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Dec. 20, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:52
3156 Pathological Altruism | Barbara Oakley and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
We have Dr.
Barbara Oakley, who's a get for us.
We've been looking forward to chatting with her for a while.
She's a professor of engineering at Oakland University, where apparently you have to have the first three letters of your name to get in.
Studies the complex relationship between neuroscience and social behavior.
She's the author of books such as, and we'll put links to these below, A Mind for Numbers, Evil Genes and Pathological Altruism, which we are going to discuss today.
Thanks a lot, Dr.
Oakley.
Great to chat.
Well, it's nice to be here.
Thanks for having me on the show, Stefan.
All right.
So, pathological altruism.
Because you've made the comment, and I think it's worth breaking out for the audience, that as we've kind of fallen away from more traditional religious values, the yearning for meaning, the yearning for virtue, the yearning for the field that we're doing good in the world remains as strong in the human heart as ever, I would argue.
And we've kind of taken altruism and elevated it.
To the status almost of a quasi-religion.
And when you say pathological altruism, it sounds like evil virtue to a lot of people.
I wonder if you can help break it out so that people don't imagine that we're just proposing blanket contradictions.
Okay.
Well, of course, I'll try to unpack it, as they say for you.
It seems that I'm, like, totally for altruism.
I think that altruism is one of the best of human characteristics, that it can really make life worth living, and so it means a lot to me.
But I've also, because I've sort of worked around the world and seen a lot of different things, in particular working for the Soviets, I used to work as a translator up on Soviet trawlers during the early 1980s.
So I had deep familiarity with communism from the inside.
And what I began to discover was that sometimes people's best intentions can truly be the road to hell.
I mean, they lead to terrible outcomes.
And how do you figure that out?
And I think part of the first step to that is realizing that good intentions aren't enough.
That your feelings about something being good are actually not enough.
And that you have to look a lot more deeply and more carefully to make sure that when you're doing something you think is beneficial for others, that it actually really is.
Right, because I've had this sort of suspicion, and this is why it's very interesting for me to chat with you in particular, that we're sort of dopamine-based life forms.
And I think that when people feel that they're doing good, they get that high, they get that physiological hit that is sort of a reinforcing thing.
And what they're actually chasing is the dopamine hit, rather than is it actually doing good for people?
Because, you know, there is that old phrase which you alluded to, the road to hell is paved perfectly.
With good intentions and it's almost like if you're getting the hit, the happy joy juice hit in the brain, it kind of doesn't matter what happens to the effects of your actions because the purpose of it is to get you happy rather than to achieve empirical or tangible good.
That is so true.
And I think the epitome of that is the frequently heard phrase, it's the thought that counts.
So you'll do something, it'll have really detrimental consequences, but people will kind of shrug it off and say, well, it's really the thought that counts.
But actually, it's not the thought that counts.
And that's kind of a pernicious saying, because what that does is that removes you from the consequences of your actions and it's just all too easy to do something that seems very kind and actually in the long run it isn't and at the same time A lot of times,
you can do something that looks really mean and really nasty, and actually, in the long run, it's very beneficial, but you don't get any credits for it.
Nobody's going to sit up there and applaud you for looking mean and nasty.
So sometimes we, I think as a society, can be led off the rails because...
It's just so much easier to do the knee-jerk, simplistic, seemingly kind thing.
And one of the great things about religiosity was the degree to which it would allow you to defer the gratification of goodness.
And sometimes a life of suffering and penance would get you a place in heaven.
And so we had this really long horizon, and the fact that something was uncomfortable in the short run Was accepted as, you know, the straight and narrow, the thorny path to virtue that it was considered to be often a negative emotional experience to do good in the world.
But I think with increasing secular values, I guess you could say, I think what's happened is people have demanded a shorter term satisfaction for their virtue.
I think that has avoided or helped to avoid this necessary circling back.
When I was an entrepreneur, every time we had a project that didn't work out, we'd spend days in a post-mortem.
How did it go wrong?
What can we learn?
This circling back for continuous improvement doesn't seem to be part of our I think you're right.
I think there's a lot of different factors that play into that.
A big one, and this is what was pointed out by researcher Joan McCord with her research in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
What she found was that researchers would often come up with great sounding programs to Do important things like reduce racism, to improve and reduce people's addiction to drugs, all sorts of seemingly great programs.
But then if you actually tested how these programs, what they produced, they often had outcomes that were exactly the opposite of what was intended by the researchers.
But instead of publicizing these, and in fact, instead of even following up and seeing what the results of these programs were, researchers were like, oh gosh, we can't actually see whether this works,
because if it doesn't, the bad thing that will happen is that people will become disenchanted with these programs altogether, and then they won't They won't support research in this area, so let's just not research whether these programs work.
And this allowed all sorts of kind of really pernicious, seemingly good-sounding drug programs like DARE, you know, the program to reduce drug addiction, to get into the public domain, and then it turns out they actually Don't work very well.
They backfire.
So there's lots of different things going on.
People want that feeling that they're doing something good, but they don't actually want to know whether it's doing good because then it could ruin that feeling.
Right, and I guess the intellectual cloak is, well, if we have an anti-racism program that doesn't work and we publicize that it doesn't work, people will somehow no longer be interested in combating racism.
And, of course, that's not the case.
If something isn't working, given that resources are so scarce, including life itself, because we're mortal, we want to make sure we're putting our efforts into that which produces the best outcomes, and we need to constantly readjust.
You know, it's like if you drive off and your GPS says recalculating...
You go back to where you were supposed to be going, but there is this grim doggedness to simply push through good-sounding, good-feeling.
I mean, it seems to me they put more work into coming up with the names of government programs than actually making sure that they work, because it gives people the feel-good in the moment.
And I think the more you invest in that, the worse it is if you realize something isn't working.
Then I think you have a very big crash, like you can't get the drug.
And so it's not just you want to maintain the high, I think people also want to avoid the crash that comes from recognizing that something is a big failure.
This is very true.
And coupled with that is that the researchers themselves get great benefit from having these kinds of programs.
They're the ones that are seeming to be very altruistic and that they're actually being supported in part and receiving kudos from their university because they're bringing in university funds and so forth.
And so the unspoken part of this is that Researchers themselves are not sort of innocent bystanders who are looking at this with nothing to benefit themselves from it.
They actually have a lot to benefit themselves from it.
And so it's to their, unfortunately, to their advantage to look the other way if it turns out that their programs are not indeed beneficial.
And there is, I mean, I don't necessarily want to delve too heavily into sort of public policy, but I was just, before our conversation, I was sort of mulling over things that really bother me that aren't being circled back to Jack, right?
I mean, there was this post-9-11 mission that America had, or you could say the West has had, let's bring peace and stability to the Middle East.
And this was sort of propagated, and the Middle East is like a flaming wreckage at the moment of people fleeing it like racks off a burning ship and so on, and causing massive destabilizations, things like It's like the war on drugs.
Oh, we're going to get rid of drugs.
We're going to make it a drug-free America and so on.
The war on poverty where it seems to have created a sort of entrenched underclass of people who've never seemed to develop the human capital that they need.
You know, we're going to pour more money into government education.
That's going to make government education better.
We're going to have programs to heal racial divisiveness within the United States.
This is just sort of off the top of my head.
Wherever you are on the political spectrum, I think it's safe to say that they've not We're kind of in this 1984-style blur of now, where there's no circling back to say, okay, what was our goal?
How much have we spent?
Head Start program has spent $100 billion trying to raise test scores of disadvantaged kids, a tiny bump, and then they kind of go right back to where they started, except The country is $100 billion poorer.
And these kinds of great fanfares, big Ritman cupping, confetti parades, and then we just run off to the next thing and never really circle back to see what's happened, it seems has become, I think, Kind of endemic within Western society.
I don't know about other societies.
I don't really study them as much.
But it seems to be endemic.
Like, that's just our default position now.
And I try not to romanticize the past too much because there was good and bad to it.
But it seemed in the past that there was more of an interest in empirical follow-up.
Oh, I don't think that's actually the case.
I think it's...
Let's see, there's been ups and downs throughout history and we're just going through another cycle where I think that we have to be careful not to allow ourselves to become demoralized by only focusing on the negatives of, you know, how we can be misled by our own feelings of compassion and care for others.
I think the best that we can do from this is to try to start forming our own kind of positive Going past naivete, appreciation for the fact that,
yes, there's a lot of naivete in the human condition, and to do what we can to kind of help others along so that I mean, we ourselves don't have a complete picture.
Nobody ever has a complete picture of whatever kind of social program or whatever you're really looking at.
And it actually takes a much more comprehensive and nuanced picture of whatever is going on, whatever you're trying to fix, and an understanding of many perspectives to try to come about with something that is truly helpful.
And it also takes decisiveness at the end because understanding many perspectives still doesn't get you to decisiveness.
So I do think that there's hope for all of us and that just being aware of the pitfalls as well as the benefits of altruism is a path towards that hopeful future.
Right.
Well said.
Now, the question of altruism I think a deeply fascinating one.
I know that biologists, of course, have struggled with the challenge of the selfish gene versus cooperative altruism.
And my approach to some degree has been to say that altruism is a virtue if it's mutual and reciprocal.
But altruism is not a virtue if it's willed against people who aren't reciprocating or who are exploiting that altruism for their own benefit.
I wonder if you could talk about Where altruism has its greatest value and where it has its greatest weaknesses?
Oh, let's see.
That's an interesting question.
Because I think altruism has...
I mean, our judgments about value and weakness...
All depend on our own cultural backgrounds, all depend on what our own personal needs are, what the needs are of people around us, and so forth.
And that can shape much more than we ever might think, whether we perceive something as altruistic or not.
When I first started researching altruism and pathologies of altruism, I thought, well, this is pretty easy.
I mean, we all kind of know what's altruistic and what isn't.
But actually, that's not true at all.
And in fact, often what is deemed to be altruistic is sort of what most people around you think is altruistic.
So if you think that I mean, if the people all around you think that it's altruistic to kill some social group, you'll probably think the same thing, and you'll be raised to think the same thing, and that's what you'll kind of do.
I was just in South Africa and talking to wonderful South Africans there who had grown up under the apartheid regime, and on both sides, black and white, And the whites, you could tell, many of them were just still...
Still puzzled and often really remorseful at how they had grown up.
It's sort of like in Cambodia.
There was a young man who'd been brought up, and he still remembered stoning to death this couple who had fallen in love together, which was simply not allowed under the communist regime of the day at the which was simply not allowed under the communist regime of the And he regretted to his dying day that he had done that.
So, you know, your feelings about what's right and what's good are so shaped by what's around you.
It is rare to find the person with the wherewithal to stand up against real Against flagrant inhumanity to other mankind and humankind.
I mean, that's one thing that has startled me.
And I always wonder myself, would I have been able to stand up against Nazism, against apartheid?
I think it all would have depended a great deal on how I was raised.
So, circling back to your question, I mean, what are the, you know, when, I guess, to me, just when does altruism go awry?
And that often, for me, just depends on, or it comes down to, are you really, are you doing something that hurts other people?
In the long run and if you are then that's something you really want to step back and take care about but it's all too easy to say well that's not really a person That group, whoever I don't like, whether it's you're a conservative and you don't like liberals, whether you're a liberal and you hate conservatives, it's all too easy to say, well, it's okay to do something bad to them because they're not right thinkers, right?
And it's just amazing at how quickly people can exclude some group from their definition of humanity.
Well, I just noticed this with the terrible shooting that happened in California a few days ago.
The people who were the liberals on the media were immediately trying to pin it on some Republican or some anti-government right-wing group.
And people on the right were like, oh, I'm sure it's a Muslim.
And it was really, it's this kind of jockeying for power by ascribing negative characteristics to the out-group is a tragically common thing.
And the other thing that I've really grown to appreciate over the years is the degree to which, you know, we want to do good, you know, those of us with hearts and compassion.
We want to do good to other people.
We want to help the world.
But the world is a very difficult thing to help.
It's incredibly humbling, especially if you take your own resources and you go out and you try and do good in the world.
It is literally trying to grab a soap bubble sometimes to actually achieve tangible good in the world.
And it's very humbling.
And I think that's sort of a feeling of omniscience, I think, that a lot of people have.
All we need to do is X. You know, find poor people, give them lots of money, and everything will be solved.
Or ban drugs, and everything will be solved.
Or, you know, there's just, we'll go and invade Iraq, and everything.
Like, there's this weird megalomania, or I don't know if it's narcissism or whatever, but this weird perspective that good, and what is good for another person It's easy to achieve and can be centrally planned and executed by some state agency or whatever.
But in my experience, and I'll obviously share where you're coming from in this, it is a very humbling experience to try and help people in the long run because it relies upon their voluntary participation in the process.
And if they were good at figuring out what was good for them in the long run, they probably wouldn't need as much help to begin with.
So I'm always promoting it.
It's really tough to do good.
We wish we had a magic wand, but then we wouldn't have free will and humanity to go with it.
So as far as helping people in the long run goes, do you find that it's a tricky thing in your own life, looking across history or current events?
Oh, I think that we help people much more than we ever realize that we do.
It's become sort of fashionable now to say that the only way that you ever help other people is by working for a not-for-profit, for example.
Well, that's simply not true, and it really marginalizes the incredible help that simply going to work and doing your job every day can do.
I went in, I had to, you know, just get my cholesterol checked for my annual physical.
So I went in a few mornings ago, and the woman who drew that blood, she is the most amazingly efficient, upbeat, just a wonderful human being, and just kind of boom, you know, it was all done in a second, and you didn't feel a thing.
And she was telling me, she said, and I said, wow, you're really amazing.
And she goes, oh, well, thank you so much.
She said, people used to say that back in the day, a few decades ago.
And it's surprising, but...
People just don't say that much anymore.
In fact, they'll come to me and they'll put their finger in my face and they'll say, don't you screw this up.
You've got one chance at this.
And she says, it makes it kind of harder for me to do my job.
And here she's doing this job that's really important and of great value for a lot of people in society.
And yet she's not getting what she really deserves which is praise for her great work.
So I think we can all do some good by going out and just kind of cheering the people who are doing a great job in their everyday work.
Well, I think that's true.
Spreading a little smile here and there can work wonders for people's enjoyment of their day.
Now, I don't mean to sort of turn your immense scholarly achievements into some sort of Cosmo checklist, but if we wanted people to look in the mirror and say, Am I perhaps somewhat in the grip of pathological altruism?
In other words, am I doing things that more promote dopamine-based self-righteousness hunting rather than actual good for others in the long run?
Do you have any kind of checklist or any kind of way that people could Analyze their relationships, analyze their lives and figure out where they might fall on the spectrum of, you know, we don't want to not care about people, but at the same time, we don't want to pretend to care about people just to make ourselves feel good at their long-term expense.
Do you have any kind of signs or checklists that people might be able to look at?
I would say, who are your friends?
If you're looking at, and all of your friends belong to the same group that you do, they all are vegetarians, and they all are people who are keenly pro the environment, and all of your friends are like that, that's when you start getting a challenge.
Because you're not hearing other perspectives.
So I would say if you're a vegetarian, you need to cultivate some friends who are carnivores.
And if you're a carnivore, you need to cultivate some friends who are vegetarians.
If you are...
Whatever social position you think is really just the bee's knees, cultivate someone who has an opposing idea about this.
This doesn't mean that...
For example, I'm deeply opposed to racism.
So does this mean, oh, I have to go make friends with racists, right?
I'll expect to see a little peak hat in the back next time we have a conversation.
But at the same time...
What people often find is that people that they have dubbed racists are not racists at all.
It's just that was a convenient way to vilify individuals, right?
And to marginalize them and to make sure that you didn't talk to them.
So surprisingly, people whose views you may think are just really an anathema, when you actually talk to them, They're quite reasonable.
An interesting study I saw was that when conservatives were asked to describe liberal perspectives, they could do it pretty well.
But when liberals were asked to describe conservative perspectives...
They couldn't do it at all.
They had these sort of straw man, very, very false ideas.
Homophobic, racist, religious nuts, gun loving, or whatever it is, right?
Right.
So, I think the more that we can talk to people who are different than us, and I mean truly different, not just in the color of our skin, but actually in our ideals and intellect, the more we can become more broad-minded in our approach to whatever we're trying to think about, whatever kind of social issues we're trying to resolve.
Right.
Do you think that there are any gender differences, and again, speaking in very general terms, do you think that there are any gender differences overall in how men and women approach the question of altruism?
Oh.
You know, that's a good question.
I do think that men...
Men and women have pretty much the same IQ. In my personal experience, men sometimes approach things perhaps a bit more analytically.
And women, and I'm judging this by my own, tend to be a bit more, you know, like I'm a super soft touch person.
In the family, my kids come to me first.
Now, I know in some families it's the mom who's the hard one, but I can't help but wonder that perhaps a few more women are kind of like me.
They tend to be a little bit more of an easy touch when it comes to calling on my emotions.
And it's actually, it's the emotions that we have to be careful about.
Daniel Kahneman wrote the wonderful book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
And he talks about, he doesn't really give the underlying neuroscience.
He was a very smart man.
That's why he's the only psychologist to win the Nobel Prize.
But what he did was he said, basically, we want to divide, I want to give you two Sort of heuristics, rules of thumb about how you can think about human thinking.
And one is a very analytical approach.
That's sort of slow thinking.
And it's harder.
How do you do a multiplication problem?
How do you think through the analysis of any particular situation?
The other is fast thinking.
And that comes easy to us.
It's emotionally based.
It's the kind of thing where...
You see a little kid that is lost and crying in a grocery store, you just immediately, you want to try to do something to help.
If that little kid is all by themselves, your emotions are just like, oh, what can I do to make sure this is okay?
So the thing is, fast thinking, this emotional thinking, is exactly what it sounds like.
It's fast.
And a lot of times, there's a phenomenon known as Einstellung, which means it's a mindset effect.
You get an idea in mind, and as soon as you get that in mind, it blocks other ideas.
Ultimately, if you put these sort of concepts together, what that means is you can get a fast emotional response about what the right thing to do in a situation is.
And it blocks your ability to look at it more analytically and say, hey, wait a minute.
This is actually not the best thing to do.
Let's say you had a drug addict for a cousin, and he came to you and was continually begging for more money, which you know he's going to use for a fix.
And in fact, your family needs the money really badly.
Your knee-jerk response is to help this person.
But if you stop and look at it more analytically, it's not helping them.
And in fact, it's harming the people who could really use the money.
But sometimes people just have real problems overriding that first emotional response.
Right.
No, I was just thinking while you were talking that my daughter this morning was practicing the multiplication, like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and she started to get higher and higher, and she's like, can I guess?
And I'm like, Not really.
Math, you can't guess.
Not allowed.
But I wonder at the degree to which...
Because, again, this is...
I'm a stay-at-home dad, and my wife is very much like, try to prevent my daughter from ever getting injured.
And...
I appreciate that and child-proof the house when she was a baby and all.
But I'm very much like, okay, if you feel you can do it, give it a try.
The worst that can happen is you'll turn your ankle or whatever and then you'll learn your limitations and so on.
And it's very tough for my wife to see that.
And again, it's really a ridiculous exercise to try and generalize from personal experience.
But in seeing the other parents that I know and other families around, it's not a rare pattern for the wife to be like, don't!
And the dad to be like, yeah, give it a try.
See if it works out.
And it sort of has struck me that Given how many children these days are growing up without fathers, whether or not there may be some of this has been commented about in American universities, I don't know how much it is in the engineering department, but certainly in some of the softer social sciences,
this inability to handle differing opinions, you know, like you need safe rooms, you need hugs, you need, you know, I wonder the degree to which perhaps more of a matriarchal I think?
The money is going to be very upset with you if you don't give it to him right away, and you're going to have to go through days or weeks or months of negative experiences before the person hopefully will dust themselves off and say, thank you so much for not giving me that which I desperately demanded.
I think, was it one of the great heroes who wanted to hear the song of the sirens, and he had his sailors tie him to a mast, and then he was like, no, no, it's so beautiful, I've got to swim to see it, untie me, and they put wax in their ears and so on.
And so I wonder the degree to which altruism may have been, like productive empirical long-term helping people, may have been somewhat diminished in its efficacy by having more don't get hurt rather than learn how to deal with negative experiences.
That's a very long thread, and I hope that made some kind of sense.
And if it doesn't, we can just cut it and move on.
But I wonder if you had any thoughts on the matter.
I think it does make sense.
It's always hard in any society to point to it, and you know this, to point to an individual cause for any greater societal behavior because it's so many strands woven in together.
But I definitely think that sort of the reduced risk taking is part of it.
Perhaps a reason why we're seeing these kinds of behaviors unfolding, the reaction against microaggressions and so forth.
The thing is that people, it's really tough to, I think, There's so many different strands of things that are going on now.
There's a lot of benefit for people to nowadays sort of perceive themselves as victims.
And they're being encouraged to see themselves as victims.
And it's not to say that being a victim is necessarily a bad thing.
But that thinking of yourself as a victim can really inhibit your desire to crawl out of that status and to move on with your life and to think independently and to be a contributor to society.
Victim thinking is...
It's a really pernicious sort of thing because it sounds so wonderful, right, to say that you're supportive of victims and so forth.
It's hard to realize that that's tacitly encouraging victim thinking.
But I want to kind of turn back to something that I thought was really interesting.
When you were alluding to your daughter and her Her multiplication table and her efforts to learn the multiplication table, because I struggled terribly with that when I was a kid, and The thing is, I think in education, there's a lot of pathologies of altruism.
So this is why we see, for example, that in the field of education, only 0.13% of all research literature, of all the main research literature, has been replicated.
So what this means...
Sorry, let me just get that number correctly.
Not 13%.
0.13%.
Yes, which is minuscule.
It's negligible.
Wait, I'm sorry.
I think I just heard several million taxpayers throw themselves off a cliff because that seems like not a great return on social investment.
Sorry, go ahead.
It is.
It's kind of crazy.
And it is why...
Education doesn't have a good reputation.
Basically, if you can get something published, nobody's ever going to check you, and then you can look like you've got great material out there because it's published and peer-reviewed, but nobody can ever check you.
I'm working on a new edited volume.
I did the last one on pathological altruism, but the next one is on altruism, bias, and groupthink in science, and it's omnipresent.
It is absolutely omnipresent.
So this is why educators, like if you're in the discipline of physics and somebody questions your data, you better be able to show that data.
But if you question data in education, an educator will be like, how dare you?
How dare you?
Question me?
Right?
These quasi-Victorian fainting spells, like they fall on the couch and they need smelling salts or something, right?
It's an affront to their honor to be questioned.
I mean, that's the deal, isn't it?
That's what you do when you put out research is people should be able to comb over it.
And like, I'm always putting sources into the stuff we put out and I expect people to go check them.
But if you check in education, it's more of a question of, how dare you?
It's published.
That's good enough.
That means it's been reviewed already.
So anyway, there's a lot of really bad educational literature and educational theories and approaches.
So it did make me laugh.
My colleague is Terence Mouski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute.
He and I did a massive open online course.
It's the biggest course.
It's amongst the very biggest course.
We've had around 1.2 million students in it so far.
It's called Learning How to Learn.
And it is just, you know, I have to laugh sometimes because if an educator had been asked to produce a course, Learning How to Learn, instead of a neuroscientist like Terry and an engineer like me, if an educator had been asked, they would have produced a course that, first they would say, oh, well, it can only be for teachers because only teachers are really interested in, you know, helping people learn.
It's like, no, no, no.
Mm-hmm.
People themselves are actually interested in learning, and so we want you to produce an actual course on learning for people.
What they would have done is they would have given you three weeks of the history of education, three more weeks on educational theories, Three more weeks on how babies learn.
Hang on, hang on.
I need a crash helmet.
I'm getting flashbacks to public school.
I'm going to just fall straight into the monitor.
Too boring.
Yeah, go ahead.
And you would have never gotten, except in the very last week of the course, maybe a little bit of practical information on how you learn effectively.
But our course takes neuroscience, takes the best of cognitive psychology, and we're talking about information from articles in nature and science and really good research literature.
And it's just amazing.
People love the course.
I think when you get past the pathological altruism of poor literature, Poor approaches that don't really help people and you get to the reality of genuinely beneficial approaches.
People just go crazy for it.
And since you've just brought the topic up, if there's any chance to spend a couple of minutes on groupthink within science, it's a topic that I've wrestled with on this show time and time again because when I point out some of the collectivist and negative financial incentives for scientists, people somehow think I'm like anti-science or something.
The scientific method is one of the great glories of civilization.
I mean, it's what separates us from science.
Most of the dismal prehistory of the species.
I'm massively a huge fan of the scientific method.
However, as it's sometimes practiced, particularly in, let's just say, not customer-facing institutions, like sort of insular institutions that get money from governments and so on, I don't want to be like, ooh, we agree on some things, so tell me more.
But if you have done the research on this, it would certainly help my listeners out at least understand where some of this may have some backing in terms of problems of groupthink and lack of self-criticism in scientific departments.
Well, we're starting to see a lot of evidence of this even as it's coming out that the research, apparently statistically sound research, is often just cherry-picked.
The researchers just sort of toss the dice until they get the answers that they want to get, and that's the answers that they publish.
There's lots of evidence that that takes place.
People don't publish negative results.
They publish, there's, well for example, recently it came out that only When you looked at some of the gold standard studies in social psychology, only 30% could be replicated.
So what this meant was there was less than chance, odds, that whatever you were publishing was actually correct.
So in other words, it's almost as if researchers were deliberately picking something That was their pet theory, and chances were, it was dead wrong.
But the thing is, we get this because of, in part because of litigation, And which is not, I mean, the value of litigation is sometimes questionable, but sometimes it's really important.
But people, we get this misleading idea that bad science is always in the past, that it's somewhere started like maybe 50 years ago.
That's bad science.
Like, oh, those eugenicists, they were terrible.
And, you know, but it's all been fixed now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, sure.
They were wrong in the 30s or 1970s in saying everything was all, you know, I don't have a dog in the fight of global warming.
I'm not a climatologist and I don't know anything about it.
But I just, I look at it and say, well, let's see, in the 70s, everything was going to freeze, right?
And now everything's going to, you know, hell's going to burn over and so forth.
No, no, no.
That's one iteration behind because the first one was global freezing.
The second one was global warming.
Now it's climate change and that stuff's going to change, which seems to me kind of indisputable and not much of a null hypothesis for that particular thesis, but sorry, go ahead.
It is.
That's true.
But what people take from this is, wait a minute, they were all wrong 50 years ago, but it's okay now.
And the reason that this kind of feeling arises is because nobody wants to really...
And we're talking about any issue.
We're talking about...
The current trends in psychology, in sociology, in whatever field, anthropology, that you want to name, and particularly the social sciences.
Or nutrition, just to bring up one as well, where it seems the weather vane of the nutritional fad seems to be very dizzying, but I just wanted to throw in that.
That was a good point.
But the thing is that people are still alive, and they consume you, If they don't like what you're saying about their scientific research.
And so this is why there's this, like, 50-year window.
Because people are safely dead, and you can criticize them back then.
But the same stuff is going on right now.
There's lots of evidence of groupthink.
For example, I was very interested.
Martin Nowak is a Preeminent evolutionary biologist, sort of physicist.
He's at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
And he published a paper about evolutionary, about, let's see, if I remember correctly, it was about group processes in the evolution of altruism.
And so what happened was somewhere around 120 or so psychologists published a paper that basically said, well, you're wrong because we all signed this paper.
And there's stuff out there that kind of says that you're wrong.
And they didn't really refute, I mean, specifically go and find any issues whatsoever with his mathematical analysis or anything.
It was just basically, as a field, we think you're wrong.
And it was just, I'm almost thinking that the more that petitions come out and people start alluding to the importance of what everybody else is thinking in a field, the more problems there are in that field.
Because it's a strong indication.
Because what are you going to do if you're a young researcher and somebody comes to you and says, sign this petition?
Right.
You're screwed if you say, no, I'm not going to sign this.
You're not going to be invited to be an associate editor on a journal.
People are going to start looking a little more carefully at your contributions.
Your submissions for grants are going to be looked upon questioningly.
There's a lot of groupthink that goes on in science, and it's I mean, researchers all know this.
I mean, you know that there are certain journals you can't turn your work into.
If you follow a certain body of thought, and this journal has a different perspective, they will send your paper back in a body bag.
So, you just have to be...
I mean, it's just so omnipresent that if you're in it as a scientist, you know it.
But if you're outside it, you kind of think, oh no.
You kind of think of it almost like a church.
They can't be that way.
They should be really good.
But it's not that way at all.
If it's a church, it's a very, very incestuous one.
Oh, the idea that science is consensus, you know, one of the great scientific heroes, at least of mine, Albert Einstein, after he came up with the general theory of relativity, I think it was 150 physicists signed a paper saying that he was wrong.
And he said, well, why would you need 150 if one can disprove the data?
You don't need 149 others.
I mean, just work with the data.
I don't need a bunch of signatures.
That's not how science works.
And this consensus stuff is troubling because, again, to the outsider, it looks like a phalanx of absolute empirical correctness.
But knowing it's the old thing, like how scientific consensus makes reminds me of Bismarck's old statement, like there's two things you shouldn't see getting made, laws and sausages.
And I think sometimes scientific consensus may fall into that category as well.
That's so true.
Well, one of my heroes is Stanley Prostner, who won the Nobel Prize for his discoveries in relation to prions, which are these kind of malformed proteins.
And he worked for decades.
Everyone opposed.
I mean, if you read his autobiography, it's just, I mean...
It's remarkable that he was able to persevere in the face of such unrelenting criticism by people who were vested in the viral approach.
That's how they were getting all their grants.
So everybody just wanted viruses.
And who was this upstart to come up with some bizarre idea?
Another of my heroes is Santiago Ramoni Cajal.
And what Cajal used to say, he won the Nobel Prize for, and he's considered the father of modern neuroscience.
He was working in the 1920s, 1910, 1920s.
But he said, I'm not brilliant.
Actually, my gift is that I can persevere and that I'm flexible in the face of changing data.
He said, I've worked with many geniuses.
And their challenge, their problem is that they jump to conclusions, they're not used to being wrong, and so as a consequence, they're completely inflexible when their ideas prove wrong.
They just have to keep going.
So I think that's a lot of what continues to take place in science today.
And as you say, by the time people have proven wrong, it's a long way down the road.
And then there's some new thing that people are afraid to talk about and criticize.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time.
I probably could chat all day, but I did have a look at your online course.
We'll put links to it below as well as links to your books, which I highly recommend.
Very entertaining and engaging writer.
And if I can just get your kindness for maybe a minute and a half more, your husband.
You have to tell the story, if you don't mind, of how you met your husband.
I mean, I like asking couples how they met in general.
I just find it kind of fascinating.
But if you and I were at a dinner party, I'd be like, okay, this is it for the dinner party.
You're just going to tell this story over and over again, because it's quite remarkable, if you don't mind.
Well, I was working at the South Pole Station in Antarctica, so it was very, very cold, and that's where I met my husband, and he swept me off my feet.
Three weeks after we met, he proposed, and three weeks after that, we were married in Akaroa in New Zealand, and so I always say I had to go to the end of the earth to meet them.
What was he doing?
Was he lost?
Did he, like, take a wrong turn at Albuquerque?
I mean, was he looking for the edge of the earth according to the Philadelphia?
What was he doing down in the South Pole?
Well, he was the man to know.
He was in charge of the garage operations, and I was a radio operator.
So he, I mean, you know, hanging out with this guy, we could actually go out to the garbage dump together.
We could get on a vehicle, right?
I mean, we started global warming.
I mean, what can I say?
So, you know, for the guys out there, if you really want to know how you get game in the game of romance, you take a woman to a garbage dump when it's minus 80.
That apparently is the best way to warm a woman.
It's a real turn on, I'm telling you.
Absolutely.
Well, I guess you can judge a man by the size of his tires.
Well, thanks very much.
We'll put links below.
We'll send you a copy of this, of course.
A real pleasure.
I hope we can do it again.
And thanks for all the work that you're doing to bring challenging and esoteric subjects to the attention of intelligent laypeople.
It's a real pleasure to have the conversation.
It's great speaking with you, Stefan.
Thanks so much.
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