A little background. Last fall, I wrote my usual post trying to roughly estimate the subject matter breakdown of the main stage talks at Skepticon, the largest free conference dedicated to freethought and skepticism west of the Mississippi (and the only one ever to be partially funded by volunteer nudes). One of the speakers roundly objected to my classification of her talk:
Skepticon #sk8 Full Recap | Damion Reinhardt https://t.co/aNgrqlF035
— Skeptic Ink (@SkepticInk) November 24, 2015
https://twitter.com/szvan/status/669230221640396800
https://twitter.com/szvan/status/669645845650763776
Hey, she could be right. As a skeptic, it certainly doesn’t hurt to double-check.
As promised in a comment on my earlier post, I am reviewing the contents of that particular talk now that it is freely available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBr4QtmlGQg
The science education part starts around 7:30 and is more-or-less wrapped up by around 15 minutes or so. The remainder of the talk contains rather few references to the underlying psychological science, and focuses primarily on how to make the world more socially just (e.g. raising the social cost of victim blaming, sharing messages about injustice on your Facebook wall, targeting organizations and decision makers in a position to make significant improvements) and how to stay motivated in the process.
I have few criticisms of the talk itself, other than to point out that the psychological manifestations of the halo effect (and its reverse) should probably be denominated as such rather than being lumped under the just world fallacy. That aside, it’s a decent talk: a hefty dose of activism admixed with a handful of references to the scientific research.
While I remain unconvinced that this talk falls into any of the three varieties of skepticism discussed here, it may be the first Skepticon talk since Yudkowsky’s Heuristics and Biases to even touch upon the problem of cognitive biases. (Feel free to correct me on this, I may well be suffering from availability heuristic.) I commend it to your viewing, and do please let me know if you think it has been mischaracterized or miscategorized.
