The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - On the Dangers of Believing in ”Settled Science” (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.260 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad. Many of you are now familiar with the erroneous term,

00:00:08.380 settled science, right? When someone wants to end a debate as relating to something that

00:00:17.300 is within the realm of science, they usually will invoke the, but that's settled science,

00:00:23.460 which means shut up, and if you debate, then you are a science denier. And of course, this

00:00:29.040 is now coming up in the ongoing Twitter saga that we're seeing between Joe Rogan and Peter

00:00:37.940 Hotez, the vaccine pediatrician specialist, and then Elon Musk has weighed in, and Bill,

00:00:48.000 I think it's Bill Ackerman, the hedge fund guy, they're each putting money, saying, hey, we'll

00:00:52.860 contribute, at least Joe Rogan put in money, and I think Bill Ackerman also put in money,

00:00:57.080 and now it's up to, I think, well over maybe 1.5 million. I weighed in on this yesterday.

00:01:03.140 But today what I wanted to do is take a couple of minutes and remind you about how dangerous

00:01:10.520 it is to use the term settled science. Now, it is true that some phenomena, some scientific

00:01:17.860 theories, become part of the core knowledge of the discipline. In other words, it becomes,

00:01:25.920 if you'd like, part of the tree of knowledge that that field has built. But it is always

00:01:32.900 provisional in that you always leave room for the fact that something could down the line

00:01:38.400 be falsified. So that which we thought might have been true 300 years ago, we might no longer

00:01:45.160 think to be true today. So just think, for example, about the acceptance of Freudian theory

00:01:53.480 and psychoanalysis and how, you know, if you now go to do a residency in psychiatry, you're

00:02:04.000 unlikely to see the same focus on Freudian analysis that you might have 50 years ago, and so on.

00:02:11.280 And there are countless examples. But to that point, several years ago, I posted a sad truth

00:02:17.940 clip, which I'll put at the end of the current clip. For those of you who are watching this

00:02:22.480 on YouTube, it's a quote that I took, that I quoted in this book right here, The Consuming

00:02:30.740 Instinct, my 2011 book, where this is in the concluding, the epigraph of the concluding

00:02:38.080 chapter. It's a quote by J.B.S. Haldane. And let me just put up, this is a biography on J.B.S.

00:02:48.020 Haldane. J.B.S. Haldane was a brilliant evolutionary geneticist who was also a guy that had a, who

00:02:57.280 was very quotable. He could always come up with this, you know, very pithy, poignant quip that

00:03:07.060 becomes very quotable. So my favorite, arguably my favorite quote of all time, which speaks

00:03:13.940 to this idea of settled science, is one that he came up with, which as I said, I quote in

00:03:22.040 the epigraph of chapter 11. I suppose the, so now this is his quote, he's talking about

00:03:27.120 the four stages that scientists go through before they accept an idea. I suppose the process

00:03:32.940 of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages. One, this is worthless nonsense. Two,

00:03:39.320 this is an interesting but perverse point of view. Three, this is true but quite unimportant.

00:03:46.600 Four, I always said so. So what basically happens is that there is a, there is an orthodoxy that

00:03:55.500 defines what is the acceptable thought within the field and everybody, you know, walks in step

00:04:04.700 and then someone comes along who's a pioneer who says, no, no, wait a second, this makes

00:04:09.940 no sense. And it is often those who come up with these radical ideas that are then immortalized

00:04:15.600 in intellectual, in the history of intellectual thought precisely because they came up with an

00:04:23.800 idea that was counter to the prevailing orthodoxy and they were eventually proven to be right. Now,

00:04:29.980 the reason why, as I explained in the, the earlier sad truth clip, which I'm, uh, providing you at the

00:04:38.260 end of this clip, the reason why I had chosen it as my favorite scientific quote of all time, well,

00:04:43.160 because it perfectly capped, it really is an accurate depiction of how most scientists think,

00:04:51.020 rather than being the sort of impartial, unbiased navigators across competing evidence and then

00:04:59.400 letting the truth lead them to the right, uh, destination. Most are very dogmatic. Most are vested

00:05:08.800 in a particular paradigm, in a particular worldview, and they will fight tooth and nail to ensure that

00:05:16.280 their paradigm wins out. Uh, this is why, for example, I talked about in chapter seven of the

00:05:23.000 parasitic mind, the book by Sperber and Mercier, where they were arguing that the human mind has not

00:05:31.780 evolved the capacity to reason in order to get at the truth, but rather to win arguments, right?

00:05:38.640 It's actually, stay with me, it's this book right here, the enigma of reason, okay? Uh, now I cited in

00:05:48.720 the context of chapter seven of the parasitic mind, where I'm arguing that, hey, you can build

00:05:53.720 nomological networks of cumulative evidence that allow you to have unassailable cumulative data that

00:06:01.520 suggests that your, you know, uh, phenomenon is veridical, but even then you have to have epistemological

00:06:10.280 humility in that if something comes along that falsifies it, then so be it. Now, I just want, I don't

00:06:16.820 mean to hit you with a lot of books. This is a book that was very influential in my thinking. Born to

00:06:22.020 rebel is a book by Frank Soloway, who looked at, uh, birth order and how birth order affects the

00:06:32.140 likelihood of you being someone who is either fighting tooth and nail against some new radical

00:06:39.640 scientific innovation, or whether you are the one who is either supporting the scientific innovation

00:06:46.100 or the one who espoused it. And it turns out that there is an incredible, here's, I don't

00:06:52.000 I don't know if you can see it, but there's all the diff, the, the 28 most radical scientific

00:06:57.680 innovations, you know, Copernican revolution, uh, Hutton's theory of earth, Darwinian revolution,

00:07:03.940 Harvey and the circulation of blood, Newtonian revolution, and celestial mechanics, and so on.

00:07:08.340 So each of these, uh, you know, uh, radical scientific innovations came along. And so what Frank

00:07:14.900 Soloway was doing was arguing that there is a, an actually, actually a Darwinian mechanism by

00:07:20.660 which we should expect later borns to be more likely to be the ones who come up with these

00:07:25.480 radical innovations and who support these radical innovations. And incidentally, I'm the last born

00:07:30.280 of four children. So there you go. Uh, now, why am I mentioning all this? Because all that I'm talking

00:07:36.300 about here is, is studying the, the cognitive obstacles that cause not only lay people, but scientists

00:07:46.660 who should be, you know, honest interlocutors, but they're human beings. And so they don't like to be

00:07:53.440 proven wrong. They don't like to say, Hey, you know, maybe I was wrong about A, B, or C.

00:08:00.780 And so they will be, you know, as you show them more evidence, they're going la la la, kicking and

00:08:06.600 screaming. And that's not how a scientist should think. Now, the reason why the JBS Haldane quote is so

00:08:12.400 poignant, as I've explained in the earlier clip that I'm putting for you here at the end of this

00:08:18.780 clip, it's because it perfectly captures my own academic career. Because I came along and said,

00:08:24.980 you know, I pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biological principles

00:08:29.760 in the study of consumer psychology, consumer behavior, marketing, various areas in the behavioral

00:08:36.960 sciences. And all of my colleagues in the social sciences were like, this is bullshit. What,

00:08:41.740 what does biology have to do with this? Many till today have said so. But my career is perfectly

00:08:47.800 captured by those four stages in that many of the people who were vehemently against many of the

00:08:53.980 ideas that I was trying to publish, you know, in my nearly now, you know, three decades of as a

00:09:00.300 professor are now fans of my work. I've seen them go through the four stages. And to that point,

00:09:07.380 to show you that some of the, you know, most powerful ideas in science are precisely those

00:09:13.620 that were most staunchly rejected. I have here a paper, which I'm just going to read you the reference.

00:09:21.400 It's in a journal called Scientometrics. I've, I've actually published two papers in that journal.

00:09:27.220 Scientometrics is the quantifiable study of science, for example, you know, cite, you know,

00:09:33.900 you do an analysis of citation patterns and so on. So it's, it's a great journal called Scientometrics.

00:09:39.180 And this is a paper by Juan Miguel Campagnaro in 2009, volume 81, number two, pages 549 to 565. I'll put

00:09:49.620 a link to, to that paper. And it's, it's a paper that I've mentioned in other contexts. It's,

00:09:58.140 it's titled rejecting and resisting Nobel class discoveries accounts by Nobel laureates. I'm just

00:10:05.100 going to read for you the introduction or the, the, you know, the opening quote, I review and discuss

00:10:13.380 instances in which 19 future Nobel laureates encountered resistance on the part of the

00:10:19.200 scientific community towards their discoveries and instances in which 24 future Nobel laureates

00:10:25.060 encountered resistance on the part of scientific journal editors or referees to manuscripts that

00:10:30.920 dealt with discoveries that later would earn them the Nobel prize. Now, why am I mentioning this?

00:10:36.980 You know, these rejections of these Nobel works were originally staunchly rejected, brushed aside.

00:10:47.900 This is nonsense. This is gibberish. Think about the JBS Haldane quote that I mentioned earlier.

00:10:54.500 Precisely because, look, something could be rejected either because it's complete nonsense

00:11:00.820 or because it is so true, but yet so earth shattering in, in busting the existing knowledge,

00:11:10.500 the existing orthodoxy, the existing paradigms that people don't want to hear it. So for example,

00:11:15.760 when I went to the university of Michigan back in 2008, I had been invited. This is when this first book,

00:11:22.180 The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, had come out where I was, this is an academic book where I was

00:11:26.720 demonstrating how you would use evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study

00:11:30.620 our consumatory nature. I was trying to Darwinize, I was trying to demonstrate how you would Darwinize

00:11:36.420 the field of consumer behavior, broadly speaking. And I had been invited to the psychology department

00:11:43.500 and the business school, two separate talks. And if, I think it was on a Thursday, I gave the talk,

00:11:50.560 same talk. I asked if I could give the same talk. They said, yes, there wouldn't be too much overlap

00:11:55.160 in audience. I give the talk in psychology, which is consistently ranked one of the top psychology

00:12:00.760 programs in the world. My former doctoral supervisor obtained his PhD in psychology at University of Michigan.

00:12:09.020 Michigan. Many, many of the top psychologists have gotten their PhDs at University of Michigan,

00:12:15.020 including Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for

00:12:20.720 his work in behavioral decision making. In any case, I go to University of Michigan to give my talk

00:12:28.200 in the psychology department on this book and on my work in evolutionary consumption. And they're all

00:12:34.360 like, yeah, this is gorgeous. This is beautiful. And this is a tough crowd. But many of them, you know,

00:12:39.280 were certainly open to the biological basis of human behavior. And so it wasn't a difficult sell

00:12:46.120 for me to make to the people in the psych department. On the other hand, when I gave the exact same talk

00:12:52.140 the next day, it was the most hostile crowd I'd ever had. Possibly the recent talk that I gave at USC,

00:13:01.520 where some of the audience members were profoundly obnoxious and hostile, might compete for the record

00:13:07.960 of the most hostile crowd. But I believe that the University of Michigan crowd remains by far

00:13:12.840 the most hostile crowd. And this was a more technical talk, whereas the one at USC was about

00:13:18.640 the age of enlightenment and, you know, deontological versus consequentialist ethics. I mean,

00:13:23.280 also a very serious academic talk, but not about my, you know, evolutionary psychology work.

00:13:27.860 In any case, what I had in the parasitic mind, I talked about how I noticed that as a general

00:13:35.180 pattern, the doctoral students were the ones who were most open. This is at University of Michigan

00:13:41.600 to my work because they weren't yet wedded to a particular paradigm so that they, so that their,

00:13:46.720 their brains were sufficiently malleable to be open, to be inquisitive to new ideas. In this case,

00:13:53.180 the new idea of seeking to Darwinize consumer behavior, whereas many of the more senior

00:14:00.240 professors who had spent their careers being in social constructivist world, where you reject

00:14:06.060 biology as being an explicative factor in explaining human behavior, were some of the more aggressive

00:14:14.460 ones. There were some junior people who were aggressive, but as a general pattern, the doctoral

00:14:19.080 students were a lot more open than the more senior professors. And precisely because once you are

00:14:24.960 wedded to the orthodoxy, it becomes very difficult to move you away from that. So when I see scientists,

00:14:33.380 academics using their authority, I wear a lab coat, shut up. I have MD, shut up. I have a PhD,

00:14:42.260 shut up. It's settled. Climate change, settled. Vaccine settled, right? And, and on and on and on,

00:14:51.740 right? Let's think back about Galileo, right? What happened to him in the Inquisition. Let's think

00:14:57.120 back of Socrates further back. No good comes from cashing the chip of, I have greater authority.

00:15:06.980 I'm not going to. The beauty of science is that it is democratic. If someone were to come today

00:15:15.200 with clear data that falsifies some accepted theory today, we would have to accept it, right? So yes,

00:15:24.860 it turns out that most people who are scientists are going to have the credentials that allows them to

00:15:30.540 work in science. But I talk about, in several of my works, and even most recently in my forthcoming

00:15:38.480 book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, I talk about, I think her name is Emily Rosa, who published a paper

00:15:43.660 in JAMA, Journal of the Academy of, or the American Medical Association, very prestigious journal,

00:15:51.220 from her grade four, grade five, I can't remember, maybe grade four, grade five project,

00:15:56.780 where she studied the efficacy of touch therapy. Read my forthcoming book, The Sad Truth About

00:16:03.460 Happiness, about that story. I also mentioned it in, I think it was in The Consuming Instinct.

00:16:10.300 In any case, she was only, you know, 10 years old, or somewhere around then, when she published that

00:16:16.680 particular paper. So science doesn't say you could only make a contribution if you wear a white lab coat.

00:16:25.980 So anybody who tells you, shut up, the science is settled, they are exactly behaving in a way that

00:16:35.080 is perfectly antithetical to the way that science operates. Science is always navigating in provisional

00:16:43.580 truths. Yes, in many cases, we've amassed so much evidence that we could pretty much sleep at night

00:16:51.000 knowing that this is unlikely to be falsified, but we always leave the door open. Okay. I hope that this

00:16:58.660 helps. I hope that it provides the epistemological framework for how we should be conducting our

00:17:06.160 discussions and our debates, and certainly in the public space. I mean, one of the things that I love

00:17:10.020 to do is not just publish in, you know, academic journals and scientific journals, but to also

00:17:15.640 mix it up amongst the crowd. And a lot of the behaviors that I see on both sides of any particular

00:17:22.640 issue suggest that a lot of people, including so-called esteemed scientists, have forgotten what

00:17:29.360 it is to be a scientist. Take care, everybody. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 19, 2023

On the Dangers of Believing in ”Settled Science” (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_575)

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