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3 months ago
1
It all comes down to the individuals capacity for critical thinking. If they're not educated beyond high school or they didn't really get educated properly in high school they'll most likely have ZERO critical thinking skills. This intensifies as an uneducated person goes into adulthood and gains real-world experience and matures as a human being. In life we all face "Big Bad Scaries" (BBS's) like the threat of war, or political upheaval or extreme weather events or health scares etc. and we all look for a "binky" of some sort to stick in our mouths to help us to cope with human fragility. Conspiracy theories are just binkies that non-critical thinkers pick up out of a pile of cow manure and shove in their mouth (like my 2yo did yesterday) to avoid facing the reality of their fragile emotional state. Ivermectin for those a decade or 2 away from natural death. Chemtrails for those sick of the weather where they live.
Eh, in my experience, critical thinking is not imparted by education, including college and beyond education—and it tends to vary wildly by domain, even in the same person, and I find that the more clever and educated someone is, the more difficult it is to get them to think critically on subjects where they don't already think in that way.
And even then, I can think of many scientific cultural examples where scientists of the day said, more or less, "nuh-uh" with almost zero basis for the denial, without ever clearly understanding that their rejection was NOT based on critical thinking or the scientific method, but on mistaken assumptions/cultural bias/metaphysical assumptions.
As a good recent example, see Roger Penrose's proposal about quantum consciousness.
The specifics of the proposal are generally irrelevant, and I'll note that I do not necessarily believe that the proposal is true, but what I do remember is the veritable wall of dismissal that descended on his and Hameroff's proposal, the majority of which centered on the categorical assertion that coherent quantum processes could not be perpetuated in a biological environment like an animal brain.
The assertion generally boiled down to the eventually famous and pithy assertion that brains were too "warm, wet, and noisy"; ergo, Penrose and Hameroff's proposal was a non-starter, since there could be no quantum in "quantum consciousness".
It was easily knowable at the time that we did not have sufficient information for evaluating whether inherently quantum processes could be relevant in biology, and the people dismissing Penrose and Hameroff were exactly the experts who should have known this most thoroughly.
They turned out to be not just wrong in their dismissal, but wildly wrong—we now have a plethora of confirmed examples of inherently quantum processes being used in biology across the domains of life, impacting processes as diverse as the efficiency of photosynthesis and magnetosensory apparatus in birds and other animal species, just to name a few.
This of course does not mean that these scientists are bad scientists, that their work is worthless, etc., etc. But it IS a demonstration that even very clever people, who are experts in a subject, and who we strongly associate with ample critical thinking skills, do sometimes completely fail to engage in such, en masse.
In this case, my suspicion is that their rejection had far more to do with cherished metaphysical assumptions that Penrose and Hameroff's proposal appeared to violate—several different ones, in fact, but I think even more than specific, actual contraventions, it was really more that it sounded like mystical or religious assertions to them, an attempt to sneak some kind of magic or divinity into the naturalistic, reductionist scientific process.
This has been a very common trope in scientific history—see, for example, the reactions to the Big Bang hypothesis, as well as accusations leveled at Stephen Jay Gould for his proposal of punctuated equilibrium in evolution, both of which garnered uncritical rejections from many or most of the scientists in their respective fields, often due to the sense that what the hypothesis REALLY did was sneak in some kind of "special creation"—that is, it was assumed that the creators were really just proposing religious explanations, or explanations intended to leave gap room for religious stories, rather than engaging in any reasoned scientific process.
Of course, the Big Bang came with testable predictions, and was eventually verified; "punk eek", to the irreverent, has remained a marginal hypothesis due to lack of supporting evidence (and arguably some evidence against it); and Penrose still hasn't really received many fair reappraisals despite one of the major reasons given for rejecting his hypothesis out of hand turning out to be entirely false.
Critical thinking is a very difficult skill, and to my mind, while it does require a sort of floor of cognitive ability to even begin engaging in it, it often depends more on intellectual humility and a knowledge of own's one biases and assumptions, plus a willingness to refrain from underevidenced assertions, than it does anything else. (Although certainly there are a lot of aspects of critical thinking that can be taught!)
Because there are plenty of folks with the inborn capacity for critical thinking who nonetheless rarely engage in it—and my sense is more that they lack the emotional or psychological ability for it, rather than that they lack the cognitive or educational resources to engage in it.
(Though to be fair, I think my own assessment is definitely biased towards the folks I think of as being perfectly capable of it, but nonetheless not having done it—I spend much less time lamenting that some people just can't manage it, even if they would like to. This surely influences my viewpoint.)
