Scientific Skepticism

There is a must-read article by John Horgan over at Scientific American: "Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More". This editorial is an easy and important read.

Horgan begins:

I’m a science journalist. I don’t celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.

So I’m a skeptic, but with a small S, not capital S. I don’t belong to skeptical societies. I don’t hang out with people who self-identify as capital-S Skeptics. Or Atheists. Or Rationalists.

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber. 

...“The Science Delusion” is common among Capital-S Skeptics. You don’t apply your skepticism equally. You are extremely critical of belief in God, ghosts, heaven, ESP, astrology, homeopathy and Bigfoot. You also attack disbelief in global warming, vaccines and genetically modified food.

These beliefs and disbeliefs deserve criticism, but they are what I call “soft targets.” That’s because, for the most part, you’re bashing people outside your tribe, who ignore you. You end up preaching to the converted.

Meanwhile, you neglect what I call hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions. In the rest of this talk, I’ll give you examples of hard targets from physics, medicine and biology. I’ll wrap up with a rant about war, the hardest target of all.

While I disagree with Horgan on man-made global warming, which I believe deserves to be attacked as sheer nonsense, the rest of his editorial deserves to be read. Especially the part about war:

But war is a really hard target. Most people—most of you, probably--dismiss world peace as a pipe dream. Perhaps you believe the deep-roots theory. If war is ancient and innate, it must also be inevitable, right?

You might also think that religious fanaticism—and especially Muslim fanaticism--is the greatest threat to peace. That’s the claim of religion-bashers like Dawkins, Krauss, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and the late, great warmonger Christopher Hitchens.

The United States, I submit, is the greatest threat to peace. Since 9/11, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have killed 370,000 people. That includes more than 210,000 civilians, many of them children. These are conservative estimates.

Far from solving the problem of Muslim militancy, U.S. actions have made it worse. ISIS is a reaction to the anti-Muslim violence of the U.S. and its allies.

The U.S. spends almost as much on what we disingenuously call defense as all other nations combined, and we are the leading innovator in and peddler of weapons. Barack Obama, who pledged to rid the world of nuclear weapons, has approved a $1 trillion plan to modernize our arsenal.  

How do you justify killing 210,000 civilians in the name of peace, when the deaths of Americans, or even allies to America, doesn't even remotely approach these numbers? If you want to know the source of extremist Muslims, look in the mirror America.