Digital Bits Skeptic

To submit an article for publication on Digital Bits Skeptic, read our Open Request for Skeptical Articles.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

Digital Bits Skeptic is looking for articles about skepticism and critical thinking. Using a broad definition, remember the Digital Bits Skeptic tagline: “Skepticism and critical thinking in a 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.

“What is Digital Bits Skeptic about?”

The Digital Bits Skeptic website is about critical thinking and skepticism. The articles on this site show how to use these tools in today’s society. 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.

“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?”

The revenue (from the ads you see on the site) barely exceeds the hosting costs. DBS uses that 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. The website would be 1) self-sustaining, 2) the payments would help ensure high-quality articles on skepticism and critical thinking, and 3) growing and evolving 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 our 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. $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 address link names associated with them, and these would be difficult to communicate via a podcast. So, the (much shorter) article ID is spoken during the podcast recording, “For more information, visit the DB Skeptic website, and search for article ID 125.” This gives listeners easy assess to the article text.

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.