Susan Gerbic is a very busy person, but she took some time to speak for us at our WeCanReason Webinar on Wednesday, May 24. The title of her talk is What I Did on My Lockdown.
What keeps her so busy? Susan is a self-proclaimed skeptical junkie, and she fights misinformation, disinformation, and nonsense using many forms of activism. She became interested in scientific skepticism in the early 2000s and organized a group of volunteers who called themselves the Guerrilla Skeptics. They organized sting operations against people who claimed to be mediums. Because these 'mediums' prey on people who have lost loved ones, Susan calls them Grief Vampires. Susan and the teams would collect evidence that demonstrated that these Grief Vampires were fakes and post the evidence Publicly.
Susan discovered that there was a lot of misinformation about psychics and mediums as well as other scientific topics in Wikipedia, so, in 2010, she founded Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW). She trains volunteers to edit Wikipedia articles and they correct the misinformation. GSoW currently has 144 editors. Susan also founded the Monterey County Skeptics, and in her "spare time," she writes articles for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
For her work, Susan has won several awards such as the 2012 In the Trenches award from the Skeptic's Toolbox and the James Randi Foundation Award for 2017. In 2019, the Center for Inquiry awarded her the Balles Award for Critical Thinking, and the National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) in 2022 awarded her the Philip J Klass Award.
In 2018, Susan founded the non-profit organization, About Time, to form a hub for scientific skepticism and activism. In 2020, About Time was officially granted charitable status. You can learn much more about Susan’s work by going to the website, https://www.abouttimeproject.org/.
At her presentation for our WeCanReason Webinar, Susan spoke on What I Did on My Lockdown. The lockdown didn’t stop the Grief Vampires and it couldn’t stop Susan. She told us about her activism and how it changed during the COVID lockdown. If you missed her presentation or just want to watch it again, here is your chance. You will discover that, in addition to all of her accomplishments, Susan is an absolutely delightful human being.