What makes a good skeptic




















Rather than taking the first answer for real, you challenge the truth. Rather than taking anything for granted, you want to validate the truth. We all fall victims of the mind tricks. Challenging your own beliefs requires training your mind. One person creates the story and shares it with two different people.

Then they wait and see. You simply understand that you cannot react to the first answer, you want more evidence before buying into it.

Skepticism is not denialism either. Anything is possible or not until proven the contrary. Challenging a theory is how new lines of thinking are created. Cynicism is distrusting most information you see or hear, especially when our beliefs are being challenged. Skepticism is not thinking that beliefs are wrong, but that they may be wrong, as I wrote here. There are two types of skepticism: negative and positive.

By removing bad ideas, negative skepticism allows good ones to flourish. Positive skepticism goes beyond the removal of false claims. It requires inquiring and reflecting. Positive skepticism fuels critical thinking— it encourages you to get a deeper understanding of events or things. People who are certain of an opinion are more likely to act on it.

The elections are a great example. When people are confidently in favor of candidate X, they are more likely to vote for that candidate than someone who is uncertain even though they support the same candidate. Neisser collected information the day following the incident.

He repeated the experiment three years after. Students expressed high levels of confidence that their false memories of the explosion were more accurate than the descriptions they had written down one day after the explosion. The autonomous rational mind is a myth. The concepts of the self and free will are innate useful fictions that allow us to function.

Modern neurophysiology tells us our decisions are made subconsciously before we are aware of deciding. Turn challenging the truth into a habit. Positive skepticism is about finding the other side of the story. To understand whether the sources and analysis are impartial. Listen to both sides of a story. Ask pointed questions , and expect specific answers.

If someone tells you that they heard or read something in the media, ask when, where, and in what context. You can often go directly back to their purported sources and determine the validity of the story. Check other reliable sources of information. If you have access to the Internet, search the topic and look for authentic links like university websites or other institutions.

Find the bottom line of what you are being told. In email circles, you will often see people try to lure you into believing information that is completely outrageous. An example would be the proverbial almost free laptops. Most people are automatically skeptical of these offers, but enough people fall for the sales pitch.

Fact check everything you hear on the news. Many news sources have a reputation for misconstruing information and being biased. As a news consumer, be sure to write to newspapers, magazines and broadcasters correcting mistakes and demanding that they keep a certain quality of coverage.

There are campaigns going on against "copy and paste" journalism and to get newspapers to cite and provide links to the original sources used in their stories. Cultivate a skeptical mindset. Even in the academic world, there have been innumerable instances of accepted facts being exposed over time as ridiculous. We once thought the world was the center of the universe but skeptics disproved this accepted "fact".

Frequently test facts against your own reason. This goes back to listening to and thinking about what you are hearing. If someone tells you something and it sticks with you, you are more likely to accept it as fact if you hear it mentioned again somewhere else.

If you don't objectively think about and aggressively fact check what everybody tells you, your arguments could be perceived as fallacious by others who have done research. Test statements for yourself when it is practical. If someone tells you driving with the windows down will save gas, try it out. This doesn't mean you should believe someone who tells you poison ivy makes an excellent herbal tea. Remember the results of these suggestions.

The object of the requested topic is how to be a skeptic. Statistical significance means virtually nothing. Statistical significance does not specify the likelihood that an outcome would replicate if the study were repeated, nor does the p level predict the number of statistics that should be significant by chance. Rejection of a null hypothesis does not mean the alternative is correct.

The only valid basis for a statistical conclusion is effect size how big is a difference, or how strong is a relationship , which is almost completely ignored in the GASSSPP literature.

Owing to the mistaken beliefs about p levels see item 1 above , studies are never repeated, a core requirement of real science. One recent study concluded that the validity of measures in the journals is declining, and virtually no attention is paid to validity of measures.



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