#ThinkfullyHabit: Become a sceptic
The term sceptic is derived from the Greek skeptikos, meaning “to inquire” or “look around”. Being sceptical is very different from being cynical. If being cynical is about distrusting information, particularly when it challenges existing beliefs or holding views that cannot easily be changed by contrary evidence, then being sceptical is about looking for additional evidence before accepting someone’s claims as true. This turns out to be a very important distinction.
Having a healthy scepticism can lead to important breakthroughs that challenge conventional wisdom.
Galileo was sceptical about Aristotle’s claim that heavy objects fell faster than lighter ones. To test this, Galileo dropped two balls of differing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And guess what? They both hit the ground at the same time, resulting in a new theory of gravity!*
Check out this video of physicist Brian Cox trying out Galileo's experiment for himself. He travels to NASA's Space Power Facility, home to the biggest vacuum in the world, to test out the experiment using a feather and a bowling ball...
WHY?
Challenging the status quo can lead to great advances. Take the story of British doctor John Snow who was a sceptic of the idea that cholera was caused by pollution or ‘bad air’, which was the thinking back at the time in 1854 when there was a sudden and severe cholera outbreak in London’s Soho. Between 1831 and 1854, tens of thousands of people in England died of cholera.
What was Dr. Snow's approach? To systematically map the incidences of cholera, which led him to spot a pattern that was otherwise unseen. He collected detailed information on where the victims had gotten their drinking water. He used dots on a map to illustrate the cluster of cholera cases and spotted that they occurred around a pump located on a particular street – it was the Broad Street pump.
“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days. As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”
He noted the outliers and inconsistencies. For instance at a local brewery, the workers were allowed to not only drink beer but the brewery also had its own water supply too. In nearby Poland street, a workhouse was surrounded by cases but appeared unaffected: this was again because it had its own water supply. As a result of his depth analysis he proposed a new hypothesis for how cholera was transmitted, he tested it systematically by comparing different groups of people, and provided evidence for the association of drinking water from the pump in Broad Street with contracting cholera.