A community for taking a critical look at pseudoscience, quackery, and bald-faced BS. “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” ~ David Hume Things we like: • Thoughtful discussion • Humor • Civility Things we don’t like quite so much: • Trolling • Low-effort comments and posts • Personal attacks • Spam • URL shorteners Carl Sagan’s Nine Precepts of Skeptical Thinking: 1. Confirm the reality (independent of the status quo). 2. Encourage debate on the evidence by proponents of all points of view. 3. Avoid appeals to authority. 4. Recognize that there is always more than one hypothesis. 5. Do not cling to a hypothesis simply because it is yours. 6. Attaching a numerical quantity is key to discriminating hypotheses. 7. In a chain of argument, all the links must work—not just most of them. 8. Everything else being equal, the simplest explanation is the most likely. 9. Proposals that cannot be proven or shown to be false do not have much scientific value. Suggested Fediverse Communities • RFK Jr. Watch @lemm.ee [https://lemm.ee/c/rfk_jr_watch] - Tackling misinformation being spread by antivaxxer politician, Robert F Kennedy Jr. • DebunkThis @lemmy.world [https://lemmy.world/c/debunkthis] - an evidence-based community for debunking misinformation and dubious claims.