The Agnostic and Skeptical Recruiter: The Art of Sitting on the Fence

 Management is pressing you for your opinion about whether a better, as yet undiscovered candidate for the job you’re trying to fill exists, or whether the search should be called to a halt right now.

Truth be told, because of your lingering doubts after all the work you’ve put into the hunt, you’d rather be asked whether God exists.  

Now, you would say, if you are being truthful about whether there’s a better-qualified potential candidate whom you don’t know, that, since it’s a big world, you don’t know. The problem is that although you can think you don’t know, you can’t behave as though you don’t: You are forced to choose—either end the search, or prolong it.

Agnostic Does as Agnostic Thinks? A Decision Dilemma Model

So how should you deal with the contradiction—the tension between your skeptical, “agnostic” intellectual belief and the inescapable management demand for committed action that looks so much like conviction?

This is not a bind limited to any one situation or domain of human concern. The bigger the question, the greater the tension and stakes.

For example, belief in the existence of at least one god: If you profess that you are an agnostic or a skeptic, i.e., that you do not believe any claims affirming or denying the existence of any god, or that you doubt or more aggressively will oppose all of them, how are you supposed to behave, if you are going to act on your position? 

Go to Church on alternate weekends? Sin this week, repent the next? Pray tonight, retract it in the morning? Ask all the gods to ignore  your prayers? [The lattermost being a much-needed spur for any overly passive types who need to get off their knees and butts and act decisively in accord with the maxim “The gods help those who help themselves”.]

The more specific the claim, e.g., “Zeus exists”, the more the conflicts multiply, Now, church on alternate weekends won’t be enough to salve your brain, your conscience and forestall the wrath of whatever gods may be out there; in fact, it could be dead wrong.

So, in addition to attendance at alternate Sunday sermons, trips to Mt. Olympus or at least doorstep food offerings to Zeus as well as donations to all known denominations, sects, etc., will be required as offsets against each other, and then only as partially successful compromises, since despite their proclaimed differences, most of the candidate gods have a common characteristic: being very, very jealous.  

It’s no easier when it comes to straddling the candidate fence. If you agree to a halt to the search, you’ve behaviorally, if not verbally, committed to “A better candidate [probably] does not exist.” If you agree to continue looking, it’s the opposite—“A better candidate [probably] exists.” Either way, you are behaving as though you believe when you really don’t.

“Doubt Management” Techniques

There are ways out of such “doubt management” dilemmas, but not many:

• Randomize your decision behavior, e.g., toss a coin. “Heads”, end the search; “tails”, continue it. If management appreciates probability theory and decision-making under uncertainty, this approach may be appreciated. If you are dealing with belief in gods, use as many dice as necessary, e.g., assigning one deity to each combination of two or more dice.

• Avoid all contexts that force the decision, e.g., when you’re not sure how your bet on your turn at Russian roulette with three bullets in six chambers will turn out, don’t show up. Likewise, when pressured to continue or end a job search, get management to reprioritize or redefine the job in question as a neat segue away from the dilemma. Some forms of passive-aggressive behavior will amount to this, e.g., having your family lie about your being in a coma.

• Become an “aggressive radical skeptic” or “proactive agnostic”: Vigorously argue against all the options, casting doubt on each. Management pushes for an extension of the search, argue against it; they push for a halt, argue against it. You may come across as a latter-day Socrates, but, at least you won’t have to choose between banishment and a cup of hemlock. OK, maybe banishment.

• Become a “passive radical skeptic” or “passive agnostic”:This means either withholding assent to any option, without aggressively or otherwise opposing any, or passively going along with whatever management favors. Essentially, this amounts to not suiting up for the game and the fights, even when you can’t implement #2—evasion or outright escape.

• Utilize a mixed strategy, where possible, with frequencies or proportional weightings assigned to each of the mutually exclusive behaviors. For example, if you’re not sure which team is the best or most deserving of loyalty, root for the Yankees 70% of the time, dividing the remaining 30% among all the other teams in all leagues. Given a pattern of doubt-inducing candidate searches, end them in X% of the instances, continue them in the remaining 1-X% of cases.

Keeping It Simpler

Agnostic, skeptical or merely cautious by temperament you may keep things simpler, and crisply say at least one of the following:

• I don’t know.
• I can’t know.
• I don’t believe any answer.
• I can’t believe any answer.
• I disbelieve any answer.
• You, they, etc. don’t know [I challenge your, their, others’ belief].
• No one knows [I challenge everyone’s belief].
• No one can know.
• I mustn’t act as though I know.
• I mustn’t act as though I [dis]believe.
• I can’t act as though I know.
• I can’t act as though I [dis]believe.

[These last four, albeit quite unnatural as utterances, are very important, since, as argued above, beliefs should make a difference to how we act, if they are to matter at all.]

Look at the first two in this list. If you know the basics of logic, although you will end up saying, “I don’t know”, you may be sorely tempted to say, “I can’t know”,—because you understand that it is not possible to conclusively, with 100% certainly, prove an unrestricted general “negative existential proposition”, i.e., a general “X does not exist” proposition such as “Ghosts do not exist”.

True, you can prove, and not merely confirm, highly restricted versions of these, e.g., “A female U.S. president does not exist on Earth, October 30, 2013.”  But about a “better candidate”, a “no” answer, given that you haven’t found one yet, would require an impossible search.

Even if you searched every cave, job board or beach in the world, not to mention a number of galaxies, that better candidate may have shown up only after you left; so, you’d have to keep going back to the same places, but still never really sure, until you found him or her.

In any case, because “I can’t know” sounds academically esoteric or odd, and since it implies “I don’t know”, stick with the latter.

In all of this, do not presume that skeptical and agnostic fence sitting are the same. Specific skepticism suggests adamantly believing that a specific something may not be true, e.g., the claim that candidate Jones is the best fit for the job; but it can also mean, less aggressively, not believing that something is true, e.g., that Jones is a best fit. Only the second is akin to agnostic fence-straddling neutrality—which also implies not believing that something is false.

The Difference between Skeptics and Agnostics

Hence, strictly speaking, skeptics and agnostics are quite different from each other, even though their behavior can be identical with respect to any question, however big or small the question. Even though both a skeptic and a proactive agnostic are likely to argue against a given claim that something is true, e.g., that Jones is the best candidate, only the agnostic is likely to argue equally vigorously against the opposing idea that Jones isn’t.

Only when the skeptic is a radical skeptic who doubts all claims about a specific issue does that skeptic morph into an agnostic. Likewise, that argumentative agnostic represents the most proactive among the agnostics, others, as described above, tending to simply remain silent about or evade the issue at hand.

In addition to the tactics listed above, there is one more that should be adopted as fully and frequently as possible.

Trying to remain agnostic without being antagonistic.