The underlying problem is that everyone is familiar with the primitives of ordinary, day-to-day doubt: honesty, conflicting interests, status. We all practice i

The underlying problem is that everyone is familiar with the primitives of ordinary, day-to-day doubt: honesty, conflicting interests, status. We all practice it every day as part of our evolutionary programming, and some of us even like to watch the odd soap opera to keep scratching that itch. Almost nobody really spends much time with that other kind of doubt, epistemological skepticism. Theories, hypotheses, observations. Dense articles, years of reading. So what happens when someone brings up climate change, or covid, or anything else? You can be sure they look at the former. They want to know who said what, and they want to know the interests behind it. Is this or that person a liar? What motivations might they have?