Here is a truth: You are wrong about something. You have misunderstood a data point, been given bad information, or your memory has softened. Sometimes a bad actor is to blame—a podcaster spouting junk science, an influencer selling you on underresearched supplements, or someone who posts an AI-generated video that you’ll mistake for real footage. But, often enough, we deceive ourselves through long-held beliefs or superstitions. The closer that belief winds to your identity, the more likely you are to cling to it beyond reason—and the more it hurts to admit when you’re wrong.
I see firsthand how complicated it has become to decipher—and defend—what’s real at CSICon, an annual skeptics conference hosted in June by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). This year marks the 50th anniversary of the conference and of Skeptical Inquirer, the magazine published by CSI. The lineup includes a fireside chat with the bestselling author Mary Roach, a live podcast taping of
Skeptics are a loosely organized but devoted subculture of scientists, magicians, educators, and evidence-obsessed thinkers who treat extraordinary claims as puzzles to be tested rather than truths to be believed. They make use of scientific inquiry, but push it a step further, dissecting the methodology behind how people get fooled. They also do their best to educate the public about how it works, or even replicate “magical” scams, such as faith healing or telekinesis. Skeptics’ interests range from debunking psychic hotlines to defending against Flat Earthers. CSI even employs a full-time paranormal investigator, though most skeptics engage in this pursuit as a hobby. Or, perhaps, something closer to a lifestyle.
I begin the four-day conference with a group tour of the Center for Inquiry (CFI) headquarters, located in a leafy suburb of Buffalo. CFI is the umbrella organization under which CSI falls. (There are, I learn, many acronyms in the skeptic world.) The attendees filing in largely fit the demographic I’ve been told to expect: white, male, hypereducated, and over 40—like, way over 40. Prior to the conference, I ask Bertha Vazquez, director of education for CFI, about the CSICon audience. Vazquez, who is in her early fifties, laughs, “We’re going to be one of the few without a full head of gray.” Indeed, this crew looks like off-duty professors in button-ups, polos, and graphic tees. (My favorite from the weekend quotes Dana Scully of The X-Files: “The truth is out there, but so are lies.”)
The CFI building functions as an office as well as a kind of museum of debunking, featuring a timeline of modern skepticism and glass display about the Scopes Monkey Trial, the 1925 case where a Tennessee teacher was accused of breaking state law to teach evolution. Past the building’s foyer, I find myself staring into a cabinet of curiosities. A sculpture of the Grafton Monster, a pale, headless, and unusually buff cryptid with glowing red eyes in place of nipples. A fake cast of Bigfoot’s big foot. Chupacabra toys with bared teeth. I grin back at them. To me, belief in those creatures is as plainly ridiculous as taking an educator to court for teaching evolution. And maybe that’s the whole point. A handmade tinfoil hat sits on a nearby shelf alongside a plaque that reads: “Protects the wearer from having an active social life, also makes your head sweaty.”
But the people falling for misinformation today aren’t hermits or outliers. They’re suburban kids who have tumbled down a TikTok rabbit hole and health-conscious moms on Instagram who “do their own research” rather than relying on their doctor’s recommendation. The News Literacy Project found that 81% of the teenagers they polled believe at least one conspiracy theory that they encountered online. As I move to the next set of cabinets at CFI, I feel a nauseating twinge of recognition. Inside are chiropractic devices, Tarot cards, and pendulums, the sort of objects found in homes and shops across the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.
People don’t set out to be misled. They’re vulnerable and seeking better health, connection, or answers. Then they get lured down the wrong path. “There used to be gatekeepers for disseminating information—the reputable newspapers, magazines, news shows,” Stephen Hupp, executive director of CSI and editor of Skeptical Inquirer (a niche magazine with a circulation of about 22,000), explains to me. “At some point with the internet and social media, the gatekeepers couldn’t keep the gates, and anybody with any old idea could spread it and spread it widely.”
In the scope of human progress, we are at a dip, if not a plummet. Institutional trust has tanked. Fully 70% of U.S. adults say they have little to no confidence in newspapers, television, or radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Only 17% say they trust the federal government to do what is right most of the time. Meanwhile, a recent study shows that people’s ability to detect AI-generated media is only as good as a coin toss.
That has put the skeptic community at a crossroads. After all, what does skepticism mean in an era where misinformation is algorithmically amplified, conspiracies are reposted by mainstream politicians, and it’s harder than ever to tell what’s real?
My tour group goes downstairs to a library filled with books on conspiracies, flying saucers, and the Bermuda Triangle. The labyrinth of towering shelves slows my racing thoughts and gives a sense of order, like the answer to humanity’s biggest questions about belief and the unexplained might be around the corner. But, as I pass my days beneath the bracing air conditioning of the Buffalo Convention Center, I begin to wonder: What if the skeptics are wrong too?
The magician takes to the CSICon stage in a sparkling suit. “I’m not a psychic,” he says to a crowd of several hundred attendees. “I use verbal communication (some), I use psychology (some), and I use a whole lot of magic to duplicate what psychic powers would look like if they were real.”
This is Banachek, one of the world’s most famous mentalists. He gives an impish smile through his gray goatee and instructs everybody in the room to think of a city. After correctly guessing one man’s choice (Lagos), he calls a woman forward. He places a pen and paper beneath a cloth and asks her to imagine writing down the city she chose. Something—the pen or a pen-shaped object—rises under the cloth and begins moving. Then Banachek has her look to see if the pen has written the correct name. Istanbul. She nods with a stunned, giddy look that I’ll see often that evening.
I don’t know how Banachek pulls off this stunt. It looks like something close to a miracle. But Banachek makes it perfectly clear that I am being tricked. All of us are—except, maybe, the magicians. And there are a lot of magicians.
Though magicians and skeptics may seem like strange bedfellows, magicians are foundational to the movement. They have deep roots in debunking psychics, fraudsters, and spiritualists. (As tricksters themselves, they’re particularly well-qualified to spot sleights of hand and illusions.) When the counterculture boom of the 1960s and ’70s sent interest in astrology, reincarnation, faith healing, and celebrity psychics soaring, the magician James Randi picked up Harry Houdini’s crusade against mediums and purported miracle workers. In 1973, Randi helped The Tonight Show prepare its props so the “telekinetic” performer Uri Geller could not manipulate them during a demonstration of his supposed spoon-bending powers. Geller later told The New York Times, “I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated.”
Ultimately, however, the stunt backfired and mostly won Geller more bookings. Randi took the lesson: Exposing one fraud at a time was not enough. He soon joined the philosopher Paul Kurtz, the sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, the astronomer Carl Sagan, and a loose coalition of scientists, scholars, and magicians to form the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, the group behind* Skeptical Inquirer*. They went after figures like Peter Popoff, a televangelist who used a hidden earpiece to receive audience members’ personal details from his wife. After broadening their sights to include topics like medical quackery, vaccine misinformation, and climate denial, the group changed its name in 2006 to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Though much of that original cohort has died, CSICon 2026 drafts off their legacy, the schedule brimming with magic, primers on paranormal investigations, and lectures from silver-haired founding members about the history of skepticism. But the questions addressed at their gathering also veer toward the more complicated, including questions about themselves.
Skeptics want to be spokespeople for the facts, but they risk coming off as pedants or, worse, trolls. This is especially true in the internet era, where nuance has collapsed and corrections can easily come across as attacks. To put it mildly, this dynamic makes it challenging to win people over. “If you go in there like a bull in a china shop, being an asshole, they’re just going to ignore you,” Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer, tells me. “People don’t like to be challenged.” And who cares if you’re right if nobody will listen?
Anyone—regardless of political affiliation, age, or education level—is susceptible to misinformation. “It’s not like us skeptics are immune from getting fooled or following bad information,” Hupp tells me. Not long before CSICon, Hupp saw a Facebook ad for a mug with inserts for tiny, detachable tools to pop in and out. He ordered it on Amazon, only to discover that the “tools” were actually a decal. “I got scammed for 16 bucks—it was an AI ad,” he says.
In a CSICon workshop titled “Don’t Believe Everything You Believe,” Melanie Trecek-King, an associate professor of biology at Massasoit Community College, gives a joint presentation with CFI’s Vazquez to explain why people jump to conclusions. The answer from evolutionary psychology is simple enough: The ancestor who d to think critically about a rustling sound got eaten by a predator; the one who ran without thinking survived. “We see patterns, we take shortcuts,” Vazquez says. Community helped early humans survive, too, and belief plays a huge part in bonding and group identity.
An illustration of a caveman scrolling through a smartphone flashes on the screen—Trecek-King takes over. “Now we carry access to the world’s knowledge and nonsense in our pockets,” she says. “We’ve never in human history been exposed to this much information.” At the same time, accurate content and misinformation are presented side by side on social feeds. “It flattens things so that it all looks the same,” Trecek-King says.
The truth can be a lot less fun than a charismatic influencer. People want easy answers—to health, beauty, the meaning of life, and politics. Skeptics won’t offer that, but someone else will. And pseudoscience and chicanery can pay off. By some estimates, the global wellness market tops $6.8 trillion annually—larger than sports and tourism. Meanwhile, spiritual services bring in $376 billion. How, then, can skeptics overcome the glitter of conspiracy theories, ill-informed influencers, and polarizing politics with the unsexiest, but most crucial, thing of all: facts?
Maybe I am the wrong person to ask this. I love facts. Did you know that humans have a blind spot in our eyes and that our brains fill in what’s missing? Or that organic food is sometimes grown with more pesticides than conventional produce? Or that sex might double as a cure for hiccups? All of these things I learn at CSICon.
And yet, even for me, it feels at times like an information onslaught, perhaps best encapsulated by a song performed by a cohost of The Skeptics’ Guide podcast. “You don’t seal in juices by searing meat, you don’t get headaches from too much MSG,” he strums along on guitar. The chorus throbs in my head: “You don’t know what you think you know, what you think you know is often wrong.”
I find myself asking: What is the point of CSICon? Who, exactly, is this for? As I see it, the conference has several aims. There is, of course, education—lectures about deciphering the misinformation landscape and suggestions for how to explain it to others. Then, there is entertainment—the illusions, magic, and goofy performances. One night, CSICon even has an interactive stage show from The Skeptics’ Guide hosts. During a lively game of charades, someone suggests acting out Bill Nye, the conference’s star speaker. They don’t realize he is in the audience. Soon, Nye makes his way to the stage to join in, his hands fluttering around his neck to secure a last-minute, trademark bowtie.
In that way, CSICon is like any other convention: a gathering of like-minded people looking for connection. A place where they can, finally, blessedly, talk to anyone around them with the knowledge that they agree that the Earth is round, séances are hooey, and it’s best to avoid raw milk. But, in another way, it feels like a recruitment drive. CSICon organizers seem to cater some of their content to a millennial crowd, an aspirational courtship given that their typical audience member is of retirement age. A certain existential dread permeates the weekend. I meet a presenter for lunch near the convention center. As I sit, he eyes the skeptics gathering in the restaurant with their blue badges and lowers his voice: “In 10 to 15 years, this will be dead.”
CFI’s Generation Skeptics program, led by Vazquez, produces material for teachers to bring critical thinking into their classrooms—but how to get young people into conferences? Or to simply engage online? Some individual skeptics have solid social media followings, but even they seem uncertain about how to break through the algorithm. For the most part, they produce nuanced explainers, not rage bait.
The larger organization struggles with engagement too. I overhear staffers talking about CFI’s Instagram. “It was a good post,” one whispers to another, “but it only got three likes . . . ” Stalling out matters, especially as radical and pseudoscientific organizations pull ahead with high follower counts, polarizing content, and youth influencer programs.
Is the answer, then, to mimic the methods that freewheeling “bad actors” use to capture attention? Dan Wilson thinks so. He’s a former 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has since become a molecular biologist. He learned the rules of online engagement from years of being a troll and now runs a YouTube channel called “Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson,” where he takes on anti-vaxxers and pseudoscientific claims. We meet in a quiet corner of the Convention Center. In person, as in his videos, he comes across as measured and almost preternaturally calm. Though he doesn’t wear his signature afro which, he bemoans, is a pain to style for his videos. Some of his best-performing content rides off the popularity of his enemies, breaking down claims made by Joe Rogan or RFK Jr. “We are in an attention economy,” he tells me. “I’m constantly trying to figure out how to get more attention, even though that’s not my first goal—my first goal is to produce good content that I think will resonate.” To that end, he’s taken a note from the popularity of live debates and has done his own against antivaxxers—one of which netted more than a million views.
By volume, there may be more debunking content than ever—science YouTube, podcasts, and other social channels devoted to explaining how things work. It’s less an issue of supply than the fact that, thanks to algorithms, skeptics are mostly reaching people who already agree with them. That is, if their content doesn’t disappear within the noise entirely. The internet can be as much of a black hole as a specialized library in the bowels of an office in a suburb of Buffalo, New York.
Skeptics also have a hero problem. Randi and Sagan are gone, and the stars of some living legends have dimmed. After CFI merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation in 2016, some skeptics wrote off the organization as “antiwoke.” Dawkins has been a reliable flashpoint for his perspective on transgender issues and his dismissiveness toward women who felt uncomfortable in skeptical and atheist spaces, among other issues. “He looks for sockets to stick his finger in, I really am convinced of that,” one longtime skeptic tells me. More recently, CFI has booked talks and published articles critical of trans athletes and promoting binary definitions of sex, after which some trans skeptics and their allies decamped to other corners of the community or distanced themselves from skepticism entirely. CFI’s defenders cast the dispute as evidence versus emotion, while detractors counter that the underlying science is itself contested, even among skeptics. For a community built on hashing out disagreement, this has become something of a stalemate.
Eugenie Scott, a physical anthropologist and vice chair of Bay Area Skeptics in California, has watched issues like this cost the movement. Her daughter sat on the board of Bay Area Skeptics. “She’s smart and funny, and I thought a part of this great new generation,” she says. A wave of antifeminist sniping drove her out more than a decade ago. “I’m sure she’s not alone,” she says.
Add to this the problem of religion. Secular humanists—an atheist branch focused on embracing reason and ethics—are part of skepticism’s fabric. CFI houses the Council for Secular Humanism and their magazine, Free Inquiry. However, suggesting that rationality requires rejecting faith risks alienating the 70% of Americans who are religiously affiliated. “My goal is helping people love, enjoy, and be as entertained by science as I am,” Scott says. “They don’t have to be a scientist, in the way that I’m not an instrumentalist but I can enjoy music.” In her view, they also don’t have to be atheists.
But many skeptics don’t want to change and broaden their boundaries, even as I hear again and again from concerned skeptics that the conference has become an echo chamber—the very thing they are warning nonskeptics to be mindful of. Their potential audience has been whittled down to a sliver.
I watch this rift happen in real time. Some of the youngest speakers with the most critical talks are held on the conference’s final morning. That includes the public health researcher Katie Suleta analyzing how to win young people over online and Wilson talking about leaning into algorithm-fueling content like live debates. Jon Michael, a researcher of paranormal claims, offers another approach, urging skeptics to lead with kindness rather than derision. “I’m a former ghost hunter because people showed me empathy,” he says, recalling how a welcoming local group drew him in after a few rude skeptics initially antagonized him. When he asks the audience how many are former believers, most hands go up—proof that people can change and leverage their experiences to reach understanding with the other side.
Suleta, Wilson, and Michael are addressing skepticism’s existential threats head-on and, as millennials, they are the faces of the next generation. But they are given truncated lecture times—10 to 15 minutes each. And, as I look around, I realize the room is half empty. The organizers have scheduled a private documentary screening for that same time slot, effectively dividing the audience.
Skeptics’ ideas—many of them—are good. Skeptics—many of them—want to protect others from harm. But dogmatism won’t keep them afloat. I speak with skeptics who relay this criticism to me in hushed tones. Often, they to wonder aloud: Are other people saying this? In fact, it comes up in every conversation I have, whether I prompt it or not.
“Who can skeptics be skeptical of,” I ask more than once, “if not themselves?”
Eventually the lectures wrap up. A group of CSICon attendees board buses for a Niagara Falls tour not long before a summer storm touches down. For the rest of us, the conference is officially over. I’m boarding the plane home when I overhear the man in front of me chatting with his neighbor. She asks what brings him to town and he explains that he attended a conference all about debunking pseudoscience. What does that mean, she asks? Well, he says, it is about how homeopathic remedies shouldn’t be sold alongside medical treatments, falsifying mind reading, and determining legitimate sources of information. These skeptics are actually a really nice group of people, he says. Oh, and Bill Nye was there! Then he asks her about herself—what does she think of those things? What is her history with belief?
Proselytizing, in a way. The gospel according to skeptics.