The sceptical piano tuner

Ending on a positive note (no pun intended) this week, NZ Skeptics committee member Brad MacClure was featured in an article on Stuff about piano tuning, and skepticism. There's a nice write-up and associated video.

See, aside from music, Brad MacClure's a diligent member of NZ Skeptics, a group that champions the disciplines of scientific method, is as-yet-unconvinced by claims of the paranormal. Its members have been has been (sic) nicely characterised as seeing themselves as watchdogs at the crossroads between science and consumer protection.

And this week, Brad's written a little about himself as to why he's a skeptic. I'll let Brad finish off the newsletter...

Brad's view on things

Why am I a skeptic?

I watched a friend sum it up once while talking to an uninitiated person asking this same question. He said, “I don't want to be wrong one second longer than I have to be about anything”.

It's not that skeptics are always right, nor that a skeptic's desire is to be a ‘know it all' (maybe this is sometimes the motivation). We are all probably wrong about a lot of things at any given moment. The difference to me is that being a skeptic means I want to know if I'm wrong about anything, and to be open to change. To be self aware, and aware of the flaws in my own cognitive processing that might cause me to believe silly nonsense. To be aware of flaws, biases, or motivations, that might make me resistant to changing my ideas. To learn to embrace change, to welcome it, as long as good evidence and rationale has brought it.

When I discovered the skeptical community I realised that through it I have the best chance of learning if any of the things that I believe in are true or false. That's not because skeptics have the monopoly on truth, of course. Rather it's because skepticism teaches us why we can trust science and the scientific method as our best hope of learning what is true. Also to recognise the things our brain does to keep us comfortable and therefore resistant to that truth.

I'm associated with the skeptical community because I want to stay honest with myself. I want to believe things that are true, I want to reject things that are false. I haven't done the years of study required to properly interpret esoteric academic studies, so I've learned to trust those who have done that work. I want to live my best life, what's left of it, making a difference with things that work - as I say, rejecting things that don't work.

If there's a better community for this I haven't found it yet.