Please give examples of how you personally apply skepticism to your daily life. I'm doing research for a presentation I'm giving next month and I'd love to have some real-life examples from other people. Thanks for the help!
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I work for the railroad as a signal maintainer and some people/my dad believe in wire Dowsing. they believe they can find underground cable using bent grounding wire or rods. I point out that we all laid allot of cable and know how we run underground cable and know where it starts and where it ends doesn't take magic to guess the path. on the other hand at a atheist meeting I attended we have an anti vaxxer and we where talking about to raise kids and i said "I believe we should inoculate children by sending them to Jewish,Christian and as many different kinds faith services as possible. I said no offense to the anti vaxxer. I also told him I would get the H1N1 vaccine to show him I am not dead. I tweeted about the idea and my mom sent me frantic messages about not getting the vaccine. She told my sister not vaccinate her baby but she is a nursing student and wrote her entrance paper on the anti vaxxer movement and how bad it is for public health. but she lied to my mom and told her she didn't vaccinate her baby. On top of this I goto paranormal and ghost hunter meeting as a open atheist and skeptic. I have a great time and keep them a little bit more sane and hope I give them a positive image of what a skeptic is. The main thing is I never dismiss a claim out of hand.If I am not sure I will give my reason I find it to be unlikely but I tell them I will get back to them when I have time to do some research on the topic at hand. |
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It is not uncommon at all for friends, family and co-workers to say "oh, you shouldn't eat/drink/use that food/bottle/drink, it'll cause cancer/infertility/etc." Always a good real world case to apply skepticism. Sometimes I can respond with something like "Oh, I had heard that too and was worried, but I looked into it and it turns out not to be true." Or, "Hmm, I will check on that, but I don't think they could sell this product without a warning if it is that dangerous." And occasionally, "Wow, I had not heard that!" Naturally that gets into the area of communicating with non-Skeptics in a non-offending manner. But it also provides fodder for information to determine the truth of and apply Skepticism to the claim (occasionally, they might actually be right!) I don't think it is ever a good idea (and is non-Skeptical) to simply dismiss claims of that sort until they have been validated or rejected through actual information. In short, I think some real world use cases:
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