Come see me talk at Westminster Skeptics tonight

I used to be a sceptic, now I'm not so sure... or something like that! Hope it goes well.

Hi.

It was a very enjoyable evening, and everyone made very interesting points.

I'm the one who suggested the Socratic method for challenging people, and have developed this idea on my blog: http://arkadychenko-theblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-westminister-skepti…

A CHANCE WASTED

Not your fault at all. I was the guy who came to speak to you after the initial talk, but I left when the chairman started cherry-picking questioners who wanted to defend the "Gillian McKeith is a stupid fucking cunt" type of behaviour.
I'm afraid that last night confirmed my belief that Skepticism with a K is becoming a type of cult. The change in spelling, to distinguish "us" from "them", was a bad sign, reminds me of Aleister Crowleys use of Magick with a K to distinguish what he did from the sort of magic performed by, amongst others, James Randi.
The setting up of the Skeptic camp has alienated us Fortean sceptics, who in living memory have watched quietly as continental drift, the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction and the possibility of single celled organisms existing in comets have been pulled out of the pseudoscience realm and accepted as orthodox. Fanatical belief in whatever current scientific theories hold sway is not scientific. As I type, CERN could be doing unutterable damage to the Standard Model.
This setting up of camps is non-productive. It leads Skeptics into the "conventional medicine good, herbalism bad" error, ignoring the fact that staples such as aspirin, quinine and digitalis ARE herbal remedies. It means that homeopathic treatments can't work, because the pills are unlikely to have amolecule of the original substance in them. This ignores the large amount of pills required in such treatments as aconite as a flu remedy, which, along with the regimen of overheating the body and provoking sweating, seems to work (it's almost as good without the puills, but not quite). Just because the theory is wrong doesn't mean that the treatments don't work - it would mean that no medicine whatsoever worked before germs were discovered.
Anyway, thanks for the talk, shame more people listening weren't actually hearing what you had to say.

Thanks for the great talk Frank. I think it really stimulated everyone and gave us all stuff to think about.

Hi Steve (comment 3): I'm sorry you got the impression that the chairman was 'cherry-picking questioners' to support a certain type of view.

We pick questioners based on several factors in an attempt to provide fairness. Things like location in the room (it's easy to get lost at the back), gender (no-one wants women to be under-represented) and age are among those factors.

To this end, you may have noticed that I covered quite a bit of ground to get from person to person.

Undeniably, David will take questions from acknowledged experts in a particular field - David Colquhoun or Robert Dougans (Simon Singh's solicitor) in the past both spring to mind.

But we don't know everybody in the room and cannot pre-judge or anticipate their questions.

I do hope (Steve) that you'll come again. We have some great speakers lined up for the next few months.

"...when the chairman started cherry-picking questioners who wanted to defend the "Gillian McKeith is a stupid fucking cunt" type of behaviour."

This is incorrect.

I was the chair, and I simply had no idea whatsoever what the questions are going to be about.

As Jourdemayne rightly points out, we work hard to get a good balance of questioners - not just the young alpha males who, in my experience, can tend to dominate a "free for all" approach.

Last night almost everyone who wanted to aske a question got to do so.

Moreover, if I recall, the first question was from Dave Cole, an independent and intelligent blogger whose views on anything are difficult to predict...

Steve I think you have a point that some people are backing up their own rather arbitrary viewpoints with a handwavy "Science tells us...". That's a good reason to carry on being properly sk/ceptical and standing up and telling other people how to be. Don't expect us all to be sk/ceptical, even if we say we are.

(I prefer the 'k' spelling because the c spelling reminds me of toilets)