I attended my first CSICon in 2016 and sat in on the Mini-Skeptics Toolbox, which inspired me to develop an 8-week Climate Literacy Toolkit (smaller than a Toolbox) course for graduate students in Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico in the Fall semester of 2017. The purpose was to provide a basic understanding of the scientific consensus on climate change and the tools to recognize the difference between scientific and non-scientific criticisms. Students learned the skills to communicate climate science to ordinary non-technical people in social environments and participated in a role-playing exercise in which they practiced communicating to others pretending to be members of one of Global Warming’s “Six Americas” (defined by the Yale Program on Climate Communication). We will replicate this role-playing game at CSICon with participants who have read the original Yale Report in advance: tinyurl.com/Yale6USAs

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The mission of the GSoW is to rewrite all Wikipedia pages concerning scientific skepticism, and to do so in all languages possible. They work to support the people and organizations that do the research, write the books, organize the conferences and take the heat from the anti-science and paranormal world.  GSoW gives them the best possible Wikipedia pages possible, while following all the rules of Wikipedia. The GSoW has had a large impact on education around the world since 2010. The GSoW has written and rewritten hundreds of Wikipedia pages, including Spontaneous Human Combustion, Facilitated Communication, Perry DeAngelis, Genetic Literacy Project, Jerry Andrus, “Grandmother Fish” and many more.

Also, Susan will be talking about her work with Grief Vampires, what works, what is the goal, how to know when you have been successful, how to run a sting. The actions you will be learning from her experiences with psychics will teach you how to use those same resources with other kinds of pseudoscience, including facilitated communication which she calls the low-hanging fruit of woo. Susan has multiple ongoing stings and projects that she will be reporting on in this workshop, inspiring you to do join or giving you tips for your own skeptical activism.

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Investigating paranormal claims is not as easy as reality television shows make it out to be. It takes a considerable amount of work examining all the details, tracking down leads and interviewing witnesses. Join investigators Joe Nickell and Kenny Biddle as they take you on a tour; first through their philosophy on why we investigate claims of ghosts, UFOs, and monsters, as well as the people that believe in them.

Second, we’ll explore the investigative strategies used to solve mysteries, combining traditional and modern research techniques, with some “out-of-the-box” thinking that comes from years of experience.

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Our beliefs about alleged health threats, alleged health enhancement strategies, and population health trends can be influenced by people who point to statistics, tables, and graphs. This workshop explores: (1) the vulnerability of intelligent consumers to being misled by arguments involving numbers and (2) the importance of quantitative reasoning skills for distinguishing health fact from health fiction. The emphasis will be on small-group problem solving tasks that have both puzzled and enlightened college students. To complete the problem solving tasks, you don’t need to be a math whiz and you don’t need formal training in statistics, but you will need some healthy skepticism.

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Skepticism as an ethos is based around the questioning of putative knowledge and claims. But too often, those of us who identify as skeptics are too quick to presume we are the true rationalists, in possession of objective ways of thinking and special knowledge of how the world works. The truth is that this is a supremely arrogant thing for a limited, contingent hunk of meat like a human brain to think. No single person’s perspective could really have immediate access to all there is to know, and to think otherwise is to close yourself off to the possibility of deeper and broader knowledge of the world. In this talk, I will discuss how I’ve found that when I resist the arrogant impulse, and instead admit that I do not know, that is when I learn and grow, as a mind. I will go on to discuss how my views on topics as varied as placebos and religion have evolved as a result of this perspective. 

Show Premise

In this original hybrid of stand-up comedy and multidisciplinary lecture, Adam Conover will reveal the cultural parasites that seek to control your mind and behavior, and explains how you can protect yourself from their influence and achieve intellectual freedom.

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Never in history has so much information been instantly available to so many with so little effort. Anyone with a smart phone and an Internet connection can in a moment access vast amounts of data on just about any subject. However, although it may significantly influence our beliefs, most of this information is unfiltered and has never being subjected to the fact-checking scrutiny provided in the past by journalists, editors and peer review. This makes it difficult to distinguish between fact, conjecture, propaganda and nonsense. Recent psychological research can inform us about the impact of “alternative facts” and “fake news” on our beliefs and offer guidance when deceit and folly masquerade as truth on a massive scale.

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Millions of people believe that the World Trade Center was demolished with explosives as part of a vast government conspiracy. One of the core pieces of evidence for this belief is the presence of millions of microscopic iron spheres in the WTC dust. It is falsely claimed these microspheres could only have come from the use of explosives, and so their presence proves controlled demolition. Why does this false belief persist after being debunked over a decade ago?

I explain the misconceptions about iron microspheres that keep the belief alive, and how to discuss these misconceptions with 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I’ll show where the WTC microspheres probably came from. There will be a live demonstration of one method of making iron microspheres using materials from the hotel gift shop, along with quick descriptions of ten other methods the fire marshal won’t let me show.

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In this talk, New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer explores the history of heredity, a concept that has come to define us and yet defies our intuitions. Today, millions of people are getting their DNA sequenced to understand how their ancestry made them who they are, but making sense of these tests demands that we escape mistaken views about how we inherit genes and what effects they have on us. Zimmer calls for a broader view of heredity, one that can potentially include other channels flowing from one generation to the next.

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It is 2018 and yet many people (both women and men) don’t know that IUDs are not abortifacients, eating sugar doesn’t cause a yeast infection, and all vaginas are not one wet bathing suit away from full catastrophe. We are here for many reasons including our collective inability to talk frankly and openly about the reproductive tract, the shame patriarchy assigns to a female body, and because celebrities, politicians, and corporate America know vaginal snake oil is better than striking gold. As far as reproductive health for women is concerned the age of information has passed and we have entered the age of misinformation. Dr. Jen Gunter, the Internet’s go to gynecologist, explains how all parts of the political spectrum profit from vaginal misinformation, what we can all do about it and why it matters.

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This talk will explore the underlying forces that drive biases around science and how to fight against them. In the first half, the session with explore some overlooked biases like solution aversion, inferred extremity, flight from facts, and lying as signal. It will also  comment on how an education system that thinks it is scientific often encourage these biases and general anti-scientific thinking . In the second half, the session will explore communication and change tactics such as modeling, change narratives, perspective communication, and incremental approaches,. Complete with personal stories about ex girl-friends and becoming a better more scientific person for petty reasons, former Disney Imagineer turned social scientist Professor Campbell offers a realistic but hopeful perspective. It will cover the science of why we deny science and the less talked about science of how we can lead people to appreciate and act on science.

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Does pseudoscience appeal to a certain kind of person, or do social contexts draw regular people into pseudoscience? We examined this issue by conducting survey research at the Texas Bigfoot Conference. The obtained results supported the social perspective. Exposure to pro-Bigfoot arguments and interpreting information in a confirmatory manner likely work together to create certainty that Bigfoot exists. These results suggest that folk theories about pseudoscience supporters being unintelligent or irrational are often unfair and misguided. On the contrary, susceptibility to believing in pseudoscience is a human problem. Humans, therefore, should recognize and take measures to overcome this blind spot that accompanies human nature.

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Paul Offit discusses his experiences with mainstream media outlets like morning and evening national news programs, the Colbert Report, the Daily Show and others and describes lessons learned (usually the hard way).

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The Vampire has fascinated Western Europe from the early 1700s, but the tradition was a real part of Eastern European lives for a considerable time before that. The archetype has been taken up by art of all kinds, but what is the authentic history behind the tales of the predatory, living dead?

We will look at recent attempts to understand the folklore and try to work out how an Eastern European ritual made its way to late nineteenth century New England.

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If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred, and irrationality. But this is an illusion: a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies. If you follow the trend lines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, richer, happier, and more peaceful—not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is no accident. It’s the gift of a set of ideas that many of us embrace without even realizing it. These are the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, and humanism. They impel us to use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe.

The challenges we face today are formidable, including climate change and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to moan that we’re doomed or to lurch back to a mythical age of greatness. It’s to treat them as problems to solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. We will never have a perfect world, but—defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction—we can continue to make a better world.

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Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik have studied the neuroscience of sensory and cognitive illusions in their laboratories for almost two decades, and promoted them to general audiences as an exciting and spectacular tool to confront our wider misperceptions and sharpen our critical thinking skills in our so called ‘post-truth’ era.

In Champions of Illusion, Profs. Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik present a smorgasbord of mystifying images, many selected from their Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Whether it’s false motion, tricks of perspective, or shifting colors, Champions of Illusion is packed with adventures in visual perception. If you have ever found yourself face-to-face with an utterly bewildering illusion, you know the powerful effect such images have on the mind. The question we often ask ourselves is, How is that possible? Martinez-Conde and Macknik, who study the intersection of neuroscience, illusions, and stage magic, explain just why we think we see the things we see.

The Best Illusion of the Year Contest draws entries from vision scientists, artists, magicians, and mathematicians bent on creating today’s most beguiling illusions. Featuring the contest’s most bizarre effects and unbelievable mind tricks, along with classic illusions and illuminating descriptions of what is actually going on in your brain when you are deceived by visuals on the page, Champions of Illusion is an electrifying mix of science and magic that you will not soon forget.

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Can you spot fake news when it pops up in your Twitter feed? Are you sure? Can you spot a reputable source of information? Are you getting our news from biased sources? Even scientists and skeptics can have trouble separating landmark discoveries from hyperbolic writing or dry satire when they see it in popular media. Let Yvette d’Entremont (aka SciBabe) be your guide to spotting the hallmarks of reputable sources, biased reporting, and of course, fake news with a delivery that will keep you giggling. As a science journalist with a background in analytical chemistry and forensic science, she will help you seek out media sources that play to reality, not to your biases.

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Society’s perceptions of beauty, health, success and happiness are framed by a popular culture that is increasingly disconnected from reality. The simple, evidence-based truths about what it takes to live a healthy lifestyle are often lost in the noise created by celebrities’ advice, the media’s twisted representations of science, and the marketing of bogus health products. Indeed, a growing body of research shows that popular culture has a profound influence people’s health decisions. What are the evidence-based strategies we can use to fight the pop culture bunk?

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Science is by far the most powerful approach to the investigation of the natural world ever devised. Still, it has limits, and there are many areas and questions where the scientific approach is ill suited, or at best provides only pertinent information rather than full answers. The denial of this modest attitude about science is called scientism, which declares science to be the only form of human knowledge and understanding, attempting to subsume everything else, including all the humanistic disciplines, into “science” very broadly (mis-)construed. In this talk, I argue that this is a mistake, and that it moreover has the potential to undermine public trust in science itself.

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Americans have believed in conspiracy theories since before the United States united. A ceaseless array of conspiracy accusations have demonized witches, Freemasons, foreigners, red coats, black helicopters, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, fifth columns, the government, and more recently, Vladimir Putin. The common assumption is that conspiracy theories are nothing more than the delusions of paranoid minds trying to make sense of an ever more complicated world. However, the evidence tells a different story. In this talk, Professor Uscinski will show that conspiracy theories follow a strategic logic: they are tools used by the powerless to attack and defend against the powerful. Conspiracy theories must conform to this logic, or they will not be successful. In this way, conspiracy theories are for losers.

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If skeptics are diametrically opposed to one thing, it’s woo. That’s why Kavin Senapathy took on her new Woo Watch column for Skeptical Inquirer, which explores the alternative health, clean food, and spurious parenting worlds, examines what drives these movements, and, of course, cites the evidence that condemns them. But even though she relishes wielding data and evidence, Senapathy fights woo not only because it’s wrong. What took this mommy blogger from buying Dr. Oz-endorsed supplements just a handful of years ago to her third time on the CSIcon stage? From being raised staunchly atheist by former Hindu immigrants from India to today, this Science Mom will explain why Woo Watch and CFI are part of her fight.

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In this presentation I look at the evolution of sexual reproduction and some common misunderstandings about sex, including misconceptions about the gender binary. Using examples from the animal kingdom, I debunk many ideas about what is “natural” or “unnatural” regarding both sex and gender roles. Having debunked the religious “argument from nature”, I then go on to discuss the problems of a morality that is based on reference to the supernatural, including the idea of using holy books as an excuse for bad behavior.

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Out-of-body experiences were long ignored by science – likened to astral projection and
wandering souls – and the dramatic OBE I had in 1970 seemed inexplicable. Yet all that has
changed. From the discovery that stimulating the right temporoparietal junction can induce
OBEs to brain scans of people having out-of-body illusions in virtual reality, OBE research is
now contributing to our understanding of self, embodiment and consciousness. I’ll discuss the
kind of positive skepticism that does not just debunk or ignore strange claims but turns them
into useful science.

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There’s overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus that global warming is happening and humans are the cause. However, there’s also a deluge of misinformation designed to confuse the public and generate doubt about climate change. How should we respond to the firehose of falsehoods? One way to neutralize the influence of misinformation is through inoculation. This takes the idea of vaccination and applies it to knowledge—we can build immunity to misinformation by exposing people to a weak form of misinformation. In other words, by explaining the reasoning fallacies in denialist claims—exposing the techniques used to mislead. Not only does this approach neutralize the influence of science denial, it can turn misinformation into an educational opportunity and improve critical thinking. This talk will outline the research into countering misinformation and demonstrate the approach with visual examples.

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How did the greatest “genius” of all think? What went into his mind when he was faced with a problem, an enigma or a mystery? How can we use his habits and ways of reasoning to become better thinkers? Massimo Polidoro, who has a new biography on Leonardo coming out, will share the genius’ “thinking toolkit” to help us all improve our problem solving and inquiring techniques.

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The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES) is a project of the Center for Inquiry. After decades of legal and legislative wins for evolution education, it is still difficult for many teachers to teach the unifying theme of biology without pushback from students and parents. As science standards across the country improve to include middle school standards on evolution, more and more teachers are teaching evolution for the first time and the battle to teach sound science moves into the individual classrooms themselves. The philosophy of TIES is that good teachers can teach anything as long as they have the content and resources to do so effectively. In just three and a half years, TIES has grown from a powerful idea shared by Richard Dawkins and Bertha Vazquez to a network of over fifty teachers who have presented over 100 professional development workshops in over 40 states.

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The Richard Dawkins Award is an annual award presented by the Atheist Alliance of America since 2003 to individuals it judges to have raised the public consciousness of atheism. Atheist Alliance president Mark W. Gura will introduce the award towards the end of the 4:00 pm session titled “Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry in Conversation,” on Saturday, October 20th, as Dr. Richard Dawkins will present the award this year to English comedian, actor, and activist Stephen Fry.

Randi’s career seems to be well known to skeptics, and yet lots of intriguing stories remain untold.

Watch Massimo bring back to life some lesser known, but most surprising adventures of the greatest investigator of mysteries of our times.

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