Peggy Lemaux giving her talk “The Debate over Genetically Modified Foods.”
I love attending skeptic conferences. For much of my life I wasn’t aware that like-minded skeptical people even existed, let alone held conferences. When I discovered that others were interested in investigating and exposing pseudoscience, I was thrilled. And not just at being able to attend lectures but at being able to socialize and have great discussions about the topics with people who feel that evidence matters. Because of these experiences, my curiosity has expanded; I’ve learned about facilitated communication, grief vampires (aka psychic detectives), and really cool science things like missions to Mars, the Hubble telescope, the Hadron Collider, and more.
Because scientific skepticism is a way of thinking, a method we use to expand our epistemology, we have a broad range of topic choices. And this year’s SkeptiCal conference was no exception. The fifth annual West Coast conference was held in Oakland, California, on Saturday, June 6. I’ve attended all five conferences and lectured on the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project at the second one. There are special memories for me at each.