I feel like a lot of this is just... bullshit. Yes, if a security guard literally decided to ignore every sound as the wind they would probably be useless - as

I feel like a lot of this is just... bullshit. Yes, if a security guard literally decided to ignore every sound as the wind they would probably be useless - as long as their role is literally only fast response. Except they don't, and it isn't. Their role is just as often to politely escort someone out, or remind someone of their manners. So there's that but also, maybe over time the security guard doesn't ignore everything as wind, maybe the security guard...learns quite well what wind is like. If I hear a vague rumbling on a monday I know it's my neighbour bringing the bins out. Similarly, the security guard probably can go from 5 false positives a day to 0.01 false positives a day without increasing their false negatives at all. It's like, it's a nice thought, but if you really apply attention to it, it doesn't hold up for long. >Fast, fun to read, and a 99.9% success rate. Pretty good, especially compared to everyone who “does their own research” and sometimes gets it wrong. I would wager the "do your own research" crowd hits much lower than 99.9% success rate, so what's the argument here? The person who accepts mainstream view - which is apparently what this article calls a skeptic - is no better than a rock. But that actually, the people who contradict the skeptic are no better than a rock thrown in a glass house. In my experience though, the skeptic is far more likely to be a "skeptic" of the mainstream view and to advertise themselves as that (see: literallly thedailyskeptic.org) and in reality, they're taking the bad side of the bet, by this logic you're 99.9% right by dismissing contrarians and accepting the mainstream view. if you're constantly endorsing the contrarians, you're basically taking the 0.01%. And this isn't theoretical, the skeptics I listed earlier literally posted an article today telling us how global warming is fine, because the earth was warmer... 50 million years ago when no human life was viable. The problem with skeptics isn't their skepticism, it's where they choose to apply it. There is value in there being contrarians, in order to hold people's feet to the fire, but that doesn't really apply if they're just bringing up dumb arguments and are no more complex than the people they're questioning.