LAWRENCE KRAUSS: I like to keep an open mind
but not so open that my brains fall out. And that's the key point. We have to skeptically assess the information
we receive. We can't be gullible because when we get a
lot of information, it's absolutely certain that some of that information is wrong. And so we have to always filter what we get. And we have to ask ourselves the following
question: "How open does my brain have to be to accept that information? Does it have to fall out?" And by that, I mean when someone tells you
something you have to ask "Is this consistent with my experience? Is it consistent with the experience of other
people around me?" And if it isn't, then probably there's a good
reason to be skeptical about it; it's probably wrong. If it makes predictions that also appear to
be in disagreement with things that you observe around you, you should question it. And so we should never take anything on faith. That's really the mantra of science, if you
want, that faith is the enemy of science. We often talk about a loss of faith in the
world today. You don't lose anything by losing faith. What you gain is reality. And so skepticism plays a key role in science
simply because we also are hard-wired to want to believe. We're hard-wired to want to find reasons for
things. In the savanna in Africa, the trees could
be rustling and you could choose to say, "Well, there's no reason for that." Or, "Maybe it's due to a lion." And those individuals who thought there might
be no reason, never lived long enough to survive to procreate. And so it's not too surprising, we want to
find explanations for everything. And we create them if we need to, to satisfy
ourselves, because we need to make sense of the world around us. And what we have to understand is that what
makes sense to the universe, is not the same as what makes sense to us. And we can't impose our beliefs on the universe. And the way we get around that inherent bias
is by constantly questioning both ourselves and all the information we receive from others. That's what we do in science and it works
beautifully in the real world as well. MICHAEL SHERMER: The problem is this. None of us has the truth. The only way to find out if you're deceiving
yourself or not, if you've gone off the rails, if you're wrong in some way, is to listen
to other people who disagree with you. I started encountering other people that disagreed
with me. You know, we-never-went-to-the-moon people,
conspiracy people, whatever. And I thought, "Okay, so how do we know, if
I don't know what's coming down the pike say in 10 years from now, if I was gonna teach
my students how to think critically, what are the key points, like just basic questions
they could ask?" So, it begins with one: How reliable is the
source of the claim? Here's the claim, how reliable is it? What's the evidence for it? What's the quality of the evidence? Where does it come from? Who said that? Is this some fake news, alternative site thing,
or is it The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times? The source really matters. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? This is super important because everybody
thinks they're right and every website has testimonials about this product or that idea. The question is not "What do your supporters
think?" but "What do the people who don't agree with you think?" Because that's what I wanna know. Has anyone run an experiment to try to disprove
your theory? And so in science, this is as basic as it
gets. Karl Popper called this the Principle of Falsification. That is, we can't ever prove a theory correct,
but we can disprove it by having an experiment that shows it's wrong. So, if you can't falsify it, what are you
really doing? And my favorite story on this, by the way,
let me just have a little sidetrack here from Karl. He's got this great little section in his
book "Demon-Haunted World." There's a dragon in my garage. I have a dragon in my garage, do you want
to see it? Come here, let me show you. I pull up the garage door. I go, "Look, can you see the dragon?" And you look in and you go, "Well, no, I don't
see anything." "Oh, oh, oh, sorry. This is an invisible dragon." "An invisible dragon?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's invisible." "Well, what if we put some flour on the ground
and then we'll get the footprints of the dragon?" "Well, no, see, this is a special dragon that
hovers above the ground; it floats. It's an invisible floating dragon." "An invisible floating dragon, okay. Oh, wait, I have some infrared cameras here. We can detect the heat from the dragon." "No, see, this is a cold-blooded dragon. It doesn't give off any heat." "What about the fire? We can detect the fire that the dragon spits
out." "Nah, it spits out cold fire." You see the problem? If there's no way for me to falsify that there's
a dragon there, what's the difference between an invisible floating heatless dragon and
no dragon at all? None. And of course we can apply this to God or
any other supernatural paranormal type. If I can't debunk it, if I can't falsify it,
if there's no way to test it, then how will we ever know it's true? This is the core of the baloney-detection
kit. We have to be able to get to whether it's
true or not, in some way so it's not just my opinion versus your opinion and we shout
at each other. Then we want to know, does the claimant's
personal beliefs somehow enter in? Because of course, we all have personal opinions
and beliefs about things. My politics, my religion, my ideology can
influence me. It doesn't make it wrong but it's good to
know if somebody has an agenda. So, when you watch Fox News, you know that
they have an agenda, for sure. Or there's other sources on the left that
have a liberal agenda, maybe NPR, who knows. But you see, it's good to know that, just
in case, so when you hear the facts, you go, "Well, maybe, but I know this guy has an agenda." So, that's the kinda thing. Does the new idea being proposed account for
the same amount of information that the old idea does and some of the new anomalies that
the old idea can't explain? So, people offer theories, so-called alternative
theories of physics, for example, and they always send them to me going, "Hey, listen,
I'm not good at math but if you help me with the math I'll share the Nobel Prize with you." Right. I don't do math and physics so you might take
it to the local high school physics teacher before you announce that you've made the greatest
discovery since Newton and Einstein. The problem with that is the current theories
do pretty well at explaining almost everything. Not everything, so there's always anomalies
we can't explain. So maybe there's some new theory coming down
the pike that might account for all the old theories, explanations and the new anomalies,
the anomalies that the old theory can't explain. Maybe. But again, we gotta be able to test it first. So, those are the kind of things. Does the claimant play by the rules of science,
the rules of the field that you're in, for example. Again, these alternative physics guys come
to me. Don't come to me, I'm not a physicist. Did you at least ask the local high school
physics teacher if this makes any sense? Because if you have no training, you don't
know all the mistakes that people in the past have already made to get to where they are
now. And if you're starting here without the background,
you're gonna make lots of mistakes. So, these are the sorts of things that any
good baloney-detector should know. BILL NYE: I've been messing around with this
idea of cognitive dissonance. This is to say, you have a worldview, you're
presented with evidence that conflicts with the world view, so you either have to change
your worldview, which is hard because you've lived your whole life with it, or you just
dismiss the evidence so that you don't have this discomfort, this conflict in your mind,
this dissonance. And that's what I'm working with right now. And apparently the way to overcome that, is
to say, "We're all in this together. Let's learn about this together." Present the conspiracy theorist with the idea
that he or she may be rejecting evidence because it's just so uncomfortable, and you're in
it together, we're in it together. I'm uncomfortable too. And just understand it's a process. Somebody who has a worldview that's inconsistent
with evidence, and I may have some, it takes a while for you to turn around. Like the example of palm reading or astrology,
it's not something people reverse their ideas about immediately. It takes, in my experience, it takes about
two years for somebody to sort of look at palm reading, look at cold reading, or tarot
card reading, for a while and then realize that these tarot card readers, palm readers,
are just taking information that you've given them, the client's giving them, and feeding
it back to you. We all tend to go, "Well, look at the facts,
change your mind," but it takes people a couple years to change their mind. So, my recommendation, stick with it. You'll get frustrated, the person will get
frustrated, but present the idea of cognitive dissonance. This is my latest idea about a way to work
together to a scientific understanding. KRAUSS: Science doesn't prove what's absolutely
true. What it does, is prove what's absolutely false. What doesn't satisfy the test of experiment,
we throw out. What remains may not be true, but we shrink
it down, as Sherlock Holmes would say, "And what remains after all of that is done, is
likely to be true." So, many sources, question what you see, and
whether it's consistent with what you already know, and be suspicious of your own likes
and dislikes when you accept information. That's probably the reason we shouldn't, when
we turn to the internet, go to echo chambers and just read the sources that we like. Now, having said that, if you look at many
sources, you could also quickly decide which ones are not reliable and throw them out. If they're not reliable in one case then you
should be highly suspicious of them in the future. So, we all turn to different sources that
we think are more or less reliable based on our past experience. Try that, and I think it's one great way to
filter out a lot of the nonsense on the internet. When I talk about being skeptical, it is important
to recognize that you can be surprised. And something that you don't think is sensible,
can end up being sensible. That's the way we learn things in physics. So, when someone presents you with an idea
that may seem strange, it's reasonable to be skeptical of it but it's worth pursuing
long enough to see if it might make sense and to listen to arguments that might be convincing,
that might cause you to change your mind. In fact, there's a great school of pedagogy
that says, "The only way we actually learn anything is by confronting our own misconceptions." So, once again, while it's reasonable to be
skeptical of external information, if you're always skeptical of your response to information,
and what your misconceptions are and what your prejudices are, then you will both guard
yourself not to accept nonsense but also you will be willing to realize that sometimes
what you think is skepticism, is really myopia. DERREN BROWN: Where I think skepticism, in
its broad, modern, popular sense, "I just don't believe in God, don't believe in this
don't believe in that," where I think it has its limits—and I speak very much as a skeptic
myself and as an atheist, as I said—where it is important to realize the edges of its
usefulness, is where those things that may not be objectively true but can be psychologically
true, in inverted commas. In other words, psychologically resonant to
the path of living, and what we take in life, and what's important to us and what's helpful. So, that's what you don't wanna throw out. You don't wanna throw out that baby with the
bath water. So, in religion, for example, those things
that are easily knocked down, if you're an atheist, they're easy to kind of make fun
of and disprove, those things are also, they kind of often are straw men to knock down,
but they can often be pointers back to something that is psychologically useful. They're signifiers of something. If you take what happens with religion, is
that you have something that happens, an experience of transcendence or a kind of a thing that
happened historically. Nothing magical or supernatural, but just
for people at that time, a connection to the sense of the transcendent, whatever that was,
a message or something. And then as that moves out of living memory,
to re-create it, a bunch of practices, and dogmas and things are formed to try and recreate
that feeling. And that becomes now a thing of belief rather
than a sort of knowledge that it was at the time. And then to sustain and protect that belief,
an institution is sort of created, and developed, and becomes politicized, and powerful, and
monetized and all of those things. And then it moves into a world where we are
nowadays, where things have to be sort of proved with evidence. So, it starts to try and come up with evidential
arguments that somehow never quite really sort of work. So, you do end up with a thing that's easy
to knock down but that can miss the fact that there's something at the heart of it, which
maybe is useful. Maybe those narratives around religion are
useful to us psychologically. Maybe they have an archetypal, or a mythological
use, that it would be a shame to dismiss because we feel the absence of those things. It's the very fact we turn to psychics, and
fortune tellers, and become terrified and lonely around death. Those things happen because we've lost touch
with some of those myths and some of those more resonant narratives. So, I think being a little skeptical about
skepticism itself and the easy narratives that it forms, is also, I think, very useful.
