A lot of people live in bubbles and local networks that don’t have regular access to the normal tools of skepticism that you and I might take for granted. If yo

A lot of people live in bubbles and local networks that don’t have regular access to the normal tools of skepticism that you and I might take for granted. If you’ve been brought up to believe what you’re told, these people can be very convincing. This is no longer an exclusively offline type of localism either. There is no shortage of online bubbles that are well insulated from outside perspectives. It’s not even a “poor, dumb people” thing. We are all subject to the network effect and must make continuous active effort to avoid sinking into a comfortable echo chamber. I know so many people who grew up combatting religious fundamentalism, dispatching creationist arguments with expert logical fallacy-fu, only to later fall into their own malign belief systems, losing the ability to question. Even academia, where the foundation stones of skepticism and innovative thinking were laid, has bubbles of very smart people whose working environment is being drained of heterodoxy.