Thoughts About Fictional Depictions Of Science From A Scientist - Tumblr Posts

Realized my biggest issue with many "skeptical" characters in fiction. Often, the things they are skeptical of - magic, aliens, etc - are things that don't exist in our world, but which are perfectly provable in the world in question and can even be studied and understood through scientific investigation. The skeptic may lack clear understanding and/or access to this thing, but there is still plenty of evidence that it exists.

Thus, it is the skeptic's lack of understanding, rather than a genuine lack of in-universe evidence for the thing, which leads to their disbelief. Skepticism towards these things then reads less to me like a "scientist" mindset, and more like the kind of self-serving personal bias that, e.g., leads some men to assume that all women must be natural caregivers obsessed with babies and unfit for fighting, regardless of what evidence exists to the contrary.

The fact that these characters are so often presented as the "scientist" character, then, honestly does a lot to explain how so many real people can hear all the scientific evidence in support of things like global warming or women/queers/poc/etc being people just like them, and still think of themselves as "just rational skeptics trying to look at the situation ~logically~" every time they manage to scrounge up (or flat-out manufacture) a single piece of supposed evidence that supports their personal bias instead.