I was actually the first person to spot a news report in the wild and tell her about it. It was based entirely on the blog posts. She asked for advice on Twitter on dealing with the first several media requests. She was not persuing the media. It was the other way around.

As for individuals, Jen doesn’t have the reach to invite more than about 10,000 people to an event on her own, even using her blog and Twitter. Using Facebook, she can only invite her friends. She has a lot more of them now, but the maximum number is still 5,000, and I have no idea how many of them are female. In order for the hundreds of thousands number to be reached, an awful lot more people had to like the idea and pass the word. In fact, PZ Myers is almost certainly responsible for reaching the greatest number of people.

Treating Boobquake as Jen promoting herself is simply inaccurate. And if we’re going to criticize, by all means, go ahead, but the criticism has no chance of reaching its mark if it’s based on inaccuracies.

There was only one side presented in the podcast, so I assumed that when you referred to two you were discussing a discussion which took place elsewhere. The rest of my comments rely on that assumption.

Regarding “dick shake”, I don’t see a difference. I would predict that it would not be nearly as popular and that we probably would not be having this conversation. It eliminates a discussion about whether women are objectified, but calls the objectification of men into question. It’s a whole lot closer to a scientific test of the hypothesis, but only if it is clear that men must commit adultery and then there is still the problem of defining dependent variables and other parameters.

The thing is, we aren’t talking about “dick shake”.

A proper response? Well, I’m always in favor of good old fashioned education. I am quite certain that there are a range of appropriate and effective responses beyond my expertise (Desiree would be my first stop if I were looking for them), but my response in this particular situation is simply to educate.

Addressing the cleric’s statements is easy. Getting people to internalize the issue is not. Education is not a one-day pursuit. It’s a giant block of granite we chip a little off of every day.

But why didn’t I write about it or anything else? Because I am not capable of catching and covering everything.

Testimony to the importance of specific definitions, I suppose, but would you be satisfied if I replaced the first “boobs” with “cleavage”?

But that’s bullshit.

I definitely was not saying that. In fact, I was agreeing in this post and in my second post on the topic that one can analyze and plan. However, I think the informal discussion in the first half of the podcast was just a bit one sided in that regard. Strawmen were harmed.

I didn’t see much skepticism in arguments supporting this thing.

Boobquest was very widely heard of. As far as I know, that’s the only statement I’ve made about the general phenomenon. Regarding our local version of it, I made a few more observations which I maintain to be accurate. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

What I would like to know, Barbara, is what specific response do you think would have been effective from the point of view of the skeptics community (or, more exactly, what response by the skeptics community) would you like to have seen to the statement by the Iranian cleric or to Pat Robertson’s comment about Haiti? (Or, what response that did happen do you applaud.)

Boobquake is over. We need to move forward. How? Don’t you think everyone should be asking themselves this?

(Don’t forget to read my second post on this)

I was referring specifically to the dialog between Podblack and McRae in the first half of the podcast.

It was an impression I had but a strong one. Perhaps I should go back and earmark statements, but that’s unlikely to happen.

A young woman with a well-publicized blog suggested that women show their boobs, then started a FB page and invited hundreds of thousands of people to an event with the word “boob” in the title.

Asinine statements like the cleric’s are made every day. Blog posts and podcasts and tweets and FB shares are full of criticisms of these things. The difference between those and boobquake are simple: boobs. A young woman with a well-publicized blog suggested that women show their boobs, then started a FB page and invited hundreds of thousands of people to an event with the word “boob” in the title. It’s not rocket science to explain why it played out the way that it did.

The community in general should never let these things get by us, but questioning JREF’s lack of response in an article about Boobquake suggests that a statement by JREF would have even remotely that same reach as a boob joke.

Now, many have cited that as a good reason to support Boobquake, which brings me to my “I’m really disappointed” moment:

“Claims were made without real evidence when the discussants opposed boobquake, and claims about boobquake that were often reasonable were discredited because studies had not yet been done to evaluate those claims.”

Perhaps you and I read different threads, but I don’t think so. Evidence was discussed. It was also ignored. Perhaps you didn’t read that far?

Here’s the problem: Discussing research of social phenomena is never simple. We have no study which specifically examines the effects of asking women to show their boobs in protest to stupid cleric’s claims that doing so makes men commit adultery which in turn causes earthquakes.

So, yeah, you could say that the specificclaims that Boobquake is ineffectual or even harmful have not been examined.

But that’s bullshit.

There are libraries crammed with research on the various components of this thing from polarization to placebo to belief bias to pedagogy to body image to narcissism to cultural conflict to ignorance of incompetence to ingroup/outgroup mentality.

And the responses to any attempt to discuss this stuff were “it’s just a joke” and “it’s not real science”. Which, btw, is certainly in line with the creator’s words, but contradicts her actions.

Blurring of lines between atheism and skepticism aside, we call ourselves “skeptics” because we use the scientific method to evaluate claims. I didn’t see much skepticism in arguments supporting this thing.

Yes, we need more applied research – research which does not require a flow chart and 50 citations to determine its relationship to the real-world. Like the pilot study I just reported: http://icbseverywhere.com/blog/2010/05/fun-does-not-sell-smarts/

But, applied research is a trade-off and it is difficult to generalize findings to other situations because the study is so specific.

This is the nature of soft sciences. Society is a complex system. There are no objections to Boobquake that allow the arguer to discuss the evidence in enough detail to satisfy a ‘believer’ (if there even is such a thing as “enough”) in blog comments. That doesn’t mean that the arguments are not evidence-based.