Episode Ten – On Skepticism And Communication Part Two

Welcome to another special episode of the Token Skeptic – and thanks to everyone who keeps on subscribing to this show despite there being a gap between the episodes. Just when I think I’ve solved one technical hiccup, another appears – this time my recordings were apparently too soft to register and the quality had even me straining to figure out what I said!

So, I’ll be rerecording the missing episodes and I really am very grateful that people continue to listen and comment.

Comments is what this episode is all about – it’s a discussion between Michael McRae, who you heard in the last episode of the Token Skeptic and Eran Segev. Eran Segev is a reporter on another podcast we have in common, called the Skeptic Zone. Eran is also the President of the Australian Skeptics.

Rather than just have comments appear on my website, I took this opportunity to take the discussion about skepticism, science communication and networking a step further – hence this interview!
I’ll post the questions I posed to them both on my blog site – what you may be missing at the start of this interview is a brief mention of a interview that featured on the ABC1 television show earlier this month here in Australia, called the Insiders on the topic of Climate Change. It featured Terry Kelly, Jason Ball and Elliot Birch of the Victorian Skeptics. You can see it at the Young Australian Skeptics official site, and I’ll post a link on the blog so you can see what inspired some of our initial reflections.

Thanks once again to everyone who continues to listen to this show – what this has encouraged me to do is focus more on the psychology of superstitions and science in future episodes and take these sorts of interviews to a different venue. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to write in questions – big thanks to SkepReview site who said that:

“The interview with Michael McRae about twenty-five minutes long, and I wish it could have been fifty minutes. The interview really made me think, and rehash things in my own mind that I have wondered for sometime. I especially get my mind twisted around how much self promotion is too much, and how much is healthy getting the word out.”

Thanks to you, SkepReview – here’s a nearly fifty minute interview and I hope that again it provides both food for thought and a better overview of what issues are clearly of concern to everyone who supports science! Thanks also to Alom Shaha, who inspired one of the questions that was posed.

Big thanks also to Eran Segev who agreed to being on the show and to Michael McRae for returning – I’ll be back to usual programming from this week onwards. You can find the official site of the Australian skeptics at http://skeptics.com.au.

Questions initially posed included:

Firstly – the media’s adoption of the word ’skeptic’ in conjunction with ‘climate change skeptics’ seems to be widespread and perhaps the public perception of the word will always link the two together. Is it possible this could change?

Secondly – Alom Shaha wrote that how he ‘believe(s) that we need more science communicators who want to engage the public with the political and cultural implications of science, not just the magic and wonder of it.‘ In regards to skeptical matters, is there more progress achieved by the likes of Dr Karl or Dick Smith being spokespeople, rather than groups?

Thirdly – Daniel Loxton, amongst others, has written extensively on the need for skeptics to focus on matters of pseudoscience and the paranormal. How realistic do you think this is?