Two Kinds of Science "Skepticism"
David Klinghoffer
Over the weekend in New York, the excellent science journalist John Horgan spoke at a convention of "Skeptics," the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, and absolutely flailed crowd. I wish I could have been there. Even better, he published his comments at Scientific American. This is a man after my own heart. He begins:
I hate preaching to the converted.
Ditto.
If you were Buddhists, I'd bash Buddhism. But you're skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism.
I'm a science journalist. I don't celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.
Preach it! Horgan makes the great distinction between "skepticism" directed at "soft" versus "hard" targets. Capital-S "Skeptics" have a tendency to bullying. Almost exclusively, they go after the weak and easy targets -- Bigfoot, UFOs, homeopathy, that kind of thing. It's their way of identifying as a tribe, says Horgan:
So I'm a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don't belong to skeptical societies. I don't hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.
When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.
Here's an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss recently wrote a book, A Universe from Nothing. He claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing?
Krauss's book doesn't come close to fulfilling the promise of its title, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book's afterword: "If On the Origin of Species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology."
Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so foolish? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. He succumbs to what you might call "The Science Delusion."
"The Science Delusion" is common among Capital-S Skeptics. You don't apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines and genetically modified food.
These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are what I call "soft targets." That's because, for the most part, you're bashing people outside your tribe, who ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted.
Meanwhile, you neglect what I call hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions.
Yes. My goodness, how I loathe tribal thinking -- perhaps to a fault.
What the genuine soft targets have in common is that, besides being encumbered by major and easily identified holes in them, they don't matter much. (I would exclude belief in God in both these respects.) If Sasquatch does or does not stalk the wildernesses of the Northwest, it hardly impacts our lives or our outlook on the meaning of existence. Also, there's no powerful Bigfoot "establishment" ready to mercilessly defend its preferred view or penalize you for your wayward thinking. Mocking Bigfoot belief costs the Skeptic nothing.
Not so with the "hard" targets, associated with prestige academia and government support. Horan's illustrations include "Multiverses and the Singularity," "Overtested and Overtreated for Cancer," and "Mental-Illness Over-Medication."
On the multiverse:
For decades, physicists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind have touted string and multiverse theories as our deepest descriptions of reality.
Here's the problem: strings and multiverses can't be experimentally detected. The theories aren't falsifiable, which makes them pseudo-scientific, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Some string and multiverse true believers, like Sean Carroll, have argued that falsifiability should be discarded as a method for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. You're losing the game, so you try to change the rules.
Physicists are even promoting the idea that our universe is a simulation created by super-intelligent aliens. Last month, Neil de Grasse Tyson said "the likelihood may be very high" that we're living in a simulation. Again, this isn't science, it's a stoner thought experiment pretending to be science.
He loses me at the end when he advocates for extreme skepticism directed at war. Pacifism and anti-war thinking can be all too comfortable ceding ground to evil, a luxury that may feel good but leaves the weak, innocent, and threatened to fend for themselves. Otherwise this is bracing stuff. Read it.
Of course among the hardest targets of all are the prestige scientific ideas about life's origins, especially the Darwinian explanation of how major novel biological structures arise. The "Skeptics" really steer clear of challenging those.
In the context of some of the discussions we have here, the critics are happy to go after a soft target like creationism. But they keep a safe distance from tackling the massive and serious critique of the Darwinian mechanism articulated by Meyer, Axe, Sternberg, Berlinski, Behe, Gauger, Wells, Nelson, et al. That's very telling.
David Klinghoffer
Over the weekend in New York, the excellent science journalist John Horgan spoke at a convention of "Skeptics," the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, and absolutely flailed crowd. I wish I could have been there. Even better, he published his comments at Scientific American. This is a man after my own heart. He begins:
I hate preaching to the converted.
Ditto.
If you were Buddhists, I'd bash Buddhism. But you're skeptics, so I have to bash skepticism.
I'm a science journalist. I don't celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.
Preach it! Horgan makes the great distinction between "skepticism" directed at "soft" versus "hard" targets. Capital-S "Skeptics" have a tendency to bullying. Almost exclusively, they go after the weak and easy targets -- Bigfoot, UFOs, homeopathy, that kind of thing. It's their way of identifying as a tribe, says Horgan:
So I'm a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don't belong to skeptical societies. I don't hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.
When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.
Here's an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss recently wrote a book, A Universe from Nothing. He claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing?
Krauss's book doesn't come close to fulfilling the promise of its title, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book's afterword: "If On the Origin of Species was biology's deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology."
Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so foolish? Because he hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment. He succumbs to what you might call "The Science Delusion."
"The Science Delusion" is common among Capital-S Skeptics. You don't apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines and genetically modified food.
These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are what I call "soft targets." That's because, for the most part, you're bashing people outside your tribe, who ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted.
Meanwhile, you neglect what I call hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions.
Yes. My goodness, how I loathe tribal thinking -- perhaps to a fault.
What the genuine soft targets have in common is that, besides being encumbered by major and easily identified holes in them, they don't matter much. (I would exclude belief in God in both these respects.) If Sasquatch does or does not stalk the wildernesses of the Northwest, it hardly impacts our lives or our outlook on the meaning of existence. Also, there's no powerful Bigfoot "establishment" ready to mercilessly defend its preferred view or penalize you for your wayward thinking. Mocking Bigfoot belief costs the Skeptic nothing.
Not so with the "hard" targets, associated with prestige academia and government support. Horan's illustrations include "Multiverses and the Singularity," "Overtested and Overtreated for Cancer," and "Mental-Illness Over-Medication."
On the multiverse:
For decades, physicists like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind have touted string and multiverse theories as our deepest descriptions of reality.
Here's the problem: strings and multiverses can't be experimentally detected. The theories aren't falsifiable, which makes them pseudo-scientific, like astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Some string and multiverse true believers, like Sean Carroll, have argued that falsifiability should be discarded as a method for distinguishing science from pseudo-science. You're losing the game, so you try to change the rules.
Physicists are even promoting the idea that our universe is a simulation created by super-intelligent aliens. Last month, Neil de Grasse Tyson said "the likelihood may be very high" that we're living in a simulation. Again, this isn't science, it's a stoner thought experiment pretending to be science.
He loses me at the end when he advocates for extreme skepticism directed at war. Pacifism and anti-war thinking can be all too comfortable ceding ground to evil, a luxury that may feel good but leaves the weak, innocent, and threatened to fend for themselves. Otherwise this is bracing stuff. Read it.
Of course among the hardest targets of all are the prestige scientific ideas about life's origins, especially the Darwinian explanation of how major novel biological structures arise. The "Skeptics" really steer clear of challenging those.
In the context of some of the discussions we have here, the critics are happy to go after a soft target like creationism. But they keep a safe distance from tackling the massive and serious critique of the Darwinian mechanism articulated by Meyer, Axe, Sternberg, Berlinski, Behe, Gauger, Wells, Nelson, et al. That's very telling.
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