For those who aren't familiar with Phil Plait, he is a former active physicist/astronomer and currently a skeptic blogger who runs a blog called Bad Astronomy. He recently gave a talk at TAM, which is on Vimeo here (I couldn't find a youtube link, so I can't embed):
http://vimeo.com/13704095
The gist of the talk is (my paraphrasing):
I'm just curious how others feel about this. Any and all thoughts are welcome. I would strongly suggest watching the actual video, as I don't think my two sentence summary is sufficient to convey Phil's position. Overall I quite agree with his argument. However, he does seem to make an argument at the end that suggests some form of accommodationism, on which I would have to disagree. It's possible that I misunderstood the point he was trying to make here, since he only had a minute or two on that subject. So, thoughts?
http://vimeo.com/13704095
The gist of the talk is (my paraphrasing):
As skeptics, our goal should be to convince others that active skepticism is the correct way to think about reality. In order to do this, we need to take extra care not to alienate those we hope to convince by being unnecessarily aggressive or insulting.
I'm just curious how others feel about this. Any and all thoughts are welcome. I would strongly suggest watching the actual video, as I don't think my two sentence summary is sufficient to convey Phil's position. Overall I quite agree with his argument. However, he does seem to make an argument at the end that suggests some form of accommodationism, on which I would have to disagree. It's possible that I misunderstood the point he was trying to make here, since he only had a minute or two on that subject. So, thoughts?