Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Skeptic (Altadena, CA)

Crazy ideas 101: how to teach skeptical thinking in the classroom.

Article Excerpt
I ADMIT IT. I'M AFRAID OF THE LOCH Ness monster. And perhaps you should be too. Try the following experiment: ask yourself what you think the odds are that there is, at least intermittently, some large creature in Loch Ness that is responsible for some of the monster sightings. You may think the probability is very small, but you're not allowed to choose zero---as a skeptic, you should admit at least some small chance that there really is something there on occasion. Choose your answer before reading further.

Got it? Now ask yourself the same question, but for the case of aliens zipping around in flying saucers, abducting people from their homes, and then returning them. Again, choose your answer now.

My guess is that most readers found the creature in Loch Ness far more plausible than the alien kidnappers. Perhaps you gave Nessie a one percent chance, and the little green men 0.01%. Or you rated Nessie at a million to one, and the aliens at a trillion to one. But most of you differentiated between the two cases, and most of you were more favorable to the lust than the second.

That's not the way the general public sees it, however. According to a survey that Gallup conducted on behalf of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, American adults are somewhat more likely to believe that "some UFO's are probably spaceships from other worlds" than that "creatures such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster will one day be discovered by science." (1) Setting aside the considerable vagaries of question wording, it seems that belief in alien abductions is at least roughly as widespread as belief in a big beastie in a Scottish lake.

It's no wonder that the general public does not consider one much more probable than the other. Both am the subjects of specials presented on scientifically oriented cable and history channels. Both have maverick scientists who defend them. And both am treated with equal disdain by most mainstream scientists.

So what? Skeptics have enough trouble convincing the credulous that either is unlikely to be true. Why confuse them with the idea that one is less prohibitively unlikely than the other?

Because sometimes the unlikely occurs. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) would be happy if the risk of a given flight crashing were one in a billion. That would make any accident a "freak" accident. But if the risk were one in a million, then there would likely be several crashes per year. And if the...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!