I called myself a skeptic for years, but I retired the term when, as you say, it started to be used by nutcases.
I am skeptical, in its classic meaning, about science.
For example, I consider dark matter and dark energy to be hypotheses but not proven, pending a better idea of what these substances might be other than "something to make the equations work."
I would have been similarly "skeptical" about the neutrino, except that the first actual detection happened in 1956, before I was born. I am not skeptical about the neutrino, except of course that I consider all science potentially falsifiable a la Popper.
Does that mean I consider dark matter or energy a hoax or a conspiracy, or just wrong?
Hell, no! If I were working in the field, I'd take them as useful hypotheses with not just explanatory but predictive value.
(And as you say, "string theory *cough*", which so far has no predictive value. And yet, I still understand why it exists.)
In a similar fashion, I am skeptical about quantum computing, if only because of the "free lunch" aspect, where if you had a fairly large number of qubits, it seems like you could compute "almost anything" "almost instantly".
No, not the halting problem! Yes, I know we really only have quantum algorithms for a few pretty basic mathematical calculations but "it seems clear" that if you had a few million qubits working together, the phase space you are computing in is so Vast (in Dennett's terms), that you "should be" able to get vast amounts of computation out of it.
I have a hunch that the Uncertainty Principle will cap the effectiveness of this technique. I am skeptical. But I'm interested to see what happens.
Do I believe that QC is a hoax or a fraud? Not at all! I believe in the accuracy of the published papers in the field. I am simply not sure if it will go anywhere.
Meanwhile, friends of mine on Facebook are a different sort of skeptic: they believe that almost all the world's doctors, medical researchers, public health officials and governments are in a conspiracy to present a false picture of medical science, though what the true picture might be they aren't clear.
This famous cartoon from the New Yorker sums it up quite well.
As I occasionally say, "I studied mathematical epidemiology at a graduate level and I aced it, I remember everything I studied, and my advice to you is, 'Don't listen to me, listen to the public health authorities.' Epidemiology is hard!"
No, the argument by minor authority doesn't work any better than any other. I am at a loss for what to do.
(If I had to sum up the mathematics of epidemiology, I'd say that the spread of an epidemic is well-modelled with surprisingly simple mathematics, but these models are wildly sensitive in a "chaotic" way to parameters and initial conditions, values which are extremely hard to measure accurately, and even "luck", individuals in a population!, in a way that. say. thermodynamics never has to consider.
(Or even shorter, "epidemics are unpredictable and dangerous, even with best effort.")
