This interview is part of my series with the featured speakers of CSICon 2022, the conference run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. It will take place in Las Vegas October 20–23, and you can find all the details and register for the conference right here. For this installment, my special guest was Professor Timothy Caulfield.
Caulfield is Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta.
His interdisciplinary research on topics such as stem cells, genetics, research ethics, and the public representations of science and public health policy has allowed him to publish over 350 academic articles. He has won numerous academic and writing awards and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Caulfield is the author of two national bestsellers: The Cure for Everything: Untangling the Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness and Happiness and Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong about Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash. His most recent book is Relax, Dammit!: A User’s Guide to the Age of Anxiety. He is also the host and coproducer of the award-winning Netflix documentary series A User’s Guide to Cheating Death.
Caulfield’s CSICon presentation, “Misinformation and the (Big) Ideology Problem,” is scheduled for Saturday at 9:00 a.m. Here is an excerpt of the talk’s description from the conference’s website:
In this provocative presentation, Caulfield will explore what the available evidence says about how and why ideology is used to spread health misinformation, and what we can, if anything, do about it.
During our conversation, Caulfield expounded on many topics, including the link between one’s personal identity and believing B.S., and he teased his upcoming provocative CSICon talk, which includes, of all things, a discussion of the connection between yoga and QAnon. Of course, we just had to discuss how dangerous Gwyneth Paltrow and her ever-evolving Goop company are. We also tried to decide if she is an evil genius or “just” a very misguided true believer! Caulfield said that Paltrow (and the wellness-community more broadly) cause societal harm by legitimizing magical thinking, but he revealed why he’s not sure that using Paltrow’s name in his book title was the right thing to do.
If you want to read more about the harm Gwyneth Paltrow perpetrates on the public, besides reading Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong about Everything? and Caulfield’s review of The Goop Lab (which you can find here), let me suggest that you also take a look at my own articles on the subject, two published by AiPT Science and one by Skeptical Inquirer:
- “Pepper Potts: Supervillain? Gwyneth Paltrow brings Goop to Netflix”
- “Netflix Slimes the World with ‘The Goop Lab’”
- “A Psychic Fraud Investigator Weighs in on The Goop Lab”
I hope you enjoy this interview, and please check out my conversations with the other CSICon 2022 speakers (including Neil deGrasse Tyson, Penn Jillette, and Massimo Polidoro). They all can be found here.