This week has been an eye opener for me when it comes to my skepticism. I've realized it's pretty easy to get a chip on your shoulder about being rational and skeptical. The problem is that you can get lazy with it and fall in to several fallacies if you let that happen. You can get some information from a reliable source, say, and forget that there's no such thing as a 100% reliable source. Or, you can accept something just because it sounds about right… relying too confidently on your own critical thinking skills… but forgetting to actually practice them.
This week, I realized that I have made both of those mistakes on two prominent news stories.
The first, and most obvious, is the story of Rom Houben – the Belgian man who was believed to be in a coma for 23 years, but has recently started “communicating” through a computer. At least, that's what all the initial news reports told us. None of them mentioned that the process that was used to determine brain activity is, itself, very controversial (fMRI has even been able to detect emotional response from whole, dead fish). Nor that the “communication” was actually the long disproved pseudoscience of Facilitated Communication.
There's been a lot of criticism of this story written by people much smarter and more famous than me. I'm not going to rehash all of that, because that's not the point of this post. For those who may have somehow missed the controversy see: Wired Science, PZ Meyers, James Randi, and the discussion at MeFi.
No… the point of this post is that I bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. Despite there being obvious red flags in the initial stories I read (I didn't see the video until I read the PZ piece), I payed no attention to them. The reports spoke of “advanced scanning techniques” and “sophisticated computers” with no specifics. Despite that tactic of credulous journalism being one of my biggest pet peeves, I skipped them. I even ignored that initial thought of “Wow… for someone who spent 23 years silent and neglected, he seems remarkably well adjusted… and ‘well spoken’.”
The second story was the one about U.S. Census worker Bill Sparkman who was found dead in Kentucky with the word “Fed” scrawled across his chest.
It turns out, it was a suicide.
When the initial reports came out in September… I didn't question them. Not one bit. In this case, I didn't even see any red flags in the reporting. No internal voice said to me, “Really? Do you really think our society has gone this far off the edge? Or could there be something else going on here?” It's particularly shameful on my part, because back during the 2008 presidential election, I strongly suspected the woman who reported to have been attacked by a black Obama supporter of lying from the first headline I read. I'm embarrassed to say… ashamed, even… that I know my biases played a part in both my skepticism of Ms. Todd's story and the Sparkman story. My brain played the “us vs. them” game, and it was easy.
So what went wrong in my head?
I've been thinking it over, and I can say there was a lot. In neither case did I practice much critical thinking. The very first thing I did wrong, was not live up to my self-assigned credo: question everything. I let my biases play way too big of a part in accepting the information I was given. Sure… both cases involve credulous journalism, but I'm not going to lay the blame simply on them. I preach all the time, that verification is the key to getting past credulous reporting. I did practically no verification. Shame on me.
But there is something that these two stories share that I think helped greatly in shutting of my critical thinking. Something I think helped a lot of people do so.
Fear.
Yep. It's the mind killer, alright.
In both cases, the presentation of something I feared… deeply… made them less prone to my skepticism.
It's an odd reaction, really. We want, desperately, to believe that our fears are founded. Really, we want to believe any emotional response we may have is justified. And the deeper the emotion, the more primal it is; the more we want to believe. And fear may, perhaps, be the most primal emotion we have.
My take-home from this is that the more emotionally something affects me, the more I must question it… no matter how uncomfortable it may make me. Lesson two is that, even though I may practice often practice critical thinking, it does not make me right all the time. Even as skeptics, we are subject to ego and biases. Being aware of those things is just as important as critical thinking skills. Being critical of ourselves is as important as being critical of the information we receive… perhaps even more so.
