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In light of recent events, self-identified skeptics may need to look back and remember why they call themselves “skeptics” in the first place. What is skepticism? Why do we do it? What are we trying to accomplish?
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, this is Jonathan from The Body of Evidence.
Recent drama I witnessed on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet has led me to ask myself very basic questions. A community of people may sometimes drift away from its mission until its members have forgotten what it was, and their actions have become antithetical to their founding principles. That’s why I believe in regularly asking ourselves, “What are we trying to accomplish? What do we believe in and why?” Through self-reflection, we should observe our recent actions and see if they align with our principles.
The type of work that Chris and I do on The Body of Evidence is in keeping with the principles of skepticism, even though one of us does not necessarily self-identify as a skeptic. We think that these guiding principles are essential to separate sense from nonsense, to determine what is likely to be true within biomedical news and to toss away unsubstantiated health claims. And we’re not the only ones. There are self-identified skeptics all over the world. There are skeptical organizations, as well as loose communities that exist both in real life and on specific Internet platforms.
Referring to yourself as a skeptic, however, is not sufficient. Actions speak louder than words. Anyone can call themselves a skeptic, but do they behave like one?
I want to remind *myself* of what it means to be a skeptic, because I may otherwise forget, and I hope that this exercise can also benefit anyone who watches it.
Scientific skepticism is about proportioning your belief-how hard you believe that something is true-to the strength of the evidence you are presented. This means that a small claim-like that I ate chicken for dinner-requires little evidence to be believed, but that an extraordinary claim-that my cancer was cured by chanting an old Persian incantation-requires extraordinary evidence to be accepted. And it’s also about recognizing that some forms of evidence are better than others, with scientific evidence trumping feelings, instincts, authority, tradition, and anecdotes.
While skeptics are often accused of being close-minded, true skepticism demands an open-mindedness. It means that, instead of being tightly wedded to an ideology, you are truly open to changing your mind in light of better evidence. Not weak evidence, but strong evidence. Extremist thinking is easy: the world is going to hell or everything is awesome. By contrast, skepticism teaches us to navigate the spectrum between credulity and denialism, all the while avoiding cynicism.Â
To quote physicist Richard Feynman, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself… and you are the easiest person to fool.” Skeptics sometimes forget that. Our brain deceives us every day. Magical illusions confound us, but subtler deceptions distort our reality as well. Cognitive biases, heuristics…. We are drawn to evidence that confirms our pre-conceptions and more easily reject that which goes against our thinking. We notice flaws in others more easily than we notice our own. We suck at estimating probabilities, and our memories are nowhere near as accurate as we think they are.
Moreover, people try to manipulate our thinking with bad arguments: logical fallacies, sophistry, arguments that, at first glance, look solid but really make little sense when analyzed. And we easily make the same bad arguments ourselves when trying to defend our own beliefs.
The very tools that we use to gather information about our health, about politics, about world events, they end up creating a cozy echo chamber around us. YouTube has an autoplay feature that is fed by so-called “Recommended Videos”. If I watch one video featuring a famous homeopath, soon I will be watching many more videos featuring…
