TAM 8 and skeptical humility.

I'll be heading to TAM 8 in Las Vegas soon. I've read books by about 3/4 of the speakers, including Richard Dawkins, Micheal Shermer, Carol Tarvis, Phil Plait, James Randi, and many others. It should be good. Maybe I'll have some thoughts to share when I get back.

I had also been thinking about skepticism and humility recently. I forget what made me think about it. It was probably some post on a skeptical blog with a dismissive tone. Although many skeptics take a better tone, a few often are dripping with contempt at their targets. I can understand that, to some extent. Some of the ideas are so obviously wrong, and some of them cause harm. The believers continue to spout their nonsense no matter how many times they are corrected. We see this with creationism and anti-vaxers and global warming denial and many others.

When you spend a lot of time dealing with these pseudosciences, there are two common responses. One is to see how completely wrong they are and to dismiss them all as fools and idiots with a contemptuous tone. However, I think another, much more humble response, is more appropriate. I am more interested in why people believe these things than what they believe. The one thing that is most obvious is that people do not believe because they are stupid. Very intelligent people believe things we know are wrong. Intelligent people are better at deceiving themselves with sophisticated arguments than less intelligent people. Studying pseudoscience means studying all of the ways we can't trust what we believe. Our memories can fool us. We all seek out confirming evidence and ignore contrary evidence. To resolve cognitive dissonance, we convince ourselves we weren't wrong when we made a mistake, and refuse to admit error. Now, I suppose it is possible that all of the other intelligent people fall victim to those things, but I am better and am correct in all of my beliefs. If I believe that, I have learned nothing from studying pseudoscience.

Even Nobel Prize winners have supported obvious woo. Do I really believe I am not susceptible? I think I can confidently say I am wrong about some things that I am confident I am right about (did that make sense?). I just don't know what I am wrong about. I am blind to it, by it's very nature. I try to think critically about everything and try to avoid falling into faulty thinking, but I would be a fool to think I can succeed completely. However, I can show a little humility and recognize that those that believe in woo are not different in kind from anyone else, and I should not hold them in contempt.

How can we identify if we are wrong? There are a few things to look for. If you hold a belief that is in stark contrast to most of the experts in the field, you should look at your belief very carefully. I don't want to make an argument from authority and say the experts are always right or that you should never question the common wisdom. We need people to question authority and the experts are sometimes wrong. But the stronger the consensus, the more careful and thorough you have to be if you oppose them. You could be the lone clear thinker and thousands of scientists are wrong, but it is more likely the other way around. You should look carefully for blinders if you oppose the majority. If someone who opposes evolution says "if we evolved from monkeys, then why are monkeys still around?", they obviously are not qualified to oppose evolution. Biologists have not gone 150 years missing such an obvious objection. There is a simple answer, and if you don't know it, you don't know the theory of evolution.

Global warming is a good example, and I can speak from personal experience. When it first became a public issue in the late 1980s, I was skeptical (the actual science goes back 100 years before that, although I did not know it at the time). It is perhaps my natural instinct to doubt such ideas, and there have been numerous examples of distorted environmental fears. This seemed like another example of crying wolf. To a non expert, there seemed to be enough reason to doubt it. But I wasn't an expert. I never dismissed it out of hand, fortunately, and maintained some humility in admitting my lack of understanding. By 1997 the first IPCC report showed there was a consensus for warming. At that time, I tentatively accepted the consensus. I recognized that I did not have sound science to deny the consensus. If I were to disagree, I would have to bone up on the details of the science. I certainly couldn't deny it just because of my biases or instincts. Since then, I have tried to familiarize myself a little better with the science and the arguments of deniers. The science seems solid. I certainly have no basis to deny the consensus of thousands of experts. I have also noticed that the arguments of deniers tend to follow the same pattern of arguments I have seen in many other pseudosciences, so I have definitely rejected most of their arguments.

There can be a delicate balance. When you study pseudoscience and see how easily we are deceived, you can doubt yourself so much that you think knowledge is impossible. How do I know I'm not wrong just as all of the confident deniers are wrong? Science is a way to know. It never has certainty, but you can have reasonable confidence. Science can correct for our errors of thinking.

If you have changed your mind about quite a few things, it suggests you are at least open to evidence. On the other hand, if your beliefs on most topics are the same now as when you were 18, you should be worried. What are the chances you happened to get everything right at that age? In the modern world, people are often criticized for changing their minds. I think we should critisize the people who never change their minds. They are the ones who are most certainly wrong about many things.