The OPEN-minded SKEPTIC - Are you Okay to not know the answer?

Gullibility. Naivety. Easily fooled.

For us who work in a clinical procedural profession, where things that go wrong can be devastating for the patient - and for us - we don't want to get conned into a new procedure that doesn’t work.

So the sensible dentist is skeptical

We don’t believe everything that everyone tells us. Just because someone says it works, doesn’t mean it does. Perhaps they forget the cases that didn’t work. Perhaps they explain them away.

I once read some very sensible advice. Never be the first into something. Or the last.

Over time, we work out filters to make sure that something works before we use it. Perhaps multiple layers of evidence. Literature. Expert opinion. Friends say it work. An understood mechanism on how.

And of course, the most important proof of all. The test of time. Things that work tend to survive. Things that don’t, tend to come, and then go.

But evidence doesn’t create. Knowing that something works, didn’t cause it to work. Knowing the mechanisms of Bernoulli’s principle doesn’t invent the physics of flight. It just discovers it. The physics still worked before it was discovered. We just didn’t know how to manipulate it. We didn’t teach birds to fly.

And so it is, that things that are unproven may or may not work.

Lack of proof is not proof of lack

This is where it is easy to become close minded. We acknowledge that we don’t know it works, but then suddenly explain that it doesn’t.

When we know something doesn’t work, without proof, we’ve actually stopped being skeptical. The skeptic doesn’t believe something that’s unproven. But the skeptic doesn’t believe it doesn’t work without proof either.

So the true skeptic should be open minded

They know to be skeptical of new ideas that are probably nonsense. But they are constantly questioning old ideas that might be nonsense too.

So just remember, whenever you know something doesn’t work, without proof, you are no longer being skeptical.

The true skeptic can admit the important statement. “I don’t know”. I don’t know if it works or not. It might. But I’m not going to risk it just yet.

So be an open minded skeptic and embrace your lack of knowledge. 🙂

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