On Being Open Minded

Here's the thing about open minds. A lot of people think it means something that it doesn't mean.

People who practice a skeptical mindset are always open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Always. It's a fundamental part of skeptical philosophy - to self-reflect and examine our own biases, and to change our opinions when given sufficient reason to do so. It's absolutely baseline 101. If you are interested in skepticism, this is the first thing you need to know.

People who say to skeptics "you should have an open mind" almost never do this. They never consider the possibility that they might be wrong. Maybe they have what they believe to be a good reason to think they might be right. Maybe they're just stubborn. But whatever the reason, the idea that they might be wrong is never seriously considered.

And here's where it gets tricky. Most of the things that people say "you should have an open mind" to skeptics about are things that have already been seriously considered and rejected, usually a long time ago. This looks like dismissal. This looks like the skeptic is not open to the possibility that they are wrong. But that's not what's happening. Almost everything that people challenge skeptics with are things that we (collectively as skeptics) have been open minded about, seriously considered, and rejected on the basis of logic and plausibility. And the ones that aren't are the ones that are just patently ridiculous or are clearly the product of mental illness.

We don't need to seriously consider the possibility of ESP, because ESP has been seriously studied for decades and no-one has come up with anything substantial. So skeptics don't need to "keep an open mind" about ESP. We've already done that and the hypothesis was rejected.

We see the same thing with creationism. "But what if you're wrong?" Yeah, we've considered the idea that we may be wrong about creationism, decades ago, and the overwhelming evidence in favour of evolution and the complete lack of evidence in favour of creationism is sufficient to draw a conclusion that we can be pretty sure is reliable.

For homeopathy in particular it's even worse. Not only is there no good evidence that it works, there's plenty of good evidence that it doesn't work, and furthermore there is a lack of any plausible mechanism for how it might work. Any proposed mechanism would require the laws of chemistry and physics as we know them to be fundamentally incorrect, and we are pretty sure that they aren't. We've considered it. We've looked into it, we've studied it, and we've determined that it is not real. We could continue to do so (and there are indeed some who do) but for the rest of us, there's really no need to rehash old ground. It's been done before.

If this looks to you like we're not being open-minded, then all I can say is that it isn't that. It isn't that at all. It's us having already been open-minded, having already studied and examined, and having drawn a conclusion based on logic, reason, and evidence.