The Big Think published an article on April 25, 2025, How “Gibson’s law” makes it hard to trust experts, discussing the related topics of Gibson’s Law and Pyrrhonism.

Gibson’s law is: “For every Ph.D., there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.” The law is a humorous conjecture that for just about anything, one can find a Ph.D. to claim it, and another Ph.D. to refute that claim.

The article then discusses how Gibson’s law is wrong. Not all experts have equal expertise, so it's best not to assume that all experts are equal.

So far, so good, but from there the article launches into a badly mistaken criticism of Pyrrhonism. Here’s what it says,

Not all disagreements are of equal weight. This is a key point that Pyrrho the Skeptic got wrong. …Pyrrho believed that if there was an unresolved disagreement about something, the rational (and most peaceful) course of action would be to suspend judgment. If your favorite political TV show collapses into a bickering, shouting madness of experts, it’s best to just shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, heck, I don’t know.”

The ancient Skeptics were guilty of a peculiar form of the “peer by default” bias we saw earlier. They did not necessarily assume all disagreements were of equal weight, but they insisted on trying to make that the case. They were intent on playing devil’s advocate — about everything. …Pyrrho encouraged his students to gather all the arguments they could so that it seemed like debates were of equal strength (a practice called isostheneia). It was thought everything had an equal counterpoint, if you looked hard enough.

But that’s simply not true. Yes, we can gather sources arguing any side of a debate. As Gibson’s law teaches us, if we have enough will (and money), we can drag out any number of experts to defend any position. That does not mean that all arguments are equal and that all experts are peers.

This is so full of mistakes it’s hard to decide which part of this knot is best to untangle first.

I’ll choose the claim that all experts are peers. This is simply false. We have no record of Pyrrho or any other ancient or modern Pyrrhonist making that claim. What we have records of are Pyrrhonists criticizing claims of expertise made by others. Implicit in this is that one should think that the Pyrrhonists got it right and the criticized experts got it wrong.

That sure seems to rule out any possible claim that all experts are peers.

And so, dear reader, I wish to persuade you that you should prefer my expertise about Pyrrhonism over that of The Big Think. We are not peers.

So, how is it that my expertise should be preferred?

It’s because I have knowledge.

“Ha!” I can imagine my opponent saying here. “You’re no Pyrrhonist! Pyrrhonists disclaim having any knowledge.”

No we don’t. Our dispute is about what knowledge is. The dogmatists conflate two kinds of things as knowledge that should not be treated the same. They treat the empirical and the non-empirical the same. We don’t. We see a fundamental difference between believing that the sun is shining right now and believing, as for example the Stoics do, that virtue is the only good. The first kind of belief comes from experience; the second does not. An expert whose expertise is grounded in experience and based on that which is empirical is much to be preferred over the kind of linguistically clever type who can articulate plausible-sounding stories about what causes what, making claims about what’s going on about things we cannot see.

It’s like Plato’s cave. We Pyrrhonists think everybody is stuck in the cave - perhaps better called our own skulls. Knowledge is those shadows on the wall. The dogmatists claim to have knowledge of what is behind and beyond what can be seen in the cave, and that what is seen in the cave isn’t real knowledge, but just shadows.

We Pyrrhonists do not play devil's advocate about everything. We accept the empirical. It’s all of this non-empirical stuff that people come up with that we have a problem with. And we especially have a problem with it when those stories the dogmatists tell contradict the empirical facts.

“But, you Pyrrhonists go around saying there are equal arguments! It’s a big part of your practice. You even have special terms for this part of your practice: isothenia and equipollence. It’s a fact! You can’t say that stuff isn’t true!”

It is certainly part of our practice, but you’ve misunderstood the point of our practice. Like Epicureanism and Stoicism, Pyrrhonism is practiced to attain eudaimonia. Some of what we and Stoics and Epicureans do are what Pierre Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” This exercise about equal arguments is one of them. You’re treating it as an epistemological claim, but it isn’t one. It is a skillful means for bringing the mind to suspension of judgment.

We have a bunch of these skillful means. For example, we have the Pyrrhonist slogans. They’re maxims we can call up out of memory to help us induce the state of mind we’re aiming for. These slogans are not formal arguments; they’re mind hacks.

The formal arguments Pyrrhonists use are in our techniques such as the Five Modes of Agrippa, or the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus. Using these techniques, we think we can show that all claims about non-empirical matters are ultimately unprovable. This is the Pyrrhonist aporetic method. It takes a lot of work and, at times, a lot of skill. Because of that, it’s handy for the practicing Pyrrhonist to have faster, easier techniques to use to bring the mind to suspension of judgment.

However, it’s true that in some ways this is more than just a technique. The practice of Pyrrhonism requires an ability to come up with opposing arguments and a disposition towards doing so. If you can’t do it, you can’t do Pyrrhonism.

Experts are not all peers. Arguments are not all equal. But experts can be presented as peers, arguments can be presented as equal, and one can have a big think about whether the empirical data support or refute the claims, or whether it’s all just a sophisticated just-so story.