“Skeptical About Skeptics” is organized by The Association for Skeptical Investigation and supported in part by:

The Moez Masoud Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Education

by Craig Weiler

Why are we skeptical about skeptics? Isn’t skepticism about approaching new ideas rationally and examining evidence objectively before jumping to conclusions? Shouldn’t we avoid believing anything and everything that comes our way? Of course we should; that is the foundation of science after all.

But it is also possible to go completely overboard on skepticism to the point where it’s just overwhelming bias against new ideas. They are rejected out of hand and evidence is disregarded before it is even seen. This is actually quite common. You can pick pretty much any controversial topic and there will be a wide range of opinions ranging from true believers to dogmatic deniers, whether we’re talking about climate change or UFOs or bigfoot, it doesn’t matter. There will be people of all types.

This site focuses on the people who fall in the dogmatic denier category because they present themselves as being the most truthful and objective, which they are not. They call themselves skeptics and they would be harmless save for the fact that they have a lot of influence in academia and the mainstream media and are invested in making sure that mainstream sources, such as Wikipedia reflect their point of view. (And only their point of view.)

Nearly any controversial subject you care to name has another side to the debate that you probably haven’t heard. It is the goal of Skeptical About Skeptics to show you the reasons why you’re only getting one side of the story.

Craig Weiler is owner of the website The Weiler Psi and the author of: Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet: The Story of a Wild and Vicious Science Controversy that Anyone Can Join!

Skeptical About Skeptics is dedicated to countering dogmatic, ill-informed attacks leveled by dogmatic skeptics on pioneering scientists and their research. Healthy skepticism is an important part of science, as in all walks of life, but some skeptics use it as a weapon to defend their dearly held ideology. Naturally, this inhibits free inquiry as certain ideas and lines of research are denigrated and the careers of scientists who pursue them anyway are threatened. They believe in a purely material world, a clock-work universe filled with machine-like creatures. They believe living minds are nothing more than brain chemistry, that consciousness is an illusion and automatically dismiss any evidence to the contrary.

Members of militant skeptical organizations often think of themselves as defending science and reason against superstition. These are worthy aims, but we at Skeptical About Skeptics think that science and reason are best served by considering the evidence for unexplained phenomena scientifically, rather than assuming a priori that they do not exist. We value science and skepticism, but not scientific fundamentalism. Our purpose is to shine a light on these self-appointed gatekeepers and counter their dogmatic arguments whenever they arise.

We Counter Skeptics by:

• Investigating pseudoskeptics in popular media.
• Exploring the pseudoskeptical mindset, motivation, and method.
• Looking at ways in which scientific objectivity is compromised by vested interests, fraud, experimenter effects, and merchants of doubt who use skepticism as a weapon to further corporate interests.

This website is the successor to “Skeptical Investigations” at skepticalinvestigations.org which ran from 2004 to 2014.