The Ockham Awards
Since 2012, The Skeptic has had the pleasure of awarding the Ockham Awards – our annual awards celebrating the very best work from within the skeptical community. The awards were founded because we wanted to draw attention to those people who work hard to get a great message out. The Ockhams recognise the effort and time that have gone into the community’s favourite campaigns, activism, blogs, podcasts, and outstanding contributors to the skeptical cause.
The winner of this year’s Ockham award for Skeptical Activism is Dr Flint Dibble, an archaeologist who earned international plaudits when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s show to debate and comprehensively debunk claims made by Graham Hancock, a promoter of the lost city of Atlantis.
Other past Ockham winners include the BBC’s disinformation unit, Dr Elizabeth Bik, Dr Natália Pasternak, Professor Edzard Ernst, the European Skeptics Podcast, Britt Hermes, and more.
While we recognise the best in skepticism, our awards are also an opportunity to highlight the danger posed by promoters of pseudoscience with our Rusty Razor award. The Rusty Razor is designed to spotlight individuals or organisations who have been prominent promoters of unscientific ideas within the last year.
This year’s Rusty Razor went to Twitter owner Elon Musk, whose takeover of Twitter has overseen a boom in scams, conspiracy theory accounts, health misinformation, anti-vaccine propaganda and hate speech. Musk has personally intervened to restore the accounts of figures like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and Tommy Robinson, and on multiple occasions has actively engaged with and promoted their dangerous misinformation.
Previous Rusty Razor winners have included Dr Aseem Malhotra, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr Mike Yeadon for his anti-vaccination scaremongering, Dr Didier Raoult for his promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, Andrew Wakefield for his ongoing promotion of anti-vaxx misinformation, and Gwyneth Paltrow for her pseudoscience-peddling wellness empire, Goop.
Nominees and winners from previous years: