The skeptics Guide to the Universe Reddit

The Novellas have written a second book, "The Skeptic's Guide To The Future". I just learned that this, too, is a reference to a specific work by Douglas Adams. His final production was "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Future" for BBC, and you can still hear it.

Steve,

I very briefly shook your hand at the after party in Vancouver right before you left to catch your flight. Words cannot describe the impact you've had on my life.

But enough with the flattery! I spent about an hour at the Vancouver dinner talking with Jay, and before he left I mentioned to him that I had a lot of ideas to help grow the viewership of the SGU. Many of them were reddit themed, including doing an IAMA and starting your very own subreddit (which I secured for you guys many moons ago). Alas, I emailed Jay but never heard back (in his defense he warned me that he was going to be swamped with TAM Australia stuff).

But I really feel like I can help you guys go from a large science podcast to a grassroots force in what feels like an imminent scientific enlightenment. All you need are a few well placed tinkerings with social media. Over the past year or two I've been extremely passionate about the success of good science media, and recently I took it upon myself to bring Carl Sagan's words back to life by creating The Sagan Series. I've only been working on it for 3 months and it's already amassed 1,000,000+ views, collected 10,000 members, and gotten attention from NASA. A huge reason for the series success if because I know how to use social media effectively.

• Part 1 (I even gave the SGU a shoutout at the bottom of the video description!)

• Part 2

• Part 3

• The Sagan Series on Facebook

I would be ecstatic to help manage and grow the online community aspects of the SGU. If there's anything I can do, or if you just want to hear my ideas, drop me a response!

Reid.

I listen to SGU every week, and there's a lot of great stuff on there. I keep getting bugged by a few things that I would consider bad skepticism.

1. Going with their gut reaction. About 3 weeks ago, they made fun of an Apple spokesperson for saying that the metal on the watch had been engineered so that the atoms in the metal lay closer together. As if such a thing were impossible and laughable. But different allotropes of a metal will have a different crystal structure, and the atoms in these different allotropes may lie closer together. Gold has only one crystal structure (fcc), but iron has several. But they didn't show any understanding of this, they just went with their knee jerk reaction. Even if their knee jerk reaction happens to be right, it is still bad skepticism.

2. Reading way too much into a study. In this week's episode Steve talked about a study that showed that athletic compression clothing does nothing. The study was on calf muscle compression. Bob then expanded this to all athletic compression clothing, comparing bench press shirts to power bracelets. But bench shirts work on a different proposed mechanism than compression socks would. Not only that, but looking at world record bench press numbers with and without bench shirts, we see a difference of hundreds of pounds.

3. Futurology. Jay said something to the effect of, "Yeah but in a thousand years we will have the technology to release 10 millisecond radio bursts with the energy of a month's power output of the sun." It seems like Jay and Bob say stuff like this all the time. It seems baseless.

The show is entertaining, and Steve is a true expert on his subject matter. But if they're not talking about something medical or an outright hoax, then they don't often seem to know what they're talking about.

For example, UFO proponents have argued that UFO sightings by airline pilots should be given special weight because pilots are trained observers, are reliable characters, and are trained not to panic in emergencies. In essence, they are arguing that we should trust the pilot’s authority as an eye witness.

The above is indeed a justified reason to give one observer's opinion more weight than another's (though it's still not proof ofcourse).

If you read the article carefully, you can see it's actually full of one type of logical fallacy - "special pleading, or ad-hoc reasoning". It begins with the assumption that UFOs, ESP, conspiracy theories etc are false, then tries to work its examples of logical fallacy around those topics to associate those topics with logical fallacy.

For anyone wanting to learn about logical fallacies without the requirement to adopt the writer's opinion on things which are not related to logical fallacies - I suggest a text such as the following: http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Logical%20Fallacies.htm

There are many more on the internet, most without the emotional baggage contained in this article.