u/enocenip

Happy Independence Day!

On Monday Shasta Skeptics in the Pub will meet at Fratelli’s Pizza in Founder’s Square for a game of trivia specially curated for skeptics, free thinkers, and science enthusiasts.

We’ll be mixing up the format a bit going forward, continuing with short talks some months, special topics other months, and the occasional one-off like trivia.

See you Monday at 6:00!

RSVPing at https://meetu.ps/e/Q6l9b/1fMPwX/i helps me out

And keep up with future meetings at https://meetup.com/shasta-skeptics

Geologist and president of the Shasta Gem and Mineral Society Brian Puleri will tell us about a scientific journey to understand a Pleistocene debris avalanche covering 450 square kilometers.

Join us this Monday at Final Draft Brewing Company. We’ll learn, we’ll chat, and some of us may have a few pints. 🍻

RSVP not required but it’ll help me out. Shasta Skeptics in the Pub: When Mountains Collapse

Here’s a pattern I see in our comment sections: someone shows up with an opinion outside expert consensus, is a little woo-adjacent, or demonstrates that they haven’t memorized a table of informal fallacies. The community dog piles, downvotes, and insults them.

We’re missing an opportunity and we’re chasing away someone who is interested enough in scientific skepticism to be browsing this subreddit. This is not how a successful movement grows.

If someone comes here and comments in good faith why not answer them in the same spirit? Worst case, it’s an opportunity to sharpen our critical thinking skills, best case we help someone plug in.

Depending on the subject matter we could explain the history of the discussion, show them the research, and explain what expert consensus on a topic is and how it was arrived at. If they’re a little off base on their thinking we could direct them to their library for a copy of A Demon Haunted World or help them plug into their local freethinkers group. If they’re philosophically out of alignment, that can be an opportunity to practice critical thinking and a chance to verify our own beliefs or, if we’re lucky, update them.

I don’t have data on our demographics, but I strongly suspect that as a group we’re aging. A lot of us have been in this world for decades now, back to that post 9/11 explosion, we might not remember what it was like to be a curious science enthusiast looking to understand more.

I’d like to suggest that we as a community try to push our culture in a more welcoming direction by:

• Meeting good faith with good faith

• Showing our reasoning, not just stating our conclusions

• Not treating disagreement on atheism, agnosticism, philosophy or even religion as evidence of stupidity

• Reserving downvotes for trolls, spammers, and bad faith arguments

• and being a little less fucking certain that we’re right

I’d also like to invite a discussion on how to create these changes. I’m not sure exactly how to go about moving our culture, but I think unless we do we’ll continue to lose relevance.

My wife and I have been having a terrible time finding a rental, we keep getting denied at the last second, or we get told someone else was selected and then we see the house back up on the market a week or two later.

I have a six figure income, a fine rental history, a masters degrees, good credit, and a stable job with a kind of impressive title. My wife immigrated recently and so is kind of a blank slate as far as rental history and credit goes.

We’re applying for houses that are firmly in a reasonable price range for our income.

I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but it’s getting weird. I’ve never had trouble renting before, even when I was damn near broke. Now shit keeps falling through, but on paper we should qualify easily.

Has anyone else had difficulties? We had kind of a heart breaker where we had been all but promised a spot, then at the very last minute they used Claude or something to start talking legalese at us after my wife submitted her application. Mine was fine and we’d toured the house and spoken to them.

I don’t imagine people are just seeing where she’s from, laughing, chewing on their cigar and stamping “No” on the application. I think they’re probably using her lack of credit history as a proxy for recent immigrant. Since the bureaus don’t have anything on her, running her credit can produce an error “person not found” or something, I’ve seen this with Experian, I don’t know how the others handle it. We of course have other proof of her ID and that she’s adjusting her status to a marriage based green card.

I’m not sure what to do. I don’t really want to start filing complaints and making a fuss, but the frustration is mounting. This has been going on for months.

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to put this together. I’m looking forward to meeting y’all.

Skeptics in the Pub is an international network of informal monthly meetings where skeptics, critical thinkers, science enthusiasts, and other like-minded people meet, network, and share community. There’s no universal format, but a common one is a brief 15-20 minute presentation from a guest speaker followed by Q&A, discussion, and socializing.

Shasta Skeptics will follow this format, and I plan to add our group to the registry maintained at https://www.skepticsinthepub.org/.

For our first meeting, I’ll give a brief talk on scientific skepticism itself.

If you can’t make it this time, future meetings will be on the first Monday of every month. The venue may change.

EDIT 2: Meetings will be Mondays starting May 4th, I’m calling venues now.

EDIT: Alright, this looks like plenty of interest, I'm going to move forward with it. I DMd everyone who posted in this thread, and for anyone seeing this now the doodle link below is a poll to determine the best time for our meetings. I'll leave it up for a day or so, then start contacting venues. I hope to have the first meeting pretty quickly to keep momentum, then monthly after that.

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/dL1O4yDe

I'm toying with the idea of organizing a monthly get together for like-minded people to discuss topics related to critical thinking, scientific skepticsim, and general science and nerdery.

Usually events like these will have a speaker with a 10-20 minute presentation followed by discussion, food, beer, and comradery

If there's enough interest I'll start shooting out DMs and see if we can get behind a time each month. Also let me know if you have a topic you'd like to present on or if you have connections to a venue that might want to host us.

https://www.skepticsinthepub.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_skepticism