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Skeptical Principles

Here’s an interesting post on SkepticBlog.com. It’s from Brian Dunning (of the ‘Skeptoid’ podcast) justifying some advertising that Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy’ – a fellow skeptic – had undertaken for an alleged ‘junk science’ product:

After some consideration, I think the way to react to this is probably not to criticize Bill personally. There are realities that we all have to live with in this world, and one of those is the need to earn a living. There is, unfortunately, little or no money in science journalism (or in critical thinking outreach), and if you check Bill’s IMDB page, you’ll see that not even he has been nearly as busy in recent years as we’d all hope. My guess is that Activeion made him a much-needed offer, and I think we’d be jumping to conclusions to say that he accepted it lightly or without reflection.

There’s an obvious benefit in being able to live to fight another day. The Activeion product is a bottle of water; it’s not going to hurt anyone except in their wallet. If you have to choose a snake-oil product to promote, this is as harmless as it gets. There is probably a number that Activeion could offer me and I’d have done the same thing Bill did. I’d reason that if I took that job, it could fund Skeptoid and my other projects for some time. It could pay my kids’ tuitions, and there’s value in that — there are certainly snake oil salespeople out there whose money I’d be glad to leverage to my own advantage under the right circumstances. I’m not saying I would, I’m not saying I wouldn’t; I’m saying I’d definitely weigh the pros and cons. Whether or not you agree with the choice Bill made, you at least owe him the benefit of the doubt and recognize that it’s neither a simple nor an easy decision.

So it seems that shilling snake oil is okay, as long as you’re a skeptic, and you get offered the right “number”. Dunning, by the way, is the ‘Skeptologist’ that said Stanton Friedman was “more concerned with his bank account than with reason“…

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  1. Double Standards
    Somehow I imagine Dunning’s blog post would be a little different it were Dr Gary Schwartz advertising Activeion to raise funds for his consciousness research.

    The Activeion Grail… maybe you should give them a call, Greg. 😉

  2. Gotta agree. Pretty poor
    Gotta agree. Pretty poor defence of anything at all. The comments to that article are all very negative as well, apart from a couple of defences that are at least a little better thought through.

    If i had to pick any defence to play devils advocate for my own dislike of what this looks like I think the best is that Nye has been duped or didn’t research something before promoting it (so at best he’s silly or lazy!). In addition to that brand of defence would go something like ‘we can all make mistakes, it is how we behave afterwards that counts.’ If these products do not ionise the water and if ionised water is not better for cleaning then the responsibility to Nye is to withdraw his support and make a public statement regarding why.

    The world is no doubt full of sham ideas and products, no matter how your belief falls. One way in which we could make it better is to try and promote the changing of minds (not arguing to change peoples minds – i mean more like it being considered more acceptable to change your mind more often). Activeion may well have shot themselves in the foot in a very big way if they cannot back up their claims. Lets hope that if they cannot Nye can change his mind, give back the money or donate it to charity, and put this product in its place with a humble public declaration of his mistake. Otherwise two things can happen. The product is genuine, in which case all this serves no purpose (all we have at the moment are some claims of ionisation, which might be happening, bubbles below a certain size, which might be there, and the rather dubious sounding claim of increased cleaning ability). Else Nye’s reputation will take a justified hit – and continue taking it while he supports something fraudulent. It will depend on the evidence for the effectiveness of the device. I am quite dubious at this point though.

    I am reminded here of the divided image of someone like Newton. Great at physics, crap at history. It is highly likely that Newton would be different today (who wouldn’t), but what if he still insisted on using the story of Jason and the Argonauts as justification of literal biblical history (yep, he actually did).

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