I'm just talking about the word skeptic. If you say it in a crowded room, the webster definition is probably what people are talking about. Its safe to assume when I use the word skeptical, I'm talking about concensus opinion in the form of a dictionary entry.

As far as self education goes, I think it works alright. There are some subjects which would be difficult, if not impossible, to self teach (chemistry springs to mind since most of the practical implementations require equipment and supplies that are often difficult to obtain). Things you need to take into account is access to materials, like research papers, equipment, supplies, etc. What I like about it is the pace difference, however.

To that extent I'm largely self educated and its been a successful mechanism for me. I'm at the age where I would just be graduating college and currently I'm a lead technical manager for a small company. This is the 4th promotion I've received in one and a half years, which has me contracted to give strategic advise to multi-billion dollar software companies on how they should implement their software. I'd say they have a significant degree of faith in my analytic capabilities in my field. So I wouldn't knock self education. The reason I've done well in my career is that my field is primarily a meritocracy. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Ironically when I talk about self education I'm not referring to Google. Primarily I've been an avid reader of books. Usually I'll start with some "favorites" for a particular field, then move on to books primarily motivated by exams (passing the bar, certification, etc).

In a similar vein, I'm working on educating myself to some extent in two other fields of interest - law and financial analysis. In my opinion those two fields have implicit and explicit benefits as "secondary" skills to someone like me. Financial analysis, ironically, can directly be applied to many other fields. I have been successful in applying it in order to evaluate software architecture and project bids. And for the most part these are all things which involve practical implementation, not theoretical. Its hard to debate how good I am at security analysis if I were to consistently beat the market, for instance, or how good I am at software design if I'm within 5% of budget and timeline requirements and am able to sufficiently forecast maintenance costs. Those things meet my hurdle rate for in depth investigation because they have practical and measurable benefits well worth the time investment. One of my beefs with college education is the amount of time you waste on "fluff", or learning things that have little to no practical value. I wouldn't pay $100k a year to learn about asian culture. Not because I don't think its not an interesting topic, but because I can't justify the cost and time expense knowing I'm not going to recooperate those costs.

I would agree that to some extent I'm a contrarian, but also a skeptic. And being a contrarian isn't about trying to instigate other people. It lies in the following principle of investment: You cannot get superior returns by mirroring the market. That tenet applies to many things, for instance in computer science one can assume that if a problem is a common problem and if common solutions solved that problem, then the problem would be deterministic and short lived. That's because the engineers working on it would've figured it out. So by the time I get pulled in to push a fix on it, it stands to a fair degree of reason, that some of the commonly accepted information about the problem must be invalid. Operating under that presumption will lead to the fastest fix. Most of the time I've found that you have a long term error that defies timelines its because an arrogant presumption (our hardware SDK is flawlessly written, etc) is wrong. The holdup for the fix is that they continue to maintain a degree of certainty about quality of a component that is misguided. Once that assumption is dispelled, the fix is forthcoming. To that extent I'm paid to be a contrarian and every strategic decision I advise to a client must be backed by some form of quantitative analysis.

As far as evolution goes, I'm mostly just busting your chops, but I question how certain anyone can be of something that happened long ago in the past. I've heard the argument that if there's some unknown X factor that isn't currently present or measurable today its pointless discussing, but I can't simply argue away that distinct caveat of talking about things that happened a long time ago. You cannot reproduce the creation of man today therefore the practicality of that area of research doesn't meet my hurdle rate. But even if it did, that's a pretty hard thing to argue away. I'm content to say we should agree to disagree, because we both have very different viewpoints on knowledge. Personally, even if I've conducted a full analysis on a choice path, I still view the result of that path as a "spread". Meaning, based on which risks realize themselves, any limited number of potential outcomes are possible. Therefore you can say I'm never certain of pretty much anything. I might have a very good idea, but certainty just isn't in my vocabulary.