Speaker 1: How can we improve political dialogue? And what does this
Speaker 1: have to do with discovering that the universe is behaving
Speaker 1: completely differently than expected. Why do we all cling to
Speaker 1: beliefs even when evidence pushes against them, What does this
Speaker 1: have to do with polarization? And what if the biggest
Speaker 1: problem facing humanity could be solved with practice. Today we're
Speaker 1: going to talk with Saul Pearl Mutter, a Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: winning astrophysicist. But instead of the cosmos, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the inner cosmos. We're going to talk about
Speaker 1: polarization in society and how we might be able to
Speaker 1: address that with a different kind of thinking. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos with me David Eagelman. I'm a neuroscientist and
Speaker 1: author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply
Speaker 1: into our three pound universe to understand why and how
Speaker 1: our lives look the way they do, and specifically today,
Speaker 1: why we think the way we do, and whether we
Speaker 1: can improve our thinking. Okay, so imagine you've spent years
Speaker 1: as an astrophysicist, as space scientist working to understand the
Speaker 1: universe out there. You've got a bunch of measurements, you
Speaker 1: have your instruments calibrated to exquisite precision. You've pulled in
Speaker 1: data from stars that exploded billions of years ago, these
Speaker 1: little pinpricks of light you can't even see with the
Speaker 1: naked eye, and you and your team have worked to
Speaker 1: stitch all of that together into a single picture. And
Speaker 1: finally you pull all this into one place and you
Speaker 1: plot the data, and you look at the curve and
Speaker 1: something is off. Let's say it's not dramatically off, but
Speaker 1: the data just isn't land in a place that it should. Now,
Speaker 1: this is the key moment in science, and it's maybe
Speaker 1: not what you expect, because in this situation, you don't
Speaker 1: jump up and shout eureka and call a press conference.
Speaker 1: What happens instead is that you assume your graph is wrong.
Speaker 1: Because what we all learn in science is that if
Speaker 1: something looks really surprising, the most likely explanation is that
Speaker 1: you screwed something up. So you go back, you check
Speaker 1: the instruments, you look at all your assumptions, you tweak
Speaker 1: the calibration, you dig really deep to see whether there's
Speaker 1: some bias in how you collected the data or some
Speaker 1: stupid explanation hiding in the machinery. And you do this
Speaker 1: for days, and then for weeks and months, you keep
Speaker 1: rebuilding this graph, and it keeps landing in that strange place.
Speaker 1: So you refine the measurements and the graph stays. You
Speaker 1: improve the calibration, and the graph just sharpens. And then
Speaker 1: very very slowly you begin to entertain the possibility that
Speaker 1: maybe the graph is right. What if the universe itself
Speaker 1: is doing something unexpected, Because you know that ever since
Speaker 1: the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding outward. Everything
Speaker 1: is rushing away from everything. But the pull of gravity
Speaker 1: should be slowing down that expansion over time. Like when
Speaker 1: you throw a ball up in the air, it goes
Speaker 1: up and then it slows because of gravity, and eventually
Speaker 1: it falls back down. So the universe should be slowing
Speaker 1: down under the influence of gravity and eventually coming back together.
Speaker 1: Except your graph says it's not doing this. Your graph
Speaker 1: says the expansion of the universe is accelerating. In other words,
Speaker 1: something is pushing everything apart, something we don't understand, something
Speaker 1: we now call dark energy. Now, one of the key
Speaker 1: figures in this discovery, and who we're going to talk
Speaker 1: to today is Saul pearl Mutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.
Speaker 1: And that discovery that the expansion of the universe is
Speaker 1: accelerating completely reshaped our understanding of cosmology. And in twenty
Speaker 1: eleven Saul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. But
Speaker 1: here's the point I want to make right now. His
Speaker 1: big discovery came about as a long, uncomfortable process of
Speaker 1: eliminating every possible way that he could be wrong. And
Speaker 1: that's what scientific thinking is. It's not like what they
Speaker 1: teach you in high school science, where they tend to
Speaker 1: give science as a collection of facts. Instead, science is
Speaker 1: a way of thinking. It's a way of navigating uncertainty.
Speaker 1: It's a way way of asking, over and over, how
Speaker 1: might I be fooling myself? Now, this is deeply counterintuitive
Speaker 1: to how our brains usually operate, because our brains are
Speaker 1: evolved to lock onto patterns and construct stories. A whole
Speaker 1: bunch of my episodes touch on this point that brains
Speaker 1: are always seeking explanations that feel coherent, and once we
Speaker 1: have a model of the world, we tend to protect it.
Speaker 1: We look for confirming evidence, and we tend to filter
Speaker 1: out contradictions. But a scientific mindset asks for something different.
Speaker 1: It asks for a kind of intellectual humility. What it
Speaker 1: asked for is a willingness to say, look, I might
Speaker 1: be wrong. In fact, I'm probably wrong about a bunch
Speaker 1: of things, and the only way forward is to keep
Speaker 1: testing and keep updating. Now, when we look at the
Speaker 1: political world around us, that might mindset of being willing
Speaker 1: to be wrong is starting to feel more relevant than ever,
Speaker 1: because we are living in a moment saturated with information,
Speaker 1: but we struggle to process it. All of us take
Speaker 1: really complex issues and smush them down into binaries like
Speaker 1: us and them, or good and evil. We all form teams,
Speaker 1: we defend our positions, and we treat uncertainty as weakness.
Speaker 1: But what if the ability to live with uncertainty is
Speaker 1: one of the most powerful tools we have for solving
Speaker 1: the mess that we're in. What if thinking in probabilities
Speaker 1: and revising our beliefs and engaging with disagreement. What if
Speaker 1: this is our way out of the whole. So today's guest,
Speaker 1: Saul Pearlmutter, has spent his whole career grappling with uncertainty
Speaker 1: at the largest possible scale, but in recent years he's
Speaker 1: turned his attention to something closer to home. He has
Speaker 1: zoomed in on this issue that scientists every day rely
Speaker 1: on a set of thinking tools that aren't always taught explicitly.
Speaker 1: In other words, scientists have ways of reasoning about uncertainty
Speaker 1: and evidence and disagreement. And Saul asked himself, what if
Speaker 1: everyone learned these tools? What if we taught everyone not
Speaker 1: just the content of science, but the process of thinking scientifically.
Speaker 1: Because the stakes are about how we all make decisions
Speaker 1: in a society, how we communicate, how we navigate a
Speaker 1: very complex, very interconnected world. So I started this episode
Speaker 1: with a conversation about a graph that didn't make sense.
Speaker 1: But today's show is really a conversation about how we
Speaker 1: come to believe something that overturns our expectations. And ultimately,
Speaker 1: it's a conversation about how a species standing on a
Speaker 1: small planet under and expanding universe might learn to think
Speaker 1: just clearly enough to build an excellent future. Here's my
Speaker 1: conversation with Saul Pearl Mutter. Okay, so, Saul, let's start
Speaker 1: when you discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating,
Speaker 1: When you first got this idea about dark energy, What
Speaker 1: did that moment feel like intellectually? Was it excitement, skepticism,
Speaker 1: disbelief because of other things that you'd thought previously.
Speaker 2: I think what people may not realize about the life
Speaker 2: of a research scientist is that most of the time
Speaker 2: you're trying to figure out what's broken. That most of
Speaker 2: the time you're trying to figure out, you know, okay,
Speaker 2: what's wrong with my current setup, what's wrong with the
Speaker 2: data that I just brought in? If you're really lucky,
Speaker 2: you're trying to figure out what's wrong with the fundamental understanding.
Speaker 3: Of the universe.
Speaker 2: But that's that's really lucky, you know, if you get
Speaker 2: to that point. And so when we first started data
Speaker 2: that suggested this kind of unusual result, the first assumption is, Okay,
Speaker 2: we're lucky that we've managed to piece all the parts
Speaker 2: together and we got a graph at all. Now we
Speaker 2: have to figure out, you know what, what parts of
Speaker 2: the graph to trust, what things we still have to recalibrate.
Speaker 2: And you just don't take it at all seriously when
Speaker 2: you when you first see it, you're just happy you
Speaker 2: got a graph. It's you know, there's so many different
Speaker 2: elements of the story that you had to pull together,
Speaker 2: and so much data had to be collected, and you were,
Speaker 2: and you're so many calaborations that you had to do.
Speaker 2: Then the hard work starts that you're starting to work
Speaker 2: on the next you know, part of the hard work
Speaker 2: of trying to figure out what do you believe? And
Speaker 2: finally what happened after months and months is that the
Speaker 2: data kept sharpening up, looking stronger and stronger as we
Speaker 2: understood and calibrate everything, and it was starting to stay
Speaker 2: in this rather odd place that suggested the universe was
Speaker 2: not doing what we expected. It wasn't slowing down as
Speaker 2: expansion as you would expect gravity would slow it, but
Speaker 2: it seemed to be speeding up. And this is saying
Speaker 2: that finally, after months and months, we start to believe Okay.
Speaker 3: That's probably the answer. We're going to have to go
Speaker 3: public with this.
Speaker 2: But so the moment of AHA is a little bit
Speaker 2: hard to describe, right because it's not a AHA moment,
Speaker 2: you know, that instant, It's AHA spread out over seven
Speaker 2: eight months and so but by the time you finally
Speaker 2: believe it, it's no longer a big surprise.
Speaker 1: So the most interesting discoveries in science are often the
Speaker 1: ones that contradict our expectations. And so how does the
Speaker 1: scientific process train people, and you, in particular in this case,
Speaker 1: to embrace having been wrong and having a new model
Speaker 1: of something.
Speaker 2: Once you having in your mind that you're that most
Speaker 2: of what you're doing is trying to figure out what's
Speaker 2: broken and trying to build up confidence in different pieces.
Speaker 2: In some sense, the idea that something is wrong with
Speaker 2: the big watching theory is is a part of the game.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's kind of what you're trying to do.
Speaker 2: You're trying to figure out can we sharpen up our
Speaker 2: understanding of the world and can we figure out, okay,
Speaker 2: which part have we not quite got right yet? And
Speaker 2: for the community as a whole, the huge excitements are
Speaker 2: whenever you figure out something that we all had thought
Speaker 2: was the case and now we figured out something new
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 3: But your career is.
Speaker 2: Based on as a sciences it's based on really doing trustworthy,
Speaker 2: very careful work so that people trust that the results
Speaker 2: that you're doing aren't just what you hope they would be,
Speaker 2: they're actually what you find and that you are checking
Speaker 2: for everything you could that could be a mistake.
Speaker 3: And so that's where all this comes from.
Speaker 2: That that that that ability to convince people that you've
Speaker 2: really looked for your own mistakes, and in some sense
Speaker 2: probably it's the reason that science has had to learn
Speaker 2: how to work with people you disagree with, because they're
Speaker 2: the ones who are going to help you find your
Speaker 2: mistakes most effectively. I mean, I can say in their
Speaker 2: particular case we had, there was a rival team that
Speaker 2: started working after we'd started this project. They started racing
Speaker 2: with us, using the very very similar techniques to get
Speaker 2: the result, and it was a very fierce competition. But
Speaker 2: that actually is what helps you. The fact that you
Speaker 2: have a group that's going to try to figure out
Speaker 2: where you're making your mistakes and you're trying to figuret
Speaker 2: where they're making their mistakes.
Speaker 3: It's one of the best.
Speaker 2: Ways to make that kind of guarantee that you've really
Speaker 2: hunted for where the problems are.
Speaker 1: A lot of people when they hear about dark energy
Speaker 1: and dark matter, they interpret that as ignorance, but scientists
Speaker 1: interpret this as progress. So why if your goal.
Speaker 2: Is just to prove things you already know, then it
Speaker 2: sounds like it's a big step backwards if you found that, oh,
Speaker 2: what we thought was true is wrong. But that's so
Speaker 2: much not the philosophy of what you're trying to do
Speaker 2: in the sciences. In the big picture, you're trying to
Speaker 2: you're assuming that there are things that we don't understand,
Speaker 2: and you're trying to figure out what they are. And
Speaker 2: so it's a huge success when you figure out that
Speaker 2: there's something that we had misunderstood and that now we've
Speaker 2: honed in our home di in on our understanding just
Speaker 2: a little bit more.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: This is the kind of thing that just you know,
Speaker 2: the scientists week up in the morning hoping they do
Speaker 2: someday they figure out something that overturns a piece of
Speaker 2: the puzzle, and that that's really where the excitement is.
Speaker 1: So you in your career sat in your lab and
Speaker 1: in meetings and you realize that scientists seem to be
Speaker 1: using a set of of course thinking tools that maybe
Speaker 1: the rest of society could benefit from. And so you
Speaker 1: about twelve years ago started a course at Berkeley tell
Speaker 1: us about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I was I think I was watching some
Speaker 2: political debate. This is you know, even before all the
Speaker 2: current uh you know, particularly strong polarization. But it's one
Speaker 2: where I think they were trying to figure out what
Speaker 2: was the right level to set the debt ceiling or
Speaker 2: something in one of these earlier periods, and and it
Speaker 2: wasn't a particularly uh you know, vociferous, uh you know,
Speaker 2: a moment. But even so, it struck me that the
Speaker 2: style of the conversation didn't look at all like the
Speaker 2: style of conversations I saw at the lunch table of
Speaker 2: a bunch of scientists talking about almost any topic, and
Speaker 2: it included things like that probabilistic thinking that I just
Speaker 2: you know that we just discussed. There are all these
Speaker 2: different just parts of the vocabulary of how people talked
Speaker 2: that were I felt very good at helping think through
Speaker 2: a problem rationally and be able to handle just the
Speaker 2: the logic of the question in a way that I
Speaker 2: thought was missing. Uh, when you saw our society asking
Speaker 2: just a cold question about what is the right level
Speaker 2: to set a debt in a in the debt ceiling
Speaker 2: in a society, that's not a it's not an emotional question.
Speaker 2: It's just a question of what works best. And yet
Speaker 2: you're not hearing any of that kind of thoughtful discussion
Speaker 2: that you would see around any bunch of scientists, just
Speaker 2: using the terminology that they would use. So I found
Speaker 2: myself asking, well, where is it that these that this
Speaker 2: terminology comes in. I mean, it's not like we're taught
Speaker 2: it in any physics, biology and chemistry course that I
Speaker 2: know of, and uh, and I realized that it was
Speaker 2: taught sort of by osmosis. By as people go through
Speaker 2: a training as a research scientist, working with other scientists,
Speaker 2: they start to learn this vocabulary of ideas, and it
Speaker 2: just seemed to me that it would be really useful
Speaker 2: for everybody to know about it much much earlier, even
Speaker 2: if they were going to be scientists, they should learn it,
Speaker 2: learn it like directly, not just you know, little by
Speaker 2: little through what people say. And then people are not
Speaker 2: going to become scientists, they should be using this all
Speaker 2: the time. It's it's just a very useful way to
Speaker 2: have an approach that helps you think through problems in a.
Speaker 3: In a very effective way.
Speaker 2: Hey, for almost anything you do day to day, and
Speaker 2: for any business decision, any medical decision, any you know,
Speaker 2: personal decision, this could all be useful.
Speaker 3: So that's what picked off this this idea for the course.
Speaker 1: And so you hooked up with a couple of your
Speaker 1: colleagues and you started thinking about what are the scientific
Speaker 1: tools that could be useful for public conversation and as
Speaker 1: the starting set. You came up with twenty three of them,
Speaker 1: so give us a flavor of what sort of ideas
Speaker 1: would be useful.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I should mention that my colleagues John Campbell,
Speaker 2: philosopher and Rob mccoonn, a social psychologist in the Public
Speaker 2: Policy School, that I thought it was really important to
Speaker 2: bring people from other parts of the university together because
Speaker 2: as a physicist, you know, it's not like we have
Speaker 2: a monopoly on all these thinking tools, and that you
Speaker 2: want to try to bring the best of you know,
Speaker 2: what everybody's been coming up with. And we actually put
Speaker 2: a sign up asking people come work on the on
Speaker 2: the on this developing the course, saying signing, you know,
Speaker 2: are you embarrassed watching our society make decisions? Come help
Speaker 2: invent the course and come help save the world. And
Speaker 2: about thirty people started showing up, like every week at
Speaker 2: the end of Fridays we would hangk We would be
Speaker 2: there for a few hours before dinner, trying to come
Speaker 2: up with you know, what would a set of concepts
Speaker 2: look like that would be helpful for everybody to have.
Speaker 2: So in answer to your question, I mean, these some
Speaker 2: of the concepts where things like propositions are probabilistic. We
Speaker 2: we know them, just as we were saying before, you
Speaker 2: know some that we know for real strong certainly ninety
Speaker 2: nine point nine nine percent, some sixty percent. Other concepts
Speaker 2: were ideas like, when you look to understand patterns in
Speaker 2: the world and signals in the world of of what's
Speaker 2: going on, it's very easy for our brains to see
Speaker 2: patterns that are just random noise, that things that will
Speaker 2: randomly to us appear like there's ah, we've suddenly just
Speaker 2: detected you know, a A this relationship, this is causing
Speaker 2: this a huge fraction of the time, and it's easy
Speaker 2: to see that humans will just see a pattern that
Speaker 2: is not really there. It's just the random events look
Speaker 2: like a pattern to us because our brains are such
Speaker 2: good pattern finders. So that concept led to the idea
Speaker 2: of you know, what are the elements that we've learned
Speaker 2: about how do you differentiate those kinds of mistakes? And
Speaker 2: these are the issues of false positives and false negatives.
Speaker 2: You know, when is it dangerous to think you seeing
Speaker 2: a pattern that's not there? But when is it dangerous
Speaker 2: to miss a pattern that really is there? And how
Speaker 2: do you balance those and what's the right order of
Speaker 2: techniques that people have developed to handle those. So these
Speaker 2: are three concepts you have to start with. Many of
Speaker 2: the concepts are very much these cautionary ones, how to
Speaker 2: avoid fooling yourself, because so much of science is built
Speaker 2: around the idea that we tend to fool ourselves, and
Speaker 2: so we're constantly having to develop these techniques to avoid
Speaker 2: doing it again. But there are other unbalancing concepts that
Speaker 2: we each which are techniques for keeping going and for
Speaker 2: some sense of optimism and forward motion despite all that
Speaker 2: cynical uh you need to avoid to avoid another chance
Speaker 2: to you fool yourself. And so some of the concepts
Speaker 2: include things like the idea that scientists have really as
Speaker 2: a culture, developed a capability to have some confidence that
Speaker 2: you can solve a problem, and therefore you stick to
Speaker 2: it long enough to actually solve it, because most people
Speaker 2: give up way too soon or in a difficult problem,
Speaker 2: and that this is just a trick of the trade,
Speaker 2: is to have a little bit of an arrogance just
Speaker 2: long enough to be able to get you to the
Speaker 2: point of actually being able to take on big problems.
Speaker 1: So let's step back to the first issue you mentioned
Speaker 1: about probabilities. So how did this come up at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the pandemic? What happened in terms of public
Speaker 1: communication of scientists to the public. That's where the issue
Speaker 1: of probability started. Really the interface had a lot of
Speaker 1: friction there.
Speaker 3: Now now here.
Speaker 2: I feel like there was a real missed opportunity because
Speaker 2: and I should say before I say anything else, I
Speaker 2: should say, if you are a public official and you're
Speaker 2: in a position that you suddenly faced the pandemic, it's
Speaker 2: really difficult, right, I mean, I can and so people
Speaker 2: making mistakes. I feel absolutely no you know, sense of
Speaker 2: you know, smugness. Though I would have done better. I'm
Speaker 2: sure that I would have done worse because it's really
Speaker 2: difficult to figure this out, But in armchair quarterbacking watching.
Speaker 3: It, you know, from the outside, I would say that,
Speaker 3: you know, there was a moment where you had a
Speaker 3: choice of being absolutely.
Speaker 2: Confident about what it was you were going to tell
Speaker 2: the public to do, and I think that ended up
Speaker 2: being a trap. That you should not claim a confidence
Speaker 2: that you don't actually have, and that you should put
Speaker 2: up with the fact that some people may be a
Speaker 2: little less willing to follow you in exchange for a
Speaker 2: really strong sense of honesty about here is what we
Speaker 2: know and here's what we don't know, and we are
Speaker 2: going to play the odds. And when I said I'm
Speaker 2: chair quarterbacking, I realized that actually the metaphor of football
Speaker 2: plays could have been really useful that I think it
Speaker 2: would have been a moment to leveled with the public,
Speaker 2: and I think that people could have listened if you said,
Speaker 2: we are about we're in a football game with the virus.
Speaker 2: We don't know its plays, it doesn't know our plays,
Speaker 2: but it will try to adapt to our plays. We're
Speaker 2: going to try to get ahead of it and go
Speaker 2: with a better play depending on what we see it doing.
Speaker 3: And so every week, every two weeks.
Speaker 2: Every month, we're going to tell you what our latest
Speaker 2: play is, and then we're going to play it as
Speaker 2: best we can and we're going to win this football game,
Speaker 2: you know. Whereas if instead you say we're going to
Speaker 2: come up with, you know, here's the rule. This is
Speaker 2: what you guys should do from that on, and then
Speaker 2: a month later you have to change it because now
Speaker 2: we known something different. People say, well, you keep changing
Speaker 2: your mind, how do I know what to follow? But
Speaker 2: if you tell people this isn't a you know, a
Speaker 2: one off thing. You know, either we're right or wrong.
Speaker 2: This is a constant update that we're going to figure
Speaker 2: out its plays and then we're going to do our plays.
Speaker 2: People would get it, I think, and I think they
Speaker 2: would follow you as you updated the recommendations as we
Speaker 2: learn more.
Speaker 1: And part of the idea here is that generally the
Speaker 1: world doesn't think too much in probabilities, but in sports
Speaker 1: they do, right, That's that's your point here, naturally, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: And you know this is those things where you know,
Speaker 2: we often feel like, oh, well, how could the public
Speaker 2: probably possibly follow something so complex. The answer is they
Speaker 2: do it all the time in certain situations, and so
Speaker 2: all we need to do is have them recognize that, oh,
Speaker 2: this is another situation in which we have to use
Speaker 2: that muscle that we that we have, that that thinking tool,
Speaker 2: and you know, we we understand it, you know, in
Speaker 2: a sports context. Now we have to use it in
Speaker 2: this medical context. It's a little bit unusual, but it's
Speaker 2: really the right it's the right answer.
Speaker 1: That's right. And and people, all of us often treat
Speaker 1: complex problems as binary. Why do you suppose we're so
Speaker 1: attracted to yes or no answers?
Speaker 2: I mean I've been trying to think about that a lot,
Speaker 2: you know, as we've been discussing these topics, and to
Speaker 2: some extent, I think we have all of us have
Speaker 2: a little bit of the child in us where we
Speaker 2: sort of remember those days in which our parents knew
Speaker 2: the answers and where, you know, if we weren't sure
Speaker 2: about something, our parents would say.
Speaker 3: Something and we feel we'd feel safe.
Speaker 2: And I think we're all looking for that sense of Okay, well,
Speaker 2: let's just go find the person that the authority. They'll
Speaker 2: tell us it's right or it's wrong. They'll tell us
Speaker 2: what to do, and and that's it.
Speaker 3: But you know, the world isn't isn't that way.
Speaker 2: We grow up and we realize that actually many things
Speaker 2: are balancing acts, and many things we have to figure
Speaker 2: out how to play the numbers and play it and
Speaker 2: play it as best we can. And that's where our
Speaker 2: success comes from, that sense of being able to go
Speaker 2: with what we learned. I mean, the other metaphor that
Speaker 2: I've been thinking about was, you know, you wouldn't want
Speaker 2: to try skiing down a hill by just locking your knees,
Speaker 2: putting your weight in one position and then just going
Speaker 2: you actually shift your weight. You move things depending on
Speaker 2: what the bumps and terrain are doing. And nobody would
Speaker 2: expect to make it down alive if you just were rigid.
Speaker 2: You know, all the way down a hill, you're reacting
Speaker 2: to it. And that's what we're very good at. I mean,
Speaker 2: humans are quite good at that if they know that's
Speaker 2: what their job is.
Speaker 1: By the way, this thing you said about parents and
Speaker 1: being able to give you answer, you know, Sigmund Freud
Speaker 1: famously argued that this is why we have religion, because
Speaker 1: when you're a baby, you've got these two giant creatures
Speaker 1: that care for you when you're in pain, they feed
Speaker 1: you when you're hunger, and eventually you grow up and
Speaker 1: that goes away and you need a replacement. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying this as an indictment of religion, but I think
Speaker 1: that's interesting to think about this issue of what we
Speaker 1: lose as we age and how we yearn for that
Speaker 1: kind of simplicity. Let me come back to this issue
Speaker 1: about our imposition of a model on random noise. One
Speaker 1: thing that's interesting is what we're doing is we're each
Speaker 1: taking our internal model and imposing it onto the random noise.
Speaker 1: Let's say in the political world we're talking about. We
Speaker 1: see some new stories, some headline, and depending on our
Speaker 1: neighborhood and culture and politics and whatever, we see that
Speaker 1: story and we say, ah, this one case is an
Speaker 1: example of this much larger thing. So how could we,
Speaker 1: given that we're all yoked with our internal models that
Speaker 1: we've developed over our whole lifetime, how might we be
Speaker 1: able to see a little further beyond the fence lines
Speaker 1: of that.
Speaker 2: So this is a among the different conceptual ideas that
Speaker 2: we've been talking about that we that we all need
Speaker 2: to use as our tools. One of them, of course,
Speaker 2: is that real understanding of the fact that we have
Speaker 2: a tendency to fall into confirmation by us right, that
Speaker 2: we will tend to look for information that will back
Speaker 2: up our position that we already have and supposed to
Speaker 2: look for information that will disconfirm it, and once somebody
Speaker 2: happens to give us information, will be much more skeptical
Speaker 2: of the information that goes against something that we believe
Speaker 2: than information that is just backing up some that we
Speaker 2: that we believe. And that knowledge that that's what we do,
Speaker 2: I think is a really important element of scientific thinking
Speaker 2: of this, of the kind of describing because, among other things,
Speaker 2: that it's one of the reasons why we've learned in
Speaker 2: this culture of science to go work with people that
Speaker 2: we disagree with, that we go to conferences, we send
Speaker 2: our papers in for review, and people give us.
Speaker 3: A hard time, and that's their job.
Speaker 2: There's supposed to be not our best friends for this purpose,
Speaker 2: they're supposed to be our best enemies, right, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean to put it in a strong terminology. Their
Speaker 2: job is to figure out where the weaknesses are of
Speaker 2: what we're saying. And it actually is something that we
Speaker 2: learned from and in the science is nobody enjoys when
Speaker 2: they get criticized, but they take it in and they
Speaker 2: actually try to improve their thinking by In the political context,
Speaker 2: it seems to me that the analogy that we've been
Speaker 2: really losing track of is that there's a reason that
Speaker 2: we would have a loyal opposition. There's a reason that
Speaker 2: we want to have people who are disagreeing with us
Speaker 2: in the room when we're making policy. And it's because
Speaker 2: there's no way that we're not making mistakes. We must
Speaker 2: be making mistakes. It's inherent in how complex the world
Speaker 2: is and how much we're trying to figure out and
Speaker 2: to think that we will have a policy that must
Speaker 2: be right is bound to be leading us into danger
Speaker 2: zones of one kind or another. And one of the
Speaker 2: best ways to get at that is to have people
Speaker 2: who are going to disagree with the policy in the
Speaker 2: room giving you a hard time. And I think that
Speaker 2: we've lost that. One thing that our current society has
Speaker 2: perhaps really not taken advantage of is the possiblity of
Speaker 2: having good conversations with people who disagree with you and
Speaker 2: try to work through. Okay, if I were born twenty
Speaker 2: five miles away from where I was born, I would
Speaker 2: probably believe everything you believe. Right, It's pretty clear when
Speaker 2: you just look at the maps of where people live
Speaker 2: and what they believe that you know, it can't be
Speaker 2: the case that I'm amazingly right about everything I believe.
Speaker 2: And if I happen to move twenty five miles away
Speaker 2: and that's where I lived, I would be right, you know,
Speaker 2: with some other point of view.
Speaker 3: That can't be you know, the.
Speaker 2: Whole story, and so we I think we absolutely need
Speaker 2: to find ways again to become part of a single politics,
Speaker 2: you know, where people consider it to be important type
Speaker 2: of conversation and not scary that they actually enjoy trying
Speaker 2: to figure out. Ah, you know, if I believe that
Speaker 2: one little piece that you believe, I would switch sides.
Speaker 2: I'd be on your side, and they ideally would say
Speaker 2: the same thing. The would say, you know, if that
Speaker 2: other thing you just said it was true, I would
Speaker 2: I would be joining you. And you can't find that
Speaker 2: out unless you have a conversation. And once you find
Speaker 2: that out, you still have another job to do, which
Speaker 2: is together try to figure out, Okay, which of those
Speaker 2: facts is true, if that's the issue, or which of
Speaker 2: these our priorities do I do want to lean into
Speaker 2: if that's what's differentiating you.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't happen unless you have that conversation.
Speaker 1: Scientists really have to train themselves out of this instinct
Speaker 1: because the fundamental intuition for all of us is that
Speaker 1: when something contradicts our beliefs, we have to double down
Speaker 1: on that. So how do scientists get themselves out of
Speaker 1: that instinct?
Speaker 2: I think it's partly a question of where do you
Speaker 2: put your pride, and that the ideally what you want
Speaker 2: is to not have your pride in always being right
Speaker 2: in everything that you currently believe. That your pride should
Speaker 2: be in being very capable of understanding which are the
Speaker 2: weak parts of what you currently believe, which parts are
Speaker 2: more likely to need to be revised, and pride in
Speaker 2: showing off the fact that you get a real kick
Speaker 2: out of learning something new that you didn't know before,
Speaker 2: and that that's really where your sense of ego lies.
Speaker 2: And I think that's the funny shift that science helped
Speaker 2: people do. And I should say it's all I'm describing
Speaker 2: as aspirational. It's not that the scientists individually always do
Speaker 2: this right. All of us fall into all these traps
Speaker 2: of confirmation bias and doing it wrong all the time.
Speaker 2: It's that the culture helps us not always do that.
Speaker 2: It helps us be able to sometimes show off our
Speaker 2: excitement about finding out that we were wrong on something
Speaker 2: and that there's something else going on here that somebody
Speaker 2: has shown us. And the best of all is times
Speaker 2: when you find yourself that you're wrong, because that you
Speaker 2: can show.
Speaker 3: Off you know how you did that.
Speaker 2: But I think it's something that you are taking advantage
Speaker 2: of a culture helping you shift this natural human tendency.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you this. When we look at politicians,
Speaker 1: if they change their mind, that usually loses points for them,
Speaker 1: and people call them wishy washy. This you know, changing
Speaker 1: your mind in science is a badge of honor. How
Speaker 1: could that spread more widely outside the Ivory Tower.
Speaker 2: Well, this is the saying that you know, I've been
Speaker 2: very much interested in asking, is it possible that if everybody,
Speaker 2: you know, every in high school right is supposed to
Speaker 2: be learning a little bit of you know, physics and
Speaker 2: chemistry and biology. You know, people are supposed to have
Speaker 2: just enough of that, whether or not they're going to
Speaker 2: go onto the science, is just enough so they can
Speaker 2: recognize what it is that we know about the world,
Speaker 2: and they can understand a little bit what's happening when
Speaker 2: scientists report what they're learning.
Speaker 3: For my money, I would rather trade in a little.
Speaker 2: Bit of the content of physics, biology and chemistry in
Speaker 2: exchange for some of this scientific thinking how do we
Speaker 2: think through problems? Because I think that would really help
Speaker 2: us be able to build a society where people, you know,
Speaker 2: when they see one politician who's saying to them, you know,
Speaker 2: this is a place where we do not know the answer.
Speaker 2: We're going to come up with an iterative way to
Speaker 2: get the answer. We're going to try this policy if
Speaker 2: it doesn't work, We're going to update it with this policy.
Speaker 2: I want to build a society where people say, oh,
Speaker 2: that sounds a lot like how you think through a
Speaker 2: problem that I learned in high school, as opposed to
Speaker 2: saying that, well, that person sounds wushy washy, you know,
Speaker 2: And that's I think the long term goal.
Speaker 3: Now, short term obviously.
Speaker 2: You want to you want to have lots of people
Speaker 2: watch your podcast and try to get this out into
Speaker 2: the world, even now for those people who did not
Speaker 2: get in high school, just as they're reminded that there's
Speaker 2: something that's been very, very effective. I don't think we
Speaker 2: would have airplanes and GPS, and we wouldn't be able
Speaker 2: to go to the moon, and we wouldn't have all
Speaker 2: these capabilities if we didn't have this culture. And if
Speaker 2: people recognize how effective it is, I think they would
Speaker 2: also feel, like, you know, if they're running a company,
Speaker 2: the company should just should adopt this more actively as
Speaker 2: a culture and as a society. Hopefully then people would
Speaker 2: start looking for it in their politicians.
Speaker 1: Okay, I love that. One thing we see though in
Speaker 1: society is that disagreement tends to be very tribal, and
Speaker 1: it strikes me that the difference might be I don't
Speaker 1: have time to really get the data about the debt
Speaker 1: ceiling and this issue and that issue, and so it's
Speaker 1: easier in a sense to say, look, my skin isn't
Speaker 1: attached to you know, what happens in this war or
Speaker 1: that thing over there on the other side of the planet,
Speaker 1: and so I'm just going to go with my team here.
Speaker 1: How do we move things away from that.
Speaker 2: I've been very impressed at the few places where people
Speaker 2: have come up with techniques that seem to get beyond
Speaker 2: that team playing. So there are these techniques of like
Speaker 2: deliberate A polling is one term that people were using.
Speaker 2: Citizen assemblies is another term of people I'm described where
Speaker 2: if you structure it correctly, you bring together a truly
Speaker 2: random set of the population, you know the way a
Speaker 2: jury does, and you organize how they will start to
Speaker 2: deliberate on some questions and topic where they are supposed
Speaker 2: to collect all the places that they don't know the
Speaker 2: answer as they're talking, and then they have a team
Speaker 2: of a panel of experts available to them that represent
Speaker 2: people who do know a lot about these topics.
Speaker 3: They may disagree with each other, but the jury.
Speaker 2: Of citizens can interview them and try to figure out
Speaker 2: what they believe and then go back and continue deliberating.
Speaker 2: And the experience that people have had when they've done
Speaker 2: this is that people don't get locked into their tribal
Speaker 2: associations the way they would ordinarily.
Speaker 3: Now they feel they're a.
Speaker 2: Group that's working together to get an answer, and their
Speaker 2: job is to figure it out together. And apparently people
Speaker 2: identify with each other much faster when they're in that
Speaker 2: sort of situation and they try to figure out without
Speaker 2: their badging and their their sense of you know what
Speaker 2: team they're on getting in the way. Doesn't always work,
Speaker 2: but it seems to be a very effective technique when
Speaker 2: people have tried it.
Speaker 1: What other principles could we take from scientific practice to
Speaker 1: reduce polarization?
Speaker 2: So there are a number of things that we do
Speaker 2: know that that can be helpful in this. One is
Speaker 2: that it clearly makes a difference if people have friendships
Speaker 2: and activities that they're doing with other people and then
Speaker 2: discover that they disagree on something, because then they feel
Speaker 2: like they know each other, they know that they're not
Speaker 2: bad people, they're not trying to hurt anybody, and they
Speaker 2: want they want good and so then they're more able
Speaker 2: to talk to each other.
Speaker 3: And so I think it does.
Speaker 2: Make a big difference if we have people societ where
Speaker 2: people are finding lots of ways to tie to each
Speaker 2: other music and sports and art, and you know, there
Speaker 2: are many ways that people can you know, hiking here,
Speaker 2: there are many things that people can do where they
Speaker 2: start to feel like they have a tie and then
Speaker 2: they're able to have a conversation.
Speaker 3: So that's that's an element of the story.
Speaker 2: I think there's another element of people really using the
Speaker 2: scientific ability to be curious that you want people to
Speaker 2: be thinking, not that their job is when they find
Speaker 2: somebody to disagree with. Their job is never originally to
Speaker 2: convince them that they're wrong. Their job is to talk
Speaker 2: to them and try to figure out with this real curiosity,
Speaker 2: what is it that is leading you to your position,
Speaker 2: and how how could I be in your position?
Speaker 3: What would make me agree with you?
Speaker 2: And I think that's the kind of thing that is
Speaker 2: a much more open starting point, and it makes it
Speaker 2: much more possible for people to have a real interesting
Speaker 2: conversation without getting angry at each other.
Speaker 1: Do you see ways that we could structure conversations or
Speaker 1: institutions designed explicitly around this scientific style of having structured debate.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I'm always a little wried about
Speaker 2: the fact that the only thing that people know about,
Speaker 2: for a like, what do you do in school if
Speaker 2: you want to get people to have a discussion about
Speaker 2: some problem, is you have them do a classical debate
Speaker 2: where they have to take a position and stick to
Speaker 2: it no matter what. I would love to see basically
Speaker 2: a deliberation society as opposed to debate society in out
Speaker 2: in the world and in schools, where the goal is
Speaker 2: to figure things out together and come to some common
Speaker 2: understanding and figure out what would actually make everybody feel
Speaker 2: good about the solution rather than to win. And I
Speaker 2: think that would actually be very interesting experiment, just to
Speaker 2: do that in the school so that people got used
Speaker 2: to it as a different style to start with. I
Speaker 2: think in real life, you know, I'm uh, you know,
Speaker 2: if you don't count school, let's say adult life. You know,
Speaker 2: I would be very interested in trying to set up
Speaker 2: more activities that felt like they encouraged this kind of
Speaker 2: thing and that people had models of it to watch.
Speaker 3: So I was imagining I was supposed to.
Speaker 2: Set up a like a reality game show where you
Speaker 2: where you watched pairs of people who disagree with each
Speaker 2: other together do a learning journey where they go and
Speaker 2: interview people, they talk to people, they have to do
Speaker 2: everything together until they come to some common conclusion about
Speaker 2: what what they believe about something and see.
Speaker 3: What would happen.
Speaker 2: I bet it would be kind of fun to watch,
Speaker 2: uh if, if, if it was you know, played right,
Speaker 2: you know, But in general, I do think this is
Speaker 2: one of the jobs of our society right now to
Speaker 2: ask And the reason I'm bringing this up, you know,
Speaker 2: as a focus, is that we're really good as a
Speaker 2: society at solving problems once we identify the problem. And
Speaker 2: you know, generally it's amazing the scale of.
Speaker 3: Problems that we can now handle.
Speaker 2: I mean, when when I was a kid, you know,
Speaker 2: two thirds of the world was going to bed hungry,
Speaker 2: and apparently that's now down below like eight or nine percent,
Speaker 2: and the population has what tripled or more, you know
Speaker 2: since that time, and we know, nobody thought we could
Speaker 2: solve that problem of world hunger. And yet once you
Speaker 2: understand the problem, people can take it on. Today's biggest problem,
Speaker 2: I think is this problem of polarization and inability to
Speaker 2: think through problems together. And I think once we've identified
Speaker 2: that problem, now our job is to come up with
Speaker 2: the techniques and the solutions that will get people into
Speaker 2: conversation with each other so that they can solve problems.
Speaker 2: I think if we do that, we're home free. I'm
Speaker 2: not really afraid of, you know, pandemics. I'm not afraid of,
Speaker 2: you know, even comments hitting the earth and wiping out
Speaker 2: the population the way they know it wiped out the
Speaker 2: dinosaurs or all that.
Speaker 3: I mean, we are amazingly capable.
Speaker 2: But the one last technology that we have to learn
Speaker 2: and the last problem we have to solve is this one.
Speaker 2: Developing these techniques for getting people into useful conversation with
Speaker 2: each other. And we've seen great patterns, so I'm not
Speaker 2: worried about it being impossible to do. It's just that
Speaker 2: we have to take that on and do it, and
Speaker 2: we have to take it on while we're developing new
Speaker 2: technologies like communication capabilities of the Internet, like the conversational
Speaker 2: capabilities with AI. All these things have to be used
Speaker 2: now for answering this last question. And if we do
Speaker 2: this one, then I think we're we're in great shape.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 1: I love that I couldn't agree more. I want to
Speaker 1: come back, just for one second to this issue about
Speaker 1: debate and how when kids learn debate in high school
Speaker 1: it's all about winning. There are interestingly, for example, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a Reddit channel where people debate each other,
Speaker 1: but the goal is to change the other person's mind,
Speaker 1: like any debate, but the person explicitly says, okay, I
Speaker 1: give you a point for that. You changed my mind.
Speaker 1: Here's a karma point for that. And so then people
Speaker 1: try to rack up as many points as they can,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of lovely because it ends with this
Speaker 1: thing of hey, you changed my mind. Now. What happened
Speaker 1: is a Swiss research team about a year ago released
Speaker 1: some AI bots that ended up doing six times better
Speaker 1: than humans on this front in terms of changing other
Speaker 1: people's mind. And of course everyone lost their minds and said,
Speaker 1: I can't believe there were ai bots that were doing this.
Speaker 1: But the really interesting lesson that nobody talked about was
Speaker 1: that the AI bots did not do anything in terms
Speaker 1: of misinformation. They simply presented their arguments more empathically and
Speaker 1: calmly and rationally, and it changed people's views on particular things.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a lovely lesson there about how
Speaker 1: we might actually become better humans by looking at a
Speaker 1: in analogy to how we've done that with chess and
Speaker 1: go and other things, by learning how to present arguments
Speaker 1: well and how to change our own minds, which I
Speaker 1: totally take your point that that's missing in high school debate.
Speaker 2: Now, love, I love I love that example, and uh,
Speaker 2: and I've really enjoyed that the fact that there is
Speaker 2: that reddit, uh, both.
Speaker 3: The original one and the and this story.
Speaker 2: Now, it'd be fascinating to know something that I that
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer to, which is if we
Speaker 2: look at how the the bots were doing this, were
Speaker 2: they bringing in a unfair sample of the facts and
Speaker 2: managining to calmly change people's mind using a distorted subset
Speaker 2: of facts?
Speaker 1: Apparently not?
Speaker 3: Were they winning?
Speaker 2: Okay, so they were winning because they were actually helping
Speaker 2: people touch reality. And if that's the case, that's of
Speaker 2: course what we would love to keep using.
Speaker 3: More and more of. And I and I. Another example that.
Speaker 2: You're described of what you're describing was this study that
Speaker 2: was done where they tried to ask they had conspiracy
Speaker 2: theorists talk to a bot and the conspiracies. These were
Speaker 2: actually known to be false conspiracies, but they found that
Speaker 2: the conspiracy theorists were much more open to possibly being
Speaker 2: wrong after they'd had this conversation with the butt. For
Speaker 2: the I think like only like four exchanges of a
Speaker 2: few minutes each, and I thought that was a really
Speaker 2: another good example where the fact that they it was
Speaker 2: a calm situation where they didn't feel any ego involved
Speaker 2: in the interaction help them just ask, well, but rationally,
Speaker 2: what do we know about the world? Is it possible
Speaker 2: this is right as possible is wrong? And I think
Speaker 2: that that is something that we can learn from the
Speaker 2: fact that we have other thinking tools to play with,
Speaker 2: like the AI. Now, it could go wrong in many ways.
Speaker 2: You could imagine it being used to make trouble, but
Speaker 2: I think this is one of these places where we
Speaker 2: really would like the AI researchers to be putting their hats,
Speaker 2: their thing hats on. From the point of view, what
Speaker 2: do we do to build something that will help everybody
Speaker 2: deal with reality in a much more direct way?
Speaker 1: Yes, because a lot of conspiracy theories, I think a
Speaker 1: piece that's often overlooked is the social aspect to conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: So if I tell you my big theory about the
Speaker 1: moon or JFK or whatever, I get to be the
Speaker 1: guy who knows something and I'm telling it to you,
Speaker 1: even if you disagree with me. I get to be
Speaker 1: smarter than the rest and so on. But if you're
Speaker 1: talking to a bot, as you said about the ego,
Speaker 1: all that stuff is gone. I'm not trying to prove
Speaker 1: something to the bot. I'm not getting the social reward
Speaker 1: for convincing the bot that I'm smarter than they are.
Speaker 1: So I'm more open to listening. I think there's a
Speaker 1: real opportunity there as you do.
Speaker 2: Absolutely and probably one of the reasons that you really
Speaker 2: don't necessarily want the butts in the end to become
Speaker 2: too human in these interactions. You want them to stay
Speaker 2: just clearly not human enough, long enough so people can
Speaker 2: have a thoughtful station with them without feeling there they're invested,
Speaker 2: you know, in in being right, you know, in the
Speaker 2: same way they would if it was a human.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, so I want to zoom the camera back out.
Speaker 1: Your physics work deals with the largest scales imaginable to
Speaker 1: studying the universe. Change the way that you think about
Speaker 1: human disagreements on Earth.
Speaker 2: I had a violin teacher who I stayed with for
Speaker 2: you know, a big chuck of many people do with
Speaker 2: with the music. Teachers stay with a big shock of
Speaker 2: your life, and they're very you know, it's very influential
Speaker 2: in terms of your philosophy of life. And I remember
Speaker 2: her telling me a story once about the fact that
Speaker 2: her father used to take her and her sister out
Speaker 2: at I think it was like once a week out
Speaker 2: to look at the stars and to and to talk
Speaker 2: about astronomy.
Speaker 3: And she said that years later, when she grew up,
Speaker 3: she asked her father, what was that all about.
Speaker 2: You know, you're not particularly a huge astronomy fan, and
Speaker 2: and you know it's not in keeping with everything else
Speaker 2: you do, and he said, oh, I thought it was
Speaker 2: really really important for you to not have a narrow
Speaker 2: view of of the world, to be able to see
Speaker 2: see the larger context of things. And to some extent,
Speaker 2: I think one of the real pleasures of doing things
Speaker 2: like cosmology is it brings everybody together around something that
Speaker 2: we enjoy thinking about. And but it sets a sense
Speaker 2: of scale that you know, we are, you know, just
Speaker 2: a part of a very rich world that we live in.
Speaker 2: And uh, in some sense, you know, that we should
Speaker 2: be thinking of ourselves as what is it that would
Speaker 2: make make us special and and and and give us
Speaker 2: an interesting role in in this uh cosmos, that that that.
Speaker 3: We would like to feel proud about.
Speaker 2: We'd like to feel like we're building a world that
Speaker 2: we'd like to that we you know, that that we
Speaker 2: would feel.
Speaker 3: Represented something important and meaningful.
Speaker 2: And it's kind of interesting to do that in the
Speaker 2: face of the idea that we're such a small corner
Speaker 2: of such a small uh you know, galaxy in such
Speaker 2: a you know, small cluster galaxies and such a gigantic
Speaker 2: universe that that you could feel like, where where is
Speaker 2: the meaning at all? But for me, it actually feels
Speaker 2: a little different. It feels like it gives us a
Speaker 2: sense of that we're unusually able to look out to
Speaker 2: this outer world. We're able to look into the inner
Speaker 2: world of the fundamental particles. As physicists, that's then that
Speaker 2: we care about a lot as well. And somewhere in
Speaker 2: that nestled amidst all these different skills, we exist and
Speaker 2: we have the possibility of building something that feels meaningful.
Speaker 2: And so for me, it actually allows you to step
Speaker 2: way back think of the big picture and yet also
Speaker 2: feel like you're you have a responsibility out there to
Speaker 2: do something, to do something good.
Speaker 1: So when you think about the future of humanity scientifically
Speaker 1: and culturally and technologically, do you feel optimistic?
Speaker 2: Well, I should admit to start with, I tend to
Speaker 2: be an optimist in these respects and maybe for no
Speaker 2: for no fair reason, and you and I can easily
Speaker 2: just you state that ahead of time. However, I will
Speaker 2: also say that I think we have lots of good
Speaker 2: reasons for optimism.
Speaker 3: I feel like we have.
Speaker 2: Solved one problem after another that looked unsolvable. That once
Speaker 2: we know about a problem, we are as a group
Speaker 2: now individuals sometimes yes, sometimes no, but as a group
Speaker 2: we are amazingly capable. And that when you put a
Speaker 2: group of people together in a healthy, positive mode where
Speaker 2: their job is to disagree and work together, but they're
Speaker 2: going to solve a problem together, they I have not
Speaker 2: seen problems that they have not been able to solve,
Speaker 2: you know, and that you would never have imagined that
Speaker 2: they could solve.
Speaker 3: So that's for me, the source of optimism.
Speaker 2: It's always a scary moment, right because you know, we're
Speaker 2: aware of all the things that can go wrong, and
Speaker 2: we're also aware that at the moment we're not very
Speaker 2: good at getting on the same page, and we could
Speaker 2: easily hurt ourselves hurt each other if we can't do
Speaker 2: better than we are at this instant. But in the
Speaker 2: big picture, stepping back, we've come together after many times
Speaker 2: where we've fallen apart as societies, we've come back together
Speaker 2: and we've managed to build things. And I think that's
Speaker 2: we just have to do it again. And I think
Speaker 2: that's why I'm optimistic, because I think that we've done
Speaker 2: it before, we can certainly do it again, and we
Speaker 2: have all the tools we need. That's not the problem.
Speaker 2: I think we just need to get everybody able to
Speaker 2: think together and not feel too married to everything they
Speaker 2: believe being having to be right, but being able to,
Speaker 2: you know, enjoy walking around the problem with some other people,
Speaker 2: just long enough to solve it.
Speaker 1: So if you fast forward one hundred years from now,
Speaker 1: what do you hope humanity has figured out that we
Speaker 1: haven't yet.
Speaker 2: If we manage to pull this off, if we manage
Speaker 2: to get ourselves into a mode where we're actually thinking,
Speaker 2: even it doesn't have to be everybody, but even just
Speaker 2: enough of a core of people who are trying to
Speaker 2: solve problems together. I imagine that we'd be living on a
Speaker 2: planet where we're what we're really worrying about is how
Speaker 2: do we make sure that everybody on the planet is healthy,
Speaker 2: is given the opportunity to be creative and to and
Speaker 2: to work on things besides just bears since survival, that
Speaker 2: they're actually being able to think about what kind of
Speaker 2: questions would they'd like to ask, what kind of creative
Speaker 2: projects would they'd like to work on. I think it's
Speaker 2: perfectly possible of if we did this right, that one
Speaker 2: hundred years from now, that would be the challenge that
Speaker 2: we say, oh, look, we just found that, you know,
Speaker 2: we've gotten the kind of right in these parts of
Speaker 2: the of these countries.
Speaker 3: Now we just have to get you know, the the you.
Speaker 2: Help this group over here that hasn't quite figured out
Speaker 2: how to do it, they have some good ideas how
Speaker 2: they would like to do it.
Speaker 3: Let's give them a hand.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I feel like we could be in that position where
Speaker 2: we were looking around and asking, you know, where are
Speaker 2: the last pockets of unhappiness that we could possibly help
Speaker 2: alleviate and you know, bring a society where the only
Speaker 2: problems are the the fact that you know, humans are
Speaker 2: human and we're going to always you know, we have
Speaker 2: our ups and downs, but that we have a chance
Speaker 2: that everybody has an opportunity to be doing something productive together.
Speaker 2: I just imagined that it would feel like such a
Speaker 2: pleasure for everybody at you know, at any uh current
Speaker 2: uh position in our current world, that they would all
Speaker 2: feel this pleasure if they felt like they could walk
Speaker 2: down the streets and feel they were part of a
Speaker 2: planet that was thriving in that way, was making it
Speaker 2: possible for you know, the presumably our our ecosystem of
Speaker 2: other animals to be doing well, and that we were
Speaker 2: also now beginning to think more about where would we
Speaker 2: like to explore, both intellectually but perhaps you know, visiting
Speaker 2: other parts of the of the Solar system eventually more.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a lot of room for us to
Speaker 2: be feeling something very exciting at this moment, and I
Speaker 2: and I wish that people had that sense that this
Speaker 2: is their their opportunity to do something positive, not just
Speaker 2: to be scared of all the things that go wrong.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Saul pearl Mutter. We started
Speaker 1: with astrophysics, but we quickly got ourselves to how we
Speaker 1: hold our beliefs. What Saul noticed a long time ago
Speaker 1: is that science has developed, over many centuries a very
Speaker 1: particular culture around belief It's a culture where you want
Speaker 1: to be uncertain and where disagreement is not something to avoid,
Speaker 1: it's something to seek out. Now that's really unusual because
Speaker 1: in most areas of life, we build our identities around
Speaker 1: what we believe. We attach ourselves to ideas and then
Speaker 1: we defend them. We double down when our beliefs are challenged.
Speaker 1: But in science the game is different. The goal is
Speaker 1: not to be right, it's to get it right, and
Speaker 1: getting it right requires the ability to step outside your
Speaker 1: own perspective and to examine your own beliefs as though
Speaker 1: they might be flawed. We invite criticism, which never feels good,
Speaker 1: but we do it because it sharpens the picture. And
Speaker 1: it's hard because it runs against deep instincts. As I
Speaker 1: mentioned at the beginning, our brains are pattern finders. Our
Speaker 1: brains build internal models of the world, and once those
Speaker 1: models are in place, they tend to become self reinforcing.
Speaker 1: We catch the evidence that fits, we discount the evidence
Speaker 1: that doesn't. So what do we do about this? The
Speaker 1: answer that Saul suggests is the scientific approach. You build
Speaker 1: systems that help you wriggle free from your own biases.
Speaker 1: You invite people who disagree with you. You create structures where
Speaker 1: your ideas are challenged and refined. In other words, you
Speaker 1: make disagreement part of the process. And when that works,
Speaker 1: perhaps we get a future where humans can think together better.
Speaker 1: We can collaborate, we can disagree productively, We can update
Speaker 1: our beliefs as new information comes in. Saul's hope is
Speaker 1: that if we can do that, then many of the big,
Speaker 1: overwhelming problems we face become tractable. And history gives us
Speaker 1: lots of examples of this. Problems that once seemed insurmountable,
Speaker 1: like feeding a growing world population, or getting rid of smallpox,
Speaker 1: or getting ourselves to the moon. All these problems yielded
Speaker 1: when enough minds worked together in the right way. So
Speaker 1: what I take from today's conversation is that the biggest
Speaker 1: challenge we face probably isn't any particular problem out there
Speaker 1: in the world. It may be the meta problem of
Speaker 1: how we think about problems, how we talk to each
Speaker 1: other about them, and how we navigate disagreement. Because if
Speaker 1: we can get that part right, all the rest will
Speaker 1: fall into place. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast
Speaker 1: for more information and to find further reading. Join the
Speaker 1: weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe
Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode
Speaker 1: and to leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman,
Speaker 1: and this is Inner Cosmos