Aren most skeptics just closed-minded bigots?
People who have failed to convince skeptics often say “Well, skeptics are just closed-minded bigots who won’t listen to me!”. This is not true. Skeptics pay close attention to the evidence. If you have no evidence then you will get nowhere. Unfortunately life is short. Most of us have better things to do than investigate yet another bogus claim. Some paranormal topics, especially psi research and UFOlogy, produce vast quantities of low grade evidence. In the past people have investigated such evidence carefully, but it always seems to evaporate when anyone looks at it closely. Hence skeptics should be forgiven for not bothering to investigate yet another piece of low grade evidence before rejecting it. Isaac Asimov has suggested a triage process which divides scientific claims into three groups: mundane, unusual and bullshit [my terms]. As an example, a claim that “I have 10kg of salt in my lab” is pretty mundane. No-one would disbelieve me, but they wouldn’t be very interested. A clai
