Pyrrho of Elis came back from Alexander’s campaigns in India around 330 BCE having learned that confident knowledge claims deserve scrutiny. David Hume showed us that even causation rests on assumptions we can’t prove deductively. These were serious people doing serious work. Their intellectual descendants include every scientist who ever questioned a consensus.
Then the word “skeptic” got mugged in an alley and had its wallet stolen.
Now it’s attached to people who deny everything from gravity to the moon landing. There’s a distinction that keeps getting lost: genuine skepticism asks how do we know what we know? Denialism asks what if the thing that is obviously happening isn’t happening, and also everyone who says it’s happening is lying? The first gave us the Enlightenment. The second gave us Lysenko rejecting Mendelian genetics while Soviet crop yields collapsed and dissenters got sent to the gulag.
We’re talking about Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments from the 1950s, Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor’s New Clothes (and how everyone misuses it), the contrarians who were actually right (continental drift, germ theory, Barry Marshall drinking from a Petri dish), and why the difference between them and the people insisting it isn’t raining is that they eventually showed their work.
Some things really are that obvious.
Some people really are full of shit.
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