It’s the Thought that Counts

I struggle with the idea of blogging about being a skeptic, or writing posts full of skepticism on beliefs that are widely held by a gullible public. What’s the point?

I know there are bloggers out there going point by point through lists of reasons to believe in God, refuting every dumb thing written on Conservapedia, or answering every anti-vaccinationist nut that writes a blog comment — and I’m happy that they’re doing it. I’m happy that there are lots of web sites explaining why homeopathy and acupuncture aren’t real medicine. I just don’t understand having the necessary motivation, given that so many of those websites exist and have existed for a while now, to write new posts about old issues that have already been covered. I know I usually can’t muster it, for two main reasons.

Reason 1: Redundancy. There are scores of blog posts out there explaining why crazy thing X is not worth believing in. I’m not an expert in the truth about crazy thing X, and while I might be able to explain the arguments in a slightly more articulate fashion than a few other people out there, I couldn’t add any substantive material. All I would be doing is repeating what’s already been written.

Reason 2: Audience. True, we do get the occasional hit from someone searching “no pain spray” on Google. I’m glad that people are finding my criticism in addition to online advertisements for the product. By and large, though, the people reading skeptical blogs are skeptics. The people reading atheist blogs are atheists. It’s fun to read someone really eviscerating the writings of Ray Comfort or Dinesh D’Souza, but almost no one who believes either of them is going to be reading along with you. Anyone who is is just looking to post an angry refutation, and isn’t likely to change their mind.

I get a sort of self-congratulatory feeling from the millionth post I read about Bigfoot hoaxes or alien sightings or the argument from evil. We’re not really convincing people, we’re just trumpeting how great we are that we are capable of reason. Yeah, it’s a nice feeling, and yeah, we’re not going to be encouraged to be reasonable by anyone else, but aren’t we wasting our time? It seems like we can all get together and agree that homeopathy is full of crap, then move on to applying our critical thinking skills to new issues.

When a newspaper writes an article about how awesome pet psychics are, fine, blog about how this is stupid. When a new study comes out finally doing a thorough scientific debunking of some woo, okay, blog about that. I’m not really talking about those things. What I mean is: We know that Answers in Genesis doesn’t care about scientific facts, and we know that intelligent design is creationism. We know that the only valuable aspects of chiropractic medicine are the same as the valuable parts of back massage. We also know that so-called psychics don’t have any special powers and are just good at fishing for answers from you. Merely explaining that these people are wrong is not giving new information.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, in terms of my own blogger’s-block issues, but it came to the forefront for me as I was looking around Edger. Let me first say that this is an awesome, new site for the skeptical youth community, and I encourage you to check it out. It’s a student initiative of the Center For Inquiry. By its own description, “Edger presents hard-hitting and reasoned news, views, and event promotion on issues pertaining to secularism, atheism, science, humanism, and the cosmos, and actively promotes and celebrates international freethought activism.” That sounds great to me. However, they did something I don’t understand.

Here’s the Edger post on homeopathy. It does a good job of clearly explaining the principles of homeopathic medicine and why they make no sense whatsoever. I’m not knocking that. It’s just that we already had that, here, here, here, and here. Also here, here, and here. Don’t forget here. Or the other 405,000 hits you can get searching “homeopathy fraud” on Google. Or the 21,800 for “homeopathy debunked,” or the 202,000 for “homeopathy scam.”

I know some of those Google hits are for sites titled things like “Homeopathy: Fraud, or the Most Awesome Thing Ever?” I also know that there are 7.5 million hits for just “homeopathy,” and plenty of them are not skeptical at all. I see the value of trying to play with Google rankings. I just think this is a long, slow way to go about trying to win over people to the skeptic side. If we look at expected return per unit effort, I think it turns out to be better for skeptical bloggers to stop writing brand new posts saying, “Hey! I found someone saying something dumb!” and spend that time brainstorming new ways to educate the public effectively. (I plan to do some of that brainstorming in a future post.)

Am I wrong? Is there some reason I’ve missed? Where do you get your motivation for skeptical blogging? Please let me know in the comments.

Tags: blogging, skepticism