> “I found myself attacked by the Committee members and board, who considered me to be too soft on the paranormalists,”
It is actually a pretty interesting point to consider deeply. Engaging with people from a position of constructive scepticism does require going in with an open mind that could realistically be changed. However, anyone who has done that once or twice quickly realises that:
1) Most people appear to have avoided thinking critically about any of their beliefs at all. At best they are repeating poorly-understood arguments from other people they respect, at worst they are playing team sports.
2) Many topical problems appear to have been settled decades or centuries ago and people are just not interested in the problems they are professing to be concerned about. This happens a lot in politics; it is wildly unusual for a new topic to come before a legislative body and most policies that make it through the process haven't been thoughtfully assessed in terms of what happened the last time people tried it. The fact that people want to tinker with the laws at all is actually a pretty big tell that the process is weird - the situation a society faces doesn't change so quickly that the laws need to be adjusted every year. It should be a rather rare thing.
It requires a sophisticated understanding of the world and an unusual grasp of empathy to maintain a level of honest scepticism in the face of those two dynamics. Trying to have a conversation about why people believe something just turns up the answer that they do and they don't have any particular reason. Most of the time there isn't anything to discuss or dig in to.
1) Most people appear to have avoided thinking critically about any of their beliefs at all. At best they are repeating poorly-understood arguments from other people they respect, at worst they are playing team sports.
This is usually given as a reason for people being dumb, not thoughtful, etc. But I think it’s more of a misreading of what these belief systems (itself a misleading name) are actually doing.
The belief aspect is interpreted by intellectual, argumentative types as the key lynchpin, whereas the actual “believer” (again, loaded language here presuming that belief is central) is a member of the community because it provides social benefits, a sense of meaning in a confusing universe, a connection to their personal ancestry and culture, and so on. The actual belief itself isn’t unimportant, but it’s not the reason why the person is there in the first place.
This is why the approach of atheists critiquing some specific belief of X religion or Y holy book never convinces the religious practitioner (a better word than believer, IMO) of anything. Adopting a belief didn’t get them into the community and critiquing that belief won’t get them out.
As the cybernetic phrase goes, “a system is what it does.” Not what it claims to be doing, or is described as doing by a particular class of people. And that is why skepticism often doesn’t really go anywhere – it’s focusing on the belief and ignoring the vast anthropological and sociological aspects under the surface.
> Most of the time there isn't anything to discuss or dig in to.
Yes. It took humans centuries, millennia, or a couple hundred millennia, depending on how we think about it, to slowly, as a group of millions of people, develop the systematic checks and filters on our thinking that we call mathematics and science.
The surprise is having inherited that, some of us think checking our own beliefs this way is natural. We are healthy skeptics of ourselves.
That many people honestly (and I believe it is generally honest) don't "get it", don't understand how easy it is, for each of us to fool ourselves, is the unsurprising thing.
We did not evolve to discover solid truths. Just to navigate natural and social environments full of correlations, unlikely ever to be well understood, and statistically survive. Natural "beliefs" were/are simply imprinted correlations, adopted heuristics, or social identification, that upon being fixed, let us stop wasting time rethinking the incomprehensible. The pinnacle of innovation until recently.
> We did not evolve to discover solid truths. Just to navigate natural and social environments full of correlations, unlikely ever to be well understood, and statistically survive.
This is the important part. Evolution prepared us to build and maintain social groups that help us hunt for food and survive. Maintaining that social group is much more important to our nature than our ability for rational thinking.
Thus our rational thinking will readily make way for any beliefs that are required to maintain the social group, even if they are entirely contradictory and easily disproven.
I think beliefs are an optimization of brain resources first. Flexible thinking by an individual without recent structural thinking, likely has diminishing returns on any topic.
Magnified by the high cost of further experimentation in traumatic but survived experiences.
But then, as you say, where the subject has strong social implications, survival weighs in strongly for consistency.
wrong, so so wrong, surviving in the pre technolgical stone age world required the ability to comunicate very very precisely, and self evaluate, and also for elders to make decisive decisions that were constantly and neverendingly central to the groups survival, a shallow dive into the size and composition of neo lithic tribes, there environment, and the very sophisticated use of the resources spread over wide goegraphic areas is nessesary, before comenting on what those people were capable of, and what was important and central to them bieng able to thrive. there truths were tested in inumerable ways,and our existence is the proof of there rationality, and nothing less
It helps to know how people where as teenagers. Teenagers are having by very nature of the thing in a crisis of faith, in their parents, their school, everything. It shows how you handle the world, when you had your first crisis of doubt. Weather you seek out the destruction of certainty, to wash away everything non-diamond aka science! Or if you for little brittle earthen sandcastles to hide on top because the fear of getting your feet wet is more horrifying, then standing a life long on a crumbling hill on a flooded beach, building your lifes work on a "this has worked before"- heuristics foundation.