Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I am your host, Massimo Puchi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Masimo, today I am pleased to introduce our special guest, Ken Fraser. Ken is a science writer and long time editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He's also a former editor of Science News, has written and edited ten books and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Ken, welcome to the show. All right.

Thank you very much. I am very honored to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. So you are basically being the editor of Skeptical Inquirer, US Central, in my mind, sort of a skeptic at large. You see all sorts of stuff crossing your desk about people that write about skepticism. Right. And you've been doing this for a long time. How long at this point?

Well, I hate to say it because I think I'm right. I've been doing it now for thirty seven years. It'll be in August. Wow.

So you've been essentially you've been one of the people shaping the direction of the skeptic movement by, among other things, choosing which topics to cover and skeptical Inquirer, which is kind of a cornerstone of the movement.

Yes, it's a it's a serious set of obligation, I guess, to to be in that position. I take it seriously. I consider science and skepticism a very.

Serious and productive and intellectually vital topic, and also one where we do communicate with the public and I think helped them sort fact from fiction and information, good information for misinformation and good science from bad science.

Now, right there, you mentioned the two words that I'm going to I'm going to use this as sort of my first question, which is science and skepticism. As you know, there is there's disagreements about within the broader skeptical community about what the relationship is between science and skepticism. But some people that essentially say they're synonymous, they're the same thing, other people that make distinction. What's your take on it?

Well, I consider skepticism as a part of science. It's one of the many excellent attributes of science. I think you can have skepticism and not be doing it scientifically. But nevertheless, scientific thinking has a very strong arm of skepticism along with its creative aspects.

But skepticism also as as is understood by, I assume, readers of Skeptical Inquirer and other similar magazines is sometimes actually brought in in science. I mean, there are certain things like even classical skeptic topics such as UFOs or parapsychology and things like that. Typically, actually, scientists don't do that. They don't actually do research or inquiry into that. And so would that suggest that skepticism as a type of inquiry is actually broader than science, sort of instead of I mean, I agree with you that it's an important component of doing science clearly.

But I'm wondering about when it applies to things that are actually not directly scientific topics.

Well, I consider skepticism as sort of organize common sense, which is also the introduction of science to an unsatisfactory one. But you can apply skepticism to any aspect of life. In the Skeptical Inquirer, we have somewhat limited our concerns to matters of empirical claims, which basically generally involve science. But you are very right that most scientists, most working scientists don't have either the time or the inclination to deal with the public's fascinations and mis understandings of things that have something to do with science.

And so our role all along has been to fill a gap that scientists, although they may wish they could, but generally don't take the time or have the time to do any organized investigation which may result in a banking or it may not may actually turn up something new and communicating and educating the public on these matters. But one of the things we have done is popularized the idea that a good scientist should devote a certain amount of their time to this public education and public communication effort.

It's very important.

Yeah, this this position that the skeptic movement and magazines like Seattle Inquirer have occupied to me one of the strong points or maybe the best reason to occupy that niche is I've been hoping to serve as a gateway for people who maybe weren't that interested in science or the scientific method or critical thinking, but are actually really interested in astrology or UFOs or whatever. Pick your poison, whether that's from a sort of curious standpoint or from a this is so irritating. I want to talk to other people who like debunking this standpoint.

And my hope, although I really don't have a good sense of how much this is, in fact, the case is that the the critical thinking tools, the sort of scientific methodology discussed in the skeptic movement, you know, well, sort of the people who come in wanting to just talk about astrology and UFOs will start to apply those tools to other things, maybe, maybe not in their everyday life. Maybe, you know, when they read a news article or see statistical claims and a science news or something like that.

So I was hoping that, you know, occupying this role could serve as a way to sort of spread scientific thinking in the public. Can do you have any sense of whether that's, in fact, happening? I think it happens to some degree, and that is certainly our hope as well. We we we have a large variety of different kinds of readers of Skeptical Inquirer. Many of them are scholars and academics and scientists and science oriented people who are concerned about public misunderstanding.

On the other hand, you have a large amount of members of the public who are just curious and interested in certain claims, the things they've heard about, things they may have passions about, but don't have access to good scientific information and good and don't understand the methodologies of science to help sort sort through the all the wheat from the chaff in these areas.

So that's what we hope we do, whether whether that succeeds or not. Well, I think we do. I think we get a number of letters from our readers who thank us for for pointing out points of view about things they had gotten caught up in that they weren't aware of and for providing solutions to mysteries that they had no means of investigating themselves.

So, again, speaking of letters, that skeptical inquiry gets in on a variety topics. So I remembered that not that long ago, you guys got a large number of complaints from readers of regular readers of skeptical inquiries because you happen to do a special issue on climate change, which in fact I contributed a small entry. What was that all about?

Well, since 2007, we have been embroiled in the climate change controversy, of course, like evolution, there is not a whole lot of controversy about climate change within the scientific community of climate scientists. They accept the findings that the earth is warming and and we'll continue to do so due to the rise of greenhouse gases. But we have discovered a large number of people in the United States particularly and including among some of our readers, and among those some of them who are members of the skeptic community feel otherwise.

And this is not unique to our magazine. All Science magazine science oriented magazines have encountered this conflict with their readers on the issue of climate change. So I think it's a matter of ideological predispositions that are preventing otherwise good and intelligent people from simply accepting scientific evidence and then arguing about policy ramifications.

Right. But but what it's what I find dispiriting about it, other than, of course, that these kinds of these sort of rejection of science, the best scientific findings, because, you know, as you know, in science old findings, especially, that kind of complexity, always provisional. But nonetheless, as you were saying, these are very, very broad agreement among the experts in that field that climate change is real. So what I found this building is not just the rejection of science on the part of a community or part of a community that it's allegedly about reason and empirical evidence and all that.

But to me that the thing this particular dispute is that this is exactly the same attitude that we accuse, let's say, creationists of indulging in. Right. That it's not the creationists, they're stupid him and some of them are. But a lot of caution is that very intelligent people. And the problem is they start with an ideological position and that simply precludes them, filters out certain kinds of evidence as a result of that ideological position. And it's very interesting to me that we have people in our own community who make merciless fun of the creationists for doing that and then turn around and do exactly the same thing.

Except that the ideology in question is not religious, it's political in nature.

Yes, it was quite a shock to me when we published the results of the latest IPCC report. I think of it as 2007 and got lambasted by a number of readers just for simply reporting the consensus resort as a result of the world climate science community about climate science. And it surprised me that there were so many such people in our among our own readers.

But it it it. One thing we have to realize is skepticism and a skeptical community is not homogeneous and never has been. So in a way, you have to understand that. But nevertheless, like you, I was very surprised. I continue to be surprised, although I shouldn't be. I'm not surprised by anything I hear out of the creationist community and haven't been for 30 years of doing this. But I still still find find myself surprised by some things I hear in some reactions I get from otherwise reasonably science oriented, intelligent people who I respect for their work in other areas of science and skepticism.

It's an amazing thing.

Well, just to Massimo's previous points, it's I think it's easy to say, like, well, from the outside, it's easy to say, well, you know, look, you're just doing the same thing that, you know, you're your opponents or the creason creationists are doing. But that's always how it looks from the outside, if you like, from within their reasoning. It's very different. You know, the creationists don't have good reasons and they do to reject this, you know, apparent conspiracy consensus, just like from the outside.

If you don't already accept that reason and evidence are important ways of deciding what to believe, then it's easy to say, well, look, you're just you have this blind faith in science the same way religious people have a blind faith and in their gods, you know, and it's very different from the inside, obviously.

I think the you know, the people who dismiss the scientific consensus on global warming are wrong. I just don't think it's fair to say that they're wrong because they're following the same pattern is the same as the people on the other.

Well, you know, OK, let's have a little discussion about that, because actually, I think it is perfectly fair. I mean, if you if you talk to creationists, as I'm sure Ken has done and I've done for for a long time, you will hear exactly that kind of defense. You know, they'll say, no, no, we have we have the evidence on our side and we have reason on our side are not this is not just a matter of faith.

Now, of course they don't. But but neither do the climate change deniers. So I really actually fail to see the difference as as a sort of a structure in their in their reasoning between the two. Now, of course, there are there are other kinds of differences. I mean, I think that even though neither climate change nor evolution are reasonably deniable, certainly evolution is far, far less reasonably deniable than climate change. I don't know if there is a scale of unpredictability.

I think the creationists win on this one, but that's only a matter of quantity.

I don't think there is a qualitative difference.

The dynamics are much the same, of course, and they and they're both being influenced by immense propaganda mills that forge their own belief systems and ideological structures.

So they differ because one is religiously influenced and the other is ideologically influenced on political sort of political social spectrum. So they're different that way. They're totally different people for the most part, as you know. But there but the dynamics are distressingly similar.

Yeah, I don't think we disagree that much, actually. I just I thought that Masimo was saying that, you know. Well, the mistake that these particular climate science denying skeptics are making is in dismissing evidence the same way the creationists are dismissing evidence. The problem I was trying to point out is just that sometimes it's correct to dismiss evidence if it's bad evidence. Just so you know, they think this evidence is bad evidence. I think they're wrong.

But like in the end, it always just comes down to the quality of evidence. And it's I've just found it hard to come up with any sort of other rule for for for judging whether someone is, you know, is evaluating an issue correctly or not to say, well, you're like listening to the consensus or you're not listening to the consensus or, you know, you're.

Yeah, like all the rules that you can use will fail in cases where the evidence is bad and succeed in cases where the evidence is good. And so it just comes down to like I disagree with the way they're evaluating this evidence.

And that's who you trust, isn't it? Most of the climate contrarians or deniers have enormous distrust of first of all, government and much science is funded by the government, including probably most climate science. Many reports are governmental or money. Agencies are governmental. But then, of course, from a scientific point of view, there's nothing unusual about that. The government has sponsored most research in the United States at the frontier level four for a little while since World War Two, at least so and then there have distrust of institutions in general and then they have distrust of science as an institution and all the while while accepting other good science.

So, yeah, and that's that's the part I find very interesting. Right. Because first of all. Yeah, you can distrust you can always distrust the sources of funding. You can say, oh, well, those are climate scientists who are funded by the government. So of course they go with the line that the government. Yes, but if they were, I don't know, medical researchers funded by Big Pharma, then you wouldn't have exactly the same countries.

I mean, the source of funding is always, as can always be a source of criticism. But one needs to sort of separate the idea that it is reasonable to be skeptical of certain sources of funding that doesn't necessarily indict all the research that it's done with that money. I mean, I don't dismiss everything that is done with funding from the pharmaceutical industry just on the basis that it is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. I'm going to be a little more careful, perhaps taking a look at that research.

I want to compare it with with research that is done by other sources of funding. But you can't it it's just too easy to say, well, the money comes from there. So you must be following that that particular agenda that can play across the board.

But but it is true. I mean, I know Ben Goldacre has published some stats on this in his recent book, Bad Pharma. It is true that studies done by pharma are much more likely to show positive, significant effects of their drugs and not to show negative side effects. And and it's just I, I feel dispirited about how about our potential to actually accurately, objectively judge the quality of their research, given, you know, we don't see the studies that they decided not to publish.

We don't see the sort of background choices that they made in the methodology. It's pretty easy to choose methodologies that are, you know, going to be more sympathetic to the position that you want to end up with.

So so I actually I don't know, it's not a terrible heuristic to just pretty much dismiss research funded by the pharmaceutical industry, you know, dismissing research based on who funds it is actually it's better or worse heuristic in different cases. And I, I just I keep coming back to the you know, it's really complicated. You have to get like many layers of analysis deep before you decide whether the statistic is actually good or bad in this case.

Yes. And of course, the vested interests are very, very strong in the pharmaceutical industry, whereas in the climate science industry industry, it's very hard to see what climate scientists are getting out of climate science, disclosing stuff. Well, they want to keep their jobs right.

But that's the argument that the climate science deniers make, that you need this to continue being a problem so that they can keep their jobs, which is not I don't know, on the face of it, it doesn't sound like a terrible argument. It's just it doesn't actually seem to be how things work.

Well, it's not necessarily a terrible argument, except for the fact that climate science has always been well funded because we care about things like the weather. And so it is you know, it's not like it started getting funded once that people started making rumors about climate change. Climate science has always been well funded. There are certain areas of research that are, for instance, fundamental physics that have always got a significant amount of money because people think that those are generally interesting area research.

So regardless of which particular theories the scientist working on it are espousing. So, yes, you can you can always question the source of funding, but you have to do it in an intelligent way. That's all I'm saying, is you can just say, well, the funding comes from there, therefore. But but that brings me to a closer to where the topic, which is, you know, we were talking earlier on about the fact that scepticism can be applied broadly, even more broadly than sort of strictly scientific, of course, subject matter.

It can also be applied to science itself. And, of course, people who are skeptical of sort of climate change, they think that they're applying sound skepticism to. Claims made by scientists now there is a venerable tradition of skepticism, of certain claims of science, you know, if you go back all the way to the beginning of the 20th century before there was any such thing as a skeptical movement, there were people who were critical of what at the time was mainstream science, for instance, in the field of eugenics.

Today, there are a number of people who are skeptical of at least some claims made by, say, evolutionary psychologists, for instance, or or of some research on the neurological basis of neurobiological basis of gender differences or race differences, things like that. So there's always that kind of skepticism. But can and can I know that the Skeptical Inquirer has published articles, including some of my own columns, actually about these kind of topics. But but do you think that that is one of the areas where skepticism has been growing or broadly over the last several years, moving away from or expanding, I should say, from UFOs, parapsychology, Nessim Bigfoot?

Well, yes, but but we have continually broadened our scope and the Skeptical Inquirer applying skepticism to more and more areas. But but it's not new. Even even when we started, we had the name paranormal in our name and in our mission. But Paul Kurtz, our founder, pointed out that that it wasn't that we were interested in just the paranormal curiosity shop, but our main goal was to increase understanding of how science works. So from the very beginning, he and others of us all understood that while in the 70s when we started here, there is an enormous public fascination and acceptance of a wide variety of paranormal claims, no doubt about that.

And that is probably what that is definitely what instigated our our committee's founding in nineteen seventy six and I joined in seventy seven. But we always have seen, seen a broader role of educating the public about the methods of science, about what good scientific thinking is, and applying that kind of thinking to a number of broader issues we've dealt with in columns in the magazine with research into why gay and lesbian and to trends in global violence and obesity and the economic fraud and the gender issues in science, whether morality is innate and all sorts of other things.

Yeah, that's that's a very broad range of topics. And the questions sometimes, I mean, I find it fascinating. I mean, as you know, I actually support the broadening of of sort of topics of interest to skeptics. There is an interesting issue there, however, and that is an issue of sort of competence, basically. Right.

So and let me let me explain this. I'd like to take you to have your take on this, but let me explain what I mean. If we're talking about the sort of classic let's call it classical skepticism like paranormal investigations and see UFOs, etc. in that area, it seems to me that skeptics, most of them, are obviously not full time skeptics, although there are there are a few. But skeptical investigators have actually carved out a unique area of expertise that I would say easily trumps the area of the expertise of scientists in those in those areas.

I mean, a typical scientist, for instance, could be fooled by a magician performing an alleged paranormal trick or it could be fooled by it and they're happy or it could be fooled by a particularly well done, a UFO fake and so on and so forth.

And that is because despite the fact that this scientist, they're not their expertise, their know how it's not in those areas while skeptics have built over decades of expertise in this area.

So there I think there's very little controversy about the fact the skeptics out as non scientists have a special expertise. Now, when it comes up to some of the issues that you mentioned, the thing becomes more complicated. Right?

Because, for instance, if we're talking about things like, you know, the really I mean, in in in modern philosophy, well, that's a huge field where that is, of course, professional philosophers talking about it.

Or if you're talking about scientific claims from neurobiology, well, that's a huge field where there are actual neurobiologists going at it. So what's what's your take in terms of sort of the the the role of expertise in these areas?

Oh, you're exactly right. And I think what we do in some of these areas is kind of go along and then dip into an area and and report on it and report on both sides of controversies that are within the science of that area and then go on to another one. I don't think we have. Broad based competence in every area of science, we have always pretty much left to the scientific community. Major issues within each scientific field that every scientific field has, major controversies going on at any given time.

Generally, those those are of interest to us when they become a matter of public interest and when the and when things get skewed and when the understanding of them gets strangely out of kilter for the public. So generally, I think we reserve ourselves for those kinds of things, but we nevertheless kind of troll around science and scientific issues and dip into that every now and then and get a picture of real scientific controversy in certain areas of science.

But you are right, our core competency is always going to be the areas that were what you might call a classical skepticism.

But nevertheless, most scientists and scholars have a broad way of thinking and in their thinking and applying scientific principles and ideas to issues and controversies that may be of interest to the public I think are worthwhile and valuable. They always are. You know, we have to have a bit of humility always about it, because nobody is an expert on everything and nobody is always right.

So can I have a different concern than Masimo? Actually, I agree with most of his concern. I have an additional concern about broadening the areas of skeptic focus, although I'm also totally in favor of broadening it in various ways. So my concern, especially as there's been increasing discussion in the last year or two about skeptics focusing on social issues and sort of moral issues and issues of values, of how our society should be structured and how we should treat each other, etc.

. My concern has just been that it's it can be really difficult to extricate the empirical questions and the the questions of reasoning from the questions of values. So, yeah, I can just give an example in case anyone is not clear on what I'm talking about.

So I'll be careful with you because I know this is the other problem that it can turn into a minefield. Go ahead, pick your heart content, a relatively uncontroversial topic of gender and evolutionary psychology. So, you know, there's there's various evolutionary psychology studies or I don't know if you could call them studies, theories, maybe some studies about why the genders behave the way they do, why they think the way they do. You know, the degree to which there are actually differences in the sort of experiences of the genders in the human species.

And so there are definitely empirical questions there. And there's there's like really interesting sort of intellectually chewy meat there about methodology and what makes a theory worth what what means to be should take theory seriously, like can it be tested? And that's a totally relevant question for the field of evolutionary psychology. So there are those empirical questions and then there are questions of reasoning that often come up in these discussions, like people making arguments either explicitly or implicitly, like, well, you know, it has always been the case that, you know, the men are the sexual predators and the women are sexually passive or something.

I don't I don't even know if that's actually empirically true. But but even if it were empirically true, that doesn't mean that therefore we should continue to arrange our societies that way. That's the naturalistic fallacy. So that's actually a case. If skeptic's were to focus on reasoning like that, in which skepticism might be different from science, that it might actually be legitimate to make that a roll of skepticism, to point out problems and people's reasoning when they try to apply science to questions of how we should live.

And so that's sort of a gray area for me. Maybe skeptic should be doing that. And then the then the area that makes me more concerned is the area of values when we're talking not about how to reason about the scientific results, but just about our our sort of moral and ideological preferences for how we should run our society. Like should we prioritise more, making sure that women always feel safe and prioritise less men's freedom to approach women? Or should we prioritise more giving rights to transgender people and what kinds of rights, etc.

? And those aren't really questions. I feel that skepticism has much to say about those are questions of values.

I think most skeptics would agree with you and feel a. Comfortable getting into those areas, some don't, some some are just like to wade into those issues, just like anyone else who has strong opinions might. But skepticism is is not doesn't deal. Just like science itself doesn't deal with values, but with evidence, we tend to pretty much have to leave it to others to deal with value laden issues. But of course, they come at us from every direction, don't they?

And they hit us when we're least expecting it, value controversies so it can be a minefield. I think skeptics mostly have tried to stay out of such things because we haven't even talked about religion yet. Religion is the biggest one of all. And skeptical groups have their own discussions and arguments about the role of religion and what the role of skepticism about it. We deal mainly with empirical claims and the skeptical Inquirer and the committee, the skeptical inquiry. But we go a little bit beyond that, but not not heavily into just critiques of religion and promotion of atheism.

And that's that's not our role.

And yet that was since you brought it up.

And it was next on my list of topics. Anyway, that was that's that's been a controversy even in the past, that organizations connected with skeptical inquiry, I mean, even even Polecats himself has been involved in these kind of discussions about, you know, to what extent should skeptical inquiry, for instance, treat claims about religion? Because one can make the argument that even when those claims are not directly empirical, they do go at the core of are there reasons to believe X?

And some of the reasons for believing X can be empirical, but they may also be sort of logical. And so from one perspective, one can argue, well, religion shouldn't be outside of the scope of skeptical inquiry because it does deal with in part with factual claims about the age of Earth or something like that, and in part about sort of logical claims such as the nature of God and things like that. But there is also another way of looking at the same thing, which is, well, you can make a distinction between creationists that does make a claim that is demonstrably false on empirical grounds.

The Earth is 6000 years old and a person who says, well, there may be an intelligence that at some point it's something to do with the creation of the universe. But that's about all I'm going to say on the on that ground. That seems much more remote from any kind of certainly empirically based criticism. So that is that being part of the lines and the discussion in the past.

Well, Paul Kurtz, of course, had had two sets of views, but he always strongly supported the idea that the skeptical Enquirer's involvement with religion should be where there are empirical claims towards the end of his last maybe 10 years of life.

He broadened that out broader. And and I nevertheless think if you even if you limit it to empirical claims, that allows a large amount of leeway for skeptics and skepticism to elucidate and analyse the deficiencies and problems and religious belief. I think it's a very broad area that there's still a lot of meat in for skeptics without getting into just anger at people who who are religious or that that's not what we're going to do. But of course, Paul always had a whole another organization to deal with those issues that he also founded.

So he had the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for skepticism and evidence based analysis of empirical claims and the Council for Secular Humanism to deal with issues of religion and social values, which sort of brought those two together and in the overall arching organisation Centre for Inquiry. But we are still trying to maintain the two separate brands and two separate identities of these organisations. Can you for skeptical inquiry and that Council for Secular Humanism.

Are there new frontiers that you wish skeptic's would branch out into that? So far there hasn't been much movement towards because we don't have enough to do so far.

Yes, I would say I've been involved as they all these decades that I've never, ever had an issue where we had. One blank page I've never had I've never had any problem dealing with, you know, having no controversy ahead of us to deal with. I've never had all issues settled, so I don't know. Tell me what you're thinking. There are always going to be new ones.

But but the thing that always surprises me is how the old ones keep popping up under under new names in this new language and with new sets of believers.

And and it's all new to them. But we realize it's all the same as it was 30 years ago or 40 years ago or one hundred years ago.

I guess if I had to pick an area that certainly hasn't been totally unexplored. But but if I could pick a pick, it is a new area of focus for the skeptics. It would be my being not just to keep alternative medicine and creationism out of mainstream schools and popular talk shows, etc., but also lobbying to improve the scientific method. So this would be lobbying not just the public, but the scientific community to try to find solutions for things like publication bias.

The founder effect where, you know, we don't get to see papers that didn't find a significant result. And so the significance testing is skewed or possibly things like transparency and peer review or or possibly issues of science communication to the public in fields like nutrition, where there is because of the structure of the field and the nature of the claims being investigated, there's more false positives than you would get in a typical field, making that clear in science reporting.

This seems like something I don't know if this is something that skeptics should do. There might be competency issues, as Massimo mentioned, and maybe it's just not our comparative advantage in terms of strength. But this is something I wish more people. I wish there was more attention going towards. So it might be something that skeptics could could valuably contribute to.

Some skeptics are dealing with those issues of alternative medicine.

Is is it has become just a huge topic now in the last 20 years or when we started, it was just called quackery or something like this name gives a false gentility, alternative medicine.

I like that phrase, but I don't think we need to go along with that anymore. We need to accept what Dr. Paul Offit says. And it says there's no such thing as alternative or or complementary or any of these kinds of medicine. There's just medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work.

Coincidentally, Paul is going to be our next guest on the podcast.

But actually, Julia's point is interesting. I would add one more to my wish list that I've also seen occasionally, but not but not much. And those are claims made by economists.

And economics is a hugely important discipline.

And there is major rifts within the discipline itself. There's classical economics. There is different schools of classical economics, for that matter. Then there's behavioral economics. And some of these claims are clearly, obviously empirical in nature, and some of them are methodological notes in terms of epistemic warrant and all that. So those are actual and they clearly affect all of us.

You can't get away from it. So so that's another area where I would like to see some. Obviously, again, there is is the issue of expertise. I mean, it's not it's not like just anybody can do it. But but that's that's beginning to be the case, I think, in general, for a lot of cutting edge skeptic topics. You need you need people who actually know what they're talking about in terms of specific expertise.

So I'm looking for someone to do an article on just those kind of issues. A good, good friend of mine who's president of a company and a skeptic and a reader is skeptical. Inquirer sent me an email just last week making exactly the same point you just did with a very specific example. He gave up some nonsense in economics that need a skeptical analysis and exposure, just like we do with so many other issues.

And if you do that, be prepared to receive an avalanche of letters.

Yeah, and that was also going to be my comments.

I don't want to get into a new issue like this without knowing. And this is not an area I feel comfortable being an editor of. Certainly the climate science one. I was very comfortable with that as a science writer and editor, because I first wrote my first article about climatology back and saying my science news, my very first year in science news. And so a long time ago before all these recent Tafero started going. So I've seen the whole evolution and history of that controversy and understand.

I understand that fairly well, a lot of other areas I don't feel confident in to so but then that's true without that's why we have fellows and consultants and experts who who who are specialists in various areas, which we have many, many areas covered before we wrap it up.

I have one of those somewhat silly. Who's your favorite kind of question?

Because this is a question that is often posed to me, and that is who do I think are sort of, broadly speaking, the most influential skeptics or skeptics that people should read or be aware of and all that? And my answer typically is David Hume, Bertram Bresson and Carl Sagan in no particular order. If you were asked that kind of question, which I'm sure actually some people probably have asked you, what would you what names would you bring in?

Well, I was heavily influenced by some of the same Martin Gardner. Yes. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan or my intellectual mentors and inspiring gurus, I guess, from the very beginning. But Paul Kurtz has been an enormous inspiration to me throughout his entire life. He died just a year ago, as you know. Yes. And was a prolific writer and editor and a very interesting scholar, a very pragmatic philosopher. So I would recommend his writings. And there are so many.

But it's a pretty good group, actually, Julia. Well, you're sort of the next generation. What would you say? What are the most influential skeptics for you? Oh, goodness. Probably the most influential for me is going to be a different question than the the ones I would recommend to the average person asking me that question. That's a good question.

But let's say let's say you're the most influential for you.

I'd probably put Ben Goldacre on that list. Really? Yeah, I think he significantly contributed to changing the way I think about research, about medical research, especially about drugs. And he also introduced me to some important concepts about scientific methodology that I wasn't aware of.

I mean, I knew about publication bias, but he he was the one who introduced me to ways of measuring or sort of estimating the magnitude of publication bias in various fields. I don't I don't think he invented the notion, but certainly he's done a great job of popularizing it. And and I think his level of like the level of sophistication in his writing is like just about the right level for me in terms of stuff that I like to read, popular blog post articles and books.

It's like rich with sort of analysis and statistics while still being conversational. So that's like a, you know, a direction that I like to see the skeptics. One more name before we wrap it up.

Martin Gardner, I wrote a blog post about that actually on on the occasion of his death. But he was his books when I was a kid were like really influential in getting me to see math as this, like, intriguing, cool, fun field of like puzzles and paradoxes. And that's certainly helped contribute to put me on the path that I ended up on.

And with my statistics, Major Martin, that will never be another person, quite like Martin Gardner. And it was his his book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which I was given as a present in graduate school and read and was just blown away by it. And then later when I was editor of Science News, he wrote to me and complained about some articles we did about Uri Geller and a few other nineteen seventies New Age topics.

And that led to my inviting him to try telling him we need a group of people like you to help us, science writers and editors to understand the correct facts on these issues. So Martin was an enormous inspiration to me. Of course, we published him for many years in the Skeptical Inquirer. What a wonderful person and did.

All right. Well, let's wrap up the segment of the podcast and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, we pick a suggestion from our listeners that has taken our rational fancy. This time we ask our guests, Ken Fraser, what he suggested Ken.

Well, I pick the book Brainwashed The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience by Sally Satel, a psychiatrist, and Scott Lilienfeld, a psychologist and one of our colleagues and a member of the Executive Council of CSI. It's a very, very interesting book, I think timely. A psychiatrist and a psychologist present needed scientific perspective about the often overhyped or even faddish current popular interest in neuroscience. Now they caution against overinterpretation of brain scans and simplistic arguments about their meaning. They question overreliance on brain based interpretations of behavior, which they call neural centrism.

They examine the what they call neuromarketing of new technologies, and they consider the legal implications of modern neuroscience. And I found this to be a balanced inquiry into how how many real world applications of neuroscience can obscure rather than clarify the many factors that shape our identity and behavior. And this isn't this isn't a negative book about neuroscience. It's a negative about over over the overhyping of especially in the public arena of certain ramifications of brain scans and misunderstandings about what what what the new scientific imagery can tell us and what isn't reliable about those images.

So it's a really interesting book I recommend. That sounds excellent. I've I've been really pleased to see more discussion of sort of the theoretical or methodological problems with neuroscience filtering into the mainstream media in the last year or two. I feel like it's been a noticeable uptick in the last year or so. Thanks, I guess in part to books like this.

Yes, we're going to publish an excerpt of it in the next Skeptical Inquirer so readers will be able to see what we're talking about there.

Very cool. Well, Ken, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. And and thank you so much for your amazing work for the last 30 years as the editor of Skeptical Inquirer and pioneer of the Skeptic Movement. Here's to another 30.

Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks again. This concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense. The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission.

Thank you for listening.