The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

In this week’s eSkeptic, Peter Boghossian says that students taught to formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence may, ironically, be digging themselves into cognitive sinkholes — and, the more intelligent they are, the deeper the hole…

On a scale from 1–10, how confident are you in a belief that you hold? What evidence could you encounter that would undermine your confidence? What would it take to lower your confidence from 9 to 8, or even 6?

In his April 2017 ‘Skeptic’ column for Scientific American, Michael Shermer discusses the principle of proportionality: that we should prefer the more probable explanation over the less probable. Also in this week’s eSkeptic, MonsterTalk interviews folklorist and author Mark Norman to discuss legends of black hounds.

Greg Hart celebrates the life and memory of critical thinking giant Dr. Richard Paul (1937–2015) — the founder and iconic force behind the Foundation for Critical Thinking — who passed away on August 30, 2015 after a lengthy battle with Parkinson’s.

The human tendency to organize information even where no useful information exists appears to be hardwired into our brains. In this week’s eSkeptic, we present on article from the archives of Skeptic magazine issue 5.1, from 1997 wherein professional magician Jamy Ian Swiss discusses critical thinking as a way of protecting ourselves from the threat of deception.

In this week’s eSkeptic, John E. Buckner V and Rebecca A. Buckner discuss compartmentalization and conformity as possible socio-psychological mechanisms that might explain how individuals, through education, can decrease their paranormal/supernatural beliefs without improving their critical thinking skills.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Kevin Mccaffree and Anondah Saide present a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed empirical studies that evaluate the success of teaching critical thinking strategies in the classroom. In addition, they discuss some reasons for the limited impact of these strategies.

Barbara Drescher digs further into the roots of irrationality in Part Two of her exploration of the difference between rationality and intelligence.

The Skeptics Society is proud to announce the creation of our brand new group blog, INSIGHT at Skeptic.com. Dedicated to the spirit of curiosity and grounded in scientific skepticism’s useful, investigative tradition of public service, INSIGHT will shed light, offer critical perspective, and serve as a broadly accessible, evidence-based resource on mysteries of science, paranormal claims, and the wild, woolly, wonderful weirdness of the fringe.

In a guest post, Eugenie Scott welcomes the creation of the Skeptics Society’s new INSIGHT blog, and argues that science and critical thinking are for everyone.