Skeptics - double standards?

http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/skeptics-and-left-brain-pitfalls/

Challenging read about skepticism - something for you to read and please go to the link above and copy and paste to read the whole article.

Skeptics and Left Brain Pitfall - Craig Weiler

Lately, I’ve been devoting some energy and time to understanding skepticism.  There is clearly some sort of process failure going on in the minds of people who demonstrate such overwhelming resistance to psi phenomena because the behavior that they display is so completely at odds with their intelligence.  In fact, skeptics are typically very smart people, which makes their behavior all the more odd.  It’s called pseudo skepticism and there are common traits associated with it:

1. Denying, when only doubt has been established

2. Double standards in the application of criticism

3. The tendency to discredit rather than investigate

4. Presenting insufficient evidence or proof

5. Assuming criticism requires no burden of proof

6. Making unsubstantiated counter-claims

7. Counter-claims based on plausibility rather than empirical evidence

8. Suggesting that unconvincing evidence provides grounds for completely dismissing a claim

Another common feature widely observed among skeptics is an aversion to confronting contradictory evidence at all.  When skeptics are asked to read through evidence that runs counter to their views, they typically don’t.  Or of those who do look at the evidence will typically latch on to the first thing that looks like they might be able to argue against and stop there.  Most importantly, they seem to never take a step back and look at the evidence as a whole.  When new evidence is introduced, no matter how convincing, it fails to make a dent in their point of view.  Much of this skepticism comes from academicians and the sciences where one would presumably least expect it.  What stands out about these patterns of behavior is that they reflect a lack of holistic (right brain) thinking.
At first I thought that perhaps these people were simply right brain deficient, but that is not true.  Some are musicians, some are magicians and others display other forms of creativity.  The idea that skepticism is associated with right brain deficiencies might be true in some cases, but not all.  It is not a determining factor.  So what could be happening?  The answer, it turns out, may be a bit more complicated, but not overly so.  The behavior of skeptics towards psi phenomena is very similar to the behavior of people with right side brain damage.  The only difference here is that skeptics don’t have right side brain damage, which means that something else is mimicking this effect.  It appears that the left brain of skeptics is failing to connect adequately with their right brain, either through overuse of the left brain faculties, a predisposition to left brain functions or a combination thereof.  Regardless of the cause, when that happens, the left brain, which depends on the right side to grasp context, simply fills in on its own, making nonsense solutions to problems as long as the gap is filled.

Informally, I have experimented with this idea by engaging skeptics in right brain style debate over parapsychology.  The method I use is to present psychic ability as a whole, rather than focusing on any individual issue.  The argument goes as follows:  Billions of people claim to have had experiences; millions of personal accounts are available;  thousands of positive scientific studies have been done; hundreds of scientific investigations have taken place; and on and on taken as a group as evidence.  Skeptics do not seem to be able to address the evidence in this fashion.  They always move back to specificity and detail, completely ignoring the bigger picture.  and if this proves to be a dead end, they simply move on to another small and specific area.
They generally lack the ability to evaluate as a whole what these forays into detail mean.  They can be proven wrong 19 times out of 20, and only see the 20th time when they were right.  It is not that specificity and detail aren’t important in examining an issue, they are, but only up to a point.  You cannot learn anything about a 50′ wave by investigating individual drops of water, yet this is essentially what skeptics do.  They are not making the proper associations or treating the subject holistically -tasks very much associated with the right brain.