Why Smart People Still Fall for Pseudoscience | Steven Novella, PhD | The Proof Podcast EP #364

Summary

In this engaging episode of The Proof Podcast, Dr. Steven Novella discusses with host Simon Hill about why even smart individuals sometimes fall for pseudoscience. Novella, promoting scientific literacy and critical thinking, elaborates on the importance of understanding the scientific method, media literacy, and critical thinking to combat the spread of misinformation. He shares insights from his book, 'The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe', and discusses the challenges of conveying scientific uncertainty and complexity to the public. They delve into the appeal of pseudoscience and emphasize the value of skepticism and scientific education to foster a well-informed society.

Highlights

• Dr. Steven Novella emphasizes the emotional appeal of pseudoscience and the need for scientific education to combat it. 🔬
• Scientific thinking offers awe-inspiring, factual stories that far outshine pseudoscience. 🌌
• Skepticism isn't about being contrarian; it’s about seeking truth through evidence and logic. 🔍
• Critical thinking requires understanding the media's influence on information dissemination. 📰
• Real change in belief often requires shifting narratives rather than mere presentation of facts. 🔄

Key Takeaways

• Pseudoscience often appeals to emotions and desires, making it intriguing but ultimately flimsy. 🤔
• True scientific stories are far more fascinating and substantial than pseudoscientific tales. 🌟
• Critical thinking involves humility and recognizing our own cognitive biases. Always challenge your beliefs. 💡
• Scientific skepticism requires combining scientific literacy, critical thinking, and media savvy. 🔍
• Effective science communication must address scientific uncertainty and complexity without being oversimplified. 🎙️

Overview

In this episode of The Proof Podcast, Simon Hill brings on Dr. Steven Novella to explore why smart people often fall for pseudoscience. Dr. Novella delves into his personal journey from a young believer in paranormal phenomena to a skeptic armed with scientific knowledge. He beautifully outlines how the allure of pseudoscience stems from its emotional engagement and the human desire to believe in something more exciting than mundane reality.

The conversation shines a light on how scientific stories, when truly understood, offer much more excitement and wonder than pseudoscientific tales. Dr. Novella stresses the importance of distinguishing real science from fake, illustrating that genuine scientific discourse is continuously unfolding and demands critical thinking and humility. He discusses the role of scientific education as a vital tool in promoting broader skepticism and literacy.

Moreover, Dr. Novella discusses the essential pillars of scientific skepticism: scientific literacy, critical thinking, and media literacy. He emphasizes how understanding these can help people navigate the complex landscape of information overload in today's world. The duo discusses the challenges of science communication, particularly around COVID-19, illustrating the struggle between presenting nuanced scientific evidence and the public’s desire for simple solutions.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to the Episode and Guest In this chapter, the host introduces the episode and the guest, Dr. Steven Nella. They discuss the prevalence of misinformation in a world where everyone can present themselves as an expert. The conversation focuses on the significance of scientific thinking in everyday life, not just within the confines of a lab. They delve into the basics of science, the crucial role of scientific literacy, and strategies for developing a critical approach to the often misleading health advice prevalent today. Dr. Nella's book, 'The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe,' is highlighted as a key resource.
• 00:30 - 03:00: Foundations of Science and Critical Thinking The chapter titled 'Foundations of Science and Critical Thinking' delves into the significance of scientific literacy and the debunking of pseudoscience. Through an exploration of personal motivation, the chapter highlights a career dedicated to promoting understanding and critical evaluation of today's wellness trends. Key themes include clarity, curiosity, and humility in approaching scientific information.
• 03:00 - 05:00: The Appeal of Pseudoscience The chapter explores an individual's early fascination with science, beginning in high school. The person describes a journey of self-study beyond the classroom, engaging with books, articles, and popular science magazines. This pursuit reflects a deep-seated passion for science and highlights the enduring appeal of pseudoscience alongside traditional scientific study.
• 05:00 - 07:30: Skepticism and Critical Thinking This chapter explores the influence of skepticism and critical thinking, especially in the context of paranormal beliefs and pseudoscience. The narrator reflects on their early engagement with topics such as creationism, ESP, Bigfoot, and UFOs. They discuss how, during their younger years, they inadvertently equated paranormal phenomena with scientific topics, influenced by the way these subjects were presented in documentaries. This reflects a journey from belief to skepticism fueled by critical thinking.
• 07:30 - 13:30: The Role of Education in Addressing Misinformation The chapter discusses the seamless blending of factual and fictional topics presented in media, such as documentaries featuring both dinosaurs and mythical creatures like Bigfoot. This creates confusion, especially when authoritative voices of the time, mentioned through references like Leonard Nimoy's 'In Search Of', were used to promote these ideas. However, the narrative shifts towards the importance of education in discerning fact from fiction, highlighting personal growth and understanding of scientific methodology as a pivotal factor in recognizing misinformation.
• 13:30 - 17:00: Debate on Science Communication and Public Perception This chapter focuses on the debate surrounding science communication and public perception, featuring discussions on the skepticism expressed by science communicators like Carl Sagan in 'Cosmos.' The narrative explores the realization that science is a mix of reality and fiction, leading to a deeper understanding of how to distinguish between the two.
• 17:00 - 19:00: Real World Consequences of Misinformation The speaker, reflecting on their college years, describes themselves as a hardened skeptic with a strong affinity for science. Their love for science was closely linked to a commitment to critical thinking, particularly in distinguishing legitimate science from pseudoscience.
• 19:00 - 20:00: AI and the Future of Information The chapter discusses the mundane nature of daily life and the human desire to connect with something larger and more meaningful.
• 20:00 - 21:00: Closing Remarks and Guest Goodbye This chapter focuses on the emotional appeal and awe that science brings. The discussion highlights the importance of effectively communicating science to the public, in a way that marries the wonder of scientific discovery with an emotional connection. Sean exemplified this approach successfully, embracing both the immense age of the Earth and the depth of knowledge science provides about the world.

Why Smart People Still Fall for Pseudoscience | Steven Novella, PhD | The Proof Podcast EP #364 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 In a world where everyone has a platform and anyone can sound like an expert, how do we know what's real? Dr. Steven Nella joins me today for a conversation about the power of scientific thinking, not just in the lab, but in everyday life. We unpack the foundations of science, why scientific literacy is so, so important, and how to become more discerning in the face of overwhelming and often misleading health advice. His book, The Skeptics's Guide to the Universe, is by far one of my all-time
• 00:30 - 01:00 favorites. And in this episode, we use it as a springboard to navigate today's wellness world with more clarity, curiosity, and humility. You've built a career out of promoting scientific literacy and debunking pseudocience which is are things that I think about and speak about quite regularly almost in every episode. What what sparked that mission for you?
• 01:00 - 01:30 I mean it's always gone hand inhand with my love of science you know even the ear like I remember in high school you know earliest days really of really getting involved in um like self-study and science like going beyond what I was learning in the classroom to like really you know voraciously reading you know books and articles and magazines and subscribing to discover you know the thing that the science you know popular magazines that were out at the time and
• 01:30 - 02:00 you know encountering ing things like uh creationism was definitely an early issue or ESP, Bigfoot, you know, UFOs. Um I I kind of started believing uh not the creationism part, but believing a lot of the paranormal stuff when I was even younger, like in uh you know, before high school or early high school, because to me it was all the same, right? Because you watch science documentaries on TV, you know, in one documentary they're
• 02:00 - 02:30 talking about, you know, the dinosaurs and the next one they're talking about Bigfoot, you know, or whatever. And it's kind of all seamless to the end user. And um even like, you know, Leonard Nemoy and In Search of and whatever. So there were, you know, voices that my younger self respected that were promoting it. But once I started to learn about like how science actually works, it started to all crumble, right? And you know, for that I I largely credit like one of my first influences
• 02:30 - 03:00 where a science communicator was expressing skepticism was Carl Sean in Cosmos. And you know, once you start down that path of thinking, oh, okay, so it's not all good. It's some of it's real, some of it isn't real. Um, and how do we know the difference? Then all of the pseudocience is pretty flimsy. It is a house of cards and it collapses pretty quickly. So by the time I was out of into college and certainly out of
• 03:00 - 03:30 college, I would was a pretty hardened skeptic at that point. Um then my science you know my love of science you know went handinhand with the critical thinking aspect of it and specifically discerning science from pseudocience. Do you think there's a level of intrigue and and excitement to in in sort of accepting all of these I guess contrarian views as real. Sure. I mean,
• 03:30 - 04:00 I think most people are living, as they say, quiet lives of desperation and just, you know, our mundane day-to-day life, we work, we whatever. It's pretty, you know, it's pretty can be pretty boring. And so, we always, we're all looking for things to liven up our lives, make it more exciting, make it more interesting, and just and to feel connected to something bigger, something larger than us. The idea that there is something more to life than just the dayto-day drudgery. And um so yeah,
• 04:00 - 04:30 that's I think that's the that's the appeal that is the biggest appeal to all of this. Uh and so that's what people fall for, you know, that's their the emotional hook. And so it's important I think when you're communicating science and again Sean did this so well to combine you know the awe for science itself because you know I again when you really start to wrap your head around what science is telling us about the world how old the world is the long
• 04:30 - 05:00 history of life and all the things that have gone on how big the universe is how amazing it is the things that are still mysterious that we don't understand that is plenty all inspiring and it's actually way more interesting than the fake stuff. The fake stuff starts to really feel cartoonish and childish by comparison over time, you know, and the and the people who are promoting it and really believe in it don't really have good stories to tell um in terms of why
• 05:00 - 05:30 I should believe them, you know, in terms of, you know, like evidence or logic or internal consistency. it's all tends to fall flat. Whereas science, you know, real science once you start to follow it as an unfolding story, you know, you start following the research and following the science news and waiting for that next experiment or the next thing the Hubble telescope is going to discover or whatever, it's way more exciting. So, it's important, I think, in science communication, not just to
• 05:30 - 06:00 say, "Oh, yeah, Bigfoot's not real. UFOs aren't real. This is pseudocience. Acupuncture doesn't work. this is not right. You have to also say but here's what we do know. Here is what is exciting about the world. This is this isn't this is actually interesting. Um right. So the real science just way better stories than the fake stuff. But you got to sort of give that to people at the same time. Like this is nonsense but this is really exciting. You use the word skeptic a lot. you you used it just before and it's in the title of of your
• 06:00 - 06:30 book and and your podcast and I believe I've I've read you kind of clear up the distinction between skepticism and being reflexively contrarian. I think this is important because often the people who take the position that Bigfoot is re real that UFOs are real are also at least putting themselves in this category of skeptics. So what's the
• 06:30 - 07:00 distinction here? Yeah. So you know the skeptical movement the modern skeptical movement or self-identified skeptics like myself who are actually skeptical who are scientific. What we are promoting is what we call scientific skepticism and that is a you know a dedication to a few things right one is just the scientific method science is the best way of knowing factual claims about the universe right we follow
• 07:00 - 07:30 methodological naturalism we follow you know basically a scientific epistemology in terms of how we know what's true and we don't believe things that aren't supported by logic and evidence right we sort aortion our belief, our acceptance of things to the actual facts and to logic. The second piece is critical thinking, right? Because we all can be fooled. Our brains are flawed, right? We have to fully embrace humility. you know what I call neurosychological humility
• 07:30 - 08:00 which is just a recognition that our brains are imperfect tools for understanding the world that they're subject to many pitfalls to biases to bad logic and bad thinking and also we're emotional creatures so we fall prey to the desire to believe things that we want to be true rather than things that are are true and what we call motivated reasoning um so you have to understand the psychology and the neuroscience of how we come to beliefs
• 08:00 - 08:30 and how we get fooled and remain perpetually humble in order to make sure that you're thinking clearly. You don't just study the facts and study the science, but you have to think clearly about those facts and avoid being fooled. And then the third piece is just to understand the media and how information ecosystems exist in our society. how that can influence the information that we come in contact with and what other people come in contact
• 08:30 - 09:00 with and it influences what they believe. So those are sort of the three legs of the scientific skepticism stool. Scientific literacy, critical thinking, media savvy. So that's what we promote and there's good evidence. I mean we kind of figured this out by doing it, but there's good psychological research which shows that you do need to promote these things together and that if you don't, it's not enough. Right? If you just tell people scientific facts, it's not enough. It does not dissuade them from believing things that are not true.
• 09:00 - 09:30 That's kind of like the 1990s approach. So, people need to understand how we're getting to those facts. So, so scientific literacy is that is that one of the main things that is standing in the way of of really combating misinformation and disinformation? So again, scientific illiteracy is just one piece to the puzzle. And again, if we go back to like what we were doing in the 80s and 90s, for example, and before that, the um science communicators were
• 09:30 - 10:00 operating under a paradigm that we call the knowledge deficit approach, right? We assume and again Carl Sean as great as he was was operating within this paradigm because that was the that was the dominant paradigm of the time. And he even said people believe pseudocience in direct proportion to what they to their misunderstanding of real science. And that's only partly true. That's only true in some issues. You can give people all the facts, but they still will
• 10:00 - 10:30 believe nonsense or reject science or engage in denialism if they're not also engaging in critical thinking or if they're not aware that they are engaging in denialism. They're not aware of how that works. And this is issue by issue. You have to kind of understand well why do people reject for example the scientific consensus on global warming on anthropogenic climate change. It's not a knowledge deficit problem. It's not scientific illiteracy. Um they
• 10:30 - 11:00 actually people who are like really active and firmly reject climate change have above average factual knowledge on the topic than the average person. not that scientists, not than science communicators, but than the average person. And if you give them more facts, it doesn't dissuade them at all from their belief. There's something else going on. Um, they have they're living under a a certain narrative. And what
• 11:00 - 11:30 the what the evidence shows is you have to not only give them information, you need to give them a new way of understanding that information. You need to give them a new narrative. you have to replace their narrative with the new one, a science-based, a critical thinking narrative. Um, and it has to include understanding of the things that have they have fallen prey to like conspiracy theories and science deniialism. um and and all you know a host of
• 11:30 - 12:00 logical fallacies that tend to come up and and only if they really can understand those things can they start to deconstruct their belief in you know um climate change denial and you're probably not going to get there only talking to them about climate change because they're going to be engaging in defensive motivated reasoning. Right? So you can't teach them these principles in the context of their true belief system.
• 12:00 - 12:30 You have to kind of teach them with regard to something else like find something that they don't believe in or they're skeptical of or a science that they do think is legitimate and and say well why what's the difference? Why do you believe in this? Why do you not believe in that? and then ex you know so it's it's a lot easier to learn the the basic principles of critical thinking and and how science works and knowledge if your guard isn't up if it's about a topic that you're emotionally neutral about that it's not part of your tribe
• 12:30 - 13:00 or your identity then you're free to sort of explore it honestly intellectually and understand oh okay yeah I could see how people insulate themselves into conspiracy thinking and how that can be a fault and then at some point. Either the light's going to go on or it isn't going to go on. They're going to go, "Wait a minute. Is this what I'm doing with respect to my true belief over here?" And we've seen people do that. It can happen. But we've also
• 13:00 - 13:30 seen people um get to that point and have that question. And it's like Theodoric of York from old SNL. I don't know if you remember that's a too old a reference where he's like maybe we need to you know not believe in magic and elves and whatnot. Then he goes nah at the end but and some people do we've seen people in real time do that like the the the movie behind the curve about flatearthers where they're like gee am I doing this? Nah, you know I'm not I'm not doing that. But they kind of get right up to the line but then they can't emotionally step over it and challenge
• 13:30 - 14:00 what has become a tribal identity belief for themselves. So all of these things are operating at once, right? And you need to address them all. Otherwise, you're not going to really be making progress. So on on that topic of human or humans contributing to to climate change, let's let's just roleplay this. You know, for example, pretend you and I are at a dinner table together and I say to you, I think, you know, climate
• 14:00 - 14:30 change is a hoax. I think it's it's made up by governments. as a political agenda. You just kind of mentioned that you're it's not about the facts. So, you're not going to try and convince me, but it's not just about the facts. It's not just about the facts. So, would you start off with me with facts or how would you how would you go about this conversation if your goal was to try and change my view? It's a good question and it sort of depends on what I know about
• 14:30 - 15:00 you, what our relationship is, how long term is are we talking about. Is this one cocktail party or are you a friend that I have months and years to work on? You know, so if are you playing the short game or are you playing the long game here? Are you just in a comment, you know, battle with somebody on a on a blog post or something? So context is important there. But the some of the strategies we use I think the first starting point is to find common ground right that just explore like are there any things we agree on and if you can't
• 15:00 - 15:30 find any common ground it's kind of hard to move forward maybe you have to get really really basic like do we agree that science works right that science is the way to understand this question again if they don't if they reject science then you're like there's no point in going beyond that like you have to deal with that issue do first, right? So, you go sort of as fundamental as you have to until you find an area of common ground and then you try to build from there like okay well then you know how
• 15:30 - 16:00 does science operate? How does it know if something is true or not true? You know what is the threshold of acceptance? And then you you to build sort you got to sort of not laying a trap but you're sort of laying the framework to then be able to say well if this is how science works and if this is the threshold of acceptance and if this is how consensus works in science then if we plug the facts that we have at hand and then if you disagree over facts those can be resolved right if there's a
• 16:00 - 16:30 disagreement about like is it warming or not it's like well what criteria are we using to determine that and let's go let's see what the evidence shows then you can resolve kind of those disagreements but you got to plug them into a framework that you mutually accept is a way to understand what reality is if they're operating under a paradigm of well I don't believe anything scientists say because they're they're engaged in a conspiracy or whatever it's like well okay so then
• 16:30 - 17:00 there's no point in me telling you what the scientists are saying let's talk about that then First, why do you think that, you know, and why do you believe the oil industry and not scientists and you think that they have a conflict of interest, but people making trillions of dollars off of this product don't have a conflict of interest? Is that reasonable? So, that that's something like that is how you proceed, but it's dynamic. I can't give you a formula. It's got to all depends on what what the other where the other person is and and how they respond to this. No, that makes sense. So, I mean, the way that I'm
• 17:00 - 17:30 understanding that or hearing that is a lot of that is down to logic. And if you can point out that they're they have a logical inconsistency in how they're treating two different topics, it gives them something to reflect on. Yes. And yeah, other thing, don't expect the scales to fall from their eyes and go, "Oh, I guess I was wrong." What you're really doing is sort of planting a seed. You know, if you can get them to think, then you have a chance, right? It's again not a guarantee because they may at some point at some point they're you're going to you're basically
• 17:30 - 18:00 creating cognitive dissonance right cognitive dissonance is when somebody's trying to hold two beliefs at the same time that are mutually exclusive that conflict with each other and people deal with this all the time like there are things that I want this to be true but that fact contradicts it. So how do I resolve this? Most of the time we resolve cognitive dissonance. Um, it kind of depends on how emotionally invested you are in the topic. If you're not emotionally invested at all in the
• 18:00 - 18:30 topic and you just believe something that is factually wrong or it conflicts with something else you factually believe, then you just update your beliefs to whatever evidence you have available to you. Right? So, we actually are fundamentally rational people. you know, we will follow what what we call a basian approach. Whereas we have new information, we update our beliefs based upon new information. That's like the reasonable way to do that. We don't chuck out all the old information. We just sort of incorporate the new data,
• 18:30 - 19:00 the new facts. If we if it's a correction of a prior misconception or or a false belief or whatever it is and we just update our beliefs. But if you have emotionally investment, you know, for whatever reason in one in one conclusion, then that process creates cognitive dissonance, meaning all right, uh, the facts are pointing me in this direction, but I really already am locking in this other thing over here.
• 19:00 - 19:30 And so most of the time we engage in in motivated reasoning and we rationalize away the conflicting information and reinforce our tribal belief or whatever our what we want to believe our prior belief. Um so what all you could really do in somebody who has a belief or disagrees with you again you may be the one with the false belief right all you know is you disagree with somebody else. it really all you could do is create cognitive dissonance, but then they're
• 19:30 - 20:00 going to resolve it however they're going to resolve it, right? Either they're going to resolve it by updating their beliefs to a more scientific beliefs or they're going to resolve it by doubling down on their motivated reasoning and saying whatever you're part of the conspiracy, whatever they have to say to resolve that cognitive dissonance. Most of the time people rationalize. They they do the motivated reasoning route. Like most of the time people are not able to overcome again depending on how powerful
• 20:00 - 20:30 the emotional attachment is. But occasionally they do and maybe it takes time and maybe they start to see it or they're talking to their colleagues who also deny climate change and they start to see the the fallacies in them and then at some point it may break them down and they may be able to push through and say, you know what, I guess I've been deceiving myself for the last whatever years. We see that happen too. Can I predict when that's going to happen or not? No. It's all happening in
• 20:30 - 21:00 somebody's brain and it's really hard to know and sometimes people surprise you. Um, but be prepared for most of the time it's not going to work right. It's they're going to just you created your cognitive dissonance and they will resolve it. They will rationalize it away and reaffirm whatever their comfortable belief is. Yeah. It's it's a form of mental gymnastics. That's that's how I like to think of it. And and what's interesting
• 21:00 - 21:30 is at least from my experience often when that happens and there is a doubling down of of a a belief and and you kind of discard this evidence that leaves you feeling uncomfortable. I guess cognitive dissonance is it's an uncomfortable feeling. Then people often seek out and find other people on the internet that have that same view and it becomes an echo chamber and it kind of just perpetuates and strengthens it over time. Absolutely. And that's one of the dangers of you know the social media is
• 21:30 - 22:00 that it's so easy to create these echo chambers of other people who are reinforcing your tribal belief and then then it becomes like really identity and tribal and community, right? It's like now if you reject the belief you're rejecting your community. You feel you'll be rejected by your community. And that happens. Some people lose their friends. They lose their their infrastructure. They're they're they lose that community because they abandoned a belief that that was at the core of it. You know, if you're a
• 22:00 - 22:30 flatearther hanging out with a bunch of other flat-earthers, you can't one day just say, you know what, I think maybe we're wrong and the earth is really a globe. You know, that's it. your whole your that's a huge traumatic change to your life. You have to give up all your friends basically. Um so that's a that is a a huge problem. It you know back be preocial media when most people got their news from like the television or whatever there was at least more of a shared reality. there was a common sources of basic information and now
• 22:30 - 23:00 we're not sort of going to we're not being fed you know rather a you know information that has been editorially vetted to some extent right we're not sitting down and watching the evening news or reading the New York Times people still do that but I mean that's not the main conduits of information instead we are finding these um communities online that are feeding us curated
• 23:00 - 23:30 information, right? So now it's not like just all the information that's out there or information that you know is above a certain threshold in terms of its quality or reliability or verifiability. It's information curated to cater to a particular narrative, a particular community, a particular belief perspective. And that's massively reinforcing. then then that makes people think well this is reality. So you know like you know we're
• 23:30 - 24:00 so politically divided now partly because you have you know two groups of people neither of which can understand how the other group could possibly believe what they do you know and they both believe that. And why is that the case? Um it's because they're living in different e in uh information ecosystems. Their re realities are literally different you know and I'm not saying that they're
• 24:00 - 24:30 therefore equivalent. I think you know I have personal opinions about which side is closer to reality than the other. But in any case yeah the somebody who you know uh has completely different you know political opinions than you. It's not just that they have different priorities and values. It may be that they really think the world operates differently than you do. They have a completely different set of information that they're proceeding from. And it's true today in a way that just wasn't true 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And
• 24:30 - 25:00 it's really challenging because, you know, it's like everything I might say about them, they'll say about me. And it's almost like a perfect symmetry now of just it's like yeah okay we just just we're swimming in different information ecosystems. And do people this is the cynical side of me coming out of here. Do people really care about living a reality based life as as you put it or is it comfort and being
• 25:00 - 25:30 accepted by the people around them? Are those things higher on the the pecking order on the priority list? So I mean it is yeah so all of those things are true right and if you look at psychological research again looks at has asked and answered that question do people care if what they believe is actually true or not and the short answer is yes they care people do have a a truth you know bias if you will we do want our beliefs
• 25:30 - 26:00 to be true and we we do not like it when they are wrong that again that causes that cognitive dissonance But we also want to believe what we want to be true, right? And to meet all of our other psychological needs. And we also want to feel like we have a a narrative that is manageable that allows us to grapple with and understand a complex world, right? And we also want to believe the things that our community
• 26:00 - 26:30 believes, whether that's an online community or a physical community. you know, increasingly like Americans are also segregating themselves physically based upon their political leanings, you know, so we actually if you're a Democrat, you're much more likely to be surrounded by neighbors who are Democrats and if you're a Republican, you're way more likely to be surrounded by neighbors who are Republican. So, um, all of those things are true at the same time, you know, and we know this from neuroscience, like our consciousness is more like a committee, right, than a single solitary voice. We have all these
• 26:30 - 27:00 different parts of our brain beliefs, you know, narratives, whatever, all clamoring for our attention and our priority all at the same time, but something wins, right? And again, it's kind of like chaos. It's hard to predict what's going to win moment to moment. And um some at some and sometimes people might say, you know what, you you might be right. This could be wrong. But then they get sucked back into their comfortable narrative uh because of they
• 27:00 - 27:30 and gets reinforced by other people's in their community or they get more information or they find they figure out some way to dismiss the uncomfortable information whatever. Um believing prioritizing the truth like absolutely over everything else. That's what a skeptic is right. So we say, well, you know, we're going to, and this is not easy to do, and nobody does it perfectly, but at least that's the ideal we're striving for is for the whether or
• 27:30 - 28:00 not something is factually correct, logically consistent is the highest priority. I want to believe only believe things that are true and not believe anything that is not true. And I know I will never get there, but that is the goal that I have set for myself. And that's the journey that I want to go on. and probably prioritize it over all else. And that's, you know, that but that's a high energy state. That takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of emotional work. It t has to take the
• 28:00 - 28:30 ability. That's where the humility comes in. Again, you have to have the ability to say, "I'm wrong. I was wrong about this. I'm imperfect. I believe stuff that is stupid. And sometimes I'm just trying to get less wrong over time." knowing I'm never going to get to any kind of final destination of now I know everything or now I'm a um immune to being fooled or whatever. Like you never achieve that state. It's just a process. But if you don't engage in that process, then you're going to just be stuck in some narrative and you could be there
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• 30:00 - 30:30 month trial today at shopify.com/proof, all lowercase. That's shopify.com/proof to start building your business the smart way. You say that's an energy demanding state because constantly trying to prove yourself wrong is constantly asking questions, being curious, which is the opposite of the path of least resistance being to just accept something. Yeah.
• 30:30 - 31:00 And so, but part of the of what you have to do like once you like realize intellectually, you know, this is really the only intellectually honest approach to to life is you have to align your identity to that, right? So, my identity as a skeptic, as a truth seeker, as somebody who is intellectually honest, as somebody who is logical is greater than my identity as anything
• 31:00 - 31:30 else. And it's also part of it is like recognizing the phenomenon of identifying to a belief and like consciously not doing it. Like for example, I do not identify with any political party. I may be registered for strategic reasons but you know in myself like I don't see myself and I don't identify to people I know as a label as
• 31:30 - 32:00 an ideological label because once you do you're part of a team and now you have to defend your team and it's a you are you are biasing yourself and there's no way around that and so it is so freeing to just say I'm nothing I'm I don't have a political label I can trash talk anyone I want. I can accept anyone I want. I can believe anything I want. I can believe based entirely on logic and evidence and and
• 32:00 - 32:30 ethics and priorities and not to defend a team. And that is so freeing and but you could do that for everything, right? You have to just basically do that for everything. It's it is really freeing to say I just have to make myself not care what the actual truth is. And part of that is like not pegging yourself to a belief, not putting your money down and
• 32:30 - 33:00 say this has got to be true and I am staking my reputation on this being true or whatever. It's more I stake my reputation on my ability to change my mind and my ability to admit when I'm wrong and to really have a light a very light footprint on any current beliefs that I have. I have to hold on to them really loosely so that I can give them up. And in fact, not only am I minimizing the negative emotional toll being wrong has, I actually turn that
• 33:00 - 33:30 into a positive thing because oh, I have the opportunity to change my mind. And that's like that's that's a positive thing because it reinforces you know that I will change my mind when new facts come to light and I will admit error and I do you know it's also very freeing like the humility is very freeing it's like nobody is perfect nobody is free of error we all can be led to believe things that are not true and when you accept that about
• 33:30 - 34:00 everybody including yourself then you're free to screw up right you're free to change your mind you're free to be wrong like you you've just made yourself free of this sort of pressure or obligation to feel like your side, you have a side and your side has to be right. It's all toxic. It's all very toxic to logic and reason, you know. So, you have to just get rid of that. But that's a process that doesn't you can't just tell people to do that and they do it. Yeah. I think there are some some genuine fears that
• 34:00 - 34:30 come come with that with with what you're putting forward because it makes so much sense. Like if if you really are interested in the truth, then removing yourself from tribes and ideology and group think is is only going to be in your best interest. I feel like many people are are kind of missing a sense of community. So that's one reason why they gravitate towards those. And I also
• 34:30 - 35:00 feel like there's this perception or conflation I should say out there where changing your mind and saying I don't know somehow is is conflated with not knowing enough not being an expert. And so in the general public, at least from what I I see and and and hear from people, is that confidence is comes from the person
• 35:00 - 35:30 speaking in absolutes who has all of the answers. But what you're putting forward here is that someone who is interested in the truth is going to have more humility is going to be open to changing their mind, changing their mind. And so we should see that as a strength. Exactly. Humility is a strength. Right? Uncertainty is a strength. Doubt is a strength. And rather than overconfidence or bravado being a strength or not changing your mind or always being right
• 35:30 - 36:00 being being a strength. Um so but here here's the really tricky part uh is that when you again this is this is a never-ending process. When you do that you tend to then identify with being a skeptic, right? you identify with being critical a critical thinker. So then you think, well, I'm a critical thinker, so I must be right and I I can't be fooled because, you know, I I know how people get fooled and how they fool themselves. And so you have to
• 36:00 - 36:30 constantly be reminded of your humility though and say even even as somebody who is well steeped in science, who is spent years studying critical thinking, who has really tried to prioritize believing in truth, I still can fail. I can still fall prey because I have a human brain just like everybody else. I have human emotions. I have limited information. The world is complicated. We have to constantly be telling each other and
• 36:30 - 37:00 telling ourselves this. Don't fall into the because that's the ultimate trap for skeptics is to think that well being a skeptic makes me immune. It doesn't. It's like thinking that you can't be fooled by a magician. Magicians love that because they're the easiest people to fool are the ones that people people who think they cannot be fooled. Um so that's that's a constant struggle too. That's a constant battle as well. You have to always and humility is the guiding light. You always got to maintain that humility because when you lose that, you're kind of the game is over because that once you once you
• 37:00 - 37:30 have, you know, have lacked that sort of self-doubt and that humility, it means that you you're going to be overconfident in your beliefs. You know, there's like just kind of no other option. And that's if you look at listen to pseudocientists, gurus, like people who think that they know better than the scientific community, the lack of humility is blazingly the one universal feature that they share. They completely lack humility and that is their major malfunction. That is almost the
• 37:30 - 38:00 beginning of the what is wrong with the process. So the the other the other part of that is you say you might be thinking like well can we never be confident in our information then it's like well you can be but you don't have confidence in an individual you have confidence in a process and you have confidence in institutions and you can have confidence in the community. No one scientist, no one person has so much knowledge and so much
• 38:00 - 38:30 you know wisdom and is immune to these influences that you can trust them as an individual authority. Authority comes from crowdsourcing, right? It comes from lots of people arguing with each other, you know, calling keeping each other honest, calling each other out and and biases will tend to average out across a community of scientists, a community of philosophers, of people. And you know,
• 38:30 - 39:00 not that there can't be group think. Again, there's always a wrinkle, right? There's always a caveat. There could be you have so you have to worry about group think as well but where basically you're a group of people acting as a single entity but um if you keep you know that's why you have a community following a process that's capable of self-criticism that is capable of changing their minds and they're constantly sort of challenging what they believe against the facts against reality keeping each other honest and
• 39:00 - 39:30 that's a science that's a well functioning scientific community. There are pathological scientific communities, but that's a well functioning psych, you know, scientific community. And that's why science works because it does all of those things. And it is ultimately humble, which I know is not the sort of image that the public has of scientists. They're kind of seen as know-it-alls, but really when you're talking to a scientist and you're in the community, like you're in the that world, man, humility is always front and center that
• 39:30 - 40:00 because you can't function without humility. You cannot function as a scientist without it because you're constantly trying to prove yourself wrong. That's how science works is you trying to prove yourself wrong, asking the people, why am I wrong here? Tell me how I'm wrong. How how can I be getting this wrong? that model that you just kind of walk through of of science and and when it works at its best where there's a a kind of centralization of information, a
• 40:00 - 40:30 consensus, institutions putting information out relies on trust in the centralized institutions. Is it just me and you've been in this space for longer than I have or is that trust in institutions and here I'm thinking about you know cardiology guidelines for you know medical interventions and dietary approaches. It feels like there is an erosion of trust in those
• 40:30 - 41:00 institutions over the past you know 5 10 15 years. Absolutely. I just wrote an article about this on science-based medicine like last week, you know, just by coincidence that the this lack of trust is a core problem and I was exploring why why are we here? How did we get here? And you know, part of it is why should we have trust in the first place and again it's like yeah you don't really I mean to some extent you have to trust individual people you know because science is not an abstract
• 41:00 - 41:30 thing. It it's what people are doing. You know, institutions are made of people, right? It's like we we could believe in the constitution abstractly, but it doesn't mean anything unless people are supporting it and following it and believing in it. You know what I mean? So, science is the same way. Our institutions are the same way. But again, if there's enough people and there's transparency and there's a process and there's self-reflection,
• 41:30 - 42:00 etc., and there are standards that are objective. All of those pieces are in place. Then the an institution can achieve a sort of level of trust and reliability that no individual could. Um part of that is by admitting error, being transparent, holding themselves accountable, holding each other accountable. All those things have to be in play. I think we largely have those in lots of institutions. I think acade academic institutions, again, no one no one's perfect. I'm never going to ever claim that any person or institution is
• 42:00 - 42:30 perfect or beyond criticism. It's all a work in progress. But there are some institutions like scientific, professional, academic that have earned a certain level of trust, a certain level of respect for their process, for their rules, for their ethical guidelines, for all the things that make them function as as a you know professionally. And what we have seen over the last 20, 30 years even has been this slow erosion of trust. And it's been deliberate. It's
• 42:30 - 43:00 not like it's not just something that's just happening in the culture and nobody knows why. This is a deliberate campaign because um a lot of people, a lot of other institutions or entities um they are bumping up against these institutions, right? And so they whether they whether conscious this is their approach has been to erode trust in the institution. So like for example and
• 43:00 - 43:30 this is the main example I used on science-based medicine because it's a medical blog is the whole alternative medicine movement right at the end of the day what is what is alternative medicine what is that what do you want to call it complimentary or whatever all the very shifting labels that they have at the end of the day it's about eroding trust in the institutions of science and medicine that's what they are doing uh because they want to substitute themselves as gurus
• 43:30 - 44:00 right? As they want the public to put their trust in them as individuals, not because they're following any process, but because they have intuition or insight or whatever it is. They're just special people that they can know what's right even be even when hundreds of scientists are getting it wrong or whatever. They're mavericks or they're, you know, whatever. That's their their cults of personality built around around the sort of guru theme. and but they don't but if they're being
• 44:00 - 44:30 held to objective standards, well then they can't function, right? Um if they have to prove their claims with facts and they have to practice within an ethical framework and they need to constantly demonstrate their own expertise and the safety and efficacy of their interventions, well, they would be doing science if they were doing if they were doing all of those things, right? They would be practicing science-based medicine. So they but they want to practice alternative medicine and they need to erode the the institutions that
• 44:30 - 45:00 are keeping them from doing that and they have successfully done that. They have eroded trust in experts in the very notion of expertise itself partly by portraying expertise as elitism. Right? It's like don't believe those elites. They'll screw you over. Right? So don't believe those so-called experts. Look how and then they emphasize every time we got things wrong. wrong. It's like, well, yeah, we admit that we get things wrong. That's part of the process. So, it's kind of a no-win scenario, you
• 45:00 - 45:30 know. Um, and this is what the fossil fuel industry did to climate scientists. They had a systematic campaign of eroding public trust in climate science and climate scientists. Right? This is what emailgate was all about. It was about eroding trust. You can't believe these guys. They're not trustworthy. They're out for themselves. They're just trying to get their next grant dollar, right? So that's why they're lying. Um, you can't trust government, you know,
• 45:30 - 46:00 which is ironic because now the people who have been saying that are are now the government and they're kind of playing this game where it's like you can't trust the government, but we are the government. But it's but again that's but they have to hold true to that narrative. So they have the deep they invent the deep state, the government within the government that you can't trust, right? So and then and this all gets tied in with conspiracy thinking, right? there has you have to engage in a conspiratorial mindset in order to believe all of this. It's like well why isn't the media holding them accountable because they're part of the
• 46:00 - 46:30 conspiracy? Why aren't doctors holding the pharmaceutical industry liable because they're getting paid off by them? Like so everyone becomes part of this global massive conspiracy in order to explain why you can't trust anybody. So you have so that creates fear and anxiety and uncertainty and so you look for a safe haven and then you have the snake oil pedaler selling this comforting package telling you exactly what you want to hear. Nope, this is simple. It's natural. It'll make you
• 46:30 - 47:00 feel good and you don't believe those all of those industrialized medical experts or you know elitists or whatever. It's very effective. It's very effective and it has been working and it has absolutely eroded trust in all of these things. Not fatally. They still relatively have like science and and scientists still have relatively high trust but only relative to everything else which is super low you know but but
• 47:00 - 47:30 it is eroding and it's a problem. It it is absolutely a problem. the hardest problem that we deal with because our message is complicated, right? Our message is well, it's all nuanced and we don't know anything for sure and we are wrong all the time and we're, you know, we have to proceed with humility and it's not clean and simple. It's complex and hard. It's like it's hard work. There's no easy shortcut to getting to an answer. You
• 47:30 - 48:00 have to do the hard work. And you know that's another sort of cognitive dissonance thing like yeah but people want the simple hack you know they don't want the hard work. That's speaking to me in a number of ways. I recently did a a debate on someone else's podcast. I'm not sure whether I should have I I might get you to comment on that after I share this with you. But essentially I was asked to to come on and debate this American doctor who believes the optimal diet for humans is just steak.
• 48:00 - 48:30 And and so I thought, well, this is interesting. I'd love to know what evidence he's using to support that that view. And, you know, I was pretty confident in in my position going into it, although there is definitely some uncertainty in the exact specifics of of diet, but I feel like there is good evidence that supports a a broad dietary pattern. and he was was blaming the
• 48:30 - 49:00 American dietary guidelines for all of the poor health across America. And I pointed out to him, I said, "That's interesting because we have quite a lot of of data that suggests a very small percentage of the American public, it's 5 to 10%, actually adhere to the dietary guidelines." So I find it it difficult to blame guidelines that people are are not able to follow you know and from my end the you know the guidelines there
• 49:00 - 49:30 there's room for improvement but there's a lot of evidence behind them and and really the issue to me seems that we can't the food environment the socioeconomic status all of these disparities that are affecting people from adopting a diet that is advocated for and recommended within the guidelines seems to be a more likely explanation rather than the guidelines causing chronic disease. But when I put that to him, he would just go off into
• 49:30 - 50:00 storyland. And he wouldn't answer my my question directly. And going into the to the debate, I kind of had this mindset that I don't want to be argumentative. So, I probably didn't do a great job bringing him back and holding him to that that question and let him go a bit. And I noticed in the comments, at least a lot of people from my community seemed to pick up that pattern of question and then a response with a story. But there were there were
• 50:00 - 50:30 still a large number of people who who were convinced by essentially a story without any evidence. Yeah. So yeah, the debate debate has been going on for a long time like should we debate pseudocientists, right? And so I'll answer that question first. Um the answer is maybe you know it depends on a number of variables. Uh one is like who are you debating and why in what venue? You know who is the audience? Is it moderated and controlled or is it
• 50:30 - 51:00 open-ended? Um, and I wouldn't debate unless you have at least two things. One is you have topic expertise so that you can, you know, you know the evidence pretty well. And two, you know what the other person's going to say, you know the pseudocience. Um, for example, evolutionary biologists, you know, have many of them
• 51:00 - 51:30 debated Dwayne Gish, who was a creationist, and they, you know, I think they won on points. But as far as rhetorically, they lost the debate. You know, how did they, how did an evolutionary biologist lose a debate to a creationist? Well, it's because they didn't know what he was going to say. They don't they might understand um evolution, but they don't understand creationism. They don't understand pseudocience. They don't understand the methods that he's going to use. And so they felt they he they
• 51:30 - 52:00 walked into every trap he laid for them just because they're just again they were they were knowledge deficit problem, you know, paradigm. They were saying, "Oh, we just need to give people facts." Saying, "Yeah, no, it's not not what you need to do at all. you need to confront all of the logical problems that are going on and all. Anyway, so if but if you're if you're debating somebody on an area where you are confident and you know the pseudocience, you know the methods they use to create their false beliefs and it's going to be
• 52:00 - 52:30 controlled enough that you can sort of hold their feet to the fire, it can be successful. You know, you can make some progress. The problem is, you know, what you one of the problems is like what you pointed out is like they will they're just using it as a platform to tell their stories and they're not actually debating you. What are you accomplishing? You're just giving them a platform. They're talking at you, you know, or if they're going to give you what we call the Gish Gallup, you know, named after Dwayne Gish, where he's just going to throw out a hundred misconceptions and you'll get to maybe 10 of them, you know, over the course of
• 52:30 - 53:00 the debate. You can't It takes a lot more time to correct a misconception to create one. So, if you if it's open-ended rather than very than moderated and focused, you can't win because they're just going to they're just going to machine gun you with nonsense. Um, so yeah, you know, but again, this it's also a good illustration of what I was saying is here you have a guru, right, who thinks that he knows better than all nutrition scientists, that he has the the hack, the simple thing, the formula, and that all these scientists
• 53:00 - 53:30 are all compromised. because they don't know what they're talking about and they're making a mistake that he can see through because he's got the perspective or the insight, you know, and uh right and it's telling people something. All you have to do is just eat steak all the time and you'll be fine. And they have stories to tell, right? They have these, you know, again, they to a scientist they sound ridiculous, but to but they're they're designed to be compelling to a lay audience. That's what their point is. Their whole goal is not to answer to facts, not to be held accountable to logic and evidence and
• 53:30 - 54:00 science, but to tell stories. To tell stories which support their narrative, which support their position as a guru, which support their products that they're selling, whatever the narrative is that they're selling. Um, so yeah, that doesn't doesn't sound like it was a it was an amendable venue for a debate. um if he was able to get away with that. Uh but that's you know what you I think you have to be thinking of going in. I've done debates. I've done lots of
• 54:00 - 54:30 debates. I think I've won them all to be honest. Just you know with all due humility I've only because I and that's only because I only go into it when those when those criteria are met. When I think all right this is on a topic I know inside and out. I know the other side. I can almost tell them what they're going to say before they say it which is very effective. You know, if you undercut their position before they even have a chance to lay it out, then they look foolish or then it throws them off their game. You got to be operating at that level. Otherwise, it's you're probably going to get overwhelmed with
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• 55:30 - 56:00 order. Yeah, I'd if if some of those are available on the on the internet, I'd love to put them into the the show notes for people to watch. Yeah. I mean, it's it's been a little while, but I think most of them were are on somewhere online. As a a clinical neurologist and Yeah. and someone who's just commenting on misinformation and disinformation in general, what are the the real world consequences here if we don't get this right? I mean,
• 56:00 - 56:30 there everything really. I mean if you so if we first of all if you live in a democracy where you're voting right then the public understanding of topics is guiding to some extent our voting patterns right so again we could take an issue like global warming again where you know if people understand the science understand the implications and vote accordingly we can we can get this done right we can we can deal with it we have the technology we know what we need
• 56:30 - 57:00 to do It's not unsolvable. It's hard. Not going to say it's easy. It's going to be a massive investment, but we can do it. The models show it's like, well, if we just do these things, it'll be okay. If the public doesn't understand it though or they don't prioritize it because they don't they don't really really get it or they're being convinced that oh it's not going to be that bad or the scientists don't know what they're talking about and it doesn't become a priority then you know then we will see
• 57:00 - 57:30 runaway global warming that will have dire that will cost our society trillions. you know, it'll there's a a cost in lives, a cost in um in in money, a cost in quality of life, in disruption, massive cost. And then you can go down every issue. Look at RFK Jr., who is now the HHS secretary. Again, he is just a a conspiracy and disinformation machine. He believes all
• 57:30 - 58:00 kinds of nonsensical stuff. Again, because he thinks he knows better than everybody else. He has no no humility whatsoever and there's already people dying because of what he's done and there's already a body count associated with that. So we make decisions for ourselves, we make decisions for our family and we make decisions for society that are increasingly science-based, right? We live in a technological world, you know, run by science and technology and it's only
• 58:00 - 58:30 getting more so and rapidly. You know, think about, you know, artificial intelligence and the impact that's having on our world or, you know, the uh genetic manipulation, you know, should we be genetically modifying our crops or not? You know, that's a big collective decision that we're making. Are we going to feed the world or destroy the world with GMOs? I think we're going to feed the world. I think that all, you know, anti-GMO um narrative is all propaganda and nonsense um and misinformation and
• 58:30 - 59:00 disinformation. You know, I can strongly make that case and that is directly affecting directly affecting policy which is directly affecting people's lives. How many poor children are going to go blind because Greenpeace opposed golden rice on ideological pseudoscientific grounds? Where do you think most people get tripped up if we use this as an example when it comes to GMO crops? Is it is it high level that
• 59:00 - 59:30 this isn't natural therefore must not be good? Yeah. So for that particular topic, that is one of the few topics where it really is an information deficit problem and it's the one that can be fixed with information. And that's because the anti-GMO attitudes are the result of a deliberate anti-GMO campaign mostly funded by the organic lobby because big organic is a thing
• 59:30 - 60:00 too, right? Right? It's a multi-billion dollar industry. And they're like, "Hey, you know, we could sort of we could promote our brand by trashing the other brand by fear-mongering about GMOs." Now, they may again they may really believe what they're saying and that I think there is some ide appeal to nature kind of ideology in there. Of course, there is because that's what the whole organic thing is all based upon anyway. But it's built it's a house of cards built on direct misinformation. And you know, it's pretty
• 60:00 - 60:30 straightforward misinformation, too. And when you correct that, if you really if people are willing to listen and update their factual knowledge, it does change their minds. So, that's one fortunately where we can do that. For example, most people think that Monsanto sued farmers for accidental contamination of their farms. Never happened. It's never happened. Most people are shocked to hear that that's the case. In fact, the organic lobby sued Monsanto
• 60:30 - 61:00 preemptively saying they're suing farmers for accidental contamination and we want to sue them to prevent them from doing it in the future. And in a court of law, they were unable to produce a single case where it happened. So now we're in within a within a court of law, right, where there are rules of evidence. You can't just make up, right? And in that venue, they couldn't produce a single case where it happened.
• 61:00 - 61:30 All the usual cases that people reference are not cases of that. They're cases of people deliberately trying to basically steal genetically modified seeds from the company. Essentially, all those cases were about one thing, and that's patent exhaustion. They were claiming that Monsanto's patent for their genetically modified seeds was no longer valid because of A, B, or C,
• 61:30 - 62:00 right? Because I'm growing these seeds from the plants that I grew or because, you know, I harvested these from the roadside or whatever. and and Monsanto was arguing that no that nothing ends the patent, you know, nothing cuz once you get outside the patent, then it's it's over, right? They basically because seeds are self-reroducing. So, if you could endlessly reproduce GMO seeds, then the
• 62:00 - 62:30 patent's useless. So, that's what the lawsuits were all about. people who were arguing that Monsanto Monsanto's patent didn't apply to them and their situation. Monsanto was saying yes it does. It was not about accidental contamination. Um most people are surprised to find out find out that their GMO seeds are not um sterile, right? They're not like you can't reproduce with them. That's that was that was just a lie. That was yes, they were working on that technology, but
• 62:30 - 63:00 they never brought it to fruition. It never was on the market. Most people will be surprised to find out that most farmers don't save their seeds. You know, why would you do that anyway? It's it's expensive. It's it's pain in the ass. If they get wet, they could be ruined for the next year. So, it's so much easier. You don't have to separate out seeds and purify them and store them and keep them dry or whatever. Just buy new seeds next year. It's actually cheaper and easier to do that. So, you know, arguing that, well, farmers want
• 63:00 - 63:30 to save their seeds and replant them. No, they don't. not in industrialized nations anyway. They may maybe in you know other parts of the world it's different different sort of different story but anyway you can go down the line every single anti-GMO belief is factually incorrect. It's factually incorrect. No, there is no studies that show that there's any biological harm. You know we we in fact we have massive evidence to show that there is no harm from consuming GMOs. They are perfectly safe. So, and if you do that, if
• 63:30 - 64:00 somebody has the patience and the curiosity to listen to the evidence to to verify it, you realize that there really isn't any valid reason left to oppose GMOs. You really could just go down the line and prove every single one wrong. And so, that works. That in that one topic that works. Yeah. But ultimately, I think that last bit that you just said there is really important. patience and curiosity because that's
• 64:00 - 64:30 what we're asking, right? Because if if if people aren't going to just trust the institutions, if if that trust in institutions is has been eroded or is eroding, then in order to improve scientific literacy, get people to update, evolve the way they're thinking about these issues across society, it's going, especially when the horse has bolted like on this topic, right? It's going to require immense
• 64:30 - 65:00 amount of patience, curiosity, and humility. Whereas, we live in a world where in within a couple of seconds, you can share something on Instagram or on Facebook or on on on X that confirms a belief maybe about GMO crops without any patience or curiosity and then you're just perpetuating that idea. So, that's the meta question, right? That's the deeper questions. Like we on each of these issues, we could say, well, this is, you know, we have to deal with conspiracy thinking or we have to deal
• 65:00 - 65:30 with denialism or we have to deal with factual misinformation or some combination of those. But this all assumes that you're dealing with people who have some kind of relationship to reality, have some kind of intellectual curiosity and honesty. And that you know so there is um that gets to like well we need to support education to the point where we have a basically scientifically
• 65:30 - 66:00 literate and a basically critically thinking electorate you know populist people citizenry. If people don't have a certain minimal amount of just intellectual virtue, curiosity, whatever, it's all kind of pointless, right? Then and you're not going to succeed on any of these issues no matter what strategy you use. But I, you know, the the good news is that most people, you know, humans are pretty curious species. You know, we do want to know
• 66:00 - 66:30 stuff and we do find things interesting, you know. So there is this sort of commonality there that you can appeal to. Again, you just have to, you know, I think it's that's why again it's important to convince people that real science is interesting. It's fascinating. It's not just some egghehead nerdy boring thing. You know, it's fascinating. Um, and has really good stories to tell, you know, you know, just absolutely all inspiring. Um, and that's why you have to convince people that like being critical thinker is
• 66:30 - 67:00 empowering. It's really empowering. It's freeing, you know, and when people get to that critical threshold where they buy into that, you know, then then they're kind of hooked, you know, then it's then it's just refining it from there forward. But yeah, you have to get people to a certain critical threshold of respect for truth and knowledge and intellectual curiosity and legitimacy. Um, and then there's also the trust component, which
• 67:00 - 67:30 is another thing because they could have all those things but not trust anybody and be a conspiracy theorist and then they're also lost, you know. So, yeah, there's a lot of points of failure which is why again our job is really tough. We have our, you know, our fingers in a thousand holes in the dyke, you know, all at once. Any one any one of them could be your downfall, you know. Um but and again without a a decent basic education again it's not really it's going to be very hard to make any progress. What would
• 67:30 - 68:00 that look like? You know I think studying the limitations of your brain, studying the scientific method and what it is and what it is and how we use it, why we need to use it. This this can be years and years and years of of work. But if someone was to just start on this, what are the, you know, three, four or five things that you think someone could relatively quickly grasp that would make a big difference? I mean, first of all, there's some good primmers out there, you know, not to
• 68:00 - 68:30 promote my own stuff, but I'm going to do it anyways. Like our book, this the skeptic's guide to the universe was designed to be your first entry into this world. designed to be a primmer where somebody who knows nothing about any of this can read that with lots of examples that most people can relate to to say to like say here are all the pieces you know here's why you need to have some basic understanding of science here's how we def fool ourselves here's how we think logically you know here's why people deny science this is conspiracy thinking it's all there um
• 68:30 - 69:00 and then in terms of like what would be a good specific issue that's dependent on the person and I usually ask them what are you interested in what do you believe in what you what do you not believe in? Let's talk about that. What are you skeptical of? Because most people are skeptical of something, right? So find them and then ask them question. What? Engage their skepticism. Why don't you believe that, you know, or how would we know or find a neutral topic that they're interested in, right?
• 69:00 - 69:30 What doesn't matter what it is, you know? people ask you questions about something and and you say, "All right, well, let's" You don't just give them like, "Oh, this is what scientists have to say about it, right?" And again, this if you're raising kids, this is a, you know, this is something that I specifically endorsed and did with my own girls. Almost never answered a question with a fact, right? You answer a question with how would we know that? How could we know that? What what would be convincing? What would be enough evidence? What are the other possibilities? How do we know this isn't
• 69:30 - 70:00 true? It's a process, right? It's a journey. And so you you have to engage with what people are interested in. You have to engage with what they already believe and don't believe. And you bring out their inner skeptic, right? You got to bring that out. Engage with that. Show them how empowering it is. Make them feel good about the control that it gives them. And it also protects you. It's like you don't want to be fooled by a con artist, right? You don't want to be scammed. Nobody wants to be scammed,
• 70:00 - 70:30 right? Nobody wants to be a chump. It's like, well, how do you not be how do you not be scammed? Let's talk about that. Let's talk about not being scammed. That's you do that by recognizing deception. Well, how do they try to fool people, but you know, and then that's another beautiful entry point. Magic is another entry point. People like to be entertained by magic, but it's like, yeah, but how do you think they do that? How are they fooling you? Do you think somebody could do that and
• 70:30 - 71:00 not tell you it's a magic trick and fool you just as well? Maybe to get your money? You think that could happen? How would you know? If you could be fooled by that guy, how do you know you're not being fooled by somebody else doing the same thing, but maybe not honestly for entertainment, but dishonestly to get your vote or to get your money or whatever. How do you know? And there's lots of hooks that you could get to people, but you got to sort of meet them where they live, you know. Um, the
• 71:00 - 71:30 better, the more you know someone, the better able you are to do that. But if you don't, like if you're going blind, I just start by asking questions. Yeah. I was I was chuckling when you were sharing that about your daughters because my my dad, he's been a professor of physiology for 40 years, and I can just remember vividly any question I would ask him. I would rarely get a fact. I would always be hit with another question. Right. But that's the way you learn. That's the Socratic method, right? That's it's it is great and it's so much more interesting. Remember when my like whatever four or fiveyear-old
• 71:30 - 72:00 daughter asked me what color dinosaurs were? Could have given her some answer. The answer is not interesting. What's interesting is how could we know what the answer is? How do we know from bones what color they were? You know, and then that leads to a discussion of well what how could we know? I was like, well, we could think about it from the point of view of what do animals look like today and why do they look that way? Well, some animals are camouflaged because that makes them more stealthy. So maybe some dinosaurs were camouflaged
• 72:00 - 72:30 to make them so we could sort of reason our way to what they might have looked like. We could also, you know, look at, you know, and is there a possibility there's any trace fossils, maybe something other than bones that might survive? And that leads to discussion. Well, yeah. Some scientists have found proteins, you know, in the fossils and that are coloring proteins that would we could say, oh, that protein is red. That would give red color to feathers or skin or whatever. So, sometimes we have
• 72:30 - 73:00 direct evidence of what they what they might have looked like. And that's more interesting than just saying, oh, this is what they look like, or this is what color they were. It's just double clicking on things with a through a lens of curiosity and and wanting to to know more than just the fact that that is but it's how we know like that's like like we we as we say on our show all the time we don't tell people what to think. We try to model for people how to think, how to better think, how to think more, you
• 73:00 - 73:30 know, consistently and logically and effectively. Um and yeah obviously there you have to deal within with facts right you can't do be doing this in a vacuum so we have to be work operating within a framework of facts of information of data but you got to be operating in a in a way that is telling you how to think about those facts how to think about that data how to analyze them and evaluate their quality and reliability
• 73:30 - 74:00 and resolve apparent conflicts and suspend your belief when we don't know and that's okay and put error bars on things like sc like think scientifically scientists have error bars on everything right nothing is 100% yes or no everything is is a maybe it's just different levels of confidence and you sort of get people to think that way not black and white not yes or no right or wrong but just what are our confidence intervals here that's it just changing
• 74:00 - 74:30 the way people think about data think about knowledge can have a huge impact because if people are thinking about it in this simplistic right or wrong true or false way then it's you know they're very susceptible and then when they find out something like that when they find like scientists have changed their mind on something they think oh they don't know what they're talking about it's like no no no new data came along they adjusted their confidence intervals that's it that's always happening this is not they believed A now they think they're wrong and they believe B that's not how it works they're just you know updating
• 74:30 - 75:00 their data Yeah, that's that's what's happening. That happened a little bit in CO I noticed where there was some change in recommendations and you know I even had friends who who kind of pointed to that change through really no fault of their own just just not being educated in in science as the government flip-flopping and going back on its word as opposed to sort of embracing this idea of uncertainty and as new data presents recommendations can change.
• 75:00 - 75:30 But, you know, perhaps the government could have made that clearer to the to the public. I disagree. They made it absolutely clear. They made it completely clear that we had no idea what was going on initially. They were very transparent about the fact this is a novel virus. We have no data on this virus. We are building this plane as we're flying it. I've heard them say that many, many times. They said this is a this is our current recommendation
• 75:30 - 76:00 based upon the evidence we have right now but we don't really know and they changed those recommendations as new data came up and they said this is why we thought that we thought that you know that the COVID was aerosolized more than it was and it turns out it wasn't so you know the masking is really effective but social distancing was not that not that important remember there were all the washing the hands at first I was like, yeah, we don't know that it's not transmitted through contact. So, you
• 76:00 - 76:30 know, if you want to be safe, you can wash your hands. Then, when we found out it wasn't transmitted that way, like, ah, you don't have to worry about it anymore. So, again, it's all probability. Again, science works with probability, risk versus benefit, right? Medicine is all about risk versus benefit within a framework of what we know probabilistically. And so, yeah, you have to sort of make some bottom line. Yeah, this is probably right now the best recommendation we have, but again with massive error bars on it.
• 76:30 - 77:00 Um, could they have done a better job of communicating that? I don't know. I was pretty damn impressed with how Fouchy and others were communicating the uncertainty and the preliminary nature of the information. The media, not so much. You know, the media gets filtered through a media who doesn't who is like black and white. So, you got to account for that. But also, it was weaponized politically. It was absolutely misrepresented and weaponized politically. And so it really was a no-win scenario at the end of the day.
• 77:00 - 77:30 But if you go back and get I lived through it and wrote about it in real time and was following it very closely. They were absolutely transparent about our level of knowledge and uncertainty every step of the way. And even after the fact like, yeah, we were wrong about that. This is what we thought. This is why we made that recommendation. We we got more data and it turns out that wasn't true. And so we modified our recommendations. I don't know what else they could have done. I am absolutely excited to share an exclusive offer with the proof community. This is a limited
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• 79:00 - 79:30 kidney function, as well as selenium and iodine nutrients that are essential for thyroid and overall health, yet rarely tested. So, what are you waiting for? Run over to functionhealth.com/simonhill today and be one of 1,000 listeners to score a $100 credit. That's functionhealth.com/simon. I think going a level higher. So more broad broader
• 79:30 - 80:00 science education. So, not just we were wrong about it, but having discussions, people like yourself talking about science that making it clear that this is not just a a circumstance that we're seeing in CO. This is science in general. Here are here here are 10 things you really need to understand about science that are going to help you better understand CO. I mean, it was there. It's not like again, the internet exists. All this
• 80:00 - 80:30 information was there. It was all there and I see again I was watching very closely and commenting on and critically analyzing a lot of the you know the the health uh public health officials and their their interviews their press conferences and how they were doing some did better than others right sometimes like ah that really wasn't a good way to say that or that was probably going to create a misconception so they failed there too I'm not saying they were perfect but on the whole they pretty
• 80:30 - 81:00 much did what they were supposed to do. I think they communicated on the whole pretty well. It was just that they were commu, you know, again, it's like you are you saying that we should have educated the public about the scientific method and critical thinking and SK? Absolutely. Absolutely. I would wish we would do that, but is that exist in our culture? Do we have is is TV and all these all these outlets are they engaged in teaching critical thinking lessons all the time or are they just bottomlining it for the public most of the time? So given this cultural context
• 81:00 - 81:30 that they were dealing with, they did a pretty damn good job. And it really was a hit job. It really was a political hit job to sort of, you know, create this narrative that they lied and they were telling they were deceiving the public. It's all It was really just a political hit job. They literally demonized Fouchi and tried to make him into the bad guy. But I mean, I lived through it and was critiquing it all the way. and the, you know, the the good
• 81:30 - 82:00 ones did a great job of putting it all into context. Uh, you know, as good as you can do given the level of uncertainty that we had at the time, you know, but it's a great example of why, again, why critical thinking is so important, you know, because it was so easy to fool people with a narrative of these people don't know what they're talking about or they're lying to you for some reason or they're taking your liberties away and it doesn't really work or whatever. The political narrative was very compelling. was very clean and and punchy and it's hard to
• 82:00 - 82:30 oppose that with well we're not really sure but this is why we kind of think this and the evidence is preliminary but you know risk versus benefit I would er on the side of being cautious or whatever you know it's hard to that's where we were that's hard to communicate you know and especially if across the population there is not an appreciation that science is all about uncertainty and that when someone speaks with uncertainty this is usually a sign that that scientist is being objective and
• 82:30 - 83:00 has humility. So, I guess the point that I'm trying to make is I just wish people better understood what good science communication looks like so that then they weren't walking away from press conferences thinking that, you know, nobody knows what's happening or what's going on and people are flip-flopping. And it wasn't so much the press conference as the commentary afterwards lying about the press conference. That was really the problem. You know, there's also the angle here that when you're when you're engaging in public
• 83:00 - 83:30 health communication, there are there's a body count that is attached to what you say. And so, yeah, you know, absolutely. Did they simplify their method for maximal effectiveness at times? Sure. Because you have to do that. You can't just go in with scientific level of nuance, right? you're when you you have to know your audience, right? When one physician's like when I'm talking to another physician about something, I talk about it in a certain way. If I'm
• 83:30 - 84:00 giving that same information to a patient, I frame it in a different way. It's not less true. It's not less honest. It's just more, you know, I might be bottomlining it more for them or putting it in a different framework or maybe emphasizing certain things in a different way to help them make a decision, right? that's because that's what they're doing. I'm not just going to just give them a raw data dump, you know, like I might a researcher or a
• 84:00 - 84:30 clinician who's not making a decision. Um, right. And they just that context is important. So when you're a health public health official, you you have to be very careful how you frame things. And I think that they were walking that line pretty well of saying like, you know, listen, this is a novel v virus. We, you know, we have preliminary information. There is some uncertainty but given all this we feel people should wear masks you know and they you know making a very simple recommendation sort of a firm recommendation is the best thing to do
• 84:30 - 85:00 from a public health standpoint but then of course it does open them up to later criticism. Masks is still a good idea. It works. The anti-masking stuff is BS. Other elements of it like did we need to shut down schools? Well, we don't know what the counter narrative is. like we don't know how bad it would have gotten if we didn't shut them down or we don't know how much we would have had to shut them down anyway because all the teachers got sick but yeah you know the downsides of doing that is worse than we thought it was going to be. You have to admit that it turned you know the
• 85:00 - 85:30 schools were not as prepared and the negative impact on on kids especially the younger kids was worse than we thought. We got to own that right. We made a decision never you know without data based upon the the best you know and best guess we could make you know it's our and they often said that this is our best guess this is our best guess and it often was and it often was effective and I think we did a did a good job of minimi of saving a lot of lives and minimizing spread getting the pandemic under control you know as quickly as we could you know
• 85:30 - 86:00 recommending the vaccine absolutely does that mean that we have to ignore the fact that there was, you know, one in a million people got a blood clotting disorder. You know, yeah, you have to acknowledge that that was real. But you got to put that into perspective, too. You got to, you know, from a public health point of view, you have to say things like you are overwhelmingly more likely to be helped by this vaccine than to be harmed by this vaccine. That is true. Is that the complete story? Is
• 86:00 - 86:30 that like putting numbers on it? No. But that's a good bottom way to bottom line it for the average person. So anyway, it's complicated and it's so and again if you're if you're operating intellectually honestly in the public interest, you know, that's one thing, but if you're weaponizing it for political and ideological advantage, it's so easy because reality is complicated and messy and it's just really easy to just, you know, to uh to misrepresent it and to to weaponize it
• 86:30 - 87:00 in that way. And that's what we saw. We're still seeing it. We're seeing it over the now that Trump is trying to say officially there was a lab leak. There was, you know, there that's There is no evidence for a lab leak. The medical data all supports a a spillover event from the meat market, the Wuhan, you know, a zonotic spillover. We can't rule out a lab leak. We have to admit that. We don't have the smoking gun, but there's no evidence for a lab leak.
• 87:00 - 87:30 That's the the even the intelligence agency says h it's slightly more likely but we don't really have any way to prove it and now but they're politically saying it was a lab leak. That's now the official answer of the federal government. It's But you know it takes a long time to explain to people what the reality is because it's like because we don't know at the end of the day. It's just that scientists have one best guess. The intelligence community has another best guess. I think the scientist's best guess is
• 87:30 - 88:00 better and more confident and that's where we are. But that's that's kind of a again it's kind of a soft nuance story. It's a hard cell. It's a hard cell. Is it Brandolini's law? The the energy that's required to refute misinformation is orders of magnitude greater something like that. Yeah, that's the Gish Gallup thing as well. Yeah. It's like it's so much easier to create misinformation than to correct it. The truth is a very high energy state again and people sometimes
• 88:00 - 88:30 just don't feel comfortable with the uncertainty and the nuance right and you could take you take a complicated highly charged issue like biological sex and trans issue and is biological sex binary and it's complicated you know trans health care for minors is a complicated medical ethical question do you have a few hours we could talk about it and I can get into the weeds on that But it's so easy to say, "Oh, that's all Men are men and women are women and they're just it's just woke liberal, you know,
• 88:30 - 89:00 nonsense. It's the like they have a very clean, powerful, emotional narrative that can only be countered by an hour-long science lecture, you know, and it it's really tough. It makes it very difficult." Coming back to you as a critical thinker, truth seeker or skeptic. Earlier you you mentioned that one of the traps you can fall into is that you may always think you're right. And so you kind of have to check yourself. You have to have some humility
• 89:00 - 89:30 always kind of front of mind. What are the the main things that get in your way or what what are the things that you're always trying to think about so that you don't fool yourself? Well, one thing it's good to check with other people too, not just check yourself. You keep each other honest, right? It's always good to have sort of that community who again will will give each other feedback, right? Will call each other out, right? Not just reinforcing each other. And it's good to ask like, am I
• 89:30 - 90:00 the here? Am I getting this wrong? Like, am I going down a rabbit hole? Or does this make sense to you, too? And I have, you know, again, not everybody can do this, but because of I'm an academic and a podcaster, I have a, you know, I can call up a physicist and ask them like, am I getting this right? Like, is this make sense to an expert? But if you don't have that, like if you don't have a physicist on speed dial, there are you got to find outlets that are like people you respect and outlets that you respect who are, you
• 90:00 - 90:30 know, academic, professional, have a good track record of being intellectually honest. And if you disagree with the experts, assume you're wrong. And that's a good first assumption. Assume that you misunders you have a misunderstanding. Again, always take the most humble assumption first. And always ask that question. All right, but can I be wrong here? Am I wrong here? Just just reflexively, you have to ask that question. Um, and just have to constantly be going through that process. There are some areas where I
• 90:30 - 91:00 find that I'm most vulnerable to selfdeception that I have to really be careful about. And one is I'm very vulnerable to the skeptical narrative. Meaning this person is claiming X. X is a pseudocience. It's complete And I'm going to call this guy out on their on their pseudocience. And you can create this sort of clean skeptical narrative of they're completely wrong. They're
• 91:00 - 91:30 pseudoscientific. And sometimes usually the story is more complicated than that. Not always. Sometimes, you know, creationists pretty much are 100% wrong, right? Because they're operating from a false, you know, premise and then and false um they're they're not engaged in science. They are engaged in something else. Right? So um they've sort of raised it getting being wrong about evolution to an art form. It's really amazing. But a lot of
• 91:30 - 92:00 things it's like you know the narrative isn't that clean. Sometimes there are pieces of the narrative which are like somebody might have a conspiracy theory and I want to say every single element of that conspiracy theory is But sometimes there's an element of it that's actually plausible. And you got to say, okay, but this piece here is actually I have to say is actually plausible. And so, you know, we just we
• 92:00 - 92:30 have to, you know, allow for that nuance and not just knee-jerk. It's pseudocience. It's got to be wrong. Um, sometimes the people you really dislike because they're con artists or conspiracy theorists or science deniers, sometimes they get things right, not because they're following a process, just because reality sometimes happens to align with whatever their narrative is, right? It would be amazing if it never did, right? Sometimes it does. Sometimes, yeah, the government did actually lie about that one thing or yeah, you know, that was scientific
• 92:30 - 93:00 fraud. It happens. And you have to be, you know, to admit pieces of the puzzle that make your story really complicated and messy and not clean. And sometime there's a huge temptation to sort of sanitize the skeptical narrative. And we have to be careful not to do that. The other big red flag is when when the skeptical story aligns with your worldview. you know, even if that
• 93:00 - 93:30 worldview is political or ideological or cultural or whatever, it's like it's you have to be especially careful that like you have to like, oh, I believe this thing that, you know, the people that I generally a agree with believes. I have to make absolutely sure that that's correct because it's so easy for me to be falling for, you know, following this narrative. You know, if you're holding a view that is the
• 93:30 - 94:00 opposite or different to experts on that topic, you're probably wrong. Having that kind of humility, how does that work? Like let's say let's take a real world example, something that's kind of in my sphere and in nutrition, vegetable oils or seed oils. So the guidelines and and recommendations certainly advocate for consuming more plant-based oils or vegetable oils over saturated fats and have for quite some time. But if you
• 94:00 - 94:30 were to say is my view aligned and I'm not talking about me, I'm just talking about anyone who's thinking about this topic. Is is my view aligned with experts? You will find experts online who think that seed oils are toxic and then you'll find experts online who think that they should be consumed instead of saturated fats. So which experts are you cross referencing? Choose your expert. Yeah. So that's where it comes to like no single expert is an authority, right? No single person
• 94:30 - 95:00 is an authority. No small group is an authority too. They're also like you know these small groups of scientists who all believe the same thing or you know not necessarily scientists but you know people who are in operating in this space. So you have to to say well first of all sometimes scientists are going to disagree and that just means that we're uncertain or it's genuinely controversial or maybe it's not genuinely controversial and these are outliers. Is there a strong consensus
• 95:00 - 95:30 and an outlier or are there two equally valid schools of thought here? And how do you know? You got to talk to an expert to know or you got to be an expert or you got to read someone who can distill that for you who you trust. You know, again, there's no simple it's no simple hack. There's no one rule that of thumb or that you can do like each situation is its own thing that you have to to invest time in. how much time?
• 95:30 - 96:00 Well, how much is it worth to you? You know, but at least, you know, like one expert can be absolutely wrong, right? And even if they're right about everything else, like I know experts who are who are aligned with the broad consensus on most things, but they have this one thing where they're an outlier, where they just believe this one thing for whatever reason that's just conflicts with the with the prevailing consensus. So you have to that's again being a critical thinker being media savvy being you know scientifically
• 96:00 - 96:30 literate means you know to ask the question all right I know there are you could find experts who believe anything so that in and of itself is not valuable that you found an expert who believes something doesn't mean anything you have to have a way of evaluating the consensus of scientific opinion is there a consensus what is it how strong is it how un uniform is it are there outliers are there minorities Minority opinions are they valid? Sometimes the minority opinion becomes the dominant opinion but
• 96:30 - 97:00 or is this are this really just cranks who are really far out of you know they're out of the mainstream. How confident are the consensus experts that the outliers are wrong. You know you have to ask all those questions or talk to somebody who has the ability to ask all those questions and distill it and summarize it for you. Um there is no shortcut. There's no there's no shortcut there. You got to do the work, you know. And yeah, it's a complicated world.
• 97:00 - 97:30 There's no easy answer. Sorry. Like there's I can't give you like, oh, do A, B, and C and get to the right answer. It's like, no, you got to got to go through the process, you know? Right. I can imagine people are listening and and I've probably fallen into this line of thinking before where you just have resistance to this idea of the population at large becoming more scientifically literate. You don't think it's realistic. But then the question is what is the alternative? Yeah. The alternative is is is not
• 97:30 - 98:00 pretty. Yeah. I mean and you know remember I started doing this before the internet revolution. You know I mean lived through a lot of changes and the you know social media and the internet really has created a different world in very bad ways. You know the information and I mean in some good ways too. I do think that people are more knowledgeable, more factually knowledgeable than they were. We have access to a lot of information. There's, you know, the social media has allowed
• 98:00 - 98:30 talented science communicators, scientists to communicate directly to the public and the public has access now to all kinds of fantastic highquality information. If you want that, if you want to, if you are interested in educating yourself about science and critical thinking and all these things, it's all there. It's all distilled for you, packaged in multiple formats, video and audio and books and articles. It's all there. That's great. But it's buried
• 98:30 - 99:00 under this mountain of misinformation and pseudocience and nonsense and commercial speech and all kinds of things that are trying to lead you astray. So right now, the most important tool anyone could really have is the ability to sort of sift through the nonsense to the real information and have some way of telling the difference. Right? That's really the most important skill you can have in today's world is the ability to tell what's real from what's not real, what's reliable and valid from what's not reliable. And so that's what I think when we talk about
• 99:00 - 99:30 we want to this to be baked into education. That's what we're talking about. not what's happening today, you know, in public school, unless there's a good, you know, some science teachers can do it, you know, and a lot of them do do it and they have good science teachers out there who are teaching critical thinking, but it's not baked into the curriculum like teach like civic scientific literacy. civic critical thinking skills. Like your ability to participate in society, to survive in this ecosystem of
• 99:30 - 100:00 misinformation should be baked into K through2 curriculum and should be baked into every science course. And that's partly part of what we're trying to do is re-educate the scientists and the academics out there who like don't want to teach pseudocience. Like, no, you have to teach the pseudocience. It's not this messy thing you don't want to deal with. You have to teach it. You have to teach your students how to recognize it. How to recognize science deniialism, how to
• 100:00 - 100:30 recognize pseudocience. Otherwise, you are sending them out naked in front of the wolves. You know, you're not preparing them for the real world. If you maybe you're preparing them for the ivory tower and then even there it's not really enough but you're certainly not preparing them for the real world without without telling them how to identify pseudocience and science deniialism and conspiracy thinking and why it's wrong you know why it you know
• 100:30 - 101:00 how it operates all of those things. If you don't do that, you know, then you haven't done your job, right? And no matter how many facts you give them, it's not enough. It doesn't help. It's not gonna prevent them from becoming cranks, you know, when once they leave your classroom, which makes me makes me think about the role of of AI here, which you mentioned earlier. So, do you do you think that AI could potentially help by removing certain biases that
• 101:00 - 101:30 that may be unique to humans? These blind spots that we have, or are we in the same position where human biases can just get in the way of of acting on the information that we get from AI? I mean, it's both of those things, right? It's like if you go re rewind 20 years and you asked me, do you think social media is going to be a force for good or evil in the world? And it turns out it's both. And it's really just a matter of rel how much relatively I think AI has the power to help us deal with all of
• 101:30 - 102:00 the information to help us sift through it. And it it's a tool, right? And it could be a tool that we can use to help us get control of the misinformation. It's also a tool that can be used to generate an unlimited amount of misinformation. And we know that that's already happening. And I think both of those things are going to happen. And it's just a matter of the proportion. Is there going to be enough people using it as a tool to help us control our
• 102:00 - 102:30 information world or is it are we just going to be buried under an avalanche of things that we can't tell, you know, real from fake? you know, is is is are we seeing the end of truth, the end of reality, and just the beginning of just an AI generated, you know, fake re, you know, just fake reality that nobody has any chance of telling what's real from what's not real where there's no trust. We're all just, you know, just trying to survive and just we'll all just say, "Oh, screw it. No one can know anything,
• 102:30 - 103:00 so I'm just going to believe what I want to believe." Some people are already there. That's already the culture. For example, on certain social media platforms, like on Tik Tok, there's a lot of great information there, but the overwhelming culture is, yeah, believe what you want to believe. It's all just it's all just getting clicks. You know, that's really it's all just performance. There's no there is no truth. There is no reality. It's all just performance. And that's that's very dangerous because then we're vulnerable, right? So, what h and this is my nightmare scenario. I
• 103:00 - 103:30 don't I don't know if that's where you intended to go with this question, but my might nightmare scenario is basically what's happening in China right now where you know we we are creating these powerful tools could be used for good, could be used for evil and eventually they're going to get in the hands of dictators and authoritarians and it's like a game set and match, right? It's game over at that point when you have an author authoritarian government who can control
• 103:30 - 104:00 the truth, can control history, control facts, control information, absolutely with powerful tools powered by AI. How do you combat against that? How do you exist? How do you push back against an a completely all powerful authoritarian government that we have handed that power to through these tools of information. You know, if if we lose our
• 104:00 - 104:30 ability to maintain a liberal democracy, it may there may be no way back from that, right? It may be a one-way ratchet towards authoritarianism. We got to sort that out fast because it's happening now. This is happening right freaking now and nobody really knows what to do about it. So, you know, at this point, your guess is as good as mine as to what's going to happen. We just have to hope there's enough of a popular push back and enough
• 104:30 - 105:00 people in the, you know, with, you know, the perspective to see what's happening to sort of raise the alarm bells that we could at least maintain the ability to maintain a liberal democracy because right now it's not looking good. I think that's a pretty good place to land the plane here today and hopefully I can convince you to come back on uh perhaps in person next time. And I meant what I said at the the outset. I think you're one of the most important voices in
• 105:00 - 105:30 science today. I really really recommend everyone goes out and gets a copy of your book. I'll link to that and the podcast in the show notes. Really appreciate you making the time to be with us today. Think I'll try to maintain my humility with that kind of feedback. I appreciate it. I do. There you have it, friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and want to stay up to date with future episodes, be sure to hit that subscribe button on YouTube and follow on Apple or Spotify. Finally, thank you for showing up and
• 105:30 - 106:00 the effort that you're making to take control of your health. I look forward to hanging out with you again in the next episode.