75: How to Talk to a Science Denier (w/Lee McIntyre)
What happens when a philosopher of science shows up at a flat earth conference to test out his theories about changing people's minds? This story catapults you into Lee Mcintyre’s new book, How to Talk to a Science Denier. As anti-vaccine and anti-quarantine protests flare up around the world, and the pandemic drags us all through financial and emotional destruction, discussing science communication has become more necessary than ever. Mcintyre's 2018 book, Post-Truth, examined the manipulative world of “alternative facts.” As a sort of addendum, his latest charts a boots-on-the-ground course to understanding and engaging with false beliefs. Julian's interview with Lee is the main focus of today's episode. After we run the interview, the crew debriefs and discusses.Show NotesTalking to science deniers and sceptics is not hopelessWhen Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political MisperceptionsSanta Claus and Dr. Tam have a video chat
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Conspirituality 76, how to talk to a science denier with Lee McIntyre.
What happens when a philosopher of science shows up at a Flat Earth conference to test out his theories about changing people's minds?
This story catapults you into Lee McIntyre's new book, How to Talk to a Science Denier.
As anti-vaccine and anti-quarantine protests flare up around the world, and the pandemic drags us all through financial and emotional destruction, discussing science communication has become more necessary than ever.
McIntyre's 2018 book, Post-Truth, examined the manipulative world of alternative facts.
As a sort of addendum, his latest charts a boots-on-the-ground course to understanding and engaging with false beliefs.
My interview with Lee is the main focus of today's episode, and after we run that interview, the three of us will debrief and discuss.
By way of introduction, I want to mention that the book points out some very helpful and even hopeful things.
The first has to do with a 2010 study that was picked up by the media and described as showing something you may have heard of.
It's called the backfire effect and the claim was that people double down on their false beliefs when presented with facts and evidence to the contrary.
Well, it turns out on further research that this study's conclusion has actually been shown to be false.
It is very hard to change the minds of science deniers, but engaging in rational discussion turns out not to be an inevitable dead end that just reinforces their beliefs.
So I'll include those two articles in the show notes.
McIntyre also cites a 2019 study that really got his attention.
It made the distinction between two terms.
Content rebuttal and technique rebuttal.
So content rebuttal is an approach we're all familiar with.
It seeks to correct false statements with facts and evidence.
But the second approach that actually has turned out to be more effective per the science is called technique rebuttal.
And this examines the underlying structure of science denialist arguments.
And I'll leave it up to McIntyre to unpack the five common tropes.
and how to point them out.
But inspired by these developments, McIntyre headed out into the wild, visiting conferences organized around flat earth, anti-vax, and climate denialism.
And what he discovered makes for a fascinating read, because his intellectual approach to science advocacy takes a turn, perhaps unexpectedly, into seeking to understand the psychology at play, the needs that are being met, and the identity that forms around these kinds of beliefs.
In addition to his wading into engaging with true believers at these conferences, McIntyre also shares conversations he's had with longtime friends in which he set up a kind of structure to examine their conspiratorial beliefs and...
And in all cases, his approach emphasizes empathy over derision, respect over dismissal, and really seeking to sincerely understand the underlying concerns that inform people's beliefs.
There's an entire chapter in the book titled Talking with Trust.
I highly recommend it.
Here's a quote from Lee.
He says, every single time a hardcore science denier changes their mind, they do it in the same way.
It's always on the basis of engagement with someone they trust.
Someone takes the time to talk with them in an engaging way.
Science denial is not just about doubt.
It's about distrust.
A magical thing happens when you engage with someone as a human being and talk to them respectfully, calmly, patiently.
You listen to them.
They begin to trust you.
Lee McIntyre, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh, absolutely.
You come to us with an extensive and prolific academic background.
It would take a while to list it all.
And I know you're making a lot of appearances, so you probably hear people do this a lot.
But let me just start by saying that you're a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an instructor in ethics at Harvard Extension School.
What else would you like to add to that?
Let me see.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon.
I was in the first generation to go to college, and I love writing books.
I used to write academic articles.
And academic articles are read by about 20 people that you already know on a first-name basis.
And I wanted to write more clearly than that.
Yeah, you're also the former Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, which I found really interesting.
And you are, as you say, you love writing books, the author of amongst nine books, one novel, including The Sin Eater, and then lots of nonfiction like Respecting Truth, Post-Truth, The Scientific Attitude, and most recently, How to Talk to a Science Denier.
So this is all Very much in the wheelhouse of what we like to talk about on the podcast.
Great.
So, your field is history and philosophy of science.
Let's just start there.
How do you define science?
I just wrote a book about that.
My previous book, The Scientific Attitude, because that's really the central question in the philosophy of science, is what's special about science?
How is science a distinctive way of knowing?
And philosophers have bashed their heads against the wall on one another for about a hundred years trying to come up with some logical or methodological criteria of demarcation between science and non-science, between science and pseudoscience, you know, trying to get it perfect.
I mean, if there's one way to define philosophers, they've got to have it perfect.
Just, you know, exactly the right set of necessary and sufficient conditions that there are never any exceptions.
And after a hundred years, I think that if we were going to find that perfect criteria, we would have found it by now.
So that was the motivation for my book to start thinking about, so what is special about science?
If it's not something that's logical or methodological, what is it?
And what I think it is, is the attitude.
It's the idea, I define the scientific attitude as the idea that scientists care about evidence, and they're willing to change their mind on the basis of new evidence.
And that is it in a nutshell.
They have that openness and flexibility of mind, while nonetheless being skeptics.
So often when people think about science, they picture lab coats, test tubes, but beyond working in a laboratory, it sounds like you're already saying there's a way of thinking about the world that perhaps we can call being science-informed, if that term works for you.
Yeah, I think you're right about that.
I think that what the scientific attitude is most basically is a commitment about values.
It's a commitment about We're not wanting to fool ourselves with whatever we think is true.
And the idea that we're going to test it against nature is a certain amount of humility.
There's a certain amount of cooperative spirit with other scientists.
That's something else that I think is really important about science, is that there's this community ethos of checking one another's work.
And being honest about it and, you know, not claiming that your theory is right just because you're the one who came up with it.
But, you know, being willing, as I said, to change your mind when the evidence shows that you're not right.
That's something that I think is humanity at its best.
And this is why it upsets me so when people attack science, because I think first, they really don't understand it.
But second, we really could use more of it.
Yeah, one thing I've really appreciated about reading your work and seeing several interviews that you've done is you're constantly referring back to the fact that this is not only an empirical methodology, but it's also there is a social context within which it's happening.
There are a set of values that are sort of underpinning this endeavor.
And I think that's often a difficult thing to communicate because we We're often in a landscape, especially with the demographic that we deal with, where people have a sort of caricature of science, and as you point out, this expectation that it is sort of perfect and airtight and never changing, when in fact the scientific attitude is the exact opposite.
People who think that science has to be perfect, that it has to offer proof or certainty, are people who have never done science.
Real scientists understand.
I mean, they're always, when their back's not up, when they're not angry and defensive, they're always talking to one another about confidence intervals and error bars and what they know and what they don't know.
Because You have to, you know, with empirical reasoning, you always have to hold out the possibility that further evidence will come in that will cause you to change your mind.
To people who are outside science, I think that even people who trust science, by the way, not just the ones who distrust, I'm not sure they really get that.
And I wish that more scientists would talk about that, would embrace the idea of uncertainty as a strength rather than a weakness of science.
Well, yeah, and I wonder if you'd agree that part of the public communication travesty that's been happening during the pandemic has sort of centered around this, that the ability for public health officials and scientific experts to change their mind as further information emerges in an unknown new situation, that communication has not been well done.
I completely agree, and I think there's a little bit of fault on both sides here.
I'm not usually a both sides kind of guy, but let me say a word about that.
If somebody has the impression that science is about proof and certainty, and then the scientists change their mind, say on mask wearing, then it sounds like they're lying.
Yep.
It sounds like they just they made up something that they wanted to be true, they wanted you to believe is true, and then they're lying.
But I think that there's a little bit of blame here on the side of the science communicators because, as I said, when scientists have their back against the wall and they're defensive and people are questioning their credentials or their knowledge or, you know, whether they're trustworthy individuals, it's easy to blur that line between You know, this is overwhelmingly probably true.
And we're certain that this is true.
And when you cross that line, then you're, it's like you put your chin out for somebody to punch it, because then inevitably, as always happens in science, you have to modify what you said.
And then the other people will think that you're liars.
So the example that I've, you know, of course, the pandemic is the great one about Changing their mind about masks.
Now the nice story about that is the, I think, the correct one.
That scientists, epidemiologists, public health officials, didn't really have the evidence at first to think that mask wearing was going to make that much of a difference.
And so they, you know, would say, well, we don't have the evidence.
Notice how they put that.
We don't have the evidence.
They're not saying it's not true to think that this could help.
Now, I remember talking to my wife, who's a physician, saying, Would it hurt to wear a mask?
And she said, well, no, no, it wouldn't hurt.
It wouldn't hurt.
I wondered why didn't they say that?
And then I figured it out.
Months and months and months later, it came out that one reason that the scientists and public health officials were pushing that line so hard is that they didn't want all the PPE, all the N95s, to get snapped up by the public and not have them available for the people on the front lines, which is a completely reasonable and laudable thing.
to a goal, but they went about it in the wrong way because they sort of lied.
They, they, that is, they could have said, you know, yes, it might help you at the margin.
So it wouldn't be a bad idea, precautionary principle to wear an N95 mask, but they didn't.
And I think what they should have said is, look, of course wearing a mask is better than not wearing a mask, but we don't have the evidence to show that it makes that much difference.
But if you want to wear a mask, it couldn't hurt, but we're going to make a plea to you not to wear the N95s.
Please leave those for the health care workers for whom it will make a big difference.
And I think that would have worked.
And then, because look at the long-term consequences, that tiny little white lie.
Yeah.
There are thousands and thousands of people now who won't believe the public health officials, and they're dying.
Yeah, even though the ulterior motive was a noble one, it still feeds some kind of conspiratorial mindset that you're not telling us the truth.
It did.
And they sort of, kind of, at the margins, were not telling the whole truth.
And boy, once you show that to a conspiracy theorist, they will never trust you again.
I wanted to, sort of for fun, for people like us who think this is fun, do a kind of a lightning round with you, and we'll see how lightning it is.
But as a philosopher of science, I've no doubt you've come across all of the various standard arguments against science, and I wanted to just list off a few and perhaps see if you have a couple sentences on each.
So the first one, is science part of an enlightenment project that justified colonialism and slavery?
Pass.
Too long.
That's too long of an answer to give.
I mean, science can always be misused.
Sometimes misused without people even realizing that they're misusing it.
But to be continued, that's a much longer answer that I'd have to give.
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole set of questions like this that, for me, the answer often ends up being, well, depending on the context, depending on the values of the people applying it, depending on what was going on historically, there are ways that science may have been misused.
The scientific way of approaching the world is a lot more sort of open-ended and less ideological than that.
Do you think that's accurate?
Well, I guess one thing I want to flag is the question that you asked was a historical question.
Was it misused in the past?
And I think unequivocally the answer is yes, it has been misused in certain ways.
I don't, in saying that, want to do anything to give aid and comfort to the folks who think, ah, that means that science is a plot against the poor or the underprivileged and we just have had enough of it and we should move on and science is just one way of knowing, you know, amongst many.
Yeah, exactly.
Tell that to the folks in Flint, Michigan.
You know, tell that to the folks who were barred by the president of South Africa, Mbeke, at the time from getting AZT that might have helped with their HIV-AIDS because he said, no, it can be cured with the garlic and lemon juice, right?
The scientific truth is Very important to all of us.
I think especially to the poor and disenfranchised.
Truth matters, you know, because who are the people who always suffer when somebody is, you know, trying to pull a fast one and pretend that something is true when, you know, the science says it's not.
It's the poor and disenfranchised.
Can science be misused?
Yes, it can.
But it can also make a huge difference for the good.
Yeah, I often like to point out as well that it can be misused precisely because it is so powerful in terms of the truth that it delivers, right?
That's efficacy in the world, yeah.
That's right.
Okay, I know that was a tough one.
How about this?
This is something that I've come across a lot.
Like we, on this podcast, we've sort of been in the yoga and wellness space for a long time, and this is a popular idea.
Does quantum physics debunk scientific materialism?
I would have to know a lot more to answer that question.
I've heard a lot of people talk about quantum theory that don't have the first idea of what it is and what it actually means.
I mean, as a philosopher, I should probably have a ready answer to the, you know, the idea does it interfere with Free will does it, you know, what are the implications?
But I want to be careful to not be one of those people who's talking beyond my knowledge base here.
And I mean, I have seen a lot of work, even by philosophers, that tries to take the quantum theory in physics and apply it to the human brain or human mentality.
I'm just not sure that that's a good application, but I'm also equally not sure that I have anything credible to say about that.
Yeah, I feel like often it gets framed as scientific materialism is somehow rejecting of consciousness and what quantum physics supposedly shows is that consciousness plays a direct role because of the observer effect on the material world.
Or that materialism isn't what we think it is.
I mean, the physicists right now are in crisis.
I'm not sure even the physicists know the answers to some of these questions.
So what about scientism?
We hear this accusation that people who value the scientific way of thinking are just practicing a kind of scientism.
How do you respond to that?
Scientism is a real thing.
It is possible to engage in scientism when you are unthinkingly copying things that seem scientific without really thinking about the underlying reason why you're doing it.
Sometimes this happens with people trying to quantify things that cannot be quantified.
Maybe they can be measured, but not in the way that they're trying to do.
The example here that immediately pops into mind was the Neoclassical revolution in economics where Jevons and Walrus were trying to copy physics to the point where I remember some equation and I don't think it was one of theirs but I remember this equation
That, you know, from physics that was brought over just in whole to economics, but they replaced force with prices and they replaced energy with something else.
I mean, you know, just to try to make it work that that's, you know, That's worshipping something without really understanding what it is.
The criticism of scientism, I think, is often used by people who are hostile to science.
And they're trying to look for a way to say, you're not so great.
What makes you think that, you know, you can, you know, come in here and tell us about reality?
Well, I'll tell you what makes them think so.
If it's an empirical question, I don't think there's any better method than science for investigation.
Now, I also believe that there are some questions that science cannot answer because there are no data.
And so it is possible, I think, for science to get ahead of its skis sometimes in trying to make pronouncements in areas where there may be truth, but there is no evidence.
And where there's no evidence, I'm not really sure how science can help us.
And I'm thinking here of not just of questions about ethics, science, science, science, science, Some people want to turn ethics into a science.
I'm not sure how they would do that.
The one that I'm thinking of most specifically is the question of life after death.
There are no data.
No one knows the answer to this.
No one.
What we have are, you know, three-quarters of people on the planet pretend that they know.
Theists or atheists, we do not know the answer to that question.
So how can you make a science of it?
You really can't.
Now, I'm very interested in these folks who are trying to measure the claims of people who have had near-death experiences where they will say, okay, you said you had a near-death experience and you rose above your body and you look down and you notice the nurse had a bald spot.
Terrific!
We're going to test that.
So they went in and they put little shelves at the top of the room and all the operating rooms and they put a playing card face up on the shelf.
And then anybody who claimed to have a near-death experience, they said, what was the, you know, what was the playing card?
Nobody's been able to answer that.
So that's a kind of a scientific attitude, trying to gather some data, you know, about something that people claim is an empirical experience.
It's become very common since 2016 to use this term post-truth, which is also the title of your 2018 book.
And we look around today with COVID denial, anti-vaccine activism, the epidemic of conspiracy theories based not only on suspicious mistrust of institution, but also a kind of sweeping rejection of the scientific consensus.
When you wrote that book, Post-Truth, during the Trump era, Do you think you imagined we'd be here in 2021?
And what do you think has led us into this landscape of alternative facts, anti-vax and even QAnon?
It's hard for people to go back in time and recognize what things looked like just after Trump was elected president and, you know, what, you know, where it looked like it was it was going.
I'm not.
I think trying to flatter myself to say that I was worried about where it was going, that if you were worried enough and you took the science seriously, you could sort of see where it was going.
Tim Snyder's book on tyranny, I think of Jason Stanley's work, how fascism works and how propaganda works.
So there were some people who were concerned and, you know, had read George Orwell and some other thing and Hannah Arendt and started to worry, you know, where are we headed?
So let me put it this way.
If you were paying attention to the signs, it was all predictable.
You could see it coming.
And I got a lot of pushback when I wrote Post Truth from people who said, Oh, my goodness, you know, isn't this catastrophizing?
How could we possibly end up here?
But as the years went on, Um, it looked worse and worse.
You know, I kept waiting for the book, you know, to be outdated, you know, not to apply, but it really didn't.
And I think that was, again, not because I had some, you know, great power to foretell the future, but because if you were paying attention to what Trump was doing, it was something that had been done before by autocrats, by fascists, and it was predictable.
The difference was the internet.
The internet made it possible to spread the disinformation much more quickly.
So it was a unique circumstance which had a unique word to define it, post-truth.
A lot of people even deliberately misunderstand what that word means, as if it means, well, truth doesn't matter anymore.
The term post-truth is a term of lament, meaning truth is in danger.
And I defined it in the book as the political subordination of reality.
And you could see that in the very beginning of Trump's presidency.
But the greatest example of post-truth came in the January 6th insurrection.
If there was ever—and the Stop the Steal campaign, right at the very end of his presidency.
If there was ever an example of post-truth, that was it.
Yeah, the sort of ultimate flowering of everything that had been coming for quite a few years.
You know, recently—what did Trump say three days ago— This whole, the fraud in Arizona?
Yeah.
And so what did they find?
That Biden actually won by 300 more votes?
Trump goes to a rally and he says, did you see the results of the audit?
It completely vindicated me.
It showed that I actually won Arizona.
So, I mean, that too was predictable.
You put facts in front of him.
He doesn't buy them.
Then, you know, the Arizona Republican Party takes the ballots, takes the voting machines, does this, you know, cockamamie audit.
Even, you know, as biased as they are, they find that he didn't win.
He still takes credit for it.
That's post-truth.
Yeah.
That is, I mean, it's laughable, but that is post-truth.
If we go a little further back to the science wars of the 90s, I'd love to ask you about that.
I mean, it seemed that at that time it transformed from being an argument between science and conservative traditional fundamentalist religion You know, Pat Buchanan's famous statement about the culture war at the 1992 GOP convention, but there's this shift instead to the growing trend on the left towards the postmodern critique of enlightenment ideas and values.
I just am curious about your take on that.
Maybe you can tell us first, if it works for you, which aspects of postmodern philosophy you see as useful and valid, and then perhaps where it may have confused or short-circuited the discourse.
You know, I wrote a little bit about this in Post Truth.
I don't think that the folks who came up with the idea of postmodernism intended it to go where it went.
I think that their heart was in the right place.
You know, they were Derrida making the claim that there was no such thing as objectivity, you know, that you couldn't actually know the truth outside a context.
You know, this was an interesting idea in literary criticism that might even have some applications that scientists should take seriously.
Foucault's idea that, you know, in an environment in which you can't know objective truth, what does that mean?
It means that those who are claiming that they know the truth are really making a power grab.
You know, it's about power, not about knowledge.
Another really fascinating idea, which I think, by the way, goes some way toward explaining what happened with Trump, okay?
So, there are aspects of postmodernism that are Interesting and relevant and insightful.
The problem is this.
George Orwell once said that liberals are people who play with fire and they don't even know that fire is hot.
And I think that that's something of what happened with postmodernism.
That is, taking it beyond the point where it is interesting and let's see how far it goes and how far it applies, but then using it as a cudgel to attack the possibility that you could know things in the sciences.
That there was any possibility of knowing anything about gravity or anything in astronomy is absurd.
but But once that happened, once the science wars came to the attention, and this wasn't a straight line, right?
This moved through relativism and a couple of other, you know, isms along the way.
But once that critique of science from the left came to the attention of the folks from the right, Notice what happened.
They said, wow, is this a powerful tool?
It's like they were on the battlefield and said, look at this flamethrower.
Let me pick this up and see how this works.
Right?
Yeah.
And then, because once you can incinerate truth from the left, you can also incinerate it from the right.
And then you have this really interesting thing happen.
Liz Cheney, Or not to Liz Cheney, Lynn Cheney, her mother, once wrote a book, you know, excoriating the relativists, you know, just against, you know, all of this left-wing relativism.
And yet, here comes Kellyanne Conway with the idea of alternative facts and Giuliani saying truth isn't truth.
Which, what is that but relativism?
So, I make the case in my book Post-Truth that there are right-wing postmodernists.
Not to say that Trump was reading Derrida or Foucault, but some of the thought leaders were on the right.
Some of them had studied postmodernism and understood that what you really need in any denialist campaign, which I think MAGA is, Um, is a, an alternative narrative.
You need to incinerate the truth that you don't like, and then build up your own narrative.
And that, and postmodernism contributed to that, which drives folks on the left insane.
And it's why I got some hate mail from folks on the left at the time, because who wants to be responsible for that mess, right?
Um, but again, I don't think their heart was in the wrong place.
I think they were just playing with fire and didn't know it was hot.
And then the right got a hold of it and used it to hurt people.
And that is not what the inventors had intended.
I'm struck every day by the use of this word narrative from the right and from conspiracy theorists that they spin whatever kinds of facts and evidence are invalidating their position as, well, that's just another narrative.
And I'm like, can you get much more postmodern than that?
Well, that's right.
That's right.
Because yes, it is.
You make a good point.
What's so difficult about the time we're in right now is that everyone wants to characterize their own view as the skeptical and evidence based one.
I sometimes disparagingly refer to this as freshman skepticism, in which all knowledge is equally suspect regardless of its basis, right?
Except, of course, for the truly batshit crazy stuff, which somehow is on an equal footing with everything else.
And those claims are usually accepted for all the wrong reasons.
And in our work, we find conspiracy theorists and spiritualists will often say that the rest of us have fallen for the mainstream narrative, while they're the ones who are doing their own research from a skeptical position.
How do you think about this epistemic crisis and is there a way out of it?
You've asked a really important question.
I think that a lot of people who self-describe as skeptics don't understand what the term skepticism actually means.
Skepticism is a virtue.
Skepticism is a good thing.
Some of my favorite philosophers and scientists, you know, are skeptical people.
Skepticism does not mean that though that everything is equal because in the absence of this is where we come back to this idea of proof and certainty and science, right?
Some people will say, well, science needs to prove it.
And then whatever science can't prove, they go, aha, now I'm skeptical.
And my theory has just as much likelihood of being true as theirs.
Where did they draw that conclusion from?
Because there's a doctrine in philosophy and science called fallibilism.
This idea that no matter how much good evidence you have for your theory, it's always possible that you're wrong.
But there is also such a thing as likelihood, given the evidence.
And just because a scientist can't prove something, or doesn't have perfect evidence, doesn't mean that your alternative hypothesis is just as good.
In fact, it probably suggests that it's likely to be false, right?
Because most scientific hypotheses in the long run end up being false.
So it's this, it's this double standard that really bothers me.
This idea that I call it cafeteria skepticism.
I'm going to go through and I'm going to choose the things that I'm going to be skeptical about.
And then but the things that I which are the things I don't want to be true, but the things that I want to be true.
I'm going to be completely gullible about that.
I don't really need much evidence for that.
And that just makes it a free-for-all, which is not what science is about.
It's not what any sort of empirical reasoning should be about.
Because it means that anything that we come up with, that we can imagine, Because we imagine it, we think, oh, that might be true.
Therefore, it's probably true.
Therefore, it's just as probably true as the scientific theory.
Yeah.
And if you don't mind, I'm going to now morph into conspiracy theories here, because I think there's a part here.
Look at the way that conspiracy theorists reason about evidence.
When you ask a conspiracy theorist for evidence that their conspiracy is true, if there is any, they'll gladly provide it.
They'll cherry pick out whatever they need.
You know, Walt Disney's signature has three sixes in it.
You know, and once you see that, you can't unsee it.
How does that relate to Flat Earth?
I'm not entirely sure, but I sat through a, you know, a seminar one time where they tried to explain that, right?
So, you know, they cherry pick that one piece of evidence.
Is it really evidence?
I don't know, but the point is, they thought it was.
And yet, where you would expect that there would have to be evidence that this conspiracy were true, and you say, if there's a worldwide conspiracy of all the airline pilots and all the teachers, all the scientists, all the world leaders, don't you think it would have leaked by now?
That one of them would have cracked?
I mean, do you really think you could have gotten Trump to keep his mouth shut if the earth were actually flat?
He would have said it at least once, wouldn't he?
But, but no, because when there's no evidence, then the conspiracy theorist says, that just shows how good conspirators are.
Yeah.
Which means that they're in this hermetically sealed box where they can count both evidence and lack of evidence in favor of their theory, which means that there's no way that they could possibly ever give it up.
That is a travesty of reasoning.
I regard conspiracy theories as really the most toxic form of human reasoning, precisely because it is completely insulated from evidence.
I noticed in the book that you mention Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay's work.
And I've appreciated that in the past, and I don't know if you want to say anything about this, but I feel like James Lindsay seems to have gone quite off the rails lately.
I don't know if you've been keeping up with any of that.
You know, I became aware after I published that they had been up to a lot of other work that I didn't know about, right?
So I cited their work.
on How to Have Impossible Conversations, which seemed a very solid book that, you know, made a lot of sense.
I, you know, and I have to say to all the folks out there listening, just because I cite somebody's work doesn't mean that I agree with everything that they've said or that I've investigated every other thing that they have written, okay?
So, you know, I'm aware that both Boghossian and Lindsay have been up to other work.
I'm not vouching for that.
I'm not citing that in my work.
And I recently, because Boghossian's a philosopher, I know that some of what he's been up to recently and that he just resigned from Portland State.
I really have no idea with Lindsay.
But I mean, you can tell me if you want to, but that'll just reveal the fact that I'm asking that, how ignorant I am of, you know, this other piece of it.
Because I think that sometimes there's a bit of guilt by association, you know, how can you cite this word?
Well, he's most recently, he's started to become very open about being an anti-vaxxer, believing that the vaccines are dangerous and probably- Nobody should take them, yeah.
Wow!
Not what I would have expected to hear.
Yeah, and so this is related to my next question.
The phenomenon that we encounter again and again in our research is the contrarian scientist.
Now, I know Lindsay's not a scientist, but The whistleblower, the former researcher who has now decided that vaccines are deadly, like Gerd van den Borchow or Mike Yeadon, perhaps that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, as in the case of PhD evolutionary biologists Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying, that these are suppressed miracle drugs.
And of course, you know, we know that there are people with scientific credentials, Speaking at conferences about UFOs, Bigfoot, 9-11 truth, the paranormal, anti-vax, and all of that.
And there are accomplished scientists like Francis Collins who are also creationists.
But what do you think is maybe going on here specifically with people who have the scientific background that should inoculate them against conspiracy and pseudoscience, but it doesn't?
Science has always had gadflies.
And science needs gadflies.
Science needs the people who say, I don't care what the consensus of the discipline is.
I think I'm right here.
Galileo is the example everyone always uses.
And this comes up in climate change a lot.
You know, you hear people citing Richard Lindzen, a professor at MIT, and you know, other folks who are contrarians about anthropogenic climate change.
I mean, you hear this in anti-vax with other, you know, names like you just mentioned.
So, I think what happens is You have to remember that science is a discipline where it relies very heavily on the idea of critiquing one another's work based on the evidence.
So, you know, if somebody is a contrarian, if they're a gadfly, they can be vindicated if they have the evidence.
That's the problem, right?
That's the problem when I look at somebody like Andrew Wakefield, who is a medical doctor, though he was stripped of his medical license.
You know, the fellow who claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism did a scientific study on this that was that was pulled because it was shown to be not just sloppy and misleading, but also fraudulent.
He's hailed as a hero at anti-vax conventions.
So, You know, what's going on here is, you know, you asked a slightly different question, I guess, than the one that I'm answering here, because you're asking, how did these particular people miss the fact that they're going against good scientific principles?
And I think that part of the answer is they're human.
They have cognitive bias like the rest of us.
You know, scientists are always more attached to their own theories than someone else's theory.
But you get rid out of the profession, you know, if somebody refutes your theory and you say, well, that's just your opinion.
And then, you know, you continue to do more, more experiments.
But I think there's something else going on here too, which is that People enjoy the adulation.
They enjoy, you know, even if they're scientists, they enjoy the idea that there are tons and tons of people who think that they're right.
And, you know, when you start to play to the crowd, And you stop playing to your scientific colleagues, I think there's trouble.
Look at Galileo, look at Wegener, look at this fella Harlan Bretz, the geologist that I discuss in my Scientific Attitude book.
These were scientists who were in such a small minority, you know, it wasn't even funny, but They never gave up on the idea of playing to their scientific colleagues.
They never said, well, let's bring in the public relations people and have a press release, you know, and just see how many newspapers we can advertise in, right?
It's anachronistic to say that about Galileo.
But I mean, look at Semmelweis, you know, the guy who said, you know, maybe we should wash our hands occasionally when we're delivering babies, right?
He was persecuted for his views.
I mean, he was the gadfly, turned out to be right, but he never went appealing to the crowd.
He always was trying to appeal to his scientific colleagues.
Why?
Because he had the evidence.
So, you know, these other folks that you're mentioning, whose work I don't know, And what I say to people who write me and say, you know, here are the 20 things you should read, you know, before you go to bed tonight, or you're an asshole, you know, about anti-vax, you know, just read this, read this, read this.
I always say, why are you trying to convince me?
Why are you not publishing this in a scientific journal and trying to get it peer reviewed?
Because then you would actually be convincing, you know, more people than just me.
But they don't do that.
Now, maybe they claim you can't get your papers published, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But what makes people think that they're entitled to kick in the door and say science should come to a grinding halt to, you know, to consider their data?
They have to go through the same process that everybody goes through.
It's just you cannot decide scientific results based on public relations and crowd appeal.
It just does not work.
Yeah, I think so often then the next, the next move is to say, well, because the institutions have been corrupted, we can't, this information is being suppressed.
We can't get it out there.
Look, big tech is shutting us down.
It's all part of a conspiracy.
And actually we are, like Galileo, we will be seen in the future.
Yes, Ted Cruz is the next Galileo.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, that claim that all scientists are biased, again, I draw back to the idea of a conspiracy theory.
Scientists are some of the most competitive, ruthless people that ever existed.
Do you really think that if they saw a flaw in their colleagues' work, they wouldn't point it out?
I mean, they're the first to do that.
I always say that scientists keep one another honest, even if they're honest in the first place, because it's such a cutthroat culture.
Yeah.
Not in the sense that they're committing fraud or something, or that they're mean people, just that they're absolutely ruthless with the idea that you have to have the evidence, and if you don't have it, let's get that out of the way, because the field needs to move on.
So, that's I mean, it's just, it's a misunderstanding of science to think that they could all keep this secret.
You hear this again about climate change.
They're making too much money on it.
That they're all, they're all, you know, it's all a function of liberal bias.
They love people paying attention to their work.
Could that actually ever really be true amongst so many scientists?
I mean, imagine the conspiracy that would have to be the case for them to keep that secret, fudge all the data.
It's really impossible.
It boggles the mind.
It does.
So look, the news is not all bad.
In your new book, How to Talk to a Science Denier, you report on some very important data about what changes people's minds.
You refute something called the backfire effect, and you identify five key techniques of science denial.
What do you want to tell us about that?
I didn't refute the backfire effect.
Warren Wood did that.
I just reported on it.
And by the way, the fellows who came up with it, good scientists, they said, yeah, that result is irreproducible.
Good, honest science as it's supposed to be done.
I think the important thing to know here is It is possible for all of us to play a role in pushing back against science denial.
You may think it's impossible to talk to a conspiracy theorist or, you know, cherry picker or, you know, any of the folks who think they're the next Galileo, but it's not.
The way to talk to them, though, is not to try to shove facts down their throat.
Because science denial, based on my own research, is more often about identity than it is about, you know, reasoned thought.
So, you know, Jonathan Swift said you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themselves into in the first place.
So, I went to a Flat Earth Convention.
How are you going to talk to them?
Are you going to bring up Newton?
Are you going to bring up Galileo and Aristarchus?
They've read that and rejected it because they distrust them, because they think that those folks are in cahoots with the devil.
What are you going to say?
How are you going to make that transition?
The secret to talking to a science denier is to realize that there are no magic words or magic facts that are going to convince them.
The way that hardcore deniers change their mind is when they Engage with somebody that they trust, who takes the time and has the patience to pull them out of it.
And you do that through empathy and respect and love, really.
That's how, same way you get someone out of a cult when you get right down to it.
You have to let them talk, you listen, and then you ask questions like, how could that be the case?
Or, why do you believe that person but not this person?
Or my favorite question of all, you say that your view is about evidence, so tell me what evidence could possibly convince you?
And then if they can't answer that, you say, well, your view doesn't seem to be based on evidence, then it seems to be based on faith.
You know, is that really true?
So, I mean, there are ways to have these conversations.
By the way, what I just did there is something called technique rebuttal, which is based on this idea that every science denier No matter the topic, evolution, climate change, anti-vax, it reasons in the same way.
They cherry-pick evidence, they engage in conspiracy theories, they employ illogical reasoning, they rely on fake experts, and they think that science has to be perfect.
That work was done by some cognitive scientists a while back, and it fits, it works, and once you know that pattern, once you know that blueprint of reasoning, You can use that.
There is no backfire effect.
You're not going to make a science denier's beliefs worse.
You can be patient and listen and show them respect and ask them some questions.
And I'm going to be honest, it probably won't work because that's just how virulent this information is.
But I'll put it this way.
If anything is going to work, that will.
Because every single anecdotal account I've ever read of a hardcore denier giving up their beliefs about anti-vax or climate change is because they had a personal encounter with someone that they either trusted already or grew to trust.
And my book explores many different examples.
of this type of conversation.
And it is very, very hard to do, which is why I want more people to do it.
Because, you know, if you, we need an army of people engaging with folks.
I'll say one, one final thing on that, that question.
At another level, Science to Know is about community.
It's about feeling alienated from the normal culture and finding community against other deniers.
And if we just cut off and don't have conversations with deniers, We're leaving them to the disinformation that they're getting from the other people in their community.
By preserving the relationship, we are enlarging their community.
If there's somebody that you love, somebody in your life who's an anti-vaxxer, don't cut them off.
You know, have that conversation with them over time and don't let it break the relationship because that, if anything, that's what's going to bring them back.
The backfire effect was this finding, and this I feel like became very widely accepted as an insight, right?
That when you, if you are too good in arguing against someone's science denial or someone's entrenched conspiracy belief, that it will actually harden their commitment to it.
They will dig in deeper because of the emotional nature of their belief, right?
That's right.
It'll backfire, so it will not just cause them not to give up their belief, but to hold their belief more strongly, which is perverse, right?
It means that your disconfirming evidence confirms their belief.
I mean, that's just backwards, right?
And that idea, I mean, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, it was everywhere after the study came out in 2010.
You know, facts don't work.
We shouldn't even be talking to these people because we might be making the problem worse.
Porter and Wood found that that didn't exist, and then other people later as well.
Now, I'll admit something here.
My 2018 book, The Post-Truth, I discussed the backfire effect, and at that time I did not know because it had just happened that Porter and Wood had done their work.
And so that, as I discuss cognitive bias, one of the cognitive biases that I discuss in that work as a root of post-truth is the backfire effect.
Turns out not to be the case.
I was wrong.
You were wrong, and that study ended up being Not being replicable.
And so there's a much more nuanced position that I hear you going for in how to talk to a science denier, which is Understanding that the, what is it, the information deficit model is maybe not the way to go, right?
The assumption that, well, if you just give them enough information, then they'll change their mind.
But more so that there's understanding that the emotional component is a really big deal, and then the identification is a really big deal.
To a science denier, their beliefs are not just what they believe, it's who they are.
And when you attack their belief, you're attacking them as a person.
Now, so just imagine that.
I mean, that explains why it's so hard, doesn't it?
If you tried to talk somebody out of their religion or out of their political beliefs, You wouldn't expect to just share a few facts and then they'd say what a fool I was and you know you walk away.
You would expect a tough fight and that's what you have with with a science denier.
Now the interesting thing about denial is that it exists on a spectrum.
Some people are the audience for disinformation and you know science denial and they haven't gone completely down the rabbit hole yet.
Some of them have gone completely down the rabbit hole.
Vaccines is a good topic for discussing this because anti-vaxxers are afraid and they love their children just as much as anyone else does.
But they don't want to do the wrong thing.
And so they don't know the answer.
And maybe they go to their doctor and their doctor says, I'm surprised at you for raising these questions.
That's ridiculous.
Bring your children and have them vaccinated.
They feel resentful and they feel alienated.
So they get on the internet.
What do they find there?
When you put in Google, do the MMR vaccines dangerous?
I guarantee you somewhere on that first page is going to be an anti-vax answer to that.
The way the algorithms work on social media, once you start looking for that, you're going to find more and more and more.
Then where are you?
Could all these people really be wrong?
Maybe I'd better hold off.
I mean, I'm not saying I don't believe in vaccines, just maybe I'll give it a little more time.
An awful lot of people who are anti-vaxxers, that's the way they are.
And think how that plays with COVID.
While they're saying, I'm waiting for more evidence to come in, COVID is stalking them and killing them.
So, at the root, at the root of all of this is disinformation.
Not misinformation, disinformation.
Intentionally created lies.
By someone who has something to gain economically, politically, ideologically, from Having people believe false things about all the topics we've been discussing.
And so there's a sense in which science deniers are victims and they deserve our empathy.
And it's really hard to empathize with somebody who is so certain that they're right when you know they're wrong and they're in your face and maybe even infecting you while they're arguing with you.
It's really hard to empathize in those circumstances and I get that.
Um, but I think there's a sense in which they are duped.
And, you know, not just willfully ignorant, but duped.
And I think that that's a, that opens another door here, which is that I think, since I've written the book, I've thought more and more about this.
We don't just need to talk to the people who are already infected with the disinformation.
We need to figure out how to shut down the disinformation.
Figure out where it's coming from.
Figure out how it's being amplified.
We know how it's being amplified.
It's on social media.
There was a story in NPR recently which found that 65% of the anti-vax propaganda on Twitter was due to 12 people.
It doesn't take that many people to amplify.
Yeah, and those those 12 people we've reported on that a lot, the disinformation doesn't.
Yeah, their their posts will end up getting shared and reshared hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times.
And they have they have huge influence.
So I want to come back for the last question here to talk about trust and respect, because that's one of the key things that you discover.
But before I do that, you mentioned technique rebuttal.
And that technique rebuttal is based on recognizing these five key Exactly right.
And it feels wrong to do that.
It feels like, get in their face and debunk them.
me, tell me if this is right, that you're talking about stepping back from debunking the content and more sort of examining the underlying structure of the arguments that they're making.
Exactly right.
And it feels wrong to do that.
It feels like get in their face, debunk them.
But if you just step back a minute and think, why did you just say that?
How How are you reasoning?
Is this thing that you just said inconsistent with this other thing that you said five minutes ago?
That's a very powerful thing.
They're not prepared for that usually.
There's an absolutely brilliant paper in Nature Human Behavior, Summer of 2019 by Cornelia Betsch and Philip Schmid, that outlines, that provides the scientific evidence that this is possible.
And not only that, they provide scripts.
Again, not that they're magic words, but I mean, they say, you know, if this is the piece of disinformation, this is what you can say.
You know, and then I've tried to add to that how you say it, you know, makes a difference.
Her study was done online.
I'm an advocate of face-to-face.
I want to extend their work for hardcore deniers, not just, you know, people who are hearing disinformation for the first time.
But they found, again, they confirmed the idea that there was no backfire effect and that you really could change people's mind.
And that was part of the inspiration for my book.
That really opened up a whole world to me because that means that we all can play a role, not just scientists.
Everybody can play a role in doing this because those five steps are easy to learn.
And if you don't want to read the scientific paper, there are four or five popular media accounts I can think of off the top of my head that discuss how to do it.
I footnote them all in my book.
It's all there that helps anybody learn how to do this.
The biggest impediment is to be willing to be uncomfortable and have these conversations.
Well, it's really important, I think, especially to our audience because so many of our listeners have had really painful ruptures with family members, with colleagues, even with their bosses, with friends around what's happened in the pandemic with conspiracy theories, all of the anti-vax stuff, the COVID denial.
One key message of your book is about trust and respect.
When discussing overheated topics and also you touch on how trauma often plays a role in the formation of an identity around false beliefs.
Maybe we can close with that if you just want to share anything about that to bear in mind as people perhaps try to repair or rescue those relationships if that's possible.
If you had a loved one who had an illness, you wouldn't cut them off, you wouldn't blame them for it.
And there's a sense in which if somebody has been infected with this information, again, they're a victim.
And it's a hard thing to accept.
It's a hard thing to realize.
I hear even as I'm saying it, people saying, ah, you know, what can I do?
It's their fault.
You know, do I really have to go through that?
And yet it's true.
I get mail.
I get mail, not just hate mail from science deniers, but I get mail from relatives of science deniers asking me for advice.
I memorably got, and I have to be careful here, I memorably got a piece of mail one time from someone who had a family member who was a flat earther and it was tearing the family apart.
And my advice was, Don't discuss the content of the belief, because you'll get nowhere.
Preserve the relationship, because if there's anything that will help in the long run, it's preserving the relationship.
And I refer you here to the work of Steve Hasson.
I don't know if you know his work.
Oh yeah, we've interviewed him.
Yes.
So, I mean, I didn't discover his work until my book was already published, but I was on a show with him and hearing him talk about the cult of Trump, and I was thinking, wow, there's some similarities here, right?
And then I read Eli Saslow's book, Rising Out of Hatred, and I realized that this is a thing.
You can take people with extremist beliefs that tear families apart and bring them back and the only way to bring them back is through empathy and love and respect and listening.
So I think you should always prioritize the relationship because if not then really and I don't want to moralize here but if not just realize that what you're saying is This person is sick and I'm going to abandon them.
They're just going to go off and have to burn through it.
They're going to be off in their information silo and they're not going to hear any more from me.
Now, that does not mean that you have to tolerate being around a COVID denier who's going to get you sick.
You know, it's perfectly acceptable.
In fact, I heard of this working recently of a fellow who said to his friend, he said, You know, one, he had been vaccinated and the other guy was not.
And he said, listen, I love you.
Nothing you do can ever break our friendship.
But until you get vaccinated, you're not coming in my house.
Now that's love.
That's tough love, right?
But it preserved the relationship.
It said, I disagree with you, but you're still my brother.
And I think that's important to remember.
It was part of my motivation for writing the book, because I too have family members and friends who, you know, fall into this camp.
And I wanted to think about how can you possibly reach them?
And it's not just through Argumentation.
I mean, I'm a philosopher.
We argue all the time.
That's not the only way to do it.
It's not even the best way to do it.
And so this is why I got fascinated with it.
Because we're all human.
And, you know, we, I think we could reach out more than we do.
I really enjoyed that interview.
I just think the whole arc of it was fantastic.
It started with, OK, so what is science?
And it ended with love and empathy.
So that's a pretty good circle.
You know, I appreciated his his acknowledgment of the criticisms that we commonly hear that, yes, something called scientism is a thing.
Yes, there are issues with, obviously issues with the scientific method and culture being tools of colonialism and empire.
I really loved what he said about, you know, when you talk to somebody about their beliefs, you're also talking to them about their identity.
I don't know.
I think what I'm chewing on most is Lee's definition of the scientific attitude that he pinged off the top of the interview, which revolved around humility.
And as I understand it, you know, this is the expectation that one will be wrong and that there will be an ongoing process of correction that, you know, you have a willingness to submit your work for peer review.
You have a willingness to change or recant or, you know, change direction or attack.
And you also have an ability to know when you're out of your depth and, you know, when you should just shut up because it's not about you, because it's about the world and data.
And I don't know, I've been chewing on it all week because it brings up these questions for me about what else it means to be humble.
Because I can answer that internally, like, as a humanities person, like, and somebody who loves psychology, like, I know when I feel humble.
But how do I let others know that I am humble or that I have that attitude?
Like, how do I show humility?
You know, in journalism, that's about receipts.
You know, it's about fact checking, legal, the general understanding that if you fuck up, you're going to be punished.
So, you know, humility might be an attitude and a technique within scientific culture, as McIntyre describes, and I think in some ways it can be evidenced through all these processes, but it's also difficult to quantify in social terms.
And I think that in the influencer sphere, often we're talking about, and I would include us in that, often we're really talking about affect, like some kind of presentation of approachability, of relatability, something resonant in the person that's speaking that engenders trust.
And so, this made me think, like, you know, who's talking to science denier's performance of humility comes off best, right?
Like, McIntyre is obviously really good at it, but as he says, the world needs an army.
It's going to take all types.
I love what Dr. Dan Wilson does with Debunk the Funk.
You know, I think that Fauci is actually a really good communicator.
And even if messaging has been confusing from his departments and you know, those organizations that he he has had a humble demeanor, in my view.
But then what about like, John Oliver, going after anti-vaxxers, or like, what about, who's that guy, ZDogg?
Yeah, Zubin Damania.
So there's a lot of, in our neck of the woods, there's a lot of debunking.
I have this question about the affect of debunking and whether or not it's coherent with the sociality of humility.
And I'm confused enough about these questions that I'm going to work them over for Monday's bonus episode.
I'll really look forward to hearing where you go with that, Matthew.
And I'm really glad you mentioned influencers and affect and all of that, right?
We're in a subculture that has a very performative relationship to humility as something that is often anything but, right?
It's the humble brag or it's the pretentiousness toward a kind of piety or like, Yeah, just being really approachable and being really open and being trustworthy while... Having wonder, having awe, all of those things, right.
Yes, while often saying really batshit crazy or dangerous things that are about manipulative kind of gaining of influence.
I find it really helpful to distinguish between two different types of humility that you're already touching on.
I think there's a specific technical scientific meaning of humility that McIntyre is invoking.
And as you say, it has to do with the willingness to change beliefs based on the evidence.
And in that sense, we place our beliefs and our opinions as subordinate to the evidence itself, right?
So there's a humility there that says, I will change in the face of the evidence rather than trying to force the evidence to fit my preferences.
And in that sense, we actually have a normative, within the scientific community, a normative social agreement that says exactly that, This is how you should relate to evidence.
And this social agreement is that the consensus of view that that's arrived at by following the scientific method is one that you should adopt regardless of your pet theories, right?
As you said, it's not about you, it's about the world.
And it's an acceptance of standards of evidence as humbling what might otherwise be really grandiose proclamations or even emotionally convincing hunches.
So that's the one sense.
The second, more everyday interpersonal use of the word humility, I think refers to an attitude or a communication style, as you flagged.
It's not really about the content or the basis for belief.
And in this sense, being humble often equates with never directly telling anyone they're wrong.
And so if we use that criteria, then, you know, Dan Wilson certainly kind of fails it, right?
And John Oliver fails it.
And you can see why some people and ZDogg definitely fails it.
You can see why some people in the wellness space would not think that they were humble because they're not being agreeable or tolerant of divergent beliefs, you know, in this kind of who are we to say way, right?
Because, you know, people who know what they're talking about will say this is actually false.
This is wrong.
So in that second sense, I think many people see something like the communication of scientific consensus based on strong evidence as a kind of arrogance because it will inevitably rule out claims that are not supported by evidence or that are so at odds with the bedrock established law of physics, I think many people see something like the communication of scientific consensus based on strong evidence as a kind of arrogance because it will inevitably
I think what's often overlooked here is that the scientific consensus can and does change over time, but it changes because of really strong evidence.
And because the standards of strong evidence are exclusionary, it doesn't mean that they're lacking in humility.
They just are strong standards.
And I want to add one other thing here, which is that This more everyday sense of humility that can sometimes be confusing with regard to science, it's often elaborated in spiritual circles as this even more reverential kind of solipsistic relativism in which there's no objective truth or reality, just what is true for each individual like they have a kind of sacred circle of sovereign beliefs around them that cannot be criticized.
I think that's a really bad idea.
There was this really interesting point in MacIntyre's discourse where he says that, and I've heard people say this before, that the actual playing field of scientific humility is cutthroat in the sense that, like, if you present bad evidence, you're going to pay for it.
And so I'm thinking that part of the problem and the bridge between these two meanings of the word Between the sort of like technical, what does it mean to be kept honest?
And what does it mean to present yourself as approachable that there's a real problem in translation there because we're talking about people trained on a battlefield basically to get to the heart of things and to cancel out all bullshit and then somehow they have to pop out of that into the science communications realm and say, hey, look, I understand
It's very tricky, and I want to add too that when you talk about it being cutthroat in that way, and when McIntyre does, it's cutthroat in a way that's not personal, right?
So the standard thing, if you talk to people who work in the sciences and go to conferences and present their papers and stuff, they'll say, someone will absolutely tear your ideas To smithereens because you got something wrong and then you'll go and have a drink together afterwards.
There's a, there's a sense of, I mean, maybe there, there may be interpersonal shit that happens, but I'm sure there is, but there's still, there's a sense that like the shared project of really coming to truths and really testing ideas is, is, is valued above personal egos when it's operating at its best.
And I think that that's happening a lot of the time.
That's also the difference between debating ideas, which I don't think social media is really geared toward because of how personal everyone takes everything on social media.
If you're attacking ideas now, a lot of people treat it as if you're attacking their person.
And that's just really problematic.
You know, when you discuss the kind of humility that might be overly pious or kind of self-sealing and is really reflective of a person's Just their personal values.
Yeah, I believe that that is a factor.
I'm also aware of the kind of humility that is won through relationships and service.
And I have more to say about that, but you know, I appreciate this distinction between scientific and social humilities.
But that humility, number one, is the real sticking point because it's the province of those within scientific discourse already, but it's number two, the social one, where the rubber meets the road, really, in terms of public communications.
And I think we have to own that we, on this podcast, often get accused of, as in our role as cultural critics, As having a lack of humility, because we present our arguments with too much confidence, or perhaps too much emotional force, that we mock those that we disagree with, that we're rigid, narrow-minded, because we won't compromise on the scientific consensus regarding vaccines, for example.
Um, some will want us to have the kind of humility that they see Zach Bush performing perfect when he's in when he's in rapture over the microbiome or the fishes or whatever, right?
Yeah.
And that's so perfect.
But Matthew, that's it's so perfect, right?
Because it's it's it's it's the it's the humility that that he's the performative humility that is engaging in, which is this mythopoetic kind of, you know, beautiful, mellifluous voice, all the rest of it.
The things he's saying are so not actually humble, they're outrageous.
Yeah, that's why I'll just keep, this is my refrain I think for the podcast, is that just put the content aside and study the affect of the influencer because that's where the trust lines are built.
And with Bush, you know, his followers specifically love him for his own attack on the impious and non-humble technocrats of the medical world.
So you know it's like I feel like if humility is an affect of scientific integrity I don't think we can ignore this much older and more common meaning of humility that also that belongs to the religious sphere which we see Bush invoke because
When people don't find us sufficiently spiritual, they will say that we lack humility, but what I think sometimes they are saying is, how dare you be so certain and so, like, articulate or whatever, verbose, when I feel so confused by this mystery of life.
Well, you would say that.
Right.
Anyway, okay, so here's my disclosure and humility zone for this episode.
I think I often perform my own confidence in the subject matter that we present with a little less than what I would describe as good faith.
Because if I'm completely honest about the positions I hold, I don't hold them primarily based on evidence.
And rationality and being willing to change directions and all these great values that that McIntyre is proposing.
Like those things all play a role for me, but I think actually a much bigger but more hidden role is played by my networks of social trust.
Like who do I actually believe and want to be associated with?
Well, if you're not basing it on evidence, how are you a co-host here?
Right.
That's why we hired you.
Because we're well, yes, but the pay rate was so anyway.
But that's a great question.
Like, why am I co-host?
This is such a great question.
I think I'm a co-host because we knew each other.
Now, how did we know each other?
It goes back a decade.
We intersect in various social circles.
But I think, I don't want to speak for you guys, but I think There was an implicit trust that if we undertook a project like this, we would work hard and we would try to have integrity about it.
But, like, we didn't make any agreements.
We didn't check any boxes about, like, you know, how do we actually prove something or what are our standards of evidence or what levels of rationality are we using to come to our positions.
I mean, we don't have to because we're not presenting, like, you know, branded positions.
We're discussing things.
So, but that's a great question, Derek.
Like, how did we wind up here?
We share social spaces and class and education and a whole bunch of things that don't really have much to do with, you know, am I a really good evidentiary practitioner of analysis or whatever?
Well, and really quickly, I would just say my answer to that question is that we all meet enough of a high bar for one another that we feel like it's a worthwhile project, but that we're not a monolith, that actually we are going to come at things from quite different angles and often disagree on some of the details, if not on some central tenets.
I love that you both took my sarcasm seriously, but it turned out that it worked because I feel exactly the same way that you do.
Growing up, my mother called me a bull in a china shop, and my wife always calls me a bear.
It is my last name, and it actually does Come from the animal.
But the funny thing about that is I just kind of trudged through life, you know, not always thinking, but going off of my emotions sometimes as well.
But that also speaks to an important point about humility.
And I want to second Matthew's sentiment, Julian, that it was a really good interview.
In fact, Listeners might notice that we don't usually lead with interviews, and after both of us heard the interview, we were like, let's lead with it this week because it's such an important discussion and then we can talk after instead of pre-analyzing what Lee lays out so clearly, which was really nice.
As I was going through and making my notes while listening to the interview, there were really just two common threads, and they both had to do with the distance between how we act in real life and how we communicate on social media.
So specifically, I'll start with one of them now, and then later I'll get to the other one, but about humility.
I published my bonus episode on Monday and then I have an article on Ethos today about introversion.
We live in a society that is very much geared toward extroversion as a leadership position or as a fulfillment of your destiny, as some sort of higher level to reach is often presented as extroversion.
In her book, Quiet, Susan Cain goes to a Tony Robbins conference to talk about this because here you have someone who, you know, there might be a number of introverts in the audience, but Tony is telling you walk on that fire, be loud, scream, dance, and the whole idea is often presented as the introverts need to be more extroverted and then they will find their destiny.
They'll be in their power, however you want to phrase it.
And how that relates, I've always fought with social media and why it's not designed for humility.
Because if you wanted to post about your meditation practice, well, first off, you wouldn't post.
But if you did, you would probably take a photo of the ocean or the mountain that you're looking at.
You don't have to be in the shot.
So, whenever I see someone posting a photo of themselves in meditation, that to me completely lacks humility.
I would want to see what you're looking at, and I don't want to see you.
The whole idea that we can have a conversation around humility on a vehicle, a mechanism, technologically, that is designed for extroversion Designed for just showing yourself off.
I mean, look at Facebook's announcement today, Meta.
The company that's supposed to bring people together is doubling down on the focus of the individual.
And so it really gets hard to have conversations around humility on social media when the actual communication system is not designed to facilitate such conversations.
I want to go back for a moment to something you were saying, Matthew, about just your really frank acknowledgement of how so much of what we base our opinions on has to do with networks of social trust.
And I want to give a shout out to philosophy professor Tien Nguyen, our fantastic guest host from episode 55.
I really, really enjoyed talking with him.
He's done incredible work on precisely these questions, noting that because we cannot be experts on everything, we inevitably have to choose which experts to trust in areas where we don't, and for sheer logistical reasons, cannot really have detailed knowledge.
And this gets into his examination of echo chambers and filter bubbles and how social media polarizes us not only politically but also epistemically, meaning on what basis we claim knowledge.
But listeners can go check out that episode for more if they have the same nerdy obsessions I do.
I'd suggest though that our criteria for deciding who to trust really do matter, and they can be evaluated and reconsidered with exactly the sense of rigor and humility that being science-informed requires.
And I would hazard a guess that you're doing that with your network of social trust, Matthew.
Yeah, I guess what I'm bothered by, I'm disquieted by, is that the criteria for deciding who to trust is really post-hoc.
Because I wind up trusting people before I know why.
And it happens instinctually.
I do have some ideas, so I'll lay them out as to how I actually do that.
But I mean, I'll just give an example.
You and McIntyre discussed the mask thing and how that whole debate was centered on fomites versus aerosolization versus the supply chains of PPE and whether or not the administrators actually thought that the healthcare workers had enough stuff for themselves to keep themselves safe.
So there's like at least three very complex variables, probably more intersecting to form this public health communications like disaster.
And I didn't have, I personally didn't have a clue about any of those issues at the time.
I don't even think I knew what the word fomite meant.
And at that time, at the time in which the discussion is most confusing, the...
That's the time at which it was crucial.
That's the time at which people were getting infected, people didn't know how they were getting infected, and people were being hospitalized and intubated and dying.
I was scared for my family, for my children.
In those high-pressure moments, we just make our best guesses as non-specialists.
But based on what?
You know, in these micro-moments, I think all that we have that's really available is social instinct.
You know, and like I remember all of the videos from the health care providers saying, don't touch the mask with your fingers, you know, grab the loops only, which is generally good advice.
But but if it's not fomite, you know, concern, that's not really the point.
And to me, that meant, oh, I can get infected from this thing that's supposed to be protecting me.
It was very, very confusing.
And so, it would take a long time to actually unravel.
Why did I listen to Dr. Tam here in Canada, the Chief Public Health Officer?
Like, why did she fill me with a sense of confidence and peace?
Like, what was it about her affect and her whole social presentation that really put me at ease?
Because I think if I can describe that for myself, I'll understand what trust might mean, maybe in a wider sense.
Susan Cain writes about this in terms of the introversion versus extroversion idea, and again, People, it's called the free trade theories, introverts can be extroverted at certain times, vice versa.
So it's not destiny.
But what studies have shown is that someone who is more introverted in nature tends to trust someone When they come across someone else who they have camaraderie with.
So if I meet you and we both like the same book or music and we find that out very early on, that builds a sense of trust.
Extroverts, by contrast, tend to trust people they're in competition with, and that could be because they see part of themselves in that other person.
So even though they're competing, they trust them.
Whereas if they meet someone, they can kind of steamroll over, then there's less trust.
So when you, when you mentioned that Matthew, about why we trust others, it very often is subconscious or pre-conscious before we even think about the reasons.
There are these social triggers that exist that don't always turn out right or well for the people who trust, but they are there.
Well, that's the thing is that I had this feeling that if I had met Dr. Tam at the comic book shop and we both figured out that we loved Avengers or something like that, or Star Trek, then I would more believe what she had to say about masks Than if we hadn't had some sort of other prior human connection.
It's really, what a tangle.
Okay, so if you are in a group, even of the three of us, if we were hanging out together and we had just met, if I was with you and you crossed your arms, if I crossed my arms within five seconds, you would trust me more than if I did not cross my arms.
There are so many pantomimes, and how does that travel across digital spaces?
I mean, I'm extrapolating and speculating here, but it could have been her affect.
It could have been the tone of her voice.
It could have been the way she held herself when she was talking.
All of those things influence how we perceive others.
Well, I would say that, okay, what she didn't show, here are the markers as I plotted this out.
The markers of non-trustworthy people for me are, affect-wise, you know, as the amount of charisma goes up, the trustworthiness goes down.
As the amount of contrarianism goes up, Trustworthiness goes down.
As the amount of belligerence goes up, trustworthiness goes down.
Basically, the more American a fucker is, the more my trust goes down.
Individualism as well.
The sense that like, you know, I'm just, there's a self-sufficiency that I can glean from somebody.
Anyway, Dr. Tam doesn't have any of these things going on.
She's somewhat contained.
Seems like an adult.
Well, like an adult, but also somebody who has been very concentrated over her data for a very long time, in almost a monastic way, who is able to sort of quietly say, well, this is what I've discovered over my many years.
And so, I look at these public health officials here in Toronto, I just assume that they're well trained, but what it really comes down to is, Well, hold on a second there, because I wanted to ask you something before you go any further.
When you were disappointed, as we all were, right?
By the communication about masks flip-flopping back and forth and being a bit of a shitshow.
You know, realizing that, oh, actually you were just trying to preserve the protective gear by having ordinary citizens not all using it in a panic.
When that happened, for none of the three of us did that flip us into saying, well, you can't trust anything that public health officials say anymore.
And actually medical science is all a bit of a sham because look, they said this and now they've changed their fucking minds, right?
It's true.
None of us made that move.
And so I think there's a whole interesting piece that you've both been exploring around implicit biases and, you know, personality traits that make us trust different things for different reasons and the perception that we have of someone at that more sort of psychological level.
But I think there's something else at play here, too, in terms of how we think about the evolving process of who to trust and who not to trust and what makes us completely lose trust in the person talking or in the institution that they're speaking for.
Well, I never had the sense that when those public health officials changed their messaging on masks that they were changing their affect.
It was the same, it was the same, we think this is a good idea for you to wear masks, but you don't really have to, was beginning.
It was in the beginning, and then when it switched over to, it's actually really important, the sort of tone, the feeling, the setup of the press conferences, it all felt the same.
It felt, and maybe, does this mean I'm a sucker for just sort of institutionalized aesthetics?
You know, like where if the press conference feels reasonable to me, then I'm like, I feel safe.
But I see, but I think, but I think, I think you're, you're maybe going slightly too far and not giving yourself enough credit for the, because I think there's two things that come together.
There's all of that.
And then there's the other thing where you have enough of a working knowledge about the imperfect and unfolding nature of scientific process that you're like, eh, they got it wrong.
And now they're telling us what the data shows and, and that's actually okay.
And I'm not going to like completely reverse my opinion of them based on that.
And I'm going to forgive them because I know what it's like to make mistakes even when I'm working in good faith.
Exactly.
Right.
Exposure was key for me because I've mentioned before, I lived in a hospital when I was young for a while with a broken femur.
I worked in the same hospital for two years in the emergency room.
And I think of my experience about, what, six or seven years ago where in an 11-month period, I had cancer surgery and knee surgery.
And in both situations, I had certain issues with my oncologist and orthopedic surgeon.
And overall, I think they did fantastic jobs.
And what I didn't agree with them, I didn't take.
I didn't take the advice on those things.
And I even confronted One of them about it, about the prescription of opioids she gave me, which I thought was completely unnecessary when I just treated myself with cannabis for pain and was fine.
And she had the humility to actually agree with me.
And that relationship with the medical system, understanding that they're people and it's not infallible.
I think for me it was very important going through this pandemic process.
So I do get mad about some of the communications and the way that they were rolled out, but these are people who are... The idea that everyone involved in the system is part of this complex, deep state that is just out to get us is so juvenile and ridiculous.
And you have to understand that If you were to look historically at how we've evolved in medicine, I'd rather be alive going through this now than any of the previous pandemics.
Okay, so juvenile and ridiculous, but if we're talking about this through the framework of how do we establish social trust, we also have to say that these are folks who have not found their networks of social trust in those spaces.
And so why has that not happened?
Does it have to do with the, you know, predatory healthcare system in the U.S.?
I mean, we know all of the reasons.
We know all of the reasons.
So, and it just seems to be such like a thick, almost wicked problem that we have this backlog of life experience, all of us, that we bring to these situations in which instinctually we are going to establish trust in very, very small windows of time under high pressure and we can go, you know, we can wind up
Trusting Joe Rogan because we say, oh, he's my guy.
You see his t-shirt and you hear his voice for five seconds and you're like, that's my bro.
Or you listen to Dr. Dan Wilson for five seconds and you go, oh God, thank God, somebody sounds like that.
Somebody sounds like that.
He's like, hello, I'm Dr. Dan Wilson.
I'm a PhD microbiologist.
I'm like, oh my God, thank you for being a human being.
But if he said something completely ludicrous, you would change your mind.
That's what I'm so disquieted about, right?
Is that, is that it turns out that, okay, do I have, do I have the best kind of allergy actually?
Is it fortuitous that I hear Joe Joe Rogan and I start getting the creeps.
But when I hear Dr. Dan Wilson, I'm like, Oh, I want to hang out with you.
I mean, seriously, he is, he's just a wonderful communicator and he makes me feel, he makes me feel like love for science and everybody who does good work in the world.
Right.
I mean, people could, people, people trust, people trust somehow to, to, to, to, Tony Robbins is a thing because somehow people are able to listen to the first five seconds of his voice and not have explosive diarrhea, right?
But that's That's not me!
It's not only that they're not having explosive diarrhea, it's that they listen to his voice for five seconds and it hooks into some deep need that they have inside of them that is otherwise probably unexamined, right?
For most of his audience.
Yeah, it's got a hook, but it's got a hook into some need that happens unconsciously for sure, but the affect of aggression has to be absorbed.
It has to be interpreted immediately as a kind of like, you know, firm paternal love or something like that.
Strong leader, yeah.
Yeah, and it's just like we are wired so differently.
It's very, very disturbing to me that this question of trust is so difficult to navigate.
Yeah, I really appreciate how you're wrestling with that.
And I want to flag here, too, what we were talking about a minute ago.
There's a piece of this which is about privilege, right?
There's a piece of this that says the three of us bring a certain life experience to the table where in these situations, we are able to establish trust in a relatively narrow window, as you said, because we're not overwhelmed by our associations of perhaps trauma or injustice or feeling that, you know, if I trust again, I'm going to get screwed
Yeah, and when it comes to like, you know, turning on Joe Rogan, my whole, you know, I identify myself as being, you know, different from him class-wise, educationally-wise, and I do that all very prejudicially, very, very quickly.
And I have this image immediately of the hockey goon in my head.
that I just can't shake.
We do.
And it's very difficult for me to recognize that and for me to look through it if that's actually the right thing to do ethically.
We do.
We have this conversation sometimes because I was speaking for myself.
I listened to a lot of Joe Rogan years ago.
I don't anymore.
I can't.
But his last Netflix special was really funny.
He did a 15 minute segment on, it was just comedy about cats.
It was amazing.
And I could still enjoy that.
I can still go watch that clip and laugh my ass off, even though I cannot tolerate him anymore.
Or someone like Sam Harris, you know, there are many figures who I can take certain aspects of and be like, I really appreciate that.
But then this, I just, I can't get down with.
Yeah.
So, so with, with someone like Joe Rogan, I would guess Derek, because this is the case for me, I'm not looking to him.
For the same sort of thing.
I'm not looking to have the same level of trust with him that I might say with a Dr. Wilson or someone else who we really trust to have command of the science.
Very good point.
Exactly.
I would never turn to him for medical advice.
But it's interesting because I think what both of you are saying, one logical conclusion is that you might, maybe I'm wrong, but maybe you cut him a wider path.
You give him more space to do his thing because there are places in which he resonates with you socially.
And so he's got more, he's just got a bit of a hall pass.
Well, maybe he does because, you know, if Joe Rogan is interviewing Steven Pinker or Sam Harris or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Dr. Cornel West, I'm listening to their half of the conversation and then I'm listening to him.
I'm listening to him some Sometimes having good insights and sometimes interacting with them in ways that I appreciate, but also sometimes say things that I think are really wrong.
And it's okay that he's saying things that are wrong because that moves the conversation forward.
And the expert he's talking to gets to be like, well, let me break down for you a better way of thinking about this.
A bigger picture thought that I'm having with this conversation is something I've thought for a long time, both during the pandemic and with social media in general.
The binaries that are presented on social media are so problematic because I don't have any close friendships in my life where anyone agrees with me 100%.
But there's this fever pitch constantly on social media where it's just like, I'm sure there are people who are listening now that heard me say that I can still appreciate Rogan's comedy and got triggered by that because of other things.
And that to me just does not represent how humans interact socially in general.
The friction that exists in relationships, that tension, is very bonding for people when they can work through it.
But social media does not allow for that, which gets back to If I had a criticism of Lee's work, and also we've talked about this in the past when we had Stephen Hassan on, is that I feel like a lot of their remedies are great for interpersonal relations when you're with the person one-on-one and they're in your social circle, but they fail when you're talking about the communication systems of media and social media specifically.
Because it does not represent how humans actually interact face-to-face, and that is something I have not come across any ways of addressing with these topics yet.
You know, the field is full of great diagnosticians and like, it's thin on prescriptions, I find.
I mean, that's been my experience of this whole project over the last 18 months is like, we can get really, really good and have really good guests describing the core of the problems that we face.
And then when it comes to remedies, we're We have a really uphill slog.
But it is a reason that I think that as much as people will scream censorship, one effective technique we've seen is deplatforming.
Yeah.
Because it just silences some of that noise that people are putting out.
And it's wielded wrong, it's used wrong in many situations.
We had a video taken down on YouTube when we were Talking about ivermectin and the problems with it, and it was flagged as promoting ivermectin, and when I reached out to them, they kept it down.
AI does not understand nuance, so there are many problems with deplatforming as well, but it is at the very least something that does turn down the noise.
In the long run, I don't think it's the right way, but it is one of the few things we've seen that does have some efficacy.
I don't know if we're heading towards rounding up, but one thing that I want to flag for the future is that part of what Lee presents, and I think Julian this resonates with a lot of the way you think about the world, is that
You know, the scientific method represents a clear kind of historical progression that has allowed for all kinds of positive developments and, you know, a betterment of epistemology and all kinds has had all kinds of knock-on positive effects that we can kind of
We can juxtapose against earlier, perhaps more religious ways of viewing the world, but one thing that struck me as I was thinking about how I formulate trust in these questions is that it's not a lot different from the way in which I trusted people in religious life.
The people who were able to give me insight into a particular doctrine or into some literature or into a ritual or something like that, the ones who resonated with me resonate for the same reasons, with the same kind of social humility that my favorite public health officials do when they're talking about, you know, whether we should mask or not.
And so I often feel like there's a a rationalist bias towards, okay, well, we're not thinking or behaving religiously anymore, but the ways in which I think we actually, or at least I, form relationship and nurture relationship through form relationship and nurture relationship through the daily ritual of communication, there's a religious aspect to it that does run on a certain amount of faith and something mysterious that I can't quite there's a religious aspect to it that does
I think that that's true.
True, I don't disagree with that at all.
The interesting question that comes up is like, okay, so if we're willing to own that such a large percentage, as you're saying, of why we trust people is this kind of more mysterious, affect-laden, kind of intuitive response to the person that may tap into our own implicit biases, well then, on what basis do we feel that we have any sort of uh, position from which we can say to someone else, well, you're, you're doing the same thing I'm doing.
It's just that you're choosing the wrong person for the wrong, you know, based on, based on like problems you have in your, in your way of assessing who's trustworthy.
I don't, I don't want to like, um, reduce the discussion to networks of social trust, because that really does put the, the, the anti-vaxxers and, you know, pro-vaccine public health officials on the same ground.
And in some ways they are, which is helpful for empathy and respect.
But then there's something else going on here that we need to name as well, right?
Well, let me tease what I know I've been wanting to do for an episode, and a lot of listeners have asked for us to look more at Christianity and certain devices that exist there.
And to me, this always comes back to a subject that I was studying 20 years ago, which is creationism and how creation, quote-unquote science, presented itself as As being on equal footing as evolutionary biology, that was an actual coordinated effort by evangelicals to debate people.
People like Bill Nye took the debate for better or worse.
It was actually a good conversation they had.
Debate creationism.
You just simply can't.
It's so ludicrous.
And so when you get into the idea of being concerned about vaccines, being concerned is right.
To say vaccines don't work or are going to kill you in six months or whatever, that's also the same level of ludicrousness.
So you have to look at the people driving these messages and what they're actually doing.
And I feel like in many ways, That debate of creationism that was set off, and I'm going to go in a lot more depth when we do get to that episode, because it had to do with the school boards in Texas and the ways that they wanted to instill it into the curriculum, which still happens.
Well, the same thing is happening now with the anti-vaccination movement.
These are coordinated efforts by people with agendas.
There is a space to understand that you can be skeptical of a system, but you also don't have to go so far as to think that everything in that system is wrong.
And that is the conundrum that I feel like I'm battling all the time when I'm looking at these issues that we deal with on the podcast.
Or that maybe, maybe that I'm saying that the, how, how one balances out the, the, the, the value or the, or the, the power that your affective kind of appreciation for how someone communicates and how they comes across with your analysis or interpretation of the content of what they're actually saying, like how you, do that math, I think really matters.
And I think we make better sense of the world, the more we're able to put those things in a healthy relationship with one another.
So I agree that it's a kind of faith.
And I definitely hear what you're saying, Matthew.
I think for me, I like the word trust better because I have a kind of trust in specific things like educational standards and institutional checks and balances.
And that the vast majority of people working, say, in public health have good intentions and are doing their best to follow the science as it unfolds.
Which doesn't mean that corruption can never happen, right?
Because conspiracy theorists will immediately say, oh, so there's no corruption.
Well, yeah, corruption happens, but you need, you know, you need evidence for those specific instances of corruption and a vast and covert conspiracy involving many thousands of doctors and nurses and medical researchers and government officials all lying deliberately.
It's just, it's exceedingly inconsistent with My perception, which I trust, of how reality functions, especially in a democratic society, I don't really see that as being super similar to religious faith because there's no supernatural reference point.
There's no claim that can't be grounded in good lines of evidence and reason.
And I think what often happens with people who become enamored of a conspiratorial way of thinking is they develop a paranoid
