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The World Needs More Sceptics Than Experts

A sceptic’s doubt is often more useful to society than an expert’s certainty

source: pixabay.com

In a world enamoured with certainty, people view sceptics with distrust and contempt. Let’s try to understand what a sceptic is and what they are not.

A sceptic is a doubter, a questioner, and a critical examiner of facts. For a sceptic, knowledge is open-ended. It’s a project with no closure, a journey without a destination.

Sceptics are, however, not cynics. pessimists or nihilists.

Knowledge explosion has brought more disagreements than consensus

It is a supreme paradox of modern civilization that exponential growth in knowledge has led to fierce intellectual battles, hateful ideological wars, bitter political disagreements, and undesirable scientific squabbles.

Everybody seems to know more but nobody will acknowledge other points of view. Everybody seems eager to learn, but few will unlearn and rethink what they know.

When expertise becomes a curse than a blessing

I am not against experts or expertise, but I dislike the expert’s intolerance of criticism and questioning. I respect an expert’s deep knowledge of a particular subject, but I disfavour an expert’s dogmatism and hubris.

When people expect experts to inform, instruct, and guide public opinion, they often confound, misinform, divide, and mislead people.

Healthy disagreements deepen knowledge; intolerant posturing corrupts knowledge.

The two key areas where experts disagree and confuse the people, for example, are climate change and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO).

When the pandemic broke out, experts could not agree even on a basic thing as wearing masks as a protective measure.

Science versus Scientism

Science doesn’t seek the truth but tries to reveal facts as they appear empirically. Science does not offer certainty of knowledge; it seeks to falsify itself continually as unknown facts emerge. A scientific fact is a creature of the moment; it has no eternal life. A fact can take rebirth as a new avatar.

Falsification is science’s gold standard. Scientists midwife new ideas, but they do not own or parent ideas. They slaughter their progeny to create better offspring.

Scientism is the very antithesis of science. It conflates facts as truth. Scientism is an extreme philosophy or ideology that sanctifies science as the universe’s ultimate arbiter. Scientism projects science as a panacea for all our ills, even for our moral dilemmas.

Scientism seeks to convert science into a religion, as an inflexible belief system.

Sceptics offer a buffer against the certainty of knowledge

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.” (Richard Feynman)

Eminent scientists like Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Carl Sagan were sceptics in the sense that they were humble enough to question and change their theories in the face of fresh evidence.

Sceptics help prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Scepticism urges us to slow down our thinking, pause, and question assumptions, theories, and expert-mediated facts.

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best — and therefore never scrutinize or question.” ~Steven Jay Gould

A sceptical mindset is a perfect antidote to the spread of conspiracy theories. Scepticism teaches us to suspend judgment and belief for as long as our minds feel uncomfortable with the hypotheses and theories circulating with mass approval.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (Carl Sagan)

Scepticism encourages curiosity

A sceptic’s mind is the questioning mind. It is curious to explore and investigate. The term sceptic is derived from the Greek ‘skeptikos’, meaning “to inquire” or “look around.”

“Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.” Milan Kundera

The sceptic asks more questions than seeks answers. Civil debates have become a thing of the past. People do not discuss or ask questions to explore new perspectives. They talk but do not listen or pay attention to what others are trying to say.

Scepticism can be healthy and unhealthy. Healthy scepticism is about critical enquiry; unhealthy scepticism is about negativity and condemnation. A true sceptic plays the Devil’s Advocate; a false sceptic wallows in dark cynicism.

Healthy scepticism is ethical; it functions within well-defined boundaries. Unhealthy scepticism is unethical; it is indiscriminate. Healthy scepticism is positive; it does not seek perpetual ambiguity. It accepts answers, conclusions and theories if overwhelming evidence supports them. Unhealthy scepticism is negative; it does not want any answers. It’s judge, jury, and executioner rolled into one.

Summing up

The world is full of people who are so sure about their beliefs and convictions that they cannot tolerate opposing views. They feel threatened by uncomfortable questions about their beliefs and seek refuge in the certainty of their worldviews.

Societies are turning increasingly divisive. Ideological divides threaten to destabilize democracies. Hateful polemic monopolizes social media.

Experts make polarization worse by their conflicting and shifting opinions.

A healthy dose of scepticism is the best vaccine to inoculate humanity against the debilitating pandemic of misinformation and distrust.

Let’s train our children and youth to cultivate a sceptical, questioning, and inquisitive mind so that they cultivate objectivity to suspend rash judgements. They should be more like scientists doing experiments with a capacity to unlearn, rethink, and relearn than behave like preachers, politicians, and prosecutors.

Thanks for reading.

Knowledge
Expert
Skeptics
Questioning
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