Every year, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)—a program of the Center for Inquiry and publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer—honors the creators of the published work that best communicates the importance of skepticism and empirical science with the Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking. Normally, the $2,500 award is presented at the Committee’s annual CSICon conference, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conferences for 2020 and 2021 had to be cancelled. Therefore, the prizes for 2019 and 2020 have yet to be awarded.

Until now. Rather than wait another year, CSI is proud to announce the winners of the 2019 and 2020 Balles Prizes in Critical Thinking.

(And here’s hoping we get to present the 2021 award at CSICon 2022!)

 

The Balles Prize for 2019 Goes to Susan Gerbic: The Psychic Stinger

We are sick of being duped.

One of the hardest lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is that our culture is saturated with con artists, snake oil hucksters, and swindlers, all insisting they have special access to secret truths. Some claim to have knowledge of vast global conspiracies. Others promise cures and remedies to whatever ails us. And still others pretend to be able to read minds and speak to the dead.

For far too long, this last group of charlatans, so-called psychics and mediums, have enjoyed credulous coverage and precious little scrutiny of their scams. They are fawned over by talk show hosts and the victims they’ve fleeced. But in recent years, these “grief vampires” have met their match.

Susan Gerbic is fake psychics’ worst nightmare that they never saw coming. Over the course of dozens of meticulously executed stings, tests, and exposés, Gerbic has uncovered the fraud underlying the claims of several celebrity psychics. She has assembled a team of dedicated volunteers who assist her in planning and research for elaborate and rigorous undercover operations that reveal the tricks employed by psychics and mediums.

And she has thoroughly documented all of it in the pages and on the website of Skeptical Inquirer. Her articles about her and her team’s numerous stings—with whimsical code names such as Operation Pizza Roll and Operation Ice Cream Cone—are compelling accounts of skeptical investigation, digital sleuthing, and real-world spycraft, filled with slap-your-forehead moments of revelation, as well as honest appraisals of the times she and her team fell short of catching a crook in the act. Her articles are as transparent as they are thrilling.

Gerbic’s incredible work exposing the lies of the self-proclaimed “Manhattan Medium” and “Seatbelt Psychic” Thomas John caught the attention of The New York Times, which published a magazine profile of the escapades of Gerbic and her “group of online vigilantes” in February 2019, “Inside the Secret Sting Operations to Expose Celebrity Psychics,” written by Jack Hitt.

“The world is ready for stories such as this,” Gerbic wrote that year. “People are sick of reality television and lying cheats getting away without consequences.” Now, in the age of COVID-19 misinformation and QAnon conspiracy madness, her words ring even more true.

Indeed, you could say her diagnosis of American attitudes toward fraudsters was prophetic! But we can’t prove it. What we can do is award her the 2019 Balles Prize in Critical Thinking.

The Balles Prize for 2020 Goes to Timothy Caulfield: A Booster Shot for Science

From the despicable we move to the outright destructive. Our current frustration with celebrity con artists has reached a fever pitch during the COVID-19 pandemic, as snake oil profiteers have flourished, enriching themselves through the promotion of misinformation and pseudoscience.

Luckily, one mild-mannered Canadian man has been hot on these hucksters’ trails the entire time. Timothy Caulfield wrote in 2020:

I have studied the spread and impact of health misinformation for decades and have never seen the topic being taken as seriously as it is right now. Perhaps that is because of the scale of the crisis and the ubiquity of the nonsensical misinformation, including advice from some very prominent politicians. If this pro-science response is to endure, all scientists—not just a few of us—must stand up for quality information.

Caulfield earned international attention a few short years ago for calling bullpucky on the false and unscientific promises of celebrity gurus such as Gwyneth Paltrow, with her Goop empire of pseudoscience. In 2020, Caulfield’s clear, accessible, and hopeful advocacy of science and evidence were invaluable for a public desperate to navigate their way through the infodemic during the pandemic. As we are overrun by invading armies of media figures wielding fake cures, half-baked treatments, retracted studies, and absurd levels of reality-denial, Caulfield has been a happy warrior for the truth.

In 2020, Caulfield partnered with Canada’s Sen. Stan Kutcher to found ScienceUpFirst, a national initiative that works with a collective of independent scientists, researchers, health care experts, and science communicators. In December of that year, Caulfield appeared on Skeptical Inquirer Presents to rally the reality-based community to his cause with a clear and simple message: Debunking works!

Caulfield understands that to have any hope of emerging from the infodemic intact, we must all be a part of the solution, not simply by ignoring false information but by flooding the zone with real, evidence-based information. This is something we can all contribute to, but he particularly calls on all scientists, researchers, and medical professionals to stop ceding ground to the liars. He wrote, “Correcting misrepresentations should be viewed as a professional responsibility.”

This happy warrior is not done fighting. On any given day, you can find his byline in any number of media outlets, large and small. You can find him spreading his pro-science message on TV news, online videos, and podcasts. He is never condescending and never despairing. Instead, he shows genuine compassion for those being victimized by false information and an infectious enthusiasm for winning this war. What would we do without him?

For the pandemic, we have vaccines. For the infodemic, we have people such as Timothy Caulfield. That’s why he’s the winner of the 2020 Balles Prize in Critical Thinking.

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The Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking is an award given to the creator of the published work that best exemplifies healthy skepticism, logical analysis, or empirical science. The prize was established by Robert P. Balles, a practicing Christian, along with the Robert P. Balles Endowed Memorial Fund, a permanent endowment fund for the benefit of CSI. The winners of the 2018 Balles Prize were Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken for their book A Deal with the Devil: The Dark and Twisted True Story of One of the Biggest Cons in History.