The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism, which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy Ian Swiss, shooed me off the stage and took my Q&A time to rebuke me. After I published my talk on ScientificAmerican.com (under the headline “Dear “Skeptics”: Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War  More”), I was slammed by Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, David Gorski, Steven Novella and many others. The controversy was covered by Nature and other media. People still cite my diatribe, so I decided to publish an edited, updated version here on my free journal, which has no paywall.

I hate preaching to the converted. If you were Buddhists, I’d bash Buddhism. But you’re skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism.

I’m a science journalist. I don’t celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.

I’m a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe can make you dumber.

Here’s an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. In his book A Universe from Nothing, Krauss claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing?

Krauss’s book doesn’t fulfill its title’s promise, not even close, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book’s afterword: “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”

Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss, a hack physicist, to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so dumb? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. The author of The God Delusion succumbs to what you might call the science delusion.

The science delusion is common among Capital-S Skeptics. You don’t apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines and genetically modified foods.

These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are soft targets. When you attack these soft targets, you are criticizing people outside your tribe, who can ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted.

Meanwhile, you neglect hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions. In the rest of this talk, I’ll give you examples of hard targets from physics, medicine and biology. I’ll wrap up with a rant about war, the hardest target of all.

MULTIVERSES AND THE SINGULARITY

For decades, physicists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind have touted string and multiverse theories as our deepest descriptions of reality. Here’s the problem: strings and multiverses can’t be experimentally detected. The theories aren’t falsifiable, which makes them pseudo-scientific, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Some string and multiverse true believers, like Sean Carroll, have rejected falsifiability as a method for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. You’re losing the game, so you try to change the rules.

Physicists are even promoting the idea that our universe is a simulation created by super-intelligent aliens. Neil de Grasse Tyson says “the likelihood may be very high” that we’re in a simulation. Again, the simulation claim isn’t science, it’s a stoner thought experiment pretending to be science.

So is the Singularity, the idea that we’re on the verge of digitizing our psyches and uploading them into computers, where we can live forever. Powerful people tout the Singularity, but it is an apocalyptic cult, with science substituted for God. When high-status scientists promote flaky ideas like the Singularity and multiverse, they hurt science. They undermine its credibility on issues like global warming, evolution and vaccines.

OVERTESTED AND OVERTREATED FOR CANCER

Now let’s take a look at medicine, not the soft target of alternative medicine but the hard target of mainstream medicine. During debates over health-care reform, critics of socialized medicine often insist that American medicine is the best in the world. That is a lie.

We spend