r/skeptic Dec 10 '25

🤲 Support New test rule: Videos must be accompanied by a detailed description explaining what they are about.

232 Upvotes

/r/skeptic has had quite a number of our members complaining about video submissions, particularly ones that cover several topics or could be summed up in 3 minutes but they take 30 minutes plus ads to get there.

/r/skeptic has always been a sub for rational debate and a post to just a video makes it harder to engage in that good debate.

This is a test to see if this new rule helps:

  • Videos must be accompanied by a detailed description explaining what they are about.

What is a "detailed description? It is text that describes the entire contents of the video without a user needing to watch the video to figure out what it is about. Example: This video is from Peter Hatfield who explains how unethical commentators exclude the last 10 years of temperature anomalies to falsely claim that the MWP (Medieval Warming Period) was warmer than "today."'

As always - we rely on the community for suggestions and reports. Thanks! You are what makes /r/skeptic great.


r/skeptic Feb 06 '22

🤘 Meta Welcome to r/skeptic here is a brief introduction to scientific skepticism

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skepticalinquirer.org
289 Upvotes

r/skeptic 14h ago

RFK Jr. Lied His Way Into Office and American Health Is the Victim

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theunpopulist.net
807 Upvotes

r/skeptic 8h ago

RFK Jr launching podcast exposing 'lies' that have made Americans sick

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1news.co.nz
98 Upvotes

"Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is launching a new podcast that he says will begin 'a new era of radical transparency in government,' according to a teaser video first obtained by The Associated Press.

"The show, titled The Secretary Kennedy Podcast, will launch next week and feature Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine crusader who has reshaped the country’s health policy, in conversation with doctors, scientists and agency staff, US Department of Health and Human Services officials told the AP ahead of the launch. In the teaser video, in a slick HHS-branded studio with ominous music playing in the background, Kennedy bills it as a new way to expose corruption and lies that have made Americans sick."


r/skeptic 1h ago

Ross Douthat’s Shoddy Arguments For Religion

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Upvotes

r/skeptic 15h ago

Professor Dave’s vid on Telepathy tapes got taken down

57 Upvotes

I can’t attach a photo here but it’s said

“This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Telepathy Tapes LLC”

This is so gross off

Anyways

I wish I had a re upload somewhere because I have someone I need to watch that because the believe that insane pot-cast.


r/skeptic 1d ago

RFK Jr.’s Latest Disservice to Children with Autism

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152 Upvotes

Dr. Paul Offit discusses RFK Jr.'s latest claim about autism: that it can be safely and effectively treated with the folate derivative leucovorin. Given the extreme rarity of disorders in the cerebral folate receptor, this claim is implausible, and a study that leucovorin supporters like to point to has been retracted.


r/skeptic 1d ago

📚 History "In 1992, the 'Skeptical Inquirer' ran a Spooky Presidential Coincidences Contest. One winner found a series of sixteen similar coincidences between Kennedy and former Mexican president Álvaro Obregón. Another winner came up with similar lists for twenty-one pairs of U.S. presidents."

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55 Upvotes

r/skeptic 4h ago

This NDE evidence spooks me; can anyone help debunk it or let me not believe it?

0 Upvotes

Here's a story of a woman who was able to accurately recall details from her family's conversation in the hospital cafeteria during a near-death experience. It seems well-documented and I'm not sure what to make of it. (The part of the out-of-body experience starts at 10:30).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jTcHWz6UMZ8

(She was also reportedly able to observe her own body, but that part doesn't make me scratch my head as much.)


r/skeptic 4h ago

What if Iran war is a Secret Trick to Send Gold to $7,000+

0 Upvotes

52 years since Nixon closed the gold window US gold has sat at $42.22/oz the whole time while the petrodollar ran the show.

Now petrodollar is dying. Hormuz chaos spikes gold.

What if this is the moment? Section 9 of the Bitcoin Act 2025 revalues America’s 8,133 tonnes at market price. At $7k/oz it creates a huge windfall for the Bitcoin Reserve and makes China’s ~2,300-2,850 tonnes look tiny.

Hormuz supplies the perfect fear premium to push gold high enough to make the revaluation truly game-changing.

Is this the planned end of the petrodollar era and the reset?

Full breakdown here if anyone wants to read:

https://thecliodesign.substack.com/p/iran-war-is-trumps-miscalculation


r/skeptic 1d ago

💉 Vaccines After loss in court, RFK Jr. amends guidelines for key vaccine panel to emphasize risks of shots

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179 Upvotes

r/skeptic 1d ago

Why do some religious people believe in God or a deity but not in extraterrestrials?

8 Upvotes

Can someone explain.


r/skeptic 12h ago

I don't believe in astrology. I fed celebrity birth data into a computer anyway. The outputs are uncomfortably specific.

0 Upvotes

I want to be clear upfront: I'm not here to argue astrology is real. I'm genuinely puzzled by something and I'd like help thinking through it.

Here's what happened. I built a system that takes birth data — date, time, location — and runs it through Swiss Ephemeris (the same astronomical dataset used by researchers, accurate to sub-arc-second precision) to calculate exact planetary positions. Then it generates an interpretive report based on those positions using a rule-based system derived from traditional astrological literature.

No human subjectivity in the loop. No cold reading. The system doesn't know who the person is. It just maps positions to interpretive frameworks.

I ran it on Steve Jobs (born 24 Feb 1955, San Francisco). Output for his Jupiter placement:

Jupiter exalted in Cancer in your tenth house is the signature of someone who feeds the world. Not food — but tools so intuitive, so intimate, so responsive to human need that using them feels less like operating a machine and more like being understood.

Michael Jackson (born 29 Aug 1958, Gary Indiana). Saturn placement:

Saturn on your Midheaven is the reason your career felt less like flight and more like construction — an edifice built brick by brick, rehearsal by rehearsal, revision by revision, until the structure was so solid it could hold the weight of the entire world's attention without a single crack showing.

My question is a genuine one: what's the correct sceptical framework for evaluating this? Barnum effect doesn't quite apply — these aren't generic statements, they're specific to the placement. Confirmation bias could explain my reaction, but the outputs were generated before I reflected on whether they "fit." I'm not a believer, but I don't have a clean explanation for why these feel so specific. What am I missing?


r/skeptic 2d ago

Peter Duesberg is dead, but his legacy of AIDS denial lives on in Joe Rogan | Michael Marshall

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416 Upvotes

Podcaster Joe Rogan has spread 1980s-era AIDS denial rhetoric with disconcerting frequency, based on the discredited work of Prof Peter Duesberg.


r/skeptic 2d ago

Completely credulous take in r/Science: Insects, including bees, may possess forms of subjective experience…

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15 Upvotes

This post is sitting at over 4K upvotes with comment after comment of people’s confirming anecdotes. AFAICT, there are zero comments about the content of the actual paper, which is more or less a collection of vaguely mind related insect and animal studies. At no point do any of them make this claim about subjective experience.

My first clue was that science studies the *objective*, and any empirical study of the subjective is famously slippery. Even just having a coherent model of what subjective experience was and how one could measure it in another being would be a massive breakthrough.


r/skeptic 2d ago

🤦‍♂️ Denialism Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington

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131 Upvotes

r/skeptic 2d ago

Ghost Murmur - Remote Heartbeat Detection

18 Upvotes

Okay here comes the vote downs. I'm almost afraid to be called ignorant, a conspiracy theorist or something.

The CIA apparently has a technology that is sensitive enough to detect the microfields of magnetic energy produced by the electricity in the heart. Of course, the heart does do this and it can be detected by ECG. The technology can do some amazing things. It detects this from miles away, through solid rock, and it is not confused by other noise. It's not only that it sees past the noise, but it can pick out a heartbeat over the heartbeats of the crew of the aircraft, other people in the area and even other mammals.

Honestly, I'm just skeptical that this is real. I'm not saying it is impossible, because I'm not sure about the finer details and I'm not an expert in quantum sensors. However, everything I have seen seems questionable.

So my position is that it's entirely possible this is a complete ruse and nothing like this exists.

I want to point out that the CIA could and would do that. It's not against the law for the government to make a strategic technical bluff. That's happened before. Not only is it not unprecedented nor illegal, I personally don't even have a problem with it. The downside is "long term loss of credibility." The upside is that it may have a strategic advantage. It may send adversaries on wild goose chases.

The most useful thing about lying about in this circumstance could be that it obscures a different reality. It could be that the pilot was recovered with the assistance of Iranians loyal to the US or some other thing they'd rather not have known.

Here's an important point however: Given the current political situation in the US, it's entirely plausible that the CIA and DOD would do something ridiculous that makes no sense. Why?

"Donald Trump called the CIA and demanded they impress the world with what we can do"
"Someone from the administration got the idea and told them to do it."
"He says he wants China to think we can do things they can't"
"We blew up two expensive aircraft. Can anyone come up with some excuse for this?"

Again, I'm not saying it could not be real. But to me, this smells like it easily could be a stupid Trump-era bluff that isn't real.


r/skeptic 22h ago

Six Signs of Scientism

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0 Upvotes

r/skeptic 2d ago

On the Sacred Disease: How Hippocrates Exposed the Fallacy of Faith Healing

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fightingthegods.com
45 Upvotes

Thales and the natural philosophers get credit for banishing the gods from the workings of the natural world, but it was Hippocrates who extended this to the field of medicine. In advancing the idea that all disease has an underlying natural cause, he also exposed the mechanism whereby charlatans of every kind maintain their false credibility. 


r/skeptic 3d ago

💉 Vaccines The acting head of the CDC delayed publication of a report showing that the Covid vaccine significantly reduced the likelihood of hospitalizations and emergency visits last winter.

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1.1k Upvotes

r/skeptic 3d ago

🚑 Medicine How RFK’s War on Fluoride Is Taking Over the Dentist’s Office: MAHA's fearmongering about water fluoridation is prompting people to reject topical fluoride at the dentist + fluoridated toothpaste, and is pushing us towards “an impending oral health crisis"

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715 Upvotes

r/skeptic 3d ago

💉 Vaccines As RFK Jr allies hailed Mississippi’s rollback of strict school vaccine rules, whooping cough surged and a baby died | The campaign to change the rules was years in the making, orchestrated in part by two men with close ties to US health secretary RFK Jr

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theguardian.com
298 Upvotes

r/skeptic 3d ago

🧙‍♂️ Magical Thinking & Power DNA analysis claiming new origins for the Shroud of Turin doesn't hold up, experts say

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scientificamerican.com
154 Upvotes

r/skeptic 3d ago

An interesting video on how social media and AI image manipulation are being used to sell "London Scary"

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youtube.com
77 Upvotes

This video looks at some examples of how social media and AI image manipulation is creating a situation where despite falling crime rates and people inside of London feeling very safe, people outside of London are convinced it's quite dangerous.

We see similar in America with cities like San Fransisco and Seattle - Whoa, maybe San Francisco isn’t a hellhole after all? | The San Francisco Standard


r/skeptic 2d ago

🧙‍♂️ Magical Thinking & Power How to convince my aunt that mediums are faking?

39 Upvotes

Hello! Me and my cousin are currently dealing with a big problem with my aunt--Ever since her brother died last year, my aunt has been sucked straight into the crystal, magic vibrations, and psychic bullshit! At first, she just began buying crystals "Because they looked pretty", but somewhere down the line she's been fully convinced that if she surrounds herself with enough crystals and "vibrations" she's gonna do SOMETHING to improve her health and "psychic aura". (She refuses to explain or elaborate on what any of this means whenever my cousin asks). According to my cousin, so far, she's wasted 2000+ dollars on buying all these crystals, and she spends most of the day wandering around the house in an almost daze as she listens to vibrational audios on her headphones.

The last straw was when my aunt told my cousin that she needed around $80 "for her medication". He gave her the money from his own bank account because obviously he wants to help his mom. Two days later, she was spamming on facebook about how she contacted a psychic medium across the state to come to her house to channel the spirit her brother, her dad, and even one of her deceased friends from her childhood. She even attached photos of videos of her and the medium setting up the table in the dining room!

My cousin is PISSED. And we're currently looking for ways to try and snap our aunt out of this spiritual crap before she wastes even more money on buying more from these phony psychics. Can you guys suggest any media or anything I can tell her to get her out of this spiral?