Exam 12: Skepticism: Becoming Critical Thinking Speakers and Listeners

To be an open-minded person you must

True believers

Research shows that truthful information rarely spreads to more than 1,000 people, but the top 1% of false news routinely spreads to between 1,00 and 100,00 people on Twitter.

James Randi investigated 105 faith healers and found every one of them to be a fake. No one was cured of any organic disease or affliction. Given this evidence, a skeptic must reject faith healing as simply impossible.

The Heaven's Gate cult returned a telescope to the store where it was purchased because when members looked through the telescope they could see the Hale-Bopp comet but they couldn't see a spaceship trailing behind it. They deduced that there must be something wrong with the telescope. This is an example of rationalization of disconfirmation.

You're the leader of the Interstellar Dark Beer Drinking Doomsday cult. You predict that the world will end when consumption of dark beer declines by 5% or more in a year. Consumption declines 7%, but the world does not end. When this fact is pointed out, your response is, "Members of the IDBDD drank mass quantities of dark beer, so they saved the world from extinction, proving the validity of my teachings." This is an example of