Extreme Skeptics Continue To Confuse Local Man
I was listening to a podcast last week - called I Should Be Writing, which is excellent and should be checked out by anyone aspiring to write fiction - when I heard a commercial for The Amazing Meeting 7. It’s a conference on “critical thinking”, and says that among other things, it will “sharpen your skeptical skills”.
This is the second or third time in perhaps a year that this notion has been presented to me. A former was a podcast that had been recommended by some friends, which I found the urge to stop listening to in short order because it began with a group of guys sitting around and talking about how they’re all skeptics. Even more, they were lauding a member of their group (who wasn’t with them) who was, they all agreed, a great skeptic.
And I don’t get it. I don’t get the appeal of being actively skeptical. Certainly not of being a notably “great” skeptic. And really, how is being skeptical about everything you hear any better than believing everything you hear? How is one extreme better than the other?
Personally, I don’t know that any extremism of any sort is a mentally (nor physically) healthy thing.
Maybe it’s just me. I’ve certainly got a more temperate personality than many do, so extremism of any flavour isn’t big on my list of qualities, nor things I find appealing. And there’s doubtless an argument to be made for my spending a lot of time playing with story and character ideas in my head, so perhaps it’s just not in me to default to questioning if/how that this or that could actually happen so much as revel in the possibilities; enjoy the wide-eyed wonder of “what if”s.
Do we know everything? Of course not. We’re constantly building up our base of knowledge about ourselves and everything around us. So it smacks of hubris when “great skeptics” write off certain concepts as being impossible. Unproven is one thing. That it simply can’t ever be, or ever have been, the case is a whole other matter.
Do we know a lot about a lot? Absolutely. I just think that a healthy mind is one that’s open to possibilities and constant learning, even about things we think we know.
And for anyone who’d eschew the notion - dammit, we know what we know and what is and what isn’t - I’d remind you that at one time the best and brightest minds knew for a fact that Earth was the centre of the universe. Looking back, how foolish we were then…
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You miss the point of skepticism. What you are suggesting is denying, not skepticism. At least, not what the folks at Skeptics Guide to the Universe, and other mean when they use the term. I am a skeptic by their standards - if you present me with a new idea, I like to do research and see it proved out before I believe it. Doesn’t mean I don’t grant it could be possible until proved one way or the other.
Fair enough. Perhaps I attach too much weight to the doubting aspect of the term than the logical questioning and researching aspect it’s intended (at least in this case) to convey. Though your explanation unfortunately doesn’t shed any light on my confusion of how anyone can be deemed a “great” skeptic. Even given the more questioning angle of the term - researching something newly heard before opting to believe it as truth (or not) - would it not be an on or off/black or white thing? You research something before believing it, or not. Is it maybe the amount of research done prior to believing something what sets an everyday skeptic apart from a great one? If you Google the issue, you’re a skeptic, if you hit a library about it, you’re a good skeptic, if you write a paper on it, you’re a great one? Or something?
In many cases, a “great skeptic” would be one who dedicates much of his time to not only determining for himself what is true, but educating others, and (and this may be the threshold for “great”) confronting/disproving the “True believer” who makes the assertion. Like The Amazing Randi, who has offered $1 Million to anyone who an conclusively prove the existence of a supernatural event in a testing scenario approved by both parties.
At least, I think that is what they mean.