Reflecting on Ken Frazier, skeptic

A few thoughts on life, uncertainty, death, and happiness

Ken in his office, 2018, Wikimedia.

Ken Frazier has passed away a few days ago. His death affected me more than I would have anticipated. We were not close friends, largely because we have lived our lives thousands of kilometers apart and had only a few opportunities to spend time together at conferences. But I have known of Ken for most of my life, and met him personally the first time in 1999. It has been an occasional, but long relationship.

Ken was the longtime editor of Skeptical Inquirer, the premier magazine devoted to fighting pseudoscience and defending reason and science. Indeed, Ken has been the editor since the magazine changed its name from the rather unwieldy “Zetetic,” back in 1978. He has written essays in every issue for 35 years.

He has also published a number of books, most recently Science Under Siege: Defending Science, Exposing Pseudoscience. He won the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Pioneer Award for his “effective worldwide advancement of rational skepticism,” and was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science because of his “distinguished contributions to the public understanding of science through writing for and editing popular science magazines that emphasize science news and scientific reasoning and…