{"id":3088,"date":"2014-12-01T21:05:52","date_gmt":"2014-12-02T03:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3088"},"modified":"2014-12-01T21:05:52","modified_gmt":"2014-12-02T03:05:52","slug":"chart-of-the-week-skepticon-update-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2014\/12\/01\/chart-of-the-week-skepticon-update-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Chart of the Week – Skepticon (UPDATE)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two weekends ago was the seventh\u00a0annual Skepticon in Springfield, MO. Skepticon<\/a> is the largest skeptic\/atheist convention in the Midwest and is an excellent way to get in involved in the wider movements, especially if you happen to\u00a0live within\u00a0driving distance. I’ve seen various arguments break out on Twitter and Facebook (not to mention the occasional blog post<\/a>) about whether the conference is aptly named, and I have tried on two\u00a0previous<\/a> occasions<\/a> to take a somewhat more data-driven approach to the question of whether Skepticon is indeed a skeptic con, in the traditional sense of what constitutes scientific\u00a0skepticism<\/a>. This post is an update to those posts.<\/p>\n

As before<\/a>, Chas and I tried to sort all the talks into either skeptic or atheist bins, relegating\u00a0everything else (talks about how to do activism in general, musical performances, comedy, social justice, etc.) into a catch-all category of other. As before, we only included the main stage events, and as always\u00a0we welcome peer review. If you think we binned a particular talk wrong, after looking at the source data in the spreadsheet<\/a>, please\u00a0let us know and we’ll consider resorting it.<\/p>\n

Some of the talks were tricky\u00a0to categorize. Hemant Mehta’s talk<\/a>, for example, was about why atheists need to be better skeptics in the sense of methodical fact-checking. Melanie Brewster’s talk<\/a> was mostly about doing social science\u00a0on atheists. Scott Clifton’s talk<\/a> was essentially\u00a0atheological counterapologetics, but fairly heavy on\u00a0philosophy of science. You get the idea: Plenty of conceptual crossover. Now on to the updated graph:<\/p>\n

\"Skepticons<\/a><\/p>\n

As you can see, science and skepticism made a bit of a comeback this year. Overall, we saw\u00a0roughly an even split\u00a0between\u00a0talks primarily\u00a0about skepticism, talks primarily\u00a0about atheism, and\u00a0the catchall category which was mostly humanism and feminism this year. Seems to me they have\u00a0struck\u00a0a pretty decent balance,\u00a0all things considered.<\/p>\n

Your thoughts?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two weekends ago was the seventh\u00a0annual Skepticon in Springfield, MO. Skepticon is the largest skeptic\/atheist convention in the Midwest and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,42,18,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-conferences","category-damned-lies-and-statistics","category-skepticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}