I was rather too much into "skepticism" of the tedious Neil Tyson or Michael Shermer sort, for a few years. Colliding with Caltech set in motion various intellectual processes that would break through the defences of that youthful commitment to skepticism, but for a chunk of adolescent years, centered roughly around 1990-92, I was into "debunking" and James Randi and, later, Penn and Teller.

It has taken a long time to dismantle the worst of those old habits, which have gotten in the way of our studying magic and the occult (and other things). And the work is far from over! We grew up with U.S. and "Western" scientists and academics all round us, absorbed their way of talking and discoursing about things. There's still a lot of residual aversion to touching anything as silly and (gasp) forbidden as occult lore.

I'd like to point out something that I hope is now obvious to most persons: it may have been fun in the 1980s and especially the 1990s (once the GOP had finally suffered some political setbacks) to be a "skeptic" of the most irritating sort, slinging insults and ten-cent "debunkings" at anyone who professed belief in nonsense, or whatever was judged in the heat of the moment to be nonsense.

It sure seemed like entertainment, or at least a way to pass the time, when I was rotting away in a Caltech dorm room and I couldn't sleep, so I'd page through Usenet arguments to pass the time and try to convince myself that I was seeing something vital and important to humanity. A great Debate™. A Discourse™. An international Conversation™.

Oh I had precious ideas about the #Internet, when it was my newest toy (roughly 1993).

There's people who still conduct themselves thus on a round-the-clock basis, and there's many billionaires who claim that they want #technology to be a democratizing force, enabling the international Conversation™ and all that. They politicized the #Internet (by inviting politicians to advertise there, chiefly) and want it to stay that way (although they themselves claim to be apolitical and devoted to freedom of speech) and they say this is a good thing: it's good that the marginalized should forever be locked in "debate" with the powerful.

So, early 1990s "debate me" culture from Usenet still rules corporate #socialmedia. There's still people talking like those "skeptics" and "debunkers" I used to hang out with in high school and then Caltech.

For the defect of the dedicated "skeptic" is that it's not actually possible to disbelieve everything at once—not if you want to stay within the bounds of popularly accepted sanity—and so the hardcore skeptic develops lines of belief and faith within themselves, they evolve an ideology through clinging to certain principles harder than others, but the skeptic refuses to acknowledge the existence of such boundaries.

They do not easily deal with the reminder that there really ARE certain things in their imagination and their rhetoric which they take on faith, which they simply assume to be true without being able to prove them, because they're now committed to the public pose of steely rationality. So the irrational flaps around their thinking and their behavior anyway, but under poor control and without public acknowledgment, except in perhaps the most oblique of ways.