Great essay. We are undergoing a generational changing of the guard, and so your deep history of skepticism eases my concerns that the next gen may not be as excited about rationality as I would hope. There have been many changings of the guard.
As you well know, Keith Stanovich, in Robot's Rebellion talks about "wantons," people who haver such low standards for themselves that they never fail to meet them. I think these people have smooth psyches and are never liable to charges of hypocrisy. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Stanovich would endorse the idea that being charged with hypocrisy is an inevitable reward for having ideals and aspirations that are hard to achieve. Couple this sad fact with the very strong emotional (evolutionary, game theoretic, narratively pleasing?) reward for catching hypocrites -- the good person who is possibly bad is much more exciting than the bad person who everyone knows is actually bad -- and one can easily please the crowds by saying "but are the skeptics truly skeptical?" Fine, tell the physician to heal herself, but at least she's a physician. Further, on a deeper, epistemic level, self contradiction seems to me to be inevitable. If Whitehead and Russell can't ground math in logic, if Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems mean whatever the hell they mean (don't ask me), then I think one should be very careful about the thrill of finding out that at a certain point someone is just bootstrapping an opinion. Dig deep enough and everybody is going to be bridging an epistemic gap with an axiom; one such axiom is the Wikipedia policy of "parity", which is my main response to Horgan. Wikipedia has certain policies that are, thus far at least, dropped in from on high to try and get everyone to play fair and keep the encyclopedia working. "WP:PARITY" basically says, "if you are quoting a bunch of iffy sources to support some fringe idea, then you can't keep out criticisms of that idea because the criticisms aren't peer reviewed or published in a big publication. This is the policy that usually allows Science Based Medicine to be used even though many pro fringe editors will call it "just a blog." The point being, woo peddlers and charlatans weaponize the wackiness of their ideas by making them just weird enough so that most reputable experts won't want to wallow in the mud to refute them. Those of us who don't have to worry about maintaining our professional reputation, those of us who might actually have a penchant for mud wallowing, we can use our mediocre minds and free time to patrol the fences and push back against all the Goop. So if Horgan doesn't get this, he should be told. We really need people to go after the low hanging fruit.
Claims, “extraordinary” or not, require appropriate evidence if you want me to accept them. Are the number of visible stars from Rome on 27 April at 0545 an even #? I don’t care, so offer as little or as much evidence as you like. Interesting essay, as always
Thanks as always Massimo for a very thought-provoking article. I recently had to consider what agnosticism (in the sense of complete neutrality) really means when I was summoned for jury duty for a criminal case. We were of course instructed on the need to remain impartial. But what does this mean in practical terms?
It can't mean, for example, that prior to the trial I think there's exactly a 50-50 chance the accused is guilty. Or that there's only a 50% chance the prosecution can prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Surely no competent (and non-corrupt) law enforcement system would bring a case to trial if they didn't feel they have a strong case to make. So am I then obliged to take a position of complete neutrality on the competence and integrity of the prosecutor's office? Perhaps, but is this even possible?
I'm sure there must be an extensive literature on this topic (which I didn't consult), and as it turns out I didn't make it onto the jury. Perhaps the defense attorney suspected (correctly) that I would be a gadfly unhelpful to his side! But it did make me realize that 'pure' agnosticism - complete neutrality - might be a worthy aspiration but is often very difficult. We have all sorts of prior assumptions that can't easily be shunted aside. Or - and this is my favorite version of the open-mindedness quote - 'an open mind is not a vacant one.'
The UFO case reminds me of the case of the origins of life. Here I have noticed among fellow investigators a deplorable tendency to ascribe much too much credibility to this or that scenario, out of fear that failure to do so is giving credibility to the supernatural alternative.
This was an unusually thoughtful and broadminded overview of the skeptical tradition. There is a regrettable tendency to polarisation around this issue! I particularly liked your generous last paragraph. (I suspect I enjoyed Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine more than you did; I am glad you can nonetheless see her virtues.)
I am grateful for Skeptical Inquirer, I was a subscriber and voracious reader of it from 1983 to the early nineties. It certainly was a large influence on my personal philosophy as a layman. Most of all it helped me from feeling crazy! I worked in electronics and computers in the United States Navy, and my colleagues were other young men who were bright, we all scored in the top percentiles of our military aptitude exams. But we all lacked a college education; we were there to get money to go to college.
I learned that bright people can believe in nonsense, and Skeptical Inquirer was a life line to learn how to think critically without being a jerk about it! I had intuitions to be suspicious of supernatural sounding claims based on past experiences. But you and the other authors taught me how to formulate my intuitions and understand and explain them. Thank you!
Great essay. We are undergoing a generational changing of the guard, and so your deep history of skepticism eases my concerns that the next gen may not be as excited about rationality as I would hope. There have been many changings of the guard.
As you well know, Keith Stanovich, in Robot's Rebellion talks about "wantons," people who haver such low standards for themselves that they never fail to meet them. I think these people have smooth psyches and are never liable to charges of hypocrisy. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Stanovich would endorse the idea that being charged with hypocrisy is an inevitable reward for having ideals and aspirations that are hard to achieve. Couple this sad fact with the very strong emotional (evolutionary, game theoretic, narratively pleasing?) reward for catching hypocrites -- the good person who is possibly bad is much more exciting than the bad person who everyone knows is actually bad -- and one can easily please the crowds by saying "but are the skeptics truly skeptical?" Fine, tell the physician to heal herself, but at least she's a physician. Further, on a deeper, epistemic level, self contradiction seems to me to be inevitable. If Whitehead and Russell can't ground math in logic, if Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems mean whatever the hell they mean (don't ask me), then I think one should be very careful about the thrill of finding out that at a certain point someone is just bootstrapping an opinion. Dig deep enough and everybody is going to be bridging an epistemic gap with an axiom; one such axiom is the Wikipedia policy of "parity", which is my main response to Horgan. Wikipedia has certain policies that are, thus far at least, dropped in from on high to try and get everyone to play fair and keep the encyclopedia working. "WP:PARITY" basically says, "if you are quoting a bunch of iffy sources to support some fringe idea, then you can't keep out criticisms of that idea because the criticisms aren't peer reviewed or published in a big publication. This is the policy that usually allows Science Based Medicine to be used even though many pro fringe editors will call it "just a blog." The point being, woo peddlers and charlatans weaponize the wackiness of their ideas by making them just weird enough so that most reputable experts won't want to wallow in the mud to refute them. Those of us who don't have to worry about maintaining our professional reputation, those of us who might actually have a penchant for mud wallowing, we can use our mediocre minds and free time to patrol the fences and push back against all the Goop. So if Horgan doesn't get this, he should be told. We really need people to go after the low hanging fruit.
Claims, “extraordinary” or not, require appropriate evidence if you want me to accept them. Are the number of visible stars from Rome on 27 April at 0545 an even #? I don’t care, so offer as little or as much evidence as you like. Interesting essay, as always
Thanks as always Massimo for a very thought-provoking article. I recently had to consider what agnosticism (in the sense of complete neutrality) really means when I was summoned for jury duty for a criminal case. We were of course instructed on the need to remain impartial. But what does this mean in practical terms?
It can't mean, for example, that prior to the trial I think there's exactly a 50-50 chance the accused is guilty. Or that there's only a 50% chance the prosecution can prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Surely no competent (and non-corrupt) law enforcement system would bring a case to trial if they didn't feel they have a strong case to make. So am I then obliged to take a position of complete neutrality on the competence and integrity of the prosecutor's office? Perhaps, but is this even possible?
I'm sure there must be an extensive literature on this topic (which I didn't consult), and as it turns out I didn't make it onto the jury. Perhaps the defense attorney suspected (correctly) that I would be a gadfly unhelpful to his side! But it did make me realize that 'pure' agnosticism - complete neutrality - might be a worthy aspiration but is often very difficult. We have all sorts of prior assumptions that can't easily be shunted aside. Or - and this is my favorite version of the open-mindedness quote - 'an open mind is not a vacant one.'
The UFO case reminds me of the case of the origins of life. Here I have noticed among fellow investigators a deplorable tendency to ascribe much too much credibility to this or that scenario, out of fear that failure to do so is giving credibility to the supernatural alternative.
This was an unusually thoughtful and broadminded overview of the skeptical tradition. There is a regrettable tendency to polarisation around this issue! I particularly liked your generous last paragraph. (I suspect I enjoyed Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine more than you did; I am glad you can nonetheless see her virtues.)
I am grateful for Skeptical Inquirer, I was a subscriber and voracious reader of it from 1983 to the early nineties. It certainly was a large influence on my personal philosophy as a layman. Most of all it helped me from feeling crazy! I worked in electronics and computers in the United States Navy, and my colleagues were other young men who were bright, we all scored in the top percentiles of our military aptitude exams. But we all lacked a college education; we were there to get money to go to college.
I learned that bright people can believe in nonsense, and Skeptical Inquirer was a life line to learn how to think critically without being a jerk about it! I had intuitions to be suspicious of supernatural sounding claims based on past experiences. But you and the other authors taught me how to formulate my intuitions and understand and explain them. Thank you!