April 2nd, 2009 admin
Show Notes: Greg Taylor, of The Daily Grail on the New Skeptics
Guest: Greg Taylor, blogger and creator of the popular paranormal website The Daily Grail. Here’s the link to Greg’s article on the Million Dollar Challenge:
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-myth-of-james-randis-million-dollar-challenge
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Alex: Welcome to skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On this episode of skeptiko, I have a very interesting interview with Greg Taylor, the founder and main blogger over at The Daily Grail, a paranormal website that I think many of you are familiar with or maybe should be familiar with.
It’s a very, very interesting website. It does a great job of balanced reporting on strange anomalous stuff, and also some skeptical stuff, with a real, intelligent edge to it. I’ve always enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed the chance to get to know Greg a little bit and speak with him on this interview. We talked a lot about skepticism and what it’s like trying to be kind of a counterweight to that skeptical voice that is out there in so many places. It’s a very interesting chat. I think you’ll enjoy it. Coming up: my dialogue with Greg Taylor, of the Daily Grail:
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March 9th, 2009 admin
View Show Notes: 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, Michael Brooks
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On this episode of Skeptiko, science journalist and author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time, Michael Brooks.
“People might say come on science give us the truth about this. I’m not sure people actually want the truth. I think a lot of the time, in science and religion studies, people want validation of their original viewpoint.”
Stay with us for Skeptiko.
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February 17th, 2009 admin
Show Notes: Is the Dalai Lama an Atheist? Dr. Alan Wallace
Guest: Buddhist scholar and author of the upcoming Mind in the Balance, Dr. Alan Wallace discusses Buddhism and atheism.
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Alex: Is the Dalai Lama an atheist?
“In the framing itself, the question is already skewed. It’s not so obvious to a person who’s totally immersed in western civilization and has almost no glimmering of understanding of anything outside of western civilization. Frankly, so much of the rhetoric, this antireligious rhetoric from the likes of Richard Dawkins and so forth, is just wildly unconsciously and uncritically ethnocentric. Do the Buddhist themselves, and I’m honing in on your question. Do the Buddhist themselves ask are we atheists? Well, I’ve never seen that question posed. In Buddhism that would be regarded as such a dumb and uninformed question that is not even worthy of a response.” — Dr. Alan Wallace
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February 4th, 2009 admin
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Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
In this episode, I have coming up an interview with Mike Tymn, author of book, The Articulate Dead. But before getting to that, I want to spend some time in bringing you up to date on some things that are happening with OpenSourceScience medium experiment of course that we’ve been engaged in. Now I’ve received a number of e-mails last week from folks asking me to respond to some of the comments that were made in the last episode of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe with Dr. Steve Novella. As most of you I’m sure know, about a year ago, the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe agreed to collaborate with us on a medium demonstration/research project. As I’ve documented on this show, that’s kind of evolved in the research project that we’re doing right now today.
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November 10th, 2008 admin
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On this episode of Skeptiko, psychic detective Nancy Weber recounts her amazing work in the Amie Hoffman Murder Case.
I also went to speak to the then captain and I said to him, “You have an officer whose last name begins with a C.” He said, “I have two of them.” I said the, “The hard C.” He said, “You mean Costanza?” I said, “Yes, that man has ticketed the murderer. He will know who he is when you just ask him. — Nancy Orlen Weber
Stay with us for Skeptiko.
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On today’s show, we’re going to pick up on a topic that I’ve covered a little bit in the last few episodes but I really need to nail down, that’s this challenge between hardcore skeptic and editor of the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, Ben Radford, and myself regarding psychic detective work. Now if you recall, back in August Ben came on the show and we talked about psychic detective work. I said, “Why don’t you ever investigate very good cases,” and Ben said why is whatever case we pick never good enough? So, we decided that I should really pick the case and that we should investigate it together. Let me go back and play an extended clip from that show so that everyone’s up to speed on where we are with this challenge. Here it goes.
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October 29th, 2008 admin
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“Of course, there are many people who pride themselves on being skeptics, who are not skeptical about the things they believe in. We, all of us, are inclined to read a disconfirming research more critically than confirming research. There’s actually been research on this.” – Dr. Carol Tavris
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
Before we jump into today’s interview, I wanted to update you on some of the things that have been going on here at Skeptiko. We really have quite a bit happening. For those of who are regular listeners, I know that you’re interested in the research projects that we have going on, and I do receive a bunch of e-mails about that. So, I want to update you.
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September 26th, 2008 admin
Download Audio of This Interview (MP3) (35:11min, 16MB)
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On today’s episode, we’re going to look at psychic detectives. The psychic detective story has been repeated so many times in newspapers and on TV that it’s almost become cliché. When the police are trying to solve a tough case, one of the detectives hears about how psychics have been used in cases but is reluctant to bring her on. Then, the case is solved through the help of the psychic and the cop winds up saying something like, “Well, I was skeptical at first. I do not know how she did it, but it was amazing.”
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September 24th, 2008 admin
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Skeptiko Show Notes
On this episode of Skeptiko author Lynne Kelly offers a skeptical view of psychic medium communication:
“What I’m saying with a lot of psychics is not that they’re frauds. Far from it. Most of the astrology and tarot readers that I see are absolutely genuine people who have a faith in the system and therefore giving credit to the system when it’s actually their own intuition and it’s already built into the system that’s working. I think the same is probably true of most mediums.” – Lynne Kelly
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and you may recall on the last episode of Skeptiko we interviewed Dr. Julie Beischel and discussed her experiments into psychic medium readings. That is, she’s exploring a purely scientific way whether or not a person who goes in, meets with a psychic or a medium to try and connect with a deceased person, whether there’s anything real going on or whether there’s anything scientific. I think we had a very interesting discussion with her along those lines and specifically about her protocol and about how we are going to use that protocol to try and replicate a demonstration of that very research. So this time out what I thought would be interesting is to try and look at the primary explanation that skeptics and many other folks have for what may be going on in a psychic reading and that is, of course, cold reading. So the typical line from skeptics is that if you think there’s anything real that’s going on in a psychic reading, that is, if it seems like there’s real information coming through from someone’s who deceased, someone who’s passed away, that’s just the psychic using these tricks of picking up information that you’re giving off unknowingly or just fishing for information out of you. I was very fortunate to find Lynne Kelly, who is the author of The Skeptics Guide to the Paranormal and is a science educator and a skeptic based in Melbourne, Australia, who’s very, very familiar with this phenomenon. As a matter of fact, Lynne has become somewhat of an expert in cold readings and has even developed her own cold reading system which is quite interesting in its own right and she’s very, very successful at it. As a matter of fact, on our website she has many interesting pictures of her doing cold reading demonstrations which she’s done hundred of times and has achieved very amazing results in terms of establishing a belief of the person that she’s reading for that she really was connecting with someone who is deceased and yet, of course, she then later admits that she’s not and that she’s just using these mentalists tricks, these psychological tricks to convince someone that she really is connecting with the great beyond and she’s not. So, I thought she would be a perfect person to talk to, to discuss the research protocol that we’re trying to develop for this demonstration that we’re doing along the same lines of the research that’s been done by Dr. Julie Beischel. Stay tuned - very interesting interview with Lynne Kelly on cold readings coming up on Skeptiko.
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September 18th, 2008 admin
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On this episode of Skeptiko, Dr. Julie Beischel on how to conduct psychic medium research:
“I think people fail to understand that proper research design includes optimizing the possibility of achieving positive results. If you wanted to study plant growth, you don’t put a dry seed on the bench top in the lab and then say, ‘Plants can’t grow.’ You use soil, water, sunlight, and then you study the growth of the seed.” — Dr. Julie Beischel
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris. Okay, now on today’s show we’re going to dig into the nuts and bolts of psychic medium research. We’re going to look back on some of what’s been done in the past and the criticisms of it, and we’re going to look forward to the kind of research we might do in the future in collaboration with open-minded skeptics like Ben Radford from the Skeptical Inquirer and Steve Novella from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. And there’s no better person to join us and help us in this than Julie Beischel from the Windbridge Institute in Tucson. Julie, as many of you know from our previous interview with her, is researching medium communication as a way of answering or at least examining the bigger question of whether our consciousness survives death. So Julie, thanks for joining us again on Skeptiko.
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September 17th, 2008 admin
Download Audio of This Interview (MP3) (61:10min, 28MB)
Alex: Welcome to skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakaris.
On today’s show, I have a very interesting interview with Ben Radford, Managing Editor of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine. The interview is almost an hour, so I’m going to jump right into it. But I wanted to let you know that at the end of the interview, I have a couple of comments and clarifications on some of the points we talk about, so you may want to stay with us for that.
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