Skepticism is Not About Intelligence

IT’S NOT ABOUT INTELLIGENCE

A mistake many people make is to assume that thinking like a scientist in everyday life comes down to intelligence. Not only is that assumption wrong, it’s a destructive misconception that probably causes many people to shy away from adopting a skeptical outlook. They aren’t sure they are smart enough to think like a scientist, so they don’t bother trying. The truth, however, is that all of us who fall well short of genius status can be very good skeptics. And the reverse of this is true as well: People who are extremely intelligent can be weak skeptics and fall for virtually every other nonsense claim that comes along. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A brilliant or gifted brain doesn’t do you any good if it’s not used well and consistently. Ten soldiers with handheld rocket launchers might be the most lethal killers on the battlefield potentially, but if they aren’t trained or are too scared to use their weapons in a timely and appropriate manner, one guy who has a crossbow, and the will and skill to use it, could take them all out.

Being smart, whatever that word means to you, doesn’t automatically make someone a good skeptic. It can help, of course, but it’s just not the most important factor when it comes to defending yourself against nonsense and lies. I once knew a bright guy who was convinced that there are large, technologically advanced, secret cities underground in various locations around the world and the people who live in them control everything on the surface. That may be a dumb idea, but he wasn’t dumb. Many men and women with doctorates and master’s degrees are weak skeptics who believe things that a good high-school-age skeptic can dismantle in seconds. My teenaged son is a far better skeptic than about 75 percent of the people I went to college with, including several straight-A engineering students. I once worked with a woman who was well educated and would probably be described as intelligent by most people. Smart as she may have been, however, she was absolutely convinced that a Russian girl had x-ray vision and could see inside of people with her bare eyes. My coworker read about the claim and swallowed it—hook, line, and sinker. If true, this extraordinary power could be easily verified with credible scientific testing. But it never has been confirmed, so it makes no sense to believe it. My former colleague was typical of the highly educated weak skeptic that is all too common today. She had a sharp mind and achieved more academically than most, but in school she apparently was taught only what to think and not how to think.

History offers numerous examples of very smart people who believed very goofy things. Today Isaac Newton is considered by many to be no less than the greatest scientist who ever lived. It’s tough to argue against him. Toiling in the 1600s, Newton managed to invent calculus and figure out how stars and planets move about in the universe. But he didn’t spend all his time on the work that would make him so famous. This undeniable genius also devoted much of his time and energy to the Christian apocalypse claim. He seriously thought he could calculate the exact date of a supernatural doomsday and did come up with one. (You might not want to make any plans for the year 2060.) Newton was a great mathematician, but not a good skeptic. Had he been, he might have recognized early on that his time would be better spent on other things. We can cut him slack given the time he lived in, of course, but what other great things might the brain of Isaac Newton have contributed to science if it had been protected by the force field of skepticism? Fast-forward to today, and one wonders what contributions to science and the world won’t happen because some of the twenty-first century’s brightest minds are distracted or derailed by bad ideas that skeptical thinking could easily brush aside if applied?

Why do you suppose it is that the world’s professional astronomers spend virtually no time on astrology and UFOs? The reason is that they are good enough skeptics to know that their efforts will be better spent elsewhere because nothing is likely to come from trying to work out the influence of Jupiter on the love lives of people born in September or determining if the alien crew survived the Roswell UFO crash or died on impact. There is an invaluable life lesson in this for you. Everyone loves to say that hard work is the key to success. But few explain that hard work is only part of it. What you direct all that effort at matters a lot, too. You can work twelve-hour days, seven days a week, year after year, but if it’s all toward proving that some houses are haunted, you are probably wasting your time because skeptics have shown over and over that there is no good evidence and there are no compelling reasons to believe it. It’s safe to assume, for example, that the hardest working psychic in history has contributed less to the world’s understanding of the human brain than, say, one lecture by one random psychology professor at any university.

This is not to suggest that some things should be off limits for inquiring minds. Everything is worth a thought or taking a peek at because one never knows what discoveries lie just beyond the reach of current understanding. I’m not for banning ghost hunters or making UFO-watching illegal. People should be free to think whatever they want and to follow their passions where they lead. However, it’s in one’s own interests to be reasonable and realistic when deciding what to pursue and devote limited time and energy to. For example, the Yeti, or abominable snowman, might be real—it’s possible—so I suppose you could spend a career looking for it. But if discovering an unknown species is your dream, then it makes much more sense to look for new arthropods or microbes in deep caves or in the Pacific abyss than it does to hunt a giant primate in Tibet. A basic skeptical analysis of the Yeti claim and a review of all available evidence make it clear that it is among the longest of long shots, to say the least. However, based on past efforts, it’s hard to imagine not finding a few previously unknown arthropods and microbes if one looks in the environments they are likely to be in.