Raistlin

:D
I should rant about my parents' obsession over Chinese medicine. Drives me crazy. Just eat right and exercise like I am doing; gosh.

The problem for skepticism is how counterintuitive it is to us. Our brain learns to recognize patterns which leads to paraedolia. We think we can believe what we see. We also tend to lock in on something we believe and continue to believe it even if the face of overwhelming evidence. Not just "some scientist said", but real, personal evidence. People can't shake their conceptions. Then you've got confirmation bias... etc. Our brain is just "made" to rage against skeptical inquiry.

I know I'm not telling you anything new, but it's even hard for those who are skeptics to be skeptics. It is a skill based on a broad toolset and you have to actively employ it constantly not to fall into the traps of how our brains are wired. So with it difficult even for those who try... how much harder is it for those who couldn't possibly give a sh*t any less?

Socially skeptics appear ostensibly to be curmudgeons who want to debunk and are hideously closed-minded. I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it either. People like to romanticize ideas about paranormal crap or ancient, mystic medicines. They don't want to be told not to and they view it as an attack from people who either are douchey or they turn into conspiracy theorists who assume there's someone trying to cork the bottle for monetary gain.

Yearg: definitely! I was not trying to argue that skepticism is easy or that everyone can readily do it. I know you weren't arguing against me, but my point is that, intellectually, almost everyone recognizes the value of skeptical inquiry. But because most people don't do it (because it is so counter to our desires), they instead simply pay it lip-service while just sticking to their whims.

And yeah, supernatural stuff is cool. When I was a kid I really wanted to believe ghosts were real, just because ghosts and paranormal stuff are so damn cool (this was when I was like 8-12, when I was already skeptical about god and religion, but I was ok with that as they were much more boring).

I'm skeptical that most people recognize the value of skeptical inquiry. I'll have to think on that. I think you'd have to define it more for me. Anti-vacc people are skeptical in sense (a conspiratorial one). They have a type of skepticism that leads them to not believe any evidence as they are skeptical of anything that isn't their preconception.

In reality, they are the type of "skeptics" that the major of people think actually skeptics are. They blindly follow a dogma and question everything else. People would view someone like me as being dogmatically against eastern medicine or religious belief, but the reality is that I just follow the evidence.

I've been embarrassingly unskeptical pretty much my entire life. I was a deep believer in various bits of the paranormal even years after I'd lost my faith. I was skeptical in non-religious areas, but I'd not learned to apply my skepticism to everything. It's too easy to be selective and even skeptics usually have a pet non-scientific thing they get attached to.

I've grown much more skeptical and independent in the last few years. Pretty much everything throws red flags to me. I love Bullsh*t! as a skeptical show, but man does it ever send off alarm bells not only due to their libertarian bias, but just the way they will sometimes appeal to emotion (low tactic) or other logically fallacious things where they are playing by the same (crappy) rules of the opposing side. Sometimes I personally feel like they've weakened their argument by resorting to such methods, but realistically they are being smart to appeal to an audience that normally wouldn't listen to a skeptical message with their nudity, vulgarity and humor.

I feel confident only when I'm seeing red flags in things that I agree with. Sure a lot of paranormal and pseudoscientific stuff makes me sick, but I feel reassured with myself personally that even listening to detractors (SGU and the like) I feel personal red flags popping up. I think that's the hardest thing for skeptics... to keep it turned on when they are hearing what they want to hear.

Did you know that tea partiers sometimes use that quote to refer to atheism? Being able to look past having deities is a mind too-open 8)

Too open? I would think it would be considered too closed. But that just shows how ass-backwards some theists view logic: whatever they believe is obviously the default, and anything else is what requires an additional step.