The Cynic, the Skeptic, and the Charlatan
We build ourselves a city of ideas. Some of the buildings in this city are very old, with weathered stone exteriors, marble colonnades, words engraved above the entryway in languages we have never spoken. These edifices have been passed down to us generation by generation and, when we walk the streets of our mind, we may hardly notice them. They are part of the landscape, seemingly immutable.
Alongside these ancient structures, we are building new neighbourhoods every day, some with solid foundations that we have dug and poured ourselves through hard-won personal experience, diligent scientific endeavour, and careful critical thought. In other districts, the construction is more ad hoc—hasty tent cities springing up to fill immediate needs, tent poles and guy-lines sourced from wherever is most convenient. Here’s a whole pavilion supported by something your buddy told you at a bar after a couple of drinks. There’s a lean-to held up by a tweet.
Some of these buildings definitely aren’t up to code. And yet, the city as a whole runs reasonably well. Every conscientious critical thinker knows that even an imperfect structure can have value. It’s unlikely to be all the way wrong, and there’s no need to tear down a functional house just because some of the walls are a bit wonky. And yet, if we have any allegiance to the truth at all, then we can’t just build and build and build. The tools of critical thought must sometimes take on the character of a wrecking ball.
To that end, walking the streets of this city, we have three safety inspectors, with three very different mandates. Sometimes these inspectors are informed by criticisms and challenges passed on by friends, the media, institutions of science. Sometimes they are the product of our own independent critical thinking. But, in order to best act on their advice, we must learn to tell them one from the other. These three characters are the Cynic, the Skeptic, and the Charlatan.
Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to tell these three apart. All three of them can present well-reasoned cases for controlled demolition, and there’s no easy answer to the question of just how flawed an idea can be before we are better off tearing it down. Perhaps the subtlest pitfall awaiting a critical thinker is that once you’re in the habit of inspecting foundations, you will see nothing but cracks.
It is, therefore, absolutely essential to have a rubric for separating the helpful critique of ideas from the wanton and the opportunistic. Whenever we encounter even the most well-reasoned attack on a widely held belief, we must engage in the messy work of untangling the motivations and ideologies behind it. We must understand what drives the Cynic, the Skeptic, and the Charlatan.
The Cynic is a force of chaos in the city of ideas. They have taken the tools of critical thought and sharpened them to a cutting edge that no building material can withstand. You will recognize the Cynic by the way they leverage the strongest attacks against everything in their path. When presented with any scientific theory, no matter how strong or useful, the Cynic is ready with critiques of selection bias, sample size, p-hacking, and the perverse incentives that drive research and publication. They will speak also of the problem of induction, the dangers of verificationism, and the fundamental underdetermination of theory by data. It is far beyond the scope of this piece to untangle each of those arguments, but the important thing to understand is that they’re not wrong.
The Cynic is dangerous because he stands on solid philosophical ground, well trod by influential minds from Descartes to Hume to Quine. Every practised critical thinker is in danger of becoming a Cynic. It is the natural endpoint of unadulterated rationality. But the Cynic is a menace in the city of ideas. The city is a compromise, a pragmatic thing, and it must be kept, at all times, safe against the indiscriminate demolition advocated for by the Cynic. The Cynic rarely has bad intentions, but an advisor who tells us every single structure within the city limits is unsound is useless to us, even if correct.
The Charlatan is more dangerous still. A Charlatan will attack an idea not because it is particularly weak or treacherous, but because it is inconvenient to their goals. You will see them often using the same tools as the Cynic, but selectively. To the Charlatan, some of the most solid and important structures in the city—immunization, climate science, democracy—are the most attractive targets for the simple reason that they sit on prime real estate.
When you encounter a Charlatan sizing up a building for demolition, it is important to ask what they intend to build in its place and why they’re ignoring the more obviously precarious structures that stand all around. Unfortunately, Charlatans are not always easy to spot. Their arguments often seem reasonable, particularly on their surface. Sometimes, they travel in packs, and work to achieve positions of power, amplifying their suggestions.
And yet, still, sometimes buildings do need to come down. We need that third safety inspector, the one you always want in your corner, the one you will ideally become yourself. The Skeptic.
The Skeptic keeps a full set of tools and, critically, knows when it is appropriate to use each. When the Skeptic questions a study for reasons of selection bias or sample size, it’s not simply because these arguments are easy to wield. It’s because they are genuinely concerned about the quality—and presence—of evidence that this new idea will serve the city better than the one it strives to replace. The Skeptic is well aware that all knowledge is imperfect, that the underpinnings of science leave every theory vulnerable to attack, but they are also pragmatic enough to recognize the very real benefits that follow from an idea that is good enough.
It will always be difficult to differentiate the Skeptic from the Cynic and the Charlatan. All have conflicts of interest. But making this distinction is of paramount importance, and it is another opportunity to use and hone our tools of critical thought. At Miss Trust, we aim to always walk the path of the Skeptic, but we solemnly hope that you will use every tool at your disposal to second-guess us, to double check our work. And, when we challenge an idea that has long stood in the heart of your city of ideas, we hope that you will always ask yourself why.
It is, after all, your city. You have to live in it. You can outsource a lot of the surveying, the inspection, the construction—indeed you must. But, at the end of the day, it must be you and you alone who oversees the planning, zoning, and steady cultivation of this city of ideas into a harmonious whole that will allow you to proceed through your life confident that you’re doing the best you can with imperfect information. Because that’s all any of us can ever do.
The progress towards a more perfect metropolis can be agonizingly slow. The beauty of science, however, is that, over time, the explanation that consistently yields the best outcome will eventually win out, so long as a Skeptic is at the helm. Through skepticism, progress becomes inevitable, not because the universe favours truth but because the Skeptic recognizes the pragmatic value of new ideas with stronger predictive power. That is, the Skeptic is willing to tear down existing structures, but only when necessary.
As individuals, we simply can not move to new and stronger beliefs if we don’t have the tools at hand to disassemble the old ones and, critically, to recognize when the old beliefs are still sound. As a society, the more we can proactively encourage critical thinking in public discourse, the better we can become at protecting and preserving the long-standing ideas that serve us best, while also clearing room for new ideas that will build a stronger future. This is necessarily a collaboration, an exercise of carefully placed trust. Because although we each live in our own city of ideas, we build those cities together.