How to be sceptical, with Gemma Milne

Future-Proof Your Career

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career we’re talking about scepticism, the willingness, and the discipline, to question what we see and hear. And to have the skills to find the facts amongst the opinions and beliefs.

As always, we’ve invited an expert guest to speak to us, and this time it’s Gemma Milne, writer and researcher, and author of the excellent book Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It.

Gemma gave us loads to think about, in terms of how we improve our sceptical skills. Here are a few of the key takeaways from the conversation:

The skill of scepticism has never been more important

There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. And it’s not just on social media. We need a level of awareness to all the places that people through motivation or ignorance might share hype or inaccuracies.

Scepticism is accessible. It’s something we can all do

You don’t need deep expertise in a subject to be sceptical. That’s not to dismiss expertise or experts - this is very much a podcast that believes in those things! But there are some basic questions we can always ask and things we can do to get a sense of truth.

Separate emotion from fact

We have to recognise that a lot of claims and ideas, and the stories around them are designed to play on our emotions. Can we step back from our emotional engagement and ask some logical questions?

Simple questions

We can always ask, even if just to ourselves: ‘What does this claim depend on?’, ‘How do you get to that conclusion?’, ‘What is the underlying evidence?’

Big claims need big proof

It’s a good rule of thumb that if someone is going to make big claims, they need strong evidence to back it up. How good is the evidence?

Be empathetic

Understand why other people will reach certain conclusions. Why do certain ideas appeal to them? And what makes them so committed? Be sensitive to this when challenging someone’s beliefs.

Scepticism is a responsibility

If we want more facts and less hype and misinformation, then scepticism is a responsibility for us all. Before you share that chart, paper, or meme that confirms your beliefs, do some sceptical checks.