Digital Bits Skeptic is about promoting critical thinking and skepticism. This site was created as a response to the frustratingly large amount of credulity and scientific ignorance in today’s society.

A skeptical outlook in life is healthy. At the very least, it prevents you from wasting your time or money. At the most, it can save lives. Much of what we see reported in today’s media is overly credulous. Impressive claims are often accepted as fact, without question. Those that are questioned are often not tested scientifically to prove the claim.

From New Age mysticism to organized religion, from aromatherapy to Bigfoot, Digital Bits Skeptic is a collection of articles critically examining these kinds of topics.

Digital Bits is a registered trademark.

“How can I help?”

If you’re serious about helping, there are two things you can do:

1) Support DBS. This helps ensure the long-term survival of the site. And apart from happiness resulting from spending money on a worthy cause, subscribing also gets you additional perks.

2) Write an article. This helps ensure continuing quality content.

“Who’s responsible for all this?”

Digital Bits Skeptic was conceived, designed and implemented by Andy Kaiser. Andy also happens to have written a few articles. He’s the guy reading the podcast, and the person with whom you deal when submitting an article for publication.

Andy Kaiser’s day job as a networking and systems consultant keeps him busy, but he spends a lot of after-hours effort on DBSkeptic, usually writing his own articles, editing those of others or maintaining the site. He has written weekly technology columns for multiple newspapers, and has had his work featured in many high-geek-profile publications, including Slashdot, Geek Speak Radio, Techdirt and 2600 Magazine. For skeptical-centric appearances, he’s appeared in Skeptic magazine and been interviewed by “Warning: Radio“.

Kaiser’s interests span a wide range of topics. These include physically testing the actual effect of “electric vampire power“, testing the validity of “orgone chips“, finding the worst drink for your teeth , or having arguably unique takes on the usually stale topics of UFOs and lake monsters. Some articles are more nebulous and theoretical, like a critical analysis of popular fairy tales, thoughts on the meaning of life and the failure of Digital Rights Management.

“What kind of articles is Digital Bits Skeptic looking for?”

Digital Bits Skeptic is looking for articles promoting skepticism and critical thinking. Using a broad definition, remember the motto: “Bring skepticism and critical thinking to our world of new age, religion and credulous pop culture“.

For specific ideas, see the Wikipedia article on skepticism. The DB Skeptic website is more focused on the topics labeled as “scientific skepticism“, “activist skepticism“, and “religious skepticism“. To pick just a few of the many options, here’s a section from the same Wikipedia article:

“Common topics that scientifically-skeptical literature questions include health claims surrounding certain foods, procedures, and medicines, such as homeopathy, Reiki, Thought Field Therapy (TFT), vertebral subluxations; the plausibility of supernatural entities (such as ghosts, poltergeists, angels, and gods); as well as the existence of ESP/telekinesis, psychic powers, and telepathy (and thus the credibility of parapsychology); topics in cryptozoology, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, alien visitations, UFOs, crop circles, astrology, repressed memories, creationism, intelligent design, dowsing, conspiracy theories, and other claims the skeptic sees as unlikely to be true on scientific grounds.”

Your article doesn’t have to be a standard essay, and can cover far more topics than those listed above. Published topics include a review of a theist/atheist debate, a critical examination of consumer technology and a commonly-held belief, positive reviews of books exemplifying critical thought, and negative reviews of books and movies ignoring critical thought. Articles are funny and satirical, and sad and mysterious. They deal with ingrained cultural beliefs like astrology and Bigfoot, and introduce new skeptical concepts. Articles have analyzed ”mysterious ghost orb photos“ and debunked pseudoscientific claims about aromatherapy.

The allowable range is very wide. A final comment, however: when picking an article, we prefer something more than an opinion piece. While we’ve published many of these, priority and preference is given to those articles that actively promote critical thinking and skepticism. If you believe something, include proof of why you believe this is right. If you are critical of something, analyze it properly and fairly. If you report on a test or experiment, make the testing double-blinded when possible, and make the test repeatable so others can verify your results.

If in doubt about a topic, just contact Digital Bits Skeptic and ask.

“I don’t want to get paid. Can’t I submit an article for free? Or can the payment just be a link to my own website from my skeptical article?”

Of course, though it falls under the same rules you see mentioned in the open request for skeptical articles, including the requirement that your article can’t be available anywhere else on the Internet.

“What are the goals of Digital Bits Skeptic?”

and

“I’m just wondering why you’re paying people, and so much, considering there is no print/subscriptions for you to make money off of?”

DBS uses any extra money to pay writers for their skeptical articles. We want to offer a respectable payment per article for those willing to contribute their writing. Long term, here’s what we want to happen:

1) DBS will become self-sustaining.

2) Paying the writers helps ensure higher-quality articles.

3) DBS will grow and evolve using a method we haven’t seen used before on the Internet.

Extra money would be nice, but it’s not the focus. The intent is to disperse the majority of income to the writers contributing to the site. The site isn’t intended to make money. If it breaks even, we’ll be happy. If it makes money, it will exceed expectations (and we’ll be happy). In order to pay writers, DBS has operated at a loss for a long time. We’re perfectly willing to do this, assuming the goals listed above are eventually met.

The reason we’re offering “so much” is because:

We’ve been happy to take free articles, and advertised that fact for a while. We got no takers. This makes sense in our world of instant blogs and cheap Internet access.

We then began offering $5 per article, and was told by someone on another forum that they’d give us free articles, but $5 was an insult. (You just can’t win.) $20 is as high as we’re comfortable paying at this time. We want to stop messing around with small amounts and be willing to offer an amount people would actually notice.

“I want to submit an article to you for publication, but it’s already been published somewhere else. Why won’t you publish it?”

and

“After you’ve published my article, I will then take the the text and add it back to a relevant page that I already posted in the past. This may seem like I posted the article in my blog before you published it.”

When Google, Yahoo and other search engines crawl through the Internet, one of the factors they examine on a particular web page is the creation date. If two pages have the same content, but page A was created before page B, page A will get higher priority in search results. One of the reasons DBSkeptic pays money for publication rights is to justify getting this earlier creation date. The “post new text to an older page” method described above subverts this system.

So, if you want to work with DBSkeptic, the article you submit must not appear before DBSkeptic’s post. It also must not appear to have been posted earlier, in the case of copying text back into an earlier-posted article.

“What is the Article ID?”

You’ll find an article ID listed at the beginning of each article. The article ID number is used mostly for DBS’s podcast listeners. All DBS articles have long web address, and these would be difficult to communicate via a podcast. So, the (much shorter) article ID is spoken during the podcast recording – listeners can then use the search tool to look up the article ID they want.

The actual structure of the ID number is for informational purposes as well. The first two digits indicate the year of publication (with “11″ being considered year one – 2007), and the rest of the digits indicate the article count for that year. So in the case of “article ID 125“, that’s the fifth article published by DB Skeptic in 2008.

“Who wrote the music used in the podcast?”

The title of the piece is “Chaosity“, and was composed by OmTheory (Greg Wiseman). Chaosity is released under a Creative Commons license.

“I could see the need for dbskeptic.com to be anonymous, but how do you show you can be trusted if nobody knows who you are?”

(This question was asked early in DBS history, when the site itself and all articles were presented anonymously.)

To some extent, you do have to blindly trust us, at least when submitting your first article. But I can think of several ways to verify we’re legitimate:

Email the people who have written articles on the site, and ask them about their experiences dealing with Digital Bits Skeptic. (Authors are listed at the top of each article. Most link to either an email address or a website.)

Look at the number of articles, the number of writers, and read the submission guidelines. That’s awfully elaborate to be a scam. The amount of time it would take to create such a scam would be better spent actually building a real site!

Email us with an article idea, via the Digital Bits Skeptic “Contact Digital Bits Skeptic” page. You’ll find the publication process is standarized and formal, and Andy Kaiser (the editor) is a nice guy to deal with.

“How do I get an image posted with my comments?”

As you look at user comments after each article, you may see some users have customized pictures next to their comments. To get one yourself, sign up for a free Gravatar account. Sign up with your email address. Give the Gravatar system a photo. Then, all comments made by you will use your Gravatar picture. You just need to make sure that, when filling in comments, the email address you use in the comment form is the same one that you used to sign up for your Gravatar account.

This will work on all forums compatible with Gravatar photos, including Digital Bits Skeptic.

I want to use DBSkeptic pictures or text. What’s your reprint and legal policy?

Everything on Digital Bits Skeptic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Digital Bits is a registered trademark.

Why can’t I leave a comment on an article?

All articles allow anyone to post comments for six months. After 180 days pass, comments are closed. This ensures that finished conversations aren’t dredged up after the initial discussion has long since finished.

Why was my comment deleted?

While honest comments to further a discussion – and your time spent writing them – are truly appreciated, the anonymous, chaotic nature of the Internet makes this section a requirement. Comments will be deleted if they meet any of these conditions:

Your comment is insulting or abusive.
Your comment offers nothing to further the discussion.
Your comment does not have anything to do with the topic you’ve replied to.

If a user seems earnestly involved in having a productive conversation, a warning may be given. However, this is not a guarantee. Comments may also be deleted with no warning.

Skepticism. Critical thinking. Podcast. Community.

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