One consequence of questioning everything is that you will run into someone who disagrees with you. It’s not the end of the world. Indeed, it’s depressingly common. Disagreements can result from incomplete data, different experiences, different conclusions, different biases or any of a dozen other issues.
The issues (for lack of better word) are not flaws in skepticism. They come from imperfect information. Humans (in spite of what some of them may believe bout themselves) are not perfect. No person has perfect information on a subject. No person has flawless reasoning about everything. No person has flawless logic on every decision. It’s the way we are. We have to deal with it.
What follows these facts are lot of my own opinions.
Anyone has several avenues to deal with disagreements between two parties. Nations start throwing bombs at each other. Young children start screaming, crying, and kicking. Socially nervous people tend to shut down and walk away. Businesses call in hordes of lawyers.
Unfortunately, none of these methods are very effective at settling a dispute in a reasonable fashion. By reasonable, I don’t mean that one party is dead, in jail, or getting a cookie to stop the crying. I mean reasonable in that both parties are satisfied that the best possible resolution occurred and/or the truth has been found.
To quote a whole bunch of people, “Well there’s your problem right there.”
You see, people can’t even agree on what the best possible resolution and/or truth is. Too many people believe that the best possible resolution is “I win and fuck you.” The other response is “I’m right and nothing you say will convince me.”
And this (cleverly) brings us back to skeptics. In my mind, skeptics are supposed to be above this petty squabbling like two kids of the last cookie. We have reason and we use it. We have logic and we use it. We search for data and we use it.
And yet, we still have disagreements.
There are somethings that just will not be resolved. It’s not possible for everyone to agree. These are aesthetic qualities and events which happened for which there is no record.
For the first category, we could have (and I have seen) an epic, knock-down-drag-out-fight over who is the better horror writer Lovecraft or King. I’m not a huge fan of either, but I think Lovecraft the more creative and King the better writer. I love European dance and house music. Another well known scientist/atheist blogger really likes the Beatles. We just aren’t going to agree on this.
For the second category, we don’t know how life formed on this planet. We will (most likely) never know exactly how life formed on this planet. The event is buried in time and the pieces involved in the event are too small to leave any kind of record. We do have ideas about how it could have happened. We have thousands of experiments that support individual pieces. But we’ll never know if the first ‘living thing’ on Earth was in a warm pond or near a black smoker. It’s not possible to know this… wait… what’s that Blue Box?
For these topics, we do the best we can. And then we agree to disagree or we continue to look for ideas and evidence to support those ideas. I’m not going to skip a conference because one of the presenters likes {shudder} country music. Origins of life research continues on.
And that’s fine. I respect the opinions of others… on those relatively inconsequential topics. It doesn’t hurt me… unless I have to drive from Austin to Atlanta listening to country and western.
There are other topics, which are not as inconsequential where skeptics might disagree. Many of these are what I would consider scientific issues that will be or can be resolved… just not yet. Discussions on these topics can be… lively.
The original readers of Origins of the Species were right to question Darwin. It was a valid response to a new idea. But we’ve progressed much, much beyond that now and (in my opinion) people who reject evolution are just being silly. It simply works. Similarly, the ideas developed from Einstein’s original works took a long time to develop into testable experiments. Now, no one questions Einstein’s work… well that’s not really true anymore what with the Cosmological Constant coming back into vogue.
Skeptics, and I have to include scientists in the skeptic category for purposes of this discussion, should be able to say, “I don’t know.” and “We need more evidence.” We should be able to make our points and then wait until new evidence appears.
One thing that has been bothering me about some discussions I’ve been having is these people who listen to your argument, think you’re crazy and then, when you (correctly) walk away from the argument, claim victory. “See he’s not commenting anymore, he can’t refute me.”
In my experience (which is considerable), the person who walks away is doing the smart thing. A person makes the best argument that they can. Then support it with evidence and logic. They even teach when needed. But if someone refuses to ‘get it’, there’s not much more anyone can do. You can only say the same thing so many times.
I know a guy who has been recycling the same argument on a weekly basis ( and I mean this literally) for over four years. No amount of logic, reason, or evidence can penetrate his shield of faith. Honestly, I doubt nuclear weapon could penetrate him. I have never seen anyone so resistant to everything. We can only tell him he’s wrong for so long before it becomes crazy.*
A true skeptic, at this point, will conclude that there’s nothing more he can do and walk away. Two skeptics who disagree like this should, at least, agree to wait for more evidence. If the best argument doesn’t convince the other party, then repeating it won’t help. Maybe new evidence will. Maybe not, especially if the evidence is ambiguous or against a lot of other evidence.
Skeptics may also have some ideas about non-science things. I really try to avoid these, because they are squishy subjects and information on the is very, very incomplete (sometimes all but non-existent) and yet they are still highly charged topics which generate powerful emotions and strong argument.
In a way, these are almost like the aesthetic arguments above. There really isn’t a good solution, humans being what they are and all. But something MUST BE DONE!!!!!!
A lot of politics falls in this category. We can’t make people of another country behave rationally. Just the interference tends to piss people off (on both sides). But something MUST BE DONE. It hurts to see people killing other people because the second group isn’t willing to be slaves to the first group. It sucks. It’s stupid. It’s immoral (by my standards, which are the only ones that matter to me). But bombing the hell out of that country isn’t a solution. Talking isn’t much a solution either. The same for trade restrictions. All of those tend to result in more harm to the people we’re trying to help.
We can’t make our representatives actually represent us. I wish we could. But on many issues, the will of the people is subverted by their ‘representatives’ who are acting in the name of the people. It’s annoying. We, the people, are having to fight battles with our own representatives… and the issues I’m talking about here are ones that are massively supported by the people… not even touchy subjects like abortion.
If the people we consider the smartest, the most reasonable (in actually using reason), the ones who examine all the evidence still can’t decide on reasonable course of action, then what are we to do? How can we resolve these issues that directly affect the people of this planet?
I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that it’s not the fault of skepticism or humanism. It’s the fault of us flawed humans. Us prideful humans who would rather destroy an entire country, race, or species before admitting fault. Us reactionary humans who make decisions, then try to rationalize those decisions instead of thinking first. It’s all on us.
And it’s all on us to fix these kinds of problems. And here’s a hint. If you say
If everyone would just listen to me
OR
They need to change their minds
OR
Nothing can change my mind
Then you are part of the problem.
The one thing that skeptics are good at is changing our minds… when presented with a good argument and evidence. That’s not a flaw of skepticism either. That’s a feature.
It takes a powerful, confident person to admit they were wrong and change how they think when new evidence comes in. We need people like that trying to settle arguments, not people who know they are right no matter what.
This post brought to you by the Pacific Rim Soundtrack
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* I’ve often heard that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result.
