Making Sense - Sam Harris - #302 — Science & Civilization

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:32.500 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.540 what we're doing here please consider becoming one well there's a lot going on out in the world

00:00:48.460 i guess there always is but in the last 24 hours it seemed especially so as i'm recording this intro

00:00:55.600 we appear to be witnessing the complete implosion of ftx the cryptocurrency trading firm whose ceo sam

00:01:06.280 bankman freed has been on this podcast and he has been one of the most visible faces of the effective

00:01:12.440 altruism movement at the time i interviewed him sam was worth over 20 billion dollars it might have

00:01:19.800 been 30 billion at the time and had pledged to give virtually all of it away cryptocurrency is quite

00:01:26.780 volatile and as of i think the day before yesterday he was worth something like 15 billion dollars

00:01:34.520 virtually all of which appears to have evaporated in the last 24 hours it seems along with the holdings

00:01:41.780 of many other people who had their money and trust in ftx at this point it's not clear just what degree

00:01:51.400 of malfeasance there was on sam bankman freed's part so i will reserve judgment there no doubt we will

00:01:59.260 all learn more soon but as to whether or not this is a bad outcome for him personally for investors in

00:02:06.660 ftx and for the effective altruism community there really can be no doubt of that this was really

00:02:13.900 bad news on all those fronts in happier news we had our first virtual retreat over at waking up

00:02:20.180 over 40 000 people registered for that on the day i think we had about 10 000 when joseph goldstein and

00:02:27.920 i did a live q a at the end anyway both the retreat and the q a are now available to be done

00:02:34.000 at your leisure in the practice section in the app and i think we'll be creating more of those in

00:02:40.240 the future okay well today i'm speaking with neil degrasse tyson neil is an astrophysicist and the

00:02:49.120 author of the number one bestseller astrophysics for people in a hurry among other books he is also

00:02:55.460 the director of the hayden planetarium at the american museum of natural history in new york where he

00:03:01.380 has served since 1996 he has his own emmy-nominated podcast star talk and its spin-off star talk sports

00:03:09.580 edition the man has received 21 honorary doctorates and various other awards he has an asteroid named

00:03:17.600 after him and most recently he's the author of a new book titled starry messenger cosmic perspectives

00:03:24.160 on civilization and we focus on the new book we talk about what makes science a unique human endeavor

00:03:30.440 the tension between respecting scientific consensus and overturning it which leads to confusion about

00:03:37.380 paradigm shifts and scientific controversies we talk about the social importance of probability and

00:03:43.340 statistics climate change a relative blindness to exponential cultural change social media social

00:03:51.680 inequality and affirmative action identity politics and a post-racial future the wisdom of focusing on

00:03:58.480 class rather than race and other topics it's always fun to talk to neil as you'll hear he is always good

00:04:05.800 company and now i bring you neil degrasse tyson

00:04:09.120 i am here with neil degrasse tyson neil thanks for coming back on the podcast yeah thanks for having

00:04:20.600 me i feel like an old timer well you are a repeat and much beloved guest and uh i i'm pretty sure i've

00:04:28.460 been living with you more than you've been living with me of late because i digested your your last book

00:04:33.600 uh 100 as an audio book i i tend to bounce between audio and and uh hard copy when i really want to get

00:04:41.620 something into my brain but for you i just happened to there's some great fall weather where i am and i took a

00:04:49.600 bunch of long walks and uh you were walking with me it was really a miracle of technology and a really

00:04:55.220 a wonderful use of time which i highly recommend it was my i did narrate the book myself yes as you

00:05:01.280 should with that voice of yours do you have you narrated all your books or have you no just the

00:05:05.740 shorter ones i mean i i did a huge book on war it was 600 pages or so and i said i can't i just

00:05:12.200 if i had the time i would have but i just couldn't justify it plus you're taking money out of someone else's

00:05:17.600 mouth where they read professionally you know so i figured let's do you find it hard to do is it does

00:05:22.920 it come easy easily for you or it is but not 600 pages and you know to spend six days in a sound

00:05:28.540 studio or whatever that would have taken as it is this book is relatively short story messengers

00:05:35.240 minus the end notes is 200 pages or so and the book is a small format so so i could do that plus a lot

00:05:42.720 of it is in my voice i mean figuratively and literally because it's there's some storytelling

00:05:47.900 that i do in there about events in my life and how that connects to the science and the culture and

00:05:53.780 the and the geopolitics so i felt that these are stories no one else can or really should be saying

00:06:00.100 to you as you walk in walk in the fall weather yeah i find it hard to do though actually i and i find

00:06:06.720 that occasionally i have written a sentence that i literally cannot get through out loud and i have

00:06:12.880 to change the wording to it becomes a cirque de soleil routine for me to try to get to the end of

00:06:17.340 the sentence and i i have to rewrite it for the audiobook well you're i mean you're a brilliant writer

00:06:22.660 and i i'm eternally envious not in a in a vengeful way but just envious not in a dark way in a dark way

00:06:30.860 thank you your command of words that are just the right words and just the right time and place

00:06:37.520 are are brilliant and what i try to do when i write is have the sentence work not only as words on a

00:06:46.700 page but as words that you hear in your head so that there's a rhythm and a flow and a and a balance

00:06:55.640 of of what words are used that may be a little challenging versus others that are not and in that

00:07:02.180 balance i think it becomes an easier product to read to read out loud yeah well well you do you do

00:07:08.980 read it very well so i recommend audio if that is a person's predilection i should say the name of the

00:07:15.920 book here you you said it quickly but it's it's starry messenger cosmic perspectives on civilization

00:07:21.700 civilization and um the subtitle really does capture the the angle here because you you do think

00:07:29.900 about civilization a lot and i and so we'll get into that you you've taken a turn slightly toward

00:07:36.540 the political at various moments in the book and i remember last time we spoke your allergy to

00:07:42.060 striking a political note was palpable and um also uh understandable has something changed on that

00:07:49.420 front for you or what what what's your thinking yeah i was around politics the book basically came to

00:07:55.520 term in the sense that i've it's been gestating within me my entire life if i may use uterine

00:08:04.000 analogies here i remember when i was a middle schooler you know early years when i'm thinking

00:08:10.320 scientifically literate in a scientifically literate way which began maybe when i was nine or ten but it

00:08:16.500 didn't really sort of hit a stride until i was 12 and 13 and i just remembered looking around at

00:08:23.880 full-grown human beings adults listening to what they're saying and watching what they're doing and

00:08:29.820 i'm saying what you're saying what you think what and in one case explicitly there was a comet headed

00:08:37.820 around the sun and it was expected to be very bright turn out that it didn't live up to expectations

00:08:42.940 that's not what matters here we astronomers had discovered a comet and it was in all the news no

00:08:48.120 one saw it yet with the naked eye it wasn't brighter close enough yet and i'm walking out there and

00:08:53.320 there's a man with a placard marching up and down the street saying repent the comet is coming

00:09:00.020 the end of the world is near and i said and i said you're a grown-up okay don't you have any

00:09:05.840 understanding and and so i've been collecting in me these observations of all the ways people

00:09:13.360 in cultures and civilizations and especially people in power think about the world and the and how

00:09:20.400 absent it is of science literacy of of numeracy of especially statistical numeracy is is is lacking

00:09:29.440 and so it was in me and i'm sitting there during coven i said this i can't it has to get birthed

00:09:35.840 this book has to come out and it just got birthed whole the whole thing just came out of me i'm on

00:09:41.500 this site goodreads and someone asked oh dr tyson when you're writing this book did you how did you

00:09:46.740 get through writer's block there was no writer's block yeah yeah and so that's great so the whole

00:09:52.800 so it's been in me i just haven't had the occasion to write about it and in a way it's my most scientific

00:09:59.260 book because everything about what we see what we do and what we think i'm highlighting ways that a

00:10:06.940 scientist would view that and if you care i mean if you don't care that's one thing but if you wondered

00:10:13.300 what what how does a scientist say about what i'm doing this is the book for that purpose well what is

00:10:19.280 it that you think makes science unique i mean if we're going to take a bird's eye view of our situation

00:10:25.500 and distinguish science from the rest of human endeavors how would you distill that for someone

00:10:34.000 who's just considering this demarcation for the first time yeah there are two separable variables

00:10:39.240 there one is science as an enterprise and the other is the scientist and scientists if i need to

00:10:46.460 remind people are also human and they are susceptible to many of the the sort of vagaries of what it is

00:10:55.440 to be human and so where you think your opinion is of higher value than someone else's opinion

00:11:02.140 you might think your opinion is a fact even though the evidence doesn't support it and all the the

00:11:09.220 portfolio of biases that you learn about the great wiki pages on you know cognitive bias the scientist

00:11:16.860 has a susceptibility to it like everyone else however there's the expectation that they would try to

00:11:24.940 ferret it out in some way or another and and so to scientists in an argument there's an unwritten

00:11:34.020 rule unwritten that either i'm right and you're wrong or you're right and i'm wrong or we're both wrong

00:11:41.780 and i don't know many other arguments that unfold in society that have that pre that prior arrangement

00:11:50.600 in that conversation and by the way when you have conversations set up that way at the end you say

00:11:56.980 you know i think we need more data okay or we need let's let's wait until this other result comes in

00:12:02.840 it's oh great great now let's go have a beer so the arguments between scientists end up in a bar

00:12:09.960 and the arguments between other people of even if it's of a similar sort of intensity can in their

00:12:17.140 limit end up in all-out warfare bloodshed and death because two people do not agree on their

00:12:23.500 worldview of who they should worship who they should sleep with what side of a line in the

00:12:29.380 sands you live on what language you speak what color your skin is and in science so much of it

00:12:35.320 transcends that that there's a limit to how much we're going to get riled over and so there's great

00:12:41.780 value to seeing the world scientifically especially cosmically because it lifts you up and away from

00:12:47.820 so much of what divides us what are some common misunderstandings of what science is it seems to

00:12:53.400 me that we're we're living through a period where the dirty laundry of science or the the sausage making

00:12:59.480 to you know pick your cliche has been exposed to public scrutiny in a way that has left people

00:13:07.640 pretty cynical about and and frankly confused about science i'm thinking specifically of our

00:13:15.320 misadventures through covid right so we see we have you know changing and this is something that you

00:13:21.040 touch on some and we have these changes of policy which seem like frank confessions of scientific

00:13:30.640 error that are marks against science as a methodology and science as a source of authority

00:13:37.920 whereas in most cases what you're seeing is just the kind of the moving target of scientific consensus

00:13:45.600 and fact-finding and debate and you know the the cure for scientific mistakes is it's just more science

00:13:54.220 you know more testing more data more scrutiny more criticism and the process looks messy as we

00:14:02.100 lurch about we can leave aside for the moment i want to come back to it but we can i mean there's

00:14:07.280 there are obviously other problems like bad incentives and corruption and misinformation and fraud i mean

00:14:14.560 they're possible contaminants to any human conversation and and you know any scientific one but even just

00:14:22.400 the pure scientific process of criticism and uncertainty and and further testing that can look

00:14:31.320 like you know an all-too-human failure to figure something out for the longest time and i i think

00:14:39.940 people now or i mean just science as an institution you know i'm just taking the temperature based on

00:14:45.880 you know a few polls i've seen and just the general vibe on social media it seems like the institution

00:14:51.440 itself has lost some of its luster in the eyes of of uh non-scientists over the last few years

00:14:58.320 especially because of what's happened around public health messaging and covid i'm wondering what you um

00:15:05.420 what you think about that yeah i mean that's this is a very important issue especially in modern times

00:15:10.740 so i think there there there's several moving parts here and if i can unpack it just a little bit

00:15:17.280 so we live in a time where you don't have to get off your ass and go to a research library

00:15:25.540 to gain access to research articles you can get them online but once you go online to find them

00:15:33.800 you have the mixture of what is authentic research with what people just want to be true

00:15:40.660 because any google search will find you every other person who thinks exactly the way you do

00:15:46.580 in what it is you're searching for so you have a contamination a noise level of your ability

00:15:53.040 to find that which is authentic and that which isn't that's the first part of it second part of it

00:15:59.320 the scientific community is not trained at communicating with the public it is not in our it's not a part i took

00:16:08.140 one class in graduate school about giving public talks something like that it was it became a

00:16:14.180 mandatory thing i'm i'm old enough so i'm talking about the 1980s so this was early it was like wow

00:16:21.120 why are you doing that when we should be learning what to do in the lab right so even that got pushback

00:16:26.080 in its day so now you have people who spent their lives in a lab and they did well and now they

00:16:31.940 they they they're promoted to some higher position of institutional authority and messaging and now

00:16:40.020 the press is in front of them and so what are they going to say all right so we're early covid

00:16:46.380 and one of them says oh this is not going to be too bad we're going to have uh it'll be over within a

00:16:53.520 few weeks and the cases will be contained they don't know to say but they should have known or

00:16:59.800 in another world they would say based on these assumptions that we're making on how china is

00:17:07.180 handling it and how scandinavia is handling it but if we do the same as they do we will contain this

00:17:13.240 within two months okay the if then statement is so important but the urge to give a definitive

00:17:20.400 statement to the press so that the press can then create a headline is so high it leaves you then

00:17:25.680 it's susceptible to like you said the the the the bleeding edge moving frontier of one research

00:17:33.060 article versus the next building on the previous one possibly showing that it's not as effective as

00:17:39.160 was as was intended that's possible on the frontier and so the couching of the the advice i i think

00:17:48.600 in retrospect well i knew it when it was happening but the institutionally they they had especially

00:17:54.280 the cdc with their new director said we're going to have to be better at this better at this

00:18:00.020 communication and that is for damn sure so now you have this this uh what is science and how and why

00:18:08.960 does it work you see people watching this edge of science move back and forth and give conflict

00:18:15.400 sometimes conflicting information now they want to apply that to anything else science says

00:18:20.100 they say well maybe earth is not round okay or maybe we're not warming the planet or maybe because

00:18:25.840 scientists can be wrong and what they're missing is of course when you have a scientific result

00:18:32.320 verified multiple ways by experiment it is not later shown to be false this is a missing piece of this

00:18:41.200 understanding of how and why science works it's not taught in the schools it's not taught and you even

00:18:46.220 have people say science people who mean well say science unlike religion will change its mind when

00:18:53.500 the data shows that it needs to change its mind e will never equal mc cubed okay it's mc squared it's

00:19:00.400 not there are things that we're not changing our mind about not because we're stubborn but because the

00:19:05.160 evidence is so overwhelming that we have something in the books that we're not looking to see if that's

00:19:12.500 going to be different one day because all experiments have verified it we're on to the next problem

00:19:16.640 so all of these are factors and and i'm pretty sure that if science were taught as an enterprise taught as

00:19:24.860 a means of querying nature taught as a possibly unique way to sift that which is you want to be true from

00:19:35.320 that which is true then people would come out of the school systems without this kind of skepticism

00:19:42.400 of the entire scientific enterprise yeah it seems to me that there is a if not a paradox something close

00:19:49.580 to a paradox at the heart of the enterprise that understandably leaves people confused and it's it's

00:19:57.220 around this tension between valuing scientific consensus and scientific authority and not being

00:20:05.920 blinkered by it because you know obviously almost by definition scientific progress you know any real

00:20:13.560 breakthrough is a breakthrough because it goes against the grain of you know received opinion and by

00:20:22.740 definition expert you know consensus right so it's when you have a you know an einstein who gives us

00:20:29.500 special and general relativity you know that goes against a prior paradigm and you know to the initial

00:20:37.620 mystification and consternation and and just frank resistance of many qualified experts you know it even

00:20:46.660 goes further with you know where you know someone like einstein himself became you know resistant to

00:20:52.860 quantum mechanics right and you know he famously said you know god doesn't play dice with the universe and

00:20:58.060 debated bore until i guess the end of his days never having fully come around and you know the realistic

00:21:05.000 picture of what's going on there is still not resolved but there is this tension because you don't accept

00:21:11.740 something as true just because most scientists believe it or just because the most famous nobel laureate in

00:21:20.600 the given field believes it or says it so that's really not the cash value of the reasons for belief you have

00:21:27.660 made to really get to the cash value you have to actually understand the the data and the argument and the

00:21:34.140 evidence and you know it's in the math it's in the detail that gives you the the reasons for saying it's so

00:21:41.160 right and so just to i mean to take the simplest case we it's it we believe that that water is two

00:21:47.920 parts hydrogen and one part oxygen not because the most famous chemists have said so but the fact that

00:21:55.140 every chemist on earth you know with a you know who's neurologically intact would agree that it is so

00:22:01.800 that is a surrogate for the real reasons to believe in the chemistry of water and you know we can't

00:22:10.300 there's not enough time in a single human life to run every experiment and drill down to bedrock on

00:22:16.460 every scientific claim we have to take received opinion and scientific authority as a surrogate for

00:22:23.280 our own investigation you know all the areas where there's not a pressing reason to do other otherwise

00:22:28.840 so there is this dual mode we're in because we do care about scientific consensus and authority

00:22:35.060 and when you know 95 percent of scientists say that something is so the weight of our credence

00:22:41.720 is with them as opposed to the crankish fringe who's saying the opposite and yet it's also true

00:22:48.940 that the lone voice in in the scientific wilderness is occasionally right and can completely upend the

00:22:57.500 scientific consensus based on better arguments and better evidence and it's in the presence of any

00:23:03.000 given minority voice you know the one epidemiologist who says that you know these new mrna vaccines are

00:23:11.200 going to kill millions of people unless you really understand the field or even sometimes even if you do

00:23:16.900 understand the field it might not be immediately obvious if you're in the presence of a crank or a lone

00:23:23.140 genius right and there's and there's work to do to figure that out and i feel like what we're living

00:23:28.160 through now is a an instance where trust in scientific authority and consensus uh has been dialed way

00:23:36.540 down right and the institutions and for understandable reasons and for obviously spurious ones i mean the

00:23:43.180 institutions have also heaped shame upon their heads by being you know obviously politicized on various

00:23:48.200 points you know in debates about you know gender and race and i mean it's just been some crazy stuff

00:23:54.140 happening even in our best scientific journals and you've got epidemiologists by the thousands

00:23:59.180 castigating right-wing people for their public demonstrations but then supporting left-wing people

00:24:05.120 for their public demonstrations all within the same pandemic and so people have grown quite cynical

00:24:10.480 but i'm just wondering if you can speak to this core tension between trusting scientific authority

00:24:17.040 and the progress of science being more or less synonymous with overturning authority at least on

00:24:24.880 certain points yeah so there's a caricature of science which has understandable and obvious

00:24:31.560 origins but doesn't represent the typical scientific advance the caricature is everyone believes one

00:24:39.420 thing and then there's some lone genius who's comes up with an alternative idea that would negate or

00:24:46.160 otherwise render render wrong the prevailing view and then they're suppressed and then they finally

00:24:53.540 rise up and then it becomes the new paradigm and that is not how most of this works all right so for

00:25:01.820 example take the discovery of the double helix we did not have a prior paradigm before the double helix

00:25:11.640 it's like we just didn't know right okay it was uh we don't know how it is we're looking

00:25:15.580 up comes the double helix oh that's a good that's a good one that works and arguably one of the

00:25:21.860 greatest discoveries in science was not the act of overthrowing a previously held idea so and i just

00:25:28.340 want to make it clear that most discoveries in science are of that nature right not of the nature of

00:25:34.480 overthrowing a previously held idea that's my first point second a previously held idea use the word

00:25:40.700 consensus and authority often in those few moments and i don't like the word authority because that implies

00:25:47.160 you should do it because they have some position of power and plus consensus the way most people hear that

00:25:54.860 word it would be opinions the gathering of opinions and you look at what the majority opinion is we also use that

00:26:03.280 word in science but not to reference opinions which creates some of this this disconnect communication

00:26:09.540 disconnect we use it for what is the scientific consensus and what that typically refers to is

00:26:15.500 the research papers on this topic what do they show and the research paper is not a scientist opinion

00:26:23.200 it is the scientist displaying data and provided they're not themselves biased like i said there's

00:26:30.880 always that risk especially in the scientific fields that involve the measurement and the analysis

00:26:37.140 of other human beings they tend to be particularly susceptible to bias that would include all the fields

00:26:43.940 of psychology anthropology and the perhaps the most biased period of any field ever would be like 19th

00:26:54.040 century anthropologist creating the races of man and ranking them and judging them and and and making that

00:27:01.720 the foundation of the science of eugenics right there's a whole thing you have to like look really carefully

00:27:08.340 when people start ranking other people what is their field what is their motive what are their funders

00:27:13.780 and the and the like in the physical sciences which is a little more distant from the social sciences

00:27:19.780 and the and the biological sciences more distant from human beings we're a little bit less susceptible

00:27:26.060 to that and so you look at what is the body of research show we will call that a consensus but has nothing

00:27:33.160 to do with their opinions and i assert that if you have 97 research papers saying one thing because the data

00:27:40.300 shows it and one person says no you can you should bet on the 99 you should bet on bet on that consensus

00:27:47.800 because that's how it goes the the one person that says you said do you have data do you have

00:27:54.180 what what well i don't think it's that way go check it out you'll find out that they will cherry pick

00:28:00.920 things to fit their needs or their beliefs or their worldview and just because an entire scientific

00:28:09.540 community does not agree with you it doesn't mean you're correct okay so so and and the point with

00:28:17.920 with newton becoming einstein this is a fascinating chapter here's the towering achievements of classical

00:28:25.580 physics and we have newton newtonian gravity and newtonian motion oh my gosh it's explaining

00:28:31.520 everything but then wait a minute there's some things it doesn't explain oh okay well there's

00:28:36.840 mercury's orbit and there's weirdnesses and we don't and oh einstein comes along so i got i got this

00:28:44.060 and he introduces special relativity and general relativity which is basically the modern version

00:28:50.740 of motion and gravity and they supplant newton they don't go back into newton's world and say

00:28:57.960 your experiments that you did are wrong no they're still correct what it did was draw a larger circle

00:29:05.840 around the newtonian physics and it said newtonian physics is a special case of einsteinian physics

00:29:13.260 you put low speeds and low gravity into einstein's equations they become newton's gravity so yes

00:29:20.220 it was a new worldview and it took a lot of people to get used to it oh yes but that did not mean the

00:29:27.040 previous worldview was all of a sudden wrong in all the ways that it had been tested we grew in our

00:29:33.460 understanding of the world and einstein's resistance to quantum physics i he okay this was his attitude

00:29:40.920 towards it but he contributed mightily to quantum physics some of the most important results came from

00:29:46.600 him he just didn't like the underlying foundations of what could be making it okay but the experiment

00:29:52.760 still did all the talking and so yeah i mean people like to talk about scientists fighting and arguing

00:30:00.180 at any conference that's what they're doing but once it emerged once it comes through through the mill

00:30:07.380 the experimental mill that's not what anybody's arguing about anymore and so so yeah what do we do about

00:30:15.680 our institutions they need to communicate better they need to communicate more honestly they need

00:30:20.940 to not use the word these are the errors in my measurement in my measurement that's they don't

00:30:25.580 know how that people hear that they say oh they made errors no these are the uncertainties in the

00:30:31.000 measurement and every measurement has uncertainties that's not taught that where do you get that you

00:30:36.920 sort of get it somewhere maybe in one lab class in high school that's it when that's a fundamental

00:30:43.320 feature of what it is to take data and the next experiment needs to reduce those uncertainties

00:30:50.340 so that you can have greater confidence in what's going on and then you look at what all the science

00:30:55.120 tells you and and it's what comes it's why we have the national academy of sciences they digest this

00:31:00.720 information and present reports there it is and that's not we're not trained to do that and it's sad

00:31:07.760 because we needed that at the at the moving cusp of coven yeah i mean well i think we should let's

00:31:13.460 take another pass over the same terrain because i think i want to i want to drag you back into the

00:31:17.980 weeds here because i think it is it's just a mess and uh if we can straighten anything out i think we

00:31:22.960 should so there's a few few other things i'll put into play here well one is it just an analogy which

00:31:28.520 i think i have from you it's like i have a vague memory of you having said this years ago i think we

00:31:34.480 were probably at one of those salk institute conferences and correct me if i'm wrong or maybe

00:31:39.900 maybe i'm right and there'll be no way to know you won't remember having said this but i think the

00:31:45.120 analogy when something like you know imagine science is like an apple at the level of the skin of the

00:31:51.560 apple you know the front edge of it there's this area of scientific controversy where we're pushing

00:31:56.980 into the unknown and yes there's you know the the whole paradigm could swing in the balance but

00:32:03.260 as you move away from the skin as you go into the the meat of the apple and down to the core

00:32:09.920 most of it is no longer in play right and it's and things are not going to be radically overturned and

00:32:16.680 it's so for instance to just give a biological example it is just not the case that we might wake

00:32:24.040 up tomorrow and discover that dna has nothing to do with biological inheritance right that's not the

00:32:31.860 kind of popperian falsification that may yet await us in science i mean we just it's just too much

00:32:37.740 data to conserve it would be an absolute miracle at this point if dna had nothing to do with

00:32:43.840 inheritance and so that's not the that's not the place that's not the part of the apple where there's

00:32:49.460 there big movements are going to occur does that capture your thinking or do you recall ever saying

00:32:55.020 that not my analogy but i i'd like it generally when i speak of apples they're falling no other

00:33:01.540 than the newton apple that did not hit him uh that the the earth's atmosphere is to earth as the skin

00:33:10.340 of an apple is to an apple in terms of relative thicknesses so just to put that in context for

00:33:16.380 people who think we're at the bottom of some infinite ocean of air it's actually quite thin that's the

00:33:21.400 only case i would have used an apple but i'm in full agreement with that reference for that reason

00:33:26.120 the term paradigm as introduced and used in the way that thomas kuhn used it for the structure of

00:33:33.900 scientific revolutions is way overplayed okay because a paradigm shift as as people think about

00:33:42.700 it and use it every scientist is thinking this but then some new data comes along and then everyone

00:33:47.740 shifts over and then they think something different leaving you with the impression that science is a

00:33:52.320 construct of belief systems at any given moment and the last time there was a paradigm shift of that

00:33:59.620 kind was the copernican revolution where no one knew any of this okay but that predates the active

00:34:08.840 engagement of scientific of of experimental science where you're going to say i have an idea but let me test

00:34:15.680 it the testing an idea did not become a routine thing until at least the 1600s and the copernican

00:34:23.620 revolution basically predates that what goes right up to galileo my point is yes we can call that a

00:34:29.900 paradigm shift no i have no hesitation but newton to quantum physics newton to einstein is not a

00:34:38.920 paradigm shift as much as it it is a growth in our understanding of the world because nothing shifted

00:34:44.980 it just got bigger and it's a very important difference here so i don't think anything is

00:34:52.340 so strongly held as to be a paradigm if there's insufficient data to support it they're just

00:34:57.900 people's leaning towards one idea or another i would hardly call it a paradigm and now what what do

00:35:04.420 you do about the social problem really i mean it's only an intellectual problem in that we don't always

00:35:10.560 have enough time to drill down far enough and figure it out and do science on on the clock

00:35:17.280 to anyone's satisfaction but what do you do with the problem that you can always find a phd or an md or

00:35:25.140 you know a collection of them who will take any position on anything right you can find phds who will

00:35:33.200 say that you know smoking doesn't cause lung cancer and that actually was a documentary on some of these

00:35:38.600 guys and they were the same ones who then set up shop on other points of non-controversy they moved

00:35:44.500 from smoking to i think you know fire retardants in uh california and other topics but i mean it's

00:35:51.860 something we witnessed during covid you had people who would you can just always find someone to put on

00:35:57.900 a podcast who has the right scientific credentials you know seemingly and yet is taking this position that is

00:36:06.280 extreme and extremely deranging of the conversation about you know what what is plausible or what is

00:36:13.120 worth paying attention to in any given moment how do you recommend people assimilate that fact because

00:36:20.180 it is you know i i just noticed you know people who i i could name who should be you know connoisseurs

00:36:26.040 of misinformation at this point get quite bewildered in the presence of many of these people and and again

00:36:33.120 this is the thing that makes this so bewildering is that in the presence of a an emerging pandemic

00:36:38.260 there really was a lot to be uncertain about and there were in any given week the facts weren't yet

00:36:46.900 in and as i said earlier it was a moving target and to some degree it still is how do you deal with

00:36:53.880 this as a consumer of information how do you think about the public consequence of basically everyone

00:37:00.980 being able to do their own research and therefore everyone is able to land in the presence of someone

00:37:08.960 who seems to have all the the relevant scientific bona fides and yet they're so outside the bounds of

00:37:18.460 scientific consensus on any given point that they should be treated with with extraordinary skepticism

00:37:24.120 yeah so the the 900 pound gorilla in what you said is the the people who are selected

00:37:30.880 to give this dissenting view are people whose dissenting views resonate with your politics your religion

00:37:38.480 your culture or your overall desires so you're fulfilling of you're finding someone who will fulfill

00:37:46.860 what you want to be true rather than what is true so that's a that's a first part of that

00:37:51.820 another part is that you're i i divide i try to address this in the book in the in the chapter on

00:38:00.380 risk and reward so what i do is i take certain risks and i recast it in another way which is a formally

00:38:08.100 equivalent risk but makes you think about it a little differently so for example for a while the

00:38:14.880 off quoted number was 97 of research papers show that humans are are warming the earth and in the

00:38:22.280 past 20 years that percent has gotten higher it's probably 99 or near 100 percent so so but let's go

00:38:31.400 back to when it was 97 and that's when everyone was talking about it that's when that first manifested

00:38:37.040 so i said all right let's say there's 100 engineers and there's a bridge just brand new built across this

00:38:44.560 river and 97 engineers say if you drive your car across that bridge it will collapse and three of

00:38:54.140 them say no not a problem just go ahead and do it in fact it'll be safe for you and everyone who

00:39:00.560 follows you like would you drive your car across that bridge like would you and i'm thinking you

00:39:06.960 probably won't even before you investigate are there biases among the engineers you would say you know

00:39:13.680 these are engineers and i'm not an engineer but i'm gonna go with this consensus so to say i'm gonna go

00:39:21.620 with the three percent of the hundred percent of climate scientists who are saying by the way many of

00:39:28.060 them were not even client climate scientists but they were scientists to say that we're not warming

00:39:33.100 the the earth and that fits with my economic philosophies that i'm hoping that when you see

00:39:39.320 these numbers presented in these other ways you might think a little differently about it take smoking

00:39:45.520 for example the last numbers i saw there's an eight percent chance of dying from lung cancer if you're a

00:39:51.480 chain smoker okay and somewhere around there and and of course there are other higher percentages

00:39:58.000 for other diseases but let's take lung cancer for a moment and then i say all right let's recast that

00:40:04.040 so next tuesday everyone who lights up a cigarette okay will be entered in this lottery so that the

00:40:13.240 moment you light your cigarette and take your first pup eight percent of them their head will explode and

00:40:20.160 they'll fall over as a bloody gut gutty mess on the street okay and then everyone else if that didn't

00:40:27.040 happen to you you can smoke the rest of your life are you going to take that chance are you going to

00:40:32.600 risk that and by the way that's a cheaper solution than what reality would be because then you die

00:40:39.060 immediately and there isn't this health care that has to be sustained while you first get cancer and

00:40:44.260 maybe we'll try to cure you and remove a lung and whatever else happens so that would be a way cheaper

00:40:50.060 solution in society if that were enacted of course it's not but but so i i spend a fair amount of pages

00:40:56.980 recasting certain risk factors that people are interpreting in ways that they think don't apply

00:41:04.680 doesn't apply to them and so other than that exercise i don't have a silver bullet here but what i do know

00:41:12.920 is that public illiteracy innumeracy in statistics and probability are at the heart of so much of

00:41:21.540 people's understanding of risk and i'm not the only one who thinks about in oxford is it oxford or

00:41:26.720 cambridge there is there's a chair an endowed chair called the professor of the public understanding

00:41:32.820 of risk somebody said this is important enough we're going to make an entire endowed line professor

00:41:39.780 line to address this and so yeah people are making decisions that they think they've thought it

00:41:47.020 through correctly and in fact they haven't yeah well let's linger on the topic of climate change because

00:41:52.680 that is especially difficult to think about because as you point out the economic incentives certainly the

00:41:58.820 short-term ones seem to point in the direction of not taking it seriously and it suffers from many of

00:42:07.000 the variables i've mentioned so far i mean there are obvious reasons why the general public is

00:42:13.240 has kind of lost sympathy with the consensus opinion because it's been so highly politicized

00:42:20.780 it's um you know in in certain cases that you know religion interacts unhelpfully with it but now in

00:42:28.480 in recent years it's we have this new face of climate activism which seems to be teenagers with

00:42:36.200 with obvious anxiety disorders and and you know or autism i mean the teenagers who need help

00:42:43.580 have in some cases become the most prominent voices of climate activism and in you know in recent

00:42:53.020 weeks and maybe this has been going on for longer than that but i've just noticed it probably about

00:42:57.620 a month ago you've got people who are gluing themselves to the most famous works of art in major

00:43:04.080 museums or you're throwing paint or soup on um you know priceless pieces of art and uh you know this

00:43:12.120 is turning off the general public for obvious reasons i can imagine your head has been settled

00:43:18.440 on the topic of climate change for quite some time why has this been so difficult to take seriously as a

00:43:27.860 problem yeah it's a it's a mismatch of time scales right you know we have an election cycle that runs

00:43:33.980 on a two year with two years worth of expiration dates and then they get renewed and you know senators

00:43:41.680 are six years presidents or four possibly eight if you want to talk about something on a 20-year time

00:43:46.760 scale how's that ever going to show up in your in your stump speech how's that even going to who's going

00:43:53.740 to be listening to you oh the very youngest of the generations who will inherit what it is you do but

00:43:59.060 even then is that enough for you to get elected on so there's a mismatch between our political system

00:44:05.340 and our capacity to engage solutions for problems that are operating on a time scale longer than the

00:44:15.180 political time scale of what we of what we of the society that we built for it so yeah i mean this this

00:44:23.200 is part of the problem by the way that kind of activism i mean this is you tend to see that with

00:44:28.520 younger people in any level in any topic of activism all right i don't know that 60 year old men and women

00:44:37.280 throw paint on throw soup on paintings it's it's the young generation the young generation protested the

00:44:43.440 vietnam war it was not the older people it was the younger people so so it's not a weird fact

00:44:49.460 that we have a social cultural issue in need of progressive change and the next generation is

00:44:56.060 leading that that does not i'm not surprised by that and soup on a on a painting it got your attention

00:45:04.900 okay it got people's attention and so you know i i don't i don't know what to say other than

00:45:12.620 to say well we'll one day we'll think about solving this that's a recipe for disaster when it involves

00:45:19.840 an existential risk and by the way again i blame people's of the fact that we're not taught

00:45:29.380 probability and statistics in school so let's take the bell curve for an example okay uh in my world we

00:45:37.200 call it a gaussian curve because he sort of first laid out the fully explored the fully expressed

00:45:43.220 mathematical form of it and what it says is most things that vary uh would be in the middle and

00:45:50.620 and there are fewer and fewer things out on each extreme okay fewer fewer uh representations of whatever

00:45:57.640 variable you're measuring okay so now watch they announce there's been a one degree 1.2 degree increase

00:46:05.360 in the temperature in the average temperature of the world celsius increase and this will be

00:46:11.340 devastating and and you say to yourself i have more than a one degree variation in the rooms of

00:46:19.020 the home that i live in all right yeah within the same room i have a more higher temperature variation

00:46:24.940 than that and then from day to day from and from day to night so you're telling me i'm worried about

00:46:31.840 a one degree change in the temperature of the earth well okay well that okay because we're not

00:46:38.100 talking about what's in the middle the one degree shift in the average yes that bell curve shifts a

00:46:44.280 little bit to the right okay temperature increases to the you shift it a little bit it looks almost the

00:46:49.220 same except when you go on the tail now you slide off to that tail a one degree shift in the middle

00:46:56.780 has devastating consequences out on that tail and that tail of the distribution is what all the

00:47:03.600 action is that people are reacting to with the the intensity of the hurricanes and the and the the the

00:47:10.440 once-in-a-century flood zone that now floods every 10 years the the epic rainfalls you know right now

00:47:17.320 it's it was 73 degrees out my window today in in new york city all right and so well that's odd

00:47:24.760 because it's november well it's just a day okay maybe all right but the tail of that distribution

00:47:30.820 carries all manner of extreme weather with it and now we're talking about two degrees by 2030 2050 or

00:47:40.540 i forgot the exact year and we'll just see more and more of this happen if people knew and understood

00:47:46.600 the effects of the tail of a bell curve of data relative to what you see in the middle maybe they'd

00:47:54.760 react differently i don't know you know everyone in their math classes i will never need to know

00:48:00.820 this for the rest as they learn trigger trig identities and so again that is definitely a

00:48:08.480 pedagogical mistake that we don't teach probability and statistics to high school students routinely we

00:48:15.080 teach them you know trigonometry and calculus and and you know if calculus which arguably have much

00:48:22.520 less application to problems of immense social concern so my one conspiracy theory in the book

00:48:30.340 is that the reason why we don't teach probability and statistics is because money for education

00:48:38.060 in practically every state is partially fed by lottery tickets

00:48:43.040 and so so if this if if you taught probability statistics in the school no one would play the lottery

00:48:51.500 and so yeah you have this story about uh the the scientific convention in vegas where the the i think

00:48:57.880 was the mgm grand made less money than it ever made in history uh the american physical society

00:49:03.640 which is my my physics peeps in back in 1986 they were going to hold their convention in san diego

00:49:09.600 and there was a hotel snafu and and vegas says we'll take you and the mgm grand back then the mgm

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 11, 2022

#302 — Science & Civilization

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