Looking around at the Skeptics in the Pub groups it’s pretty obvious that there’s no group in the middle of the South of England.
There are groups meeting regularly in London, Bristol and Oxford but nothing in the middle of the South. This area of the country is a skeptical vacuum just begging to be filled with insightful and informed comment from those driven by science, reason and critical thinking.
If you live in Hampshire and the surrounding area in or near places such as Basingstoke, Winchester, Southampton, Portsmouth, Guildford, Farnborough, Reading, Newbury, Andover or Salisbury and you would like to join a Skeptics in the Pub group that potentially could move along the M3 corridor for meetings, please let us know by showing your interest in the comments. Or you can let us know via email by using the contact us form at the top of the page.
We already have some awesome skeptical luminaries who have offered to speak. So we need to generate as much interest as possible in order to plug the hole in the dyke of reason and do something to hold back the flood of woo washing over us.
Also, if you do know of a small skeptical group or happen to be a member of one in the South please let us know so we can get in touch with them.
Click the logo below to show your interest in starting a Hampshire Skeptics in the Pub group.
Create a Skeptics in the Pub group
Solicitor, live Swanmore nr B Waltham, work Farnham
Wow. The Bad Astronomer linked to us on his blog !
How awesome is that ?
Big Awesome.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/11/18/tam-london-followup/
Lets keep going guys. I’m keeping track of the people who are interested in starting a SitP and when we’ve worked out some of the details and organisation we’re going to need some help. So I’ll be asking those interested if they can give us a hand.
Thanks !
I think a skeptics in the pub meeting sounds like a great night out.
[...] Hampshire and would be interested in attending a Hampshire SitP event, please register on the Hampshire Skeptics society group and/or join the Hampshire Skeptics group on [...]
Hi, I live in Whitehill, Bordon and work in Church Crookham. A Hampshire sceptics in the pub sounds like a fantastic idea.
Neil
Hi, Caught you guys on the 10^23 event – fantastic.
I live and work in the Farnborough area. A local SitP would be great.
[...] week I attended the inaugral meeting of Hampshire Skeptics in the Pub (Hants SitP) I must admit I turned up a little concerned that everything would be far too intellectual for me, [...]
Hi,
Just like to say good luck with your group.
All the professional groups that I know are all very sceptical,including ourselves.
If you are total sceptics and disbelieve all paranormal existance The only problem I can see is if and when you do have a sighting or experience what do you call yourself?
On the other hand if your sceptism is to investigate the event and give a true result, either false or paranormal then I welcome the success of your group.
Alan.
Hi Alan,
Well we’re not total skeptics. We have a threshold beyond which the quality of evidence of a particular phenomena is sufficient for us to accept the phenomena as real.
For a total skeptic that acceptance threshold is infinitely high.
This is why we doubt the existence of things like ghosts, psychic powers and claims made by pseudomedicine practitioners etc… The evidence they have presented to support their claims is poor quality and in many cases non-existent. And yet we accept many things as true because they have met the criteria of having strong supporting evidence.
So if there is a claimed sighting of something we can examine the claim and perhaps make efforts to investigate and hopefully be present at a repeat of the event.
But in all cases to date there has been no strong evidence presented in support of such phenomena and no repeatable sightings of things like ghosts.
If there were then people like me, other skeptics and a good chunk of the scientific community would be all over them trying to find out what the hell was going on and having modest late night fantasies of an all-expenses paid trip to Stockholm to pick up their Nobel Prize.
There’s also another matter you raised of assuming that an experience or event can either be false or paranormal. This is a false dichotomy in that there are zillions of other explanations for things before one jumps to a paranormal conclusion. Unfortunately many people are all too eager to make that jump and ignore their own skepticism.
I have been in situations where I have been satisfied that the experiences I am having have a naturalistic explanation and yet others have come to a paranormal conclusion and attributed their experience to a ghost or other manifestation.
I think this may happen because their threshold for accepting something as true is rather lower than my own. I also think there is a healthy dose of wishful thinking in there too.
I certainly feel that wishful thinking aspect as I would love there to be unicorns, dragons, psychic powers and people able to talk with the dead. Can you imagine the things we could learn from them if that were so ?
Things other than the utterly banal alleged remarks of the dead regarding their wish that little Johnny do well in the swimming competition or that they hope everyone will give up nuclear weapons/protect the environment or that the long gone aunty Mable still loves you.
Basically if these things were real there would be some quality evidence to support them.
There is as yet, no such evidence. It may come but one must come to a point beyond which one stops putting a lot of effort into investigating things that have never, ever produced anything of note or worthy of serious investigation.
We don’t give much thought to the idea that the sun is a firey chariot dragged across the sky by four golden bulls. Why ? Because we have lots of evidence to say that such is not the case and no supporting evidence to say that such is the case.
So until someone comes up with something serious we put it down and consign the idea the the annals of superstition, pseudoscience and myth. So we pay it no more mind.
That is why we don’t spend a lot of effort with investigating the claims of psychics, pseudomedicine practitioners or other such ideas.
If quality evidence can be supplied in support of these or other such paranormal claims then we’ll be happy to reassess the situation.
We can have our minds changed by evidence. We welcome it. After all it makes things much more interesting than having an unchangeable and dogmatic mindset that no amount of evidence can alter.
Cheers
D
A skeptics in the pub locally would be fantastic. I am a science and critical thinking student from Reading and there’s nothing like this around here… a Berkshire skeptics in the pub would be even better
Would love a local SITP, live in Farnborough and work in Egham.
I’ll try and make it up from Portsmouth this month. Just found this site.
Just moved into the area, (outskirts of Salisbury) and a Southampton / Salisbury or surrounding area SITP sounds like a great idea.