 100% certainty is not required, we can be certain ENOUGH with the scientific method as our process for learning the world around us and for reducing the effects of human bias. What I FEEL is not a good indicator for what actually IS because of all the crazy things our brains do to trick us(1). I can FEEL attacked, but that doesn't mean anyone necessarily attacked me. And we can have empirical evidence and observations that are not subject to our personal perceptions (like outside observers, a video camera, even a rational analysis, in the "attacked" example) that can confirm how well our "feelings" actually match reality.
http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/14thFFoCPt2.html
But science dispels propaganda because it eliminates bias by design; it has to because it’s an investigation, not a predetermined conclusion like religion is. So every proposition must be requisitely evidential and potentially falsifiable, and must be subjected to a perpetual battery of independent and unrestricted tests wherein anyone and everyone who thinks they can is welcome to try and find and expose from flaw in it –to correct it. ...
Science is necessarily rational and empirical. That means that whatever we believe isn’t a matter of choice; its an obligate condition imposed upon us by our knowledge of the evidence, and that position will only change in accordance with our understanding.
Science is necessarily rational and empirical. That means that whatever we believe isn’t a matter of choice; its an obligate condition imposed upon us by our knowledge of the evidence, and that position will only change in accordance with our understanding.
There are an awful lot of individual subjects to look at skeptically, or to ask how skepticism and rational inquiry play a part in decision-making processes or in everyday life, far more than I could possibly cover in a single journal post, or even several. There are some great podcasts that cover exactly these kinds of topics, from what the scientific method is, to how it's used, to specific topics that are evaluated. These podcasts do a much better job of explaining what I tried to say here, because they can go into so much more depth and nuance over time and over a series of episodes than I can get in this single post. They're also more entertaining to listen to than I am to be read.
All of the following recommendations can be downloaded through iTunes, although I am providing links to websites for convenience of those who do not use iTunes or have iPods. It is not necessary to have either to listen to podcasts, but installing iTunes (free) will allow you to subscribe to a podcast, which will download each new episode automatically to your computer, to be listened to at your leisure. Individual names are linked to their Twitter accounts, most of which I also follow.
I STRONGLY recommend listening to Skeptoid, which is kind of like Snopes in that it takes a look at specific topics in pop culture and investigates the myth or reality behind the legend. These are particularly great because the episodes are only about 15 minutes long. The host, Brian Dunning, has also started a video podcast of the same topics, called In Fact, which is appropriate for use in the classroom and great for visual learners, like me.
Next, take a listen to The Skeptics Guide To The Universe, which is a panel of 5-6 people with various science-y type jobs and backgrounds, as they discuss current news items & pop culture. This is a GREAT way to learn how the scientific method is used in practice, in every day life. The Skeptics' Guide 5x5 (on the same page) is five minutes with 5 people on topics that aren't covered in the longer show.
I also recommend Point of Inquiry, which is more of an interview show with DJ Grothe who does a fantastic job of playing "Devil's Advocate". He talks to leaders of the scientific community, authors, philosophers, and pop culture members of the media who support rational and skeptical inquiry and asks them the hardball questions, often the questions of the opposition, but without coming off as belligerent or rude or antagonistic (something I have yet to learn). He really gets to the meat of the matter. DJ has recently gone on to become President of the JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation), and will be hosting a new podcast called For Good Reason. I recommend going back through the PoI archives to listen to old episodes, since DJ is worth the effort & won't be hosting PoI any longer. I'm not sure who will be taking over, but I'm sure he'll be just as great, if different.
Mr. Deity is a deliciously sarcastic, snarky video podcast that pokes fun at Christianity specifically, using biting humor to illustrate the logical fallacies and circular reasoning so often found in religious beliefs. My absolute favorite character is the Devil. Watch it, and you'll understand why, especially when you get to the Magic episodes.
For a more practical, day-to-day what's-the-harm look at non-scientific beliefs, listen to Quackcast with Mark Crislip. He is an infectious disease doctor and he also uses snark and ridicule, along with actual scientific research, to investigate the claims made by alt-medicine. This is a great podcast for seeing exactly what harm can befall someone for not using rational inquiry and critical thinking and substituting that with magical thinking.
Also visit What's The Harm, a website that highlights exactly what's the harm with just letting people have their wacky beliefs, live and let live, if they don't do it to me then leave it alone. Problem is that it's so often live and let die, and they *do* do it to me, but What's The Harm will cover all that in detail.
I have yet to listen to these following podcasts (or I've listened to one or two episodes only), but they all come highly recommended by the same people who first turned me on to the podcasts I recommended above. They are all on my list to start listening once I've caught up on all the others in my queue: Skepticality, Reasonable Doubt, The Naked Scientists, The Non-Prophets (out of Austin, Texas), and The Skeptic Zone (out of Australia) with the AWESOME Richard Saunders & Dr. Rachie (of the recent Shorty Awards incident).
1. I strongly recommend reading books like "How We Know What Isn't So" and "Why People Believe Weird Things" and "How To Think Straight" and "How to Think About Weird Things" and "Demon Haunted World" and "How We Believe" for a better understanding of why what we "feel" isn't a good enough reason to believe it is so and why it is so important to use critical thinking and the scientific method to sort out reality from subjective perception.
I also recommend visiting my YouTube Channel for Awesome Science Stuff and good Atheism videos.
