Skepticism vs Cynicism (plus Nuevo Skepticism)

How do you avoid cynicism while being a skeptic? I evaluate these two approaches to ideas, both radical and orthodox. I also explain what I can "Nuevo Skepticism" - an odd synthesis of the two.

#science #skepticism

[withusura]

The difference between a skeptic and a cynic is that the skeptic doesn't feel betrayed

[jonathanskipper]

I love your thoughtful soliloquys, Dave!

I agree with the premise of this video absolutely. I see cynicism as a form of hopelessness, or disillusionment. Whereas skepticism, to me, is more of a healthy reservation towards new information.
I've heard the saying, "the most cynical person used to be the most idealistic, " and I think that captures the idea of what cynicism is perfectly. Just as you said about the food pyramid, to be cynical about something means to have had an idea formed, only to have it destroyed. It is somewhat the curse of growing up to become cynical about various aspects of life. It is the psychological state of "seeing behind the curtain."

I think I share a deep cynicism of the American education system. I grew up in a small Montana town, and actually eventually went back to work there as a substitute teacher. I have spent time tutoring students, and since the teachers at the high school I subbed at knew me, they often allowed me to teach the lessons of the day. I feel that the public school system fails students in most areas of learning, but particularly I feel that many teachers have become selfishly motivated. It has become less about ensuring the next generation is equipped to face the challenges of life, and more about fulfilling quotas and solidifying one's job. Too many teachers find ways to make their own job easier. They place more and more restrictions on students, make arbitrary rules that are impossible to follow, assign useless work that is easy to grade, excessively assist students on tests because it is easier than ensuring that the students know the information.

Don't get me wrong, teachers are only human, and students can be a pain. But, in all my experience as a student, mentor, and teacher, I think I can say that many (if not most) teachers are too strict/pedantic when they need to be simpler, too lenient when they need to be authoritative, too harsh when they need to be kind, and too kind when they need to be harsh. What we end up with is a whole generation too soft to handle hardship, too dogmatic to be flexible and empathetic, and too laid back to be productive. I am sure that all sounds like contradictory, I am just not sure how else to express it.

I could write an essay about how I think the school system has failed, but in the end, I think it really comes down to teachers caring less and less about the well-being of their students. I also have only a few years experience as a mentor/teacher, and have since moved on into the art world, so maybe I just had a bad experience.

Great video! Can't wait for the next one.

[bradspitt]

I think it's useful to take three isms together in order to contrast:

Skepticism: questions, then research.

Pessimism: negative attitude towards things.

Cynicism: skepticism + pessimism about people's consciousness.

There's nothing wrong with skepticism, and there's nothing wrong with pessimism, but the problem with cynicism is the mind-reading. You treat others as if they have bad intentions and create conspiracy theories. You can be skeptical about someone's motives, but if you don't do research and treat them as if they are guilty that is the problem.

Pessimism can simply think evil will triumph over good, but not necessarily treat others as if they are guilty.

[LordBaktor]

Slightly off topic, but the food pyramid made me remember something from when we studied nutrition in Natural Science class when I went to school (late eighties/early nineties). There was an image of a languid, skinny and unhealthy looking kid with the caption "this is what a kid who doesn't eat any meat would look like". I was raised vegetarian (I abandoned vegetarianism at age 14, when I started questioning my mother's authority and such) and I was the healthiest kid in my class because I ate next to no processed food. That single experience made me very skeptical of the education system at an earlier age than most people I know.

[TonySharkks]

This topic dovetails nicely with scientism. People that rigidly adhere to orthodoxy and appeal to authority which is something I've been thinking about lately. Nice timing!

[samuel_wilson]

I agree that the cynicism is not an extreme of skepticism, rather it’s an attitude coming from a different starting point. You get a taste of this in an argument. A skeptic will listen and address what you’ve said; a cynic will dismiss what you’ve said and attempt to skew the argument

[mehmetcy]

The two are of two distinct and independent domains. Skepticism is about suspicion towards information, and cynicism is suspicion towards moral values. I am not sure why/how would one try to lump these two into one scale.

[paulallen]

Nuevo Skepticism sounds exactly how Young Earth and Creationist act and debate.
When I was younger I used to listen to Bob Dutko, who is a Creationist. All of his arguments sounded very skeptically sound(if you accept the core of his theory), and he would encourage people to come debate.
But whatever evidence they gave was never "enough" to disprove his original beliefs.

This almost false skepticism really does a great job of convincing people they are on the logical and scientific side of things, even when its the opposite.

Thanks for articulating that idea David. I'll make use of it!

[clearsmashdrop]

Im GenX and went to school in California. I definitely remember the food pyramid in school back in the late 70s or early 80s. Then there there was the off and on again 'eggs are bad for you'.

[melparrishjr]

@David Stewart,
You are very well informed and I like that as opposed to my own ignorance of things that most people take for granted. You see, I dropped out of school and ran away from home to join the circus... true story! What?! you mean punctuation isn't multiple choice??? I don't have the kind of education that everyone else has but because of that, I am able to see things from angles that others never even knew existed. And despite my lack of formal education, it seems that writing is my only way to communicate so many exotic ideas that only make the powers that be cringe. I don't know if the glass is half anything ...I didn't even know there was a glass! I'd always just cupped my hands together to drink and it seemed to kill 2 birds with one stone by washing my hands and quenching my thirst at the same time without any extra effort. Rambling again cause I'm just a rambling man...lol you got a new sub.

[CuriousPlumber]

Skeptics are more positive, cynics are negative. Skeptic needs evidence for something to be healthy and positive where a cynic sees negative and pessimistic everywhere.

[kaku]

There's an interesting dynamic between the skeptic and cynic as well the nihils and stoic. I observed, primarily where these philosophies are allocated epistemologically and hemispheres in the brain. Almost dualistic as a masculine & feminine principle. In regards of Western philosophy and school of thought. I'm still studying and working it out. But would like to hear others perspectives in this comparative and contrastive discourse.

*Oh almost left this out, if anyone keen on psychology I would be grateful for a analysis of these 4.*

[urc]

Why does every new generation grow up thinking they are smarter than the previous one and then spend the the rest of their lives complaining about how dumb kids are today?

[ironstarofmordian]

David V. Stewart dabbing on Jack Conte's bullshit! Hell yeah!!!!

[glitchygear]

I've always eaten more than the doctors say I should be and weighed less than the doctors say I should. I have a very high metabolism to the point it's not on the charts. For that very reason I've never loved the height and weight charts in offices.

I've also had very bad experiences with psychiatric medications and doctor offices. What they gave me caused minor hallucinations for years and never once solved my actual psychiatric issues; when I became old enough to have a say in it myself I quietly stopped taking it, and have been a much happier and mentally healthier person ever since. Seriously, people with mental health issues are treated SO poorly in today's day and age, I know from personal experience.

These things combine to give me a very skeptical view of medicine, and how we understand nutrition.

I've also been exposed to a lot of what's dogmatic about both the Left and Right, as well as what we've come to call the "right" but is really extremism or centrism. So I've come to be very skeptical about any political statement, and have come to feel the very act of partisanship can corrupt a positive belief or action into an inherently harmful one. (Which sums up my feeling on progressivim - people trying to be good, yet have had their actions and movements corrupted by partisan acts.)

So I'd say I grew to be a very skeptical person over the years. A lot of people who don't understand the need to stay skeptical, such as my father, a quite pretentious person, falsely take me as a cynic, but in reality I'm quite the optimist and I always surprise these people by better being able to define what is incorrect. I always do these random little things like look up at the sky and predict pretty much the exact time of day, predict exactly when someone will wake up based on their last message of the night, etc, that nobody else can do, proving I have a higher understanding of some things than even people much older than me.

But I don't think I'd ever call myself "a" skeptic. If I did that I'd be conflating myself with the skeptic community online. That's an atheist group that generally treats science as their new God; it's there the false notion that science *"is fact"* came about, and why it's so common on the Internet for someone to quote some random (often unrelated) scientific blurb at you and think they won an argument. You know how that goes, Right wingers get that a lot actually. While some "skeptics" are good people I have no love for that particular community. In fact I find it a huge part of the problem with this whole partisan one-up culture which has so much taken root here on YouTube.

[FortuitusVideo]

I call them "kindergarten truths" they're not lies per se but they arent the full truth.

[sacredraisincake]

Thank you for making your videos!
Some things that struck me- I never thought about the relation of conservatism and skepticism. To be clear I'm speaking of a Burkean type conservatism which is roughly speaking a disposition towards change and the new. A Burkean conservative outlook holds that change should be slow, contextual, and should be built on the thousands of years of wisdom. It is therefore *skeptical* of new alternatives that deviate radically from what is previously established( just as an aside this type of conservatism is not anti change; it's rather a guide to change).I wonder too if this is (one) of the reasons why some prominent skeptical atheists seem to be able to at least get along with some prominent conservatives. Both are going to share an aversion to radical social and political change. Although the broadening of what it means to be rightwing has forced many unlikely friendships between the center left and the right.

The other thing that I am thinking - can we say that it is the case that cynical people are more inclined towards conspiracy theories? Something like not all cynics are conspiracy theorists, but all conspiracy theorists are cynics. I think the word conspiracy usually has a negative connotation of bad faith, since we don't normally think of positive conspiracies. I think about all the talks I have had with acquaintances who believe in conspiracies. 911, chemtrails, false flags, illuminati etc all have bad faith actors in the conspiracy. I just wonder if being overly cynically leaves one subject to more belief in conspiracies.

[Jared_Wignall]

Very good video. You were spot on regarding the educational system with American history and how we don’t learn the whole truth from the text books and what the teachers were teaching us. And I remember the food pyramid growing up in school. A lot of what is taught in schools are what’s approved by the three biggest populated states and really are politically biased, like you said. That alone should make people skeptical about what’s being taught in US schools, since students aren’t getting the whole truth about various things we are taught.

[DeDraconis]

Statin's are terrible. I read and watch a lot of stuff about diabetes and intermittent fasting, and even their colloquial description sounds backwards. Another one that was the same was Osteobiflex, that was supposed to help with diminished bone density. Your bones have two major maintenance cell types, osteoblasts that build new bone cells, and osteoclasts that destroy and recycle bad ones to provide a good foundation for the former to build upon. The drug just killed the ostoclasts, so the osteoblasts built and built, and you got an overall higher bone mass/density. Problem was building on poor foundation was the same as trying to build a castle by piling rocks on each other without making flat portions with mortar in between. They didn't stop pushing it so hard until they had studies showing people on it had a higher incidence of bone fractures.

The whole grains/fiber idea was/is actually a great one - for people who eat nothing but highly processed foods and have no fiber in their diet. They will see a wonderful change, but then they'll go overboard and just be consuming way too much whole grain carbs because the concept of "too much of a good thing" is foreign to a lot of people.

[LordBaktor]

Sorry for double posting, but I just thought of something I would love for you to tackle in one of your videos (or in reply to this comment, of course): Labels. All kinds of labels from metalhead, geek, right-winger, leftist, atheist, etc. I personally hate them because I get the impression people use them to avoid getting to know each other. Every label has a lot of associated assumptions so if I say "I'm a metalhead" people imagine long hair, leather, spikes and all the stereotypes. When someone tries to label me I tend to reject the label because even if it partially or mostly fits it probably gives that person a wrong or incomplete image of myself so I tend to say "instead of labeling me, buy me a beer and let's have a conversation".