When ‘people’ (the media mostly) started to refer to politicians who denied the existence of climate change, ‘climate skeptics’, it annoyed me.
I was a scientist and my view was that our scientific currency was essentially healthy and intentional skepticism. It didn’t translate to me as something negative. And I felt in some ways that it was a point of professional pride. As a community, we didn’t and couldn’t just accept others’ findings, even our most esteemed colleagues’ findings, without submitting them to rigorous re-examination.
I have since realized that 1) I was right, but for the wrong reason, and 2) I was wrong.
(I feel your immediate skepticism that this post will amount to anything of value.)
There are at least two different varieties of skepticism that the dictionaries don’t quite capture it seems to me. And there is a third thing that purports to be skepticism but is actually the opposite.
Basically, skepticism is misunderstood.
And far be it for me to step into the role of defending skepticism, but I feel like I at least need to clear things up on its behalf.
Partly because I believe in the usefulness of good skepticism. And then there are times when it’s unhealthy and can be part of the problem, and then still more times when people claim they are being responsibly ‘skeptical’ when in fact, they are trying to convince you of a contrarian point of view.
And it’s important to recognize the difference. Our understanding of the world and our sense of trust in what we know and where we go to find it, all depend on how we use skepticism.
So, in this post, I’m going to deal with the first ‘useful’ kind of skepticism and then in posts two and three, later this week, we’ll touch on the other two.
Real and Useful Skepticism
The only (small) way in which I was right to herald skepticism as positive is when it is narrowly defined, and based on a clear understanding of when to apply it.
For example, we should be skeptical of powerful people advocating for a change that would give them more power, or of a politician who tells you his opponent is only after your taxes/guns/vote/choices/first born etc. It doesn’t mean that the politician or the power broker is wrong, but it would be wise to be skeptical, since in both of those scenarios, our belief in the information serves the source.
So in scenarios where the person or source of information has something to sell you, a clear personal/economic benefit in getting your support, or has a history of lying or cheating (all self-serving motives), then your skepticism is likely warranted. This is how we avoid being gullible to people who might have reason to mislead you. We might even (actually definitely) need more of it in our fast food media diet.
So the main ‘trigger’ for being skeptical in this case is understanding the motive of the person or organization doing the information-sharing.
The challenge is being discerning about motive. We can also be sold on misinformation about other people’s motives, especially if we’re more apt to listen to our ‘tribe’ than to think about it for ourselves.
For example, we (the scientists), were literally accused of being ‘in it for the money’ when climate change science was being challenged by those who had their own motives for not wanting climate change to be a problem. It only takes a little, slightly more objective, step back to realize that people who want you to believe their agenda are using a tactic to undermine the credibility of the climate scientists1, and even less of a step back to realize it isn’t even likely to be true: I don’t think I know any rich climate scientists but there are some very wealthy politicians….for instance.
The surest way of undermining credibility is attacking motive, and if we’re more concerned with following our ‘tribe’ than genuinely considering what we’re being told, it can be easy to mis-assign bad motives to others. Partly because we’re more inclined to believe that the other guys have bad motives to start with.
It’s my contention that we often don’t independently consider the motive of the people we listen to. At least not enough. I am not looking to distrust people (this is the subject of part II of the post), but thinking (again, independently) about why a person is telling you something can lead us to some useful insight into motive. I think a little bit more of this might cause us to pause before always siding with our tribe or considering that sometimes the other guys might have a point.
So, this is the useful side of skepticism. And depends on two critical elements: discernment, and independent assessment of motive.
But we’re going to dive into more about how it can be overused in part II and falsely claimed in part III, with a little wrap up in part III as well.
I’d say that on the topic of climate change, it has now become much more difficult to discern who has an agenda. At the beginning, it wasn’t so much about ‘saving the world’, it was about sharing the science. Now, there are a lot of people trying to convince us of every part of the spectrum from the world is about to end, to it’s just fine and could even be good.