Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle For The Skeptical Movement?

[Belacqua]

You can guess how closed minds come about.

Children are open to information, and they take it in from their environment. If they are supplied with science-type information, they form that kind of view. If they are supplied with religion-type information, they form that kind of view. Closed minds come about when either side, once the view is formed, decides it's the only good one and is closed to alternatives. 

I think you have a misapprehension about what a scientific model is. It's not so much that a model is wrong, for the most part, rather that we correct them to better fit the available evidence.

Tacho Brahe's system fit the available empirical evidence and a lot of people believed it for a while. Then a better explanation came along. 

People thought that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and then the guy discovered H. pylori. 

Intellectual humility demands that we acknowledge that many of the things we currently hold to be true will similarly be replaced.

Please tell me what misapprehension you think I have.

It wasn't until someone got the not-so-genius idea to put wheels under their luggage, that they realized a better way to move their luggage, and today we take that for granted.

Technology improves. Someday, if we don't go extinct, the tech we have now will look primitive. People will say it was ridiculous that we didn't see some things sooner. Intellectual humility demands that we recognize this.

systems and ideologies, but does nothing for us now. We know better now, and I have no doubt in my mind with further discovery, inventions and overall advancement, that we will know better still in the future.

Ideologies and political systems are not the same as technology. Sometimes they get better, but in other ways they may get worse. Capitalism, for example, is likely to make the planet uninhabitable. A nature religion that held the earth to be sacred would be better for us now. 

This type of thinking excludes the possibility of granting errors on their own, and imposes on them the thinking that everyone else is wrong. 

And you believe that your scientific approach to knowledge is correct, and everyone who doesn't agree with you is wrong. "Oh, but in MY case it's correct!" But everyone says that. Intellectual humility demands that we recognize the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. 

"Religion" is a big word that includes a number of very different subjects. It can address ethics and metaphysics, subjects which by definition science doesn't deal with. 

Intellectual humility demands that we recognize the boundaries of what science does and doesn't do (this is why it works so well at what it does). Metaphysics and ethics may not be susceptible to proof in the way that scientific issues are. We have to deal with each issue in its appropriate form, and not imagine that our favorite method is one-size-fits-all. 

Religions can only survive as mind viruses.

Any system of explanation only survives because it is passed from one person to another. Concepts aren't really viruses -- you're using a metaphor to express your contempt. 

5. Maybe for the lucky atheists that weren't brought up with a faith being shoved into their face every Sunday. Try that same shit with an apostate, you'll get a different response.

Or with unlucky atheists who have never learned anything about religion other than it is some kind of idiot-making virus. This is narrow minded and historically false. 

I wouldn't be quick to dismiss emotional responses. With that said, you can't use in a meaningful way, e.g. what path is the shortest between 2 points with emotions, and that's where reason plays its part of an analytical approach. It's with humility that we are able to accept errors on our own part. Faiths hijack this.

You're begging an important question. You seem to have the idea that any "meaningful" way will necessarily be a geometrical, analytic approach. But people aren't robots, and meaning is found or created in all kinds of ways. To declare that emotion is never a part of meaning is silly. 

Humility demands that we take non-science seriously, when discussing questions that aren't empirical, repeatable, and quantifiable. 

Your faith in science is hijacking your ability to learn humbly from people unlike yourself.