A Troubled Skeptic
It is so hard to be a skeptic, that I really feel frustrated about it, I don't know how to cope with it. I mean, who has the time to check everything? You got to take things for granted, you simply don't have a choice. Knowledge is a collective effort.
And I think I just had an epiphany:
I am inevitably going to fall for some stupid shit, OK? This is going to happen. It is going to happen more than once. The key is: to bounce back. To keep bouncing back. Not to get caught in a downward spiral of clinging to a pet theory despite mounting evidence against it. To be able to admit - OK, I was wrong! It sounded good, it was beautiful, it was convincing - hey, you know, maybe I was stupid to believe it, but I'll certainly be more stupid if I don't admit my mistake now!
The key, I guess, sounds simple: being able to admit a mistake and let go. But it's not simple at all. The emotional attachment one can develop to some random "fact" about the world is just unbelievable. It's about investment, I guess - when something convinces you, you kind of "vouch for it", you unite your own being with it, to some degree.
Here is an example: I saw a news item on some "hydrogen mileage booster" shit, and I kind-of swallowed it. I checked around in a couple of articles… decided I'm unsure about it - maybe it does work. The funny thing is: when my cousin Boris proved to me using high-school arithmetic that there's no way this thing could work, I was dismayed… I still remember the feeling. I was happy, of course - I just learned something - but I remember the strong urge to resist the evidence he brought, to keep thinking maybe there's something we didn't understand, or something… The funny thing is: I don't give a flying f%@k about mileage boosters! I don't even have a car! I looked into the whole matter on the Internet, for like, an hour, tops. That was my whole investment. I wasn't even fully convinced. But the bad feeling was certainly very present - I had to overcome some noticeable internal resistance to let go.
So imagine, what degree would that same resistance reach if my investment was bigger than that? What if I had a car, and I had friends who claimed the booster worked, and I spent my money on one, and blogged about how great this shit was, and all that? I'm afraid it would be really, really, hard to let go of the delusion at that point. And what if it was not some booster shit (the whole harm of which is a few hundred bucks), but some serious stuff that royally screwed up my life? The investment would be enormous…
So, I'd say: being a skeptic is not so much about being really "smart" and all, and not accepting dubious claims to begin with - it's much more about being at ease with re-evaluating the claims you already accepted in light of new evidence. And I suspect that when you get good at that, the ability to filter out stuff to begin with will improve as well. Or so I hope… :-)