Followup to: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale

Related to: Explain, Worship, Ignore

Skepticism is like sex and pizza: when it's good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it's still pretty good.

It really is hard to dislike skeptics. Whether or not their rational justifications are perfect, they are doing society a service by raising the social cost of holding false beliefs. But there is a failure mode for skepticism. It's the same as the failure mode for so many other things: it becomes a blue vs. green style tribe, demands support of all 'friendly' arguments, enters an affective death spiral, and collapses into a cult.

What does it look like when skepticism becomes a cult? Skeptics become more interested in supporting their "team" and insulting the "enemy" than in finding the truth or convincing others. They begin to think "If a assigning .001% probability to Atlantis and not accepting its existence without extraordinarily compelling evidence is good, then assigning 0% probability to Atlantis and refusing to even consider any evidence for its existence must be great!" They begin to deny any evidence that seems pro-Atlantis, and cast aspersions on the character of anyone who produces it. They become anti-Atlantis fanatics.

Wait a second. There is no lost continent of Atlantis. How do I know what a skeptic would do when confronted with evidence for it? For that matter, why do I care?