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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?"
I'd question that assumption, too. It seems to me there are two "geeky" areas where the ability to have a skeptical viewpoint is important: debugging and security. Both require you to be able to think, not in terms of, "Well, let's see, will this work?" -- a perfectly natural perspective when you're trying to solve a problem -- but in terms of Murphy's Law: "How can this be made to fail?" I suspect anyone that's spent any significant amount of time with geeks knows that some are a lot better in these areas than others.
Is it even a teachable skill, or is it just an innate part of the geek personality?"
I think it's some of each. In some cases, at least, I think I've managed to teach a few people how to think more skeptically / critically. It's easier with people that have a basic grounding in some kind of scientific or mathematical discipline, I think because that tends to teach you that your intuition is not always a trustworthy guide. On the other hand, anyone committed to an ideology, whatever the flavour, is usually uneducable.
Well, I have evidence for the existence of God that's probably about on par with aliens that we haven't seen yet: Watch technology progress, especially the field of artificial intelligence and various simulations. What happens if we develop a simulation so intricate, inhabited with artificial beings so complex, that we couldn't easily tell the difference between our world and the simulation? Well? The person who made that simulation is like God, just like our life-forms are "like" extraterrestrials. Granted, it doesn't "prove" that God exists, but it does provide that data point that we can use to extrapolate the possibility of the existence of God.
I hear mostly staunch atheists promoting the idea that artificial intelligence will soon be developed (~50 years), but things like artificial intelligence and artificial worlds (things like Spore or World of Warcraft) are the most solid philosophical evidence yet of the existence of God, and the evidence will only get more convincing the more that such technology develops. What happens when there are more artificial entities living inside rich computer environments than there are fleshy entities? You would have to admit that you are most likely INSIDE such a world yourself! And, *gasp* someone PROGRAMMED the world you live in! OH! THE HORROR!
You seem to mistake me for the person to whom you originally replied.
My point was that the phrase didn't mean anything so spelt, that it is not normal to put "argumentum" before "non sequitur" in English, and the phrase didn't make much sense with a question mark attached to it so haphazardly. "Isn't that a non sequitur?" would have made more sense.