Edinburgh Skeptics (Edinburgh Skeptics Society) is a nonprofit organisation that promotes science, reason and critical thinking in Edinburgh and throughout Scotland. It was founded in 2009. The Society hosts regular social and educational events in Edinburgh and has campaigned against the use of homeopathy and challenged claims of ghost sightings.
The Society organizes regular talks as part of Skeptics in the Pub. The speaker invited to launch the group in March 2009 was Chris French. Subsequent speakers have included David Aaronovitch and Julian Baggini. In 2010 the Society created the award-winning Skeptics on the Fringe event, which is held annually during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Skeptics on the Fringe won an Ockham Award after a vote by the readers of The Skeptic magazine in 2013 and has been awarded 4 stars by the publication Broadway Baby. An Ockham award was again won in 2017. Speakers such as Simon Singh, Richard Wiseman, A C Grayling, Edzard Ernst and Paul Zenon have taken part in this event. Other Fringe activities include themed walking tours of Edinburgh.
Current activities include a range of talks held as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, a cinema night, a discussion group and a mobile stall to deliver science and rationalism outreach to the public. In 2015 the Society started the Edinburgh Skeptics Podcast on a variety of platforms with content including interviews with various personalities as well as recordings of the Society's events.
In the past the Society has also co-hosted special events, such as a talk by Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes and continues to work with various groups in the scientific and skeptical community.
History
Edinburgh Skeptics was the fifth Skeptics in the Pub group to be established in the UK. The group was formalised as Edinburgh Skeptics Society in 2009 by Ash Pryce, later to be joined by Alex Buque and Keir Liddle in 2010.
Edinburgh Skeptics was one of the first Skeptic groups in the UK to implement an anti-harassment policy to promote inclusiveness. The policy "Respect people, challenge ideas" covers both visiting speakers and attendees.
Meetings
The Society organizes regular educational events in Edinburgh. Edinburgh Skeptics also holds social meetings and informal discussions on skeptic topics such as "Should Atheists Ignore Christmas?". The group has also arranged excursion events entitled Skeptical Days Out.
Edinburgh Skeptics in the Pub
Meetings include a guest speaker which have included David Aaronovitch discussing his book Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History, and philosopher, writer and journalist Julian Baggini on the subject of Being Sceptical of Scepticism: Ways of Being Wrong. More recent speakers have included Professor David Nutt, Phil Hammond, Kat Arney and Margaret McCartney.
Talks are also given by group members and cover a wide range of subjects including health care, science, atheism, the paranormal/supernatural, psychics, politics and psychology. Skeptics in the Pub continues to be held on the third Thursday of every month.
Skeptics Between the Covers
Skeptics Between the Covers was the first skeptical book group in the UK. It was founded by Edinburgh Skeptics to discuss books of interest to Skeptics. The group has covered both fiction and nonfiction genres, such as social psychology and biography, with books including When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, which contains one of the first published accounts of cognitive dissonance, and Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard by British journalist Russell Miller. Bare-Faced Messiah is a posthumous biography of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, which was originally withdrawn from publication in the US after legal action, although the Court of Appeal of England and Wales allowed publication in the UK in the public interest.
Homeopathy
The 10:23 Campaign was an awareness campaign and protest against homeopathy. It was started in the UK by the Merseyside Skeptics Society and has international participation. In 2010 the Society organised a protest that included mass homeopathic overdoses outside Boots stores to mock what the protesters asserted to be the lack of efficacy in homeopathic products. As participants in this campaign, Edinburgh Skeptics organised a protest outside the Princes Street branch of Boots against its policy of selling homeopathic preparations as equivalent to mainstream scientifically based medicine.