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| Dr. Jon Smith, Devil’s Advocate |
If you knew me in real life, you’d know that I’m often apt to bring up references to This American Life in everyday conversation. Too often, really. Like all the time. I’ve listened to every episode (480 of them as of this week) and taken many to heart. I’m basically just like that annoying Christian that spits out a Bible verse on every occasion, except that my canon is a radio show and comes loaded with contemporary wisdom instead of barbaric tribalism.
Today, I’d like to share just part of one of my favorite episodes with the skeptical community: Act Two of Episode 402. Go listen to it now, it starts at around 42 minutes into the episode. Seriously, go have a listen. You don’t even have to come back to this page, I trust that you’ll make all the connections yourself.
In this act, we hear Professor Jon Smith describe the degeneration of the life raft debate at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, from a serious symposium in which scholars debated and extolled the virtues of their respective contributions to the liberal arts, into something more like infotainment, and eventually into vacuous entertainment with little substantive value, something characterized as a “convergence of silliness” by one of those closely associated with the event. Smith laments the understandable tendency for serious teachers to get more joy out of making students laugh than helping them to learn, and he closes his argument thusly:
“Look, folks, it’s gone too far. You may have been entertained for the last half hour or so, 45 minutes, whatever, but I don’t think you were intellectually challenged. I don’t think a strong case was made for anybody’s discipline, and I honestly think The Life Raft Debate has gotten kind of far away from what it initially used to be — and what it should be. You have a chance tonight to change that.
To vote for no one is not to say, oh, I don’t like any of them, or they’re not all funny, or they’re not charming, or whatever– it’s just to say, come on. Treat us like adults. Argue for your discipline. You can do that and be funny, but please– you can send that message, and I hope tonight you will.”
I’d like to ask that my fellow skeptics, and especially my fellow conference organizers, take these words to heart. It’s not enough to book speakers that are popular entertainers with well-delivered comedic routines vaguely related to some field of science; we also need to treat our attendees as adults, giving them something of substance to chew on: Hypotheses worth testing; methods worth using; ideas worth more than a cheap laugh. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
