My fault for having skipped posting for a week — Substack is still new for me and I don’t yet have it fully integrated into my weekly workflow, so when I had a ton of business travel dumped on me this week, articles had not yet been posted in advance. My bad, and I will do better, and get on a regular publishing schedule for both free and paid readers. And now, on to why I was in Georgia this week.
The travel did bring up a topic I’d like to talk about today, triggered by the topic of a talk I was giving. My trip the past several days was to give a presentation to an annual meeting of elected officials in Georgia. Georgia is a state that is nearly exactly 50/50 split between liberals and conservatives, so I knew going in that mine would be a divided audience. And that’s totally fine for me; I keep politics and religion out of my talks, which are designed for all audiences. Anyway, as you may know, I try to be an Equal Opportunity Offender, revealing faulty thought patterns wherever they are found across the political spectrum.
The topic of this talk was challenging your assumptions, and it is my talk most designed for business audiences. We all operate under some faulty assumptions about the world, our bosses and customers, our co-workers, our workflow, and how decisions are best made. This talk is designed to help you root them out and fix them. The final slide ends with the exhortation:
Seek out information that
CHALLENGES
your assumptions;
never information that
CONFIRMS
them.
When I returned home, I found the following in my inbox:
I sat through your presentation and must express my deep disappointment. It's astounding that in this day and age, you still blindly assume the reality of "global warming." By basing your entire argument on this unproven, overhyped theory, you've utterly undermined your credibility. Perhaps next time, consider a more objective and well-rounded approach, lest your audience dismiss your claims outright.
Now this kind of feedback is nothing new. And in the spirit of improving what I do, I always do read and listen to negative feedback: If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be practicing what I preach about seeking out information that disagrees with you. But in this case, there is no mention of global warming in this particular talk at all! However there was one audience Q&A which asked me about it, and so I gave the consensus view. That’s probably what triggered this feedback, though I’ve no idea whether it came from that same audience member or someone else. It could have come from anyone in 50% of that audience, keeping in mind that Georgia is a 50/50 split.
But I am struck by the irony of the email. Following my talk on the importance of challenging assumptions, it accuses me of failing to challenge my assumptions. That would be a fair criticism, except that my answer in the Q&A made it clear that the climate consensus is not anybody’s “blind assumption” and I briefly explained the process by which I determined the current consensus in order to report it.
As any honest research attempt to learn the climate consensus shows that global warming is real and human caused — with no ambiguity or doubt — I can only assume that this person has made no such honest attempt. It is more likely that they surround themselves with information that confirms their preferred view that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by their political enemies. They have clearly closed their mind to any information that challenges that view.
And so we see, yet again, that the failure to seek out challenging information leads to faulty conclusions.
(And while we’re on the subject, I’ll just throw out a pitch to have me come and give this talk at your organization. It’s what we do here at Skeptoid Media.)