SIO77: Stephanie Zvan on Anti-Harassment Policies and More

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 77. I'm your host Thomas Smith. Alright, today I'm going to be speaking with Stephanie Zvan. We'll do a little bit in the intro. She'll introduce herself, but she was in, kind of on the ground floor of trying to get harassment policies, anti-harassment policies, I guess you'd call them, in atheist and skeptic conferences. And you'd be surprised, it would seem like a straightforward thing, but unfortunately it wasn't. I talked to her about that, feminism related things, really interesting conversation. So, without further ado, let's get right over to my interview with Stephanie Zvan.

0:01:16 Thomas: I'm joined right now by Stephanie Zvan, whose name I've had wrong in my mind for a while. Thanks for correcting me on not Stephanie Zvon, which is what I would have said. Thank you for joining me, Stephanie.

0:01:28 Stephanie: Thanks for having me on.

0:01:29 Thomas: I read your piece that you wrote in response to, I guess David Smalley did a talk that was kind of like the article that he already wrote that we, I think we both kind of responded to. But at any rate, it was a really excellent piece, and you talked about fact that you've tried to get anti-harassment policies into these skeptic conferences, and I just realized I don't really know much about that, and I'm a little worried, like, to find out what has happened with that, because it seems like a pretty straightforward thing, right? You would just write up a policy, and everybody would be happy, right, is that how it went?

0:02:08 Stephanie: Oh, I wish. So it's not really surprising you haven't heard about all of this. At least the most recent wave of feminist activists working on the movement itself really dates back to about 2009 when we were talking about the fact that almost all the speakers at every conference were, were male, and white, incidentally. But we hadn't identified nearly as many black atheists at that point or ex-Muslims at that point to make that as much of an issue. There were plenty of women around. It was a couple of years after the start of the new atheist boom, but women weren't being put on stage, um, and so we worked on that for a couple of years with varying degrees of success, um, lot of argument, because these things always come with argument. And then in 2012, Melody Hensley organized the Women in Secularism conference for the Center for Inquiry in D.C. And there

0:02:26 Thomas: Hmm. All White men.

0:03:15 Stephanie: Were a lot of amazing speakers put on stage. There were from Susan Jacoby, who, how can you not put her on stage anytime you get a chance, to young, call them internet atheists, like Jen McCreight of the old blog Blag Hag, and there was a panel about feminism in atheism, because of course it had been a mildly controversial topic for a couple of years, had really ramped up the year before with Elevatorgate. And the short version

0:03:15 Thomas: No. I'm just kidding, oh, Yeah, yeah.

0:03:53 Stephanie: Of that, that is that Rebecca Watson of Skepchick spoke at a conference in Ireland and hung out in the bar and the hotel the evening afterwards, talking with a bunch of people, the way that you do at conferences. And about 4 a.m., she said, oh, and during this, you know, a lot of the talk, was a lot of the discussion was related to her talk where she talked about not wanting to be sexualized and that this happens to her a lot. And so about 4 a.m., she announced to the room she was tired. She was going to bed. One of the people who had been hearing her say that all night, an older gentleman, followed, followed her back to the elevator, got on with her, at which point, in that nice small space with the doors closed, he invited her up to his room for coffee. And she did a little video about the event and, you know, said at the end of that, guys, don't do that.

0:04:24 Thomas: That's Pretty much exactly how she said it too, from my memory, like, it was, I, she wasn't like screaming, she was like, really, you know, yeah, she's like, guys, don't do that, and oh man, and that was that right, it just was over after for that, point everyone's like, okay, just that became

0:05:00 Stephanie: Yeah. I think she shrugged, you now. Um, and then yeah, I mean everybody took it really well, they all understood the concerns, the internet exploded.

0:05:19 Thomas: A culture war, like a class, it's crazy, Yeah.

0:05:23 Stephanie: Yeah. Much of that explosion happened on, around PZ Meyer's blog, including comments, um, the infamous Dear Muslima comments from Richard Dawkins, which basically said, you know, what are you talking about, you're, you're not living under an oppressive Islamic regime, how dare you complain. It was all written in completely different words, but that was the gist of it.

0:05:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:05:49 Stephanie: And, and at that point, um, and atheism was a big hot button topic and it really didn't slow down. So that was point where we were, uh, almost a year later with, yeah,

0:05:59 Thomas: I just want to, if you don't mind, I want to butt in here, because that's something that I become more social justice oriented. I think I started kind of like just agnostic about the whole thing because I wasn't really immersed in it, and then slowly I started to see, one reason, and I've come out more on the, just on the social justice side, is I start to see wild overreaction by white men and like incredible sensitivity and like attack, you know, and it's just, it's, it really, once you, once you notice it, it is like, geez, it is everything, like Rebecca Watson merely said, guys, don't do that, like that was literally her tone and she is just telling her personal opinion about how you should maybe not, you, you know, hit on a girl in that way. And it was taken as like, what, guys can never hit on a girl, like, just crazy overreactions to the point where she was really viciously attacked online, which, I don't know, you'd probably know more about that than I would.

0:06:01 Stephanie: I

0:06:59 Thomas: But just this oversensitivity in this like victim mentality is really, it's something I've noticed in the last year a lot, and it's really disturbing how easy it is to just offend this mob of people who will come after whoever it is, usually women.

0:07:17 Stephanie: Mean, in the, the reaction after all of that, there was a, um, a couple of comment threads on another blog, I won't even mention it at this point, but that just went on and on for hundreds of comments about how terrible this all was, etc, etc, and went after anybody who happened to agree with Rebecca. So, for example, I had my employer information posted in there as though, you know, that was going to be really relevant, that people were going to need to talk to my employer about this or something. As far as I know, it never happened, but yeah.

0:07:44 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:07:54 Thomas: These are the same people, by the way, who are like, oh, free exchange of ideas. What? You disagree with me? I'm doxing you. You know, it's that kind of thing.

0:07:55 Stephanie: Yes. Yes, these are the same people who, if you block them from, on Twitter, you're, you're interfering with their free speech. So that's the kind of dual standards we're talking about. Yep, yeah, again, that's where we were when Women and Secularism happened, and there was a panel on feminism, and Jen McCreight was on that panel, and she happened to mention that she had, since she'd started speaking at conferences, had people pull her aside and tell her which male speakers she shouldn't be around, because, because she could get persistently hit on, followed back up to her hotel room, groped, worse. And she mentioned this on stage, and it got live tweeted on the conference hashtag. And, as it turns out, the internet can explode more. So this was a revelation at that point. I wasn't sure that could happen, but it did.

0:08:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:59 Thomas: Did she name names? I don't remember this.

0:09:03 Stephanie: She didn't, although there was certainly discussion in the restaurants attached to the hotel later that night when everybody was sitting around. It's kind of well known that was happening because naming names could damage people. And I'll come back to that, that's an important part of this to talk about. Next morning I woke up with my brain buzzing, probably about 5 or 6 a.m., before it was time to catch a plane at like noon, and sat there in my hotel room realizing that in order to actually have something come out of this other than explosions, it was, was time to get ahead of it, um, and basically wrote a piece which was, yes, this is real, yes, this is a problem, um, here are several of the objections you're going to throw up because we've heard them over the last year, and here are answers to those objections, um, I won't say it made the internet blow up any less, but it did at least get people to think about it as a, as something to be dealt with rather than, let's debate whether this is happening so much.

0:09:05 Thomas: Okay.

0:10:24 Thomas: So what was your, your experience that led to that, was it really just her experience, or did you have any personal experience with this? Had it been building for a while? Okay.

0:10:31 Stephanie: At that point, I hadn't spoken anywhere. I hadn't been doing more than hosting the Atheists Talk Radio show in Minnesota, which was very local, and I'd been writing for about a year on, on Freethought Blogs, so I wasn't very high profile, um, you know, there were things like, so people want to flirt with each other, and is that, this isn't flirting. Jen is a professional, speaking in her professional capacity at conferences, and she is being warned of something that as a professional she has to navigate that other people don't.

0:10:41 Thomas: Okay.

0:10:58 Thomas: But yeah Yeah, it's almost like, uh, like, don't, don't feed the animals kind of thing, it's like someone had to tell her, like, okay, that's a dangerous person, over, you know, that's, that's a weird thing to have to go through that, as you said, weird that, that, you know, no one else has to go through it, like, no one els has to worry about this, but she has to, like, be very careful to steer around these people's behavior, yeah.

0:11:41 Stephanie: She should be worrying about whether she has all the slides she needs. She should not be worried about somebody following her up to her hotel room. Um, and I mean, basically, I wrote this because the internet had been exploding for nearly continually for a year, and I really just wanted something to happen to take it in a productive direction. Um, I was gratified that once it had been said in that kind of venue, um, people started taking it seriously. And so the next thing I said is, there are these things called anti-harassment policies. They exist in the professional world. They're not that hard to pick up. Here's the Geek Feminist wiki with a decent example. It may not be exactly what works for you, have one.

0:12:26 Stephanie: Be prepared to deal with this. Don't, you know, don't go bury your head back in the sand. And several organizations were really good about picking that up right away. Way. Secular Student Alliance, unsurprisingly, had already had a policy, as most of their clients are students. But they took the opportunity to revamp theirs. American Atheists had recently had an incident at their conference after Reason Rally. And they were like, yes, yes, we've been meaning to do that, let's do that now, which was great. A couple of other organizations were so great. JREF and the Amazing Meeting managed to not just drag their heels on that, but actually go after the people who suggested it was necessary, as though it were personal insult. Um, for a number of years, it, I think, didn't really work out for them, although that may have also been the fact that, um, a BuzzFeed report came out talking about a rape that happened at one of their events that they apparently knew about, which

0:12:45 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:38 Thomas: The JREF was pretty, there, it's pretty bad. I've heard, I, I knew someone who worked there, and it was, uh, it was, let's just say, they were not at all responsive to this in any way, like, to the, and it wasn't just like ignorance, you know, it was it was pretty intentional, by, from what I hear.

0:13:40 Stephanie: Yeah that's My impression as well. Um, I don't want to particularly single them out, because there were other organizations, on local level that kind of thing, that also, um, after all the explanations, we're just like, well, why do we need one? Um, can't stop people from flirting, the, the human race will die out. That

0:14:15 Thomas: Let me ask you a basic question, what, what are you trying, trying to get in these, uh, harassment policies, like, what, what is in them, I mean, is it a, you know leave room for Jesus, no touching, huh?

0:14:25 Stephanie: Is an excellent question. No, absolutely not. Um, these are basically, um, describe the behavior that is unacceptable at a conference, but that is not, um, it is certainly not flirting. It is not, there are conferences that have their own codes of conduct that prohibit harassment, and that doesn't get in the way of sex, as Greta Christina pointed out, very early on in this.

0:14:54 Thomas: Yeah good point, yeah.

0:14:56 Stephanie: Basically, they targeting somebody on the basis of sex race, gender, religion. And we can talk about that one because that's interesting one in the atheist movement. Class, disability, all that kind of stuff. Basically, they prohibit singling somebody out for behavior that you wouldn't do to somebody not in their class. Many of them also specifically say, you know, if somebody says your interaction is done, on. It's done. Somebody tells you that what they're doing is harassing you. Stop. Some of them address the materials that can be presented on stage. A lot of that depends on what kind of conference it is. There are conferences where you expect a lot more sexual material on stage, there are some where it might be a surprise. And that's an issue. Because in situations with really really strong gender imbalances, putting up sexual materials and, um, really draw attention to specifically the women in the room.

0:15:35 Thomas: That makes sense yeah oh

0:16:13 Stephanie: Um, putting out materials that, uh, talk about race can suddenly make race salience and everybody's looking at the, the two black guys in the the room, that kind of thing. So there are ways of handling that kind of material. And the Geek Feminism Wiki actually has a couple of different options for doing that if that's something, you know, depending on your level of what kind of material you want or what kind of material is actually relevant to your topics.

0:16:43 Thomas: That's interesting, is that a link I should throw on the show notes? Excellent.

0:16:45 Stephanie: Yes, and I will send that to you after we're done recording. Supporting a good code of conduct also tells you, and you may notice, we've, I've moved away from talking about anti-harassment, um, we were really talking about specifically harassment in the, the wake of Women and Secularism. Um, that doesn't necessarily get to all of the ways that people can be targeted, so a lot of what we end up talking about really is better described as codes of conduct.

0:16:58 Thomas: Yeah Plus, it, normalizes it as not, like, this extra burdensome thing, like, you should just have, everybody should, should just have a code of conduct at their event, right?

0:17:25 Stephanie: Well, and when you're talking about things that people might want to flag at the beginning of their presentation to tell people that that's what their presentation is going to be about, those presenters aren't harassing anybody by including it. It's just a good expectation to set, to let people know if they might encounter particularly challenging material. And, yes, yes, we're basically talking about content notes, or, are more broadly referred to, trigger warnings. The other thing that a good code of conduct does is tell you how to find somebody who is with the event to talk to if something goes wrong.

It tells you what to expect if you make a report of being targeted with some kind of behavior. It tell you, if you are a person who, who does that, what you can expect, and what your obligations as an attendee of an event are for handling it with the organizers. So it sets the tone, it tells people what they shouldn't do, and to some extent what they should do. They're often a little bit aspirational in terms of the kinds of community they want to be. Tells you what to to do if that goes wrong and tells you what to expect from there?

0:17:51 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:43 Thomas: Yeah. Me Can this? I wonder if this will be helpful. Like, I wonder I wonder if there don't there are people listening who are thinking, you I want to go, I wanna have fun at one of these things, but now I'm worried about my behavior. Do people need to be worried listening? I mean, what are the kinds of things, you're not talking about merely flirting or merely, you now, hitting on someone, or are you? What are the kind of things like behavior-wise that people ought to To know, okay, this isn't okay.

0:19:13 Stephanie: Well, the thing about flirting is it can be unwelcome, which means that technically it could fall under a code of conduct. But the nice thing about a code of conduct that basically says, you know, somebody tells you you're done, you're down, is people feel empowered to say, no, this is not what I'm looking for right here. And then, you know, and then you can stop, and you don't have to worry about whether what you you were doing made somebody uncomfortable. It's actually an atmosphere in which it's much easier to set limits and respect everybody's boundaries, because nobody is having to kind of shuffle around to figure out what's okay and what's not, can tell you if it's not okay.

0:19:56 Thomas: Yeah, it sounds like it puts the burden on, you whoever's being hit on a lot. Do you feel about that? Does that make sense?

0:20:03 Stephanie: Well, you If you go up to somebody and you're like, hey, nice boots, let's fuck, that's still not going to be appropriate. That's not appropriate in any venue, and honestly, everybody should know that. And at some point, if you are already that far over the line, yeah, maybe somebody's not going to tell you to your face that's wrong, they're just going to go find somebody and report you. You But if you're, you know, talking to somebody and you're like, hey, so, you know, we've been enjoying this chat, you want to go get a drink, and that person says, no, I'm really not interested in anything personal, I, that's a much easier line to set, right?

0:20:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:20:42 Thomas: It's yeah. So responding to signals, signals and not just signals, like, act if you, someone says no thanks, then that's the answer, like, that's not, the not true, I think that's, that isn't that what, what those uh red pill assholes should think, like, if a girl says no, that doesn't mean no, like, you have to just keep trying forever because that's not true, yeah.

0:21:07 Stephanie: Well And at one point that was something of a social standard because we placed pressure on women to not be overtly sexual. But that's not the world we want to live in. We don't want to have women have to tell you no three times before it's okay. That kind of thing.

0:21:27 Thomas: Like some sort of magic spell or something, thing like just one, one no should be a plenty, all right, it? So sounds like, and you brought up the example of like a kink conference, I think you said something like that, like it sounds like this can still be plenty sex positive, right?

0:21:41 Stephanie: Yeah, to the best of my knowledge, sex has not stopped happening at conferences with codes of conduct. No,

0:21:48 Thomas: Because that's, I think that's often how people attack this, a lot like all these feminists, they, they, they want nobody to be having any sex, that's regressive. It's like going back to the 50s or something. I don't know.

0:22:02 Stephanie: As it turns out, sex and sexuality, at least for people who are not themselves asexual, is a really pretty durable thing. It's hard to mess with that effectively. Right.

0:22:13 Thomas: Yeah, but also, I mean, that's not what these are trying to do. It's just trying to stop unwelcome behavior. Okay. Do you think this has been most conferences? Or where are we in your timeline and kind of the battle of getting these enacted?

0:22:20 Stephanie: Exactly. For the most part, the battle was won within a couple of years of, about 2014, so within a couple of years of Women in Secularism, um, the conferences that, you struck a principal position and we're not going to have codes of conduct, um, still had to deal with things happening at their conferences and they just didn't have any good way for it to happen. Everybody else was pretty much like, oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard. It's an ongoing thing to actually make working codes of conduct, despite having some, some good examples. It's always an ongoing thing to enforce them fairly, um, that's going to be something that goes on for a long time, um, it is particularly still an ongoing things to deal with, um, celebrities who don't

0:22:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I was

0:23:30 Stephanie: Behave well, well,

0:23:30 Thomas: Going to mention that. Yeah. Because there's a really big incentive, right, for like, this person, you know, is a money-making, ticket-selling person. An incentive on the part of whoever's organizing to kind kind of brush things under the rug or whatever. Is that something that's a problem these days?

0:23:49 Stephanie: It that's always been a problem. But also, most people, even people who attend conferences in the atheist movement, are not that plugged in to what's happening online. Line, most of them still haven't heard, you know, about the fact that, um, ran an article talking about an accusation of rape against Michael Shermer, even with news that big, a lot of people still haven't heard it, so a lot of people are still asking for these people to come and speak. And yeah, they're willing to pay for tickets if that happens. So there's still a lot of organizers trying to figure out how to navigate that. And it's certainly not all of them. Some of them put their feet down pretty quickly.

0:24:38 Stephanie: There are certain people that you will only ever see at certain conferences because those conferences are still figuring out what, if anything, to do about this, but you're not going to see them at most conferences anymore. But as long as we can't talk about this as long, as we get sued for saying somebody has acted inappropriately when that person's reputation is damaged by it, that remains an uphill battle. And, you know, full disclosure, I'm being sued right now for saying somebody has acted inappropriately.

0:25:08 Thomas: Wow. Just for saying that? I mean, that's got to be... Are you lawyered up? That doesn't sound like a good... Okay, good.

0:25:12 Stephanie: Yeah, we have a good lawyer. We have an excellent lawyer. Um,

0:25:19 Thomas: Now, when you say we, who are you talking about?

0:25:22 Stephanie: I am being sued personally, along with The Orbit, the blog network that I'm on. PZ Myers is being sued, personally, along with Freethought Blogs. Skepticon and their chair are being sued. And a former student who wrote about this on her Facebook page. We're all being sued together. This is the Richard Carrier lawsuit, right?

0:25:27 Thomas: Okay.

0:25:44 Thomas: Richard Carrier, yeah, we talked about this lawsuit on Opening Arguments, I believe, or maybe, you know what, maybe it was on this show, because do a show with a lawyer called Opening Arguments. So, we talk about this kind of thing, and yeah, no, yeah, okay, well, it's bullshit, so. So, but that doesn't mean you won't, you know, people get put through hell, even with bullshit lawsuits. And it's a, yeah, yeah.

0:25:54 Stephanie: Right. Yeah, I'm one of the defendants in that.

0:26:10 Stephanie: And it's very costly. You know, having a decent attorney, even one who gives us a good rate, because he is a First Amendment attorney, and this is one of his big issues. And that's Mark Randazza. Even with the rates that he gives us, this is still not cheap.

0:26:28 Thomas: Yeah. It's, it's true that if you, if someone is dedicated to the idea of kind of legally harassing someone, there's, unfortunately, there is a downside to our system.

0:26:41 Thomas: Yeah. So, that's still ongoing. Oh, man. Man, right,

0:26:44 Stephanie: There is. It is. The courts are also slow. I mean, and, you know, that gives everybody a chance to say what they need to say before the courts make a decision, but it doesn't make it any faster.

0:26:55 Thomas: What about, how do you feel about representation in the community? You know, I frankly, and I also could tie this in because after this, boy, in the last year or so, when I've seen so many famous, quote unquote famous atheists and skeptics come out on the side of, being you anti-social justice, being Anti-PC to to the point where they're confusing, you know, purposefully making the case that Trump and Hillary were the same. This past year was not good for me, for atheism, and it was not good for the world too, but this has been a rough year. I have felt like, and I wonder what your opinion on this is, because lately I've felt like I don't even know if I'm in this movement movement anymore.

0:27:40 Thomas: You know, like, I don't really, I don't know how much I was to begin with, but I don't, I just, I feel a little lost in it, you know, with how uphill the battle is when people like Sam Harris say that Black Lives Matter is obviously harmful to our society and like a detriment to our conversation, all this stuff. And these are the biggest voices, you know, Richard Dawkins, you referenced, I mean, he's still being Richard Dawkin and saying anti-feminist stuff all the time. And it's like, it just feels like such an uphill battle that I don't even want to be a part of it, but maybe that's the wrong approach. I haven't really gotten my mind around this. How do you feel about it? Do you feel like you're in a movement? Are you still trying to reclaim it? How do You feel?

0:28:25 Stephanie: I'm still in a movement. Some of that is because I'm really incredibly stubborn. It's hard to get me to drop some things, but I think my answer to that would have been different year ago than it is now. Because right now, um, the atheist movement is also having to figure out how it's relevant in our current political realities. Um, I think there are places to do that if we, if we manage to adapt – adopt a real skepticism about the – the kinds of issues that we're facing. Not the, well, there are six studies that say men have one kind of brain and women have another kind of brain. But actually, talking about what large fields of research really say.

0:28:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:29:20 Stephanie: I really have to to mention the whole conceptual penis thing at this point because I cannot imagine anything to make us as a movement more relevant in this day and age attacking sociology and gender studies as a whole and doing it in a way that provides any constructive criticism, criticism, but in a way that is a teenage boy's gotcha dream. Um, the

0:29:21 Thomas: The Sure.

0:29:54 Thomas: Yeah,

0:29:56 Stephanie: Whole thing was

0:29:56 Thomas: I had James Lindsay on. I confronted him about it.

0:29:58 Stephanie: Yeah yeah that was the the responses to that have not been impressive, their their responses to that

0:30:04 Thomas: It's amazing. It really is. And I think that's what is one reason why I don't feel like it's even a movement because it was the skeptic movement. And there's all these things that there's just zero skepticism on, you dudes post a paper, a fake paper on essentially like a GeoCities website or whatever. Like it's nothing. The the journal they posted in, and all of a sudden the whole field is wrong. They have no experience in the field. It's one thing if they wanted to try to write a criticism, do a meta study, whatever, but they keep citing this Twitter account as though that justified their arguments all along. And it's just, it's amazing how little skepticism there is toward this stuff. It's just its own political ideology. And I think that's what's so frustrating coming back to maybe maybe where we started with this David Smalley piece is like, there are a lot of these assumptions in this movement that what I think is the neutral thing, like what, you know, the anti-gender studies and anti-PC thing is like the neutral, rational thing. And then these other people are the troublemakers. It seems to be

0:30:06 Stephanie: Yes yeah

0:31:13 Thomas: A lot the mindset.

0:31:13 Stephanie: As one of the perpetual troublemakers, let me just say that throwing out entire fields of science is a little extremist, a little. At the same time, we have people in this movement who are embedded in these fields like sociology and political science and actually have a good understanding of broad overview, can actually look at data and talk about what it really does and doesn't mean. But when was the last time you saw people putting Melanie Brewster forward? She's a sociologist who talks about, who who studies religion at Columbia. You

0:31:22 Thomas: Yeah. On almost no evidence, too like of any kind yeah Not a single one of them talked to somebody in gender studies, yeah

0:32:06 Stephanie: She actually has a PhD in her field. Um, there's Juan Navarro Rivera who worked for PRI and and other agencies that basically are looking at data on our changing demographics and telling us what's actually coming in terms of what this country is going to look like. Again, looking at how religion plays into all of this. But when was the last time you saw anybody treating those two as superstars? We

0:32:36 Thomas: Interesting Right We treat, I, I said this in one of my last episodes, we, we treat biologists as though they have these insights into everything, like they're qualified to talk about all this different stuff. And it's, it's weird. If somebody can, success, usually, if there's a man who has a PhD, they can brand themselves as like Mr. Reason, and then they're elevated to a really high position in this community. And it's another example, this whole Brett Weinstein stuff, this quote unquote skeptic community took one person's point of view on like an entire just mess of events at a university they knew nothing about five seconds ago. They just interviewed one guy and took his opinion about like the inter-office politics and like the faculty meetings and all this.

0:33:33 Thomas: And that was it. Like that was as far as anyone looked into it in this skeptic community. And it's, you know, not to say he was wrong about everything or right about everything. It's just how, how is that skeptical?

0:33:44 Stephanie: Would have no way to know. Yeah.

0:33:46 Thomas: So, so you want to stay and stick with it then, I guess.

0:33:52 Thomas: Do you, do you actually, I was going to ask this. I mean, do because there are some people who think we need a different movement or or we need a different branding, or we do rename something, or maybe you and I are social justice atheists or something. How do you feel about that?

0:34:06 Stephanie: Know, honestly, okay, Okay. I'm okay sometimes with just calling them bad skeptics.

0:34:11 Thomas: So, turn it around on them. Yeah, that's

0:34:13 Stephanie: Yeah. I The data points in the direction of saying that much of our scientific inquiry over the last couple of hundred years has been biased and we're working on fixing that by bringing in people with different biases. And as we do that, it turns out we're getting different answers and we should reconsider consider some stuff. If that's not skepticism, what is?

0:34:38 Thomas: Right. Okay, so you want to hang on to the skeptic label and just try to rebrand it, or just try what, take control of it back from people who are bad.

0:34:47 Stephanie: I did say I was stubborn.

0:34:48 Thomas: Bad. Yeah. Well, I respect that. I really can't decide, you know. But then most of the time, it's just I'm so busy trying to produce content. I don't have much time to think about it. But it's been frustrating lately. You know, it's a real uphill battle.

0:35:05 Stephanie: It is. I don't know. I mean, some of that is the economic incentives of celebrity. We've already talked about that a little bit. It applies for organizations as well. You know, Richard Dawkins has name recognition. So if you send out a newsletter that's offering a message from Richard Dawkins, there are a fair number of people who will pay attention because of that.

So honestly, actually, one of the things that I've done in recent years is worked with Secular Woman, which is a group that was also started just after the first Women in Secularism conference. Um, we did a conference two years ago called Secular Women Work, which was activist training that all of the people who were giving the training, either giving talks, sitting on our panels, or we did an awful lot of workshops, were women or genderqueer. Um, we didn't have any trouble finding people to do that, in part because a lot of the the people who do boots on the ground work in this movement are women. And they're not the ones generally being put on stage. But we've also done workshops at Skepticon the last couple of years. And we are working on putting together something a little more special for Skeptican this year that we are not quite ready to announce, I'm afraid.

0:36:32 Thomas: All right.

0:36:33 Stephanie: Should have fixed that before coming But we want to turn these people into household names. These are the people who, you know, if somebody is going to tell me that I'm doing something wrong as an activist, that I am chasing people away, these are the people I'm going to listen to because these are people who bring people in, who take care of them, who keep them around.

0:36:33 Thomas: Teaser.

0:36:55 Thomas: All Right. Well I really respect that let's try to... I'm with you on this then. You've convinced me. Let's try to wrangle this skeptic label back. But I do think calling these people bad skeptics is a really good idea. It's something I was doing, and then I had a baby and kind of forgot about it. But it really is true. Someone in a

0:37:12 Stephanie: Now you've actually done a lot of work on it and I appreciate that.

0:37:14 Thomas: Message just told me, one of my friends just was listening to an old podcast and said, oh, you made a great point that I do oftentimes is try to just look into these stories more, you know, and see like what's really behind some of these, you now, university madness stories. And then I instantly get labeled a SJW just for trying to like look into it, which you would think any skeptic would. And it's because we're so eager to put these labels on it.

And this is bad skepticism. And we, I think maybe it is worthwhile to attack it from that angle. You know something I just Just realize, this is something that just occurred to me, and I want to run this by you. I have held on to Sam Harris for so long. I've been probably too long, but I've been trying so hard to like, when he had Jordan B. Peterson on, it was just terrible in my opinion. At least the first 20 minutes where they talked about stuff where he said, I fully agree with everything he just said. And then after that, it was whatever, some some ridiculous epistemology conversation where Peterson was clearly wrong and Sam was trying to argue with him. But anyway, there's been, and it's just one thing after another, it's this Black Lives Matter thing. And a lot of people wanted, and I totally get it.

And, you know, I'm not saying you need to do anything in particular, but a lot people want to just give up on him and just say, this person's a racist and move on. And I'm just thinking, he's got such big influence that I feel like I want to keep trying to get through to him. And if we could change his mind on some of this stuff, it could filter down to a lot of people. But I don't know, what do you think? Have you given up on Sam Harris?

0:38:04 Stephanie: Well, okay. So part of where I'm situated in this whole movement is that I've never been anything but an atheist. So I don't have any celebrities to whom I owe, you know, getting me out of that.

0:39:09 Thomas: Sure. So Sam Harris didn't help you come out of some some cult or something. Yeah.

0:39:11 Stephanie: Right. I do have James Randi to thank for understanding that the nonfiction section of the library can still have things in it that aren't true. But, you know, that's as close as I get to having one of our celebrities really having changed my life in any significant good way. Way. One of the things I haven't really talked about is the fact that those of us who worked on codes of conduct got an awful lot of harassment ourselves.

0:39:43 Stephanie: Several people could not stick around in the movement and deal with that. And I'm probably only here because I'm stubborn. So So, um, the fact that people put us, people label us as invalid critics and out to destroy the movement and all that stuff that has a real impact on our lives. Um, but aside from that now for, well, honestly,

0:39:42 Thomas: Yeah, just for trying to do harassment policies. I don't understand. Is it also the behavior you've called out made public of certain skeptics, or what's gotten you the most harassment?

0:40:20 Stephanie: Probably just standing with Rebecca Watson.

0:40:23 Thomas: Yeah. All right. But anyway, back to the question. Sorry, Sam Harris.

0:40:24 Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So not my celebrities. So that makes it a little harder for me to answer this, but I don't know that you have to actually choose.

0:40:30 Thomas: Sure. Well, hold on. I know, sorry. I wonder if maybe I didn't word this this question well, because I'm not, I don't think it was predicated in my question that they have to be any sort of celebrities. It's just that you can't deny that Sam Harris has influence, like he has a ton of influence. And so whether or not, you're right, I think I threw you off because I was talking about, you know, hanging on to him personally. But I mean, even in just an effort kind of thing, like if we put, how much effort do we direct to which individuals? If I'm I'm trying to convince some rando Twitter egg, you know, which sometimes I get sucked into. It is really a nonsense thing for me to be doing.

You know, like I've tried to stop arguing with people on Twitter because it just doesn't work, you know, and it's effort that I'm putting out that I really should be putting into, you know, being a dad and stuff. But when it comes to somebody like Sam Harris, maybe there is merit to not giving up and trying to convince him because along with him might come a lot of other people and, and bring some, some,

0:40:51 Stephanie: Well,

0:41:40 Thomas: A good sea change to the movement. I don't know. It's just something that occurred to me just now. What do you think?

0:41:46 Stephanie: I think he is in such a position that we pretty much always have to criticize him. Hopefully, as a skeptic, he would pay attention to some of that criticism, but I don't know that that's something that you or I have any control over. I get a lot of people, you know, if I criticize him, saying, "Well, you should," I guess I do agree with your concern, but you should take it directly to him and and that's sweet, but, um, I am not that person he listens to, so right.

0:42:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:19 Thomas: And that's me trying to, like, I'm, I don't have his number, unfortunately. I wish I did, but yeah, it's, it's, that is one of the defenses people will do when I try to criticize him. Oh, stop. Why don't you talk to him? It's like, I'm trying. I really would love to speak to him. But I think another thing that happened, unfortunately, was because Sam Harris got hit early on, back a little bit before all this stuff, with some genuine bad actors, in my opinion, people who really did want to purposefully misunderstand what he's saying. I feel like his defenses are up now. And it's almost like any criticism is now getting lumped in with people, in his mind possibly, of people he thinks are being deliberately malicious and trying to criticize him. And it's unfortunate. I hope he's not closed down to it, but it kind of seems like that's what's happening because I can't remember the last time he... He used to have people on to try to argue with him, but I can't remember the actually debate them on something.

0:42:26 Stephanie: Right.

0:43:25 Stephanie: And I mean, I sympathize with that. I've been harassed on the internet for years, but I'm still expected to listen and figure out who has criticism worth listening to. And I try to do that and I don't have as many people counting on me to give them good information as he does.

0:43:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:47 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well, I suppose it's about the time when we come to a close. Is there anything that you wanted to make sure we got to that we missed out on?

0:43:55 Stephanie: I will just say, if you're thinking about Sam and where to put your energy, make sure you spend at least a little bit of that time promoting people who are getting things right. Because we really don't do that enough.

0:44:06 Thomas: Yeah, good idea. Good idea. I'm going to talk to you after about some guest recommendations.

0:44:15 Stephanie: Excellent.

0:44:15 Thomas: Great idea. I think you're right. Promoting the people who get things right is just as important as trying to, you critique the people who are getting things wrong. I think that's a great point. All right. Well, Stephanie Zvan, where should people go to find you? I know you're a blogger. You got some stuff going on. Tell us, give us all your plugs.

0:44:33 Stephanie: Sure, my blog is Almost Diamonds. You can find it at The Orbit, which is the-orbit.net slash almost diamonds. You can also find me on Twitter, where my handle is S-Z-V-A-N, and you will almost certainly spell it wrong on your first try. But keep looking.

0:44:52 Thomas: All right, thanks so much for coming on, giving us a little bit of that history. And it looks like, you guys were largely successful in your campaign to get these harassment policies instated, and that's great work you've done, and keep up the good work.

0:45:07 Stephanie: Thanks, and thanks for having me.

0:45:21 Thomas: All right, thanks again to Stephanie for coming on. Hey guys, on Thursday, I think I want to do the follow-up to that list of Trump Accomplishments, or as I would like to call some of them, participation trophies. So I think it'll be, I got a lot of people saying you wanted me to do that, and I'm thinking it'll be good to be able to do a full rebuttal, and I may even type it up if I can find the time. So that when Scott Adams and his ilk are around Twitter tweeting about how we need a new, new frame of reference because, uh, you know, he's accomplished so much, maybe I'll, I'll give you a nice solid list of rebuttal to, to say, "Oh no, actually he's just gotten a bunch of participation trophies." And, paper, but hey, I haven't gone through the remaining ones.

0:46:07 Thomas: So that'll be, we'll have to see. Maybe there's some good accomplishments in there. That said, thank you so much for listening. And I'm looking forward to doing that on Thursday's episode.