How To Teach a Healthy Dose of Skepticism? 880
c0d3h4x0r writes "It's no accident that 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' is one of the most common tags applied by this community to stories about proposed ideas or laws. The ability to spot and predict faults is a big part of what makes a great engineer. It starts with having a healthy skepticism about the world, which leads to actual critical thinking. Many books and courses teach critical thinking skills, but what is the best way to encourage and teach someone to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism? Is it even a teachable skill, or is it just an innate part of the geek personality?"
It's teachable. Actually, it's even easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
The very simple reason is that people who think are harder to govern than people who don't. What is wanted is people who can do their job, preferably well, but don't have any interests outside of it.
The reason why we get laws proposed that have glaring flaws is that those flaws are often what is wanted. The great majority of people does either not care or swallows the snakeoil and the promise of safety, simply because they were never taught to contemplate "what could possibly go wrong".
It's pretty much how Homer put it. We elect politicians so we don't have to think. Unfortunately, he's not alone with this point of view.
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Skepticism as Cause, rather than Symptom (Score:1, Insightful)
All of the things that I typically associate with geeks versus non-geeks differ most dramatically in the presence or absence of internal consistency and predictability, a trait that skeptics seek in anything they examine before they are willing to accept it.
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Keyword: *Healthy* (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the difference between "let's be careful before we dive into something new & shiny" and "Get off my lawn!"
Re:As a geek, (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It just comes naturally with experience (Score:3, Insightful)
No it's not, it's something you ahve to train your mind for. You need techniques that you apply to everything, including..or even especially, your acred cows.
Re:Step 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Education from a young age (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course this makes me a very negative and paranoid person. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate something correctly if you start looking at all the ways it can go wrong. And most people don't like it when your response to everything is "yeah, but *actually*..."--I've gotten the reputation for being a big kill-joy.
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing.
Pseudo-skeptics vs. skeptics (Score:5, Insightful)
A true skeptic is skeptical of both points of view, and does the critical thinking necessary to form his/her own opinion. This is harder to teach since it comes from experience, which is harder to come by in this sheltered world of ours.
It's not about teaching it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parents are too quick to pass the baton to religion, new-age hokum, or just feel-good Oprah-ness in order to make their kids feel good about the world. They just want things to be easy, and don't have the personal fortitude to usher their kids through the slightly challenging phase of learning to apply their natural reasoning skills to topics that are somewhat less immediately tangible than what happens when you touch something hot. Issues like "what happens when one state taxes high tech entrepeneurs more than the the state next door" or "what happens when you let a gene pool get too shallow" or "what happens when you use GOTO statements in your code because it lets you get to lunch earlier that day" aren't any different than "what happens when you dump a hot oatmeal bowl in your lap," but require a little more discipline to digest.
The platform for rational thought is already there. You have to kill it, though, or slowly suffocate it throughout child development, in order to make it something that it feels like work to wake it back up later. Just keep it alive in the first place, and we wouldn't have such a mixed bag cultural messes to deal with. We wouldn't be seeing the strange, sad dance of a politician twisting and turning while explaining why he's suddenly between churches while running for president... since he wouldn't have been glued to a crazy church in the first place. Think how much less noise and distraction we'd have without all that nonsense.
Re:Education from a young age (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, teach your children to think. Give them tools they can use later in life.
I Seek Wisdom and Its Bastard Son, Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
How could you get a job? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's teachable. Actually, it's even easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's terribly difficult to be a leader when you're following the opinion polls for all your decisions, for one thing. That's a big circle of people wanting the politician to do the thinking, and the politician wanting the people to do the thinking. Eventually we need to figure out that no thinking gets done that way, and only mimicry.
Clinton was renowned for following polls while in office. G.W. Bush likely also follows polls, but from his narrowly selected portion of the total US constituency. I'm not sure we've had someone in the office of President who actually did any leading since Eisenhower. Perhaps Kennedy or Reagan lead, but most modern holders of the office have been followers elected to lead.
Re:It's an innate skill (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Education from a young age (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing.
I'm certainly a skeptic in the sense described in this story, but skepticism is a tool, not my identity.
Re:Is this really... (Score:5, Insightful)
In brief, people can think "This may not work", "This probably won't work", or "This will never work" before they have any evidence.
The skeptic will go with the evidence more readily. The cynic will be biased towards the negative, but can be convinced by the evidence. The pessimist will be surprised at success even when success should have been expected.
Of course, there are optimists to the other side of skeptics on that list. They'll favor success until the evidence proves them wrong, but will favor success the next time.
Then there are "true believers" on either end who either will be convinced of failure or convinced of success even after the outcome is clear to everyone else. They'll twist the evidence and the logic to their conclusion before they allow their conclusion to change with the evidence and logic.
Skepticism is just a starting point (Score:5, Insightful)
As a person in education... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to teach others to be skeptical is to give reasons for skepticism. With middle school students (experience teaching algebra/pre-algebra), I would start off easy:
Me: What's the square root of ?
Students: *Silence*
Me: Thought so. The answer is "flower".
Students: *laughter*
Me: What? Something wrong?
Student: Ya, "flower" is not a number.
Me: And?
Student: A square root needs to be a number.
Me: Does it?
Student: YA! Duhhh!
Me: Prove it. Show me how multiplying two flowers doesn't make .
It's humorous, but I threw silly things like that in all the time. Answers the students knew couldn't be right. That gave them the courage to call me out when they thought I was wrong. I then required more of them:
Me: is the correct answer to Students: How do you know?
Me: I just know. I'm the teacher.
Students: Ya, but you lie sometimes.
Me: I do. So what do you do when you think I'm lying?
Student: We show you why we think you're lying. Me: So show me.
Student: *walks up to the board and does the math*
In this situation, it doesn't matter whether or not the student is right in her/his distrust, but that s/he was willing to check my work.
This is a tactic I use to teach and ingrain skepticism in every class I've ever taught.
Re:Education from a young age (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm an atheist skeptic who would would be incredulous even if I had the abduction complete with anal probe insertion. But then I didn't pick up her smoking habit either.
Re:The Skeptical Environmentalist (Score:2, Insightful)
Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates that you can take skepticism too far. Skepticism calls for the questioning of a hypothesis based on doubts about evidence supporting that hypothesis and on faith in counter-evidence. If the hypothesis is supported by little data, or if the counter-evidence is as great as the supporting data, it is reasonable to doubt the hypothesis.
In the case of climate change, previous finding of anthropogenic global warming are continually reinforced by new findings while alternative explanations are steadily debunked by new findings.
If you listen to Lomborg's interviews, you'll notice him dodging direct questions about whether the environment is getting worse, and redirecting the discussion to hypotheses that the environmental changes can have a positive effect and that humans can adapt to take advantage of these changes. He puts a real positive spin on the possibility of change.
The /. community has a technical term for this: FUD! (or perhaps, reverse-FUD - putting a positive spin on a negative thing).
Start with ads (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Another good recent read was "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens. He discusses briefly the idea that human credulity is a biological adaptation to help us benefit from the placebo effect. Credulous individuals are religious, superstitious and generally happier and healthier than us miserable skeptics.
Don't Fail a lot - Learn from others (Score:3, Insightful)
I claim horseshit. Those mantras are only repeated by people who have managed to succeed after relatively small failures. Failure marks you in a puritan society. Failure marks you like a tattoo. Failure burns away all your trust in yourself and your energy.
Learn or burn. Read or bleed. Let others fail and develop the skills to actually learn from their failures , not yours. Let them suffer.
* Don't buy Yahoo! stock at $160 a share at the height of market bubble.
* Don't buy a 3-room clapboard box house for $500000 at the height of a housing bubble.
* When you boss tells you that 'a positive mental attitude and vitamin D will cure cancer, along with most other ailments' and then explains that this is why you aren't going to get health insurance, take the vitamin pill and look for another job.
* When the old man at the VFW tells you 'it's your duty' to go to Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, salute him, and find some other old men to hang with who don't still wake up with 30-year-old nightmares of senseless slaughter.
* When someone says 'bet ya can't do...' on a skateboard, rub your tongue over your front teeth. Because that might be the last time that you feel them if you try it and don't quite pull it off.
* When you get stopped by the police and they pull a marijuana cigarette out of your (or their) pocket and then suggest a little trip to the ATM, pay them off and move. You can't fight it in court without paying many, many thousands in legal fees. And you'll end up with a chickenshit pot conviction like 25 million other Americans who find themselves being the only people left subject to legal discrimination and bigotry.
* Last but not least in this series, actually believe what the black people tell you about their experiences with the authorities and institutions that you have come to know and trust.
Above all, Don't Fail!
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:3, Insightful)
When a painter puts up a sign with 'wet paint' my experience tells me that I can probably trust it and choose not to test his claim.
I am a skeptic, I don't have blind faith. (I probably have some hidden pieces of superstition left, but have been very thoroughly getting rid of them)
But it is simply not practical to be skeptical about everything. At some point I need to be able to trust someone else....
e.g. when going to a doctor I need to be able to trust his knowledge of the human body. Unfortunately we allow some idiots to call themselves 'doctor' while selling quackery like homeopathy.
The hardest part is not just being a skeptic, but knowing where you can let your guard down and trust someone else's skepticism.
The difficult part is defining "healthy dose". (Score:4, Insightful)
In its best form, skepticism is a matter of caution--wanting to have good grounds for what you accept as true, and maintaining your willingness to re-examine your previously-accepted beliefs.
All too often, skepticism degenerates into simple invincible disbelief. (Or, in a softer form, active disinclination to believe.)
That form of "hard" skepticism is obnoxious in its hypocrisy. You wind up with people whose beliefs (as in, their disbeliefs) are formed irrationally, without respect to reason or evidence--but who smugly view themselves as "rational skeptics".
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:5, Insightful)
-Otto von Bismarck
=Smidge=
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't read the book, so I can't really comment on it, but one must be careful with such a "see it to believe it" mentality. It can force people to restrict their thinking to "inside the box". This is why I say skepticism is just a starting point. Though we may be skeptical, we must not shut down, but continue to be open-minded, and allow for thinking outside the box. Because sometimes there really is a dragon in the garage.
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bert
Since you brought up religion ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you brought up religion ... I saw a quote in todays' paper asking about whether people believe in bad luck on Friday the 13th (Today is Friday the 13th, btw). One wman said "Oh no, I have God watching over me, I don't have to worry. I don't believe in superstitions."
My irony meter pegged. Of course, critical thinking and logic are anathema to anyone who believes in god.
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:2, Insightful)
All things considered, we don't have any evidence for the Christian or Jewish or Muslim god, or the Hindu/Buddhist gods, or any supernatural events. Well, I should say, the only "evidence" we have is testimony, which is often thousands of years old, and distorted etc. (Hume wrote about whether one should believe in "miracles" or not. No you shouldn't, because it is much more likely that you were mistaken, if you "saw" it yourself, or mislead (intentionally or otherwise), otherwise.)
However, it is within our understanding of the way the universe works that there might be life outside of this solar system. Yes, we don't have any evidence for it, and that is why Sagan (and myself) don't claim that it exists. Merely that it might exist, and that we hold our judgment until further, and sufficient, evidence is presented.
Do you have any other examples of Sagan (or any other skeptic of a similar bent) believing in irrationalities or without evidence?
Teaching my kids Skepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead I approach every disagreement as an opportunity for a proof. "Why do I have to eat my broccli?" "Well I guess you don't, but it is pretty hard to find iron that is more easily digestable. You need iron levels in your blood to be high enough so it can process oxygen more efficiently or you will find yourself lacking energy, being tired, and even potentially becoming pale and sick. There are other ways to get the vitamins you need, but to me Broccli is worth it because it is actually pretty good, and convenient because it is right her on the table."
Sure he may still not eat the broccli, but at least I tried to appeal to his logical side and gave him a reasonable and easy to understand stance. Always honoring his questions, and answering with real logic and real science means that whenever someone CAN'T answer with something real, he will imediatly have red flags.
While "Because I said so" would probably make a lot of kids get their nutrition today, my approach will hopefully inspire him to THINK about his nutrition, and question risk/reward and give hom practice evaluating trade-offs.
Science vs. Religion? (Score:4, Insightful)
And how many people that believe in the scientific method expose themselves to the theater of science business?
A former professional scientist once told me, that scepticism is so big that it's difficult to introduce new ideas.
But when it's difficult to introduce new ideas, you have basically the same thing that stifled progress in the Dark Ages: Stagnation. Some scientists fear so much for their reputation that they barely dare to publish new ideas.
Having a healthy dose of scepticism is good, but if it's overdone, it doesn't help either.
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why amusing? It's a perfectly logical, rational conclusion based on the available evidence. No one has ever provided any evidence or test to show that there is a supreme, omnipotent being watching over us. Nor has anyone ever provided any evidence to indicate how such a being could come into existence in the first place. The best anyone has ever offered is simply, "God/Vishnu/Chutulu/whatever has always existed." That is no evidence.
On the other hand, we have absolute, concrete evidence for what it takes for life to form. Granted, we have only a single data point, our planet, but using that as our reference, we can now search the cosmos for other bodies which exhibit similar conditions and explore them for signs of life, intelligent or otherwise. We can of course also listen for signs of intelligent life through radio waves or other sources. In other words, we are looking for evidence of other beings because we know that at least in one case, our planet, such beings exist and if intelligent life exists on this ball of rock, then there is a probability that life exists somewhere else under similar conditions.
This is where skepticism comes into play. If someone says "X product can do Y job better, and more cheaply, than a name brand product", they have to prove it. Until such time, people should remain skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. Why do you think the folks who produce supplements are so adamant about not having to prove the claims they make? They know that if subjected to scientific testing, their products would be shown not to do what the manufacturer claims.
The same thing occurs with Sagan's (and others) stances on religion and why ID is not a scientific principle. Those concepts do not stand up to scientific rigor. If you want to believe that there is a God (or Gods), then by all means, go ahead. But don't equate a belief in something for which there is zero evidence to support said belief with an idea for which evidence already exists.
Re:And when are we being too critical? (Score:3, Insightful)
Science is in a weird position with respect to belief and questioning: it advances precisely because lots of people do research, that leads to wide-ranging theories, that other people use, so it is iterative and you necessarily rely on other people's work when you do yours. But at the same time, good science requires openness to change, that you be willing at any time to discard all the previous work. It requires filtering, so you can tell which pieces of evidence are wrong, and which pieces indicate that your framework of reasoning is wrong.
So, a good scientist should be exactly the opposite of the sort of person that upsets you, but that's exactly what establishes that person as a good scientist. Most of the time, people aren't able to make these sorts of visionary leaps.
I don't think it's scientists you're upset about -- I think it's human cognitive processes, and it's just more obvious in science because falsifiability is much more cut-and-dried than it is in many other fields.
Re:And when are we being too critical? (Score:4, Insightful)
A child saying "those look like they could fit together" is something any scientist would, and should, dismiss as an actual argument for the existence of tectonic plates.
When it turned out there was a massive volcanic conveyor belt discovered at the bottom of the ocean in between the two continents, with magnetic stripes from different periods of north/south flips, and an ever growing record of similar fossils on different parts of the world with more accurate dating techniques, etc, etc, and now there's something worth considering.
A scientist was right to doubt the existence of tectonic plates before based on your observation, and is right to believe in them now. The idea that people who change their mind should be shamed goes against the whole idea of science..
Also I don't know how a "science teacher", who has to teach you a fixed curriculum which you get tested on, counts as a scientist. Is this childhood experience what you're judging all scientists by?
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, critical thinking and logic are anathema to anyone who believes in god.
Well, I'm going to pretend you didn't just insult me, because that's not conducive to a rational argument.
Just because some folks don't need or want spirituality doesn't prevent others from having it. There are plenty of scientists and engineers and even evolutionary biologists who believe in God. The ones earning a Nobel probably won't, party because there's a lot of things you can't do if you want a Nobel -- you won't have time for your family, and if you were the kind of person who puts family (or God) ahead of a career then you weren't going to do what it takes to get that Nobel Prize.
There's some very confused, vocal people that have made the issue rather annoying. My religion says nothing about the physical world, and my science says nothing about the supernatural.
Some people have no need for religion or spirituality. Some do. Some people have no need to understand the science behind the things around them. Some do. They're orthogonal issues.
Flame on.
need both skepticism & wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
while it is important to foster a healthy skepticism (for obvious reasons),
the other half of this is that without a natural wonder and reverence,
much knowledge of the world may never be revealed to the pure skeptic.
"Reverence awakens... a sympathetic power through which we attract
qualities... around us, which would otherwise remain concealed" (HTKHW)
Re:It's teachable. Actually, it's even easy. (Score:4, Insightful)
And ironically, this tin-foil-hat-style thinking is precisely the hallmark of someone who doesn't actually think skeptically...
Re:And when are we being too critical? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can prove that wrong (logically, of course) (Score:5, Insightful)
Given 1: I believe in God.
Given 2: I am an excellent computer engineer, with dual degrees in computer engineering and computer science.
Given 3: Earning dual degrees in computer engineering and computer science and working as a computer engineer require strong critical thinking and logical skills. They also require having taken classes in logic and critical thinking.
Step 1: Earning computer science and computer engineering degrees and working in the computer engineering field require logical and critical thinking skills (Given 3), and I work in this field and have those degrees (Given 2). Therefore, it follows that I have logical and critical thinking skills.
Step 2: I have logical and critical thinking skills (Step 1), and I believe in God (Given 1). Therefore, there exist some people who believe in God and have critical thinking and logical skills.
Conclusion: I have disproved your statement that "critical thinking and logic are anathema to anyone who believes in god" by counterexample. QED.
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:4, Insightful)
What is this nonsense? Trying to equate loving your family with loving a nebulously defined "thing"? And then trying to use it to bash people that got a Nobel prize...? Jealous much?
No. To have done the kind of work that earns a Nobel takes a lot of time and effort over many years. That kind of time spend on the science is incompatible with spending time with a family, because there's only 24 hours in the day for everyone.
You are clearly being not only argumentative, but dismissive (fantasy, magic, ghosts & goblins, and other unsubstantiated nonsense). Did I accidentally hit a sore spot of yours? Because for all that you (well, really the slashdot crowd in general) want to claim that you're rational, you don't argue very rationally sometimes about religion.
We're not talking about the Phelps crew. We're actually talking about you and others like you.
Actually, we're not. I was specifically implying the religious folk who don't understand evolution. I do understand it, and I accept it as the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life that we see. If the state of Texas wants to try to "teach the controversy" or whatever mumbo-jumbo phrase the creationists are using lately, and someone else doesn't get to it first, my wife will sue their ass to keep it off the curriculum.
I pity you, because you must have a really bad life to need to escape from reality and invent things that probably aren't there.
Ah, *probably* isn't there! You at least admit it's a possibility? That's some real progress!
I can't prove God exists to you or even to myself. You can't prove she doesn't. It's not really the same, but IIRC it's pretty unlikely we'll ever know what was on the far side of the Big Bang, either. That doesn't mean physicists haven't advanced hypotheses, and I'll wager some of them even *believe* that one or another of these hypotheses must be the right one... even without proof.
Among other things, I observe some people dying for others when they don't have to (altruism). I observe some amazing changes of heart in people I interact with that would not be expected or predicted. I observe some real sacrificial love. I observe people like Martin Luther King, who believed in God and also achieved some real greatness by following where he thought God was leading.
But I suppose MLK was also a quack who needed to escape reality? Mahatma Ghandi was just confused?
but unless you can show that they are a reality
This in fact is a fallacy; here's why. By its very nature the supernatural is "super" natural. If it were measurable, repeatable, therified and falsifiable, it would cease to be *super*natural and merely be a part of nature.
Perhaps someday we can figure out why (or if) prayer works -- is it quantum mechanics? What if it turned out that thinking positive thoughts about someone affected their life even if you never told them or interacted with them? (That's spooky action at a distance.
There's plenty of things under the sun that aren't yet known. And in the end, no matter how much science explains of *how* things are done (gravity makes things fall, not angels; evolution created man, not God in 6 days), it will never explain *why*. Maybe there isn't a why, but *if* there is, science will never find it. It's not a question science is equipped to ask. So instead we have philosophers and religions to attempt an explanation of why.
Have a great day! Try not to get too mad because we disagree. I mean, I know someone (in your opinion, me) on the internet is *wrong*, but hey, it's just electrons. I don't want or need to convince you God is real, I just would like a little less reactionary hatred towards those who believe in God. Not all of us are also anti-science nuts.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine, come up with definitions for "love", "art", and "beauty" that EVERYONE can agree with and we'll talk. Spirituality has a different meaning for each of us, and I reserve the right to remind both theists and non-theists of this at any time. Just 'cause you don't agree with my take on it, or I with you, doesn't mean either of us needs to be insulting.
Re:I can prove that wrong (logically, of course) (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, a person may be a brilliant mathematician, engineer, or computer scientist, and able to reason through complex logic structures present in those fields. However, when it comes to personal relationships, they may repeatedly enter into abusive situations (domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, etc.), with an emotional need for acceptance outweighing the sensibility to avoid such encounters. They may even reason through those situations, attempting to create a logical basis that things are not as bad as they may be. However, it can still be argued that they are making irrational decisions lacking critical judgment.
Essentially, intelligent people come up with intelligent reasons to believe in irrational things. Again, not citing religion specifically, but I believe that while the grandparent's idea that religion and logic can't co-exist is incorrect, I believe the assumption of logic and critical thinking in all areas of one's life based on logic and critical thinking in one area of a person's life is also a flawed argument.
Re:I can prove that wrong (logically, of course) (Score:3, Insightful)
Before one can use logical and critical thinking to justify belief in God, one must provide evidence of a God. There is no evidence that there is a God, therefore there is no possible way logical and critical thinking lead to "Believe in God." To come to that conclusion, one must stipulate that there is, in fact, a God to believe in, which is a fallacy.
Re:I can prove that wrong (logically, of course) (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I can prove that wrong (logically, of course) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:4, Insightful)
I figure for an omnipotent, omnipresent being, this is a fairly trivial task.
So far, none have taken me up on the offer, so I remain religion-neutral
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
In fairness, what you get out of a system of logic depends entirely on the postulates you use.
If it is possible to postulate the existence of god(s) in a way consistent with observation, then it is not really illogical.
God doesn't really fail logic. It might fail Occam's Razor, but that's more of a rule-of-thumb than anything else.
Re:from the english language perhaps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? Did you even read your own link? From the second result (the first led me to a 404):
Where does it suggest innately resisting things because they are new?
Re:I can prove that wrong (logically, of course) (Score:1, Insightful)
Basic read skills are anathema to you.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe it was building for some time now, and they only just now admitted to it.
It's part of a larger argument that the world is, essentially, natural, and not supernatural. Having never directly experienced anything supernatural myself, I have no reason to assume that the supernatural exists -- and, in fact, it seems much more likely that any record I have of the supernatural (including, nay, especially the Bible) is faulty than to assume that there is something so beyond the physical laws that we could never hope to explain it.
Re:And when are we being too critical? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that it's perfectly correct to use the Earth as your reference point, so saying that the Earth is still and the Sun moves around it is perfectly correct. Obviously, it's a lot more practical (when dealing with the solar system) to use Sol as the reference point, but "less practical" doesn't mean "wrong".
What is wrong is to say that the other planets orbit the Earth (unless your definition of "orbit" covers some very weird relative trajectories). And that was the fundamental flaw in the geocentric theory (not the relationship between the Earth and Sun, which is compatible in both models). I'm always amazed by how many people (teachers included) fail to understand that.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Al Gore won one for putting together a slide show. Even if he isn't particularly 'good at computers' that thing couldn't have taken more than a couple of days to make.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:5, Insightful)
By analogy, let me suggest one way.
Remember Flatland? To a two-dimensional creature, a three-dimensional creature can do some amazing things. It doesn't know how and can't really conceive of it, but they were nevertheless possible.
Realize this is an analogy only; I can't claim to know how God affects the world, though I have some theories. But they're not *scientific* theories, they're really more like interesting philosophy exercises (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it did it make a sound).
Choose one, then we can tear that apart.
You are very convinced that you're right, clearly. I don't need you to believe in my god or any other god. But you don't seem like you'll be happy until you prove me (or others who believe as I do) wrong.
BTW: GodDidIt, is not an answer to the question "why" - it's still wishful thinking.
If you don't believe in God then of course God can't answer the why. In that case you're left with *no* answer to the why, which is fine if you like it. But thousands of years of philosophers tells me that some people at least want to speculate on the why.
Negativity!=skepticism (Score:3, Insightful)
Case in point: Nuclear Power. We know what could go wrong. Now, what is the probability, and the expected damage? Can we know by looking at our existing safety records, and those of more recent factories built in other countries? Which would result in more deaths; nuclear power, or coal power, once you take into account things such as possible meltdowns, nuclear waste, global warming, coal-mine collapses, etc...
Now, a true skeptic may be asking "what about solar/wind/water". My point is, that you have to keep asking questions, and do not confuse cynicism or denial for skepticism.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fail a lot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically, in the long run, stupidity is causing the death of our civilization.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And what does that have to do with religion? You snuck that little jab in there for a reason, why not follow through with it? Not only are you probably wrong (a lot of work over the years doesn't mean Nobel prize winning scientists don't spend time with their families...) but your little tangent on Nobel prize winning scientists not "having time" for... god and family is out of place and I wonder what your agenda really is.
You are clearly being not only argumentative, but dismissive (fantasy, magic, ghosts & goblins, and other unsubstantiated nonsense). Did I accidentally hit a sore spot of yours? Because for all that you (well, really the slashdot crowd in general) want to claim that you're rational, you don't argue very rationally sometimes about religion.
No, I'm very rational towards religion. I know you probably have ants in your pants being told your belief in a god is no more justified or special than a belief in unicorns or magical powers, but that's the way it goes when you believe in unsubstantiated things that have as much evidence going for them as fantasy creations.
Actually, we're not. I was specifically implying the religious folk who don't understand evolution. I do understand it, and I accept it as the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life that we see. If the state of Texas wants to try to "teach the controversy" or whatever mumbo-jumbo phrase the creationists are using lately, and someone else doesn't get to it first, my wife will sue their ass to keep it off the curriculum.
Good, but that doesn't change the fact that you also rely on non-scientific explanations and statements about the world, being god and, judging by what you say later, miracles and probably a host of other stuff. If you want to live in reality it's best for all of us that you keep your head there.
Ah, *probably* isn't there! You at least admit it's a possibility? That's some real progress!
OF COURSE it's possible. You think you win points for believing in something that's possible? Your lack of knowledge of philosophy shines here, because probably anything can be possible as human understanding is not and cannot be 100%.
This is exactly why god is in the same realm as big foot, unicorns, magic, the ether, the river Styx, and so on. These are all possible, sure you have to bend our current understanding of the world by adding in new statements and new assumptions to make them true (and thus new questions are raised, but strangely proponents of bullshit never seem intent on answering them honestly) but that doesn't stop people from thinking that because it's possible, it justifies belief in such a thing. Far from that fact.
I can't prove God exists to you or even to myself. You can't prove she doesn't. It's not really the same, but IIRC it's pretty unlikely we'll ever know what was on the far side of the Big Bang, either. That doesn't mean physicists haven't advanced hypotheses, and I'll wager some of them even *believe* that one or another of these hypotheses must be the right one... even without proof.
I never said "prove", it's a highly misleading word especially among the layman who has no understanding of reason and epistemology and thinks things can be "proven 100%" etc etc.
Regardless of what proof means, evidence is what is important. We have evidence that we are a single planet in the solar system orbiting a star with many other stars out there. Explanations that stars are holes in the sky don't fly anymore and for good reason. Is it possible, through some convoluted explanation, that they are merely holes in the firmament...? Of course. Anyone who thinks that is full of nonsense, however.
Scientists who believe without stro
Re:I can prove that wrong (logically, of course) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
People were denied communion because of stances they took on issues, not because of their party. The Catholic Church is against abortion, and believes it to be murder. It denies communion to those that allow abortion (as they see it murder) to happen on a large scale.
I don't see that as meddling with politics in ways it should not.
Re:And when are we being too critical? (Score:3, Insightful)
When people are mocked for their mistaken beliefs, they will make sure to follow the groupthink and not step out of line. Critical thinking requires you to be able to entertain wild and outlandish thoughts long enough to think about them, and perhaps even talk with someone else about them. If doing this will get you punished, you have created an incentive against questioning what you're being told.
All knowledge is fragile ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Learning to accept that You Can Be Wrong is only the easiest step, and the one most easily forgotten.
Here's a simple mathematical test:
Do you believe that addition is commutative? i.e., that 1+2 = 2+1? For any values of 2 and 1? How about (-2) + 1 = 1 + (-2)?
In any circumstances? ALWAYS????
I used to.
And then I was working my way through (no, I have not yet completed it, and I probably need to begin anew at page 1) John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession [google.com] -- a historical treatment of Riemann's Hypothesis that attempts to educate the non-professional mathematician reader so that they can at least kinda/sorta understand the problem. And then on pages 149-150, he introduces the Gentle Reader to "conditionally convergent" infinite series [abdn.ac.uk], which resolve into different results depending on the order the terms are summed! Yes, there have to be some subtractions mixed in with the additions in the infinite series, but I tend to treat subtraction as a flavor of addition (clearly an error, but I still don't see how) and it made me put down the book and walk around and ponder the significance of what I had read (and I found myself returning to those pages repeatedly instead of moving steadily forward).
While I can accept that I was wrong, I still don't understand WHY (and am almost certainly never going to). And if I can be wrong about something as apparently simple as addition -- even when dealing with the realm of the infinite (which is almost certainly wherein the difficulties lie) -- I can be wrong about pretty much anything. And so can You.
When we move from understanding simple mathematical concepts like addition/subtraction to dealing with a Reality that we can grasp only weakly, and can only perceive fragments of (can you see x-rays? feel neutrinos? hear frequencies beyond a narrow range?), it becomes quite impossible to wrap one's mind around even the notion of Absolute Truth. But we seem to be constructed to latch onto simple perceived truths and defend them as if they were the very foundations of our existence -- which in a sense, they are. But that's why being willing to re-invent oneself, casting aside those ideas that have been shown to be different than our notions of them, is so very important.
Proof is a slippery little devil, while Belief is incredibly sticky.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But have you actually had a supernatural experience of your own? If not, your argument is hypothetical and devil's advocate, and mine is based on experience.
By the way, a primary argument of GP was that the supernatural cannot, by definition, have natural evidence. So whenever we find natural evidence to explain a very weird phenomenon, it ceases to be supernatural, and becomes natural.
We have thinking machines that we're using to communicate over vast distances, using the same energy that powers lightning. It sounds very supernatural, but it's actually very natural.
Hume's argument is that for any given supernatural event, it either is not real, or it can be explained naturally -- even if we ultimately have to discover new natural laws to apply to it.
Your entire argument seems to be a wishy-washy Agnostic "Well, maybe it could be true!" That applies to anything. If belief in God is critical thinking, I don't know what isn't.
Which is not to say that people aren't capable of both. As has been pointed out elsewhere, many great scientists were religious.
Of course your answer may be different than mine -- maybe you've seen angels, and maybe you have considerable reason to believe that you were sane and conscious at the time.
But the vast majority of us have not seen angels, or anything else truly supernatural. The vast majority of us should, therefore, be atheist by default, if we wish to believe what is actually true.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ridiculous.
Perhaps I love science because I like understanding how God did things.
Do you think that your god follows the laws of the universe (the things that science tries to understand and describe)? If you do, then your god is really just a scientist with really good scientific knowledge. Which means it's not really a god (or at least not by most religious folk's definitions).
I could believe that there is no why. It makes me happier to believe there is.
Nuff said. Why are you still trying to claim to be rational?
I don't need to be "right" on this; in fact I admit that there's no way to prove it one way or another. But you keep trying to insist that, because there's a lack of proof and it's rather improbable, I must be wrong and I must admit it.
Who tried to get you to admit you were wrong? I didn't read that anywhere. There isn't any way to prove you're wrong (google Russel's Teapot), but you could admit that there is no good reason that you believe in a god.
Related, I don't know why it makes you happier to believe in a god. I don't believe, but if all of a sudden there was incontrovertible proof of a god, I'd be really scared. Because that's the dude that makes everything happen, including the bad stuff.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
People like to say "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." That's true, but it doesn't mean there's a 50/50 chance of existence/absence (as I'm sure you would agree if we applied the same argument to fairies). At some point you have to ask yourself, how do you tell the difference between utter "absence of evidence" and actual "absence" altogether? The answer is, of course, you can't. And you may also ask, what then is the probability of existence, given this impression of absence?
For a deity, some may present the argument from ignorance -- "I don't understand x, which leads me to believe it has supernatural origins" (or something to that effect). Looking at history alone should be enough to show how ridiculous a statement this is (as it once applied to thunder and lightning, and then to species diversity, and then to the origin of life, et cetera). But even on its own, the statement is utterly meaningless, as it attempts to explain something using the unexplained. Using what appears to be unexplainABLE, even, as some theists will agree and yet be satisfied.
A belief that the supernatural for which there is no evidence serves as explanation for anything, is irrational.
Finally, the "religious zealots and science zealots" parallelism is irresponsible. I'm paraphrasing an insightful quote, but basically: when two sides argue with equal fervor, it does not mean that the truth lies midway; it's possible for one side to simply be wrong.
With a rational thought process, it becomes quite clear that one side is indeed wrong, and which side it is.
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pseudo-skeptics vs. skeptics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Since you brought up religion ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I could just as well believe that I could walk to the moon. I could have faith that I could make a rock from a vacuum. However, they'd put me in a loony bin if I tried.
Even if I did believe in God, He can't answer the why anyway! As far as I know no-one's got his phone number...? (Also, if anyone claims to, they're most likely placed in an asylum, or given a big pointy white hat
Re:Teaching my kids Skepticism (Score:2, Insightful)
Say "I dont know".
Thats worth repeating. Say "I dont know". I'm not a parent (hardly 22) but i've seen many parents/teachers being incapable of saying those three words, as if uttering them would make the child think less of them. This mentality leads to the same conditioning of the child, and he may
An "I dont know" from a parent or a teacher shows the child theres nothing wrong in admitting. This will take him a long way. For bonus, you could look up the question at hand and find the correct answer, and teach yourself and the child a thing.
PS : I think there should me more parents like netsavior