In recent conversations on this page, I have been struck by just how intellectually lazy science-deniers usually are. This is hardly a novel observation, but I think it bears discussion. I also want to note that this sort of lazy thinking is common in politics and countless other topics, and it is very easy to fall into these bad habits. Critical thinking is a skill, and like most skills, it requires practice. Being well-informed takes hard work. Blind adherence to biases and preconceptions is much easier than rigorous fact-checking and serious contemplation. We are all prone to cognitive biases, but if we want to have rational views based on evidence and logic, then we need to acknowledge those tendencies and fight against them. We need to be humble and acknowledge the limits of our personal knowledge and be intellectually diligent and honest. Blind denial of any information you don’t like is easy and seductive, but it is not rational or intellectually rigorous.

To illustrate what I mean by being intellectually lazy, I am going to use comments on a recent post I wrote about masks and COVID vaccines (as well as a few others from related posts), and I’m going to broadly categorize the lazy responses into three groups: blind denial, refusal (or inability) to cite evidence, assumptions and generalities.

Blind denial

The aforementioned article took me a long time to write. I wanted to be thorough and present a fair and honest representation of the scientific evidence. So, I spent many days reading the literature, fact-checking, and making sure that what I was saying was correct. I cited roughly 50 peer-reviewed articles (mostly meta-analyses and systematic reviews) and read numerous others while preparing that post.

Unsurprisingly, many of the comments were, shall we say, less rigorous. They can be summed up simply as, “I don’t believe it, and you’re a gullible idiot for believing it.” None of these people presented actual logical reasons why my arguments were wrong. None of them presented problems with the studies I was citing. Indeed, most of the comments were made by people who probably did not even bother to read my original post. They simply saw a title that disagreed with their views, so they automatically assumed I was wrong.

This is the extreme end of being intellectually lazy. Automatically dismissing any information that disagrees with your view is the very definition of being close-minded and it is the epitome of intellectual laziness.

One of the things that I say over and over again on this blog is that we must always be willing to question our views. We must always be willing to actually consider contrary evidence and carefully examine the possibility that we are wrong.

I want to be clear here, there would have been nothing wrong with someone saying, “I don’t agree with you because of the following specific problems with the studies you cited…” followed by actual issues with the studies and appropriate contrary evidence. I’m not saying that you have to blindly accept contrary information. Rather, I am simply saying that you have to give it a fair hearing. If you are being given legitimate evidence, then it behooves you to take it seriously and carefully examine it before deciding whether it is correct or incorrect.

So, to everyone who rejected my statements regarding COVID vaccines and masks, my question continues to be, why? What specifically do you disagree with? Why is the evidence that I presented unsatisfactory? Or, to put it another way, if all of those massive studies from around the world are not satisfactory, then what would be? What evidence would make you reconsider your position? Being intellectually rigorous means taking the time to ask yourself these sorts of questions. If you are rejecting something, ask yourself why, specifically do you reject it? Can you cite specific problems with it, or does your response consist of vague generalities (see section three).

Let’s take a step back from the topic of COVID and talk more generally for a second. Surely, we can all agree that being well-informed inherently involves a willingness to accept contrary evidence, right? How could you ever possibly know that you are wrong about something unless you are willing to look at opposing evidence when presented with it? Refusal to even consider contrary evidence creates a self-reinforcing view that is immune to logic. Blind denial is so much easier than a careful examination of the facts, but it is a trap that we must avoid at all costs. Be intellectually vigilant, not lazy.

Refusal (or inability) to cite sources

The next form of intellectual sloth that I want to discuss is a refusal to back up your claims. This is another topic on which I spend a lot of time on this blog. “That which can be stated without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Stated another way, the burden of proof is always on the person making a claim.

So, for example, when I claimed that COVID vaccines saved millions of lives, I backed up that claim with multiple large peer-reviewed studies. In contrast, the good people in the comments simply made their claims without providing supporting evidence, and when asked to provide that evidence, they refused, disappeared, or dodged. That is intellectually lazy.

At this point, many people respond with something like, “we aren’t all walking around with a stack of papers all the time.” My response to that is two-fold. First, if you are going to enter into a public debate, and especially if you are going to enter into a debate where the other side has already presented copious evidence, you do, in fact, have an obligation to have evidence for your claims. No one should take you seriously unless you can provide that evidence.

Second, (and more seriously) at least in my experience, that response is usually an excuse made by someone who doesn’t actually have real evidence. Multiple times now I have had a one-on-one conversation with someone where I kept pressing them for sources before they finally admitted that, “well, it’s just something I heard somewhere.” That’s a big problem, especially when the thing they “just heard” is something like, “all scientists are fundamentally wrong about basic facts in their field.” Likewise, people often try to dodge a request for evidence with something like, “just google it.” This is a cop-out response that, at least in my experience, almost always signifies a position built on sand.

So, if you find yourself unable to produce evidence for your claims, really ask yourself, “why do I believe this?” Have you actually seen reputable evidence to back up your claim, or is it just something you saw/heard on the news, facebook, youtube, etc. Have you verified that claim? Have you fact-checked it and traced it back to its original source, or is it just something that you believe because it sounded correct to you? If you can’t provide the actual evidence, then why do you believe it?

This is what I mean by being intellectually vigilant. You owe it to yourself to make sure there is actually a logical reason you hold the views that you hold, and if someone asks you for evidence, and you can’t produce it, take that seriously. Don’t be lazy and shrug that off. Be introspective about your views and get to the root of why you think a given thing is true or false. Does your view trace back to verifiable facts from legitimate sources? If not, why do you believe it? Why would you want to hold a view that isn’t based on actual facts and evidence?

Once again, this applies to far more than just science, and, in my experience, an inability to cite specifics is usually a sign of intellectual laziness where someone holds a view simply because it feels correct to them, rather than because they have carefully examined the evidence.

For example, a few months ago I had a discussion with a relative who insisted that a particular politician was “destroying the economy with their socialist policies.” I responded simply by asking them which policies specifically were destroying the economy. I asked them to name the pieces of legislation. If their view was actually based on evidence, that should have been a simple task. If they were actually basing that strongly held view on a careful examination of this politician’s policies and their economic impacts, it should have been quite easy to direct me to some specifics, but they could not give me any species. Instead, they hemmed and hawed and made excuses and cited their “personal experience.” The sad reality is that they were actually highly ignorant of this politician’s economic policies and were basing their views on misinformation and fearmongering. They had been fed misinformation by biased sources, and rather than fact-checking and testing the validity of those claims, they blindly believed them because they fit with their world view. That is what I mean by “intellectually lazy” and the dangers of that approach should be obvious.

Here again, it is worth being introspective. If, continuing the example above, you think that a politician has caused X, but can’t give any actually specifics of what they did to cause X and instead have to rely on vague generalities, then why do you have such a strong conviction on this issue? Where is your information coming from? Is it reliable?

Assumptions and generalities

This final category is quite broad but essentially consists of dismissing the evidence because of sweeping generalities that are based on assumptions.

By far the most common expression of this form of intellectual laziness is the “shill argument.” Many people dismissed the large body of evidence I presented because they assumed that all the studies were influenced by money from pharmaceutical companies. To be clear, conflicts of interest should be considered when evaluating studies, but that is not what these people were doing. Rather than actually checking the studies for conflicts of interest (studies always declare them) and carefully considering the evidence in light of those conflicts (when they existed), they were simply assuming that all of the studies were hopelessly compromised and all of the worlds hundreds of thousands of scientists had been bought off. In reality of course, many of the studies were not funded by pharmaceutical companies and had no conflicts of interest, and even when a conflict of interest is present, it does not automatically nullify the study. Rather it is simply another piece of information that has to be considered (see details here).

Conspiracy theories more generally also fall into this category of lazy thinking. They make sweeping generalizations based on assumptions that they cannot verify and often haven’t even tried to verify. They try to wave a magic wand and dismiss any and all evidence they don’t like by boldly proclaiming unverifiable statements rather than actually looking at the evidence. This is, of course, so much easier than actually seriously engaging in a topic, but only one of those paths will lead to an accurate, evidence-based view of the world.

This post has become something of a rant, so I will end it simply by reiterating the title: don’t be intellectually lazy. You owe it to yourself to examine your views and ensure that you are basing your positions on a careful consideration of the evidence. Being well-informed is hard work. It takes effort to fact check, verify, and examine contrary evidence, but it is vital if you want to have a realistic view of the world rather the going through life blindly.