Think It Through: the Clearer Thinking Podcast Episode 13: How Skeptics "Do the Research"--an Interview with Celestia Ward
April talks with Celestia Ward, one of the hosts of Squaring the Strange, a podcast that focuses on evidence-based analysis covering a very wide variety of topics. In this episode, April finds out how Celestia got started as a skeptical researcher; they also discuss some of the techniques Celestia uses to focus on finding facts while still acknowledging that she, like all of us, has biases. Along the way they mention skeptic icon James Randi, Penn and Teller, folklorist Jeannie Thomas, and Mick West, author and founder of metabunk.org. April also find out that Celestia is a big fan of the number 13 (the episode number)! After the interview, Celestia mentioned that she spent eight years as an academic editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, and says of that experience "Cutting your teeth on reference lists that are nearly as long as the chapters instills you with a respect for thorough research."
Episode 13 show notes:
Here’s the Squaring the Strange website. You can also find them on Apple Podcasts:
https://squaringthestrange.libsyn.com/website
Hey, look what I found! An 2015 article about Celestia in Skeptical Inquirer, written by Ben Radford (now one of her co-hosts on Squaring the Strange):
https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/facing-art-and-skepticism-caricaturist-celestia-ward/
A good NPR article giving some background and a proper sendoff for James Randi:
The website for one of the best skeptic/science podcasts out there, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe:
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/
A great article from a science education website about why scientist must also be skeptics:
http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/introduction/scientific-inquiry/why-must-scientists-be-skeptics.php
Wikipedia (yeah, sometimes it’s a perfectly good source) has a list of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit episodes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullshit!_episodes
Here’s the lecture by Jeannie Thomas in which she references the SLAP testing method, and confesses that she’s even been pulled in by scary-sounding claims that ended up being untrue (it is a BYU lecture, so there is an opening prayer—do with that what you will):
To quickly check a news story to see if it has any basis in fact, try https://leadstories.com/ or factcheck.org
Wanna buy Mick West’s book? Here you go:
https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Rabbit-Hole-Conspiracy-Theories-ebook/dp/B077YS5G2N
Contact Celestia Ward for information about her caricatures at: