The 14th European Skeptics Congress was my first opportunity to give a public talk about the Tetragotchi project now that it's actually working, and as you may imagine, they were skeptical. The skeptic movement is a very fascinating and necessary thing, and the main focus of the various skeptic organizations around the world is essentially bullshit detection and unmasking. The focus of my presentation was about reaching out to give players an opportunity to acquire some useful intuitions about how evolution works, and the skeptics appreciated that. However, they were not pushovers, and they had some very good feedback for me about how to approach the popularization efforts. I was happy to get their nice mix of support and criticism.

There is lots of bullshit detection necessary all over the world, but it seems that the further east you go in Europe, the more surprising it gets. We are here in Hungary, where there is a load of astrology and other even stranger woo-woo on the television and such. They say it's a pendulum swinging back from when communism was intent upon determining what people think. Any argument against this wierdness seems like an argument against freedom-of-thought. Also, a lot of religious supersition is alive and well the further east you go, so people avoid some scientific medical treatments and pursue some weird ones.

Make no mistake though, there is craziness everywhere. One of the main focuses of the Skeptics movement these days in Europe is homeopathy, which is a total scam involving absurd dilutions of particular substances coupled with the belief in things like water having a "memory" of what it contained. My mother (a devout Catholic) sprinkled her car with holy water for protection, and homeopathy is nothing more than that, but worse. The reason it's so much worse is that it pretends to be science and medicine, and persistently tries to gain legitimacy without any kind of empirical proof. By some bizarre wrinkles in the system, homeopathy has gained some legitimacy at the European level, which is really disappointing and deserves to be addressed. Projects like 10:23 are brilliant ways to send a wakeup call.

Now I have to get back to writing a lot more documentation for on the right side of the Tetragotchi screen so people can read about how it all works. Once the documentation is satisfying, and if the software continues to work well as more people slowly appear to create tetragotchis, I will push the game out a lot more intensely, to get it to more people.