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Speaker 1: Why does changing your mind sometimes feel like losing a

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Speaker 1: part of yourself. If beliefs are supposed to track truth,

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Speaker 1: why do they so often track our tribe instead? Why

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Speaker 1: does a challenged belief feel like a personal attack. What

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Speaker 1: does your brain think it's defending when it defends an idea?

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Speaker 1: What if beliefs didn't evolve to be true, but to

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Speaker 1: be useful. What if your strongest convictions are solving social problems,

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Speaker 1: not intellectual ones. Today we'll speak with public intellectual and

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Speaker 1: neuroscientist Sam Harris about the topic of our beliefs. Welcome

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Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist

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Speaker 1: and author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail

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Speaker 1: deeply into our three pound universe to understand how we

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Speaker 1: see the world and importantly today, what we take to

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Speaker 1: be true about it. Your brain has a lot of

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Speaker 1: beliefs about what is true or false. So if I

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Speaker 1: ask you is Paris the capital of France, your brain

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Speaker 1: immediately judges the truth value of that statement. Is it

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Speaker 1: accurate or inaccurate? How about if I ask you is

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Speaker 1: ten plus ten twenty one? Your brain has to take

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Speaker 1: in the auditory information and compare it against what it

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Speaker 1: knows and make a decision. And most people would probably

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Speaker 1: agree with your judgments on these questions. But this can

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Speaker 1: of course get more complex when it involves other kinds

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Speaker 1: of beliefs, Like Mohammad was a holy proh fit chosen

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Speaker 1: by Allah to deliver a message to humanity. Some people

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Speaker 1: think that's a true statement, others think that's false, or

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Speaker 1: the statement early abortion should be supported, or Trump is

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Speaker 1: on balance a good president, or whatever. I'm not suggesting

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Speaker 1: how you should evaluate these sentences. I'm just pointing out

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Speaker 1: there are lots of sentences I can say that you

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Speaker 1: might find true or false. So every moment of your life,

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Speaker 1: your brain is making commitments. You're not necessarily announcing these

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Speaker 1: or thinking about them consciously. They live under the hood.

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Speaker 1: But these commitments shape what seems true, what feels threatening,

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Speaker 1: what deserves attention, and what can be safely ignored. These

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Speaker 1: commitments we have are what we call beliefs, and beliefs

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Speaker 1: are how the brain turns information into action. In other words,

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Speaker 1: they determine whether an utterance becomes something you respond to

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Speaker 1: or something that fades into the background from the outside.

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Speaker 1: Beliefs look like opinions, or positions, in other words, something

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Speaker 1: you might argue about or align yourself with. But from

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Speaker 1: the inside they feel fundamental, as in this is true,

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Speaker 1: this is false. Collectively, your beliefs feel like the structure

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Speaker 1: of reality itself. They build the backdrop against which your

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Speaker 1: decisions make sense. Now, the puzzle that's always fascinated me

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Speaker 1: is that intelligent people who are well informed often reach

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Speaker 1: very different conclusions about their beliefs. So you have evidence

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Speaker 1: that feels decisive to one person and that feels incomplete

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Speaker 1: or unconvincing to another. And what that means is that

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Speaker 1: changing one's mind typically feels really hard, and when you

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Speaker 1: have a disagreement with someone, this can feel personal, like

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Speaker 1: it involves your idea. So when we look at these patterns,

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Speaker 1: we see that belief seems to be doing something more

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Speaker 1: than building accurate models of the world. That might be

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Speaker 1: part of why the brain builds true and false judgments,

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Speaker 1: but there's probably more involved. For one, beliefs help coordinate

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Speaker 1: your social life by supporting identity within your tribe and

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Speaker 1: establishing alignment between people. Also, they can manage uncertainty by

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Speaker 1: stabilizing emotion. When we look at it through these lenses,

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Speaker 1: belief is, of course a biological process as much as

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Speaker 1: a philosophical one. Somewhere between encountering a claim and acting

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Speaker 1: on it, your brain has to perform a series of

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Speaker 1: operations that determine whether some statements should be reacted to,

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Speaker 1: or maybe whether it should be questioned or whether it

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Speaker 1: should be dismissed entirely. Whatever your brain decides on the

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Speaker 1: truth value of the statement, that shapes what you do next.

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Speaker 1: And all of this tends to run below the radar

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Speaker 1: of conscious awareness. Now, understanding what the brain is doing

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Speaker 1: with beliefs is massively important because what you believe to

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Speaker 1: be true and not true determines everything about cooperation or conflict.

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Speaker 1: And so this sits right at the center of all

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Speaker 1: that's happening in politics, in moral judgments, in social trust.

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Speaker 1: So I focus a lot of my episodes on these

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Speaker 1: issues about polarization and in groups and out groups and shibbleeths.

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Speaker 1: But today I want to move upstream a level and

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Speaker 1: focus on the machinery beneath them. How does the brain

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Speaker 1: decide what to accept as true? How do emotion and

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Speaker 1: identity in social context shape what feels credible? And there's

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Speaker 1: no one better to explore these questions with than Sam Harris,

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Speaker 1: whose work has examined belief from inside the brain and

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Speaker 1: within public discourse. Sam is a public intellectual, a philosopher

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Speaker 1: and author, and also a neuroscientist. He's well known for

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Speaker 1: his writings on rationality, religion, ethics, free will, and meditation.

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Speaker 1: He has long researched how science can inform human values

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Speaker 1: with books like The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape.

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Speaker 1: He hosts the Making Sense podcast, which focuses on consciousness

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Speaker 1: and society and current events. So today we're going to

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Speaker 1: ask what are beliefs really about. Here's my conversation with

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Speaker 1: Sam Harris. So, Sam, I want to talk with you

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Speaker 1: about belief. Many years ago you did neuroimaging studies on belief,

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Speaker 1: So let's start there. Tell us how you think about

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Speaker 1: belief and how you measure that in the brain.

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Speaker 2: Believing things to be true of als versus being uncertain.

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Speaker 2: This is something that our brains do readily, right, This

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Speaker 2: is largely This is what distinguishes us, certainly when we're

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Speaker 2: talking about complex representations of the world. This distinguishes us

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Speaker 2: from our closest primate cousins. I wouldn't say that that

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Speaker 2: other mammals and certainly, you know, the other primates don't

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Speaker 2: have beliefs because clearly they represent states of the world cognitively,

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Speaker 2: and they have expectations on that basis.

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Speaker 1: Like there'll be grubs under this rock.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, so they've got, you know, goal seeking behavior, and

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Speaker 2: that those goals are framed by some expectation of the

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Speaker 2: way the world is, and they can be surprised by

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Speaker 2: different outcomes. But we're the only species that were we

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Speaker 2: know of that trades in these linguistic representations of the world.

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Speaker 2: It can be completely divorced from any sensory entanglement with

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Speaker 2: the state of the world that is being described. I mean,

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Speaker 2: you get a cell phone call and there's a voice

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Speaker 2: on the other end of the line and it says,

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Speaker 2: you know, we've got your daughter and you got to

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Speaker 2: come up with a million dollars to get her back. Now,

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Speaker 2: if believed all of a sudden, those you know, small

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Speaker 2: mouth noises that came you know through the phone, deletely

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Speaker 2: common deer or you know, physiology, your whole world is

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Speaker 2: all of a sudden about that, you know, kind of

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Speaker 2: bent into the shape of the implications of of that

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Speaker 2: you know utterance. Whereas if it's the wrong number. If

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Speaker 2: you don't, I don't have a daughter, I know what

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Speaker 2: you're talking about, right, just it bounces off, it doesn't,

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Speaker 2: it doesn't, it doesn't become behaviorally or emotionally actionable. So

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Speaker 2: it was this difference between this fairly gossamer representation of

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Speaker 2: the world that that that it's just a piece of

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Speaker 2: language right in the mind. It could be your own thought,

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Speaker 2: it could be the thought of others you're communicated to you,

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Speaker 2: it could be something you read on on the you know,

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Speaker 2: the front page of a newspapers. It was it was

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Speaker 2: a transition from that just the mere, mere decoding of

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Speaker 2: a piece of language, to suddenly finding it not only

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Speaker 2: behaviorally actionable, but you know, you know, unthinkable not to

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Speaker 2: be motivated by those by those you know phonemes. So

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Speaker 2: there's clearly, you know, steps in the chain where you

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Speaker 2: you you you parse language or parse a statement and

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Speaker 2: understand its meaning, and then there's this secondary operation of

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Speaker 2: judging it to be true or false, right, or or

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Speaker 2: just deciding that you can't judge it one or the other.

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Speaker 2: And it seemed to me that on some level, this

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Speaker 2: is the most important thing in the world, right, I mean,

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Speaker 2: if you're talking about the power of ideas. You first

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Speaker 2: have to stand upstream of that claim to talk about

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Speaker 2: the difference between believing or disbelieving, accepting or rejecting certain

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Speaker 2: ideas right and so, and ideas are obviously everything in

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Speaker 2: our lives. I mean, it's it's how we're making a civilization,

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Speaker 2: is how we're failing to secure a civilization. It's how

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Speaker 2: we're needlessly producing harm for for ourselves and others. I mean,

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Speaker 2: it's just it's it's belief. Is claims to knowledge you

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Speaker 2: know true or otherwise? Are everything?

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Speaker 3: Right?

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Speaker 2: And so the question in my mind is what was

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Speaker 2: the brain doing to find something behaviorally actionable or to

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Speaker 2: find it not based on accepting or rejecting a claim

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Speaker 2: to knowledge about the world.

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Speaker 1: And so that's binary. But you also looked.

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Speaker 3: At uncertain certainty as a third condition.

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Speaker 1: But just so I'm clear, was uncertainty the I just

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Speaker 1: don't know one way or the other.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, And you clearly, I mean, like you clearly

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Speaker 2: couldn't know. So if you know a question that would

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Speaker 2: provoke that would be to give someone some gigantic number

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Speaker 2: and say that this number is prime. Right, It might

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Speaker 2: be prime ends in a one, it might be prime.

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Speaker 2: But obviously I don't know, or I have an you know,

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Speaker 2: you have an even number of hairs on your body, right,

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Speaker 2: you know you presumably you don't know, and so you

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Speaker 2: can you can come up with lists of statements that

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Speaker 2: are just as easy to decode as any other statements.

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Speaker 2: But what you come up against, you know, once you

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Speaker 2: understand them, is that there's really no way for you

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Speaker 2: to know what's true.

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Speaker 1: Got it, So you've got I either believe this to

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Speaker 1: be true some state, give me an example of what

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Speaker 1: you used.

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Speaker 2: My hypothesis was that belief, disbelief, and uncertainty were content

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Speaker 2: independent operations of the mind and therefore of the brain.

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Speaker 2: So that if I gave you a statement like two

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Speaker 2: plus two equals four versus two plus two equals five,

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Speaker 2: and those are those are parsed and analyzed very similarly. Right,

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Speaker 2: you're just just however, you understand arithmetic at the level

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Speaker 2: of the brain. You're doing that, but you're coming to

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Speaker 2: the opposite conclusion based on those two examples. But the

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Speaker 2: hypothesis was that if we interrogated many different streams of

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Speaker 2: knowledge and belief formation, so mathematical, logical, autobiographical, religious, political, right, say,

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Speaker 2: the ethical the cognitive and you know, neuro physiological operations

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Speaker 2: required to parse and judge that the truth value of

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Speaker 2: any of those statements had to be very very different.

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Speaker 2: I mean, what you're doing for arithmetic is not the

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Speaker 2: same as what you're doing for for religion presumably, or ethics,

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Speaker 2: or you know, you know, episodic memories. Say, but there

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Speaker 2: was this final there had to be a bottleneck with

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Speaker 2: which reported acceptance or rejection of the statement or uncertainty.

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Speaker 1: Great, and so you put people in the scanner and

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Speaker 1: what did you find.

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Speaker 2: Well, we found that accepting a statement to be true

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Speaker 2: versus rejecting it as false did report a kind of

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Speaker 2: content agnostic you know, subsequent operation. One thing that was interesting, though,

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Speaker 2: is that, and this actually goes back many many centuries

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Speaker 2: to the work of Spinoza. Spinosa hypothesized that merely understanding

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Speaker 2: a statement was akin to accepting it. Like it's like

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Speaker 2: in order to just if I give you, if I

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Speaker 2: give you just any utterance that you you know, any

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Speaker 2: claim about the world that you can parse. Merely kind

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Speaker 2: of getting to the end of the sentence and understanding

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Speaker 2: it puts you in a in a mode of cain

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Speaker 2: tacitly accepting it to be true and rejecting it as

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Speaker 2: false was a subsequent operation. And one thing you would

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Speaker 2: expect if that, in fact were true, is that behaviorally

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Speaker 2: false statements would be people would be slower to judge

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Speaker 2: false statements of equal complexity than to true statements. And

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Speaker 2: we found that. So you get people a statement like

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Speaker 2: two plus two equals five, they're slower to say no,

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Speaker 2: that's false than two plus two equals four is true.

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Speaker 2: I mean that that was a it was a fairly

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Speaker 2: significant behavioral difference. But in any case, the.

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Speaker 1: We let me, let me dive into that for a second.

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Speaker 1: Does that mean that hearing other perspectives, being exposed to

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Speaker 1: other perspectives, which you think, well, that's false, But at

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Speaker 1: least you've spent that moment standing in that person's truth

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Speaker 1: for a moment. So, for example, with political debates, you know,

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Speaker 1: one of the things that I think is the most

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Speaker 1: important for students is to, you know, get a three

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Speaker 1: sixty view of the arguments, to debate from both sides,

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Speaker 1: and be ready to do that. When we were in school,

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Speaker 1: I think, I don't know if this is retrospective romanticization,

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Speaker 1: but I believe that was more common. You would you

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Speaker 1: would come into a debate ready to do either side,

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Speaker 1: and therefore you knew the issues and the nuance is

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Speaker 1: slightly better than let's say a kid who's in college

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Speaker 1: who thinks, sorry, this is the truth and I'm not

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Speaker 1: going to entertain another hypothesis. Just based on what you said,

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Speaker 1: it seems to me interesting that if you're told another perspective,

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Speaker 1: you at least stand in that truth for a moment

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Speaker 1: before rejecting it, which might be useful.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, although it does actually connect with other non normative biases,

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Speaker 2: where it's something called Obviously, we have a replication crisis

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Speaker 2: in much of this psychological science, so I don't know

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Speaker 2: if this work has been replicated. But at the time,

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Speaker 2: there was something called the illusory truth effect, where you

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Speaker 2: merely being told something.

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Speaker 1: Several times so you're more likely to believe it.

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Speaker 3: Even in the act of debunking it.

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Speaker 2: So if I tell you that a certain thing was

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Speaker 2: thought to be true, but in fact it's not true,

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Speaker 2: there's a kind of memory distortion bias where just you know,

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Speaker 2: a year from now, if I ask you about that thing,

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Speaker 2: there's this reliable bias in the direction of, oh, yeah,

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Speaker 2: that was that was true, right, but you sort of

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Speaker 2: the debunking, and this is why misinformation can be so

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Speaker 2: pernicious and difficult to debunk. And again I bracket this

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Speaker 2: with not knowing whether or not I am now spreading misinformation,

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Speaker 2: because I don't know if this is washed out.

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Speaker 1: I've certainly heard the misery truth effect many times, so

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Speaker 1: now it's stuck in me as the truth. Ye fine,

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Speaker 1: So okay, So coming back to this then, so Spinoza said,

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Speaker 1: you know, you have to evaluate something as though it's

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Speaker 1: stand in that space for a moment before you make

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Speaker 1: your decision that that's actually false.

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Speaker 3: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: So the reporter of that in our study was mostly

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Speaker 2: activity in the anterior insula, which is, as you know,

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Speaker 2: the insula is the cortical structure that that is, you know,

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Speaker 2: very focused on in terror reception. And it's just the

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Speaker 2: kind of the states of the body are being evaluated

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Speaker 2: here and discussed. I mean, the discussed literature suggests that

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Speaker 2: it's mostly driven by the insula, and it's and so

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Speaker 2: that this was somehow unsurprising to us because it does

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Speaker 2: seem I mean, I think just you can get in

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Speaker 2: touch with this in the first person subjective way, there

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Speaker 2: is something to reject a proposition as false feels a

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Speaker 2: certain way. I mean, it is a kind of emotion,

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Speaker 2: it's a psychological rejection state. And if it's emphatically false,

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Speaker 2: certainly on a topic you care about, there's really just

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Speaker 2: to put that on. The continuum of disgust was not

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Speaker 2: at all surprising, right, And conversely, true statements were evaluated

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Speaker 2: with the same kind of positively valanced reward structures that

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Speaker 2: we know about in the frontal midline area of the brain.

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Speaker 2: And this might be surprising to people who haven't thought

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Speaker 2: about neuroscience very much, but generally speaking, we know that

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Speaker 2: all of our acts of higher cognition are are leveraged

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Speaker 2: from areas of you know, areas of the brain which

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Speaker 2: were not designed merely for that for that, you know,

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Speaker 2: not designed by evolution merely to support that higher cognition.

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Speaker 2: So clearly you have to do math and language and

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Speaker 2: neuroscience and everything else that only humans do using these

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Speaker 2: structures that that you know, even our chimp cousins have.

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Speaker 1: So when you hear something false, activates some sense of disgust,

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Speaker 1: and use something true, it's beautiful and rewarding.

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Speaker 2: And there was one other piece that the and this

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Speaker 2: came in a subsequent study when we were looking at

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Speaker 2: political versus and religious versus, just kind of semantic ordinary,

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Speaker 2: more ordinary beliefs. We found that beliefs that there was

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Speaker 2: there was a subsequent study where we which I ran

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Speaker 2: with Jonas Kaplan at USC He's over in Demasio's lab,

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Speaker 2: where we tried to in real time push back against

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Speaker 2: people strongly held beliefs while they were in this skin.

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Speaker 2: So we'd present them with a proposition which we we

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Speaker 2: knew in advance that that you know, some subjects would

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Speaker 2: strongly believe someone's strongly disbelieve, and we'd try to push

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Speaker 2: their beliefs in the opposite direction, giving them fairly persuasive,

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Speaker 2: but still in many cases kind of just sham evidence.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 2: So like he's like someone who would be put in

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Speaker 2: the scanner and we would we would ask them to

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Speaker 2: rate on a scale of one to seven their confidence

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Speaker 2: that secondhand smoke is a significant health concern, right, and

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Speaker 2: then we would present I think in this case it

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Speaker 2: was sham evidence against that conviction, seeing if we could

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Speaker 2: knock get back. And but we did this for beliefs

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Speaker 2: that would be nonetheless strongly held, but around which we

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Speaker 2: wouldn't expect someone's identity to be really anchored versus beliefs

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Speaker 2: that were you know, political or religious, where they you

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Speaker 2: would imagine that would be more resistant to to revising

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Speaker 2: their opinion whatever your evidence, right, And we found that

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Speaker 2: areas in again midline, but now in the posterior regions

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Speaker 2: of the brain, you know, kind of classically kind of

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Speaker 2: default mode network areas were preferentially upregulated there where and

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Speaker 2: some of these areas are and there's other work showing

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Speaker 2: that they when people are given stimuli that that are

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Speaker 2: interrogating self representation itself, like if you I give you

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Speaker 2: a list of words and ask you which of these

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Speaker 2: words apply it to you? You know, we're like patient

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Speaker 2: or kind or anxious or and then people are if

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Speaker 2: the if the if the task is is this me right?

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Speaker 2: That's this this the same region that gets activated. So

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Speaker 2: you know, at least in that experiment, we we did

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Speaker 2: produce some evidence that beliefs were people were resistant to

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Speaker 2: modifying their beliefs no matter what the counter evidence was,

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Speaker 2: where the were of a sort that seemed to be

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Speaker 2: invoking kind of the self referential uh processing.

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Speaker 1: So beliefs are tied to identity.

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Speaker 2: Not not all but such like like again there's there's

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Speaker 2: there were two buckets. Some could be strongly held. But

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Speaker 2: you know, presumably your identity isn't so tied up in

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Speaker 2: you know, whether secondhand smoke is a health hazard versus uh,

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Speaker 2: you know something about you know, abortion is wrong, or

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Speaker 2: you know, whatever your political conviction was that we analyzed

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Speaker 2: in advance.

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Speaker 1: So this leads us to the question, I think, if

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Speaker 1: what is belief for from an evolutionary point of view,

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Speaker 1: what are these beliefs useful for doing for for the

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Speaker 1: rest of the brain. One idea about beliefs is that

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Speaker 1: they're trying to build a an accurate model of the world.

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Speaker 1: Another version of beliefs is that it has to do

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Speaker 1: with something social, as in belonging, with identity and the

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Speaker 1: capitlain and all. Study you just pointed two would certainly

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Speaker 1: support that. And then another that people propose that has

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Speaker 1: to do with emotional regulation. It makes you feel better, more certain,

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Speaker 1: less anxious about particular things, especially I think that would

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Speaker 1: apply to letus say, religious beliefs. And it may not

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Speaker 1: be that there's anything exclusive about these answers, but if

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Speaker 1: we were thinking about waiting them, how do you see

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Speaker 1: the function of beliefs?

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Speaker 2: Well, I think it's subsumes almost every act of cognition

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Speaker 2: apart from kind of pure kind of sensory engagement with

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Speaker 2: the world. And even in that case, you can you

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Speaker 2: can translate the sensory experience into kind of belief talk.

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Speaker 2: I mean, it doesn't have the we don't it's not

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Speaker 2: mediated linguistically in the same way. But like my belief

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Speaker 2: that that's a table, it's built up over you know,

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Speaker 2: you can in many channels. One channel as I can

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Speaker 2: see it, and I can see that, you know, supporting

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Speaker 2: your drink, and so we're using that as a table

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Speaker 2: whatever it is. But the linguistic mediation comes into play

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Speaker 2: when we might say, oh, would you just would you

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Speaker 2: go put that over on the table. It's like then,

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Speaker 2: so now I have this abstract representation of the table,

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Speaker 2: I walk into the room, I find the table, right.

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Speaker 2: So obviously we're engaging this in multiple modes. But once

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Speaker 2: you break free of just moment to moment, you know,

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Speaker 2: behavioral imperatives of navigating that, you know, our mediate environment,

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Speaker 2: it's almost all linguistic or you know, imagistic representations of

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Speaker 2: possible states of the future, you know, plausible states of

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Speaker 2: the past. You know, do we try to reconcile our memory,

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Speaker 2: you know, our memories when there's any kind of discordance there.

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Speaker 2: But again, we're just trading in language. Oh no, no,

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Speaker 2: he didn't say that. He said this, Or no, no,

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Speaker 2: that wasn't. That wasn't on Tuesday. That was on Wednesday,

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Speaker 2: And I mean it was It's all we're doing is

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Speaker 2: talking to ourselves and talking to others about what the

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Speaker 2: world is like and what our place in it is

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Speaker 2: and what should we do next. I mean, we have

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Speaker 2: just we have this massive navigation problem which covers really

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Speaker 2: our life in every respect. I mean even you know,

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Speaker 2: I view morality as a navigation problem, and morality really

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Speaker 2: is a story of what should we do next, you know,

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Speaker 2: or in the future, right, Like, what is what's the

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Speaker 2: right thing to do? So you get two people in

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Speaker 2: a room and they're for whatever reason, their incentives aren't aligned,

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Speaker 2: and there's some kind of negotiation, and then it immediately

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Speaker 2: becomes a conversation about what's the right thing to do,

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Speaker 2: what's the fair thing to do, what's the what do

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Speaker 2: we do last time? And if you actually kind of

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Speaker 2: drill down on what's happening at each point along the way,

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Speaker 2: and what is anchoring everyone's emotional response. You're looking at

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Speaker 2: knowledge claims about the way the world is, the way

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Speaker 2: that it's likely to be, and people's kind of the waitings,

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Speaker 2: the emotional waitings. People are giving these claims with respect

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Speaker 2: to kind of a probabilistic sense of the likelihood that

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Speaker 2: they're true or false. Right, So, if someone says to you, oh, no, no, no,

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Speaker 2: that's not what happened. There's a very controversial shooting in

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Speaker 2: the news right now that has kind of shattered the

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Speaker 2: country in the last twelve hours. An ice officer shot

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Speaker 2: a woman protester in her car. You know, millions upon

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Speaker 2: millions have seen the video and have rival interpretations of

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Speaker 2: the video based on what they believe is plausible to think,

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Speaker 2: based on the angle they were looking at and etc.

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Speaker 2: All of this is a story of rival beliefs framed

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Speaker 2: by different shadings of facts. But again, facts in this

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Speaker 2: case are beliefs upon beliefs upon beliefs that people are

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Speaker 2: granting more or less credence.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 2: So, Like in this case, you know, the woman was

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Speaker 2: driving her car toward the officer, So was she trying

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Speaker 2: to get away or was she trying to run the

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Speaker 2: officer overw how you interpret that maneuver changes your sense

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Speaker 2: of the ethics of it completely. What is an officer

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Speaker 2: supposed to do when he's no longer physically in danger

417
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Speaker 2: with his gun, but his gun has drawn, he's already

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Speaker 2: shot one round at the suspect. You either know nothing

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Speaker 2: about that or you know a lot about that, and

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Speaker 2: you have very strong convictions about what the right thing

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Speaker 2: to do is or what the legal thing to do is. Again,

422
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Speaker 2: is just a blizzard of propositional claims, linguistically mediated propositional

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Speaker 2: claims about the way the world is or should be,

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Speaker 2: And it's all a matter of belief and our creedence around.

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Speaker 1: It, agreed. But what I'm interested in is not so

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Speaker 1: much the individual beliefs that we might have about the

427
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Speaker 1: trajectory of the car so on, but the social aspect

428
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Speaker 1: of this, in terms of what do my friends and

429
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Speaker 1: my colleagues on whatever my political side of the argument is,

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Speaker 1: what do they believe is true? We're so obviously influenced

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Speaker 1: by our groups, by our cultures, by our families, by

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Speaker 1: our neighborhoods. To what degree is belief fundamentally a social

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Speaker 1: issue in our social species?

434
00:26:01,720 --> 00:26:05,080
Speaker 2: Well, I think it is almost entirely. When you look

435
00:26:05,119 --> 00:26:09,479
Speaker 2: at it's kind of the primacy of language in shaping

436
00:26:09,480 --> 00:26:13,480
Speaker 2: these beliefs. So we learn the language is a social phenomenon, right,

437
00:26:13,480 --> 00:26:16,520
Speaker 2: It's an intersubjective phenomenon. You learn it. I mean, it's

438
00:26:16,520 --> 00:26:18,680
Speaker 2: not that we don't have a propensity to learn it.

439
00:26:18,720 --> 00:26:21,320
Speaker 2: Obviously we do, and that is kind of a private

440
00:26:21,560 --> 00:26:24,480
Speaker 2: individual fact about each of us. But when you look

441
00:26:24,480 --> 00:26:26,960
Speaker 2: at how it gets trained up in dialogue with your

442
00:26:27,000 --> 00:26:30,679
Speaker 2: parents and caregivers and other people in your environment from

443
00:26:31,080 --> 00:26:35,399
Speaker 2: your first hours of life, it's an intrinsically social phenomenon

444
00:26:35,440 --> 00:26:39,840
Speaker 2: which we then later internalize, such that even when mommy

445
00:26:39,840 --> 00:26:43,000
Speaker 2: and Daddy leave the room, we're left talking to ourselves. Right,

446
00:26:43,040 --> 00:26:45,680
Speaker 2: And so there's that kind of inner voice that gets

447
00:26:46,240 --> 00:26:50,679
Speaker 2: kindled and which we never seem to shake. Most people

448
00:26:50,760 --> 00:26:55,840
Speaker 2: are mediating all of their experience with language, and we

449
00:26:56,000 --> 00:26:58,800
Speaker 2: do this with one another. It is the basis of

450
00:26:58,960 --> 00:27:02,920
Speaker 2: virtually all human cooperation. I mean, it's certainly cooperation with

451
00:27:02,960 --> 00:27:07,400
Speaker 2: respect any complex task. I mean, like if you got

452
00:27:07,480 --> 00:27:11,200
Speaker 2: up and started a trip, you know, I might wordlessly

453
00:27:11,240 --> 00:27:13,320
Speaker 2: and instantly you know, grab you to keep you from

454
00:27:13,359 --> 00:27:15,240
Speaker 2: falling over, or you drop something, and I try to

455
00:27:15,240 --> 00:27:20,360
Speaker 2: catch it. That's not linguistic. But basically, any cooperation more

456
00:27:20,359 --> 00:27:23,159
Speaker 2: complex than that is a matter of us talking to

457
00:27:23,200 --> 00:27:26,400
Speaker 2: one another about what our goals are and what we're

458
00:27:26,400 --> 00:27:27,080
Speaker 2: going to do next.

459
00:27:27,280 --> 00:27:30,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, So how do you think that applies to beliefs? Though?

460
00:27:30,560 --> 00:27:34,640
Speaker 1: My belief about whether the woman was trying to kill

461
00:27:34,640 --> 00:27:39,040
Speaker 1: the cop or get away, my belief about gun control, abortion, whatever,

462
00:27:39,119 --> 00:27:40,800
Speaker 1: What do these things have to do with the people

463
00:27:40,800 --> 00:27:43,880
Speaker 1: I'm surrounded by? In other words, how do we make

464
00:27:43,920 --> 00:27:46,240
Speaker 1: our beliefs about what it's true what it's not true.

465
00:27:46,680 --> 00:27:50,879
Speaker 2: So all of our talk about beliefs is occurring in

466
00:27:50,920 --> 00:27:55,240
Speaker 2: a community, right, in the community of people who are

467
00:27:55,600 --> 00:27:57,840
Speaker 2: we have direct relationships with, and then just a community

468
00:27:57,880 --> 00:28:01,160
Speaker 2: of that is just a matter of are being embedded

469
00:28:01,200 --> 00:28:03,640
Speaker 2: in an information landscape where we're hearing from other people

470
00:28:03,680 --> 00:28:06,159
Speaker 2: who we may never meet, or we're reading books, you know,

471
00:28:06,200 --> 00:28:08,359
Speaker 2: written by people who may have been dead for hundreds

472
00:28:08,400 --> 00:28:12,760
Speaker 2: of years, but we're trafficking in the kind of just

473
00:28:12,840 --> 00:28:18,560
Speaker 2: a torrents of linguistic representations of the world, and we're

474
00:28:18,640 --> 00:28:25,560
Speaker 2: constantly revising or resisting revising our view of the world

475
00:28:25,560 --> 00:28:28,040
Speaker 2: on that basis. Right, So you read something and you

476
00:28:28,080 --> 00:28:32,800
Speaker 2: know this is where various you know, reasoning heuristics, you know,

477
00:28:32,960 --> 00:28:35,920
Speaker 2: normative and otherwise come into play where you could have

478
00:28:36,000 --> 00:28:38,640
Speaker 2: something like confirmation bias, right, which you know, in science

479
00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:40,880
Speaker 2: we're alert to the fact that this is a kind

480
00:28:40,880 --> 00:28:44,680
Speaker 2: of you know, cognitive defect or failure mode where it's like,

481
00:28:44,960 --> 00:28:47,680
Speaker 2: you know, if you're just looking for the confirmation of

482
00:28:47,760 --> 00:28:52,120
Speaker 2: your cherished hypothesis or your cherished opinion, well then we

483
00:28:52,200 --> 00:28:54,280
Speaker 2: know that's just not a good operation to see if

484
00:28:54,320 --> 00:28:58,040
Speaker 2: in fact you're you're in touch with reality. And so,

485
00:28:58,880 --> 00:29:01,920
Speaker 2: but in every area of discourse, whether it's a formal

486
00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:04,760
Speaker 2: one like science or it's just we're just you know,

487
00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:12,200
Speaker 2: gossiping with friends, we're constantly trading in statements about the

488
00:29:12,200 --> 00:29:16,960
Speaker 2: way the world is. And these statements could fall into

489
00:29:17,720 --> 00:29:21,560
Speaker 2: various categories that are just are more or less morally

490
00:29:21,600 --> 00:29:24,320
Speaker 2: salient or or psychologically.

491
00:29:25,120 --> 00:29:25,840
Speaker 3: Combustible.

492
00:29:25,960 --> 00:29:27,360
Speaker 2: I mean, so, you know, if you if you're talking

493
00:29:27,400 --> 00:29:30,360
Speaker 2: about religious beliefs, like core religious beliefs that are you know,

494
00:29:30,400 --> 00:29:33,840
Speaker 2: foundational for a specific community, obviously those have a different

495
00:29:34,240 --> 00:29:38,000
Speaker 2: gravity to them, and they are all you know, pathologically

496
00:29:38,040 --> 00:29:41,680
Speaker 2: in my view, they are protected by certain norms that

497
00:29:41,760 --> 00:29:44,680
Speaker 2: are really the antithesis of what we what we do

498
00:29:44,760 --> 00:29:47,520
Speaker 2: in science where you know, you're I mean this, you know,

499
00:29:47,960 --> 00:29:52,200
Speaker 2: religion is the only area of culture where the notion

500
00:29:52,280 --> 00:29:55,560
Speaker 2: of dogma is not not pejorative. R I mean, dogma

501
00:29:55,600 --> 00:29:57,880
Speaker 2: is literally not a bad word in you know, dogma's

502
00:29:58,000 --> 00:30:01,200
Speaker 2: you know, traditionally Catholic, you know, and word. These are

503
00:30:01,240 --> 00:30:04,520
Speaker 2: the things you're gonna believe without you know, sufficient evidence,

504
00:30:04,520 --> 00:30:06,000
Speaker 2: and you're gonna believe them as much as you can

505
00:30:06,040 --> 00:30:07,960
Speaker 2: believe anything, and they're not on the table to be

506
00:30:08,440 --> 00:30:11,640
Speaker 2: argued against or revised right now in science. If you

507
00:30:11,840 --> 00:30:13,720
Speaker 2: if you can say, if you tell someone well that's

508
00:30:13,760 --> 00:30:16,800
Speaker 2: just you know, you're being dogmatic, or that's that's a dogma,

509
00:30:16,880 --> 00:30:19,360
Speaker 2: well that's not you know, that's definitely not a nice

510
00:30:19,360 --> 00:30:23,000
Speaker 2: thing to say about somebody's reasoning. So yeah, so this

511
00:30:23,080 --> 00:30:27,800
Speaker 2: is this is it's it's everywhere. And again, the hypothesis

512
00:30:27,880 --> 00:30:31,880
Speaker 2: going into this original uh neuroscientific work was that there's

513
00:30:31,920 --> 00:30:36,040
Speaker 2: something importantly similar across across all of these domains that

514
00:30:36,120 --> 00:30:40,440
Speaker 2: we're doing where you're you're just you're you're accepting a

515
00:30:40,520 --> 00:30:44,760
Speaker 2: representation as behaviorally valid or you're rejecting it as not

516
00:30:45,080 --> 00:30:47,520
Speaker 2: and or you're or you're in a kind of holding

517
00:30:47,560 --> 00:30:49,320
Speaker 2: pattern where you just can't know one way or the other.

518
00:30:49,360 --> 00:30:51,360
Speaker 1: But I still want to understand what is the difference,

519
00:30:51,680 --> 00:30:54,240
Speaker 1: either from neuroimaging studies or just how you've thought about

520
00:30:54,280 --> 00:30:56,880
Speaker 1: serveral years, What is the difference between let's say, scientific

521
00:30:57,200 --> 00:31:01,240
Speaker 1: and political and religious beliefs. That are all beliefs that

522
00:31:01,280 --> 00:31:04,760
Speaker 1: you might take to be true or false. But it

523
00:31:04,840 --> 00:31:09,280
Speaker 1: does feel like the social component is a really important

524
00:31:09,280 --> 00:31:12,800
Speaker 1: one to political beliefs, maybe scientific beliefs too. In some cases,

525
00:31:13,560 --> 00:31:18,280
Speaker 1: the emotional regulation might be really important to religious beliefs,

526
00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:20,200
Speaker 1: as in, I've got a lot of anxiety about this,

527
00:31:20,240 --> 00:31:21,840
Speaker 1: and this makes me feel better if I were to

528
00:31:21,880 --> 00:31:26,160
Speaker 1: accept that. So there are these different components about why

529
00:31:26,240 --> 00:31:29,360
Speaker 1: we believe. In other words, if we take the position

530
00:31:29,440 --> 00:31:33,040
Speaker 1: that belief isn't actually just about figuring out what's true

531
00:31:33,080 --> 00:31:35,280
Speaker 1: in the world, which we wish it were, but it's

532
00:31:35,320 --> 00:31:38,640
Speaker 1: clearly not that in brains. So this is my question

533
00:31:38,680 --> 00:31:42,000
Speaker 1: for you. How do you think about the when beliefs

534
00:31:42,040 --> 00:31:45,880
Speaker 1: are for the purpose of social cohesion, when they're for

535
00:31:45,920 --> 00:31:48,200
Speaker 1: the purpose of emotional regulation, and when they're for the

536
00:31:48,240 --> 00:31:52,320
Speaker 1: purpose of getting the right answer for predictive actorscy the world.

537
00:31:53,360 --> 00:31:56,400
Speaker 2: Well, I think all of that is still pretty knit together.

538
00:31:56,440 --> 00:32:01,480
Speaker 2: But yeah, I would I would agree that certain beliefs function,

539
00:32:02,640 --> 00:32:06,160
Speaker 2: or certain professions of belief at least functions kind of

540
00:32:06,240 --> 00:32:08,880
Speaker 2: you know, loyalty tests or signaling as a you know,

541
00:32:09,320 --> 00:32:13,640
Speaker 2: you know, a shibboleth as you know that where you're

542
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:17,440
Speaker 2: signaling group membership, right like like we have a code,

543
00:32:17,640 --> 00:32:20,600
Speaker 2: and on that basis, there's a level of kind of

544
00:32:20,600 --> 00:32:25,280
Speaker 2: social trust and expectations about each other's ethical intuitions and

545
00:32:25,280 --> 00:32:29,520
Speaker 2: political commitments. And it's the kind of shorthand. But if

546
00:32:29,560 --> 00:32:33,240
Speaker 2: you're going to tear at those sort of core group

547
00:32:33,440 --> 00:32:38,520
Speaker 2: identity assertions, whether it's a you know it's a religious

548
00:32:38,880 --> 00:32:41,200
Speaker 2: you know, a mainstream religion or you know, small or

549
00:32:41,200 --> 00:32:45,200
Speaker 2: still like a spiritual or religious cult, or a political

550
00:32:45,280 --> 00:32:50,600
Speaker 2: cult say, or political culture, these are kind of anchoring

551
00:32:50,920 --> 00:32:53,800
Speaker 2: assertions about what is true about what really happened, about

552
00:32:53,800 --> 00:32:56,200
Speaker 2: what is real about the unique sanctity of a given book, say,

553
00:32:57,600 --> 00:32:59,960
Speaker 2: which we're not disposed to rein.

554
00:32:59,800 --> 00:33:01,000
Speaker 3: Tear very much.

555
00:33:01,080 --> 00:33:03,840
Speaker 2: And when you when you talk about specific things where

556
00:33:03,880 --> 00:33:09,320
Speaker 2: they really were, these different ways of knowing collide. There's

557
00:33:09,360 --> 00:33:11,160
Speaker 2: so many examples. He takes something like, you know, the

558
00:33:11,160 --> 00:33:13,920
Speaker 2: shroud of Turin which was thought to be this. Perhaps

559
00:33:13,960 --> 00:33:15,840
Speaker 2: in certain circles it still is thought to be that

560
00:33:15,880 --> 00:33:19,520
Speaker 2: this Christian relic where this shroud had had received the

561
00:33:20,840 --> 00:33:23,960
Speaker 2: facial imprint of Jesus, you know, it was thought to

562
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:28,440
Speaker 2: be his burial shroud. But then carbon dating was done

563
00:33:28,520 --> 00:33:30,520
Speaker 2: on it and it was it was revealed to I think,

564
00:33:31,160 --> 00:33:34,600
Speaker 2: I think it's the thirteenth century relic. So it's you know,

565
00:33:34,640 --> 00:33:37,920
Speaker 2: it's kind of a thousand plus years off from being

566
00:33:37,920 --> 00:33:41,120
Speaker 2: the real shroud. So is this a claim about about

567
00:33:42,040 --> 00:33:44,760
Speaker 2: purely religion or is this now? I mean, once carbon

568
00:33:44,840 --> 00:33:48,560
Speaker 2: dating gets invented and you can you can use it,

569
00:33:48,560 --> 00:33:51,320
Speaker 2: it suddenly becomes a claim about about chemistry, right, you know.

570
00:33:51,640 --> 00:33:55,720
Speaker 2: And so I mean that is the the enduring tension

571
00:33:55,800 --> 00:33:59,440
Speaker 2: between science and religion. Whenever you're making claims about the world,

572
00:33:59,480 --> 00:34:03,680
Speaker 2: about the past, asked about what happens after death, that

573
00:34:03,760 --> 00:34:07,360
Speaker 2: the way the mind works, about the connections between people,

574
00:34:07,520 --> 00:34:12,560
Speaker 2: you know, tangible and invisible, you're at least in principle,

575
00:34:12,800 --> 00:34:18,160
Speaker 2: in principle risking making claims that wander onto the territory

576
00:34:18,200 --> 00:34:21,440
Speaker 2: of every other way we judge the truth value of

577
00:34:21,480 --> 00:34:22,360
Speaker 2: claims about the world.

578
00:34:22,719 --> 00:34:26,160
Speaker 1: So why is it so hard for let's say highly

579
00:34:26,200 --> 00:34:29,319
Speaker 1: intelligent people to come to agreement. I mean, we know

580
00:34:29,400 --> 00:34:33,600
Speaker 1: in any science department in a university, people argue. They

581
00:34:33,600 --> 00:34:36,720
Speaker 1: spend their careers arguing. Again, if this were just about

582
00:34:36,960 --> 00:34:40,680
Speaker 1: the brain trying to find predictive accuracy, that would be

583
00:34:40,760 --> 00:34:42,920
Speaker 1: very difficult to understand. But because of all these other

584
00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:47,239
Speaker 1: components to it, the social, the emotional, it's it's a

585
00:34:47,280 --> 00:34:48,399
Speaker 1: much more complicated thing.

586
00:34:48,480 --> 00:34:50,759
Speaker 2: The search for truth it is. I mean, you can

587
00:34:50,800 --> 00:34:54,840
Speaker 2: sharpen it up more than we tend to. For instance,

588
00:34:54,880 --> 00:34:58,200
Speaker 2: you can you can be alert to the problem of

589
00:34:58,640 --> 00:35:01,480
Speaker 2: someone making claims that are on falsifiable. Right. This is

590
00:35:01,520 --> 00:35:05,000
Speaker 2: something that that Carl Popper, the philosopher of science, gave

591
00:35:05,080 --> 00:35:09,200
Speaker 2: us just the the litmus test for him was the

592
00:35:09,320 --> 00:35:12,480
Speaker 2: falsifiability or lack there of a statement that was That

593
00:35:12,560 --> 00:35:15,960
Speaker 2: was how that was the boundary between science and and

594
00:35:16,600 --> 00:35:20,360
Speaker 2: the rest of our thinking. So what doesn't mean to

595
00:35:20,920 --> 00:35:23,840
Speaker 2: make a claim that is unfalsifiable? It means it means

596
00:35:23,840 --> 00:35:28,279
Speaker 2: that you're you're saying something is true. And yet there's

597
00:35:28,360 --> 00:35:32,440
Speaker 2: no state of the world that could know, even not

598
00:35:32,480 --> 00:35:34,640
Speaker 2: even in principle, a state of the world that we

599
00:35:34,640 --> 00:35:38,560
Speaker 2: can imagine that would report to the falsity of the claim.

600
00:35:38,560 --> 00:35:39,879
Speaker 3: Well, then you're it is.

601
00:35:40,280 --> 00:35:44,240
Speaker 2: What's an example, you know, this is a the world

602
00:35:44,440 --> 00:35:48,360
Speaker 2: as the entire world, the cosmos, everything that is apparently

603
00:35:48,400 --> 00:35:54,680
Speaker 2: real was created by God just you know, ten seconds ago.

604
00:35:55,520 --> 00:35:58,440
Speaker 2: But what God also created were all of the memories

605
00:35:58,440 --> 00:36:01,080
Speaker 2: and all of the backward looking evidence we think we

606
00:36:01,200 --> 00:36:04,800
Speaker 2: have about the antiquity of the cosmos. But the cosmos

607
00:36:04,840 --> 00:36:07,680
Speaker 2: is actually ten seconds old. We just have all these

608
00:36:07,760 --> 00:36:09,920
Speaker 2: memories jammed in our heads and all of this stuff

609
00:36:09,960 --> 00:36:12,560
Speaker 2: on the on the internet, et cetera. And the rocks

610
00:36:12,640 --> 00:36:14,640
Speaker 2: or the way they are and that, you know, so

611
00:36:14,960 --> 00:36:17,880
Speaker 2: nothing would be different. But you know, this is this

612
00:36:17,960 --> 00:36:19,759
Speaker 2: is my claim. This is my magical claim, right, so

613
00:36:20,200 --> 00:36:22,719
Speaker 2: it's unfalsifiable. You know, every time you're going to give

614
00:36:22,760 --> 00:36:25,160
Speaker 2: me something that you think would falsify falsified, I can

615
00:36:25,280 --> 00:36:28,239
Speaker 2: just kind of layer into that into the thesis. Well, no,

616
00:36:28,320 --> 00:36:30,680
Speaker 2: God made it that way so as to make it

617
00:36:30,719 --> 00:36:33,759
Speaker 2: seem like, you know that way, right, So we're not

618
00:36:34,040 --> 00:36:37,120
Speaker 2: We tend to not be interested in claims like that

619
00:36:37,200 --> 00:36:40,759
Speaker 2: for good reason, right, because they're just they're not one

620
00:36:40,840 --> 00:36:44,440
Speaker 2: they you know, there's they run against the grain of

621
00:36:44,480 --> 00:36:48,919
Speaker 2: a very useful heuristic. We have in science, which goes

622
00:36:49,120 --> 00:36:53,600
Speaker 2: by the name of Oakham's razor, but more generically, just

623
00:36:53,640 --> 00:36:57,600
Speaker 2: the idea of that a thesis should be in so

624
00:36:57,680 --> 00:37:01,040
Speaker 2: far as it's possible, parsimonious, right, Like you shouldn't just

625
00:37:01,840 --> 00:37:05,680
Speaker 2: proliferate your you know, claims, you know, so as to

626
00:37:05,719 --> 00:37:08,320
Speaker 2: shore up I mean, we don't want epicycles within epicycles

627
00:37:08,360 --> 00:37:11,640
Speaker 2: within epicycles. We want the most elegant, you know, simple

628
00:37:12,520 --> 00:37:14,280
Speaker 2: thesis that still conserves the data.

629
00:37:15,040 --> 00:37:18,000
Speaker 1: But I still want to understand. If you got let's say,

630
00:37:18,040 --> 00:37:21,040
Speaker 1: Popper and Spinoza in a room together. Here, you've got

631
00:37:21,040 --> 00:37:24,960
Speaker 1: two very clear thinkers, but there would be beliefs that

632
00:37:25,040 --> 00:37:27,359
Speaker 1: each of them hold that they would end up disagreeing on.

633
00:37:28,360 --> 00:37:30,759
Speaker 1: And again I'm just I'm just circling back to this

634
00:37:30,840 --> 00:37:35,680
Speaker 1: point that it's it can't be just about the rational.

635
00:37:35,719 --> 00:37:38,960
Speaker 1: There are all these other reasons why humans hold beliefs,

636
00:37:39,239 --> 00:37:40,960
Speaker 1: you know, the social and emotional or the things I

637
00:37:41,040 --> 00:37:43,960
Speaker 1: keep hanging on about. But this feels important to me

638
00:37:44,800 --> 00:37:47,239
Speaker 1: in terms of understanding why it is so difficult, why

639
00:37:47,320 --> 00:37:50,600
Speaker 1: there's such polarization. Because what would be great is if

640
00:37:50,600 --> 00:37:55,319
Speaker 1: we could sit down and you know, make our statements

641
00:37:55,560 --> 00:37:58,399
Speaker 1: shout everything in all caps on X or blue sky,

642
00:37:58,719 --> 00:38:02,440
Speaker 1: and everyone sees the logic and says, oh, okay, we agree,

643
00:38:02,719 --> 00:38:04,360
Speaker 1: and and the whole world would come to agreement, but

644
00:38:04,400 --> 00:38:06,920
Speaker 1: that that will never happen. And and I've just been

645
00:38:06,920 --> 00:38:13,080
Speaker 1: curious about why why beliefs are so different in different

646
00:38:13,080 --> 00:38:15,160
Speaker 1: heads and often so intractable.

647
00:38:15,280 --> 00:38:18,200
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, people have I mean, obviously the people are

648
00:38:18,320 --> 00:38:23,000
Speaker 2: driven by more than just a desire to not be

649
00:38:23,080 --> 00:38:25,560
Speaker 2: wrong right, or to have or to to have their

650
00:38:26,239 --> 00:38:32,680
Speaker 2: their representations of the world be accurate in the abstract.

651
00:38:32,719 --> 00:38:34,680
Speaker 2: I mean, people are incentivized by the things. You know.

652
00:38:34,719 --> 00:38:37,520
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, there's the the famous line that

653
00:38:37,640 --> 00:38:40,040
Speaker 2: now I've actually forgotten how it goes, but something you know,

654
00:38:40,080 --> 00:38:42,440
Speaker 2: it's hard to convince a man of of something that

655
00:38:42,719 --> 00:38:45,080
Speaker 2: one of his occupation requires that he not be convinced

656
00:38:45,080 --> 00:38:46,440
Speaker 2: of it, or something like that, right, you know. So

657
00:38:46,440 --> 00:38:48,560
Speaker 2: it's like it's like, yes, if you're if you stand

658
00:38:48,560 --> 00:38:50,560
Speaker 2: to lose a lot of money if a certain a

659
00:38:50,560 --> 00:38:53,080
Speaker 2: certain state of the world is so, you're going to

660
00:38:53,160 --> 00:38:55,239
Speaker 2: tend to avert your eyes from that for as long

661
00:38:55,239 --> 00:38:57,600
Speaker 2: as possible, because you're I mean, this is just the

662
00:38:58,160 --> 00:39:01,080
Speaker 2: the classic problem of and says I mean just it's

663
00:39:01,120 --> 00:39:01,960
Speaker 2: a perverse incentive.

664
00:39:02,040 --> 00:39:02,160
Speaker 3: Right.

665
00:39:02,239 --> 00:39:05,960
Speaker 2: So in science we have worked this out to a

666
00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:08,400
Speaker 2: remarkable degree. I mean, the thing that distinguishes the culture

667
00:39:08,400 --> 00:39:11,960
Speaker 2: of science. It's not perfect, but what distinguishes science from

668
00:39:11,960 --> 00:39:16,160
Speaker 2: basically everything else human beings do is that we have

669
00:39:16,239 --> 00:39:22,920
Speaker 2: created a culture where there's a competitive apparatus that is

670
00:39:23,760 --> 00:39:26,440
Speaker 2: error correcting by its very nature, right, Like where you know,

671
00:39:26,200 --> 00:39:30,759
Speaker 2: we could both be in neuroscience and have rival theses

672
00:39:31,400 --> 00:39:34,120
Speaker 2: and we're trying to you know, could falsify each other's

673
00:39:34,160 --> 00:39:38,560
Speaker 2: claims or at least pressure tests them. And science is

674
00:39:38,600 --> 00:39:41,680
Speaker 2: the only part of culture where you can actually win

675
00:39:41,840 --> 00:39:44,920
Speaker 2: points for proving yourself wrong, right, I mean, just, I

676
00:39:44,920 --> 00:39:46,920
Speaker 2: mean it doesn't happen as much as we would want

677
00:39:46,960 --> 00:39:51,279
Speaker 2: it to, but it is. It really is a kind

678
00:39:51,280 --> 00:39:55,120
Speaker 2: of a gold standard moment of scientific communication for somebody

679
00:39:55,200 --> 00:39:58,759
Speaker 2: who has had a cherished thesis for you know, decades,

680
00:39:58,880 --> 00:40:02,400
Speaker 2: to admit he or she was wrong about basically everything

681
00:40:02,960 --> 00:40:07,000
Speaker 2: in public and to thank the person who did the

682
00:40:07,040 --> 00:40:09,120
Speaker 2: work that showed that he or.

683
00:40:09,040 --> 00:40:09,600
Speaker 3: She was wrong.

684
00:40:09,680 --> 00:40:13,120
Speaker 2: Right, I mean that you know, people people have you know, again,

685
00:40:13,200 --> 00:40:15,040
Speaker 2: it probably doesn't happen in real time as much as

686
00:40:15,040 --> 00:40:16,960
Speaker 2: we would want, but it certainly happens. And it is

687
00:40:17,320 --> 00:40:21,080
Speaker 2: it really is the quintessence of the scientific enterprise, right

688
00:40:21,840 --> 00:40:24,960
Speaker 2: and and and what what is not the quintessence is

689
00:40:25,000 --> 00:40:30,960
Speaker 2: to see some scientist who is just clearly emotionally attached

690
00:40:31,480 --> 00:40:34,360
Speaker 2: to all of the sunk costs of his work, you know,

691
00:40:34,400 --> 00:40:36,960
Speaker 2: his work and his reputation, and he's been known for

692
00:40:37,000 --> 00:40:40,480
Speaker 2: this thing and this now, this battered thesis, is losing

693
00:40:40,480 --> 00:40:45,000
Speaker 2: his credibility among the next generation of scientists. And this yet,

694
00:40:45,080 --> 00:40:48,920
Speaker 2: this old warhorse, is holding on to this doomed project

695
00:40:49,360 --> 00:40:52,799
Speaker 2: despite the fact that there's a now mountain of good

696
00:40:52,880 --> 00:40:56,240
Speaker 2: argument and good evidence piling up against him. At that moment,

697
00:40:56,400 --> 00:41:00,640
Speaker 2: it's actually right, you know, it begins to seem more

698
00:41:00,680 --> 00:41:03,799
Speaker 2: correct to say that what he's doing is it's not

699
00:41:03,880 --> 00:41:06,480
Speaker 2: like an alternative version of science. It's like it's like

700
00:41:06,520 --> 00:41:09,200
Speaker 2: no longer science, right, Like you're you're failing these these

701
00:41:09,239 --> 00:41:13,080
Speaker 2: obvious tests of credibility and the obstacle course has become

702
00:41:13,239 --> 00:41:16,080
Speaker 2: too complicated for you emotionally for some reason, and you're

703
00:41:16,120 --> 00:41:17,200
Speaker 2: no longer navigating it.

704
00:41:17,400 --> 00:41:31,760
Speaker 4: Yeah.

705
00:41:32,120 --> 00:41:34,920
Speaker 1: So okay, So this brings up something about science that

706
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:37,440
Speaker 1: I flagged earlier that I wanted to come back to

707
00:41:37,600 --> 00:41:41,680
Speaker 1: which is so when I read these original your papers

708
00:41:41,719 --> 00:41:44,759
Speaker 1: from two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine. Right,

709
00:41:44,840 --> 00:41:48,000
Speaker 1: So there's there's a belief that you think is true,

710
00:41:48,040 --> 00:41:51,000
Speaker 1: belief that is false, and then the uncertain ones that

711
00:41:51,040 --> 00:41:53,680
Speaker 1: you just don't know about. But what's so interesting to me?

712
00:41:54,200 --> 00:41:59,080
Speaker 1: As we know in science there's instead a waiting or

713
00:41:59,120 --> 00:42:02,120
Speaker 1: a probability that we put on different sorts of beliefs,

714
00:42:02,280 --> 00:42:04,960
Speaker 1: and even our most cherished beliefs. We never use the

715
00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:07,719
Speaker 1: word truth in science. We say, Okay, the way to

716
00:42:07,760 --> 00:42:11,000
Speaker 1: the evidence supports this, and if in a few years

717
00:42:11,040 --> 00:42:13,200
Speaker 1: the way that the evidence might support something else, fine

718
00:42:13,280 --> 00:42:16,120
Speaker 1: we go with that. And so I'm curious how you

719
00:42:16,160 --> 00:42:18,080
Speaker 1: would I know this wasn't part of the study, but

720
00:42:18,120 --> 00:42:21,480
Speaker 1: how you might think about beliefs of this sort, which

721
00:42:21,560 --> 00:42:24,959
Speaker 1: is the type that we hold in science of saying okay, well,

722
00:42:25,400 --> 00:42:27,840
Speaker 1: there's mountain of evidence here. Some of it points the

723
00:42:27,840 --> 00:42:29,719
Speaker 1: other way, someone points off this way, but most of

724
00:42:29,760 --> 00:42:30,680
Speaker 1: it is pointing over here.

725
00:42:31,280 --> 00:42:31,440
Speaker 3: Yeah.

726
00:42:31,440 --> 00:42:34,040
Speaker 2: Well, I do think that virtually all of our beliefs

727
00:42:34,040 --> 00:42:37,600
Speaker 2: are probabilistic. I mean, certainly in science explicitly so, I

728
00:42:37,600 --> 00:42:40,240
Speaker 2: mean we have been we have been beaten into shape

729
00:42:40,239 --> 00:42:43,319
Speaker 2: on that on that point, then again by largely by

730
00:42:43,320 --> 00:42:47,000
Speaker 2: Popper but by others where we just know we know

731
00:42:47,160 --> 00:42:49,719
Speaker 2: enough now to not say that's you know, we're one

732
00:42:49,800 --> 00:42:52,319
Speaker 2: hundred percent certain something, and so it's just the way

733
00:42:52,360 --> 00:42:54,440
Speaker 2: of the evidence, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, just in

734
00:42:54,800 --> 00:42:59,160
Speaker 2: very simple terms. And you could imagine being absolutely certain,

735
00:42:59,320 --> 00:43:02,360
Speaker 2: based on your or understanding of mathematics, that every triangle

736
00:43:02,400 --> 00:43:03,600
Speaker 2: has one hundred and eighty degrees.

737
00:43:04,400 --> 00:43:04,680
Speaker 1: Uh.

738
00:43:04,719 --> 00:43:07,760
Speaker 2: And I'd say, well, you know you're you're certain certain

739
00:43:07,800 --> 00:43:10,399
Speaker 2: and yes, absolutely certain. Would you be willing to bet

740
00:43:10,400 --> 00:43:13,239
Speaker 2: your life that it's so? And you might balk a

741
00:43:13,239 --> 00:43:15,880
Speaker 2: little bit and say, yeah, yeah, i'd be. If i'd

742
00:43:15,880 --> 00:43:17,759
Speaker 2: better on anything, I'd better on that. Well, it's it's

743
00:43:17,800 --> 00:43:19,560
Speaker 2: sort of like two plus to equals four for me.

744
00:43:20,040 --> 00:43:23,880
Speaker 2: But then someone introduces to you a concept of you know,

745
00:43:23,960 --> 00:43:28,640
Speaker 2: non look Euclidean geometry that you didn't know before, right,

746
00:43:28,680 --> 00:43:30,719
Speaker 2: So like you've just what you had in mind was

747
00:43:31,000 --> 00:43:32,520
Speaker 2: a triangle on a flat surface.

748
00:43:32,920 --> 00:43:34,640
Speaker 3: But now the basketball.

749
00:43:34,719 --> 00:43:37,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, but now someone like Remond comes along and says, yeah,

750
00:43:37,760 --> 00:43:40,280
Speaker 2: just visualize this. We're now going to curve the space.

751
00:43:40,680 --> 00:43:43,640
Speaker 2: What's happening to that triangle on the basketball doesn't look

752
00:43:43,680 --> 00:43:44,920
Speaker 2: like a little bit, a little more, a little less one

753
00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:51,000
Speaker 2: hundred degrees. All of a sudden, your intuitions get knocked around,

754
00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:54,480
Speaker 2: And if you're rational, you are now going to update

755
00:43:54,520 --> 00:43:58,200
Speaker 2: your file about triangles, right, and so if if a

756
00:43:58,320 --> 00:44:01,759
Speaker 2: core belief about something that's simple as a triangle can

757
00:44:01,800 --> 00:44:04,719
Speaker 2: be overturned, But you just had a further utterance from

758
00:44:04,800 --> 00:44:06,480
Speaker 2: you know, somebody who knows more about math and you,

759
00:44:07,320 --> 00:44:10,520
Speaker 2: what is truly off the table for revision is probably

760
00:44:10,520 --> 00:44:11,080
Speaker 2: not much.

761
00:44:12,640 --> 00:44:13,600
Speaker 3: I wish that were true.

762
00:44:13,600 --> 00:44:15,960
Speaker 1: I think I may be more pessimistic than you on

763
00:44:16,040 --> 00:44:19,600
Speaker 1: this point, which is, you might easily convince me about

764
00:44:19,680 --> 00:44:23,239
Speaker 1: a triangle, But core beliefs that I might have on

765
00:44:23,320 --> 00:44:29,160
Speaker 1: any hot button political issue, those are tougher. I'm using myself.

766
00:44:29,520 --> 00:44:33,239
Speaker 3: Can give me an example, Oh, whatever.

767
00:44:33,000 --> 00:44:36,000
Speaker 1: Your views are on abortion or gun control or whatever,

768
00:44:38,960 --> 00:44:42,120
Speaker 1: those are resistant to change because it's not as simple

769
00:44:42,120 --> 00:44:45,440
Speaker 1: as a logical thing of Oh, I see the triangle

770
00:44:45,440 --> 00:44:48,720
Speaker 1: on the basketball. Got it, I've now changed my model.

771
00:44:49,480 --> 00:44:53,680
Speaker 2: But I'm sure certainly in both of those cases there

772
00:44:53,760 --> 00:44:58,040
Speaker 2: is much more information that could be forthcoming on either

773
00:44:58,080 --> 00:45:03,440
Speaker 2: topic that could push someone's because because people's intuitions, especially

774
00:45:03,520 --> 00:45:07,560
Speaker 2: on those two topics tend to be anchored to like

775
00:45:07,840 --> 00:45:10,319
Speaker 2: some meme that got in their head, you know, very

776
00:45:10,440 --> 00:45:13,560
Speaker 2: likely early in life, that doesn't actually have a lot

777
00:45:13,600 --> 00:45:15,799
Speaker 2: of content to it. So it's like the claim that

778
00:45:15,840 --> 00:45:19,160
Speaker 2: abortion is wrong. That that that, you know, I'll drill

779
00:45:19,200 --> 00:45:21,160
Speaker 2: down on that a little bit. It felt it's likely

780
00:45:21,200 --> 00:45:25,439
Speaker 2: backed up by utterances like life starts at the moment

781
00:45:25,480 --> 00:45:25,920
Speaker 2: of conception.

782
00:45:26,719 --> 00:45:28,040
Speaker 3: Right. That's like if you.

783
00:45:28,440 --> 00:45:32,240
Speaker 2: If you're if you're a you know, a religious believer

784
00:45:32,239 --> 00:45:35,000
Speaker 2: who believes abortion is wrong, Well, that's it's just that's

785
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:37,640
Speaker 2: not true. If you're if you're a Muslim, that's just

786
00:45:37,680 --> 00:45:41,000
Speaker 2: not true. You know, in the Muslim faith, I believe

787
00:45:43,360 --> 00:45:47,120
Speaker 2: the soul is thought enter the zygote. I think around

788
00:45:47,200 --> 00:45:50,040
Speaker 2: day eighty. It's either day eighty, day one, twenty something

789
00:45:50,120 --> 00:45:53,600
Speaker 2: like that. So but definitely not at the moment of conception.

790
00:45:53,760 --> 00:45:53,920
Speaker 3: Right.

791
00:45:53,960 --> 00:45:57,400
Speaker 2: So, Okay, perhaps you're a Muslim who just didn't know

792
00:45:57,440 --> 00:45:59,160
Speaker 2: that that was the doctrine, right, so someone told you

793
00:45:59,239 --> 00:46:01,960
Speaker 2: life was started the conception. But then but then they

794
00:46:02,040 --> 00:46:04,520
Speaker 2: actually check that the Holy Books and and and it

795
00:46:04,600 --> 00:46:06,960
Speaker 2: turns out you're wrong. Okay, that's kind of like triangles

796
00:46:07,000 --> 00:46:09,200
Speaker 2: all of a sudden. So it is with gun control.

797
00:46:09,239 --> 00:46:11,680
Speaker 2: I mean, people just don't know a lot about guns.

798
00:46:11,680 --> 00:46:13,640
Speaker 2: They don't know a lot about the actual statistics of

799
00:46:13,840 --> 00:46:15,640
Speaker 2: human violence, and they don't know how many people get

800
00:46:15,640 --> 00:46:17,719
Speaker 2: shot and how they get shot and why, and they

801
00:46:17,880 --> 00:46:23,080
Speaker 2: just they tend to have they just I mean, it's

802
00:46:23,120 --> 00:46:25,640
Speaker 2: just there's just a it's a thicket of ignorance and

803
00:46:25,680 --> 00:46:27,920
Speaker 2: assumption on on lots of these topics.

804
00:46:28,040 --> 00:46:29,359
Speaker 3: And and I'm not.

805
00:46:29,280 --> 00:46:31,560
Speaker 1: Sure I agree with this in the following sense, just

806
00:46:31,600 --> 00:46:36,000
Speaker 1: because I've I've known very closely family members and friends

807
00:46:36,080 --> 00:46:39,480
Speaker 1: on very different sides of this issue who are extraordinarily

808
00:46:39,520 --> 00:46:45,680
Speaker 1: knowledgeable and bring up an infinite encyclopedia of statistics about

809
00:46:45,719 --> 00:46:49,560
Speaker 1: these issues. But they're on opposite sides, right, So so ignorance,

810
00:46:49,960 --> 00:46:52,200
Speaker 1: isn't I think a way that we can explain away

811
00:46:52,880 --> 00:46:54,440
Speaker 1: some people's positions on this.

812
00:46:55,840 --> 00:46:59,919
Speaker 2: Well, I'll grant you that it is possible for two

813
00:47:00,080 --> 00:47:03,279
Speaker 2: people to have more or less the same set of

814
00:47:03,360 --> 00:47:06,400
Speaker 2: facts and to feel very differently about them. And then

815
00:47:06,480 --> 00:47:09,040
Speaker 2: the question is what explains that?

816
00:47:09,239 --> 00:47:12,279
Speaker 3: Right? So what else? What else do they believe? Right?

817
00:47:12,320 --> 00:47:14,960
Speaker 1: What's about their internal model in this world and their

818
00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:18,840
Speaker 1: expectations about the future and the government of the future,

819
00:47:18,920 --> 00:47:21,279
Speaker 1: and the crime of the future and so on that

820
00:47:21,400 --> 00:47:24,200
Speaker 1: makes them feel that, hey, I don't need a gun

821
00:47:24,239 --> 00:47:25,400
Speaker 1: to a house. I do need to gun to a

822
00:47:25,400 --> 00:47:26,080
Speaker 1: house whatever it is.

823
00:47:26,160 --> 00:47:29,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in that case, I would say they're waiting

824
00:47:29,640 --> 00:47:34,080
Speaker 2: different probabilities. I mean, so, it's almost never the case,

825
00:47:34,360 --> 00:47:37,239
Speaker 2: especially for that debate. It's almost never the case that

826
00:47:37,239 --> 00:47:40,400
Speaker 2: you're talking about two people who are in touch with

827
00:47:40,440 --> 00:47:42,239
Speaker 2: the same set of facts, because it's just, you know,

828
00:47:42,320 --> 00:47:45,200
Speaker 2: the people who are deep into gun culture, who are

829
00:47:45,239 --> 00:47:47,680
Speaker 2: it's all about the Second Amendment, and they're happy, they

830
00:47:47,719 --> 00:47:51,080
Speaker 2: love shooting guns, they have guns, they're comfortable around guns,

831
00:47:51,480 --> 00:47:54,879
Speaker 2: they know they can store them safely, say, and they

832
00:47:54,920 --> 00:47:59,160
Speaker 2: have a very They've spent ten thousand hours rehearsing scenarios

833
00:47:59,200 --> 00:48:01,160
Speaker 2: where they would have to defend their lives or the

834
00:48:01,200 --> 00:48:04,680
Speaker 2: lives of their loved ones against some malicious intruder. And

835
00:48:04,719 --> 00:48:08,120
Speaker 2: that's there, you know, that's become, you know, a deep

836
00:48:08,120 --> 00:48:12,319
Speaker 2: part of their identity. Even that person is dealing with

837
00:48:12,360 --> 00:48:14,359
Speaker 2: a very different set of facts. And the person who

838
00:48:15,040 --> 00:48:18,080
Speaker 2: has no experience with guns, doesn't want any experience with guns,

839
00:48:18,080 --> 00:48:21,160
Speaker 2: hates guns, thinks they're dangerous, thinks that it's just appalling

840
00:48:21,200 --> 00:48:22,799
Speaker 2: that we live in a society that has so many

841
00:48:22,840 --> 00:48:26,080
Speaker 2: guns and we've got this absurd level of gun violence

842
00:48:26,440 --> 00:48:29,680
Speaker 2: that's unrecorded, that that makes us an outlier of an

843
00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:32,440
Speaker 2: outlier in you know, other in the developed world than

844
00:48:32,520 --> 00:48:34,480
Speaker 2: just to kind of it just just we're just as

845
00:48:34,480 --> 00:48:35,480
Speaker 2: a horror show.

846
00:48:36,120 --> 00:48:36,880
Speaker 3: How did we get here?

847
00:48:36,920 --> 00:48:39,719
Speaker 2: It's it's like just pure masochism that we were living

848
00:48:39,760 --> 00:48:42,200
Speaker 2: with this, you know, the religion of the Second Amendment. Right,

849
00:48:42,239 --> 00:48:45,440
Speaker 2: So those two the people, no matter how well informed

850
00:48:45,480 --> 00:48:49,160
Speaker 2: each representative of those two camps thinks they are, I

851
00:48:49,200 --> 00:48:52,200
Speaker 2: guarantee you that in almost every case, they have very

852
00:48:52,200 --> 00:48:54,560
Speaker 2: different beliefs about what is actually true in the world

853
00:48:54,600 --> 00:48:55,400
Speaker 2: with respect.

854
00:48:55,120 --> 00:48:56,480
Speaker 3: To the races of violence.

855
00:48:56,520 --> 00:48:58,399
Speaker 1: It might both be holding on to facts, though they're

856
00:48:58,440 --> 00:49:02,520
Speaker 1: paying attention to different facts. So the gun owner is

857
00:49:02,560 --> 00:49:05,560
Speaker 1: paying attention to things like tyrannies of governments and what

858
00:49:05,600 --> 00:49:08,239
Speaker 1: happens when governments take guns away from the citizens and

859
00:49:08,239 --> 00:49:10,279
Speaker 1: so on. Those are the kind of facts they draw up.

860
00:49:10,640 --> 00:49:14,240
Speaker 1: The gun non owner is drawing up facts about crime

861
00:49:15,080 --> 00:49:18,000
Speaker 1: and how many accidents happen in households with guns and

862
00:49:18,040 --> 00:49:18,359
Speaker 1: so on.

863
00:49:18,680 --> 00:49:21,600
Speaker 2: But they might have those facts wrong. So like the

864
00:49:21,640 --> 00:49:24,400
Speaker 2: non gun owner will believe that it's almost never the

865
00:49:24,400 --> 00:49:27,000
Speaker 2: case that someone successfully defends himself with a gun or

866
00:49:27,239 --> 00:49:29,160
Speaker 2: defends his family with a gun. That just doesn't happen.

867
00:49:29,200 --> 00:49:33,400
Speaker 2: That's just NRA propaganda. What really happens is kids accidentally

868
00:49:33,440 --> 00:49:35,560
Speaker 2: get a hold of their parents' guns and get shot

869
00:49:35,600 --> 00:49:38,319
Speaker 2: and shoot themselves or shoot someone else, and it's a tragedy, right.

870
00:49:39,560 --> 00:49:41,200
Speaker 3: And the statistics.

871
00:49:40,560 --> 00:49:44,360
Speaker 2: Around gun violence are highly politicized, and it's very hard

872
00:49:44,560 --> 00:49:47,040
Speaker 2: in fact to go in with an open mind and

873
00:49:47,080 --> 00:49:50,000
Speaker 2: figure out what is actually just real, you know, empirically,

874
00:49:51,080 --> 00:49:54,840
Speaker 2: because it's been so polarized. But even if we create

875
00:49:55,200 --> 00:49:58,439
Speaker 2: the perfect case where they really do have the same

876
00:49:58,480 --> 00:50:02,359
Speaker 2: sets of facts, uh with respect to what is being

877
00:50:02,400 --> 00:50:08,320
Speaker 2: talked about, there are other facts and other propositional attitudes

878
00:50:08,440 --> 00:50:12,120
Speaker 2: beliefs that are covertly working to change the sort of

879
00:50:12,200 --> 00:50:14,239
Speaker 2: the waitings that they're giving to all of these facts.

880
00:50:14,280 --> 00:50:17,400
Speaker 2: So like there are people who are just for whom

881
00:50:18,160 --> 00:50:23,680
Speaker 2: the prospect of being finding themselves helpless to defend themselves

882
00:50:23,800 --> 00:50:27,760
Speaker 2: or their their loved ones from evil. That is the

883
00:50:27,840 --> 00:50:30,560
Speaker 2: that is an outcome that is so bad, I mean,

884
00:50:30,600 --> 00:50:33,680
Speaker 2: the utility function that the that is that is so

885
00:50:33,800 --> 00:50:35,480
Speaker 2: much worse than all the other bad things that could

886
00:50:35,480 --> 00:50:39,880
Speaker 2: happen in life that whatever low probability you put on it,

887
00:50:40,320 --> 00:50:42,040
Speaker 2: like the probability Let's say we could agree about the

888
00:50:42,040 --> 00:50:44,560
Speaker 2: probability of a home home invasion, you know, where the

889
00:50:44,560 --> 00:50:46,719
Speaker 2: person has come to murder you and your family, Right,

890
00:50:46,760 --> 00:50:51,440
Speaker 2: whatever that probability is. If I wait that as worse

891
00:50:51,640 --> 00:50:56,320
Speaker 2: than everyone dying in a fire, and and and a

892
00:50:56,480 --> 00:50:58,880
Speaker 2: hundred other things that you think are probably worse than

893
00:50:58,920 --> 00:51:01,839
Speaker 2: than than a home invasion, then we just have we

894
00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:05,160
Speaker 2: just have different utility functions. Yeah, right, And that's and

895
00:51:05,280 --> 00:51:07,800
Speaker 2: that is often at play. I mean, that's where emotion

896
00:51:08,520 --> 00:51:11,480
Speaker 2: comes into it. Where you see people get really you know,

897
00:51:11,520 --> 00:51:16,120
Speaker 2: we seem like we're just having a conversation about facts,

898
00:51:16,200 --> 00:51:21,200
Speaker 2: but you see people, even granting the same sets of facts,

899
00:51:21,840 --> 00:51:28,480
Speaker 2: become highly polarized and energized around the significance of those facts.

900
00:51:28,800 --> 00:51:32,080
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And this is why

901
00:51:32,120 --> 00:51:34,560
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm still trying to figure out how

902
00:51:34,600 --> 00:51:39,880
Speaker 1: to think about beliefs because so much of our positioning

903
00:51:39,960 --> 00:51:43,120
Speaker 1: on everything has to do with these other issues. And

904
00:51:43,520 --> 00:51:47,080
Speaker 1: I've I mean, I watched this all through the last

905
00:51:47,080 --> 00:51:50,960
Speaker 1: decade where people will end up switching political allegiances not

906
00:51:51,200 --> 00:51:53,799
Speaker 1: because they like the fact, so much of the other

907
00:51:54,120 --> 00:51:58,680
Speaker 1: side it's because something discuss disgusts them about their own side,

908
00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:01,440
Speaker 1: something gets said to them, or someone accuses them of

909
00:52:01,480 --> 00:52:03,960
Speaker 1: something and they get so mad about it, and that's

910
00:52:04,000 --> 00:52:04,959
Speaker 1: what drives them.

911
00:52:05,920 --> 00:52:06,120
Speaker 4: Well.

912
00:52:06,160 --> 00:52:10,400
Speaker 2: But politics, I mean, one thing that's so frustrating about

913
00:52:10,440 --> 00:52:14,440
Speaker 2: politics is that it should be the space in which

914
00:52:14,480 --> 00:52:22,960
Speaker 2: we we rationally operate so as to cooperatively produce outcomes

915
00:52:23,000 --> 00:52:24,880
Speaker 2: that that you know, improve our lives.

916
00:52:24,960 --> 00:52:27,279
Speaker 3: Right. So it's like we politics really is.

917
00:52:28,400 --> 00:52:32,480
Speaker 2: An art of cooperation and yet and to do that, well,

918
00:52:33,520 --> 00:52:36,560
Speaker 2: we really have to be mean, you know, reason has

919
00:52:36,600 --> 00:52:41,160
Speaker 2: to be the master value, and what's true, what's plausible?

920
00:52:41,920 --> 00:52:42,320
Speaker 3: Uh?

921
00:52:42,400 --> 00:52:45,200
Speaker 2: And then the ethics. You know, you can't keep ethics

922
00:52:45,200 --> 00:52:46,520
Speaker 2: out of it. I mean, there are questions of what's

923
00:52:46,520 --> 00:52:50,120
Speaker 2: fair and what's et cetera, what is what is good?

924
00:52:50,640 --> 00:52:54,520
Speaker 2: What should we value? But so much of it is

925
00:52:55,200 --> 00:52:59,120
Speaker 2: pure tribalism, right, And it's pure in group signaling and

926
00:52:59,280 --> 00:53:03,400
Speaker 2: outgroup disparagement, and it's and and there when that is

927
00:53:03,440 --> 00:53:08,520
Speaker 2: the becoming the master value, it's just it's just not

928
00:53:08,719 --> 00:53:12,560
Speaker 2: about honestly talking about the world at all. Right, You

929
00:53:12,680 --> 00:53:14,600
Speaker 2: just like, like, I mean, in so far as you're

930
00:53:14,640 --> 00:53:17,560
Speaker 2: trading and claims about you know, the purport to be

931
00:53:17,640 --> 00:53:22,280
Speaker 2: fact based, it's still what you're really doing is it's

932
00:53:22,320 --> 00:53:24,160
Speaker 2: a team sport and you're trying to figure out how

933
00:53:24,160 --> 00:53:26,000
Speaker 2: to win, Right, You're just trying to So if you're

934
00:53:26,000 --> 00:53:31,520
Speaker 2: saying negative things about the opposition, you begin to not

935
00:53:31,680 --> 00:53:35,359
Speaker 2: care whether they're even true. Let's just see what can stick, Right,

936
00:53:35,640 --> 00:53:38,480
Speaker 2: this guy's a you know, this guy's a child molester. Well,

937
00:53:38,600 --> 00:53:41,000
Speaker 2: what's your evidence for that? I you know, I don't know.

938
00:53:41,040 --> 00:53:44,520
Speaker 2: I saw something somewhere on social media. But you know,

939
00:53:44,600 --> 00:53:46,879
Speaker 2: like if I keep repeating it, you know, enough people

940
00:53:46,880 --> 00:53:48,400
Speaker 2: are going to think he's a child molester that it

941
00:53:48,440 --> 00:53:50,759
Speaker 2: could harmless chances come election time.

942
00:53:50,840 --> 00:53:50,960
Speaker 3: Right.

943
00:53:51,000 --> 00:53:53,520
Speaker 2: So it's like that's the game, and it's awful. Right,

944
00:53:53,560 --> 00:53:59,000
Speaker 2: It's just so degrading in principle because it's leveraging the

945
00:53:59,040 --> 00:54:04,000
Speaker 2: most anti social emotions. Mostly it's leveraging fear and outrage.

946
00:54:04,000 --> 00:54:07,880
Speaker 2: I mean, I get irrational fear and outrage and false

947
00:54:07,920 --> 00:54:10,560
Speaker 2: certainty or the pretense of certainty where you actually have

948
00:54:10,600 --> 00:54:12,200
Speaker 2: no rational basis for certainty.

949
00:54:12,400 --> 00:54:14,560
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in fact, this reminds me I want to

950
00:54:14,560 --> 00:54:17,520
Speaker 1: come back to something at the very beginning about a

951
00:54:18,040 --> 00:54:22,040
Speaker 1: belief that one might think is false. You found that

952
00:54:22,040 --> 00:54:25,680
Speaker 1: that activates the anterior insula, presumably a sense of disgust

953
00:54:25,719 --> 00:54:30,279
Speaker 1: about that. I wonder the degree to which this might

954
00:54:30,360 --> 00:54:34,840
Speaker 1: differ based on different false information, some false information. For example,

955
00:54:34,880 --> 00:54:41,279
Speaker 1: you see something online clearly misinformation, disinformation, and one might

956
00:54:41,360 --> 00:54:46,000
Speaker 1: think this is really a concern for my side of

957
00:54:46,040 --> 00:54:49,040
Speaker 1: the political argument, or for my you know, ethnic group,

958
00:54:49,160 --> 00:54:53,920
Speaker 1: or for my anything this kind of misinformation. I'm simulating

959
00:54:53,920 --> 00:54:57,239
Speaker 1: the future. What if everyone believed this piece of misinformation

960
00:54:57,600 --> 00:55:02,840
Speaker 1: that's really disastrous? And so I wonder if some sorts

961
00:55:02,880 --> 00:55:07,359
Speaker 1: of misinform, let's say, false beliefs, our reaction to them

962
00:55:07,440 --> 00:55:10,360
Speaker 1: isn't simply discussed, isn't simply ah, okay, I've categorized that

963
00:55:10,400 --> 00:55:13,120
Speaker 1: as false, but instead it's hey, I've categorized this as

964
00:55:13,120 --> 00:55:15,160
Speaker 1: something that's really a concern for me.

965
00:55:15,960 --> 00:55:16,200
Speaker 3: Yeah.

966
00:55:16,239 --> 00:55:19,879
Speaker 2: Well, it's very easy to say. Again, this comes back

967
00:55:19,920 --> 00:55:23,560
Speaker 2: to the power of ideas, when you're thinking of just

968
00:55:23,960 --> 00:55:28,359
Speaker 2: how what is what could the effect be of a

969
00:55:28,400 --> 00:55:32,360
Speaker 2: single sentence? You know, in any language, the sky really

970
00:55:32,440 --> 00:55:34,160
Speaker 2: is the limit. If the front page of the New

971
00:55:34,239 --> 00:55:38,680
Speaker 2: York Times reads that nuclear war has started in thirty minutes,

972
00:55:38,680 --> 00:55:41,480
Speaker 2: it's going to get to you. Right, that's everything, right,

973
00:55:41,520 --> 00:55:45,400
Speaker 2: This is like, I mean, we're just decoding words in

974
00:55:45,440 --> 00:55:48,960
Speaker 2: this case on a website, and yet unless we can

975
00:55:49,000 --> 00:55:52,160
Speaker 2: figure out some reason not to grant them credence, right,

976
00:55:52,160 --> 00:55:53,720
Speaker 2: it's like, okay, wait a minute, this has been hacked,

977
00:55:54,360 --> 00:55:56,920
Speaker 2: is it? You know, is it April Fool's Day? There's

978
00:55:56,920 --> 00:55:58,960
Speaker 2: something wrong with my computers? Like this is really the

979
00:55:58,960 --> 00:56:01,439
Speaker 2: New York Times? Is that really the website? Now with AI,

980
00:56:01,600 --> 00:56:03,840
Speaker 2: were on the cusp of having to declare, you know,

981
00:56:03,960 --> 00:56:07,360
Speaker 2: epistemological bankruptcy with respect on the internet because any video

982
00:56:07,560 --> 00:56:11,000
Speaker 2: can now you know, virtually be faked. Right. So even

983
00:56:11,040 --> 00:56:13,040
Speaker 2: now if we saw, you know, a video of Vladimir

984
00:56:13,080 --> 00:56:15,880
Speaker 2: Putin saying I've just launched you know, our full arsenal

985
00:56:15,960 --> 00:56:18,480
Speaker 2: the evil Empire of the United States. It'll be there

986
00:56:18,480 --> 00:56:20,960
Speaker 2: in twenty four minutes. If we saw that and it

987
00:56:21,000 --> 00:56:24,680
Speaker 2: was translated perfect Russian, and you saw you know, Gary

988
00:56:24,760 --> 00:56:27,319
Speaker 2: Kasparov saying yeah, that's that's really Putin and that's really

989
00:56:27,360 --> 00:56:29,680
Speaker 2: Russian and that's really what he said, and it's now

990
00:56:29,680 --> 00:56:31,640
Speaker 2: on the New York Times website. Now you're thinking, wait

991
00:56:31,680 --> 00:56:34,640
Speaker 2: a minute, that does the New York Times have sufficient

992
00:56:34,840 --> 00:56:38,040
Speaker 2: technology to detect deep fakes? Do I really have to

993
00:56:38,080 --> 00:56:43,880
Speaker 2: believe this? But once you can't grab a handhold to

994
00:56:43,920 --> 00:56:51,520
Speaker 2: resist this slide into just helplessly imbibing the propositional import

995
00:56:51,600 --> 00:56:56,680
Speaker 2: of those words. Right World War three, you're emotionally and

996
00:56:56,719 --> 00:57:02,160
Speaker 2: behaviorally completely exposed to the implication of that claim.

997
00:57:02,280 --> 00:57:02,960
Speaker 3: Oh that's interesting.

998
00:57:03,040 --> 00:57:05,360
Speaker 1: You're exposed to it, or you've put up walls against

999
00:57:05,440 --> 00:57:06,040
Speaker 1: it as well.

1000
00:57:06,640 --> 00:57:08,560
Speaker 2: The way to put up walls against it is to

1001
00:57:08,600 --> 00:57:11,400
Speaker 2: find I mean that there are other If it's big enough,

1002
00:57:12,200 --> 00:57:14,839
Speaker 2: you know, it becomes irresistible. But I mean you can

1003
00:57:14,880 --> 00:57:18,360
Speaker 2: there are many ways to put up walls against beliefs

1004
00:57:18,360 --> 00:57:20,240
Speaker 2: we don't like the taste of, right like, we can

1005
00:57:20,280 --> 00:57:23,080
Speaker 2: ignore them, we can move on, we can distract ourselves.

1006
00:57:23,480 --> 00:57:25,200
Speaker 2: You know, this is this is kind of the purview

1007
00:57:25,280 --> 00:57:28,240
Speaker 2: of what we think about is self deception, right Like,

1008
00:57:28,280 --> 00:57:29,960
Speaker 2: how is it? How did how did the guy not

1009
00:57:30,120 --> 00:57:31,680
Speaker 2: know his wife was cheating on him? I mean there

1010
00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:33,240
Speaker 2: were these signs and he sort of I mean he

1011
00:57:33,320 --> 00:57:36,080
Speaker 2: must have seen that thing or heard that thing, or

1012
00:57:36,400 --> 00:57:38,800
Speaker 2: if she did that and I saw that. So there's

1013
00:57:38,840 --> 00:57:41,600
Speaker 2: all these you can you can say that there's this

1014
00:57:41,680 --> 00:57:45,280
Speaker 2: sort of this this boundary even within within the precincts

1015
00:57:45,280 --> 00:57:49,960
Speaker 2: of one mind, where you can we might say there's

1016
00:57:50,000 --> 00:57:54,840
Speaker 2: a an avoidance of knowledge when the knowledge is really there.

1017
00:57:54,880 --> 00:57:58,800
Speaker 2: But no if so if if the whole world kind

1018
00:57:58,800 --> 00:58:02,960
Speaker 2: of sticks your face in a claim. Right again, it's

1019
00:58:03,000 --> 00:58:05,520
Speaker 2: on the internet. The Internet's on fire with this thing

1020
00:58:05,680 --> 00:58:10,200
Speaker 2: being news, and you have to figure out whether it's true. Again,

1021
00:58:10,240 --> 00:58:14,400
Speaker 2: it's really just a matter of words or images that

1022
00:58:14,440 --> 00:58:20,560
Speaker 2: purport to represent the world suddenly transforming your life. Right,

1023
00:58:20,600 --> 00:58:22,040
Speaker 2: and this is all of a sudden, This is like

1024
00:58:22,040 --> 00:58:24,840
Speaker 2: like literally a sentence could be spoken to both of

1025
00:58:24,920 --> 00:58:30,840
Speaker 2: us that was so incontrovertible given the framing around it,

1026
00:58:30,880 --> 00:58:33,320
Speaker 2: given the way we both know the world is given

1027
00:58:33,800 --> 00:58:36,919
Speaker 2: how much would have to have been faked in order

1028
00:58:36,960 --> 00:58:39,720
Speaker 2: for it to come that way to us from that source, right,

1029
00:58:40,080 --> 00:58:43,040
Speaker 2: and this goes to the role of authority and gatekeeping

1030
00:58:43,120 --> 00:58:47,040
Speaker 2: and right. So, but provided it comes you know, over

1031
00:58:47,080 --> 00:58:50,360
Speaker 2: the transom at just the right angle, you know, the

1032
00:58:51,200 --> 00:58:55,080
Speaker 2: distance between us in this moment, you're reasonably comfortable and

1033
00:58:56,200 --> 00:58:58,640
Speaker 2: without much of a care in the world, and absolute

1034
00:58:58,720 --> 00:59:02,280
Speaker 2: panic is just you know, it's not much longer than

1035
00:59:02,280 --> 00:59:04,240
Speaker 2: it took to decode the sentence in the first place.

1036
00:59:04,280 --> 00:59:07,640
Speaker 2: It's like, holy shit, right, I mean, it's rare that

1037
00:59:07,640 --> 00:59:12,160
Speaker 2: that the stakes are that high and the testimony is that,

1038
00:59:13,160 --> 00:59:16,840
Speaker 2: you know, unimpeachable and unequivocal and irresistible.

1039
00:59:16,920 --> 00:59:17,080
Speaker 3: Right.

1040
00:59:17,120 --> 00:59:20,320
Speaker 2: So it's where we're more often trading in the in

1041
00:59:20,360 --> 00:59:23,520
Speaker 2: the land of well, it doesn't matter that much whether

1042
00:59:23,520 --> 00:59:25,720
Speaker 2: it's true or false. You know, I'll take it on

1043
00:59:25,920 --> 00:59:28,160
Speaker 2: or not. I can act as if it's true, but

1044
00:59:28,200 --> 00:59:30,040
Speaker 2: if it turns out not to be true, and so

1045
00:59:30,080 --> 00:59:34,000
Speaker 2: we're and and and we're we're dealing in probabilities where yeah,

1046
00:59:34,040 --> 00:59:36,320
Speaker 2: we're willing to bet something in that direction, but we're

1047
00:59:36,320 --> 00:59:37,840
Speaker 2: not willing to bet everything in that direction.

1048
00:59:38,400 --> 00:59:41,640
Speaker 1: What I mean is when you see a piece of obvious,

1049
00:59:41,760 --> 00:59:47,920
Speaker 1: blatant misinformation online, someone posts something stupid and and it

1050
00:59:48,040 --> 00:59:52,800
Speaker 1: feels like what your mind does is simulate, Wait, if

1051
00:59:52,880 --> 00:59:56,600
Speaker 1: everyone thought this, if this spreads, if this meme goes viral,

1052
00:59:57,560 --> 01:00:01,480
Speaker 1: that's going to have consequences. Yeah, That's what I'm pointing to.

1053
01:00:01,600 --> 01:00:04,800
Speaker 1: Is not necessarily like the nuclear war thing. But here's

1054
01:00:04,840 --> 01:00:08,400
Speaker 1: an example. Right after the Bondie Beach massacre of Jewish

1055
01:00:08,400 --> 01:00:12,480
Speaker 1: celebrating Hanukkah, somebody posted something saying, oh, it turns out

1056
01:00:12,520 --> 01:00:15,640
Speaker 1: one of the shooters is Jewish, and they showed a

1057
01:00:15,640 --> 01:00:20,560
Speaker 1: Facebook page of the guy wearing a yamica and all

1058
01:00:20,640 --> 01:00:23,320
Speaker 1: his friends and his friends on there. It was such

1059
01:00:23,320 --> 01:00:25,280
Speaker 1: an obvious AI fake when you zoom in on the

1060
01:00:25,280 --> 01:00:27,680
Speaker 1: buttons and so on, the buttons didn't make sense and

1061
01:00:27,680 --> 01:00:31,200
Speaker 1: so on. But I think the feeling that one might

1062
01:00:31,320 --> 01:00:37,040
Speaker 1: have viewing that is, hey, that's a dangerous piece of misinformation.

1063
01:00:37,800 --> 01:00:41,200
Speaker 1: Why because if it spread, if lots of people saw it,

1064
01:00:41,480 --> 01:00:44,480
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. So what I mean is it's not

1065
01:00:44,920 --> 01:00:47,920
Speaker 1: just the evaluation of, oh is this true or false,

1066
01:00:48,600 --> 01:00:51,600
Speaker 1: it's the I'm just wondering if the discussed element in

1067
01:00:51,640 --> 01:00:55,480
Speaker 1: real life might be the what are the future consequences

1068
01:00:55,480 --> 01:00:56,520
Speaker 1: of that piece of mistass?

1069
01:00:56,520 --> 01:00:59,160
Speaker 2: Oh yes, well yeah, I think that can That can

1070
01:00:59,240 --> 01:01:03,800
Speaker 2: make the field of disgusted not only a neurophysiological analogy.

1071
01:01:04,040 --> 01:01:06,080
Speaker 2: It really can make it quite salient. I mean, if

1072
01:01:06,120 --> 01:01:11,040
Speaker 2: someone says something that you know to be false or

1073
01:01:11,120 --> 01:01:13,200
Speaker 2: you have every reason to believe it's false, and not

1074
01:01:13,240 --> 01:01:17,360
Speaker 2: only and it's and and if but if believed, it

1075
01:01:17,400 --> 01:01:20,720
Speaker 2: will open the door to just manifest harms in the world.

1076
01:01:21,240 --> 01:01:25,680
Speaker 2: And it's just it's it's an ugly divisive idea that

1077
01:01:25,720 --> 01:01:29,880
Speaker 2: you believe was maliciously concocted so as to produce those harms, right,

1078
01:01:29,920 --> 01:01:33,040
Speaker 2: So like it's not all these all this negative uh,

1079
01:01:33,200 --> 01:01:36,320
Speaker 2: negativity stacked on top of it. Yeah, I mean, I

1080
01:01:36,360 --> 01:01:38,640
Speaker 2: you know, I feel discussed all the time, and consciously

1081
01:01:38,680 --> 01:01:41,800
Speaker 2: feel discussed all the time at what people pretend to believe,

1082
01:01:42,040 --> 01:01:44,080
Speaker 2: you know, or what some people actually wind up being

1083
01:01:44,120 --> 01:01:46,520
Speaker 2: taken in by and actually believe. And the consequences in

1084
01:01:46,520 --> 01:01:48,680
Speaker 2: the world are obvious. I mean, I mean, in fact,

1085
01:01:48,680 --> 01:01:51,320
Speaker 2: if you once you put this kind of lens on

1086
01:01:52,280 --> 01:01:57,800
Speaker 2: to your your view of more or less everything, Uh, people,

1087
01:01:57,880 --> 01:02:01,800
Speaker 2: do you just see that all of the world's mayhem

1088
01:02:02,520 --> 01:02:07,000
Speaker 2: is a story of kind of failures, I mean, apart

1089
01:02:07,040 --> 01:02:11,440
Speaker 2: from the things that are visited upon us from nature,

1090
01:02:12,200 --> 01:02:14,080
Speaker 2: just like bad luck, you know, just like you know,

1091
01:02:14,120 --> 01:02:18,280
Speaker 2: an asteroid impact or or a virus you know, jump

1092
01:02:18,360 --> 01:02:21,840
Speaker 2: species and now you know we're suffering its consequences. Everything

1093
01:02:21,840 --> 01:02:27,160
Speaker 2: else is a self inflicted wound based on bad ideas,

1094
01:02:27,680 --> 01:02:33,880
Speaker 2: you know, just just rank tribalism and conspiracy thinking and lies,

1095
01:02:33,960 --> 01:02:36,800
Speaker 2: I mean conscious lies meant to divide people and to

1096
01:02:37,280 --> 01:02:41,960
Speaker 2: motivate them to produce harm. And it's it's all a

1097
01:02:42,000 --> 01:02:46,480
Speaker 2: matter of kind of this belief making and belief grasping

1098
01:02:46,720 --> 01:02:52,000
Speaker 2: machinery of our minds that is just ceaselessly doing its work.

1099
01:02:52,200 --> 01:02:54,720
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder why changing our minds is so

1100
01:02:55,280 --> 01:02:59,920
Speaker 1: difficult when it comes to a scientific proposition. It seems

1101
01:02:59,920 --> 01:03:03,200
Speaker 1: to be easier, maybe because often those are like chess

1102
01:03:03,240 --> 01:03:06,320
Speaker 1: moves in the sense that they're cognitive. There's not a

1103
01:03:06,360 --> 01:03:08,680
Speaker 1: lot of emotional weight with it. But like the example

1104
01:03:08,720 --> 01:03:12,280
Speaker 1: you gave of the older professor who's emotionally so weighted

1105
01:03:12,320 --> 01:03:15,560
Speaker 1: down by what he's come up with, sometimes it's very

1106
01:03:15,560 --> 01:03:18,680
Speaker 1: hard to change our minds about things. What's your take

1107
01:03:18,760 --> 01:03:22,960
Speaker 1: about the challenges and any hopes about people changing their

1108
01:03:23,000 --> 01:03:23,760
Speaker 1: minds on things.

1109
01:03:23,960 --> 01:03:26,440
Speaker 2: Well, I think you need one needs to internaliz. I

1110
01:03:26,520 --> 01:03:28,320
Speaker 2: mean we do this in science, but I think this

1111
01:03:28,600 --> 01:03:30,760
Speaker 2: just should be exported to the rest of culture. I

1112
01:03:30,800 --> 01:03:37,280
Speaker 2: think we all have an ethical obligation to internalize a

1113
01:03:37,400 --> 01:03:42,560
Speaker 2: value that is deeper than any place where our kind

1114
01:03:42,600 --> 01:03:45,080
Speaker 2: of wishful thinking or the way that our preference is

1115
01:03:45,080 --> 01:03:47,000
Speaker 2: for the way the world is could be anchored right,

1116
01:03:47,000 --> 01:03:50,560
Speaker 2: And the deeper value is we actually want to know

1117
01:03:50,600 --> 01:03:53,160
Speaker 2: what's real. Right, We would like like we have a

1118
01:03:53,200 --> 01:03:58,800
Speaker 2: reality bias. And it's not to say that that you

1119
01:03:58,840 --> 01:04:02,400
Speaker 2: can't find these sort of low instances where a person's

1120
01:04:02,400 --> 01:04:04,920
Speaker 2: interest might be better served by not really being in

1121
01:04:04,960 --> 01:04:08,040
Speaker 2: touch with reality, like some some scope for delusion, you know,

1122
01:04:08,080 --> 01:04:11,000
Speaker 2: self serving delusion might you know, we can certainly concoct

1123
01:04:11,000 --> 01:04:14,120
Speaker 2: those examples where like the person would have if he

1124
01:04:14,160 --> 01:04:16,480
Speaker 2: if he knew what the people in the room really

1125
01:04:16,480 --> 01:04:18,480
Speaker 2: thought of him, well then he wouldn't perform nearly as

1126
01:04:18,480 --> 01:04:20,240
Speaker 2: well as he did when he thought he was popular

1127
01:04:20,320 --> 01:04:22,600
Speaker 2: or you know, thought he was handsome, or what everything was.

1128
01:04:22,680 --> 01:04:27,480
Speaker 2: But generally speaking, we shouldn't want to be deceived or

1129
01:04:27,520 --> 01:04:34,200
Speaker 2: self deceived or psychotic or and and trading in these

1130
01:04:34,240 --> 01:04:39,240
Speaker 2: hallucinations and having and watching our culture get bent every

1131
01:04:39,280 --> 01:04:43,560
Speaker 2: whish way by these kind of mass adoptions of delusion.

1132
01:04:43,680 --> 01:04:47,640
Speaker 2: You know, there's moral panics and paranoia and lives and

1133
01:04:47,680 --> 01:04:49,280
Speaker 2: half truths that become operative.

1134
01:04:49,560 --> 01:04:49,720
Speaker 3: You know.

1135
01:04:49,880 --> 01:04:53,280
Speaker 2: Again, politics is so much the story of this. But

1136
01:04:53,360 --> 01:04:57,120
Speaker 2: it's you know, I would say it it embraces you know,

1137
01:04:57,120 --> 01:04:59,080
Speaker 2: almost everything we do. He's just I mean, it's not

1138
01:04:59,160 --> 01:05:01,280
Speaker 2: it's not that understand in the world is everything. It's

1139
01:05:01,320 --> 01:05:05,520
Speaker 2: not that being rational is everything, but it is this,

1140
01:05:05,880 --> 01:05:10,120
Speaker 2: it is the thing that can safeguard everything else that

1141
01:05:10,160 --> 01:05:13,080
Speaker 2: we care about. R I mean, I view your reason as,

1142
01:05:14,120 --> 01:05:17,040
Speaker 2: among other things, the guardian of love, right like like

1143
01:05:17,040 --> 01:05:19,360
Speaker 2: like there's there's other things you can love, like the

1144
01:05:19,520 --> 01:05:22,080
Speaker 2: other experiences you can have that are not a matter

1145
01:05:22,160 --> 01:05:27,600
Speaker 2: of just rigorously understanding what is so right, but rigorously

1146
01:05:27,680 --> 01:05:30,400
Speaker 2: understanding what is so is the thing that get that

1147
01:05:30,400 --> 01:05:34,040
Speaker 2: that that that stands at the gate to protect all

1148
01:05:34,080 --> 01:05:36,200
Speaker 2: those other moments where you just want to you know,

1149
01:05:37,000 --> 01:05:39,640
Speaker 2: hug your lover or you know you're your best friend,

1150
01:05:39,720 --> 01:05:43,840
Speaker 2: or play frisbee, or appreciate art or just watch a movie. Well,

1151
01:05:44,960 --> 01:05:47,600
Speaker 2: when it comes time to figure out what's actually happening

1152
01:05:47,600 --> 01:05:50,800
Speaker 2: in the world, when there's a pandemic raging, or when

1153
01:05:51,520 --> 01:05:54,040
Speaker 2: you know people are flying airplanes into our buildings or

1154
01:05:54,360 --> 01:05:58,560
Speaker 2: or whatever the whatever it is, we should have a

1155
01:05:58,720 --> 01:06:01,600
Speaker 2: very deep bias for the truth.

1156
01:06:02,080 --> 01:06:04,160
Speaker 1: How would you teach that to high schoolers? What would

1157
01:06:04,160 --> 01:06:04,880
Speaker 1: you tell them?

1158
01:06:05,200 --> 01:06:10,360
Speaker 2: Well, one, you want to remove the stigma around honestly

1159
01:06:10,400 --> 01:06:12,880
Speaker 2: confessing that you don't know what's true, right, So saying

1160
01:06:12,920 --> 01:06:16,880
Speaker 2: I don't know should they should have absolutely no discomfort

1161
01:06:17,040 --> 01:06:20,360
Speaker 2: attached to it. In fact, failing to say that you

1162
01:06:20,400 --> 01:06:23,240
Speaker 2: don't know when you clearly don't know. Should should That's

1163
01:06:23,280 --> 01:06:25,400
Speaker 2: where the stigma should be, right, So to pretend to

1164
01:06:25,440 --> 01:06:28,400
Speaker 2: know something you don't know is where I mean that

1165
01:06:28,400 --> 01:06:33,120
Speaker 2: that should be you know, scored as kind of unseemly

1166
01:06:33,240 --> 01:06:35,400
Speaker 2: and then people should get the social feedback around that.

1167
01:06:35,480 --> 01:06:38,760
Speaker 2: So whenever you were caught bullshitting, right, that's the thing

1168
01:06:38,840 --> 01:06:41,320
Speaker 2: that should be embarrassing, not when the teacher asked you

1169
01:06:41,880 --> 01:06:44,840
Speaker 2: the question and you just didn't know, right, or And

1170
01:06:45,160 --> 01:06:48,880
Speaker 2: people should never be afraid to ask what seems like

1171
01:06:48,920 --> 01:06:51,520
Speaker 2: a stupid question, like even in a scientific context. I mean,

1172
01:06:51,960 --> 01:06:54,360
Speaker 2: you know, there are great accounts of, you know, the

1173
01:06:54,360 --> 01:06:57,640
Speaker 2: behavior of some of the most eminent scientists you can

1174
01:06:57,680 --> 01:07:01,840
Speaker 2: think of where one of the things that made their

1175
01:07:02,920 --> 01:07:10,360
Speaker 2: company so EDIFYE and it actually kind of discombobulating for

1176
01:07:10,680 --> 01:07:13,880
Speaker 2: you know, lesser scientists is that they would ask a

1177
01:07:13,920 --> 01:07:17,120
Speaker 2: lot of dumb questions, you know, apparently dumb questions which

1178
01:07:17,120 --> 01:07:20,000
Speaker 2: if if if a novice was that would ask that question,

1179
01:07:20,040 --> 01:07:23,360
Speaker 2: they might actually see there might be some kind of

1180
01:07:23,400 --> 01:07:26,360
Speaker 2: social embarrassment around around that's kind of a dumb that's

1181
01:07:26,360 --> 01:07:28,640
Speaker 2: really an elementary question. But when you know, Richard Fyneman

1182
01:07:28,760 --> 01:07:31,800
Speaker 2: is asking you that dumb question. You know, you know

1183
01:07:31,880 --> 01:07:34,200
Speaker 2: you're in the company of Richard Feynman, right, you know

1184
01:07:34,360 --> 01:07:36,760
Speaker 2: he knows physics at least as well as you know physics.

1185
01:07:37,360 --> 01:07:42,040
Speaker 2: And he's asking that question. He's actually now putting pressure

1186
01:07:42,160 --> 01:07:46,360
Speaker 2: on what is kind of a load bearing wall and

1187
01:07:46,400 --> 01:07:49,040
Speaker 2: may in fact be a load bearing fiction of the

1188
01:07:49,080 --> 01:07:53,360
Speaker 2: whole enterprise. Right, And so you should be not at

1189
01:07:53,360 --> 01:07:58,360
Speaker 2: all afraid to ask dumb questions. And there should be

1190
01:07:58,360 --> 01:08:01,480
Speaker 2: this kind of master value where you want to calibrate

1191
01:08:01,720 --> 01:08:06,960
Speaker 2: your conviction rather finally with the weight of the evidence

1192
01:08:07,040 --> 01:08:09,320
Speaker 2: and the and the and the solidity of the argument. Right,

1193
01:08:09,200 --> 01:08:11,600
Speaker 2: like like you you want to you don't want to

1194
01:08:11,600 --> 01:08:15,800
Speaker 2: be at eleven with your certainty when there's actually nothing

1195
01:08:15,840 --> 01:08:20,360
Speaker 2: to stand on. And you also should not want to

1196
01:08:20,360 --> 01:08:22,519
Speaker 2: be wrong for a moment longer than you.

1197
01:08:22,479 --> 01:08:23,280
Speaker 3: Have to be right.

1198
01:08:23,320 --> 01:08:24,960
Speaker 2: So like so like if you I mean this is

1199
01:08:25,479 --> 01:08:27,240
Speaker 2: this is the spirit in which I would have any

1200
01:08:28,280 --> 01:08:30,040
Speaker 2: debate on any topic. I mean, I have you know,

1201
01:08:30,960 --> 01:08:34,040
Speaker 2: I tend to know what I think when I'm certainly

1202
01:08:34,040 --> 01:08:36,360
Speaker 2: on a topic with where I'm in any kind of

1203
01:08:36,360 --> 01:08:40,520
Speaker 2: debate mode with somebody. But if someone makes a point

1204
01:08:40,680 --> 01:08:44,760
Speaker 2: where I see their right and I was wrong, like

1205
01:08:45,240 --> 01:08:48,000
Speaker 2: my my kind of master my master value in that

1206
01:08:48,080 --> 01:08:52,080
Speaker 2: moment is not to defend myself, you know, just to

1207
01:08:52,080 --> 01:08:54,960
Speaker 2: put a brave face on my on my error and

1208
01:08:55,040 --> 01:08:57,080
Speaker 2: try to, you know, just kind of beat back the

1209
01:08:57,120 --> 01:09:00,720
Speaker 2: truth that they just articulated, because I mean, there's for

1210
01:09:00,760 --> 01:09:02,559
Speaker 2: two reasons for this. One is if the place I'm

1211
01:09:02,600 --> 01:09:07,360
Speaker 2: standing actually has no support and the person who's criticizing

1212
01:09:07,400 --> 01:09:09,640
Speaker 2: me can see it, and they pointed out, and the

1213
01:09:09,680 --> 01:09:12,240
Speaker 2: audience is likely to see it. If they can't see

1214
01:09:12,240 --> 01:09:14,479
Speaker 2: it in the first second, they're likely to see it

1215
01:09:14,560 --> 01:09:17,200
Speaker 2: like thirty seconds from now. What I really want to

1216
01:09:17,200 --> 01:09:20,360
Speaker 2: do is no longer to be standing there, both as

1217
01:09:20,360 --> 01:09:24,840
Speaker 2: a matter of like, you know, like just intellectual integrity,

1218
01:09:24,880 --> 01:09:28,160
Speaker 2: but also just as a matter of like not losing

1219
01:09:28,400 --> 01:09:30,680
Speaker 2: you know, egregiously, if I in so far as I

1220
01:09:30,720 --> 01:09:33,040
Speaker 2: care about the way I'm being perceived by the audience.

1221
01:09:33,080 --> 01:09:37,080
Speaker 2: So the master move there would be to actually let

1222
01:09:37,080 --> 01:09:40,040
Speaker 2: the person educate you on that point right now. Hopefully

1223
01:09:40,080 --> 01:09:43,000
Speaker 2: it's not a point that is so central to to

1224
01:09:44,200 --> 01:09:46,160
Speaker 2: you know, that the topic you were debating such that

1225
01:09:46,240 --> 01:09:48,680
Speaker 2: you now have just admit you're completely wrong and you've

1226
01:09:48,760 --> 01:09:51,559
Speaker 2: changed your mind. But in fact that were the case,

1227
01:09:52,280 --> 01:09:54,120
Speaker 2: that's what I would want to do. I mean that again,

1228
01:09:54,160 --> 01:09:56,240
Speaker 2: that's the thing. I go back to the scientist who

1229
01:09:56,600 --> 01:09:59,880
Speaker 2: might have spent his entire career banging away on some

1230
01:10:00,640 --> 01:10:05,400
Speaker 2: doomed theory. The moment has really proven wrong, right the moment.

1231
01:10:05,960 --> 01:10:08,880
Speaker 2: I mean again, this is these are situations that are

1232
01:10:08,880 --> 01:10:12,200
Speaker 2: few and far between, but it does happen. The pivot

1233
01:10:12,240 --> 01:10:14,960
Speaker 2: you want to be capable of making is just to

1234
01:10:15,040 --> 01:10:19,040
Speaker 2: be grateful to now know what's real, right like that. I mean,

1235
01:10:19,040 --> 01:10:21,799
Speaker 2: that's where the reality bought. But we should be hungry

1236
01:10:22,720 --> 01:10:28,439
Speaker 2: to wake up from the dream of misapprehension. This is

1237
01:10:28,479 --> 01:10:31,600
Speaker 2: a hallucination that this is a spell we have to

1238
01:10:31,680 --> 01:10:34,000
Speaker 2: keep breaking. We just we come into this world not

1239
01:10:34,160 --> 01:10:38,000
Speaker 2: knowing what is going on, and our entanglement with it

1240
01:10:38,040 --> 01:10:42,040
Speaker 2: and with others and with culture and with increasingly sophisticated

1241
01:10:42,080 --> 01:10:47,640
Speaker 2: ways of knowing is is continually trimming down this, this

1242
01:10:48,040 --> 01:10:52,479
Speaker 2: misunderstanding and aligning us with something Again we're not We

1243
01:10:52,600 --> 01:10:56,280
Speaker 2: never get some final account where we can step outside

1244
01:10:56,280 --> 01:10:59,080
Speaker 2: of our view of reality so as to look back

1245
01:10:59,120 --> 01:11:00,840
Speaker 2: at it and say, oh, yeah, this is where you

1246
01:11:01,000 --> 01:11:04,120
Speaker 2: This is exactly how the map fit the territory. We're

1247
01:11:04,160 --> 01:11:07,120
Speaker 2: always just kind of living the map. But when we

1248
01:11:07,320 --> 01:11:11,000
Speaker 2: when we you know, bump into a hard object, you know,

1249
01:11:11,120 --> 01:11:13,439
Speaker 2: in the darkness, we should know, we don't want to

1250
01:11:13,439 --> 01:11:15,280
Speaker 2: do that again. But it is, it comes down to

1251
01:11:15,360 --> 01:11:21,519
Speaker 2: a very clear sense of what intellectual integrity is. And

1252
01:11:21,600 --> 01:11:24,160
Speaker 2: we don't teach that very well. We teach it well

1253
01:11:24,320 --> 01:11:28,360
Speaker 2: in science and in you know, kind of rigorous areas

1254
01:11:28,080 --> 01:11:32,120
Speaker 2: of academia, like you know, philosophy, and in other areas

1255
01:11:32,880 --> 01:11:35,439
Speaker 2: we seem to teach the antithesis. I mean, I mean,

1256
01:11:35,960 --> 01:11:38,760
Speaker 2: one of the worst things that's happened of late, and

1257
01:11:38,800 --> 01:11:41,759
Speaker 2: it's it has been a source of great cultural division,

1258
01:11:42,120 --> 01:11:45,439
Speaker 2: is that so much of what purports to be knowledge

1259
01:11:45,640 --> 01:11:49,720
Speaker 2: gathering in the Ivory Tower has become just rankly politicized,

1260
01:11:49,800 --> 01:11:52,920
Speaker 2: such that you have whole disciplines which are have just

1261
01:11:52,960 --> 01:11:54,520
Speaker 2: been vitiated by politics.

1262
01:11:54,600 --> 01:11:56,360
Speaker 3: Right. So this it's a culture, a culture.

1263
01:11:56,120 --> 01:12:00,479
Speaker 2: Of activism that is masquerading as a culture of of

1264
01:12:00,880 --> 01:12:05,360
Speaker 2: knowledge acquisition, and it's completely upside down. And you know, therefore,

1265
01:12:05,520 --> 01:12:09,599
Speaker 2: and it's been it's you know, the the revolt against

1266
01:12:09,600 --> 01:12:13,519
Speaker 2: the elites is all too understandable in light of this,

1267
01:12:13,760 --> 01:12:15,799
Speaker 2: and it's I mean, we're going to take a generation

1268
01:12:15,920 --> 01:12:17,320
Speaker 2: to recover I think from.

1269
01:12:17,240 --> 01:12:18,080
Speaker 3: It, I agreed.

1270
01:12:18,560 --> 01:12:20,080
Speaker 1: I will say, by the way, it is a total

1271
01:12:20,120 --> 01:12:22,759
Speaker 1: side note, I'm very hopeful about the role of AI

1272
01:12:23,720 --> 01:12:27,880
Speaker 1: helping with this problem. Here's why we can set up

1273
01:12:27,960 --> 01:12:31,800
Speaker 1: a debate bot so that each student debates the bought

1274
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:35,280
Speaker 1: some hot button issue. They go, they get graded on

1275
01:12:35,360 --> 01:12:40,040
Speaker 1: the quality of their arguments, and then they switch sides

1276
01:12:40,080 --> 01:12:42,240
Speaker 1: and they argue the other side. Why because the AI

1277
01:12:42,400 --> 01:12:47,240
Speaker 1: is great at doing this. It's calm, it's patient, It's

1278
01:12:47,439 --> 01:12:50,000
Speaker 1: able to do that with every student for as long

1279
01:12:50,040 --> 01:12:52,640
Speaker 1: as it wants, whereas no teacher could ever have that

1280
01:12:52,760 --> 01:12:55,200
Speaker 1: kind of time or patience. So I think this is

1281
01:12:55,520 --> 01:12:58,160
Speaker 1: going to be really helpful in terms of teaching students

1282
01:12:58,240 --> 01:13:01,479
Speaker 1: this three sixty view. Is there anything you've changed your

1283
01:13:01,800 --> 01:13:04,040
Speaker 1: belief about in the last decade or two?

1284
01:13:04,520 --> 01:13:08,360
Speaker 2: This is previously actually this part of the AI conversation.

1285
01:13:10,080 --> 01:13:14,080
Speaker 2: So I've been very worried about AI and the fundamental

1286
01:13:14,160 --> 01:13:16,680
Speaker 2: question of the alignment problem. I just what it's going

1287
01:13:16,720 --> 01:13:19,880
Speaker 2: to look like to build you know, truly superhuman general

1288
01:13:19,880 --> 01:13:23,439
Speaker 2: intelligence and kind of the ways in which we might

1289
01:13:23,479 --> 01:13:28,200
Speaker 2: do that wrong, you know, and effectively you know, ruin everything,

1290
01:13:28,200 --> 01:13:30,560
Speaker 2: because suddenly we have we have created a technology that

1291
01:13:30,680 --> 01:13:32,800
Speaker 2: is more powerful than we are, an autonomous and not

1292
01:13:32,880 --> 01:13:35,480
Speaker 2: aligned with our well being, and we're kind of negotiating

1293
01:13:35,520 --> 01:13:38,080
Speaker 2: with it now, and it becomes this doomed chess game,

1294
01:13:38,240 --> 01:13:40,960
Speaker 2: Like it's like, you're not going to play chess harder

1295
01:13:41,080 --> 01:13:43,640
Speaker 2: so as to to realign the chess engine. Then now

1296
01:13:43,920 --> 01:13:45,559
Speaker 2: is now just beating you at chess, and you're not

1297
01:13:45,560 --> 01:13:48,400
Speaker 2: going to negotiate with a super intelligent AI that's not

1298
01:13:49,080 --> 01:13:54,400
Speaker 2: disposed to take your advice hereafter. So, so I'm worried

1299
01:13:54,439 --> 01:13:56,920
Speaker 2: about AI. And I did think at least five ten

1300
01:13:57,000 --> 01:14:00,040
Speaker 2: years ago that autonomous weapons would be something that we

1301
01:14:00,080 --> 01:14:03,040
Speaker 2: wouldn't want to do. That just seems like a very

1302
01:14:03,080 --> 01:14:04,800
Speaker 2: dangerous thing, And so I think I even signed an

1303
01:14:04,840 --> 01:14:08,320
Speaker 2: open letter that we shouldn't have autonomous weapons. I think,

1304
01:14:08,360 --> 01:14:12,040
Speaker 2: my again, this is not really a happy epiphany, But

1305
01:14:12,240 --> 01:14:17,360
Speaker 2: I do think that leaving the alignment concern aside, given

1306
01:14:17,400 --> 01:14:21,560
Speaker 2: the arms race with China clearly and other potential adversaries

1307
01:14:21,600 --> 01:14:23,920
Speaker 2: around AI, I feel like we just need to win

1308
01:14:24,000 --> 01:14:27,720
Speaker 2: that arms race. So i'm, you know, until I hear

1309
01:14:27,720 --> 01:14:30,840
Speaker 2: a better argument. Now, I'm in favor of all the

1310
01:14:30,840 --> 01:14:33,520
Speaker 2: ways in which AI can be adopted by the military.

1311
01:14:33,960 --> 01:14:38,000
Speaker 2: Autonomous weapons included. I just think the failure mode of

1312
01:14:38,280 --> 01:14:41,760
Speaker 2: declining to do that work and waiting for China to

1313
01:14:41,800 --> 01:14:45,599
Speaker 2: do it is so obvious and excruciating that I'm willing

1314
01:14:45,680 --> 01:14:50,760
Speaker 2: to roll the dice on let's get there first. The

1315
01:14:50,760 --> 01:14:52,280
Speaker 2: first time I heard about it, I was sort of

1316
01:14:52,320 --> 01:14:54,800
Speaker 2: like the gun control guy, like I don't want anything

1317
01:14:54,840 --> 01:14:56,679
Speaker 2: to do with guns, and they're just dangerous and awful.

1318
01:14:57,800 --> 01:15:00,800
Speaker 2: And then I sort of just flipped to none, no, no,

1319
01:15:00,840 --> 01:15:02,559
Speaker 2: we need as many guns as possible, and we need

1320
01:15:02,600 --> 01:15:07,840
Speaker 2: them fast. But again, I've obviously opened to argument on that,

1321
01:15:07,880 --> 01:15:09,559
Speaker 2: but that's that was a very clear change of heart.

1322
01:15:10,360 --> 01:15:12,439
Speaker 1: This comes back to the central theme that we've been

1323
01:15:12,479 --> 01:15:16,160
Speaker 1: discussing about how beliefs you know, in the laboratory, the

1324
01:15:16,200 --> 01:15:18,639
Speaker 1: way one has to study it is with simple beliefs.

1325
01:15:18,680 --> 01:15:21,280
Speaker 1: In the year, they're true or they're false, But in

1326
01:15:21,320 --> 01:15:25,479
Speaker 1: real life they're tied to everything else, including our views

1327
01:15:25,520 --> 01:15:29,080
Speaker 1: of larger and larger geopolitical issues, such that you might

1328
01:15:29,200 --> 01:15:32,719
Speaker 1: have a flip of a belief predicated on these other

1329
01:15:33,360 --> 01:15:36,640
Speaker 1: larger issues about where you think the world is going politically. So,

1330
01:15:36,840 --> 01:15:40,479
Speaker 1: given this other constellation of beliefs that people have that

1331
01:15:40,600 --> 01:15:45,120
Speaker 1: navigate their particular beliefs about politics or abortion or gun

1332
01:15:45,200 --> 01:15:51,000
Speaker 1: control or whatever. Is healthy disagreement something that you see

1333
01:15:51,200 --> 01:15:55,040
Speaker 1: as possible, and if so, in what ways would you

1334
01:15:55,080 --> 01:15:55,759
Speaker 1: like to see that happen?

1335
01:15:56,240 --> 01:15:58,680
Speaker 2: Well, I think we we live in the zone of

1336
01:15:58,800 --> 01:16:02,480
Speaker 2: healthy disagreement all the time, and we're constantly disagreeing with

1337
01:16:02,479 --> 01:16:04,200
Speaker 2: with people we love about things.

1338
01:16:04,400 --> 01:16:05,479
Speaker 3: The question is how much.

1339
01:16:05,360 --> 01:16:07,479
Speaker 2: Does it matter? And when it matters, it's like when

1340
01:16:07,479 --> 01:16:11,080
Speaker 2: you raise the stakes, then you begin to get uncomfortable

1341
01:16:11,320 --> 01:16:14,559
Speaker 2: and you feel like you have to converge. I mean,

1342
01:16:14,560 --> 01:16:18,679
Speaker 2: it just became it becomes behaviorally and emotionally imperative to converge,

1343
01:16:19,120 --> 01:16:20,880
Speaker 2: certainly when lives depend on it. Well, then all of

1344
01:16:20,920 --> 01:16:22,560
Speaker 2: a sudden, then it's like it's a kind of a

1345
01:16:23,320 --> 01:16:26,439
Speaker 2: moral emergency to get get your facts straight, get you know,

1346
01:16:26,560 --> 01:16:29,360
Speaker 2: you know, you get some of the best argument and win.

1347
01:16:29,960 --> 01:16:32,840
Speaker 2: So it really just it comes down to what the

1348
01:16:32,880 --> 01:16:37,360
Speaker 2: stakes are and whether we're in a zone that's anything

1349
01:16:37,520 --> 01:16:42,360
Speaker 2: like that which is indicated by the common phrase, or

1350
01:16:42,400 --> 01:16:46,719
Speaker 2: we're just gonna have to agree to disagree, right, Like, well, yeah,

1351
01:16:46,720 --> 01:16:49,479
Speaker 2: that's we over here. We can we can do that

1352
01:16:49,560 --> 01:16:51,920
Speaker 2: and still be friends and this is perfect, right, there's

1353
01:16:51,960 --> 01:16:54,160
Speaker 2: no problem like that's kind of the spice of life

1354
01:16:54,200 --> 01:16:59,400
Speaker 2: to agree to disagree about that. But over here like

1355
01:16:59,520 --> 01:17:03,439
Speaker 2: we can't take another step until we figure out who's right.

1356
01:17:07,920 --> 01:17:10,920
Speaker 1: That was my interview with Sam Harris. Sam's research here

1357
01:17:11,000 --> 01:17:14,200
Speaker 1: shows that even at the most basic level, the brain

1358
01:17:14,280 --> 01:17:19,360
Speaker 1: distinguishes between accepting or rejecting a claim or remaining uncertain

1359
01:17:19,400 --> 01:17:23,479
Speaker 1: about that claim, and that distinction the brain makes that

1360
01:17:23,560 --> 01:17:27,560
Speaker 1: then roots what you do in terms of feeling and behavior.

1361
01:17:27,800 --> 01:17:30,800
Speaker 1: Some things you act on right away because you believe

1362
01:17:30,840 --> 01:17:33,720
Speaker 1: they're true, and other things you dismiss and they don't

1363
01:17:33,760 --> 01:17:37,760
Speaker 1: move any further through your neural system. So your brain's

1364
01:17:37,920 --> 01:17:43,040
Speaker 1: assessment about the truth or falsity of something determines everything

1365
01:17:43,080 --> 01:17:47,679
Speaker 1: about what happens next. As Sam also mentioned, beliefs differ

1366
01:17:47,880 --> 01:17:52,000
Speaker 1: in terms of how tightly they bind to identity. Some

1367
01:17:52,040 --> 01:17:55,840
Speaker 1: beliefs are pretty easy to revise when new evidence appears,

1368
01:17:56,080 --> 01:18:00,679
Speaker 1: like here's data about how you could make nuclear react safe.

1369
01:18:01,320 --> 01:18:05,360
Speaker 1: But other beliefs are anchored to social belonging or moral

1370
01:18:05,360 --> 01:18:09,720
Speaker 1: commitments you have, or longstanding narratives about who you are

1371
01:18:09,840 --> 01:18:13,840
Speaker 1: and how the world operates. In those cases, changing a

1372
01:18:13,920 --> 01:18:17,400
Speaker 1: belief can feel like changing sides or stepping away from

1373
01:18:17,439 --> 01:18:21,520
Speaker 1: a community or giving something up that wants provided stability.

1374
01:18:22,320 --> 01:18:26,120
Speaker 1: What emerges is a picture of belief as a kind

1375
01:18:26,120 --> 01:18:31,000
Speaker 1: of navigation system. It helps us decide what to act

1376
01:18:31,080 --> 01:18:34,200
Speaker 1: on and who to trust, and what to fear, and

1377
01:18:34,240 --> 01:18:38,479
Speaker 1: what futures to prepare for. And belief is shaped by

1378
01:18:38,600 --> 01:18:43,880
Speaker 1: evidence and facts, yes, but also by incentives and emotions

1379
01:18:44,240 --> 01:18:49,040
Speaker 1: and social environments we inhabit. Zooming out this brain research

1380
01:18:49,080 --> 01:18:54,760
Speaker 1: has consequences far beyond individual brains, because the same mechanisms

1381
01:18:54,760 --> 01:18:58,479
Speaker 1: that allow us to cooperate and reason and build shared

1382
01:18:58,600 --> 01:19:02,720
Speaker 1: models of the world can and also amplify division and

1383
01:19:03,120 --> 01:19:10,120
Speaker 1: harden identities and spread ideas whose consequences outpace their accuracy.

1384
01:19:11,040 --> 01:19:14,240
Speaker 1: In an age where language and images and claims are

1385
01:19:14,280 --> 01:19:19,240
Speaker 1: moving faster than ever, understanding how belief forms and how

1386
01:19:19,280 --> 01:19:23,680
Speaker 1: it hardens is becoming something of a civic duty. If

1387
01:19:23,720 --> 01:19:28,679
Speaker 1: belief is the gateway between information and action, then learning

1388
01:19:29,000 --> 01:19:32,240
Speaker 1: how that gateway works is one of the most important

1389
01:19:32,320 --> 01:19:37,240
Speaker 1: challenges of our time. Will presumably never all agree on

1390
01:19:37,280 --> 01:19:40,639
Speaker 1: our beliefs, but a deeper understanding of this, I hope,

1391
01:19:41,040 --> 01:19:47,520
Speaker 1: can allow disagreement to remain tethered to reality and proportion

1392
01:19:48,120 --> 01:19:59,240
Speaker 1: and humility go to eagleman dot com slash podcast. For

1393
01:19:59,280 --> 01:20:03,599
Speaker 1: more information and to find further reading, join the weekly

1394
01:20:03,640 --> 01:20:07,080
Speaker 1: discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe to

1395
01:20:07,120 --> 01:20:10,360
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and

1396
01:20:10,400 --> 01:20:16,080
Speaker 1: to leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman and

1397
01:20:16,120 --> 01:20:17,720
Speaker 1: this is Inner Cosmos