What do you mean by skepticism?
Teaching science well breeds the ability to:
Properly ask a question.
Understand what a question is really asking.
Recognize hidden assumptions within the question.
Know the form that the answer to a question will take.
Understand what must be done in order to form a relevant answer to a question.
Assess the validity of various possible answers to a question.
Science isn't just about asking questions. It's about answering them.
Skepticism, it seems to me, is about asking questions, and hiding from answers. The left is really good at skepticism.
“Skepticism, it seems to me, is about asking questions, and hiding from answers. The left is really good at skepticism.”
Mr. ArrogantBustard :-) ...
We are in agreement. I should have been clearer. Science should always keep you questioning things from a curiosity standpoint. My use of the word skeptic is probably poor. I guess I got caught up in too much of the junk science aspect I was discussing.
I’m an engineer myself and find myself being a skeptic (far too much that I should) of things like simulation tools and the like :-). If I had $1 for every bug I have found in things like SPICE models and VHDL/Verilog IP cores all the way up to the simulation environments myself, I would have retired the national debt many times over (hyperbole there ;-) ). I’ve wasted many hours chasing problems that weren’t my own :-).
On a side note, my experience with these simulation tools makes me giggle at those “climate models” the “experts” use. Some of the tools I use have literally millions of man hours of development behind them yet still have bugs that produce erroneous results. Moreover, should the models of components themselves have errors, one gets, you guessed it, erroneous results.
Now, modeling the Earth’s climate has millions of variables to take into account :-) ... I cannot buy that their simulations of a system as complex as the planet’s climate are anything resembling accurate!!!! There’s so much we still do not understand about the planet itself ... I can’t see how these bozos can peddle their doom and still call their selves scientists. I honestly think historians are going to have some hilarious things to write about these “scientists” long after we’re gone.