Who/What is a Skeptic/Skepticism?

** Because of the announcement that the Internet Archive my collapse due to copyright laws, I will copy and paste the original article below the "additional resources" section**

I pose this question in response to a blog post I came across: Why I am No Longer a Skeptic. The language interested me because I think of Skepticism as a process of questioning, systematic application of critical methods, set of procedures, process of unveiling, form of inquiry, and method of doubt as opposed to a noun or category implied by the title. The label "Skeptic" would apply to someone who practices these habits in a self-corrective, iterative, and adaptive manner. You can be "skeptical" about pretty much anything; the effectiveness of a policy, the assumptions underlying a philosophical system, the notion of 'possibility' itself, the capacity for rational methods to reveal truth, grand narratives, and all-encompassing theoretical systems. There is a family resemblance among those calling themselves skeptical, but nothing necessary or sufficient binding them to category distinguishing themselves from non-skeptics. So when I read "Why I am No Longer a Skeptic", it makes me wonder what this author thought skepticism was to begin with. The title feels like click bait; as if skeptics are a well-defined group you can "apostatize" from as in the case with organized religion in which there is a set of dogma, rituals, customs, practices, and forms of worship. A counterexample would be "Why I am Not a Christian", since Christianity has more or less clearer boundaries defining in-group and out-group membership. Since "Skepticism" is a process, verb, or descriptor, it can hardly be a categorical. A title like this is something a skeptic would be skeptical of; it obfuscates, seeks to be inflammatory, non-descriptive, and creates arbitrary boundaries that demonizes the target population under discussion. The form of the title is why I decided to respond. When I think of "Group Think", I am reminded of the image below. While reading the authors post, refer to this:

Lets just start by describing the history of skepticism; who are some famous people in which the term applies, how has the usage evolved, what makes up its content, and which concepts are antithetical to a skeptical stance. According to Wikipedia:

Skepticism, also spelled scepticism, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma.^[1]^[2

Using this conceptualization as our starting point we can see that anyone can apply skepticism towards anything. Using it to infer the authors position, perhaps they are implying the existence a group of people labeled "skeptics" who have a set of dogma; of which the author does not want to be apart of. This is odd however, because if that were the reason, they would be simply applying skeptical principles towards something deemed dogmatic. Instantiations of skepticism can be seen throughout history. Some of the earliest examples of skeptical writing can be seen in the Ancient Indian Agnostics; the Ajnana school of thought. Rejection of dogma is seen in the writings of Sanjaya Belatthiputta when asked about an afterlife. Fast forward to ancient Greece and we see Pyrrhonism emerge with its emphasis on suspending judgement with respect to non self-evident issues. Aenesidemus systematized ten reasons for the suspension of judgement which arguably characterize the spirit of modern empirical scientific methods. Sextus Empiricus catalogued the five modes of Agrippa in 'Outlines of Pyrrhonism' which are core to critical thinking and rationality. During this time there were also radical skeptics characterized by the school of Academic Skepticism. Notable thinkers of this school were Carneades and Cicero. I actually came across Carneades while studying the work done by scholars at the Center for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor. Douglas Walton and Thomas F. Gordon developed the Carneades Argumentation System for argument invention and mining. The name seems fitting; presumably intelligent systems should have the capacity for reason and doubt. Anyways, back to skepticism. The Academics were "radical" in that they doubted the very possibility of knowledge. This is definitely a different variant of skepticism; rather than applying doubt to the modes and methods of inquiry, doubt is applied to the very notion of knowledge itself. You can even think of the Socratic Method as a systematic way of applying doubt in a dialectical process to shed dogma and discover truth. Socratic Questioning seems fundamental to our modern methods of discovery; it is a core feature of a critical thinker.

If we fast forward to the Enlightenment two notable thinkers stand out for their skeptical attitudes: David Hume and Rene Descartes, the former known for criticism of religious dogma and the latter known for radical cartesian doubt. Both thinkers were absolutely transformative in their writings and similarly applied critical questioning to the established assumptions of their day. Modern skeptics would probably tend to cluster around thinkers associated with The Skeptics Society; although the methods developed throughout history have somewhat been formalized in many academic disciplines to some degree. Skeptics today are likely to be Scientific Skeptics who maintain that empirical scientific methods (characterized by being testable, falsifiable, and reproducible) are the gold standard for attaining knowledge; dismissing anecdotes, superstition, narratology, subjectivity, and untestable pseudo-theories. Again, this is nothing new in history. The difference is that emphasis is placed on attaining knowledge through scientific methods and deemphasizing less reliable sources. The spirit is the same: avoid deception and dogma by suspending judgment in light of all of the ways we can be wrong. Almost all people striving for the "skeptical attitude" are fallabilists; understanding the defeasibility and probabilistic nature of knowledge.

What stands antithetical to the skeptical attitude? I mentioned dogma before but also pseudo-skepticism, denialism, obscurantism, confirmation bias, Agnotology, ignorance, arguments from ignorance, False dilemmas, unnuanced thinking, unsubstantiated claims, lying with statistics, double standards, irrelevant conclusions, jumping to conclusions, or dismissing established knowledge without sufficient grounds. I mean the list can literally go on forever. There are so many ways to exhibit horrendous thinking; this is the premise of my blog. One of the most pernicious forms of inquiry is that of pseudo-skepticism; mainly because it appears as if it consists of rigor when in reality its a form of denialism or dogma. Its important to note that skepticism is a mode of thinking; a form of inquiry that seeks to question an established dogma. When someone is a skeptic of everything just for the sake of being antagonistic, we achieve nothing; it is counter-productive to establishing knowledge. Understanding the limitations of certain mental models is fundamental to the critical thinker. Global skepticism just seems impossible anyway from a survival perspective. I digress; the point is that you can have too much skepticism without any systems building or problem solving. The Role of the Critical Path in Logic, Systems, and Science is a nice article outlining what I am trying to convey. The point is that you have to figure out what is right, not just criticize what isn't right. The quality of your questions also has to be worthwhile. It has to be amenable to some sort of solution. The pseudo-skeptic might say "there are no dumb questions" while the true skeptic understands how to pose meaningful questions within the correct domain; understanding when they need to transcend domain boundaries while remaining goal oriented. Skepticism implies a certain degree of productivity in the questions you choose to pose; it seems reasonable to be skeptical of specific forecasts of global warming by noting the inherent unreliability of state space models applied to chaotic systems, but being skeptical because you dismiss fundamental physical principles is a different type of skepticism that verges on denialism. In order to be skeptical of that magnitude you sure as hell must bring a shit ton of evidence to back your claims. The Tree of Knowledge Obfuscation catalogues all of the pseudo-skeptic tendencies of the 'fake skeptic'; please go read more. Nassim Taleb talks about pseudo-skepticism in his Incerto; I'd recommend reading those books. The Ethical Skeptic also writes about pseudo-skepticism in the post What is Social Skepticism? This reminds me of the demarcation problem; it is sometimes difficult to distinguish science from pseudo-science. Can history be scientific? What about holistic medicine (as opposed to evidence based)? I am not going to tackle this question here but it's adjacent and similar to our current concerns. Skepticism has been practiced across cultures, space, and time. It is nuanced, typically associated with transformative thinkers and accessible to everyone. Modern skepticism is associated with science but is clearly influenced by the skeptics of history. Science is just as much a tool for alleviating skepticism as it is a system of applied skepticism.

The point of all of this is to show that "skepticism" more nebulous than implied by the title of "Why I am no longer a skeptic". There have been attempts to demarcate what true skepticism is as noted above but there is not an agreed upon categorization in which you can belong; rather there are prototypical instances of skepticism. I am guessing that we simply call someone a skeptic if they are known for applying skeptical methods to a known topic; but this is relative to the audience as not all contentious topics are common knowledge. Some thinkers are known for being "skeptics" simply by virtue of speaking out on platforms about socially sensitive topics. The word "skeptic" is sometimes used as a slur, as in the case of a religious apologist "answering the skeptics". It seems like this authors title implies "Skeptic" is something you don't want to be, since they renounce their supposed affiliation with the group (whatever the group is). Lets take a look at the article.

A little background: I've been converging on the idea that politically polarized ideologies try to establish sharp boundaries between groups by arbitrary and rather loose characteristics of affiliation (no brainer honestly). In addition, they will adopt a lexicon that is rather vague and imprecise but somehow understood by those people bolstering the ideas. Boundaries and structure are important, but failing to identify nuance at the expense of a lazy classification is the status quo with political ideologies. Leftists will group people into arbitrary categories; one being the oppressed and the other being the oppressor, the only thing preventing humanity from achieving a utopic future is through the liberation of the oppressed. The far right will do the same; one group is somehow taring the purity of the nation. The only way to return to the Garden of Eden and idealistic past is through eliminating the threat; reestablishing the nation that was once lost and saving it from further degradation. One starts with a vision of an idealistic past we have erred from, while the other starts with an oppressive past which we must break from. Anyone perceived of standing in the way of achieving these goals is simply a manifestation of the opponent trying to subvert your political crusade. I don't know who this author is but this sort of groupish lexicon seems apparent in the sample of articles I have read. The title "Why I am no Longer a Skeptic" is followed up shortly by a brief explanation that the author still retains skeptical principles of inquiry but dismisses the term as an identity category. This is great; I too see the term as a descriptor of a process rather than categorical membership. More generally, conceptualizing skepticism as group membership necessarily dilutes the practical force of its application; it ceases to be rigid. As the blog post proceeds, we start to diverge in agreement on content and form through which it is communicated:

What has changed is that I have come to reject skepticism as an identity. Shared identities like skepticism are problematic at the best of times, for numerous reasons, but I can accept them as a means of giving power and a voice to the disenfranchised. And indeed, this is how skeptics like to portray themselves: an embattled minority standing up for science, the lone redoubt of reason in an irrational world, the vanguard against the old order of ignorance and superstition. As a skeptic, I was happy to accept this narrative and believe I was shoring up the barricades.

I noticed something very particular about the verbiage and framework of analysis that almost always is characterized by someone of the New Left. Consider the word "disenfranchised"; I became very acquainted with its use while living in the North East during the divisive year of 2020. It typically arises in the context of describing "marginalized" minority groups who lack some sort of political representation; therefore lacking "equal access to resources". The author states that he is willing to overlook the problems of shared identity in the exceptional case of disenfranchisement (the question still remains who the author accepts as constituting the marginalized group); advocating for a form of identity politics in select instances. Apparently, skeptics "think they are a disenfranchised group". The author saw himself in a struggle with the irrational world, so he took pleasure in retaining the label for identity reasons. This all changed however when the author realized they are not apart of the disenfranchised group:

However, it's a narrative that corresponds poorly with reality. In the modern world, science, technology and reason are central and vital, and this is widely recognised, including at the highest level. On any major political decision, the technocrat speaks louder than the bishop, or anyone else, for that matter. Sure, Bush and Blair were noted god-botherers, but if you seriously think that, say, Gulf War 2 was their decision alone, or that that "God wills it" would have convinced anyone they had to convince, then you're subscribing to a cartoon view of history. Such decisions are always calculated, reasoned, and backed by dozens of accommodating scientific experts.

According to the author, the fact that some political decisions are made on a rational basis is evidence of the triumph of reason over the age of superstition. The "Skeptics" have won. It does not matter if the average U.S. citizen can't comprehend the mechanical functioning of their iPhone, communication networks that transmit their texts, encryption algorithms hiding their "rational" conversations, and basic physics making any of this possible; the fact that technology is central in an information economy must mean that the individuals within that economy know how anything works. It is quite a bold assumption to state that we somehow transcended dogma because technology exists. Of course, the author seems to not care about factuality. What the author is doing, is priming the reader for a good story, a narrative outlining his dissociation with the false-martyr skeptics in excellent historicist fashion. Can someone actually claim skeptical principles have succeeded when we live in a world with Flat Earthers? I linger on these two paragraphs because subtly lurking are assumptions found in Dialectic of Enlightenment; the idea that Enlightenment gave rise to a new authoritarian personality established within a framework of reason, birthing a new form of social dominance. Quoting from the Wikipedia page:

Horkheimer and Adorno believe that in the process of "enlightenment," modern philosophy had become over-rationalized and an instrument of technocracy. They characterize the peak of this process as positivism, referring to both the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and broader trends that they saw in continuity with this movement.[8]

In other words, we have become too rational; so much so that its become a new form of authoritarianism. Are the "Skeptics" the vanguard of this new technocracy? It seems implied by the authors choice of language. As we see:

That's right: the nerds won, decades ago, and they're now as thoroughly established as any other part of the establishment. And while nerds a relatively new elite, they're overwhelmingly the same as the old: rich, white, male, and desperate to hang onto what they've got. And I have come to realise that skepticism, in their hands, is just another tool to secure and advance their privileged position, and beat down their inferiors. As a skeptic, I was not shoring up the revolutionary barricades: instead, I was cheering on the Tsar's cavalry.

And here it is, revealed: The Modern Leftist "recognizing their privilege". The author is "No longer a skeptic" indeed, they are polluted by the divisive writings of modern activism; substituting critical thinking for social justice because they have "seen the light"; they have Awoken. I guess The Masters Tool's Cannot Dismantle the Masters House; Skeptics are simply white privileged hetero-normative males who serve to maintain the oppressive technocratic system of white male elites at the expense of the marginalized. The author nobly revoked their group membership once they became aware that they were part of the problem; announcing it righteously for their community to know they stand for the cause.

Now I have to admit, this is incredibly dull and boring for me. It's so repetitive hearing the dogma: privilege, oppressor class, and power dynamics. The only thing missing is an assertion that skepticism is a social construction. I had a warm tingling feeling when I read the table of contents: "Reason is not just for the Intellectual Elite", "Sexist Bastards", "Islamophobia", "Neoliberalism", "Science is constructed from a stand point", and "Positivism is past it". Each of these are as vague as the next, and are presumably attributed to the nebulous category of Skeptic the author fails to define. Each of these titles exemplify the world-view of a modern leftist; "sexism", "phobia", "neo" and "liberalism", "stand point", "positivism". They act is conversation stoppers rather than paths to discovery. This is not to say that exemplifications of these concepts don't exist. What I am saying is that the leftist immediately recoils to these when confronted with any nuance in a discussion. They have particular acceptable "ways" of communicating about these things within the context of debate such as; power dynamics, stand point, deconstruction, hegemony, "problematizing", and "normalizing". It's actually somewhat misleading to use the word "debate" because many don't even do that; free speech and debate are liberal notions many of them tend to reject. Perhaps they can use Foucault's discourse analysis to think about the power dynamics implied by these words; how they function to dismiss any credible rebuttal because skepticism towards these conceptualizations imply the interlocutor belongs to the oppressor class. Skeptical towards the charge of islamophobia? Lets check where you fall on the intersectionality matrix: white male, you are speaking from an oppressor class and can't understand the lived experience of Abdul. Skeptical about the actual impact of stand-point on scientific inquiry? That's because you are privileged and have a Western colonial bias, dismissing "feminist science" because it threatens you're legitimacy. The author is definitely not a skeptic anymore; they have accepted a new set of dogma at the expense of open ended inquiry.

Why am I fixating so much on use of language? Well, the concepts we choose to emphasize, the descriptors we use to characterize, the ways we establish boundaries around categories, the degree of rigidity, level of neutrality, or any other feature of language, significantly shed light into our fundamental assumptions governing how we process information. The author places significant emphasis on (rather arbitrary) identity categories; the way they conceptualize the out-group appears to be an ever narrowing division of nuance into compartments and totalizing descriptions, something I see almost exclusively with someone who has become tainted by polarization. This is not exclusive to the current article under examination, I see it in other writings which I will touch on later. In this instance, I fixate on language because the chosen lexicon reflects an internal mechanism which is incredibly predictable with its response to certain input information. This makes it dull to engage with, as there is no invention, robustness, authenticity, variation, or creativity with the responses; just more predictable versions of the same content. It's as if their minds have succumbed to the ease of reiterating a pre-defined schematic; they simply substitute and swap certain placeholder words when the input information has varied. I fixate on language, because some of these concepts they are using tell me almost everything I need to know about how they are going to respond to certain topics. Of course the relation is not one-to-one, I don't mean to imply they are analogous to a finite state automata (although in many cases it sure feels like it). Consider the concept of "Sin". There is significant variation in how an adherent to any of the Abrahamic religions will conceive of "Sin". There is a core; some sort of transgression against God. But what counts as a Sin, whether there is need for repentance, or whether it's "inherited" will vary from culture to culture, religion to religion, and denomination to denomination. Despite this variation, you can predict with near certainty attributes about the person, how they think, what their preferences are, and how they will respond on certain topics; because totalizing world-views are binding, brittle, inflexible, contain reusable schemas and necessarily demand a level of intolerance to counter-opinion when pressed with opposition. When you see certain concepts appearing in conversation (or blog posts), you can infer the interlocutors commitments. Embedded in the concepts are argumentative structures that contain rules and procedures for responding to stimuli. Calling something a "Sin" or someone a "Sinner" is not merely a description of some entity; it's an entire argument with implied resolutions, condemnations, strategies, and courses of action. It is not like calling the cat over there black or calling a building in a residential zone a house. When using concepts like these, you are projecting a system of interconnected beliefs onto the world. The authors tells us their world view just by listing out the table of contents; similar to how a news agency tells you their partisan bias by writing headlines. The language you choose literally tells the audience what your agenda is. This is hardly new knowledge; all I am demonstrating is that you can spot polarization by paying attention to language. Let's consider some of the authors presuppositions by investigating their language choice. Remember, this is their manifesto against the "skeptic" identity category; something caused them to renounce their affiliation. Renunciation of one category seems to be replaced uncritically with an affiliation with another category.

"Intellectual Elite" gives off hints of populism. There exists a group of "intellectual snobs" who seek to cut down, rather than lift up, those who are of "lower intellectual ability". The author chooses to stand for the people, in light of their disadvantages:

It's never pleasant to watch a group of university graduates ganging up to sneer at people denied their advantages in life, especially when for some of them it's a full-time hobby. It's an unfair fight between unequal resources, and far too few skeptics care about this inequality or want to do anything about it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this statement, but again note some of the assumptions built into the choice of language. "Denied their advantages" and "unfair fight between unequal resources" stand out to me; in particular because it assumes something economic and political about social interactions that is reminiscent of something I hear from the Left. To provide some context, the author is speaking about interactions on debate forums. Are you expecting these to be the picturesque ideal of open minded inquiry? To paint this as something "skeptics" do is incredibly narrow; its a function of the structure of these debate forums. All parties engage in this quackery; don't abandon a skeptical mindset in favor of a dogmatic political ideology because other people who call themselves "skeptic" are misbehaving. Again, lets note the use of language:

If anything, I'm convinced that most of them would prefer to keep the resources unequal. The average skeptic has little time for spreading the word of reason to the educationally or intellectually lacking. His superior reason is what separates him from the chumps around him, and he has no interest in closing the gap. For him, the appeal of the skeptic clique is its exclusivity. It's a refuge from the stupid masses, and a marker of his own special privileges. It's Mensa rebranded.

How the author conceptualizes the world is apparent; "unequal resources" when describing conflict. When you engage in a debate with someone who clearly misunderstands the topic or is wrong, you could apply the principle of charity; you could seek to clarify positions, provide depth, accuracy, apply intellectual humility and empathy. Perhaps the person you are engaged with doesn't want to understand but only win a debate. Is it bad to point out they are wrong, regardless of their "unequal resources? Don't they also have a burden of being thoroughly researched before engaging? Can't we give them the "privilege" of telling them they are wrong, so they can become right? Wouldn't you want the same thing, so you can correct your position? There has to be a level or exclusivity within intellectual domains, how else can intellectual standards be upheld? How else can we distinguish someone who knows what they are talking about from the sophists? "Skeptics" want to keep the resources unequal so they can retain their privileged position in society, not because they adhere to a set of intellectual standards they see as optimal. Just remember, according to this author, "Skeptics" are the gatekeepers of the ruling economic class; they are the new "Elite". And the author is the Apostate standing up on behalf of the people; the oppressed people who only lacked the resources to be at the caliber of the so called skeptics. But the Skeptics are merely a product of class privilege; their actions on web forums serve to demarcate them from the rest at the expense of the rest. Earlier I called this populist; the authors mode of analysis fits nicely into the "elite vs the people" mentality; it corresponds directly with the authors initial assessment of "the group" they've come to disdain.

The next section "Sexist Bastards" reveals more of the authors new presuppositions. Sexism is routinely thrown around by people on the left to diagnose, describe, criticize, classify, and refer to a range of phenomenon, events, actions, intentions, policies, and entities with increasing granularity and totalization. This is not to say that Sexism does not and has not occurred throughout history; its merely a recognition that it's become a lens to describe everything, even the most mundane sorts of action (a type of concept creep). This is why concepts such as microaggression, lived experience, and implicit bias have been used increasingly over the past decade. Every action a male takes must be in-line with the liberation feminist movement otherwise he is serving to maintain the patriarchy. Like I mentioned earlier, the reduction of nuance to binary oppositions competing for resources (class conflict) explains all facets of life; it is populist, plurality collapses to a Hobbesian battle for control over the state. The author attributes "Sexism" to the undefined group "Skeptics"; like above, skeptics only serve to maintain their male, white, technocratic privilege, so necessarily they must be sexist and any action will be confirmatory evidence in favor of their presumptions. This is how totalizing world views work. To make their case, The author refers to an example of obvious sexism, which I actually had never heard of before reading this article. "Elevatorgate" is what its called; apparently a "woman of the skeptic community" was propositioned by a man to grab a coffee in his hotel room at an odd hour, which made the woman uncomfortable, so much that she felt the need to voice her story in a YouTube video. There was subsequent backlash, even from the prominent thinker Richard Dawkins, criticizing her reaction and feminist politics more broadly. Apparently this created a "schism" in the "skeptic community", dividing those who are sympathetic to feminist ideologies from those who are not. Due to Dawkins' insensitive comments (which amounted to telling the woman to suck it up) he was labelled a misogynist, and presumably those who agreed with his stance share the label. A few things to note: examples like these literally demarcate the illiberal left from the rest of the political sphere. It is like abortion, one of the incredibly divisive topics that carves up the political landscape. I think it should be obvious that the term "feminist" has shifted meanings throughout the past century. You have to ask the question: what sort of feminism are you referring to? Of course, to a certain type of fourth wave feminist, there is only one true feminism (theirs), and any criticism is ipso-facto detrimental to the cause and therefore women's liberation. But many women will read this example and find no implication of sexism. Some will read it and ask "how else should you pursue someone you are interested in?". Maybe if she stayed in her safe space she could have avoided this incredible threat. The point is that feminist ideology perceives even mundane interaction between opposite sexes as inherently unsafe; this is exactly what my criticism is, men are perceived as threats, intention does not matter. Now, if someone voices this criticism, even if its another woman, it is assumed that we are uncaring of women safety, inherently oppressive, patriarchal, you name it. You are branded as a "Sexist", which is gaining traction to obtain the same negative connotation as the term "Racist"; a brand you will always retain. Women somehow lack class consciousness; the patriarchy has brainwashed them to internalize their oppressive situation. Again, all nuance is reduced to group struggle, because you disagree with their position you are labelled the aggressor. It does not matter if you are very sympathetic to other forms of feminism like the first and second waves that preceded the fourth wave; you are reduced to a category of person that is barbaric, you want to see women in shackles; you are lumped into the category of people who want to repeal the 19th amendment. Even the language used by these newer waves implies a sense of conflict: "women's ally", "androcentrism", and "male privilege". Simple translation: "We are right. You are either with us or against us".

While reading, I have to ask myself, did the author revoke the label "skeptic" as an identity group, or did they literally revoke the application of skeptical principles. To me it seems like the latter. For example, they follow up their rant with this gem:

To be fair, such unabashed sexists are a minority on skeptic forums, but to be fairer, the general attitude to women isn't exactly healthy.

I don't get it, is the "skeptic" group a collection of "Sexist Bastards" or not? This is the sort of Motte-and-bailey fallacy you always see from these leftist types.

Now we encounter the "Islamophobia" charge; criticism of Jihad, Islamic theocracies, and Quranic Literalism means you have a "phobia" of Muslims. Skeptics are simply Islamophobic; the author cites Richard Dawkins response to the "Sexism" charges above as "hate speech", proving his phobia plainly and simply. I could honestly give a shit less about Richard Fucking Dawkins; I really haven't payed attention to him with the exception of the South Park renditions. My problem is this word "Islamophobia"; of course many variants of xenophobia exist, but the totalizing effect of the word destroys legitimate forms of inquiry. It obfuscates actual hatred of Muslims; so much so that it can go undetected because everyone is reduced to "phobia" category if you express a form of criticism regardless of the structure and form of the message. Expressing a form of criticism reduces to a "phobia"; it's this mind-numbing, polarizing, impractical, and partisan use of language that drives me absolutely insane. The privileging of Islam over all other religions is something unique to this breed of leftism. Consider the authors statement:

As is also typical of hatemongers, he builds us a generalised picture from a number of isolated and unrelated instances. Female genital mutilation, for example, is nothing to do with Islam, as Dawkins probably knows, though he's quite happy to throw it in there and suggest it's endemic. The effect of his screed is to portray Islam as a kind of institutionalised woman-torture in which all Muslim men are complicit, thus slandering about half a billion people, and furthering the agenda of Fox News and the "war on terror".

This same argument can be used in defense of Christianity; just substitute an unacceptable action and replace "Islam" with "Catholic". I would bet, given the authors constant repudiation of priests throughout the blog, they would be happy to be on the side of the "skeptics". Is the author correctly identifying an instance of Islamophobia, or are they simply succumbing to an Islamophilia bias? The author continues by conflating Race and Religion:

To their credit, many big-name skeptics (including PZ Myers and Phil Plait) called Dawkins out on his obvious sexism; but to my knowledge — and correct me if I'm wrong — not one of them has said a word about his Islamophobia. It seems as though this racist trash is as accepted within the skeptic community as it evidently is within the common rooms of Oxbridge.

While its true that many Arabs are Muslim, Islam is not a racial category. This would be equivalent to calling Christianity a race, because it's primarily a Western European religion. I can't even begin to comprehend this level of stupidity; a key feature of being a critical thinker is making necessary conceptual distinctions, it looks like this author has thrown that out the window. But again, this is the similar pattern of totalizing ideology that we can recognize; the collapse of distinctions and nuance to monolithic categories. Conflating Islam with "race" simply makes criticizing Islam appear to be something socially unacceptable. Consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or any other apostates and critics of Islam, are they all just racist? Are the Slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina part of this newly defined race the author has concocted? Islam literally means Submission to God; adhering to the Quran has nothing to do with race; but conflating the concepts means criticism of Islam is impossible. So I must ask, does the author truly care about women's rights? Does the author mind the fact that apostates are incredibly discriminated against in Muslim countries; so much so that its permissible to put Atheists to death? By conflating Race and Islam, you subject non-believers to the tyranny of theocracy we worked incredibly hard to claw our way out of since the Enlightenment. You believe all of this discrimination should be tolerated because some "skeptic" made a claim that upset some Muslims?

Here are the consequences of perpetuating "islamophobia".

I just want to make one more comment on this before I move on. Islamophobia is just incredibly useless terminology for understanding sectarian violence and religious incompatibility. Consider the "racism against Italians" or other people descending from southern European countries in the early history of the United States. The U.S. was incredibly protestant, holding strong anti-catholic sentiment in a time not far removed from sectarian violence in Europe following the reformation. Would it be wise to conduct our analysis in racial terms while ignoring doctrinal differences and fundamentalism? Does calling it "italian-phobia" or "latin-phobia" do anything to shed light into and solve the problem? This terminology is not only inflammatory, but entirely vacuous and unhelpful for problem solving. This is a matter of two tribes fighting over who is the heretic. Leftists are so fixated on Race, and so ignorant of religion, that they do nothing to help. Now, use the same line of reasoning but substitute "Islam" in the analysis. What you are largely seeing is a form of religious tension between two faiths that are rooted in martyrdom, Abraham, and Evangelism. When you have a group rejecting your savior, openly blaspheming against what you believe, and pulling people away from what you believe to be the only path for salvation, of course there is going to be strong reaction against the "new" person in town. People will even become violent and hateful; because it is an existential threat. There are heretics subverting the word of God; how do you think Muslims respond to Christians and Atheists when they blaspheme against Allah in Muslim theocracies? Let's stop being naïve. Lets stop using poor terminology to describe the social tension in our country. Calling someone Islamophobic necessarily demonizes them; its not a description, but an implicit dismissal of any criticism. Conflating a religion with race only worsens the problem.

Moving on. We have come to the goldmine of blatantly obvious Leftist terminology that is equivalent in its predictability with that of Sin: Neoliberalism. More vague in its definition then that of Liberalism, Neoliberalism is loosely understood to be a political ideology favorable to privatization, deregulation, austerity, and reduction in government spending. This is one of the Leftists favorite slurs and ultimate conversation stopper; suggest anything remotely related and you obtain the smear, permanently associating you with the demons who unleashed this calamity on Earth. While I agree that we can isolate specific points in history where certain economic ideologies were discarded in favor of others, I reject the identity category on grounds of its non-existence. No one calls themselves neo-liberal, there are no guiding principles agreed upon such that we can identify someone as explicitly neoliberal, I can't find any economic doctrines that are uniquely "neoliberal"; I can only find very loose associations between Austrian and Chicago schools of economics, and debates between Saltwater and Freshwater schools. Where is this guiding document for neoliberalism, like I can find for Locke, Hume, and Mill? It is yet again, another nebulous term that kind of makes sense to use, but mostly pollutes the political landscape; serving only to demarcate who is a leftist from who is not. As far as I can tell, the term is used to describe both conservative and democratic politics dominant in the US: "Both are Neoliberal". The term is used to describe an establishment that neglects the needs of its marginalized classes. The term is used to criticize financial deregulation. The term is used to describe incarceration rates in the United States. The term is used to diagnose the climate crisis. The term is used to describe, literally everything we find unacceptable. Substitute the word "Devil" for "neoliberal" and you can see its totalizing effect. And yet, can anyone provide a cohesive account of what the ideology is absent a historical explanation of what politician X did to determine how we got here?

Looking at Investopedia's explanation, we can see a few characteristics. One is "Free enterprise, competition, deregulation, and the importance of individual responsibility"; how is this unique to neoliberalism? Two is "Opposition to the expansion of government power, state welfare, inflation"; state welfare has increased along with inflation, just by glancing at the statistics (google it yourself). "Government Power" is an incredibly vague notion; some might say its been increasing while simultaneously decreasing in industries such as finance. Another is "A reduction in union power and greater flexibility in employment"; I agree, the data confirms this. What I am trying to get at, is that the "group" and definition the concept is supposed to demarcate is not all that clear; so I am hesitant to use it in a conversation. From what I can gather, the term describes a sort of phase transition in political economy, which can loosely be affiliated with certain thinkers around the post-war period. The term could be useful when describing a period of history that began to become distinct in the second half of the 20th century; similar to the way we demarcate other historical periods such as "Second Temple Judaism", "Enlightenment", "Renaissance", "Early Modern" etc. I would argue that even this conceptualization of the term is charitable, since there are even less defining features. Like I mentioned above, the term is used almost exclusively in a derogatory manner rather than as a means of explication or categorization. There is typically no causal analysis or rigorous investigation into mechanisms; but a loose description followed by the post-hoc rationalization that all our woes are a consequent of this ideology. Even historians who study this era note the inherent difficulty in thinking about the concept as a category. Some historians claim the era is over, but people still believe politicians in the West are a continuation of the ideology.

If we think of "Neoliberal" as a continuation or extension of "Liberal" political philosophy, it should be clear that rejecting Neoliberalism need not necessarily imply a rejection of Liberalism. However, when the term is used by detractors, it's typically done by rejecting all forms of Liberalism (and yes conservatives, you are liberals according to the leftist doctrines). Karl Marx was notably critical of Liberalism, and philosophers who followed in this tradition also reject liberal political philosophy in its entirety. This is why its important to understand terminological differences when referring to political discourse. "Liberal", "Leftist", "Socialism", and "Communism" are understood by unread "Conservatives" to roughly mean the same thing. The truth is that the latter three categories reject liberalism. I don't want to go too deep down that rabbit hole. I just want to note that rejecting "neoliberalism" typically means having revolutionary political ideology because the word is colloquially used to denote all liberal political theory: Adam Smith, John Rawls, John Locke, David Hume, Karl Popper, Francis Bacon and many more, rather than simply the Monetarists and Ludwig Von Mises.

Given what I reviewed above, its surprising that the author sees "Neoliberalism" as a sharply defined category. They even go further, equating Skepticism with Neoliberalism:

All skeptics are neoliberals: if you do not consider yourself a neoliberal, you should not consider yourself a skeptic. I realise this can sound like a contentious claim, so please let me explain.

Based on my analysis of skepticism in the introduction, conflating neoliberalism is interesting. Skeptical principles are universal, available to us all, timeless, and can be used to question the legitimacy of any dogma. I think the author is making this sort of argument: "Neoliberalism is Evil, Skeptics are equivalent (or somehow necessary for bolstering neoliberalism), therefore skeptics are Evil"; a level of sophistication never before seen. The author proceeds to explain that knowledge is accumulated; some scientific discoveries are dependent on the analyses done by earlier thinkers. Furthermore, scientific breakthroughs are also a function of non-scientific "modes of inquiry"; they are contextual, relative to historical positionality, and the political atmosphere in which they develop. This sounds similar to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; but its more of a sociological analysis of scientific development. The author is regurgitating the claims that the scientific method is insufficient for making discoveries and the process takes place within a broader cultural framework. From this, arises fields like Feminist Science and Indigenous Science; the history of science to date was dominated by white, heternormative, and western thinkers who dismissed "alternative ways of knowing". Science is inherently political and socially constructed. Here is where we get to the meat and potatoes of the authors leftism:

Skeptics, in insisting on the primacy of scientific knowledge, deny the value of non-scientific metaphors in future scientific advance. As far as they are concerned, western liberal democracies have made all the political, social, cultural and economic advances they need to. Western thought is already so free that anyone who tries can perceive reality direct and unmediated, with no obscuring metaphors in the way. To the trained western eye, the truth simply reveals itself, in as much detail as our scientific understanding allows. It's difficult to imagine a more absolute statement of confidence in liberal democracy.
Similarly, when skeptics insist that scientific thinking should be spread worldwide, they necessarily mean that liberal democracy should be spread worldwide. Which is to say, they are neoliberals.

You see what the author has done here? Skeptics think science takes place in a vacuum, but it's really embedded in a broader cultural context. Skeptics are blind to the metaphors that guide the scientific process in our cultural context, but do not acknowledge this limitation. To the Skeptic, they think they are viewing the universe free from distortions. They think this, because the Skeptic lives in the West; the land of liberalism, free from cognitive distortions and home of the Enlightenment. They insist our "way of knowing" is the only way to understand the universe; therefore they impose hegemonic dictatorship over the rest of the world, spreading liberalism like the missionary spreads the Gospel. But as we noticed earlier, neoliberalism (and liberal democracy more broadly) is the core of every single problem you can imagine; Climate change, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, *ism, *ism, *ism, *ism (substitute whatever you want in the wildcard):

This is not the place to describe the many problems and hypocrisies of neoliberalism. Suffice it to say that I do not believe that liberal democracy, which condemns the majority of the world's population to varying degrees of slavery, is a perfect system. I do not believe that the metaphors of liberal democracy allow us a perfect view of reality. And therefore I do not believe in the primacy of the scientific method as a source of knowledge. It might be the best we've got, but when it comes to human advancement — including the advance of science itself — other sources of knowledge can be just as useful, and often more important.

Like I mentioned above, "Neoliberalism" just means "Western Liberal Democracy" more broadly. "Sources of knowledge" typically refers to the body of scholarship that rejects the supremacy of rationalism, empiricism, and scientific inquiry as mere "cultural artifacts" of a predominant society that's imposed its grip on the world. I am interested in knowing which sources of knowledge the author is willing to legitimize. Given their subtle jabs at Catholicism, would they accept Theology? Being a skeptic I must ask; what is your method for determining which "sources of knowledge" are to be more useful and important? By accepting a pluralist view of knowledge, don't you also face a demarcation problem? Does "useful" just mean whatever suits you at a particular place and time, or whatever is most politically expedient?

This blends nicely into the next section "Science always has a political dimension". This is common sense at face value, but is commonly used to question the legitimacy of any scientific research program that contradicts a deeply held presumption. It is all too easy to fall back on the "corruption" charge when results aren't what you desired. In fact, this is exactly what Flat Earthers and Anti-Vaxxers do when confronted with contradictory results. For me personally, this is a weak argument. It's commonly used by far left and far right populists to discredit valid research, the pseudo-skepticism I mentioned above. It is not to say that the charge of corruption is impossible, but it can't be your first line of defense simply because you don't like the results. But like all statements made by political radicals, they are truisms that seem obvious at face value but when you investigate deeper you find they wish to generalize more broadly then can be defended. Lets just consider a few examples in good faith. Suppose you live in a country that highly values space exploration; 100 percent of tax revenue goes towards NASA research in this hypothetical. It's obvious that discoveries unrelated to space travel are likely to be missed by the massive diversion of public resources to a specific research program. So yes, our scientific understanding in this scenario can be constrained by narrow interests. Now lets suppose you are a Cigarette manufacturer who experiences pushback from the public due to a high prevalence of cancer in the smoker community. It's obvious that the firms economic interests will cause them to seek disconfirmatory evidence showing zero effect of smoking on cancer. Consider another scenario; you are a drug manufacturer who provides vaccination services. I actually write about this in my other blog. It is certainly possible that the evidence based medicine practices can be corrupted in favor of the economic interests of the insurance companies (see the Illusion of EBM). I'm sure you can think of more examples. Of course commercial, political, and economic interests can influence the selection of hypotheses, selection of data, design of trials, and reporting of scientific research. But this is not the same is stating that science is inherently political; that would be a misrepresentation of the scientific process. It's hard for me to understand why this distinction isn't obvious; the fact that X can be manipulated by Y says nothing about the unadulterated status of X free from the influence of Y. This truism also doesn't explicate the degree to which political processes effect science and whether there are corrective mechanisms to control for institutional interests (hint: there are).

It seems the author takes a globally skeptical stance towards the possibility of an objective research program, while simultaneously holding the stance that science is our best method for accessing reality. This argument amounts to nothing more than a truism; it is self-evident that the process can be corrupted to serve bureaucratic interests. The author cites a few examples of political contamination: Lysenkoism in USSR and Race Science in Nazi Germany. He claims that "Neoliberals" also are subject to politicizing science: "Their racist experiments confirmed their racist hypotheses based on their racist observations". No one denies this; Everyone can guilty of motivated reasoning, even scientists. The problem of "Not being a skeptic anymore for these reasons" is that they are so vague and broad that they can be wielded to dismiss any research program; this is precisely the pseudo-skeptical approach that prevents us from coming closer to truth. If all science is conducted within a socio-political framework and all scientists are motivated reasoners, you can simply dismiss the entire scientific process on grounds of sheer impossibility. In fact, this line of argumentation can be used to dismiss all claims, even the authors claims. If the single greatest method discovered for discerning truth is inherently political, everything falls within a political context, and we are motivated reasoners, then all claims can be dismissed on grounds of some political bias including whatever the author believes. The author is taking one of the grandest skeptical approaches to knowledge I've seen (I refer them to Putnam's arguments against skepticism). The author is simply assuming a post-modern approach to knowledge. They assume the entire enterprise is corrupted by simply pointing to a few examples of corruption; they merely assert the impossibility of the enterprise. This is by far, one of the greatest examples of poor critical thinking I have ever encountered. They simply assert that scientific understandings and consensus are a function of political ideology, while not even considering the bi-directional nature of the phenomenon; science informs our political systems. The author takes a political fatalist approach to knowledge, assuming a one-to-one unidirectional relationship between politics and science. The author merely assumes we live in a top-down control system in which everything is predetermined by political ideology. They ignore feedback, causal loops, path dependency and self-organization while overemphasizing power, social control, "privileged discourses" and delegitimization. This is text-book modern leftism in a nutshell: "Everything is power dynamics and Hegemony".

And when the political consensus shifts, other sciences could go the same way. Whatever science you support, future generations might well regard it to be as wrongheaded as we regard racial science today. We look at reality through a thicket of political metaphors; as these metaphors come and go, different parts of reality become more or less visible; it can become easier to see where we were wrong at earlier times, and harder to see where we are wrong at the present.

Can't I simply assert, using the authors methodology, that their assessment is also subject to the effects of political metaphor? This "debunking argument" can literally be applied to their own position. The author proceeds to qualify their obvious absurd claims, limiting the impossibility to the context of questions concerning the nature of "human experience".

I'm less willing to believe that liberal democracy affords us a good view of the realities of human experience. I'm as deep in the liberal thicket as anyone else, so I can't say for sure, but I suspect many human sciences as they are practised today are heavily clouded by dubious political assumptions. The most dubious of these is the assumption the liberalism itself is a politically neutral context. This has led to the widespread fetish for reducing complex psychological or social or cultural problems to "quantifiable" data amenable to scientific study. When this data and the conclusions drawn from it are subjected to the scrutiny of free-thinking liberal experts, the results will necessarily be unbiased — or so the assumption goes. That assumption can fuck right off.

The author then qualifies even more, because obviously the paragraph above is too strong of an assertion.

Which is not to say that the human sciences are entirely wrong or useless as currently practised: I've no time for the hardcore skeptics who dismiss anything that isn't maths or physics. But skeptics should be careful of cheerleading indiscriminately for all science, any science.

Which is precisely the self-evident claim I was referring to earlier. We came a long way, so I'll sum it up. 1) The author asserts global skepticism towards scientific research enterprises 2) the author retracts, allowing for exceptions 3) the author retracts, allowing for further exceptions and finally 4) "Ok, we should just avoid blindly accepting anything produced by 'scientists', we shouldn't be too skeptical like the hard core skeptics but should be weary of being uncritical". No shit Sherlock; your arguments amount literally to nothing. Luckily, we are provided a few examples of "disciplines to be skeptical of". I find the selection astonishing because these are precisely the disciplines leftists disdain.

1. Medical science: I get it, I don't argue against the fact that the DSM-5 has changed for political reasons. Foucault makes extraordinary arguments in The History of Sexuality and Madness and Civilization; his concept of Biopower is illuminating. I've even questioned the possibility of "psychological sciences" independently of reading these books. However, I am not a social constructionist; I think there is something about medical sciences that can be known independently of someone's standpoint. We should be skeptical of concept creep, the impact of bias in research paradigms, and all of the ways our preferences can obfuscate the quest for knowledge. But this is precisely what science is designed to do. Iteratively, we can get better, fine tune our methods, and grow in our understanding; but there is no guarantee that we will always be right, science and all of human knowledge is fallible. Get over it.

2. Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, (evolutionary biology?) etc.: These are obviously politically charged at the moment given the cultural climate. Many leftists reject these disciplines; seeing them as corrupted and only serving the political establishment. The author makes no argument as to why they are unscientific so I have nothing to argue against. I do know that critics of sociobiology have a hard time excepting the fact that we aren't blank slates; this comes into conflict with a social-constructivist approach to human behavior (typical of modern leftists). They reject it because it is "unscientific", but don't provide an account for demarcating it as a pseudoscience. Some reject it because it is "unfalsifiable"; which is interesting to me because if this was the stance of the author, that would imply accepting Karl Popper's notion of falsification as the standard for discernment. But since Popper is by definition a Neoliberal, and Neoliberalism is skepticism, and Neoliberalism is the source of all evil, that would imply assuming a neoliberal framework for rejecting it as pseudoscience. Likewise, evolutionary psychology is dismissed on similar grounds. What is the argument you might ask? It is neoliberal.

3. Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: I was most surprised by this one, but after further reflection it makes sense. Linguists influenced by Noam Chomsky have shown strong theoretical foundations for the existence of inherent biological mechanisms that support language; this conflicts with social constructivism. The author claims focusing on syntax and semantics is useless, rather we should focus on pragmatics (language use). But alas, we would have to drop "logico-empirical" (aka Positivist) methods, which would mean "accepting the value of non-scientific ways of generating knowledge". But we will never do that because we are politically brainwashed. Not much of an argument. This article was written sometime in the past, so I wonder if the author still rejects computational linguistics when large language models now exist.

4. Economics: Obviously; unless its Marxian (I assume). Economists are nothing more than the ideological buttresses for neoliberalism, they are the root of all evil. So boring.

The next session is called: What's so bad about fortune tellers? I was going to ignore this section initially but decided otherwise; mainly because I slightly agree with some of the content. The author starts by giving a few examples of weird mystical, astrological, and spiritual things people believe; claiming so what? Who cares if they believe weird things. According to the author "They're mostly just a harmless diversion, a faint ray of amusement to guide us through the long and darkening days". These people have no impact on the world (probably because the author falsely assumes we live in a rational technocracy), so why does the online "Skeptic Community" continue focusing on "debunking" these false claims? The "No harm done" principle is appealing to me because I have a "live and let live" approach to the mundane daily life that occupies the majority of our existence. However, I am not quite sure weird beliefs are trivial, and I highly doubt the author actually thinks this. "People don't actually believe these things, they are comforting forms of entertainment" seems to be the assertion. People are longing for an escape from the mundane. The author thinks skeptics should focus their efforts on the real con-artist, like the "financial experts" who screw people over. I completely agree with this, but entirely disagree with the problem description. People aren't choosing to believe weird mystical assertions simply out of boredom with the mundane; they do so because there are significant issues with their thinking patterns that make them more vulnerable to patently false conclusions. Correct the reasoning and significantly reduces the chances of someone forming odd beliefs (financial or mystical). If you can demonstrate how certain patterns of reasoning lead to weird mystical beliefs that are false, people will become more self-aware about how they approach reasoning about other topics, including recommendations from financial fraudsters. Someone who believes astrology is also likely to be duped by a financial "expert" who recommends purchasing a stock merely on correlational information, but why? The reason is something more fundamental; that person is uncritical of coincidences, they see them as a sign of something. They neglect probability and chance. Pointing to the reasons why astrology is bogus will also help that person understand why certain financial recommendations are bogus because they rely on the same reasoning structure. Weird beliefs are a function of faulty patterns of reasoning; people don't merely believe these things because they are "aware of their miserable existence and need a way to cope". It seems to me that if you want to help people avoid getting screwed over by charlatans, you have to get to the root cause. Criticizing weird beliefs is simply an easy way to demonstrate some of these principles of critical thinking that people can learn only if you engage with them. I get where the author is coming from though. Why stir up a bunch of shit when someone is chillin. If someone thinks they are cured from an illness purely based on the placebo effect, what does it matter? Unfortunately, weird beliefs spread and there can be consequences. Imagine someone believes taking a certain pill improves some condition and they create a Facebook group to spread the good news. They are charismatic charlatans who gain a following purely from their public speaking abilities. Little do they know, there are long term health impacts that will cause complications not immediately seen. Should you do something? Should you correct their thinking? Unfortunately no, because the author thinks beliefs like these are solely due to systemic oppression. Religion is the Opium of the People, the only true way to help them is engage in a crusade against Capitalism.

Real medicine is better at curing its recognised ailments, but alternative medicine seems to be better at helping with a chronic unrecognised ailment: daily life under the capitalist system. And so it shall remain until opiates are freely available in pill form

This flows into the next section "Science as a Warm Blanket in the Dark". It is an extension of last sections conclusion: "Skeptics don't realize that people are just disenfranchised by our economic system".

But in picking apart the nonsense they come out with, skeptics miss the most important question, which is why they felt the need to create this nonsense in the first place.... Our political system, education and culture leave a lot of people marginalised, lost, impotent, irrelevant, and made to feel so daily. But these people are not complete idiots..... They look at the reality that has been dealt to them and ask, can this be all there is? Is this as good as it gets? And so, quite justifiably, they invent an alternative. An alternative reality where the people who marginalised them are reduced to easily-identifiable comic-book villians, plotting in underground hideouts. An alternative reality where, more often than not, they and their people are the heroes: the rebels, the fearless investigators, the pioneers of science, the true keepers of knowledge......And the same is true of almost all bunk, from cryptozoology to Christianity: it's an alternative reality for the disenfranchised, a wonderland where the losers are promised triumph, and The Man holds no sway.

In other words, Skeptics need to understand that the ultimate cause of the "irrational" things people believe, is the political and economic system; we are merely observing the result of various coping mechanism. Correcting thinking patterns will not fix the issue, creating class consciousness will ultimately awaken people to their dire situation. If you fix "the system", people will come to realize that these beliefs are false. They will feel empowered and won't need to create fictional narratives to live in.

This is revolutionary leftist ideology explicated. It is a form of dialectical materialism. Fix the economic conditions and people will feel more engaged, more empowered, less alienated, less exploited, and generally will not need to resort to coping mechanisms.

Objective reality in a liberal democracy might well be wonderful if you're a media personality or a tenured professor in a leafy college town. But for most people, reality sucks. And if they choose to reject it, I can't blame them.

Where do "Skeptics" fall in this world-view? Remember, skeptics are the gatekeepers of neoliberalism, the root of all evil. Skepticism itself is a set of dogma and a coping mechanism. Its important to realize that this is what it means to be "Woke"; the author has apparently had some revelation that caused them to realize the true source of tension in the world.

The skeptic dogma is, of course, the belief that "a core set of principles that have proven themselves powerful and useful in the scientific world also apply to everything else people do". This belief is as simple and seductive as any of the claims that priests and mullahs and gurus have made over the millennia — and almost as wrong.

I think part of the problem is the authors conceptualization of skepticism; they assume it to be synonymous with the scientific method. This is faulty; scientific principles are compatible with, and derive from, a skeptical mindset but the tradition is philosophical in nature. Science is subsumed by and inherits skeptical principles. It shares with skepticism suspension of judgment but fundamentally seeks to resolve the ambiguity with a set of methods and guiding assumptions. It relies on clearly defined hypotheses being testable and measurable, with auxiliary principles such as reliability and repeatability to strengthen the degree of conviction in results. Skepticism is obvious different; I can critically question whether reliability is relevant for ascertaining truth, whether falsifiability is necessary, whether untestable hypotheses are still worth defending etc. I can mount a skeptical argument against the use of probability theory in subdomains of science. Fundamentally, skepticism and science are different phenomenon; they share similarities but are not identical. Was Cartesian Skepticism "science" and neoliberalism? Are radical skeptics about knowledge "scientific"? Absolutely not. If skepticism, thought of as a process, could be regarded as questioning, doubt, curiosity, inquisitiveness, and willingness to revise beliefs, then literally everyone can "be a skeptic". Its not the narrow "scientific" conceptualization envisioned by the author. Like I mentioned before, skepticism is closer to epistemology; not science. Now, if a proposition within the domain of science is undecidable, a scientist will probably be skeptical of attempts various solutions. But this is nothing "inherent" to science, it's a problem of unknowability which, given the assumption of the primacy of scientific methods, the scientists will suspend judgment until an algorithm can be developed to solve the problem.

It's hard for me to even understand what this authors position is to be frank. He disdains the word Skeptic as an identity category, announcing renunciation, but sets up a strawman to attack them, keeping the reader in the dark with regards to how to spot a skeptic. In the last section, he claims that "Skeptics" are "logical positivists" without the label, but don't realize logical positivism has failed. But if we refer back to their earlier claims, skepticism "is neoliberalism". How can skepticism be neoliberalism and positivism when Karl Popper, the biggest critic of positivism (claiming to have killed it), was one of the key Austrian thinkers (along with Von Mises and Hayek) establishing "neoliberal" principles? It's these sort of embarrassing inconsistencies that are littered throughout the blog. Also, It's important to note that logical positivism is but one subset of the broader "Positivism" philosophical movement, which has its critics but is by no means "dead". But by reducing Positivism to logical positivism, the author is trying to universalize a claim which they cannot. Most notably, critics of positivism are the Critical Theory advocates of the Frankfurt school; the modern leftists such as Herbert Marcuse. Emile Durkheim and Comte have by no means been "dead"; they are alive and well in the academy (until the recent ideological infiltration in the humanities and sociology of critical theory). Many "skeptics" would probably resonate with Bas Van Fraasen's constructive empiricism or Susan Haack's Foundherentism or the notion of defeasible reasoning; why exclusively label them "logical positivists" and then falsely claim the tradition is dead? Tar and feathering someone with a slur is the crucial to the polarized mind. Why not rename the article "Here are my reasons for adopting leftist philosophy"; it would be more fitting and honest.

I don't have much more to say. It's just funny to notice how obvious leftist world-views are. The author sums this obviousness up at the end when he labels Richard Dawkins as "right-wing". I'm just saying, that's how you know you are a radical. This blog post was nothing more than watered down Marxism and Postmodernism.

REJECTING SKEPTICISM

This is not a tale of how I found Jesus, of how acupuncture cured my haemorrhoids, or of how my alien abductors revealed the ultimate truth about 9/11. I still have no faith in anything supernatural, mystical, psychical or spiritual. I still regard the scientific method as the best way to model reality, and reason as the best way to uncover truth. I'm no longer a skeptic, but not one of my core beliefs has changed.

What has changed is that I have come to reject skepticism as an identity. Shared identities like skepticism are problematic at the best of times, for numerous reasons, but I can accept them as a means of giving power and a voice to the disenfranchised. And indeed, this is how skeptics like to portray themselves: an embattled minority standing up for science, the lone redoubt of reason in an irrational world, the vanguard against the old order of ignorance and superstition. As a skeptic, I was happy to accept this narrative and believe I was shoring up the barricades.

However, it's a narrative that corresponds poorly with reality. In the modern world, science, technology and reason are central and vital, and this is widely recognised, including at the highest level. On any major political decision, the technocrat speaks louder than the bishop, or anyone else, for that matter. Sure, Bush and Blair were noted god-botherers, but if you seriously think that, say, Gulf War 2 was their decision alone, or that that "God wills it" would have convinced anyone they had to convince, then you're subscribing to a cartoon view of history. Such decisions are always calculated, reasoned, and backed by dozens of accommodating scientific experts.

Science has a high media profile and a powerful lobby group: in the midst of a global recession and sweeping government cuts, science funding has generally held up or even increased. Hi-tech corporations have massive wealth and influence, and their products are omnipresent and seen as ever more desirable. In fact, the world today would be unthinkable without the products of science and technology, which have infiltrated into almost every economic, political and social process. We live in a world created by and ever-more dependent on science, technology and reason, in which scientists and engineers are a valued and indispensable elite.

That's right: the nerds won, decades ago, and they're now as thoroughly established as any other part of the establishment. And while nerds a relatively new elite, they're overwhelmingly the same as the old: rich, white, male, and desperate to hang onto what they've got. And I have come to realise that skepticism, in their hands, is just another tool to secure and advance their privileged position, and beat down their inferiors. As a skeptic, I was not shoring up the revolutionary barricades: instead, I was cheering on the Tsar's cavalry.

REASON IS NOT JUST FOR AN INTELLECTUAL ELITE

Of course, there is nothing inherently elitist about reason or the scientific method. Critical thinking involves applying a few simple rules that are accessible to everyone, at least in theory. And indeed, a lot of people become skeptics for the best of intentions: to spread the word of reason and critical thinking, to arm the masses rather than shoot them down. In highlighting bunk and deception wherever it occurs, their aim is to protect the vulnerable against the hucksters, charlatans, politicians and priests who exploit them.

But such is the character of skepticism that good intentions quickly get swamped by bad ones. Look past the crocodile tears on any online debunking forum, and you'll quickly find that the majority of visitors are not drawn there by concern for the victims of irrationality, but by contempt. They're there to laugh at idiots. I'm not going to plead innocence here: I've often joined in with the laughter, at least vicariously; laughing at idiots can be fun. But in the context of skeptic sites, the laughter takes on a bullying and unhealthy tone. It's never pleasant to watch a group of university graduates ganging up to sneer at people denied their advantages in life, especially when for some of them it's a full-time hobby. It's an unfair fight between unequal resources, and far too few skeptics care about this inequality or want to do anything about it.

If anything, I'm convinced that most of them would prefer to keep the resources unequal. The average skeptic has little time for spreading the word of reason to the educationally or intellectually lacking. His superior reason is what separates him from the chumps around him, and he has no interest in closing the gap. For him, the appeal of the skeptic clique is its exclusivity. It's a refuge from the stupid masses, and a marker of his own special privileges. It's Mensa rebranded.

About ten years ago there was a short-lived movement to rebrand skeptics as "brights". This proposal was widely derided within the community, perhaps because it revealed too much about the skeptic mindset. Many skeptics indeed see themselves as "brights" in a world of "dims". And rather than illuminate the world, they prefer to gather on skeptic forums and try to outshine each other.

Online forums, whatever their subject, can be forbidding places for the newcomer; over time, most of them tend to become dominated by small groups of snotty know-it-alls who stamp their personalities over the proceedings. But skeptic forums are uniquely meant for such people. A skeptic forum valorises (and in some cases, fetishises) competitive geekery, gratuitous cleverness, macho displays of erudition. It's a gathering of rationality's hard men, thumping their chests, showing off their muscular logic, glancing sideways to compare their skeptical endowment with the next guy, sniffing the air for signs of weakness. Together, they create an oppressive, sweaty, locker-room atmosphere that helps keep uncomfortable demographics away.

SEXIST BASTARDS

One demographic skeptics are particularly uncomfortable with is the female of the species. It's an increasingly acknowledged fact that the skeptic community is rife with sexism -- especially in the wake of the "elevator guy" controversy, about which more later. Women are a small minority in the skeptic world, and the few who get involved get shit thrown at them constantly by their skeptic peers. Every day, they suffer the whole gamut of attitudes from sneering to leering.

Skepticism, of course, is only one of the many online interests which attract barely-closeted sexists. But the particular attraction of skepticism is also its particular problem: it allows the sexist to disguise his prejudice as rationality and "common sense". You can spot guys like this easily on skeptic forums: the word "feminism" brings them crawling out, like slugs after a downpour. For them, feminism is an unscientific discipline (but how could it be otherwise?), as nonsensical as astrology or Roman Catholicism, and as ripe and essential for debunking. They're okay with women's lib, within reason; but now it's gone too far, and the firm hand of reason must rein it in. Reason, weirdly enough, never seems to disrupt their own grip on power. It's always on the side of the patriarchy.

To be fair, such unabashed sexists are a minority on skeptic forums, but to be fairer, the general attitude to women isn't exactly healthy. Women are present on skeptic forums in much the same way that women are present in early Star Trek episodes: while the men can take on a variety of roles, the women are always sex characters. Their every attribute is sexualised and objectified. Intelligence in a male skeptic is taken for granted; intelligence in a female skeptic is a turn-on. When a male scientist knows about science, it's expected and goes unremarked; when a female scientist knows about science, she's hot! And she'll be barely visible beneath the throng of nerds trying to fap off over her lab coat.

Too often, the skeptic nerd who tries to display his women-friendly credentials ends up revealing himself only as a sexist creep. He's all in favour of women, as long as they satisfy his own ideals of what a woman should be. This kind of attitude is typified by the skeptic-oriented webcomic xkcd. "I like nerdy girls", says Randall Munroe — but can he tolerate any others? I looked through hundreds of his stick-figure strips, god help me, and where his females are characterised at all, they inevitably conform to the same constructed ideal — geeky, quirky, all-knowing, whimsical — an ideal largely constructed around Randall himself, or his own self-image. This female ideal says a lot more about his vanity than his feminism; and it's an ideal shared by many guys in the skeptic community.

Idealising women is not the same thing as feminism — in fact, it's usually the opposite. Throughout history, the concept of the "perfect female" has been more about men forcing their impressions on women, stifling them, not allowing them a voice. The Virgin Mary was not a progressive figure, and neither was Joan of Arc, and neither is the skeptic chick of your dreams, guys, whoever she may be. Wrapping women up in your clammy fantasies is not much different from wrapping them up in a burkha.

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Only a minority of Muslim women wear burkhas; some of them do so by choice, as a statement of cultural identity. Some others do so purely on the insistence of the men in their family. Some of those men are traditional sexists of the kind you might find in the skeptic community; many of the others are guided by the same kind of wrongheaded chivalry that makes nerds idealise quirky science chicks.

I don't want to blow my own trumpet unduly, but I believe the above paragraph to be a more measured and factual statement about Islam than you will find in all the work of Prof. Richard Dawkins or his co-thinkers. In fact, in the skeptic community it's much more common to find statements insinuating that all Muslims are women-hating, freedom-hating, clit-butchering, suicidal terrorists, and furthermore, find those statements accepted without comment. Under the guise of atheism, liberalism and rationality, ugly Islamophobia thrives.

A recent shocking example occured in the aftermath of the so-called elevator guy controversy. At a skeptic conference in Dublin, prominent skeptic Rebecca Watson (aka "Skepchick") was propositioned by some creep in an elevator at 4am. She politely refused and later video-blogged about the incident, saying that, guys, elevator come-ons are not such a good idea. Fair enough, one might think. But predictably for the skeptic community, her words incited the fury of a number of sexists, including Prof. Richard Dawkins, who couldn't resist dragging in one of his other prejudices from left-field. It's worth quoting his words in full:

Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so...
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

This comment was not made by some low-rent Youtube troll, or by a declared BNP member, or even by a malicious impostor; as was later confirmed by PZ Myers, these are the words of Richard Dawkins himself. That's the Richard Dawkins, author of Unweaving the Rainbow and The Blind Watchmaker, professor emeritus for the public understanding of science at Oxford university, the skeptic's ultimate skeptic. And his words are hate speech, plain and simple.

As is typical of hatemongers, Dawkins is careful not to name his target directly: instead, he works with insinuation -- though that said, calling the victim "Muslima" is particularly crass. As is also typical of hatemongers, he builds us a generalised picture from a number of isolated and unrelated instances. Female genital mutilation, for example, is nothing to do with Islam, as Dawkins probably knows, though he's quite happy to throw it in there and suggest it's endemic. The effect of his screed is to portray Islam as a kind of institutionalised woman-torture in which all Muslim men are complicit, thus slandering about half a billion people, and furthering the agenda of Fox News and the "war on terror". (Incidentally, the irony of the first paragraph doesn't conceal Dawkins' lack of compassion for the plight of "Muslima". Looking for an example of skeptical crocodile tears? I can think of none better.)

To their credit, many big-name skeptics (including PZ Myers and Phil Plait) called Dawkins out on his obvious sexism; but to my knowledge — and correct me if I'm wrong — not one of them has said a word about his Islamophobia. It seems as though this racist trash is as accepted within the skeptic community as it evidently is within the common rooms of Oxbridge.

And racist trash is what it is. Some Dawkins apologists claim that he is not Islamophobic, but simply a militant atheist combatting the evils of religion wherever he sees them; but Dawkins sees his evils rather selectively. Indeed, he is markedly sympathetic towards the faith of his childhood, the good old C of E — so much so that I suspect the "God Delusion" per se is not his main concern. From his writings, I gather that Dawkins would be content to live in a world where gentle Anglican vicars presided over their bored, civilised congregations in England's vales and hills, while the British Empire did its dirty work elsewhere, in places like Kenya, India, and West Cork. He saves his real ire for the creeds of the unruly natives — all those nasty Muslims and Catholics and tribalists who don't know their place. Not that he'd want to associate himself with the bloodshed done in his name. Like a lot of gentle liberals, he hypocritically declared himself against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while continuing to poison the atmosphere in their favour with his hate speech. At least his buddy Christopher Hitchens, for all his thuggery, was consistent enough to follow his views to their logical, and repugnant, conclusion. But then, Hitchens is better aware of what skepticism is.

SKEPTICISM IS NEOLIBERALISM

As we have seen, skepticism is a broad and varied church — welcoming, among others, elitist, sexist and racist views. One thing all skeptics have in common, though, is that they support the freedoms they believe to exist in present-day western civilization, and think those freedoms should be spread worldwide. In other words, all skeptics are neoliberals. They might disagree, like Hitchens and Dawkins, over the correct strategy to win the latest neoliberal crusade, but they can usually be relied upon to support it, at least in principle.

All skeptics are neoliberals: if you do not consider yourself a neoliberal, you should not consider yourself a skeptic. I realise this can sound like a contentious claim, so please let me explain.

Skeptics are people who believe in the primacy of the scientific method as a source of knowledge. For a skeptic, all knowledge derived through other means is either inferior or spurious. Extreme skeptics like Dawkins come close to claiming that the scientific method is the only true source of knowledge, and that what is presently non-scientific knowledge — like morals and culture — will eventually become more rigorously and correctly established through the scientific method.

The scientific method generally involves observation of reality, hypothesis based on observation, and experimental testing of hypothesis. All of these elements, particularly the first and third, involve the use of human perception — which, when building models of objective reality, can introduce a dangerously subjective element.

We perceive the world through metaphors: mental models that help us interpret and understand our raw perceptions, and construct our observations. Some of these metaphors are inherited and probably immutable without some kind of biological engineering: a rock wall is mostly empty space, but we've evolved to see it as solid mass. Other metaphors are learned, and liable to change or be transmitted to others in the environment. As an example, one can regard events as having a purpose, or one can regard events as having a cause; these are very different metaphors, that lead to very different perceptions of reality. The existence of such metaphors is uncontroversial, by the way; this isn't wishy-washy pomo stuff. Even Dawkins acknowledges them: he calls them memes.

Our observations are conditioned by the metaphors we have been exposed to culturally, socially, and in our society's history. This is what Newton meant when he said he stood on the shoulders of giants: he was acknowledging the accumulation of metaphors which helped him make his discoveries. Some of these metaphors were provided by scientists, like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Others were provided by philosophers, like Descartes and Francis Bacon, who helped transform the way people looked at the world, introducing a mechanistic and empirical view. Other metaphors still came from the cultural, political, social, economic and even religious transformations experienced in Europe in the previous two hundred years. The decline of feudalism, the emergence of a strong middle-class, renaissance humanism, the Protestant reformation, all had a profound effect on the way Europeans of Newton's time could perceive the world. (And all those transformations in turn were influenced by the influx of Islamic culture in the preceding centuries, pillaged during the crusades....)

It's impossible to imagine the breakthroughs of Newton or Copernicus or Descartes happening in 14th-century Europe. The medieval mind did not perceive the world in the right way to make them. It was too clouded with metaphors of heaven and hell and angels and divine will and oaths and tithes and loyalty and hierarchy and feudal exchange; metaphors that, in our understanding, obscured its perception of reality. When these metaphors were transformed and replaced, people could see more clearly; but these transformations were not and could not have been wrought by the scientific method alone, even if such a thing existed at the time. Scientific advance was inseparable from political, social, and economic advance. And the same has been true of all scientific advances. It's just as impossible to imagine Darwin's breakthrough in Newton's time, or Heisenberg's in Darwin's time.

Skeptics, in insisting on the primacy of scientific knowledge, deny the value of non-scientific metaphors in future scientific advance. As far as they are concerned, western liberal democracies have made all the political, social, cultural and economic advances they need to. Western thought is already so free that anyone who tries can perceive reality direct and unmediated, with no obscuring metaphors in the way. To the trained western eye, the truth simply reveals itself, in as much detail as our scientific understanding allows. It's difficult to imagine a more absolute statement of confidence in liberal democracy.

Similarly, when skeptics insist that scientific thinking should be spread worldwide, they necessarily mean that liberal democracy should be spread worldwide. Which is to say, they are neoliberals.

This is not the place to describe the many problems and hypocrisies of neoliberalism. Suffice it to say that I do not believe that liberal democracy, which condemns the majority of the world's population to varying degrees of slavery, is a perfect system. I do not believe that the metaphors of liberal democracy allow us a perfect view of reality. And therefore I do not believe in the primacy of the scientific method as a source of knowledge. It might be the best we've got, but when it comes to human advancement — including the advance of science itself — other sources of knowledge can be just as useful, and often more important.

It is my hope that human beings will one day live in a more just society, a more free society, than any that has yet existed in our history. I am certain that the people of such a society would look back at us and regard our minds as clouded today as we regard those of medieval peasants, and look back on those who insisted we had it all — today's skeptics prominent among them — as we look on friars, preachers, despots and other historical enemies of progress.

SCIENCE ALWAYS HAS A POLITICAL DIMENSION

Because we perceive the world through metaphors, all observations, theories, experiments, statements and facts have a context, including a political context. Our science is necessarily and unavoidably contaminated by our political system; political ideologies propagate through science, and science on its own is incapable of purging them. This is widely understood by people who study scientists, but less often by scientists themselves, and never by skeptics.

Skeptics like to portray science as a hermetically-sealed, self-correcting enterprise, where false theories naturally yield to conflicting evidence, and the truth will always out. To support this position they always trot out the same old anecdotes. I've lost count of the number of times I've read the heartwarming tale of the old geologist who happily dismantled his life's work once the truth of plate tectonics was demonstrated to him. However, the history of science shows that such tales are the exception, and that old theories, and old scientists, have greater stubbornness. Much more common is the scenario described by Max Planck:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

This "new generation", not incidentally, tends to be armed with new political attitudes.

The idea that politics could or should have any input into science is anathema to skeptics. They often bring out the examples of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, or the racial science of Nazi Germany, to illustrate the dangers of allowing science to be contaminated by political ideology. They less often acknowledge that racial science was not unique to Nazi Germany, and that the same kind of racist garbage was enthusiastically pursued by scientists in the most enlightened liberal democracies of the time, and found in all the standard British and American anthropology textbooks. Eugenics, including racial eugenics, wasn't just supported by Nazis, but by people who considered themselves among the vanguard of all that was good and progressive. Liberal democracy was no guard against the influence of political ideology on scientific thought. (On the contrary, liberal democracy is a political ideology that influences scientific thought.)

What's more, skeptics never acknowledge that racial science was defeated by political ideology, and not by science itself. In fact, there was nothing that could have defeated it within the empirical framework of racial scientists. Their racist experiments confirmed their racist hypotheses based on their racist observations. But while the science supported them, politics, in the aftermath of World War 2 and the Holocaust, did not. After 1945, racial science became politically unacceptable in western liberal democracies, and remains so in spite of the various attempts to revive it. It was not disproved by the scientific method; instead, the political ideologies behind racial science were discarded, and replaced by new ones that did not accommodate it.

And when the political consensus shifts, other sciences could go the same way. Whatever science you support, future generations might well regard it to be as wrongheaded as we regard racial science today. We look at reality through a thicket of political metaphors; as these metaphors come and go, different parts of reality become more or less visible; it can become easier to see where we were wrong at earlier times, and harder to see where we are wrong at the present.

What parts of reality do the metaphors of present-day liberal democracy obscure? I'm willing to believe that it affords us a very good view of physical reality: the "hard sciences" have truly prospered under the last few hundred years of political progress. Facts like "the Sun is larger than the Earth" or "the Earth is billions of years old" or "humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor" are unlikely to be rendered obsolete by political progress, certainly not progress of the positive kind.

I'm less willing to believe that liberal democracy affords us a good view of the realities of human experience. I'm as deep in the liberal thicket as anyone else, so I can't say for sure, but I suspect many human sciences as they are practised today are heavily clouded by dubious political assumptions. The most dubious of these is the assumption the liberalism itself is a politically neutral context. This has led to the widespread fetish for reducing complex psychological or social or cultural problems to "quantifiable" data amenable to scientific study. When this data and the conclusions drawn from it are subjected to the scrutiny of free-thinking liberal experts, the results will necessarily be unbiased — or so the assumption goes. That assumption can fuck right off.

Which is not to say that the human sciences are entirely wrong or useless as currently practised: I've no time for the hardcore skeptics who dismiss anything that isn't maths or physics. But skeptics should be careful of cheerleading indiscriminately for all science, any science. Here are just a few examples of where the problems could lie.

Medical science. In criticising homeopathy, chiropractic, faith healing and the like, skeptics tend to overstate the integrity of medical science, which for all its achievements is still rife with difficulties. I can't help but be suspicious of a field in which research is dominated by a handful of particularly large and unscrupulous corporations. But even if Big Pharma doesn't bother you, you should consider, for example, the political assumptions inherent in the sciences of pathology and psychopathology. Symptoms can be empirically there, but the decision to categorise a set of symptoms as an illness is frequently a political call. Over the years, medical science has tended to pathologise those sets of symptoms which interfere with an individual's participation in the profit system (like physical disability), or which confirm existing social prejudices (homosexuality and female hysteria were once considered mental illnesses), or which can be profitably "treated", regardless of whether the symptoms are actually debilitating (a process known as disease-mongering). It is conceivable that to a future society all these decisions might seem as barbaric as the decision to categorise a set of cranial measurements as characteristic of an inferior race.
Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, etc. These fields are largely bogus, and almost everyone associated with them, however tangentially, is a purveyor of poisonous bullshit. The modus operandi of evolutionary psychology is to take some observation about human behaviour (which is typically a statistical artifact of dubious significance), shear it of all cultural, historical, social and political context (other than the scientist's own), and explain it as a necessary consequence of our genetic coding or hunter-gatherer past — typically in a way that endorses the scientist's political and cultural assumptions. In fairness, skeptics like PZ Myers and Ben Goldacre regularly criticise the most obviously loony excesses of evolutionary psychology — but the methods and conclusions of celebrated friend o'skeptics Steven Pinker are just as bogus, and are seldom remarked upon. Perhaps because his politics are generally in line with the skeptic consensus.
Linguistics, Computational Linguistics. These have been dead-end fields for decades, chiefly because their practitioners are anally obsessed with syntax and semantics, the elements of language most easily tackled by scientific methods and of least importance to human communication. I'm convinced (and Wittgenstein agrees with me) that the pragmatics of language — its use in context — is much more significant; but a proper study of pragmatics (and not the quasi-semantic junk you usually see) would require dropping those clumsy logico-empirical tools and admitting the presence and value of non-scientific knowledge. Want to know why we won't be remotely close to a talking AI any time soon? Blame skeptics.
Economics. A lot of the claims of free-market economics, such as the notion of endlessly increasing growth, sounded rather dubious to my skeptic ears, and still do. I've seen skeptical exposes of Ponzi schemes (where people are incited to buy into an idea that only tiny minority at the top have a chance of profiting from) and Scientology's Sea Org (where, in order to afford the cult's most desirable products and treatments, poorer members are forced to slave away at shitty jobs for a meagre salary, or otherwise risk ignominy and destitution), but have yet to see any skeptic make the obvious observation that both of these scams are just capitalism in miniature. Perhaps it's because the capitalist perpetual-motion-machine underpins the political assumptions of skepticism that no skeptic is interested in debunking it. On the whole, they'd much rather debunk fairground sideshows.

WHAT'S SO BAD ABOUT FORTUNE TELLERS?

In their fevered debunkings of astrologers, hypnotists, mystics, spirit mediums and the like, skeptics usually miss the fact that these are simply sources of entertainment for a lot of people, and taken no more seriously than the plot of any random Hollywood blockbuster. For paranormal sideshow acts, hocus-pocus is all part of the spectacle, a fact skeptics are willing to overlook in performers who meet their approval. If anything, the psychobabble that friend o'skeptics Derren Brown uses to sell his mediocre conjuring tricks is more fraudulent than the the mind-power nonsense Uri Geller uses to sell his, if only because Geller has apparently deluded himself more than his audience.

And if you truly believe in any of these frauds, so what? They're mostly just a harmless diversion, a faint ray of amusement to guide us through the long and darkening days. Uri Geller fans, if indeed such people exist, are not hurting anyone. Evil hypnotists are not programming people's minds. And astrologers, except in the paranoid fantasies of skeptics, have virtually no influence in the modern world, for good or ill. Skeptics aside, the only person who believes Ronald Reagan's former astrologer had an impact on US policy in the 80s is Ronald Reagan's former astrologer. (That Reagan employed a court astrologer, by the way, was the least of his crimes. Skepticism would be better directed at the scum he put into positions of actual power.)

There's a lot of phony outrage on skeptic sites about spirit mediums like John Edward, who purport to channel voices "from the other side", and in so doing exploit the grief of the kind of people skeptics laugh at anyway. Edward is obviously slime, but I'm convinced that many of his customers are quite aware of that. They know he's feeding them lies, but they're comforting lies, lies they feel the need to hear at that moment in time. And the cash transaction and the audience setting and the hocus pocus and even Edward's clumsy name-flailing all help legitimise them. Edward's customers are looking for the kind of catharsis he provides; to claim he simply cheats them out of their money isn't the whole truth.

And even at their worst, the hucksters of mumbo-jumbo are only minor-league con artists. Their crimes pale next to those of our financial institutions, and all the others who convince the public to throw their life savings at the stock market, take out mortgages they can't afford, buy junk they don't need with money they don't have, and pay for the fuck-ups of bankers and the greed of speculators. But which skeptic is going to debunk these swindlers?

Cheating people out of their money is one thing, but cheating them out of their lives is quite another. To read some skeptic takes on alternative medicine, you'd think only heart disease rivalled it as a killer. It's true that alternative medicine is not going to cure anyone of serious illness, but it's also generally true that the terminally ill only turn to it when real medicine has given up hope on them. And the value of hope in one's final days is not to be dismissed so easily. The relaxed swagger of a charlatan can be far more comforting than the stress of an overworked hospital registrar, and the charlatan typically receives his patients in more comforting surroundings than a hospital. If I'm going to die anyway, I'll take aromatherapy over chemotherapy every time.

The placebo value of alternative medicine should also not be so easily dismissed, and neither should its emphasis on "wellness" instead of illness. If a homeopath cures your imaginary itch by giving you diluted water, is it really much worse than a GP curing your imaginary itch by prescribing you paracetamol or antibiotics? It might be nonsense from start to finish, but alternative medicine helps millions of people get through the day, with no side effects apart from spouting the occasional line of bullshit. Real medicine is better at curing its recognised ailments, but alternative medicine seems to be better at helping with a chronic unrecognised ailment: daily life under the capitalist system. And so it shall remain until opiates are freely available in pill form.

SCIENCE AS A WARM BLANKET IN THE DARK

Arguably the worst purveyors of bunk are the conspiracy crackpots and pseudohistorians, who really do fill the minds of their followers with some reprehensible opinions. But in picking apart the nonsense they come out with, skeptics miss the most important question, which is why they felt the need to create this nonsense in the first place.

Our political system, education and culture leave a lot of people marginalised, lost, impotent, irrelevant, and made to feel so daily. But these people are not complete idiots. They know something is wrong (though they're not sure what), they know they have been denied knowledge and power (though they're not sure by whom), they know that official life has left them on the scrapheap (though they're not sure why). They look at the reality that has been dealt to them and ask, can this be all there is? Is this as good as it gets? And so, quite justifiably, they invent an alternative. An alternative reality where the people who marginalised them are reduced to easily-identifiable comic-book villians, plotting in underground hideouts. An alternative reality where, more often than not, they and their people are the heroes: the rebels, the fearless investigators, the pioneers of science, the true keepers of knowledge.

And the same is true of almost all bunk, from cryptozoology to Christianity: it's an alternative reality for the disenfranchised, a wonderland where the losers are promised triumph, and The Man holds no sway. The masters of bunk — the bishops and wizards and cult sages — can wield considerable power in objective reality, but their greatest power is always over the downtrodden and the cast aside.

To convert their followers to skepticism, there's no use in preaching, like Dawkins and Phil Plait, about the wonders of objective reality, however eloquently they may do it. Objective reality in a liberal democracy might well be wonderful if you're a media personality or a tenured professor in a leafy college town. But for most people, reality sucks. And if they choose to reject it, I can't blame them. Proselytising skeptics certainly offer them no incentive to change their minds. Skeptics ask society's castaways to leave a reality in which they are good and valued people, and enter one in which they are pieces of warm garbage. Little wonder that so few take up the offer.

But as much as hocus-pocus is a comforter for the disenfranchised, skepticism is a comforter for nerds. Even the privileged need to be reassured in their ways; no one is too old or too grand to be tucked in at night with a conscience soother. For nerds, skepticism is the perfect self-justifying schema: a personal theology that validates their interests, their deeds, their prejudices and their politics. In this sense it's markedly similar to one of skepticism's favourite targets.

That skepticism is a religion is a idea frequently ridiculed and debunked on skeptic forums. As so often in the skeptic world, PZ Myers says it best (and here, by "the New Atheism", he means more or less exactly what I understand by "skepticism"):

"[The 'New Atheism'] is about taking a core set of principles that have proven themselves powerful and useful in the scientific world -- you've probably noticed that many of these uppity atheists are coming out of a scientific background -- and insisting that they also apply to everything else people do. These principles are a reliance on natural causes and demanding explanations in terms of the real world, with a documentary chain of evidence, that anyone can examine. The virtues are critical thinking, flexibility, openness, verification, and evidence. The sins are dogma, faith, tradition, revelation, superstition, and the supernatural. There is no holy writ, and a central idea is that everything must be open to rational, evidence-based criticism -- it's the opposite of fundamentalism."

I've got a lot of time for Myers, but I can't agree with his claim that dogma plays no role in skepticism. The skeptic dogma is, of course, the belief that "a core set of principles that have proven themselves powerful and useful in the scientific world also apply to everything else people do". This belief is as simple and seductive as any of the claims that priests and mullahs and gurus have made over the millennia — and almost as wrong. While science in its material domain has worked miracles, in the social and emotional and political domains its achievements are highly questionable, to say the least.

But if the skeptic dogma sustains you through the day, I can't blame you: most of us here are just trying to get by, with as much comfort and dignity as we can scrape together. And indeed, skepticism was once a faith I found comfort in myself. And as long as it does no harm to them and others, I wouldn't want to disabuse anyone of their faith, or deprive them of their warming blanket. While ultimately I believe the world would be better without religions of any kind, faith can still motivate people for good. Skeptics follow a faith with fundamentally well-meaning principles; not all of them are kneejerk science fans; some of them make a decent and positive contribution to the world through their skepticism. I'm not going to dismiss them personally just because their creed is even more discredited than Christianity.

POSITIVISM IS PAST IT

"Positivism" is not a word you see often in skeptic circles, which is odd, because it's basically the old name for skepticism. The positivist movement in philosophy, which began in the mid-19th century, involved a loose collection of thinkers who to some extent or other believed in the primacy of reason and the scientific method, and set about trying to establish the basis of human knowledge on those terms.

One reason you don't hear about positivism often in skeptic circles is that skeptics have no time for philosophy; many skeptics hate and fear it. It's the skeptic Kryptonite. As a fundamental, rigorous, intellectually respectable but defiantly non-scientific discipline, philosophy makes a lot of skeptics feel threatened. Skeptics are like a naval fortress, with weapons fixed to sea; while they regard themselves invulnerable against fleets of art grads, paranormalists, and true believers, they know that philosophers can strike them freely in their defenceless rear. Little wonder that philosophers bring out their inferiority complex. Some skeptics would love to dismiss philosophy, all philosophy, in the same way they dismiss religion, but they'd be afraid of appearing stupid or attracting ridicule in doing so. If anything, they're afraid philosophers already find them ridiculous.

Which brings us to the other reason positivism isn't mentioned in skeptic circles: it failed, badly, and became discredited, badly, to the extent that "positivism" is almost a swearword on many philosophy campuses, and "positivist" an all-purpose insult. As a philosophical movement, traditional positivism has been dead since the 1950s (though it lives on in the natural and human sciences in all but name). "Postpositivists" like Karl Popper have tried to salvage something from the carcass, but among philosophers, their work is widely seen as reactionary. (By contrast, Dawkins in The Devil's Chaplain disdains them as he would disdain new age crystal merchants.)

But why did positivism fail, and why did it become discredited? Well, I'm no philosopher, but I was for some years unwittingly involved in one of the last holdouts of hardcore, balls-out, unabashed logical positivism in all academia. And having seen some of its contradictions and failures firsthand, I think I have a good idea of the answer. But that's something I want to cover elsewhere at greater detail and from a different angle. Christ knows, this webpage is already long enough.

SKEPTICISM'S UGLY AESTHETICS

Philosophising won't persuade anyone to change their views; we're all epicureans, and we believe whatever gives us the biggest kicks. If one philosophy doesn't do it for you, you can easily find one that does; there are plenty of fish in that sea.

The truth is, I became a skeptic for aesthetic reasons, and the truth is, its aesthetics now repel me. I increasingly find the core skeptical output monotonous and repetitive: there are only so many times you can debunk the same old junk, and I've had it up to here with science fanboyism. And when skeptics talk about subjects outside their domain of expertise, I'm struck by how irrelevant their comments are, and how ugly, shrill and trivial.

Dawkins was a big influence on me in my early 20s, so to repeatedly call him out feels a bit like patricide; but it must be said that this kind of stuff does not cast him or his followers in a good light. In the linked article, Dawkins uses Pat Robertson's comments on the Haiti earthquake as a launching point for yet another rant about religion. It's an unreadable screed, the ravings of an obsessive, in style and content hardly less repulsive than Robertson's original. And it's all too typical of Dawkins' output lately.

It also must be said that on many topics, the best religious people have more of interest and insight to say than the best skeptics. Take this Christian response to the above Dawkins article, for example. Its author Doug Chaplin rightly criticises Dawkins' explanation for the "catastrophe" in Haiti. It was not, as Dawkins says, due to tectonic plates colliding; that was simply the cause of the earthquake. The catastrophe was caused by the earthquake happening in a poverty-stricken, overcrowded nation which has been raped by imperial powers for its entire existence. Scientific facts alone give a completely inadequate picture; but you won't find too many skeptics admitting that. Chaplin also astutely observes that Robertson and Dawkins are two sides of the same coin: both hide behind a shallow empiricism to justify their right-wing politics. When they come to pronounce on world events, they're both equally ignorant and self-serving.

And Dawkins is far from the worst offender in the skeptic community. At least when he sticks to the science, he reliably brings an infectious passion and sense of wonder; I still have a lot of respect for him as a science communicator. A lot of the most prominent skeptics, though, are ugly all the time. Loudmouth libertarians like Penn Jillette, touchy-feely dorks like Randall Monroe, lazy comedy hacks like Robin Ince and Charlie Brooker, neoliberal thugs like Christopher Hitchens and David Aaronovitch, the sniggering philistines at reddit/atheism: no one I respect could hang out with this crowd. I feel a rush of self-loathing just browsing the same web forums.

And so I came to look at skepticism as I'd look at an old embarrassing album by a band whose work I've long since disavowed. Any time I found it taking up space on my mental shelf, I'd think "why is this crap still here?" And now that I've thrown it away, I feel much the better for it.

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