Skepticism is Something You Do

If Critical Thinking is not a personality type, then how does someone become a skeptic?

When I wrote that Critical Thinking is Not a Personality Trait, I wasn’t suggesting that people should not identify as a skeptic, though I understand why this is what some have taken from what I wrote.

As someone who has used the term ‘skeptic’ to describe myself often, who has attended the conferences, hosted skeptic podcasts, written for skeptic publications, and identified as part of the grassroots skeptic movement, I get why using this as an identity is tempting. Especially if you’ve arrived at skepticism after losing previously held irrational beliefs.

The aim of the piece published here just a few days ago was to highlight why wrapping ourselves up too much in a skeptic identity carries risks, and why those risks lead to a pattern of prominent skeptics failing in predictable ways time and time again. My aim was also to explore and discuss how the wider skeptic community reacts to these instances as though they are mind blowing surprises when they’re literally anything but.

Skepticism is not the sum of all of those identity markers I listed before - it is something you do. While doing it you can of course identify as a skeptic, but not because you’ve reached some elevated, clever status. You should identify as a skeptic because you’re doing the work.

Evan Bernstein’s harmful rhetoric was described by his co-hosts as a ‘stumble’ on his skeptical journey. That framing badly understates what took place and feels a little too forgiving in its assessment. Bernstein stopped using critical thinking tools properly, stopped applying skepticism to both the ideas he was confronted with and his reaction to them.

That is not a stumble off of some path.

It is leaving the path completely.

And it’s fine for people to make errors in their judgement - to not be perfect skeptics is to be human. That’s where the emotional intelligence and the humility I talked about in my piece play important roles. In how we handle it when we make those errors ourselves, in how we react when other people do - especially people elevated to prominent positions within our community.

However, the skeptic community does have a problem with people within it who think that their self-identity as skeptics makes them immune from fallacious thinking and errors of judgement. People who would rightly condemn abusive, hateful, or harmful rhetoric from someone outside of the skeptic community who suddenly find nuance and hairs to split when it comes to doing the same with people from within their community. Including themselves.

Those are the issues I was trying to address in my previous piece. Of course you can identify as a skeptic - many good people do, many good skeptics do. However, if you identify as a skeptic it should be because you’re practicing skepticism, not because you’re using it as a shield to hide behind or a weapon with which to clobber others.

And the risk is that if you become too wrapped up in your skeptic identity - if you don’t check your own assumptions and question your own conclusions as much as you should, you’ll suddenly find yourself doing exactly that. If you treat your first reactions as probably reasonable because “I am skeptic”, you’re probably not doing good skepticism. Sorry, but that’s just how it is.

I include myself in that risk.

Nobody becomes immune to motivated reasoning because they have spent years criticising it in others.

It is embarrassing to realise you’ve jumped to conclusions with no evidential basis, or failed to spot misinformation for what it is. However, recognising these failings in yourself is how you improve as a skeptic, and this is why failing to hold ourselves to account is so dangerous for people whose identity is build around the promotion of critical thinking.

If you can’t practice what you preach, you end up preaching nonsense, misinformation, and prejudice.

That is the antithesis of skepticism.