• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• How about open or open thinkers? As in open to new ideas.

• Opponents will cause any chosen name to become a negative.

• Words such as gay and big bang were coined by opponents and embraced by advocates.

TABLE 1.5 Focus Group Rankings of Alternative Names for “Brights”

What Is in a Name?

For the most part I avoid labels altogether and simply prefer to say what it is that I believe or do not believe. However, at some point labels are unavoidable (most likely due to the fact that the brain is wired to pigeonhole objects into linguistic categories), and thus one is forced to use identity language. Whether the bright meme succeeds or not, I commend Paul and Mynga for their courage and conviction and if, in a decade or two, the brights label has the same level of social acceptance as the gays label, we will all be better off for it. What is in a name? A lot. Although I like the top-down strategy of attempting to impose some order on this linguistic chaos, in the end I don’t think it can be done by fiat. Instead, I suspect that a type of Darwinian selection will drive the most natural name into general acceptance. Or perhaps diverse linguistic species will peacefully coexist within their own niches.

Until then, since the name of the magazine I cofounded is Skeptic, and my monthly column in Scientific American is entitled “Skeptic,” I shall continue to call myself a skeptic, from the Greek skeptikos, or “thoughtful.” Etymologically, in fact, its Latin derivative is scepticus, for “inquiring” or “reflective.” Further variations in the ancient Greek include “watchman” and “mark to aim at.” Hence, skepticism is thoughtful and reflective inquiry. Skeptics are the watchmen of reasoning errors, aiming to expose bad ideas.

Perhaps the closest fit for skeptic is “a seeker after truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite convictions.” Skepticism is not “seek and ye shall find”—a classic case of what is called the confirmation bias in cognitive psychology—but “seek and keep an open mind.” What does it mean to have an open mind? It is to find the essential balance between orthodoxy and heresy, between a total commitment to the status quo and the blind pursuit of new ideas, between being open-minded enough to accept radical new ideas and being so open-minded that your brains fall out. The virtue of skepticism is in finding that balance. Skeptic is a virtuous word.

3

Heresies of Science

Why You Should Be Skeptical of What

You Always Thought Was True

HUMAN BEINGS ARE PATTERN-SEEKING, storytelling animals. For tens of thousands of years we have been telling stories about the meaningful patterns we find in our world and in our lives, and for the last five thousand years we have been writing down our stories. About four centuries ago, however, something big happened that profoundly changed the process of pattern-seeking and storytelling. That something was science. For the first time in human history there arose a set of methods by which it could be determined if a pattern is real and if a story is true. Instead of just retelling stories over and over, it was now possible to refine the story to more closely match reality. Consider the following remarkable scientific story.

On October 6, 1923, the universe suddenly and without warning exploded, expanding in size from thousands to millions of light-years across. The universe’s actual big bang expansion happened billions of years ago, of course, but this is the day that the astronomer Edwin Hubble first realized that the fuzzy patches he was seeing in his telescope atop Mount Wilson in southern California were not “nebulae” within the Milky Way galaxy but were, in fact, separate galaxies, and that the universe is bigger than anyone imagined . . . a lot bigger. We are not merely a grain of sand among a hundred billion grains on a single beach; there are, in fact, hundreds of billions of beaches, each one of which contains hundreds of billions of grains. For championing a heresy that turned out right, Hubble had the