Gen Con Skeptics Panel!

Edit: The Gen Con Events website is up and active. Here's the page for our panel. Check it out!

Today I'd like to formally announce a little project a few of us have been working on, on and off, since last year's Gen Con Indy. Tom Foss, Wikinite, Magus and I attended the con and sat in on a seminar by the Indiana Ghost Trackers on EVP (that I still need to write up for the blog). Leaving the seminar, we decided then and there that Gen Con Indy 2009 would have a skeptical presence to counter any and all woo that dares rear its ugly head.

Therefore, I invite you all to Gen Con Indy for our totally awesome skeptical seminar, "Skepticism, Critical Thinking, and Pop Culture!" Why pop culture? Because it's a pop culture convention.

We may not be Phil Plait or Steve Novella, but we plan to bring our A game nonetheless, and perhaps we'll get a good sized audience ourselves.

If you're a regular reader, you know what to expect, except there will be far less cursing because we want the seminar to attract as wide an audience as possible.

If you're coming here from the Gen Con Events website, welcome! Here I'll give a brief rundown of our plans.

Remember, anything in here is in a constant state of flux, and any information will change and be updated as we solidify the details.

Like I said above, the current panel giving the seminar is made up of Tom, Wikinite, Magus, and me, four skeptics and bloggers with an interest in fostering critical thinking skills among the wider population. This list is subject to change if it has to; the details have not yet been 100% banged out.

Our "gaming group" title (the name of the crew organizing the event) is "Skeptical Powerhouse." I made that one up on my own and I hope it's okay with everyone else.

Our general plan, as it stands at the moment, is to use pop culture paranormalism and pseudoscience as a vehicle to throw out some ideas about skepticism, critical thinking, and the scientific method. We hope to get you all thinking, really thinking, about why you believe what you believe, and the need to back up your beliefs with good evidence and sound reasoning. We hope to impress upon you the power and utility of critical thinking, the importance of science and rationality, and the general silliness of many popular paranormal claims.

In short: a heaping helping of education with just a pinch of good, old-fashioned debunking. Topics covered might include (but are not limited to) Bigfoot, aliens and UFOs, ghosts and hauntings, and medical quackery.

After we give our talk, we'll open it up for a Q&A. This isn't just any Q&A, though; this is a themed Q&A. While you can feel absolutely free to ask us just about anything regarding our talk or ideas, the theme of the session is "Stump the Skeptics!" Come prepared with your extraordinary claims, your sacred cows, your obscure bits of belief and opinion, and throw them our way. We'll do an impromptu skeptical analysis of any claim you care to throw at us, bringing our myriad knowledge and critical thinking skills to bear against it; just make sure that (1)it's a real claim that's out there in the culture, not something you made up just to annoy us, and (2)it can actually be empirically investigated: no politics or ideology, please.

All we ask is that you bring are open minds (but not so open that your brain falls out, as we sometimes like to say), good questions, and a good attitude. We don't intend or desire to offend anybody at this seminar, and we expect the same courtesy from anyone attending. We want to keep things light and fun so everyone can have a good time while they're learning.

We hope you're looking forward to the seminar as much as we are, and remember to keep checking back here to this blog entry for updates and further details as they become available. We'll see you in August!