The skeptical community stinks — and other thumb-sucking complaints that should be ignored

You don't like the schisms that divide the "skeptical community"? Horrors. Imagine if you also had to live in the rest of the world.

When I first learned of James Randi’s Amaz!ng Meeting, I knew I had to go, but it took several years before I found someone to go with. None of my friends knew what it was, nobody cared. So I didn’t go. But once I finally did, I found the community that today forms 90% of the people I know and love.

A community of Brians — Engler, Dalton, Hart, Dunning, Gregory — obviously many of us are missing from this specific shot. So far immune to schisms. (2012)

And then I learned the lesson that fell upon so many of us in those days: Communities suffer from schisms. In the skeptical community, I can think of three over the years that have caused rifts and fragmentations:

• Atheism vs. skepticism

• Scientific skepticism vs. Social Justice Warriors

• Sex/gender is binary vs. sex/gender is a spectrum

In all three cases, I recall friends throwing up their hands and saying the “community” is doomed — “organized skepticism” has failed.

Sadly, I personally lost something like 1-3 friends in each of those schisms — people who manufactured outrage that I was disinterested in pivoting to their new passion along with them and thus wrote me off as a Nazi or whatever. However, that pales to the ~200 friends I have retained over all those years. Likely, many of you reading this now are among them.

My great disappointment has been that so many good friends seem to have made more of those rifts than was necessary, and have sworn off going to conferences. They stopped going to The Amaz!ng Meeting. Others stopped going to CSICon. Even though they were not direct casualties of the schism, they were indirect casualties of the perceived loss of community.

Emphasis on perceived.

Folks, there is data here. Community schisms have been studied. And I don’t care if you go to skeptic conferences, lawyer conferences, yoga conferences, or mortgage insurance conferences — schisms happen within every community. It is normal and should be expected, and it almost never represents some apocalyptic “end” of that community.

There is organizational durability following splits.

Splinter groups might make a lot of noise, but they tend to evaporate and find their own place elsewhere. The core group weathers such divisions.¹

Community resilience actually strengthens groups after splits.

When a traumatic rift splits a group, research has shown that the core group typically experiences strengthening and growth afterward.²³ This tends to be the case for a number of reasons; among them that a foundation of knowledge remains; there is typically a governance structure that is unaffected; and the community values, including a shared identity and purpose, are typically not impacted.⁴

Network benefits are preserved.

Particularly in the aftermath of a schism, consensus building and rapport are often prominent. Trust within the network is reinforced.

Post-adversity growth.

The camaraderie and esprit de corps that typically form among the surviving side following a schism lead to a greater sense of collective strength; deeper relationships and networks; renewed openness to new ideas, and an enhanced sense of purpose.

In the case of communities built around annual conferences — and now I’m speaking specifically to the people who no longer attend following schisms at JREF or CSICon — the academic consensus shows that schisms and rifts, while disruptive at the time, not only do no lasting harm to the community but can actually strengthen it.

The benefits people derive from these communities — networking, knowledge sharing, professional development, social connection — typically continue even after organizational splits. Moreover, these schisms may actually enhance the value of the conference by creating multiple specialized communities that serve different segments of the original membership more effectively. And this resulting set of multiple related organizations can make a broader movement more resilient compared to having a single centralized structure.

So whenever I hear someone voice their frustration with “the skeptical community” or “organized skepticism,” there are two points I would like to make to them, both of which are backed up by the data:

• The schism that left such a bad taste in your mouth actually left the community stronger.

• Such schisms are inevitable in every community; there is nowhere you can go to escape them, and knowing that in advance leaves you much better prepared for when it happens.

So please, continue supporting your local skeptic events and communities, and attend every one you can.

1. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a601dc749fc2b9220caf4f5/t/5fae50d82bb93a1ea2970bbb/1605259496226/Mahoney+-+T&PV.pdf

2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5693357/

3. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-come-back-stronger-from-organizational-trauma/

4. https://merid.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Disaster-Response_Research-Findings-and-Their-Implications-for-Resilience-Measures.pdf