CSICon, run by the Center for Inquiry, looks to me like the modern-day version of James Randi’s Amazing Meeting, which was also held yearly in Las Vegas, and emphasized science and reason. I loved those meetings, and I’m going to the CSICon meeting this October as a speaker.
You can see the lineup of stars below, including Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson, as well as the Novella Brothers and Cara Santa Maria.
I won’t speak much about of the Steve Novella’s “progressive” views on sex (i.e., it’s really a continuum) and on his helping deplatform the late Harriet Hall’s positive review of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, but I will go to his talk.
I’m speaking, too—for half an hour on Saturday morning, October 26, and will probably say something about science and ideology. I recommend you go, not to see me, but to mingle with all the good people who will attend this conference, and to hear the many speakers. I don’t usually go to meetings, but wouldn’t miss this one.
You can read more about the meeting here, which is where the green button took you when you clicked the email announcement.
I’ve gone to most of the meetings (and had been to a few of Randi’s before that). Always a worthwhile way to hear some good talks and meet like-minded skeptics. A bit disappointed that Tyson is the headliner again — partly because he’s headlined before, and partly because I’m just not a fan —
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/neil-degrasse-tyson-probably-should
But Banachek is always great, no matter what he does at the meeting, and there are always a few real gems among the talks given by folks I’ve never heard before. And if that Coyne guy is going to talk, that’s something to look forward to hearing as well.
I’ve soured on Tyson as well. His recent incoherent defenses of transgenderism were the nail in the coffin.
At least they haven’t invited PZ Myers to stink up the place!
So Tyson goes full Deepak Chopra with some kind of quantum gender something or other. Tyson, quantum stuff works at a very small scale, humans do not. We exist at the the scale where gravity works. When you think that humans are so nano that all you can do is give us a probability of position and velocity, where even the observation of our gender collapses that gender self-id wave function, maybe get the hell out of sociology 101 and get back to physics and the non collapsing wave function upon observation called the social world we live in.
Hope to see you there. Have several friends that have been after me to attend for years.
Looking forward to your talk. Jerry, if you get the opportunity (I know it’s asking a lot) please ask Neil de Grasse Tyson how an astrophysicist can be agnostic about God after declaring that the supernatural doesn’t exist. Thanks. GROG
When the atheism+ people took over most of the skeptic conventions last I saw of Skepticon were some guys in furry dinosaur suits with nerf guns, a guy in a lady’s slip with a ball and chain on his ankle on stage, a ‘polyamorous’ workshop and a collection of no-name speakers who collectively did not have 1/1000th the book sales Dawkins had. Well done PZ.
Any chance you will get to ask Steve Novella in front of a live audience what he thinks of the Cass Review? And whether he might like to apologize to Abigail Shrier at long last?
Jerry, hope you get a few skeptical licks in about the absurdity of contra-causal free will, a topic that for some reason hasn’t been targeted by the skeptic community. Or maybe it has and I missed it.