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Dr. Michael Shermer is the founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and Skeptic.com , a scientific and educational outreach for scholars, scientists, historians, and professors dedicated to exploring the facts surrounding controversial ideas and extraordinary claims.
Michael Shermer
I briefly discussed the illusion of free will in both The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape . I have since received hundreds of questions and comments from readers and learned just where the sticking points were in my original arguments. I am happy to now offer my final thoughts on the subject in the form of a short book, Free Will , that can be read in a single sitting. The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice.
Sam Harris
- RichardDawkins.net
[Journalists] seem to feel let down when they discover that the real people aren't anything like the way they so relentlessly portray us; as if, since they've gone to the trouble of inventing extravagant caricatures of us, we should at least have the decency to live up to them in real life.
Felix Baumgartner is attempting to break the world record for the highest skydive ever. He recently completed a test dive from 71,500ft (22km), putting him in the top three. The purpose of the dive was to test out all of his equipment before he attempts the record breaking dive of 120,000ft later in 2012. The current [...] From an e-mail I received: As a proponent of SBM, and a someone who places a high value on reason, logic and evidence, I would like to find a physician who shares this mindset.
Home - The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
Skeptoid: Critical Analysis Podcast
Skeptoid is a weekly science podcast dedicated to furthering knowledge by blasting away the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture, and replacing them with way cooler reality. Each weekly episode focuses on a single phenomenon — an urban legend, a paranormal claim, alternative therapy, or something just plain stupid — that you've heard of, and that you probably believe in. Skeptoid attempts to expose the folly of belief in non-evidence based phenomena, and more importantly, explains the factual scientific reality.
In my last post for this blog I discussed the fact that individual scientific studies are insufficient to establish a claim or phenomenon, and yet people often cite a single study as if it offers proof of their position. In order to really understand the status of a scientific claim, rather, you need to have some sense of the totality of relevant scientific research - the so-called scientific "literature." In this post, as promised, I will cover some basics as to how to interpret the published literature. This topic, however, requires some background discussion on the nature of expertise. Many scientific areas are highly specialized and require specific technical knowledge. This may become apparent when reading the technical literature - publications intended for the expert community, not the general public.