This is part of my series of video interviews with the speakers appearing at CSICon 2023. This conference is run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and will take place in Las Vegas from October 26-29. (You can find all the details and register right here.)
For this episode, my guest is science communicator Dave Farina, best known for his popular KZread channel Professor Dave Explains, which has over 2.6 million subscribers and over 1,300 videos on too many topics to list here.
Farina is passionate about neutralizing disinformation and science denial, from flat-earthers and creationists to anti-vaxxers and medical hoaxes, and he hopes to serve as a beacon toward the rehabilitation of public science literacy.
This is how the conference’s website describes his CSICon talk, titled “The Birth of the Science Communicator,” which is scheduled for Friday at 9:30 a.m.:
What is a science communicator? The era of once-a-decade outliers such as Carl Sagan is long gone. In this current era of internet-borne disinformation and science denial pandemonium, science communication has emerged as a vibrant and painfully necessary field, with an army of science scholars focusing their expertise exclusively on informing the public.
Charlatans and anti-science propaganda have never been more prevalent, and the stakes have never been higher. As the existential challenge of the twenty-first century begins to materialize, how do we help people know what is true?
This talk will clarify the issue and players involved, as well as highlight important strategies that can be implemented toward winning this war with ourselves.
In this interview, Farina and I discussed a wide range of topics besides his CSICon talk, including how and why he transitioned from science academia into a career in science communications and how he manages to produce such an enormous amount of KZread content on such a wide variety of subjects.
We talked about Farina’s perceived urgency to increase the quantity and quality of career science communicators to battle the ever increasing “myriad of bad-faith actors on the internet and neutralize them one by one” in this post-truth era where people create their own realities. Farina believes that “calmly presenting facts has not worked,” and so “we need to identify some new strategies.”
We discussed his thoughts on “flat-earth priests” such as Mark Sargent and flat-earth KZreadr David Weiss and also talked about some of his favorite debunks. They are in the fields of molecular and evolutionary biology and origin of life research. This led to a conversation about a confrontational debate he had with James Tour, labeled by Farina a “creationist-chemist-apologist,” on this very subject at Rice University: “Are We Clueless About the Origin of Life?” As I told Farina, I had never seen anyone in any other science debate get as angry or shouty as Tour did with him.
I hope you enjoy this interview! If you want to meet Professor Dave or any of the other great CSICon speakers in person, plan on attending the conference this year; time is fast running out to book your trip. Note that you can find all my pre-CSICon 2023 interviews as well as those from last year right here.