Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening and enjoy the podcast. Say it's great to have
Speaker 1: doctor Michael Shermer on the podcast. Michael is the publisher
Speaker 1: of Skeptic Magazine, a New York Times bestselling author, and
Speaker 1: monthly columnist for Scientific American. He has been a college
Speaker 1: professor since nineteen seventy nine. Thanks for being on the
Speaker 1: podcast today, Michael, Oh, thanks for having me. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: Lots and lots of topics we could talk about today
Speaker 1: and hoping we can cover a shmorgasboard of some of
Speaker 1: these things. First of all, I want to say congratulations
Speaker 1: for your twenty fifth anniversary of in a lot of
Speaker 1: wayser life's work. Right, Yeah, that's right. It's we started
Speaker 1: Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptic Society in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: so it's our twenty fifth anniversary the organization of the magazine.
Speaker 1: And then it's also, by chance, just the twentieth anniversary
Speaker 1: my first book, Why People Believe We're Things, still probably
Speaker 1: my best selling book, I think. And then next month
Speaker 1: actually marks the two hundredth consecutive monthly columns I've written
Speaker 1: in Scientific America, the skeptic column. So we're just, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of using these all as an excuse to particularly
Speaker 1: in the age of alternative facts and fake news. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: in fact, we've been combating that for a quarter century.
Speaker 1: That's what we do. Yeah, it seems like now things
Speaker 1: are more relevant to your work than ever. Yep, they are.
Speaker 1: That's right. You would think, you know, we've made progress
Speaker 1: for sure, but there's always plenty of skepticism that needs
Speaker 1: to go around. I have a question, what is skepticism.
Speaker 1: What's the skepticism and pessimism. Well, there's no relationship at
Speaker 1: all other than they have ism at the end. Also
Speaker 1: confuse it with cynicism. Skepticism is just a scientific way
Speaker 1: of thinking. It's just using science and reason to evaluate
Speaker 1: all claims and assume that the null hypothesis, that is,
Speaker 1: your claim is not true until proven otherwise. So the
Speaker 1: burden of proof is on the person making the claim,
Speaker 1: not on scientists and skeptics to disprove a claim. So
Speaker 1: if you say you think bigfoot is real, we say,
Speaker 1: well that's nice, prove it, you know, show us a body.
Speaker 1: It isn't on us to prove that there is no bigfoot,
Speaker 1: because how would you do that anyway. So, and this
Speaker 1: is the way it is in all of science. You know,
Speaker 1: there's kind of an accepted norm of beliefs, a set
Speaker 1: of tenets that compile a theory or a paradigm that
Speaker 1: people work in, scientists work in. If you come along
Speaker 1: and you say, well, I have this completely different idea,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, that's nice, what is it? And show
Speaker 1: us your evidence that if you don't have any, and
Speaker 1: then the burden of proof is on you to go
Speaker 1: out and provide that evidence to us. And that's how
Speaker 1: all science works. So really, what we're doing is applying
Speaker 1: those principles of scientific skepticism to all areas of life.
Speaker 1: Do you think we could theoretically prove everything theretically proved? Well,
Speaker 1: technically in science pluss and science you don't prove anything,
Speaker 1: you just don't disprove it yet. Yeah, So yeah, all
Speaker 1: truths are provisional, but you know there's degrees of confidence.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the principal portionality that Hume outlined in
Speaker 1: his great work, that you proportion your beliefs to the evidence.
Speaker 1: So things like the germ theory of disease, plate tectonics
Speaker 1: and geology, the theory of evolution in biology, the Big
Speaker 1: Bank ori, the rgin of the universe. You know, these
Speaker 1: are all pretty solid theories. It would be quite surprising
Speaker 1: if they turn out not to be true. They may
Speaker 1: get tweaked here and there, of course, on the margins,
Speaker 1: but the main core the theory is very unlikely to change.
Speaker 1: And that's why when climate scientists talk about the consensus,
Speaker 1: they don't mean this in some sort of democratic way,
Speaker 1: like let's all vote and see how we feel about climate.
Speaker 1: What they mean is that the convergence of evidence has
Speaker 1: been so strong that virtually all working climate scientists agree
Speaker 1: on the general conclusion that climate change is real and
Speaker 1: human caused. Now, they disagree on a whole lot of details,
Speaker 1: and they have different data sets and different compewter models
Speaker 1: and so on. But the general consensus means that we
Speaker 1: can apportion our confidence pretty high because the evidence is
Speaker 1: so strong, and then other areas are you know, not
Speaker 1: so not so strong, and so there's lots of room
Speaker 1: for skepticism and very little consensus. So it just depends
Speaker 1: on the claim, right, So you base things on the
Speaker 1: probability upon which we have evidence for them in any
Speaker 1: regard whatsoever. I mean, things range from like we have
Speaker 1: like zero evidence that that God. Oh, that's a controversial statement.
Speaker 1: Device I feel like, right, that's a very comfortable But
Speaker 1: what's the probability evidence wise that God exists? Yeah? Have
Speaker 1: you put a number on that? Yeah, it's pretty low.
Speaker 1: It would be hard to put a number on it.
Speaker 1: But it depends on because we don't have a metric
Speaker 1: that we're using to measure it. I mean. But of
Speaker 1: course intelligent design creationists would say, yes, complexity information theory,
Speaker 1: the number of component parts in a cell, for example,
Speaker 1: would be a measure of complexity. For an intelligent design
Speaker 1: creationist to say that it couldn't come about by chance,
Speaker 1: therefore there must be a god. Of course, the evolutionists
Speaker 1: response to that is that no one ever said it
Speaker 1: was by chance. There are always simpler antecedents to these
Speaker 1: complex organisms, and that's the point of doing evolutionary biology
Speaker 1: is to figure out what the antecedents were to the
Speaker 1: structure you're looking at. So from a scientist's point of view,
Speaker 1: that would not constitute evidence for God. To creationists it would.
Speaker 1: So then it begins to turn on what you consider
Speaker 1: to be evident what counts as evidence for something like
Speaker 1: a god. And it's pretty hard to find agreement with,
Speaker 1: say theologians or creationists. What would constitute our agreed upon
Speaker 1: experiment where we're going to run and see how it
Speaker 1: turns out, and then we both agree when the results
Speaker 1: are seen. I'm just thinking about, like, you know, it
Speaker 1: seems like a lot of times there are people that
Speaker 1: live in completely different worlds in terms of their worldview,
Speaker 1: I should say, And you've done research on like personality
Speaker 1: differences in your attraction, you know, skepticism in general. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are some people who are more attracted to the
Speaker 1: work you do. There's some people more attracted to like
Speaker 1: the work like Deepak Chopra does, right, And there's individual
Speaker 1: differences in attraction to that way of thinking. Now, first
Speaker 1: of all, could you speak to that idea of personality
Speaker 1: and maybe how agreeableness could be a factor in this. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: there we're talking out so much about evidence as why
Speaker 1: people believe in certain things. That's the other area of
Speaker 1: my research that I spend a lot of time on
Speaker 1: and there it depends on to what extent you're open
Speaker 1: to new ideas. And it's good to be open minded.
Speaker 1: It's good to be open to hearing new ideas because
Speaker 1: often we're wrong and the only way to find out
Speaker 1: is to listen to what other people have to say.
Speaker 1: But of course you don't want to be so open
Speaker 1: minded as we say that your brains fall out and
Speaker 1: you believe every crazy thing that comes along. And like
Speaker 1: all human characteristics, there's variation on those traits. Some people
Speaker 1: are more open minded, some people are more close minded,
Speaker 1: and you know, and the rub is finding a balance
Speaker 1: between those two. And so, you know, a good balance,
Speaker 1: I think is to be very open minded to new
Speaker 1: ideas but also high and conscientiousness, skepticism and sort of
Speaker 1: critical thinking. That is, you're open to considering ideas, but
Speaker 1: you're also going to scrutinize them pretty carefully before you
Speaker 1: commit to believing them. That's spoken like a person who's
Speaker 1: school would score high in intellect. The thing is, you know, Ice,
Speaker 1: I'm a personality psychologist. So I'm viewing this through that lens,
Speaker 1: well partly a personality psychologist. And you know, I've studied
Speaker 1: the openness to experience demain of personality and you can
Speaker 1: divide it, and my Colleagun and I have divided it
Speaker 1: into two subsections, intellect and actual openness. And you find
Speaker 1: that if you do like a you can plot like
Speaker 1: in a two dimensional space well into like you know,
Speaker 1: with this rate x sort of model, you can actually
Speaker 1: see where IQ is correlated with extreme manifestations of both
Speaker 1: intellect and openness. And you find that extreme openness is appopenia,
Speaker 1: which is where you see the tendency to see patterns
Speaker 1: in everything, basically everything, and that apipenia lie is in
Speaker 1: a complete opposite spectrum as IQ. However, the interesting thing
Speaker 1: is that both intellect and open to experience are positively
Speaker 1: correlated with each other in the general population. So this
Speaker 1: is created a paradox, right, How can it be that
Speaker 1: on the one hand, these two traits tend to be
Speaker 1: associate with each other, yet they pull part in meaningful
Speaker 1: significant ways when you look at the underlying mechanisms associated
Speaker 1: with each and so this is just kind of you know,
Speaker 1: just in. Yeah, that's really interesting. You got to send
Speaker 1: me your papers on this so I can write about
Speaker 1: this in Scientific American. And I'm always looking for new
Speaker 1: column ideas. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I had not
Speaker 1: seen that pulled apart that way. It's hard to know
Speaker 1: where to go from that. I mean a lot of people,
Speaker 1: like a lot of creationists that I meet, a lot
Speaker 1: of Holocaust deniers, climate deny. You know, they're smart people,
Speaker 1: very smart, you know. So it isn't a problem that
Speaker 1: they're uneducated or unintelligent. You know, there's something else going
Speaker 1: on there. Ideologically speaking, they want certain things to be true,
Speaker 1: and they're really good at marshaling evidence in the direction
Speaker 1: of the way they want things to be. And the
Speaker 1: smarter and more educated you are, the better you are
Speaker 1: doing that. But that of course is not helping us
Speaker 1: get at what's really true. It makes it worse. Actually,
Speaker 1: So it's probably context dependent. There's probably another variable there,
Speaker 1: like your political or religious or ideological predilections that would
Speaker 1: then push you in one direction or another to utilize
Speaker 1: your openness and intellect to you know, evaluate evidence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I see a lot of people and I want
Speaker 1: to say, like your community, like that has the meaning
Speaker 1: to when I say that, I feel like that does
Speaker 1: mean sometime I understand. Yeah, I see a lot of
Speaker 1: people in that community, and I can tell who are
Speaker 1: the ones that would score sky high on both intellect
Speaker 1: end openness because they're highly skeptical but also highly spiritual,
Speaker 1: not necessarily religious, but spiritual, like like Deepalk Trouper you mentioned.
Speaker 1: He's very smart. He loves science. But you know, he
Speaker 1: and I have a fundamental difference in worldviews. Start at
Speaker 1: a starting point. You know. He believes consciousness is well,
Speaker 1: he calls it the ground of being. You can't get
Speaker 1: underneath it or behind it. It suffuses the universe. It
Speaker 1: is the universe and the physical stuff we're used to
Speaker 1: dealing with their manifestations of consciousness. You know, well, you
Speaker 1: need a brain to be conscious. That's like saying you
Speaker 1: need a radio receiver to get the waves. I don't
Speaker 1: agree with any of this, but I'm just telling you
Speaker 1: this is his argument. But once you can see that, say,
Speaker 1: consciousness is the ground of all being, it's fuse it
Speaker 1: throughout the users, it's everything essentially kind of a deistic
Speaker 1: more like a pantheistic argument. Then his arguments from there
Speaker 1: actually make sense. You know, it's sort of a Buddhist
Speaker 1: way of thinking about the world. And when you read
Speaker 1: his tweets in that context, it's like, Okay, I see
Speaker 1: what that's supposed to mean. If you don't understand that,
Speaker 1: then they're nonsensical. They sound like just rubbish, sure, just rambling.
Speaker 1: That's funny. I just had a chat the last podcast
Speaker 1: episode was with Dan Harris and we talked exactly about
Speaker 1: that and how if you take some of these statements
Speaker 1: that people like Eckart totally make as well, and you
Speaker 1: don't view it through a strictly scientific lens, but you
Speaker 1: could actually reinterpret the things to make sense. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: some way. Yeah, Eckart totally. I mean I read his
Speaker 1: book The Power of Now, and you know, from his
Speaker 1: context it does make sense that you know, there is
Speaker 1: only now, There is only now. Our memories don't really
Speaker 1: exist anywhere. They're just current states of you know, neural
Speaker 1: connections and storage, synaptic patterns and so on that form
Speaker 1: our memories. But the memory of say, ten years ago,
Speaker 1: is just what it is right now, and it'll be
Speaker 1: different a year from now or whatever, and there is
Speaker 1: no tomorrow. There's just so you know, the psychological now
Speaker 1: of roughly three seconds. That really is all there is now,
Speaker 1: of course, is I'm kind of saying, yeah, but my
Speaker 1: mortgage is still do next week, so I can't just
Speaker 1: live in the now. But you know, when Deepak and
Speaker 1: Eckhart talked this way, they're really talking as maybe therapists
Speaker 1: or spiritual gurus or something that make people to help
Speaker 1: people put things into perspective. Like if you're always worried
Speaker 1: about your mortgage and you always want to, you know,
Speaker 1: make more money so you can spend more money, you're
Speaker 1: sort of caught up in the hedonic treadmill. Then that
Speaker 1: actually psychologically is not healthy. So really, just stepping back,
Speaker 1: why Jews have this shava, you know, the Sabbath is
Speaker 1: that you're supposed to take a day off and don't
Speaker 1: do any of that to put things in perspective. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that kind of makes sense to a certain extent for
Speaker 1: a balance, you have some kind of balance between you know,
Speaker 1: obsession about the future or the past and living in
Speaker 1: the now. Yeah, I've been thinking about like this idea
Speaker 1: of guruishness. Are you a skeptic guru? Are you a
Speaker 1: guru within your community? I mean, like again, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think of this from an individual differences perspective. There
Speaker 1: are people that are attracted to the wisdom of Deepak,
Speaker 1: and there are people who are equally I would argue
Speaker 1: a different personality profile, who are attracted to what you
Speaker 1: can offer as well. I mean, is there such a
Speaker 1: thing as a you know, skepticism guru well and skepticism, atheism,
Speaker 1: humanism and so on. There's a handful of people that
Speaker 1: stand out that you have best selling books or whatever.
Speaker 1: They get invited to conferences a lot, and and you know,
Speaker 1: you can you can think of, you know, people like
Speaker 1: Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett and so forth. And you know,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm one of those. I don't know, but I
Speaker 1: would say in our so called community, there's less of
Speaker 1: that than another community, simply by personality style of reasoning.
Speaker 1: And I think that we don't like her rus and
Speaker 1: hierarchies and that sort of thing. It's a little bit.
Speaker 1: The analogy I would make would be with libertarians. You know,
Speaker 1: the reason libertarians will never be a big organized political
Speaker 1: party is because they hate big organized political parties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's a good point. I've noticed this. You
Speaker 1: all are very skeptical of each other in a way
Speaker 1: that a lot of Actually there's a lot of unfortunate
Speaker 1: inside fighting and personality conflicts and just ridiculous arguments over
Speaker 1: trivial things. But I think that's also what happens to
Speaker 1: most social movements, you know, Marxist feminists, you name it.
Speaker 1: There's always a purification process of purging those who are
Speaker 1: not the purest feminist, Marxist atheists, whatever. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: fine of making a joke about the Atheist of the
Speaker 1: Year award. You know, well, who would that go to?
Speaker 1: The person that didn't believe the most all year? I
Speaker 1: didn't believe even once the entire year. Okay, that's not
Speaker 1: really what it's for. But you know, what does it
Speaker 1: mean to have an organization that isn't in the organizations
Speaker 1: like religion? And it's an unfortunate thing that a lot
Speaker 1: of religious people think atheism is a thing, it's a worldview.
Speaker 1: It's it's like to be an atheist is to be something,
Speaker 1: and it isn't. To be an atheism is it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean anything. It just means lack of belief in God. Really,
Speaker 1: what we're talking about is, you know, humanism or secular
Speaker 1: humanism or Enlightenment humanism, you know, commitment to civil rights
Speaker 1: and civil liberties and women's rights and gay rights and
Speaker 1: animal rights and equal treatment under the law, and you know,
Speaker 1: basic principles of a secular government. You know, now all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, we're talking about something different, and that's
Speaker 1: really what you know. I don't like to define myself
Speaker 1: by what I don't believe, you know, So let's talk
Speaker 1: about more positive things, like you know, science and reason
Speaker 1: and rights and things like that. Well, that's the idea
Speaker 1: of belief is of interesting canon worms. There are things
Speaker 1: throughout the course of your day that you just have
Speaker 1: to have faith in in order to get through your day, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can't wait for the evidence to come into Yeah. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean it's one of the points of comment and
Speaker 1: Diversity's heuristics rules thumb is that most of the decisions
Speaker 1: we make, you know, we don't sit there and weigh
Speaker 1: the evidence and decide. We just make these snap judgments.
Speaker 1: Because as you said, you'd never get out of the supermarket,
Speaker 1: you know, you got to just go in and go toothpaste.
Speaker 1: I like the blue one, okay, And then you know fruit,
Speaker 1: I always get this fruit and this you know, you
Speaker 1: just we're just creatures that habit and quick rules of
Speaker 1: thumb or else, and that works. I think for most
Speaker 1: areas of life. Maybe it's not so good for say,
Speaker 1: financial investments, getting sucked into gambling schemes or financial scheme
Speaker 1: And in principle, it would be good if we didn't
Speaker 1: do that. In politics, yeah, now that if we weigh
Speaker 1: evidence more. But we fortunately we're pretty tribal there we are.
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm thinking about, like all these individual
Speaker 1: differences variables, I think there's something else that goes beyond
Speaker 1: intellect openness. And I try to touch on this briefly
Speaker 1: when I set agreeableness, but I would say that there
Speaker 1: seems to be in your community high in freethinking and
Speaker 1: nonconformist tendencies. There's a kind of autonomy there that people
Speaker 1: in your community seem to really crave, like to be
Speaker 1: able to be like, no, I don't want to be
Speaker 1: told it's kind of anti guru in a way. Yes, okay, cool.
Speaker 1: So let's move on to a second about a topic
Speaker 1: I know you've been increasingly more interested in, and that's
Speaker 1: free speech speech on campuses and in the public discourse.
Speaker 1: And again, these things are more relevant today. You know
Speaker 1: a lot all these things we're talking about too, are
Speaker 1: just so relevant. So let's start with how let's start
Speaker 1: with campuses. What do you make of the whole? You know,
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson has become like the celebrity now. I've published
Speaker 1: with him scientific papers, so I feel like I like
Speaker 1: I knew him when Oh yeah, he's a cloud bird
Speaker 1: of mine on openness to experience, and so it's pretty
Speaker 1: open to experience, I would say he is. Yeah, i
Speaker 1: would say he's very open to experiences. But I've never
Speaker 1: mentioned I've only seen him on Joe Rogan twice and
Speaker 1: I heard one of his podcasts with Sam Harris, and
Speaker 1: you know, it was just somebody told me he makes
Speaker 1: a lot of money on Patreon and I had no
Speaker 1: idea how this paatreon and stuff works going on there,
Speaker 1: and I was just floored. I mean, he makes like
Speaker 1: forty five thousand dollars a month. Really, yeah, yeah, really,
Speaker 1: I should be more controversial. See this is all my
Speaker 1: friends and everyone you know says to me that, you know, Scott,
Speaker 1: you could be so much more famous if you just
Speaker 1: stop trying to be so integrative. I mean, like that's
Speaker 1: just the way I think that's just the way I am.
Speaker 1: Like my personality is I want to take all the
Speaker 1: different perspectives and see what emerges as appeared to you know.
Speaker 1: But man, I mean, it's amazing what you can do.
Speaker 1: I think of, like, you know, the Milo phenomenon as well.
Speaker 1: I see Jordan perhaps as he would certainly not be
Speaker 1: happy if I like him to Milo whatsoever. But there's
Speaker 1: some genus there I can explain it. Do you understand
Speaker 1: what I'm saying? Yes, I do. I think, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think from what I heard from Jorden he really believes
Speaker 1: what he says. Milo. I'm not sure he believes what
Speaker 1: he says, you know, because he says it's wild stuff.
Speaker 1: That's a good point. It's a little bit like Alex Jones.
Speaker 1: You know, how much of it is show how much
Speaker 1: of it does he really believe? He himself says, you know,
Speaker 1: it's an act. I don't know. But any case, I
Speaker 1: think I'm hoping that the Evergreen incident is the you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of the bottom of the barrel here. They
Speaker 1: can't get any worse. Although I've been saying that for
Speaker 1: six months now. You know that maybe this will call
Speaker 1: national attention to a problem that will trigger administrators and
Speaker 1: college presidents, and hopefully fact will be to get a
Speaker 1: lid on this problem. And what's the problem. The problem
Speaker 1: is is a confusion of free speech and hate speech
Speaker 1: and what hate speech means. And you know, if you
Speaker 1: follow the reasoning, and it kind of makes sense. You
Speaker 1: know that we act based on our beliefs, and many
Speaker 1: of our beliefs are based on our language and the
Speaker 1: way we talk about other people. Then that helps form
Speaker 1: prejudices or not. And therefore the language you use matters,
Speaker 1: which is why we don't use the N word anymore.
Speaker 1: For example. You know, we've tried to be better as
Speaker 1: writers to not always say he, say he or she,
Speaker 1: or pikes it up, or you know, use the plural,
Speaker 1: you know, those kinds of things. You know, I think
Speaker 1: there are small concessions to make to political correctness that
Speaker 1: we've already done that are pretty reasonable, you know, and
Speaker 1: from there you kind of start to scale up, you know,
Speaker 1: to like the stuff that Jordan's into with various pronouns.
Speaker 1: And I guess he's combating some Canadian bill that I
Speaker 1: actually haven't read, and so I don't really know to
Speaker 1: what extent he's right about his claims. That you could
Speaker 1: be prosecuted and jailed for not calling somebody by their
Speaker 1: preferred pronoun. I'm not actually sure that's the case, but anyway,
Speaker 1: that's what he says. So if that's true, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously that's taking things too far. And I think in
Speaker 1: the minds of a lot of these students who have
Speaker 1: been taught by professors who believe not in the old
Speaker 1: Marxist class warfare conflict tension, but in the newer neo
Speaker 1: Marxist identity politics, conflict or competition for power. And so
Speaker 1: if you believe that different groups have different levels of
Speaker 1: power in society, and that we don't want any group
Speaker 1: to have any power over any other group, by definition,
Speaker 1: on a college campus, administrators in faculty have more power
Speaker 1: than students. It's just by definition. So the students railing
Speaker 1: against these power differentials, that shouldn't surprise administrators and faculty,
Speaker 1: because that's what they have been teaching them. And that's
Speaker 1: what and this is one reason why a lot of
Speaker 1: these administrations and faculty back down. Why they cave into
Speaker 1: the demands of these students, not because they're afraid so much.
Speaker 1: Whether they're invertebrates, as Jerry Coin calls them, but that
Speaker 1: they actually believe this, that you know that there shouldn't
Speaker 1: be power differentials in society because that's how prejudices play
Speaker 1: out in the political realm, and therefore we have to
Speaker 1: stop it. Bat down to the words you use and
Speaker 1: the power that's on campus. And you know why these
Speaker 1: students are more concerned about like the biology teacher Brett
Speaker 1: Weinstein when there's real issues that people like Ian heersy
Speaker 1: Ali call attention to, like female genital mutilation right here
Speaker 1: in the United States. Surely they can see that that's
Speaker 1: a bigger problem. But I think there's a practical thing
Speaker 1: as well. On these college campuses. It's just easy to
Speaker 1: walk down to the classroom where your racist biology teacher
Speaker 1: is there and surround him and burate him. It's just
Speaker 1: simpler to do that than go to Somalia try to,
Speaker 1: you know, affect some political change there to help women,
Speaker 1: you know, in a foreign land. Yeah, I hear your argument.
Speaker 1: I know that it can be controversial to just try
Speaker 1: to do comparisons between like what could be one person's
Speaker 1: internal drama. Shouldn't you say drama but internal you know,
Speaker 1: what's important to that person. You know, it would really
Speaker 1: upset that person to say, like, you know, but there
Speaker 1: are bigger problems than that sort of thing. Do you
Speaker 1: think we can come up with like objective like relative problems,
Speaker 1: like scientifically and say, look, scientifically, you're so preoccupied with
Speaker 1: this when this X, Y, and Z actually would have
Speaker 1: a greater impact on I don't know, like can we
Speaker 1: even do that? I don't know if you can do it,
Speaker 1: because I mean, the example Brett Weinstein is so poignant
Speaker 1: because here is a guy who calls himself, you know,
Speaker 1: a radical restive, a Bernie supporter, you know, a guy
Speaker 1: that's devoted his life to combating racism and bigotry. And
Speaker 1: you know, he gets surrounded by these students calling him
Speaker 1: a racist and he's just trying to talk to them,
Speaker 1: and you know, do you want to hear my answer? No?
Speaker 1: And it's like, okay, it may be beyond hope of talking.
Speaker 1: We intellectuals like to think, well, we can just talk
Speaker 1: through our differences. Sometimes that isn't the case. This idea
Speaker 1: of giving validity. Everyone wants to have the validity of
Speaker 1: their experiences recognized. You know, it's kind of a fundamental
Speaker 1: human thing. And but also we also view the world
Speaker 1: from our own perspective. So we all, I think, tend
Speaker 1: to overinflate the importance of our own personal experiences and
Speaker 1: sometimes the detriment of even taking other people's perspectives, you know, right,
Speaker 1: like you talked you you talked about tribalism earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of like do I want to
Speaker 1: go there with some of this stuff? And I figure,
Speaker 1: why not? Right, I mean, why not have an open discussion.
Speaker 1: I remember this big like Rebecca Watson elevator gate thing
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago, and I think that was
Speaker 1: in your community, and I remember Richard Dawkins, very well
Speaker 1: respected skeptic, kind of downplay that experience in a tweet
Speaker 1: or some comment, a comment saying, you know, kind of saying,
Speaker 1: look like, dear MUSLIMA, you know there are genital mutilation
Speaker 1: bigger issues than a male in an elevator, and that
Speaker 1: really upset a lot of feminists in your community, is saying,
Speaker 1: how you know that was really uncalled for for him
Speaker 1: to contrast the importance of these different invalidate her point
Speaker 1: just because there are great problems. Now I'm bringing this
Speaker 1: up and I want to talk about a subjectively as
Speaker 1: you know, like what are your thoughts on that, because
Speaker 1: one could make the case that we shouldn't be contrasting
Speaker 1: different things, and that these students and it is relevant
Speaker 1: to your point about college campuses. A student who like
Speaker 1: a pronoun issue or is upset at a teacher for
Speaker 1: triggering something or something like that, Like one could make
Speaker 1: the case of that is the teacher really should take
Speaker 1: that seriously because that is very important to that person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so who this is we are complicated? Is these are
Speaker 1: complicated the person that they gets assaulted physically or verbally
Speaker 1: assaulted or verbally insulted or whatever. They're not really helped
Speaker 1: by someone saying, yeah, but somebody in another foreign country
Speaker 1: has it, you know, way worse than you. So chill out, dude,
Speaker 1: and yeah, okay, yeah, that's true. You know, Richard kind
Speaker 1: of stepped into it there. I think his point was
Speaker 1: perfectly valid, but it was irrelevant to the point that
Speaker 1: I guess Rebecca was trying to make about hitting women
Speaker 1: up for you know, a romantic encounter at three in
Speaker 1: the morning and an elevator isn't cool. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: still amazed that blew up into a whole thing. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like any guy reading that you go, yeah, all right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get that. You know, it's a hard subject to
Speaker 1: talk about because it's so sensitive to people. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, the moment someone makes the point like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe you should not get camera drunk at a rat
Speaker 1: party to the point where you're completely out of control,
Speaker 1: then you're accused of blaming the victim. Yeah, okay, we
Speaker 1: don't want to do that. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know, if the guy and the woman are both
Speaker 1: completely plastered out of their minds, why is it that
Speaker 1: the guy has responsibility but the woman doesn't. You know,
Speaker 1: that seems to be the opposite of what feminism was about.
Speaker 1: The second wave feminism, the kind that Carol Tavers talks about,
Speaker 1: that you know, women want to be treated equally, and
Speaker 1: so this new version, this sort of third wave is
Speaker 1: sometimes called fainting couch feminism. That is, women are now
Speaker 1: being treated as like they're weak, they're indecisive, they can't
Speaker 1: control their emotions, they can't control their liquor, they can't
Speaker 1: control their volition, and therefore it's the men's responsibility to
Speaker 1: take care of them and monitor how much they're drinking
Speaker 1: at a party and don't take advantage of them and
Speaker 1: protect them, you know, to second wave feminists like Carol Tavers,
Speaker 1: you know, she finds us insulting. Like you know, I'm
Speaker 1: capable of taking care of myself, thank you. I'll control
Speaker 1: how much I drink, and I'll make my own disc visions,
Speaker 1: and I'll take responsibility for my actions and what happens
Speaker 1: to me. And I think some of the conflict is
Speaker 1: between younger millennial and whatever the next generation after millennials
Speaker 1: is compared to older say, people born in the forties,
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties, you know, baby boomers. I think maybe
Speaker 1: there's some generational differences there and where they are, and
Speaker 1: that you know, the sort of feminists or civil rights
Speaker 1: you know, movement, and to what extent you think, you know,
Speaker 1: people have personal responsibility for their actions versus anybody can
Speaker 1: be a true victim. Now, Michael, as a personal I psychologist, again,
Speaker 1: I want to put together a battery and look at
Speaker 1: differences among feminist factions. Can we do that study as
Speaker 1: well within your community? How could we do that? Yes? Well,
Speaker 1: and could do that. I give the same battery, the
Speaker 1: same exact battery. It'll become they were giving the deep
Speaker 1: ok people. Yeah, yeah, we could do that. It would
Speaker 1: be good to know. I mean, it would begin to
Speaker 1: have data so we know what we're talking about. So
Speaker 1: much of this conversations turn on anecdotes, which is, as
Speaker 1: we know, don't really mean much, you know, and then
Speaker 1: when then we start compiling just so stories, Well it
Speaker 1: could be that generationally there's these different you know, now
Speaker 1: we're off the scientific page. Yeah, you know, I yearned
Speaker 1: for peace is what I yearned for amongst all these
Speaker 1: different factions. When I look at all this, I just
Speaker 1: want to say to everyone, like, very rarely do I
Speaker 1: see people start on common ground. They'd start on emotional
Speaker 1: triggered ground, so to speak. Yeah, and that's certainly part
Speaker 1: of the campus thing. It's you know, very emotionally volatile
Speaker 1: and you see these things explode. Now, to be fair,
Speaker 1: you know, I still think it's a minority of students
Speaker 1: that are into this stuff. You know, Like I teach
Speaker 1: at Chapman University. I'm just there one day a week,
Speaker 1: so I don't I don't see a lot, but I
Speaker 1: don't see much of this at all at that campus.
Speaker 1: And even at Evergreen, now considered to be you know,
Speaker 1: the craziest campus in the entire country. You know, we
Speaker 1: saw maybe two hundred students on those videos total. You know,
Speaker 1: there's fourth thousand students there, So where are the other
Speaker 1: thirty eight hundred students? And my guess is they're just
Speaker 1: hould up in their dorms, keeping their heads down. They
Speaker 1: don't want anything to do with this one way or
Speaker 1: the other. They're just trying to study and just have
Speaker 1: a decent life. And that's my guess is that most
Speaker 1: you know, we can't call all students snowflakes or whatever
Speaker 1: insult you want to use. I think most of them
Speaker 1: are not into this at all. But but of course
Speaker 1: that you know, the media is tasked to cover the
Speaker 1: extreme events. That's what it does, you know, So if
Speaker 1: you have a you're not going to send a camera
Speaker 1: crew to some campus where nothing is happening and it's
Speaker 1: just boring. You're going to send it to you know,
Speaker 1: you're going to show the videos of the students surrounding
Speaker 1: the faculty member yell and racist at them. So it's
Speaker 1: so interesting, I mean, I trying to process all this
Speaker 1: in real time because it's such there's so many complex
Speaker 1: issues at play here, and well, what you're thinking about
Speaker 1: that me just clarify one thing, you know, my community,
Speaker 1: our community, Yeah, that one. You know, there's atheists, humanists,
Speaker 1: and skeptics, and they're actually three different things. So atheists
Speaker 1: really are are just more into combating religion. Say you
Speaker 1: might think of maybe Dawkins Harris gets you know, the
Speaker 1: late great Christopher Higgins in that camp. Then you have
Speaker 1: skeptics like myself, James Randy maybe you know, and like
Speaker 1: the skeptical Inquirer readers, skeptic magazine readers that are have
Speaker 1: traditionally been into debunking the paranormal, pseudoscience, alternative medicine, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, and largely stay out of the religion business,
Speaker 1: although just peripherally when it comes up, say regarding creationists
Speaker 1: teaching creationism in school, violation of church and state. Then
Speaker 1: humanists are more political, you know, they're into women's rights,
Speaker 1: reproductive rights, the right to die, euthanasia, the passage of
Speaker 1: legislation that interferes with civil rights. They're much more political
Speaker 1: in that sense, less concerned about, say, pseudoscience, and they're
Speaker 1: not so focused on debunking God as they are keeping
Speaker 1: religion out of politics, separation of church and state. So
Speaker 1: in your battery you might think about, you know, kick
Speaker 1: the box one, two, or three boxes that you cander
Speaker 1: yourself a member of which community because they're a little
Speaker 1: bit different. I think that would be really valuable to
Speaker 1: look at the you know, subgroup differences within the community.
Speaker 1: That's great. And deep box people, a lot of them
Speaker 1: don't believe in God. They're not Christians. They think the
Speaker 1: whole Abrahamic God thing is insane, right, you know, but
Speaker 1: they're sure that you know, there's a great spirit in
Speaker 1: the sky. You know that the cosmic consciousness is aware
Speaker 1: of us, and you know the secret and you know
Speaker 1: the universe knows what you want, and you know, not
Speaker 1: in any anthropomorphic sense at all. You know. So when
Speaker 1: deep Box says, oh, I'm into God, I believe in God.
Speaker 1: God cares about you know, he's not talking like a
Speaker 1: Christian wo at all. Well, speaking of which, I mean,
Speaker 1: these beliefs are really fluid through across our life. They
Speaker 1: can be across our life span. You were at one
Speaker 1: point of fundamental as Christian, right, Yeah, I was, Yeah,
Speaker 1: in high school and college. I went to Pepperdine University
Speaker 1: Church of Christ, and yeah, I was into it. So
Speaker 1: I really understand the mindset that the worldview. Internally, it's
Speaker 1: pretty coherent and logically consistent inside the bubble, particularly when
Speaker 1: you're surrounded by people that believe the same thing, and
Speaker 1: it just gets reinforced. That's true for all beliefs. Now
Speaker 1: we are always talking about the bubble and the cylinder
Speaker 1: and the echo chamber and all that stuff. But that
Speaker 1: was true in my religious beliefs, and it wasn't really
Speaker 1: till I got out of that went to graduate school
Speaker 1: at a secular university. This is in the late seventies,
Speaker 1: long before the whole atheism thing took off. People might
Speaker 1: have been atheists. I don't really know. It just never
Speaker 1: came up. It wasn't a thing science and religion. No
Speaker 1: one talked about it. It was just irrelevant, and so
Speaker 1: it was easy to kind of give it up. When
Speaker 1: I decided I no longer believed in the central tenets
Speaker 1: of Christianity or any religion and become an atheist, I
Speaker 1: just quit talking about it. And that was that. There
Speaker 1: was no declaration of atheism and coming out parties or
Speaker 1: anything like that. That's fair enough, and I believe there was.
Speaker 1: I mean, the whole series of chain of events that
Speaker 1: kind of caused you to eventually become an atheist. One
Speaker 1: involving a college sweetheart who was involved in automobile accident?
Speaker 1: Is that right? And you kind of were sitting there
Speaker 1: at her bedside and yeah, yeah, that's right. I wrote
Speaker 1: about that in Believing the Brain. Yes, it was kind
Speaker 1: of the last straw. It wasn't that it was a cast,
Speaker 1: but you know, she was in an accident, broke her back,
Speaker 1: paralyzed from the waist down. And you know, it's quite
Speaker 1: a shocking thing to see somebody in that state in
Speaker 1: an emergency room. You know, they got just strapped in
Speaker 1: his bed, hanging upside down and all the oxygen mess
Speaker 1: and all this stuff and hyperbaring chamber and it's like,
Speaker 1: holy shit, this is unbelievably life changing. And you know,
Speaker 1: so I was just there constantly for weeks on end,
Speaker 1: and you know, so I got boy, and this is
Speaker 1: a you know, a really sweet, sweet, nice woman. I mean,
Speaker 1: not the kind of argument you could make from the
Speaker 1: problem of evil, like you know, human sin or made
Speaker 1: bad decision. You know, it was truly an innocent person,
Speaker 1: the kind of thing we would say today like childhood leukemia,
Speaker 1: you know what's with that? And so I just prayed,
Speaker 1: you know, just like all right, you know if there's
Speaker 1: a God, if ever anybody should be healed, you know,
Speaker 1: this would be a good time. And you know, nothing happened.
Speaker 1: Of course, she's still paralyzed. I'm still in touch with
Speaker 1: her periodically, and she had a full life, heads kids
Speaker 1: and got married, head kids, the whole thing, but still
Speaker 1: not healed. So you know, to me, it wasn't like, Okay,
Speaker 1: if God doesn't heal theer, then I'm gonna quick believe in.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like that. It wasn't an experiment, but it
Speaker 1: was just like the last straw. It's like after that,
Speaker 1: I was like, you know what, forget it. This is nothing.
Speaker 1: There's just nothing here that's not necessarily evidence that God
Speaker 1: doesn't exist, though I had a either interesting possibility is
Speaker 1: David Chalmers was on my podcast, The Phiosopher Hey chatting
Speaker 1: about how may he actually puts it like a forty
Speaker 1: to sixty percent probably that we're living in a simulation,
Speaker 1: which is much higher probability than you would think. Really,
Speaker 1: but it's very possible that the simulators just aren't listening.
Speaker 1: I mean, they did their thing, they set it off,
Speaker 1: and maybe there's millions or billions in the galaxy of simulations.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, right. I mean, so, how isn't that
Speaker 1: still possible? I don't think so. I mean there's these
Speaker 1: to me, what are just essentially science fiction fantasies that
Speaker 1: are fun. You know, are we living in a simulation? No?
Speaker 1: How do you know? Okay I don't, but you don't either,
Speaker 1: so you might as well, you know, say, none of
Speaker 1: this is really like sollipsism. You know, none of this exists.
Speaker 1: You're just you know, a pigment of my imagination. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, but deig Card already played that whole thing
Speaker 1: out and built from the starting point that at least
Speaker 1: I know I exist because somebody is doing the questioning,
Speaker 1: and you know, he built from there a whole worldview
Speaker 1: that you know that essentially he's still living. And I
Speaker 1: think that's been refuted. Somebody else was saying there should
Speaker 1: be little pixels that go out every once in a
Speaker 1: while in the sceneio, because no simulation is going to
Speaker 1: be perfect, well you know, buffering or something. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean some people think that the current presidency was a
Speaker 1: glitch in the system. There's a pixel, big problem, big glitz,
Speaker 1: Like how did that happen? Oh? Yeah, So I guess
Speaker 1: this means you don't believe in an afterlife earlier either. No.
Speaker 1: My next book is on this, said, Heavens on Earth,
Speaker 1: about the scientific quest for the afterlife, immortality, and utopia.
Speaker 1: Skeptical of all of them, not just the religious afterlife
Speaker 1: of course, heavens and so forth. Not only is there
Speaker 1: no evidence for that, I think they have the same
Speaker 1: problem that the mind uploading people that Ray kurzbel isles
Speaker 1: the singularity people have. That is, it would just be
Speaker 1: a copy of your connect dome, your soul, and your
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it. Your pattern of information
Speaker 1: represents you, all your thoughts and memories, emotions. It would
Speaker 1: just be a copy. You'd still be dead in the ground.
Speaker 1: And unless there's some continuity of consciousness, like when you
Speaker 1: go to sleep and you wake up, there's kind of
Speaker 1: a break in continuity that comes back, or you go
Speaker 1: under anesthesia and you come back there's a break in continuity,
Speaker 1: but your point of view self is still there through
Speaker 1: your looking at the world through your eyes. To me
Speaker 1: an actual death, like with cryonics, to be chronically frozen,
Speaker 1: you actually have to be dead. Legally, they can't do it.
Speaker 1: Like you know today this afternoon, when you're strong and healthy,
Speaker 1: and young. If you think about it, when you're chronically frozen,
Speaker 1: it's the worst day of your life the day you die.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, or just copying your connect dome and uploading
Speaker 1: it into computer, turn the computer on, like in Transcendence
Speaker 1: when Johnny Depp's in side the computer looking out through
Speaker 1: the little camera hole here. I don't think that's going
Speaker 1: to happen. I think it's a problem of identity. You know,
Speaker 1: who are you? What does it mean to be you?
Speaker 1: Here's your memory self, the themself, and then there's the
Speaker 1: point of your self, the peel of e self. And
Speaker 1: I think you need both. And I think a copy
Speaker 1: through an uploading or chronic saying might work. That might
Speaker 1: be like a long sleep. I mean, it can't work
Speaker 1: technologically at the moment, but in principle it might. But heaven,
Speaker 1: you know, most religions say that you really religious texts,
Speaker 1: most of them say that essentially your resurrection into heaven
Speaker 1: is a copy of you, that you are still in
Speaker 1: the ground ed and buried, and that your soul the
Speaker 1: copy of your pattern it's taken to heaven or re enacted,
Speaker 1: recreated in heaven. I still claim that the problem of identity,
Speaker 1: that it's just a copy of you, no more than
Speaker 1: a twin looks at the other twin and says, there
Speaker 1: I am. I mean I had this very conversation again
Speaker 1: with David Chalmers that what once you start uploading to
Speaker 1: the system, at what point are you no longer the
Speaker 1: you here? Like we were like, when we get to
Speaker 1: fifty percent, let's say fifty percent of us in the
Speaker 1: computer and fifty percent of you is here, is still you? Okay?
Speaker 1: Like which one is you? I mean, you can actually
Speaker 1: do that thought experiment. It gets really tricky. No, I
Speaker 1: agree that this is very we don't know. We really
Speaker 1: don't know, is what I would say. No, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I'd be happy to be proven wrong in my
Speaker 1: skepticism here. So the default skeptical position is that it
Speaker 1: can't happen. You know, it's a dream. It's always been
Speaker 1: a fight cream. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Speaker 1: And you know, I wake up in a silicon chip somewhere.
Speaker 1: And although I never quite know why people think it'd
Speaker 1: be so great to live in a computer, because these
Speaker 1: computers really don't last very long. Yeah, they're not that
Speaker 1: great compared to the you know, electric need of our
Speaker 1: brain that at least last eighty ninety years. I think,
Speaker 1: like when you wrote a Scientific American article about this recently,
Speaker 1: I think like Jeffrey Miller like responded to your tweet
Speaker 1: or something with an interesting point. What was that? Well?
Speaker 1: Oh well, he said, how do you know that the
Speaker 1: continuity wouldn't last? I don't you know. I mean, no
Speaker 1: one knows it. Just to me, it seems like there's
Speaker 1: a logical break there, because, I mean, the only way
Speaker 1: to copy it connect to them at the moment it's
Speaker 1: done with lower organism is you actually sacrifice the animal
Speaker 1: and kill them and slice their brain up. This was
Speaker 1: done at this brain Preservation Price lab out in Fontana.
Speaker 1: I went out to see it, and you know, they
Speaker 1: took the rabbit and they infused. They cut its neck
Speaker 1: and put two tubes into its carotid arteries, and while
Speaker 1: it was still alive and scized and its own heart,
Speaker 1: pumped the anti freeze into the brain. The problem with
Speaker 1: freezing brains compared to say, freezing embryos, is that the
Speaker 1: brains are so much larger you can't get the anti
Speaker 1: freeze into every last cell and synapse, such that the
Speaker 1: freezing process that damages them and destroys the memories that
Speaker 1: presumably destroys the memories that are in there. So this
Speaker 1: process is supposed to get around there. And so they,
Speaker 1: you know, then sacrifice the animal, froze its brain, defrosted it,
Speaker 1: sliced it up and looked at it under a scanning
Speaker 1: microscope and you could see the synapses. We're still intact.
Speaker 1: So it's like, okay, but the animal's dead, right, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's dead. Okay, so you copy it and then what well,
Speaker 1: we put it in this computer and then what well
Speaker 1: you turn it on? Wait? Wait, what does that even mean?
Speaker 1: Turn it on? You know? So the analogy they said
Speaker 1: was well, okay, it's like incasing a book in whatever,
Speaker 1: like a resident of some kind, and you'll never open
Speaker 1: the book again. But you could slust the pages of
Speaker 1: the book and read every letter on the page and
Speaker 1: know what's in the book. It's like, yeah, okay, that
Speaker 1: makes sense in terms of reading the book, but the
Speaker 1: book isn't going to come alive and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden have a point of view. So to me, it's
Speaker 1: all just deeply flawed. You know, when I go to
Speaker 1: these I've been to the Singularity Summit a couple of
Speaker 1: these and it's like religion, you know, it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: here comes ray kerswild of Messiah. Yes we forever. Well,
Speaker 1: he's definitely probably getting a message that a lot of
Speaker 1: people want to hear. And who knows, with all those
Speaker 1: vitamin supplements he's taking, with all his cocal ten he
Speaker 1: takes every day, Rays about ten years older than me,
Speaker 1: and he looks it. Oh really, Oh well that's I mean,
Speaker 1: he would not be happy to hear that. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but you know, everybody ages and there's nothing
Speaker 1: you can do about it. What there is something you
Speaker 1: can exercise, you can have a good decent diet, and
Speaker 1: so on. The alls we're talking about is living closer
Speaker 1: to the upper ceiling. Yeah. Yeah, it's like an argument
Speaker 1: that people say, well today people lived twice as long
Speaker 1: as they used to. If you lived one hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: five hundred years ago, you'd be dead by now. No. No, no,
Speaker 1: people lived in their eighties and nineties a century ago
Speaker 1: or five hundred years ago, just not very many of them.
Speaker 1: So alls we're talking about is more people making it
Speaker 1: up to the upper ceiling. You know, you remind me
Speaker 1: of something a cartoon I saw which I want to
Speaker 1: send you where they had two different like women aid stands,
Speaker 1: so to speak. One had a sign on it that
Speaker 1: said uncomfortable truths you know, sign up here an the
Speaker 1: other one said like things that will make you feel good,
Speaker 1: And there was no like, no one was that the uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: It was like there was like a billion people lined
Speaker 1: up for the other one. You remind me of the
Speaker 1: person kind of at that lemonade stand. Yes. Unfortunately, maybe
Speaker 1: that's why my book books don't do as well as depaks,
Speaker 1: although I try to know. So my next book I
Speaker 1: have a big ending about so what's it all about?
Speaker 1: What's the purpose of life? And so on? So I
Speaker 1: try to end on a positive note. It's not like
Speaker 1: living now as if the big show is coming and
Speaker 1: this is all just a temporary staging where we practice.
Speaker 1: If anything, that would be an impoverished worldview. If you think, well,
Speaker 1: this is the big show now you are on the stage. Go, well,
Speaker 1: that's right. I mean that could be a book titled
Speaker 1: this is it? This is it? Yeah? Some thing? No, No,
Speaker 1: I get your point. I am wondering personally, are you
Speaker 1: scared of death like in your worldview? No? Okay, so
Speaker 1: you can so you can reconcile all these things in
Speaker 1: a way in which you don't need these other things
Speaker 1: in order to make you. I don't deal with that, okay,
Speaker 1: but that may be a temperament thing. You know, some
Speaker 1: people say they're bothered by it. There's a whole theory
Speaker 1: about terror management theory, right, you know, you know, most
Speaker 1: of everything we do is to avoid the terror of
Speaker 1: death awareness. I think it's nonsense. I have a whole
Speaker 1: skeptical section of my book on terror management theory. But
Speaker 1: I think most people just live their lives, even religious people.
Speaker 1: I think in the back of their minds they're thinking,
Speaker 1: I get to go to heaven and so on. But
Speaker 1: most of the time they're just living their days like
Speaker 1: the rest of us do. Okay. So I want to
Speaker 1: cover the last topic today, something that is a mutual
Speaker 1: area of interest, and that's you know, the science of
Speaker 1: flourishing and positive psychology. Before we get to your criticisms
Speaker 1: of positive psychology, I want you to talk a little
Speaker 1: about how science can legitimately inform and determined policy is
Speaker 1: optimal for human flourishing. Oh well, yeah, I'm not that
Speaker 1: skeptical of positive psychology. I mean, I've written about excesses
Speaker 1: I think, and the concerns I have about it, Like
Speaker 1: Barbara Aarnright wrote about in her book, you know that
Speaker 1: some of it sort of blends over into that kind
Speaker 1: of deep hop the secret you know, if you just
Speaker 1: if you wish it enough, your cancer will go away.
Speaker 1: You'll get to drive the Ferrari, you can have whatever
Speaker 1: you want. You know, that that kind of positive psychology
Speaker 1: that I think most real positive psychology researchers would also
Speaker 1: just how if they will. Yeah, it's not healthy, and
Speaker 1: I think, you know, living a realistic world view. But
Speaker 1: so the thing, A couple of things I wrote about it.
Speaker 1: One of them was about a Steve job So, you know,
Speaker 1: here's an example of somebody who you know, definitely you know,
Speaker 1: is pushing the envelope, you know, letting himself be controlled
Speaker 1: by other people's restrictions and all that, and thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: I can just wheel my way through life, you know.
Speaker 1: And so when he gets his cancer diagnosis, he's fiddling
Speaker 1: around with all this nonsense stuff rather than the boring old,
Speaker 1: you know, his oncologist recommendations, and he probably would still
Speaker 1: be alive had he done something about it at the
Speaker 1: right time. That's an example of over optimism bias that
Speaker 1: you know, just think I can do anything. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: actually you can't. It's better to be the slight more
Speaker 1: positive and slightly more negative, I guess. But how about
Speaker 1: just be realistic with a slight, you know, try to
Speaker 1: have a positive outlook, and maybe by temperament it's easier
Speaker 1: to be around somebody who's more optimistic and happy. As
Speaker 1: you know, there's only so much you can do about that.
Speaker 1: Some people, you know, at least fifty percent ritable. That
Speaker 1: form of temperament may be more and is tweaked a
Speaker 1: little bit by culture, and you can change some of
Speaker 1: it yourself. I guess by willpower. Maybe some people claim it,
Speaker 1: but so that'd be my concern about it. And I
Speaker 1: guess in terms of human flourishing, the better thing we
Speaker 1: could do is to try to figure out what we've
Speaker 1: been doing right for five hundred years and do more
Speaker 1: of that, you know, like expanding civil rights and civil liberties.
Speaker 1: I would have to say healthcare, you know, for everybody,
Speaker 1: would be a good thing for human flourishing. You know,
Speaker 1: at this point our healthcare system is so messed up.
Speaker 1: I almost agree to a you know, a single pair thing,
Speaker 1: but you know, just the basics of life. Get everybody
Speaker 1: out of poverty, you know, these kinds of things, even
Speaker 1: though that pudonic treadmill is real. And you know, once
Speaker 1: the people are out of poverty, they're going to want
Speaker 1: more and more and more. That's okay, that's fine whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't care about that, you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: human flourishing, Let's solve the problems at the bottom before
Speaker 1: we worry about I don't know, let's say some you know,
Speaker 1: the life of rats. Let's worry about the life of dolphin, cetaceans,
Speaker 1: the great apes. You know. Just just scale down and
Speaker 1: just start with the big steps, you know, and that
Speaker 1: everybody has rights and things like that. That's the level
Speaker 1: of human first, and I think more that than the individual,
Speaker 1: you could do anything you want. Kind of psychology. I
Speaker 1: love that I'm a positive psychologist and I wholeheartedly embrace that.
Speaker 1: I even I work at the Positive Psychology Center at
Speaker 1: Penn that's my job, right And I have long believed
Speaker 1: that the morally dimension is woefully missing from positive psychology
Speaker 1: and it needs to be part of it. And I
Speaker 1: love that equity and fairness is and helping vulnerable individuals
Speaker 1: that you talk about that, like I have you know,
Speaker 1: I've been quoted as saying that, you know, I feel
Speaker 1: like a lot of the field of positiology focus on
Speaker 1: helping the flourishing forish more as opposed to helping the
Speaker 1: vulnerable flurish. And my whole miss life's mission is to
Speaker 1: help the vulnerable for USh. So well, look, thank you
Speaker 1: for putting that perspective there. Yeah, I think what you do,
Speaker 1: you guys are doing it pan is great and it's
Speaker 1: really important. And that whole positive psychology movement that Marty
Speaker 1: Sellingman really helped planeer, you know, is really a good
Speaker 1: corrective to all the negativity stuff that psychologists were studying,
Speaker 1: which is also important. But it's like there's other aspects
Speaker 1: of human flourishing that are important. So yeah, that's all good. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and put all this stuff on a scientific foundation is
Speaker 1: really important or else. Yeah, you're just in the secret
Speaker 1: territory all the time, right, Yeah, that's study I cited
Speaker 1: in one of my columns on the entrepreneurs and how
Speaker 1: you know, entrepreneurs have to overcome a lot of failure,
Speaker 1: some over optimism bias. Is good, Like, I can do it,
Speaker 1: I can do it. I can keep pushing I can
Speaker 1: keep pushing. You're more likely to be successful if you
Speaker 1: do that then if you give up early. But on
Speaker 1: the other hand, there's studies showing Kinman writes about this
Speaker 1: in Thinking Fast and Slow that entrepreneurs tend to air
Speaker 1: too much on the over optimism side at the point
Speaker 1: where they really should cut their losses and get out
Speaker 1: of this investment and move on to something else. You know,
Speaker 1: the sun cost fallacy kicks in and they hang on
Speaker 1: to investments way too long when they should just say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm a failure here. I'm going to
Speaker 1: move on and try something different. So there. I don't
Speaker 1: know what the right balance is, but there's a balance
Speaker 1: the absolutely And I just in my head thought of
Speaker 1: something I want to circle back that we talked about
Speaker 1: earlier in the conversation. Maybe we can just end with this.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot about Robert Wright's ideas about
Speaker 1: he kind of just like, you know, there does seem
Speaker 1: to be a telios or telios to the universe. You know,
Speaker 1: there does seem like it when you look at the
Speaker 1: patterns over time, there seems to be some order and happening.
Speaker 1: And you did touch on that a little bit. You
Speaker 1: talk about complexity and stuff. What do you think of
Speaker 1: that idea of telios. Yes, I know Bob Wright pretty
Speaker 1: well and his ideas. I think he pushes that thesis
Speaker 1: just a little far. Of course, that's what writers do,
Speaker 1: and that's okay. First of all, I don't think there's
Speaker 1: anything built in or inherent or inevitable about that. So
Speaker 1: in my next book, Heavens on Earth, the last chapter
Speaker 1: I touch on this idea what does it mean to
Speaker 1: have a purpose in life? So you start with something
Speaker 1: simple like a star. What's the purpose of a star?
Speaker 1: You know, because theis what's the purpose of the universe? Well,
Speaker 1: what do you mean by purpose? The purpose of the
Speaker 1: star is to convert hydrogen into helium. You know, the
Speaker 1: moment it's a certain size and it hits a certain
Speaker 1: temperature because of the forces of gravity pulling the atoms together,
Speaker 1: and you get fusion, and then it releases through nuclear power,
Speaker 1: you know, light and so forth, you know, and then
Speaker 1: and the byproduct is helium from hydrogen and so on
Speaker 1: and so on. You build all the elements were made
Speaker 1: out of star stuff. So that's a purpose. That's it.
Speaker 1: It's pretty simple, you know. So if you just scale
Speaker 1: up what's the purpose of water. It's to find its
Speaker 1: natural level. It's the purpose of mountains to grow and
Speaker 1: to crumble. You know, Rivers are to you know, move
Speaker 1: along towards the lowest point of gravity. And what's the
Speaker 1: purpose of life? Reproduce and flourish, you know, on simple life,
Speaker 1: complex life, So you know, the more complex life, more
Speaker 1: decrease of freedom, you have some more choices you have
Speaker 1: of what it means to flourish. But at some point,
Speaker 1: just you know, trying to survive, reproduce, flourish, and you
Speaker 1: know that's our purpose and it's valshaped to us by evolution.
Speaker 1: It's just the laws of nature. This is who we
Speaker 1: are and that should be enough. And if it isn't
Speaker 1: too bad, because that's all there is and you know,
Speaker 1: accord to you well according to science anyway. But with
Speaker 1: humans are so complex, there's essentially an infinite number of
Speaker 1: things that you could find meaningful, purposeful. But the research,
Speaker 1: the kind of research you guys do, shows that there
Speaker 1: are certain things we can do that will predictably bring
Speaker 1: us a sense of purpose. Now I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: happiness here. I review a paper by Roy Baummeister and
Speaker 1: his colleagues separating happiness from meaningfulness, right, and that there's
Speaker 1: two different things. Like much of what I do in
Speaker 1: my life doesn't make me happy, but it makes me
Speaker 1: feel fulfilled. Like I just got back on a two
Speaker 1: hour bike ride. Okay, so you know I want up
Speaker 1: the super steep hill in Santa Barbara here. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm just hammering away. It's hard, you know, it's painful.
Speaker 1: I can barely breathe. I'm not happy doing this. I'm suffering,
Speaker 1: you know. But it feels good to work out. It
Speaker 1: makes me feel, you know, more like a more purposeful,
Speaker 1: meaningful life when I work out every day. That's completely
Speaker 1: separate from happiness. And so, you know, much of what
Speaker 1: you know finding you know, you know, having kids, having
Speaker 1: a family, having friends, helping charities. You know, these kinds
Speaker 1: of things don't make you happy, but in the long
Speaker 1: run they make you feel, you know, better about yourself.
Speaker 1: They bring meaning or purpose. However, you now Roy in
Speaker 1: his paper they didn't define it. They just let the
Speaker 1: subjects define it in their own minds. But clearly it
Speaker 1: was different from happiness. And so in the end, just finding,
Speaker 1: you know, those kinds of things, meaningful work, friends, family,
Speaker 1: loved ones, you know, some reason to get up every morning,
Speaker 1: get around, you know, helping to make the world a
Speaker 1: little bit better place, whether it's religion, spirituality, science, whatever
Speaker 1: your thing is. And then also you know, something like dance, exercise, meditation,
Speaker 1: long walks on the beach, heights, whatever it is, you
Speaker 1: do that kind of you know, get your body moving
Speaker 1: and you're out, you know, doing something. That kind of
Speaker 1: thing seems to predictably make people feel better. Absolutely, you're
Speaker 1: right that there's this key distinction made between Youdemonia and Edonia.
Speaker 1: But you know, my colleagues and I, particularly David Yayden,
Speaker 1: who's a graduate student at the Positive Psychology Center, trying
Speaker 1: to make the case that there's a third pillar that's
Speaker 1: really been neglecting, that self transcendence, which is different than
Speaker 1: the other two, and it's a fundamental need and there's
Speaker 1: individual differences in that need. But as well as you know,
Speaker 1: we actually are creating a scale right now in self tresentence.
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you the scale some day, going
Speaker 1: I'll put that in the battery. Maybe. So, I think
Speaker 1: that there are some humanists that feel like if atheism
Speaker 1: wins out, then what about these people that have a
Speaker 1: high need of self transcendence. Don't we need to build
Speaker 1: the equivalent of brick and mortar secular churches. So these
Speaker 1: are like Unitarian Universalists type churches where you go and
Speaker 1: you sing hymns to Newton and the sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And yeah, for me, I never really did it. I
Speaker 1: never needed that. But I know a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Do you know there's a lot of secular type Sunday services. Well,
Speaker 1: this is I mean this, these scales and the science
Speaker 1: that is being developed around this is purely secular. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's about the core modive. There is universal connectedness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really what it's about. And I think at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, when you think of it in
Speaker 1: terms of we think of the most secular friendly trait
Speaker 1: that we're studying is all awe because you don't have
Speaker 1: to believe in God to have all. You know, you
Speaker 1: can have all while having sex. You can have all
Speaker 1: while going to a concert looking at nature. And so
Speaker 1: I would say you can live a spiritual life by
Speaker 1: cultivating all in your daily life without belief system. So
Speaker 1: you know what, if we're agreed on that, let's end
Speaker 1: on that note. Thank you so much for a great
Speaker 1: chat and congratulations on the twenty fifth anniversary. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor
Speaker 1: Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just
Speaker 1: as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard
Speaker 1: today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to
Speaker 1: join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.