Are you Skeptic A or Skeptic B?

4^th October 2021

When talking with people about skepticism, I’ve often used a convenient classification to separate what I see as two main camps of skeptics. In my oversimplified model there are a) those who are skeptical because they consider themselves to have read enough to be experts themselves on a wide range of topics, and b) those who defer to people who are the experts on any given topic - people who have relevant qualifications, decades of experience, and the respect of their peers and the wider academic community.

I’d like to think of myself as being a member of the latter group. Generally when I argue a skeptical position, I will do my best to find out what the experts are saying, and what if any consensus there is, and I’ll argue that as my position. And, of course, if there is no consensus, I will try my best to either argue that or just choose to not have an opinion. After all, I don’t need to pick a side on the topic of whether it will ever be possible to create a conscious Artificial Intelligence. And I have no horse in the race when it comes to the validity of the linear no-threshold model.

When I explain this type of skepticism to others, the skepticism where someone accepts the consensus of experts - I usually add a disclaimer that I’m comfortable with the idea of deferring to the experts, except when there’s an obvious issue with them as a group. This doesn’t mean that I can just write off a consensus I don’t like or don’t agree with, but it does mean that I won’t just parrot the mainstream view on every topic.

Obviously there’s a whole raft of topics where the “experts” in the field appear to be motivated by something other than an honest search for the truth. Pretty much every branch of alternative medicine would fall into this category, for example. I’m comfortable saying that we should not trust the conclusions of “scholars” of homeopathy, acupuncture or chiropractic. For alternative therapies there’s usually not a lot of good quality evidence out there - instead, there’s a surplus of bad quality papers describing poorly designed studies that don’t pass muster. Reading meta studies and systematic reviews for these therapies, it’s fairly normal to read how researchers found maybe one hundred relevant papers on a particular therapy, and out of those only four were of a high enough quality to be included. And, of course, these papers are invariably the ones that have much less in the way of positive conclusions than the ones not chosen for inclusion. When it comes to alternative medicine, the more rigorous the paper, the less positive the evidence.

There are other topics such as facilitated communication, hypnotic regression, Myers-Briggs personality profiling and polygraphs where the prevailing opinion amongst “experts” in the field seems to be at odds with the best quality evidence we have. But when I want to give people a good example of a discipline where there’s good reason not to trust the experts, I usually turn to Biblical Archaeology - a field where there are a lot of people with vested interests, and where many churches are willing to pay good money in return for evidence that their holy book is the real deal. This particular subject is the topic of our first article for today’s newsletter, courtesy of Alison Campbell (who shared details of this story on Facebook recently).