epepke
Philosopher
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2003
- Messages
- 9,264
Now that I have your attention, this rant was precipitated by a recent exchange with Eon of the Eons. However, it isn't entirely due to her. These are the thoughts that I get when I am in a community of skeptics, and they're similar to the ones that caused me to give up on sci.skeptic.
I've considered myself a skeptic for about the past quarter century, and it has always seemed to me that the basic ideas of skepticism are as follows:
1) Test everything
Test all ideas, new or old. Test old ideas over and over again, generation after generation. Anything, even if it has been believed in for hundreds of years, could turn out to be wrong.
2) Science is good
Science, for all its faults, is probably the best method anybody has ever come up with for testing things. But it's a method, not an icon.
3) Question authority
Some people have a good track record, and some of these people get to be authorities. However, being an authority is no guarantee of being right.
4) Be conservative
Not in the poilitical sense, but in the sense of not claiming more than the evidence suggests. This doesn't mean that you can't have an opinion or make a guess, just that you should be honest about qualifying it when pressed.
I've argued matters from this perspective for a long time. It's kind of a hobby, as it is for many people here. Yet I frequently become dissilusioned with the attitudes and mindsets of others who consider themselves skeptics. Of course, from an anthropological perspective, the attitudes of a community are defined by the community, so perhaps the majority defines the real skepticism, and I'm just a twit. In that case, of course, I have no sympathy when people come here and call skeptics closed-minded fools.
It is this disillusionment I write about here. It seems to me that many in the skeptical community do things that I consider the antithesis of skepticism. Somewhere in the torrent of "not me's" and strawman accusations, I hope for some actual discussion. Here is a partial list:
1) An almost totemistic fascination with vos Savant's solution of the Monty Hall Problem
This one isn't particularly serious, and it lets me win free drinks while teaching a lesson.
2) Woowoo!
OK, I like the word, and I think that it applies to some people. However, it seems to have promoted this idea that there is an easily identifiable thing called woowooism that can easily be dismissed as bogus, whereas anything that is not "woowoo" has a tendency to be accepted.
3) Authority? Yay!
Somehow, when something comes out of the mouth or from the pen of a Great Scientist or a Physician with Letters After His Name, it gets this imprimateur of Real Science or Real Modern Scientific Medicine for free.
I was actually on a skeptic board at a WorldCon a few years ago, and someone hostile to skepticism pointed out the recent discovery of H. Pylorii and its relevance to ulcers, and how it took a while for it to become accepted by the medical community. I answered the question by saying, this is why we need more skepticism, how the old practice of giving ulcer patients a cream diet was the worst thing that one could possibly do.
Yet perhaps I did not speak for the majority of the skeptical community, who as far as I can tell did not question the old practice of cream diets. Modern medicine probably has a lot of things in it as wrong as cream diets. From my view of skepticism, as I have already explained, old ideas are as suspect as new ideas and all are grist for skepticism.
4) Woowoo, boo!
The flip side of the coin. I have seen many people claim categorically that herbal preparations are worthless. I would like to see such people drink a quart of coffee, drink a quart of white port, smoke a pack of short Camels, and toke a really big spliff and then tell me that herbal preparations have no effect, if they can even stand.
There are very good reasons to dismiss herbal concoctions, that most of them are probably nugatory, that they have not been tested, that identifying and purifying the active ingredients would probably be better, and that their major selling point is being the traditional medicine for 5000 years of a people who didn't regularly live past 50 or so.
Similarly with any weird claim. Either it works out with respect to reality, or it doesn't, or somewhere between the two. The point is that it isn't possible to tell if a claim is true based on whether it is weird or not. Weird claims have a harder struggle; this is probably good and right and appropriate. It's a good thing that quantum mechanics and plate tectonics took a long time and a lot of evidence to become accepted. But it doesn't make weirdness some sort of guarantee of falsity, and non-weirdness some sort of guarantee of truth.
5) Brain and brain, what is brain?
Skeptics are quick to dismiss Freud as nonsense. Yet a lot of them cling to a much older view of the mind as an atomistic monad, some sort of reasoning engine, which has as little support as anything that Freud ever said. In fact, the most basic thing that Freud said, which may yet be true, that the mind is made up of parts that sometimes conflict, seems to be anathema to many skeptics.
Skeptics are even skeptical of the work done on behavioral and cogntive psychology, but they are far less likely to be skeptical of their own conclusions about their own brains/minds/whatever that they get from introspection. Yet psychology by introspection is the most primitive of psychologies and not clearly any less bogus than the rest.
There's probably more, but this is probably enough for now.
I've considered myself a skeptic for about the past quarter century, and it has always seemed to me that the basic ideas of skepticism are as follows:
1) Test everything
Test all ideas, new or old. Test old ideas over and over again, generation after generation. Anything, even if it has been believed in for hundreds of years, could turn out to be wrong.
2) Science is good
Science, for all its faults, is probably the best method anybody has ever come up with for testing things. But it's a method, not an icon.
3) Question authority
Some people have a good track record, and some of these people get to be authorities. However, being an authority is no guarantee of being right.
4) Be conservative
Not in the poilitical sense, but in the sense of not claiming more than the evidence suggests. This doesn't mean that you can't have an opinion or make a guess, just that you should be honest about qualifying it when pressed.
I've argued matters from this perspective for a long time. It's kind of a hobby, as it is for many people here. Yet I frequently become dissilusioned with the attitudes and mindsets of others who consider themselves skeptics. Of course, from an anthropological perspective, the attitudes of a community are defined by the community, so perhaps the majority defines the real skepticism, and I'm just a twit. In that case, of course, I have no sympathy when people come here and call skeptics closed-minded fools.
It is this disillusionment I write about here. It seems to me that many in the skeptical community do things that I consider the antithesis of skepticism. Somewhere in the torrent of "not me's" and strawman accusations, I hope for some actual discussion. Here is a partial list:
1) An almost totemistic fascination with vos Savant's solution of the Monty Hall Problem
This one isn't particularly serious, and it lets me win free drinks while teaching a lesson.
2) Woowoo!
OK, I like the word, and I think that it applies to some people. However, it seems to have promoted this idea that there is an easily identifiable thing called woowooism that can easily be dismissed as bogus, whereas anything that is not "woowoo" has a tendency to be accepted.
3) Authority? Yay!
Somehow, when something comes out of the mouth or from the pen of a Great Scientist or a Physician with Letters After His Name, it gets this imprimateur of Real Science or Real Modern Scientific Medicine for free.
I was actually on a skeptic board at a WorldCon a few years ago, and someone hostile to skepticism pointed out the recent discovery of H. Pylorii and its relevance to ulcers, and how it took a while for it to become accepted by the medical community. I answered the question by saying, this is why we need more skepticism, how the old practice of giving ulcer patients a cream diet was the worst thing that one could possibly do.
Yet perhaps I did not speak for the majority of the skeptical community, who as far as I can tell did not question the old practice of cream diets. Modern medicine probably has a lot of things in it as wrong as cream diets. From my view of skepticism, as I have already explained, old ideas are as suspect as new ideas and all are grist for skepticism.
4) Woowoo, boo!
The flip side of the coin. I have seen many people claim categorically that herbal preparations are worthless. I would like to see such people drink a quart of coffee, drink a quart of white port, smoke a pack of short Camels, and toke a really big spliff and then tell me that herbal preparations have no effect, if they can even stand.
There are very good reasons to dismiss herbal concoctions, that most of them are probably nugatory, that they have not been tested, that identifying and purifying the active ingredients would probably be better, and that their major selling point is being the traditional medicine for 5000 years of a people who didn't regularly live past 50 or so.
Similarly with any weird claim. Either it works out with respect to reality, or it doesn't, or somewhere between the two. The point is that it isn't possible to tell if a claim is true based on whether it is weird or not. Weird claims have a harder struggle; this is probably good and right and appropriate. It's a good thing that quantum mechanics and plate tectonics took a long time and a lot of evidence to become accepted. But it doesn't make weirdness some sort of guarantee of falsity, and non-weirdness some sort of guarantee of truth.
5) Brain and brain, what is brain?
Skeptics are quick to dismiss Freud as nonsense. Yet a lot of them cling to a much older view of the mind as an atomistic monad, some sort of reasoning engine, which has as little support as anything that Freud ever said. In fact, the most basic thing that Freud said, which may yet be true, that the mind is made up of parts that sometimes conflict, seems to be anathema to many skeptics.
Skeptics are even skeptical of the work done on behavioral and cogntive psychology, but they are far less likely to be skeptical of their own conclusions about their own brains/minds/whatever that they get from introspection. Yet psychology by introspection is the most primitive of psychologies and not clearly any less bogus than the rest.
There's probably more, but this is probably enough for now.
.