AES24 A Healthy Dose of Skepticism

Better to accept the inconvenient truth than to embrace a comforting lie.

A curious mind should always exercise caution. Always challenge your own beliefs, especially when you don’t want to. The world is a big place with infinite sources of knowledge, and not all of them are true. No one’s words should be blindly trusted without evidence backing it up. Apply the scientific method and use your reasoning.

Science, is a way of not fooling ourselves

-Richard Feynman-

If you reviewed the evidence and you are wrong, admit it. Change your view to suit the proof you have. Your knowledge is ever-expanding, and you should grow with it. Beware, do not let your skepticism devolve to denialism, the people who won’t accept evidence and rational arguments are just fooling themselves, Skeptics keep an open mind until evidence shows that a hypothesis is valid or invalid, while denialists starts with a conclusion and looks for supporting claims, no matter the credibility.

Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out!

“Skeptics have a lot of respect for science, and denialists are usually out to undermine scientists working in the field where they have an agenda. Denialists will wear the costume of scientific thinking, but they usually show a piss-poor understanding of how the accumulation of studies and data work.” – Quoted from Rawstory

True skepticism, in Marcello Truzzi’s view (A well-known skeptic), has these characteristics:

• Acceptance of doubt when neither assertion nor denial has been established
• No burden of proof to take an agnostic position
• Agreement that the corpus of established knowledge must be based on what is proved, but recognizing its incompleteness
• Even-handedness in requirement for proofs, whatever their implication
• Accepting that a failure of a proof in itself proves nothing
• Continuing examination of the results of experiments even when flaws are found

By having a healthy dose of skepticism in your mind, you can urge the people around you to do the same. A society capable of healthy skepticism can effectively combat misinformation and propaganda, by promoting critical thinking and rationality.

“The skeptic doesn’t mean he who doubts, but he who investigates and researches, as opposed to he who asserts and thinks he has found” – Miguel de Unamuno