PhACT - Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking

08/21/2026

Patrick Reeder’s 15-year-old daughter, Sophie, has been missing for just over nine years. Since then, the case has gone cold and there have been few developments, he said.

08/21/2026

California Endorses Dangerous Autism Pseudoscience Stuart Vyse On July 21, 2026, the California State Council on Developmental Disabilities (SCDD) adopted a ...

08/21/2026

08/16/2026

First, we chat about what's making us skeptical these days, from the latest executive order targeting vaccine access to a really creative way to fund a biology lab. Oh, and we didn't experience zero gravity for seven seconds this week, did you? Then we bring on the legendary private investigator Bob...

08/16/2026

One of the hottest cancer pseudoscience alternative medications right now are antiparasitic drugs, specifically ivermectin, mebendazole and fenbendazole, usually in connection with a Canadian former doctor named William Makis. A Facebook search for his name returns dozens of pages purporting to be either Makis himself or his associates, all promising that cancer can be eradicated with “repurposed” drugs like ivermectin. https://healthydebate.ca/2026/07/topic/cancer-pseudoscience-and-the-cultural-moment/

08/14/2026

Facilitated communication, rapid prompting method, and spelling to communicate have repeatedly failed scientific tests designed to determine who's actually authoring the messages. Major professional organizations oppose their use. They’ve even been connected to false allegations of sexual abuse.

Yet the California State Council on Developmental Disabilities has adopted a policy that could give these methods new legitimacy.

Stuart Vyse examines the issue in Skeptical Inquirer:
https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/california-endorses-dangerous-autism-pseudoscience/

08/13/2026

It's easy to be skeptical of everyone else, harder to turn the scrutiny on yourself.

Fast Company spent four days at CSICon - Skeptical Inquirer Conference asking what happens to the skeptical movement in an era of AI-generated misinformation, collapsing institutional trust, conspiracy algorithms, and an audience that isn’t getting any younger.

The resulting piece isn’t entirely comfortable reading for us, but that's a good thing.

Read Lexi Pandell’s look at CSICon and what skepticism has to become if it's to matter for another fifty years:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91581838/can-skeptics-survive-the-misinformation-age

08/12/2026

I have been a member of the Official Flat Earth Global Discussion Group on Facebook which has 114.2K members. The challenges to my post of 2 days ago came to a halt and no one was able to refute my stance. So I took it a step further with this next picture and description:

I am no longer using the term “flat earth” because it is demonstrably not flat. Referring to it as Earth is confusing because it is impossible and nothing like the actual planet. From now on, I will refer to the flat model as “Pizza Planet” — capitalized because it’s a special case that highlights the impossible geometry.

This is not about NASA, belief, or conspiracies. It’s a pure geometry problem, and the same principles apply whether you’re talking about the Earth or a pizza sitting on a kitchen table.

At any given moment, whether Earth is a globe or a pizza, half of its surface is illuminated by the sun. That’s just how a single light source works. But on a pizza shaped Earth, there is no possible way for one half to be brightly lit while the other half is in near total darkness without artificially blocking the light. There are no curtains in the atmosphere — whether it’s an oblate spheroid or Pizza Planet.

You can test this at home:
• Put a pizza on your kitchen table.
• Turn off the lights.
• Take a lamp or flashlight to represent the sun.
• Try to illuminate exactly one half of the pizza while the other half remains completely dark.
• Stay above table level, and don’t use shields, walls, or anything else to block the light.

You will discover something immediately: It is physically impossible.
Light spreads. Light reaches everything in line of sight. Light does not magically stop at a boundary on a flat surface.

On Pizza Planet, the “dark side” would still see the sun — maybe dimmer, maybe at an angle, but absolutely visible. There is no mechanism for a sharp day/night divide.

Now take out a desk globe (you probably don’t have one), or a basketball, or even an orange from the same kitchen and aim the light at that.

The only geometry that produces:
• a clean terminator line
• a true night side
• a sun that disappears below the horizon
• a half lit, half dark world
…is a sphere.

No NASA. No Freemasons. No conspiracies.

Active scoring of responses will be in effect.
A quick guide for anyone unfamiliar with constructive dialogue:

Using a pseudonym = Minus 1 point
Insult = Minus 1 point
Insult without a viewpoint = Minus 2 points
Pseudo‑profanity (“You stupid f”) = Minus 2 points
Actual profanity = Minus 3 points

Every point you lose measures how quickly you abandoned reasoning.
- Bob Glickman

08/10/2026

When PhACT had the lecture "Circular Reasoning: The Rise of Flat Earth Belief" by Michael Marshall on February 20, 2021, I felt defeated. I had a hard time accepting that this topic was actually necessary. The general lack of Critical Thinking skills remains staggering. - Bob Glickman