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How To Teach a Healthy Dose of Skepticism?
c0d3h4x0r writes "It's no accident that 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' is one of the most common tags applied by this community to stories about proposed ideas or laws. The ability to spot and predict faults is a big part of what makes a great engineer. It starts with having a healthy skepticism about the world, which leads to actual critical thinking. Many books and courses teach critical thinking skills, but what is the best way to encourage and teach someone to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism? Is it even a teachable skill, or is it just an innate part of the geek personality?"
But it won't be taught.
The very simple reason is that people who think are harder to govern than people who don't. What is wanted is people who can do their job, preferably well, but don't have any interests outside of it.
The reason why we get laws proposed that have glaring flaws is that those flaws are often what is wanted. The great majority of people does either not care or swallows the snakeoil and the promise of safety, simply because they were never taught to contemplate "what could possibly go wrong".
It's pretty much how Homer put it. We elect politicians so we don't have to think. Unfortunately, he's not alone with this point of view.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reminds me of a quote: Judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgment.
I would say that skepticism isn't so much symptomatic of the geek personality as causative thereof: the most prominent "geek" trait that I can think of - unwillingness to embrace untested or illogical ideas paired with a willingness to wholeheartedly embrace logical or testable ideas - seems to be wholly dependent on a well-balanced sense of skepticism.
All of the things that I typically associate with geeks versus non-geeks differ most dramatically in the presence or absence of internal consistency and predictability, a trait that skeptics seek in anything they examine before they are willing to accept it.
True dat. The sooner you can look beyond your own "ego" and start looking at the world objectively, the better. Another couple of books I would recommend are the Tao Te Ching and of course Socrates. Also, a well rounded course of study in Maths, Theology/Mythology/Folklore (you don't have to believe but it puts the world's people in a more realistic perspective), Literature, The Arts, and of course Science and especially Computing, etc...
A better question might be: How can one learn a sense of 'healthy' skepticism without going overboard and becoming outright cynical?
It's the difference between "let's be careful before we dive into something new & shiny" and "Get off my lawn!"
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Holy sheet! Do you have *ANY* friends??? Get over yourself, kid.
"Skepticism is just an offshoot of experience and the wisdom "
No it's not, it's something you ahve to train your mind for. You need techniques that you apply to everything, including..or even especially, your acred cows.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In my experience, being a capital-S "Skeptic" about one's pet dislikes (people have trotted out religion and global warming already, but not a single complaint about Microsoft yet!?!) isn't nearly as well-correlated with objectivity and critical thinking about anything else as the "Skeptics" would like to think.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This is true. I'm highly skeptical because my parents are very skeptical. Unfortunately, I think their mindset came from experience rather than training.
Of course this makes me a very negative and paranoid person. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate something correctly if you start looking at all the ways it can go wrong. And most people don't like it when your response to everything is "yeah, but *actually*..."--I've gotten the reputation for being a big kill-joy.
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing.
In my experience there are two forms of skepticism-- true skepticism, which is healthy and sadly lacking in most people, and what I call "pseudo-skepticism" which is in great abundance. Pseudo-skepticism goes right along with pseudo-science and as is often used as a foundation for a belief system. Example: the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are rabidly skeptical of anything presented by the government or mainstream media (which is good, to a degree), but are completely accepting of the most crackpot theories imaginable. (The more crazy the idea, the better IMHO). They do this while covering their ears and singing LA-LA-LA anytime any one tries to debunk their theories with science or counter-evidence. Both sides of the global warming debate contain pseudo-skeptics as well, and unfortunately, they are the ones making the most noise.
A true skeptic is skeptical of both points of view, and does the critical thinking necessary to form his/her own opinion. This is harder to teach since it comes from experience, which is harder to come by in this sheltered world of ours.
It's not about teaching skepticism and critical thinking. It's about not squashing those natural talents by teaching kids about the empty power of magical thinking, house-of-cards hollow self esteem disconnected from actual achievement, and the endless wallowing in platitudes about "having faith" and "just believe, and you can do anything!" etc. The cultural institutions that rely on such stuff are always at odds with critical thinking. Kids are natural scientists - they understand the need to test causality, and are always curious. It's a shame that so many people completely misunderstand the nature of ethics, and seem to think that mysticism (the enemy of critical thinking) is required in order to derive a sound moral framework.
Parents are too quick to pass the baton to religion, new-age hokum, or just feel-good Oprah-ness in order to make their kids feel good about the world. They just want things to be easy, and don't have the personal fortitude to usher their kids through the slightly challenging phase of learning to apply their natural reasoning skills to topics that are somewhat less immediately tangible than what happens when you touch something hot. Issues like "what happens when one state taxes high tech entrepeneurs more than the the state next door" or "what happens when you let a gene pool get too shallow" or "what happens when you use GOTO statements in your code because it lets you get to lunch earlier that day" aren't any different than "what happens when you dump a hot oatmeal bowl in your lap," but require a little more discipline to digest.
The platform for rational thought is already there. You have to kill it, though, or slowly suffocate it throughout child development, in order to make it something that it feels like work to wake it back up later. Just keep it alive in the first place, and we wouldn't have such a mixed bag cultural messes to deal with. We wouldn't be seeing the strange, sad dance of a politician twisting and turning while explaining why he's suddenly between churches while running for president... since he wouldn't have been glued to a crazy church in the first place. Think how much less noise and distraction we'd have without all that nonsense.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
In general, teach your children to think. Give them tools they can use later in life.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
One useful byproduct of a long series of failures is that it produces a well-developed sense of cynicism and sarcasm, which are essential skills required for posting snarky (yet insightful - insightful, dammit!) remarks on Slashdot.
In my experience skepticism is the one quality that most agitates employers, sad to say.
I notice your examples are all things you bought. It seems to me that if you had innate skepticism, you would doubt that an item does what you want it to do, and so you would test it before you purchased it. Skepticism is useless if you don't make use of it, and realizing something is wrong once it's too late isn't a skill.
Which is probably one of the reasons no one wants to teach kids a healthy dose of skepticism--it's sort of depressing. This is a problem a lot of "skeptics" have, and I believe it comes from having good analytical skills but not having the judgment to know that they are a tool to be applied shared when appropriate, and not all the time. You have to remember that not everything is an objective matter - sometimes subjectivity is called for, and in those cases, you need to be able to express yourself in those terms, as well. In social situations, it's rarely appropriate to dump negativity on something a peer presents positively.
I'm certainly a skeptic in the sense described in this story, but skepticism is a tool, not my identity.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I think there's even a way to delineate along that line. There are skeptics, cynics, and pessimists. The lines between skeptics and cynics are a bit fuzzy, and between cynics and pessimists as well. Yet it's easy to tell the difference between a skeptic and a pessimist.
In brief, people can think "This may not work", "This probably won't work", or "This will never work" before they have any evidence.
The skeptic will go with the evidence more readily. The cynic will be biased towards the negative, but can be convinced by the evidence. The pessimist will be surprised at success even when success should have been expected.
Of course, there are optimists to the other side of skeptics on that list. They'll favor success until the evidence proves them wrong, but will favor success the next time.
Then there are "true believers" on either end who either will be convinced of failure or convinced of success even after the outcome is clear to everyone else. They'll twist the evidence and the logic to their conclusion before they allow their conclusion to change with the evidence and logic.
One thing that needs to be taught is that being skeptical is not the same as an argument. It's fine to have a hunch that an idea is bad, wrong, or won't work, but it's only a starting point. Too many people believe that their work ends at being skeptical. Such "skeptics" are among the most closed minded people in society.
Proverbs 21:19
My advice is to lie. A lot. Yes, I'm serious.
The only way to teach others to be skeptical is to give reasons for skepticism. With middle school students (experience teaching algebra/pre-algebra), I would start off easy:
Me: What's the square root of ?
Students: *Silence*
Me: Thought so. The answer is "flower".
Students: *laughter*
Me: What? Something wrong?
Student: Ya, "flower" is not a number.
Me: And?
Student: A square root needs to be a number.
Me: Does it?
Student: YA! Duhhh!
Me: Prove it. Show me how multiplying two flowers doesn't make .
It's humorous, but I threw silly things like that in all the time. Answers the students knew couldn't be right. That gave them the courage to call me out when they thought I was wrong. I then required more of them:
Me: is the correct answer to Students: How do you know?
Me: I just know. I'm the teacher.
Students: Ya, but you lie sometimes.
Me: I do. So what do you do when you think I'm lying?
Student: We show you why we think you're lying. Me: So show me.
Student: *walks up to the board and does the math*
In this situation, it doesn't matter whether or not the student is right in her/his distrust, but that s/he was willing to check my work.
This is a tactic I use to teach and ingrain skepticism in every class I've ever taught.
That's one but certainly not the only way. My mom is a whackadoodle that believes in aliens, invisible sky fairies, reincarnation, and all manner of crap. Getting emails from her is like a study of snopes.com. Dad's a nut too, but wasn't present from my upbringing.
;)
I'm an atheist skeptic who would would be incredulous even if I had the abduction complete with anal probe insertion. But then I didn't pick up her smoking habit either.
Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates that you can take skepticism too far. Skepticism calls for the questioning of a hypothesis based on doubts about evidence supporting that hypothesis and on faith in counter-evidence. If the hypothesis is supported by little data, or if the counter-evidence is as great as the supporting data, it is reasonable to doubt the hypothesis.
In the case of climate change, previous finding of anthropogenic global warming are continually reinforced by new findings while alternative explanations are steadily debunked by new findings.
If you listen to Lomborg's interviews, you'll notice him dodging direct questions about whether the environment is getting worse, and redirecting the discussion to hypotheses that the environmental changes can have a positive effect and that humans can adapt to take advantage of these changes. He puts a real positive spin on the possibility of change.
The /. community has a technical term for this: FUD! (or perhaps, reverse-FUD - putting a positive spin on a negative thing).
Start with analyzing the logical faults in television commercials and magazine ads, it is a nice safe arena for critique that is widely known. Then move on to political statements. I think that the majority of people need to be more critical about "emotional" arguments that defy or bend logic, usually by implication or ommission than faults of logically presented arguments.
I also read that book back in high school, and it definitely put me on the path towards science (and later atheism).
Another good recent read was "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens. He discusses briefly the idea that human credulity is a biological adaptation to help us benefit from the placebo effect. Credulous individuals are religious, superstitious and generally happier and healthier than us miserable skeptics.
Jeremy
It's a mantra in the electronics industry: 'If you want to succeed, increase your failure rate' - 'Just Do It' - 'It's not that you failed, it's what you learned from that failure'.
I claim horseshit. Those mantras are only repeated by people who have managed to succeed after relatively small failures. Failure marks you in a puritan society. Failure marks you like a tattoo. Failure burns away all your trust in yourself and your energy.
Learn or burn. Read or bleed. Let others fail and develop the skills to actually learn from their failures , not yours. Let them suffer.
* Don't buy Yahoo! stock at $160 a share at the height of market bubble.
* Don't buy a 3-room clapboard box house for $500000 at the height of a housing bubble.
* When you boss tells you that 'a positive mental attitude and vitamin D will cure cancer, along with most other ailments' and then explains that this is why you aren't going to get health insurance, take the vitamin pill and look for another job.
* When the old man at the VFW tells you 'it's your duty' to go to Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, salute him, and find some other old men to hang with who don't still wake up with 30-year-old nightmares of senseless slaughter.
* When someone says 'bet ya can't do...' on a skateboard, rub your tongue over your front teeth. Because that might be the last time that you feel them if you try it and don't quite pull it off.
* When you get stopped by the police and they pull a marijuana cigarette out of your (or their) pocket and then suggest a little trip to the ATM, pay them off and move. You can't fight it in court without paying many, many thousands in legal fees. And you'll end up with a chickenshit pot conviction like 25 million other Americans who find themselves being the only people left subject to legal discrimination and bigotry.
* Last but not least in this series, actually believe what the black people tell you about their experiences with the authorities and institutions that you have come to know and trust.
Above all, Don't Fail!
The fact that someone has put together instructions on how to fail tells us that people nowadays are more apt to think than to do. In general, I agree that thinking things through is good, but for trivial things, people should just act. What this has to do with skepticism, I don't know, but analysis paralysis just bugs me (I do it a lot) and is a big reason why big orgs can't get anything done.
One of the most difficult things for people to recognize is the difference between blind faith and trust.
When a painter puts up a sign with 'wet paint' my experience tells me that I can probably trust it and choose not to test his claim.
I am a skeptic, I don't have blind faith. (I probably have some hidden pieces of superstition left, but have been very thoroughly getting rid of them)
But it is simply not practical to be skeptical about everything. At some point I need to be able to trust someone else....
e.g. when going to a doctor I need to be able to trust his knowledge of the human body. Unfortunately we allow some idiots to call themselves 'doctor' while selling quackery like homeopathy.
The hardest part is not just being a skeptic, but knowing where you can let your guard down and trust someone else's skepticism.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
An overdose of skepticism is obnoxious.
In its best form, skepticism is a matter of caution--wanting to have good grounds for what you accept as true, and maintaining your willingness to re-examine your previously-accepted beliefs.
All too often, skepticism degenerates into simple invincible disbelief. (Or, in a softer form, active disinclination to believe.)
That form of "hard" skepticism is obnoxious in its hypocrisy. You wind up with people whose beliefs (as in, their disbeliefs) are formed irrationally, without respect to reason or evidence--but who smugly view themselves as "rational skeptics".
"Fools you are who say you like to learn from your mistakes. I prefer to learn from the mistakes of others, and avoid the cost of my own".
-Otto von Bismarck
=Smidge=
This book did instill an advanced "see it to believe it" mentality on me and I thank Sagan for that.
I haven't read the book, so I can't really comment on it, but one must be careful with such a "see it to believe it" mentality. It can force people to restrict their thinking to "inside the box". This is why I say skepticism is just a starting point. Though we may be skeptical, we must not shut down, but continue to be open-minded, and allow for thinking outside the box. Because sometimes there really is a dragon in the garage.
Proverbs 21:19
In the absence of any proof of a god and with 100% certainty that intelligent life developed once, it is only guessing that among the billions of galaxies it could have happened at least one more time. If I have to set a bet, I know where I'd put my money.
Bert
Since you brought up religion ... I saw a quote in todays' paper asking about whether people believe in bad luck on Friday the 13th (Today is Friday the 13th, btw). One wman said "Oh no, I have God watching over me, I don't have to worry. I don't believe in superstitions."
My irony meter pegged. Of course, critical thinking and logic are anathema to anyone who believes in god.
Kevin Smith on Prince
He doesn't accept that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life, he just suggests that it is perfectly plausible.
All things considered, we don't have any evidence for the Christian or Jewish or Muslim god, or the Hindu/Buddhist gods, or any supernatural events. Well, I should say, the only "evidence" we have is testimony, which is often thousands of years old, and distorted etc. (Hume wrote about whether one should believe in "miracles" or not. No you shouldn't, because it is much more likely that you were mistaken, if you "saw" it yourself, or mislead (intentionally or otherwise), otherwise.)
However, it is within our understanding of the way the universe works that there might be life outside of this solar system. Yes, we don't have any evidence for it, and that is why Sagan (and myself) don't claim that it exists. Merely that it might exist, and that we hold our judgment until further, and sufficient, evidence is presented.
Do you have any other examples of Sagan (or any other skeptic of a similar bent) believing in irrationalities or without evidence?
I wank in the shower.
I have had some success teaching my kids skepticism just by virtue of my parenting strategy. I don't ever really expect them to accept "Because I said so" I think that really hinders a person to be taught from a young age that if someone of authority says it, than it must be true.
Instead I approach every disagreement as an opportunity for a proof. "Why do I have to eat my broccli?" "Well I guess you don't, but it is pretty hard to find iron that is more easily digestable. You need iron levels in your blood to be high enough so it can process oxygen more efficiently or you will find yourself lacking energy, being tired, and even potentially becoming pale and sick. There are other ways to get the vitamins you need, but to me Broccli is worth it because it is actually pretty good, and convenient because it is right her on the table."
Sure he may still not eat the broccli, but at least I tried to appeal to his logical side and gave him a reasonable and easy to understand stance. Always honoring his questions, and answering with real logic and real science means that whenever someone CAN'T answer with something real, he will imediatly have red flags.
While "Because I said so" would probably make a lot of kids get their nutrition today, my approach will hopefully inspire him to THINK about his nutrition, and question risk/reward and give hom practice evaluating trade-offs.
So, in the USA, are science and religion still fighting? Why not let people have their beliefs?
And how many people that believe in the scientific method expose themselves to the theater of science business?
A former professional scientist once told me, that scepticism is so big that it's difficult to introduce new ideas.
But when it's difficult to introduce new ideas, you have basically the same thing that stifled progress in the Dark Ages: Stagnation. Some scientists fear so much for their reputation that they barely dare to publish new ideas.
Having a healthy dose of scepticism is good, but if it's overdone, it doesn't help either.
Why amusing? It's a perfectly logical, rational conclusion based on the available evidence. No one has ever provided any evidence or test to show that there is a supreme, omnipotent being watching over us. Nor has anyone ever provided any evidence to indicate how such a being could come into existence in the first place. The best anyone has ever offered is simply, "God/Vishnu/Chutulu/whatever has always existed." That is no evidence.
On the other hand, we have absolute, concrete evidence for what it takes for life to form. Granted, we have only a single data point, our planet, but using that as our reference, we can now search the cosmos for other bodies which exhibit similar conditions and explore them for signs of life, intelligent or otherwise. We can of course also listen for signs of intelligent life through radio waves or other sources. In other words, we are looking for evidence of other beings because we know that at least in one case, our planet, such beings exist and if intelligent life exists on this ball of rock, then there is a probability that life exists somewhere else under similar conditions.
This is where skepticism comes into play. If someone says "X product can do Y job better, and more cheaply, than a name brand product", they have to prove it. Until such time, people should remain skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. Why do you think the folks who produce supplements are so adamant about not having to prove the claims they make? They know that if subjected to scientific testing, their products would be shown not to do what the manufacturer claims.
The same thing occurs with Sagan's (and others) stances on religion and why ID is not a scientific principle. Those concepts do not stand up to scientific rigor. If you want to believe that there is a God (or Gods), then by all means, go ahead. But don't equate a belief in something for which there is zero evidence to support said belief with an idea for which evidence already exists.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
>Scientists are the worst examples of group-think.
Science is in a weird position with respect to belief and questioning: it advances precisely because lots of people do research, that leads to wide-ranging theories, that other people use, so it is iterative and you necessarily rely on other people's work when you do yours. But at the same time, good science requires openness to change, that you be willing at any time to discard all the previous work. It requires filtering, so you can tell which pieces of evidence are wrong, and which pieces indicate that your framework of reasoning is wrong.
So, a good scientist should be exactly the opposite of the sort of person that upsets you, but that's exactly what establishes that person as a good scientist. Most of the time, people aren't able to make these sorts of visionary leaps.
I don't think it's scientists you're upset about -- I think it's human cognitive processes, and it's just more obvious in science because falsifiability is much more cut-and-dried than it is in many other fields.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
A child saying "those look like they could fit together" is something any scientist would, and should, dismiss as an actual argument for the existence of tectonic plates.
When it turned out there was a massive volcanic conveyor belt discovered at the bottom of the ocean in between the two continents, with magnetic stripes from different periods of north/south flips, and an ever growing record of similar fossils on different parts of the world with more accurate dating techniques, etc, etc, and now there's something worth considering.
A scientist was right to doubt the existence of tectonic plates before based on your observation, and is right to believe in them now. The idea that people who change their mind should be shamed goes against the whole idea of science..
Also I don't know how a "science teacher", who has to teach you a fixed curriculum which you get tested on, counts as a scientist. Is this childhood experience what you're judging all scientists by?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
while it is important to foster a healthy skepticism (for obvious reasons),
the other half of this is that without a natural wonder and reverence,
much knowledge of the world may never be revealed to the pure skeptic.
"Reverence awakens... a sympathetic power through which we attract
qualities... around us, which would otherwise remain concealed" (HTKHW)
Given 1: I believe in God.
Given 2: I am an excellent computer engineer, with dual degrees in computer engineering and computer science.
Given 3: Earning dual degrees in computer engineering and computer science and working as a computer engineer require strong critical thinking and logical skills. They also require having taken classes in logic and critical thinking.
Step 1: Earning computer science and computer engineering degrees and working in the computer engineering field require logical and critical thinking skills (Given 3), and I work in this field and have those degrees (Given 2). Therefore, it follows that I have logical and critical thinking skills.
Step 2: I have logical and critical thinking skills (Step 1), and I believe in God (Given 1). Therefore, there exist some people who believe in God and have critical thinking and logical skills.
Conclusion: I have disproved your statement that "critical thinking and logic are anathema to anyone who believes in god" by counterexample. QED.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I am speaking metaphorically, of course. What I have in mind is someone like Newton, who could perceive of gravity, and had to basically invent the mathematics (calculus) to prove it. Gravity was Newton's "dragon in the garage". Something he could "see", but others couldn't.
Proverbs 21:19
I've told the religious folks I know that I have a simple, easily-fulfilled condition to consider joining their religion. "God" (or whatever), needs to come down and have a cup of coffee with me. I'll even pay, if said higher-being is a cheapskate. He/She/It performs some action that proves it is what He/She/It says it is, and then we have a conversation about why my *personal* worship is required. Basically a friendly job interview for the position of "supreme being so far as I'm concerned".
;P
I figure for an omnipotent, omnipresent being, this is a fairly trivial task.
So far, none have taken me up on the offer, so I remain religion-neutral
Huh? Did you even read your own link? From the second result (the first led me to a 404):
Skepticism: questioning the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual; a doubting attitude; even doubting the possibility of real knowledge of any kind.Where does it suggest innately resisting things because they are new?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The fact is that it's perfectly correct to use the Earth as your reference point, so saying that the Earth is still and the Sun moves around it is perfectly correct. Obviously, it's a lot more practical (when dealing with the solar system) to use Sol as the reference point, but "less practical" doesn't mean "wrong".
What is wrong is to say that the other planets orbit the Earth (unless your definition of "orbit" covers some very weird relative trajectories). And that was the fundamental flaw in the geocentric theory (not the relationship between the Earth and Sun, which is compatible in both models). I'm always amazed by how many people (teachers included) fail to understand that.
whatcouldpossiblygowrong sometimes seems to be a knee jerk reaction when the story involves food or anything biological, or significantly large. For the sake of fairness, skepticism is asking far more than that one question.
Case in point: Nuclear Power. We know what could go wrong. Now, what is the probability, and the expected damage? Can we know by looking at our existing safety records, and those of more recent factories built in other countries? Which would result in more deaths; nuclear power, or coal power, once you take into account things such as possible meltdowns, nuclear waste, global warming, coal-mine collapses, etc...
Now, a true skeptic may be asking "what about solar/wind/water". My point is, that you have to keep asking questions, and do not confuse cynicism or denial for skepticism.
The problem is that stupidity isn't punishable by death any more. It's most often punishable by winning a nifty lawsuit and more stupid and costly government regulations to prevent evolutionary mistakes from killing themselves out of stupidity.
Basically, in the long run, stupidity is causing the death of our civilization.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
When people are mocked for their mistaken beliefs, they will make sure to follow the groupthink and not step out of line. Critical thinking requires you to be able to entertain wild and outlandish thoughts long enough to think about them, and perhaps even talk with someone else about them. If doing this will get you punished, you have created an incentive against questioning what you're being told.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Learning to accept that You Can Be Wrong is only the easiest step, and the one most easily forgotten.
Here's a simple mathematical test:
Do you believe that addition is commutative? i.e., that 1+2 = 2+1? For any values of 2 and 1? How about (-2) + 1 = 1 + (-2)?
In any circumstances? ALWAYS????
I used to.
And then I was working my way through (no, I have not yet completed it, and I probably need to begin anew at page 1) John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession -- a historical treatment of Riemann's Hypothesis that attempts to educate the non-professional mathematician reader so that they can at least kinda/sorta understand the problem. And then on pages 149-150, he introduces the Gentle Reader to "conditionally convergent" infinite series, which resolve into different results depending on the order the terms are summed! Yes, there have to be some subtractions mixed in with the additions in the infinite series, but I tend to treat subtraction as a flavor of addition (clearly an error, but I still don't see how) and it made me put down the book and walk around and ponder the significance of what I had read (and I found myself returning to those pages repeatedly instead of moving steadily forward).
While I can accept that I was wrong, I still don't understand WHY (and am almost certainly never going to). And if I can be wrong about something as apparently simple as addition -- even when dealing with the realm of the infinite (which is almost certainly wherein the difficulties lie) -- I can be wrong about pretty much anything. And so can You.
When we move from understanding simple mathematical concepts like addition/subtraction to dealing with a Reality that we can grasp only weakly, and can only perceive fragments of (can you see x-rays? feel neutrinos? hear frequencies beyond a narrow range?), it becomes quite impossible to wrap one's mind around even the notion of Absolute Truth. But we seem to be constructed to latch onto simple perceived truths and defend them as if they were the very foundations of our existence -- which in a sense, they are. But that's why being willing to re-invent oneself, casting aside those ideas that have been shown to be different than our notions of them, is so very important.
Proof is a slippery little devil, while Belief is incredibly sticky.