Who are the best debunkers of rumours, superstitions, and fallacies in your opinion? A lot of these books and sites often cover the same old things (like say nobody in Columbus’ day thought the Earth was flat for example).
First of all there is our incomparable Cecil Adams and his Straight Dope.
Then there is Snopes. com.
Among books I’d say the best I’ve seen are Brunvand’s work on urban legends, Ackerman’s *Popular Fallacies, *and John Stossel’s Get Out the Shovel (which is more explicity political than the other ones.
Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies In The Name Of Science is the single best debunking book ever written. Granted, some of the stuff he’s debunking is now out of date or totally forgotten, but his ability to write with flair, to not get shrill* and to seem to actually enjoy the hell out of the weird crap he’s debunking makes it a must-have.
*One of the unfortunate flaws in Randi’s writings is that his written voice is shrill. Even when I’m nodding in agreement with him, I’m also wishing he’d just chill out a little.
Skepdic.com is a good site as well as Skeptic magazine. I’ll second Penn & Teller. When it ran on Showtime, their show “Bullshit” was a great. Then there’s Christopher Hitchens, R.I.P. Not a typical debunker, but one of the world’s great skeptics.
Though I have not read it, I have heard good things about the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, so this thread prompted me to look it up, and on its Wikipedia page I found this quote:
Bullshit had some excellent episodes where they completely blow apart cultural bias, the circumcision and immigration and prison episodes come to mind.
They had some episodes that picked much less focused targets and just felt boring and like shooting fish in a barrel, oh look they got a woman selling healing crystals to say a bunch of nonsense on camera like contacting past lives etc. They then proceed to freeze frame and insult her, good thing they pointed out to me that reincarnation isn’t real:smack:
Some episodes just seemed about mocking non-mainstream beliefs which never needed the debunking as no testable claims were made.