Communicating skepticism or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Media

The spread of new technologies has caused an upheaval in the world of the media, but gives skeptics many causes for optimism. This article is based on a presentation to the 2013 NZ Skeptics Conference in Wellington.

As a podcaster and a student of broadcast media, there are a few things I've noticed over the years that have led me to be more optimistic. I am optimistic because there are plenty of opportunities for the general public to influence the media and a growing number resources for those wishing to promote science and technology in general.

I think about the fantastic and influential skeptics out there - people who have PhDs like Dr Karen Stollznow and Dr Eugenie Scott, or have PhDs and do magic tricks, like Dr Richard Wiseman. I also think about skeptics who have faced and challenged pseudoscience and paranormal claims in both their personal and professional lives - people like Loretta Marron, Hayley Stevens, Sharon Hill or Daniel Loxton. There are plenty of people, who may not have formal schooling in a field, who have taken on the challenge of doing something positive and productive about strange and sometimes harmful claims.

All of these examples are also great people to talk to, and the discussions I have with skeptics like these (and many others) feature on my podcast, the Token Skeptic.

I usually define podcasts as the equivalent of online radio shows. Sometimes it seems as if everyone has a podcast; you'll find dozens of them out there covering practically any topic you care to name. Skepticism is no exception in that regard.

If you would like to know more about podcasting, or even how to start your own (and why, despite there being plenty of them, you should certainly consider doing one if you feel like it) - you can find resources on the Token Skeptic website, including interviews with the likes of Dr Pamela Gay on how to get started.

I should warn you I'll be mentioning the podcast a lot - once upon a time I was the host of an atheist conference and some members of the audience tweeted, "Oh, not another one with a podcast…" As I said, there's nothing new or particularly special about being a skeptic with a podcast.

But what I do with my podcast is use it to reflect research I've done into a number of different areas, including the thesis I eventually wrote on Australian paranormal belief. If it wasn't for podcasting, it would be highly unlikely that I would have had many of the great opportunities that I've had - like talking at events like last year's NZ Skeptics Conference, networking with people and helping science communication groups.

Skeptical history

I can mention the names of ' great skeptics' and I generally assume that my audience knows who these people are too. But when I arrived in Wellington for the conference last year, I ended up chatting over coffee with Matthew, who along with Cherry were nice enough to pick me up at the airport. And when I told him about the first time I heard a parapsychologist give a talk I realised I was making a lot of assumptions.

As I started talking about the parapsychologist' s research on the growth of spiritualist churches in Australia, I mentioned the Fox sisters from the 1800s. They are an example of spiritualists who eventually admitted that they did not have psychic abilities. Yet according to the parapsychologist whose presentation I attended, the Fox sisters never recanted their psychic powers. In her community of spiritualists, they continue to be very influential examples of spiritualists who can communicate with the dead.

I assumed that by saying "the Fox sisters" that any skeptic would know who I was talking about. Or that they may have checked out the book The Psychic Mafia by Lamar M Keene, which discusses these spiritualist churches in detail and how Keene himself used to work as a spiritualist before admitting all his psychic activities were achieved by fraudulent means.

In addition, I would think that most skeptics would likely know about psychologist Ray Hyman, who is considered one of the founders of the modern- day skeptic movement. He, along with James Randi, Paul Kurtz and Martin Gardner, used to believe in palmistry and was a practitioner, much as Lamar M Keene was a practitioner of spiritualism.

As Professor Hyman said in an interview with the American station PBS:

"When I first began doing palm reading for money, I did not believe that it really worked. However, I was amazed when my clients insisted that everything I was telling them was uncannily accurate. By the time I began college, I was a true believer. I had no doubts that palmistry worked.

"When I was a sophomore in college, a friend suggested that I try and read my next client's palm by telling her the opposite of what the lines said. If her heart line indicated that she did not like to display her emotions, I would tell her that she was the sort of person who displays her emotions openly, and so on.

"To my astonishment, this client was thrilled at how accurately I had captured her personality. So I tried the same experiment on my next few clients. The results were the same! By now, I was coming to realization that whatever was happening in a palm reading session, it had nothing to do with the lines in the hand."

My thinking that skeptics in general already know these stories, have read this book or that book, or have done research into a particular field is a huge assumption on my part. I don't mean to be judgemental - this isn't anything that's unusual for any field that is growing and developing and getting new people interested in it all the time.

Finding out that skeptics are just as human as anyone else, and that people you used to look up to in skepticism are just as fallible as anyone anywhere, is an important lesson too.

I find myself thinking that I need to keep on reading and listening, and talk to more and more people if I feel discouraged or think that I don't know enough about a topic to have an informed opinion - all of which led to my starting a podcast back in 2009.

So, communicating skepticism is not just about outreach to those people who may not know Ray Hyman's palm reading story and believe that there is something in palmistry. It's also very important for skeptics to learn about what kind of world we're in, the history of the field, and how people are led to believe in weird things - which includes people like ourselves.

For example, before the Wellington conference started, I decided to go to the hairdresser - which is the only place I ever feel comfortable about reading the kinds of magazines that people usually laugh about. Those kinds of magazines which feature Angelina Jolie looking really upset about being photographed with a huge fluorescent banner on her face saying she's lost weight, gained a new boyfriend and is made of biodegradable plastic, all in the same sentence. (Sometimes you want to know about whether the Dark Energy Survey is really going to explain whether the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate… and whether Sara Tetro will host the new season of New Zealand's Next Top Model.)

While at the hairdressers I found an article about Australian women bonding over their shared experience of contact with alien life visiting Earth.

One of them is a scientist; the others are teachers and accountants or clerical workers. They're all involved in a network of like-minded alien abductees, who talk about how they used to feel very isolated and afraid about how they'd be treated by the general public, until they started talking to each other and sharing their experiences.

For me this is an excellent reminder of how scientific understandings are reinforced and influenced by our values and the people around us.

This is where effective skepticism starts crossing over into the need to learn more about effective science communication - especially if, like me, you're of the view that skepticism is about understanding and using that understanding to inform both yourself and others about paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, especially if there's a risk of harm.

Inspiring Australia

In 2010 the Australian government began an initiative called Inspiring Australia. While I'm not employed by Inspiring Australia, I've worked at events where they have been involved, such as ScienceRewired conferences.

Inspiring Australia is an Australian national strategy for engagement with the sciences. Its goals include improving science communication and helping engage the Australian community with science. It has produced a range of programmes and expanded existing ones to help achieve its goals, including publishing reports from expert working groups, a Science Engagement Toolkit, Prime Minister's Prizes for Science and National Science Week. There is a similar initiative in the UK called the British Council, which runs science projects to communicate messages around exciting or topical scientific issues, focusing on science and sustainability.

There are a great number of science outreach and consultation groups in Australia much as there are in New Zealand, as Elf Eldridge described in his talk at the conference (see NZ Skeptic 109). ScienceRewired is one of them. They have run two conferences where they have gathered together a number of these groups to discuss similar interests and goals, and even to see if united projects can be encouraged. Another is Science in Public, which train scientists to interact with the media.

But back to the UFO-believing women in my gossip magazine at the hairdresser. One of them was a scientist. In fact, there are probably plenty of creationists, global warming denialists and paranormal claim supporters who say "but I'm a scientist…" Why is there a problem?

Australian science communicators Dr Will Grant and Merryn McKinnon have said on The Conversation website (another great source for science outreach) that knowing science factoids doesn't necessarily indicate in-depth understanding:

"Science literacy surveys such as these do nothing except keep academics busy, tick various grant recipient boxes and make the general public feel more disillusioned about their scientific abilities. Would a Nobel laureate in physics be able to answer biology questions? Possibly. But we don't ask them to. We recognise it's not their field of expertise. So why are we asking the general public questions about science unrelated to most peoples' expertise or day-to-day lives?"

For me, such a survey firstly seemed odd, considering how popular science seems to be amongst pop culture - the most popular podcasts online include those by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki and Brian Cox and Robin Ince's The Infinite Monkey Cage; both Brian Cox's and David Attenborough's tours sell out when they tour overseas. I know of many scientists, artists and activists who have signed on to be a part of an app called the Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome, and probably everyone here thinks "Science Is F*ing Awesome" - so why is there a gap?

Dr Craig Cormick of Australia's CSIRO has written:

"Values-based studies show there are strong and existing values that largely impact the way we think about science and technology, and any attempts to educate or inform people about the benefits or risks of any new technology will be accepted or rejected based on people's existing values."

We also saw this in the research that was demonstrated at the conference by Matt McCrudden, on how people may not reject the science on the basis of lacking scientific literacy or education - they often have plenty of both. But they have fundamental values that some science and technology clashes strongly with. So, what to do?

Communication

The interaction between online and the real world is where I like to live when it comes to science and skepticism, and contributing to both is what I work on. For example, in Australia there's a concern about how the mainstream media communicates science. In the space of two years, 1000 journalist jobs were lost, and science reporters were particularly badly hit. That doesn't mean that we lost all health and science coverage. And that also doesn't mean that we as readers - and more importantly, consumers - can't encourage coverage in the media.

I ended up contacting a journalist, who, with no skeptical group influence, created the No Jab No Play Campaign in the Sunday Telegraph. This campaign, which started in the state of New South Wales and called for the state government to ban non-immunised children from daycare facilities, ran for two weeks, and was then echoed by a number of other media outlets.

The stories included personal accounts of family tragedies and resilience (such as the case of Dana McCaffery, who died of whooping cough aged four weeks), and regional effects of low vaccination rates. The campaign's prompting of political figures resulted in changed laws in support of vaccination. Other media outlets, like the Sydney Morning Herald and Herald Sun, soon echoed the pro-vaccination rally.

The journalist I contacted wrote:

"Basically it started because I was searching for a childcare centre in NSW and became aware of the loophole in the law. I asked Sunday Telegraph editor Mick Carroll and Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker if they were keen to let me run a campaign. They were, so I assigned reporters led by Jane Hansen to about 35 story ideas and we approached state and federal governments telling them what we were about to do. Neither had a commitment to change the law so we started rolling out the stories from May 5th.

"We ran approximately 60 stories and by two weeks later, NSW Opposition leader John Robertson and Tony Abbott both said they would act. Robertson said he would introduce bills to parliament - whereupon premier Barry O'Farrell announced he'd put a plan to Cabinet that went even further than Robertson's proposed bill. We are still campaigning for federal change - although Abbott is on board, we'd rather have legislation before parliament than a promise.

"We have copped a huge amount of vitriol and nastiness but also vast support from our readers. Our heartland is western Sydney, where the vast majority of parents vaccinate. Their children's health is put at risk by parents in wealthy parts of Sydney where rates are much lower, and in 'alternative lifestyle' areas like Byron Bay where rates are shockingly low.

"We are proud to have changed the law but now we want to help change people's attitudes by continuing to report the facts about vaccinations - they save lives."

One journalist became inspired and made a difference, and she doesn't even identify as a skeptic. Her values were what made her act, and those shared values were a bridge to others to promote action.

Of course, science and technology continues to be a political issue - and scientists will continue to comment and encourage action on political movements in a number of ways. We can do our part by not only encouraging community radio, local newspapers, donating and voting in favour of their messages, but by being media producers ourselves.

Tactics can include:

• Wikipedia editing - there's a number of groups, started by the Royal Institution in the UK, who have done "Wiki-bombing" to improve the profiles of women in science and science topics. The same can and has been done for skeptical topics and people.
• Improving and updating existing flyers on skeptical topics;
• Creating media releases;
• Working on finding contacts who are willing to speak to the press and building a media list that can be featured for easy reference for mainstream media. I joined a number of community radio stations as a volunteer and discovered that they, and mainstream media, often enjoy good skeptical stories to feature along with news items.
• Sites like Doubtful News and Snopes collate information from around the world, and they could all use our support - it'd also be great to see more self-sustaining sites like Freethought Blogs, who have both provided a platform for bloggers and pay for their efforts through advertising.
• Creating book clubs and suggesting good texts;
• Improving our general knowledge of skeptical history and celebrating those figures so they are not forgotten through events and outreach about what they have done.
• Free video hangouts and conferences could be a solution to the isolation that many of us feel in an overwhelmingly credulous world. Inclusivity - as mentioned by Dr Pamela Gay at the NZ Skeptics Conference last year - is easy to reflect in events like that one and others. Outreach means taking a step to make the changes you want to have made, and to continue in that direction if at first you don't succeed.
• Finally, passing on information and news you find fun, interesting and enjoyable to your friends and family, because in my experience, it also helps refresh your own passion for skepticism. It's why I podcast. It's why I continue to be a student of skepticism. It's why I'm here.