Why We Believe In Conspiracy Theories with Michael Shermer

Lee Harvey Oswald is a lone nut with some psychopathy and whatever mental issues he had that that doesn't feel right right so you got to add elements you know so the KGB and the FBI and the CIA the Cubans and the models you're just cranking it up like like the Jack of a car until it's the causes are match the effect this is Star Talk Cosmic queries Edition Neil deGrasse Tyson here your personal astrophysicist I got with me my co-host Chuck Nice Jack hey Neil how's it going welcome back on for for another episode of cosmic queries yes inquiring minds want to know and the title of this one is why do people believe conspiracies why do they want to believe conspiracies that's what we really should call it oh do we need a whole episode for that because I think we do right now okay it's called stupid they're stupid stupid people we live okay we're done here thank you good night all right anyway we have I guess one of the leading if there was a patron saint of Skeptics yes this man Michael Sherman Michael welcome back to StarTalk yeah it's a good start well you know if the intelligence is distributed in a bell curve by definition half of them are below the mean so yeah you may be right except for like we'll be gone where everywhere everyone's above normal yes yeah yeah so let me just get a little your bio out here founding publisher of skeptic magazine yes and you've got your own uh podcast the Michael Shermer show I've been on multiple times thanks for inviting me uh you're you're a presidential fellow at Chapman University where is Chapman University orange Anaheim Southern California and you have degrees in Psychology experimental psychology and in the history of science very important topic there History of Science and cool you've got a book this fall uh titled conspiracy colon why the rational believe the irrational you see good thing Chuck didn't write that book because he just said you ain't rational if you believe it my book would have been called conspiracy what's up dumbass there you go all right so so Michael I love my soul's response oh boy he's like it's going to be a long show so so I I you are deep in in this topic your whole life yeah I mean it's a career you're a career skeptic and I just want to uh just enter on on Common Ground here with you there are people who might say uh I don't believe the claims of vaccines because I'm a skeptic right and so at what point do you say no you're not a skeptic you're actually ignoring evidence at what point because they might think that they're trained to be skeptical of everything they hear how do you help those people right that's the rub because nobody thinks that they are believing nonsense no one joins a cult you know people join groups that they think are good you know no one in the history of the world is ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist going down to their pseudo lab to collect pseudo facts to support their pseudo theories right they think they're on to something and so the question is what does it mean to be a skeptic really it's following the evidence and when there's enough evidence to kind of tip the scales into belief with a small B in the truth with a small T when there's a consensus you can say yeah okay so it's all accepted as provisionally true I'll be willing to change my mind if the evidence changes but for now I accept the Big Bang Theory of uh in the theory of evolution The Germ theory of disease global warming is real vaccines do not cause autism you know and and are helpful for public health and so on so none of these are based on arguments from Authority it's that I know the scientific process works in a way that scientists themselves are competitive and they push it each other to higher levels of evidentiary standards and so by the time it trickles down to me I'm not a climate scientist but you know if most climate scientists tell me that you know global warming is human caused and real it's reasonable to accept it because of all the competitive uh push and pull in the process to get there in the first place right so in the case of conspiracies it's it's a little bit different because um conspiracy theories are ideas about conspiracies which is defined as two or more people plotting in secret to gain an unfair illegal or immoral advantage over somebody else or some other group and that happens all the time right so it's not unreasonable for people to think I I said I'm suspicious that something might be up because it happens often enough in the real world Corporate America corporations you know cheat to to dodge the regulatory state or government agencies do things because they don't tell you that brings up a a very um interesting question for me okay conspiracies are legitimate as a as conspiracies but if they are done in secret then how is it that you're how can you convince somebody that the secret has been exposed or that there was no secret to begin with hmm right well so you do have to have evidence uh so not all conspiracy theories are equal which ones have evidence or not and what would you predict for evidence so for example um if uh Wikileaks showed you know millions and millions of classified documents leaked to the public not one mention of 911 as an inside job not one mention of the uh hoaxed moon landing and where it was filmed and you know no memos about that or you know or just take your pick you would expect in a leakage like that like with the Pentagon papers we found out all kinds of things that the government was lying about but none of them had to do with the moon landing or anything like that it was like they lied about the Vietnam War well okay that's not exactly shocking governments do lie to their citizens right but you would predict if something one of these other conspiracy theories that are popular were true there would be some evidence for it in a leakage like that there you go so so Michael in your book you you you speak passionately well you speak personally in many places but the one that that struck me was uh when you commented about the reaction of people to your uh 911 analysis that appeared in Scientific American Magazine I mean Scientific American is as as pedigreed a place as you'd ever find the writings of Science and could you just tell us a little bit about people's reaction to you right so there I I wrote about this one of the little memes going around that uh you know that steel melts at 2700 degrees I think it is and the jet fuel only Burns at like 1800 degrees therefore no melting steel no collapsed buildings they must have used uh internal explosive devices you know demolition intentional demolition who who did this it must have been the Bush Administration and and you're off and running anyway I just pointed out I called that Fahrenheit 277. you don't have to actually melt steel all the way right right you only have to weaken it they don't melt the Horseshoe to reshape it right it just has to become malleable so that no longer can support the weight of the structure itself don't melt horseshoes that's right right right and those buildings are heavy I mean they're each floor is really heavy right so and and from there then it's it's actually a nice test case of how you know if a conspiracy theory is likely to be true or false how many elements would have to be involved come together just perfectly in the in perfect coordination for it to happen how many people would have to be involved you know to plant explosive devices in a building you have to break through the drywall and wrap this structural support beams in in these explosive devices there must have been hundreds of them in each of the two buildings two of the most secure buildings in the entire world after the Al Qaeda tried to bomb at 93 right so how did they get in there oh well they were there under the pretense of elevator repair oh elevator repair then why are they nowhere near the elevators planning these explosive devices right and also they would have had to know exactly which floors that the planes were going to hit ahead of time to put the explosive devices on those floors because that's where the the buildings collapsed at they this collab started at that those floors you're giving rational facts right why why are they even relevant and by the way also there's the most rational fact s Administration come on yes right so and the people that believe this by the way also think this is the most incompetent uh presidential Administration we've ever had and somehow they pulled off the most sophisticated conspiracy of all time right exactly and no one that was involved wants to go on 60 Minutes and write a tell-all book or somebody that knows somebody um that was one and become wealthy independently wealthy defense for us right for having done so let's get to our questions because we know I don't want to ask questions that I know we got people who are asking so Chuck what do you have lined up all right so this is Michael here this first question Michael looks all comfortable in his chair there he loves watching my Captain's game that's great that's a good chair let's let's see if we can destabilize this chair with these questions okay go so this first question is from a Super Fan named Chuck nice he says Chuck are these patreon members and are you still not a patreon member you don't have to ask questions oh that's right okay I do have a question though I want to ask is it's a personal question for uh for Michael but I'll I'll get to our patreon Members First here we go Kevin December yeah Kevin assembly says uh do most conspiracy theories get conjured up because of Hollywood films or is it more the mistrust of government or is it a combination of the two well it's a combination of the two and many other factors as well politics plays a role but in general if a film comes out that's very popular like JFK and 91. retelling yeah I mean it was a well-made film I mean it's compelling you know back and to the left back and to the left Kevin Costner is repeating this and he's like oh my God he must have got shot from the front right and uh until you dissect the film and you you pull out all the mistakes and errors and exaggerations and incorrect uh inferences and so on there's really not much there but yeah so films drive it make it popular for a while I mean there were some actual studies done after JFK was released in which the percentage of people that suspected the government or somebody was involved besides Lee Harvey Oswald went way up it's like it was it's always been above 50 since the Warren report this is kind of the mother of all conspiracy theories it never dips below 50 but after the film it got bumped up so you know I have a whole chapter on that because that it's one want everyone's so interested in there's a whole industry of books and films about it yeah but Michael you commented that that World War One began in a bit of a had some conspiracy routes to it and that's before we have modern media even before films mattered right so right so yeah there must be something deeper within us that's not so much slave to media that we still want to make this happen right because conspiracy theories go all the way back to ancient Rome right the the plot to to kill Caesar and so forth that or when or when Rome burned there were conspiracy theories about uh you know Nero made it happen on purpose my Hopper he let it happen on purpose lie hop right this is a very old idea even uh you know Roosevelt was accused of letting Pearl Harbor right be bomb over making it happen on purpose just to get us into the war right yeah yeah because why else would line up the ships that way like like sitting ducks for their bombers right because if I call this everybody if if there's one thing we all know about America is we will resist getting into a war at all costs see I call this I call this instead of my Hopper or ly hop I call this cowhop capitalized on what happened on purpose right so it's not that bush orchestrated 911 or let 911 happen but he certainly capitalized on it right to follow his own agenda as did Roosevelt absolutely wanted to get the United States into the war to support Great Britain against Germany couldn't do it without some uh event and that was the event so politicians do do that oh you know and and they do so in secret often you know and and you know I have all chapters on all the shenanigans the CIA has been up to in the 50s 60s and 70s you know MK Ultra you know dosing U.S citizens with LSD and other mind control drugs because we didn't want to fall behind the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans and mind control technology or you know planting um spies in social justice organizations like aim the American Indian movement family are you telling me we fell behind in a mind control Gap just exactly like there was a missile Gap there was a fear that we're behind the Russians on mind control there's a mind control Gap yeah but it turns out the Russians were making us think that we were behind all along don't get meta on me now Chuck that's actually a thing Chuck that's a you know an agent of disinformation you know they're purposely uh you know leaking information that's false that sends us down the wrong track UFOs are subject to that you know that there's a lot of people that think that the government is very amused by all the talk of uaps and UFOs because it distracts the public from what they're really doing whatever that may be right right right wow God all right here we go this is uh Stephen Somers uh Stephen says greetings stargazers uh please what are the top three cognitive biases that prevent intelligent people from making intelligent choices yeah so this is this is the core of the subtitle of your book where you make the Assumption contrary to Chuck's book that he hasn't written Yet Michael you you are you are granting the person the the power of rational thought and then posing the question how does a rational person believe in such a thing so so where is the where does the rationality get driven off the cliff well in fact back to where we started with Chuck's comment about intelligence in fact intelligent people are really good at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for non-intelligent reasons that is to say most of us believe all sorts of things that we didn't arrive at through evidence and rationality and smart people are really good at that the confirmation bias only seeking confirming evidence for what you already believe and ignoring the disconfirming evidence the hindsight bias after something happens it seems obvious why it happened and we should have known it happened like the August 9th 2001 Memo from Condoleezza Rice you know Al Qaeda to strike U.S on U.S soil how come the Bush Administration didn't do anything about that well because there were 10 000 pieces of Intel every week about what Al Qaeda was up to and you know only after the fact do we go oh that's the one I mean you know this but I just want to add because I I come from the universe here that for the shuttle disasters right right you once you have the disaster you then look and find the memo from an engineer about the opening launch for those reasons right and for successful launches you don't engage in that same search where you might find as many or possibly even more memos that give just the same kind of warning it's it's very simple it happens to everybody uh probably on a daily basis let's just say for instance you're about to drive to work and you say should I take Elm Street or should I take Pine Street and because you had that thought of the choice between Elm and pine you get on Pine Street it's backed up you automatically say to yourself I knew I should have taken you say that I knew I should have taken L Street something told me to take Elm Street no what you did was you equally weighed both and decided on one but in hindsight the other seems like it was your choice because otherwise you know you're just stupid exactly so hindsight price sounds pretty pernicious but the the questioner asks is there a third bias that we put at the top of this list oh well just let me just Riff on that one more time because um and by the way Chuck Elm Street was one of the streets that the Kennedy uh that JFK turned off of onto to into the dealy Plaza so interesting you picked that one I wonder if that was random I should have turned on Oak Street instead yeah okay exactly actually Mike Michael before we get your third bias and before you flush out what you just said I'm going to take a quick break and when we come back more with Michael Shermer he's got a new book out on conspiracy theories and why rational people might think irrationally about them we'll be right back on Star Talk we're back StarTalk Cosmic queries Michael Shermer patron saint of Skeptics not only on Earth but Across the Universe I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure and I Michael is an atheist so for me to call him patron saint of anything uh so I mean I mean that in a in a in a metaphorical sense Michael I don't mean I don't think he's a man just be a patron saint so Michael the question was uh what are the three top uh cognitive biases that would lead someone to think uh conspiratorially and we left off with the hindsight bias which is particularly pernicious right what else you have going there well then also um we we missed the events that didn't happen so there's no conspiracy theories about Hinckley shooting Reagan because Reagan survived Eddie died he very likely they would have very likely been you know conspiracy theories about who was really behind Hinckley besides that you know mental illness something like that the third one I'd say proportionality bias it is we we want to proportion causes and effects they should be roughly equal if you take a little Stone and hear some Physics for you uh and you throw it you know a little bit it doesn't go very far if you throw it you know hard it'll go much farther so we think of cause and effects you know if I put a lot of effort if you ask subjects to roll a dice and and try to get a low number they kind of throw the dice gently if you want them to get a high number they really throw the dice oh yes yeah yeah oh my God it's hilarious really funny oh my God they gently if you gently drop the dice oh my God I'm gonna get a one or a two no I want a five or a six right uh so uh in terms of conspiracy theories if a big event happens So Reagan survives so okay it wasn't that big of a thing but uh JFK didn't so what's the cause of of Kennedy's uh death it's got to be the most powerful person in the western world has got to be something equal right so Lee Harvey Oswald there's a lot low nut with some psychopathy and whatever mental issues he had that that doesn't feel right right so you got to add elements you know so the KGB and the FBI and the CIA the Cubans and the mind you're just cranking it up like to make sure I have a car until it's the cause is if you think about that you know the Holocaust the Holocaust one of the worst things that's ever happened in human history committed by one of the worst political regimes of all time the Nazis that there's a kind of a cognitive balance there uh or just take say 911 you know you telling me 19 guys with box cutters managed to pull this off this is the kind of thing you hear now it had to be something massively big because it was massively big or Princess Diana cause of death drunk driving speeding no seat belts right tens of thousands of people die of in automobile accidents for those three reasons but princesses are not supposed to die by the same way that the rest of us die right so you know it had to be the royal family and Prince Charles right yeah yeah oh man so proportionality I have to go there you have to go come on you know that that's that's still a big deal like everybody yeah it was like you know once you go black the royal family kills you you know like that's tough I mean you know come on that doesn't even rhyme Chuck it's my newest it's not even a saying it's not a thing it is now so Michael um we we mentioned JFK mentioned 911 um is are there conspiracies like the mothers of all conspiracies that we can learn the best lessons from so that we can then walk away and apply it to our Thanksgiving dinner and any other conversations we we might encounter well let's just take the rigged election conspiracy theory you know when he's you know you and I take it yes were you being any young man I'm like please yeah please take it take it take it anywhere just take it you can throw it in the dumpster well okay so first of all you know there's always election anomalies if you go and search for them we call that anomaly hunting and uh and in other countries there are rigged elections I mean the CIA famously was involved in rigging elections in South American countries in favor of fascist dictators over communist dictators because at least they'd be friendlier to U.S industrial interests right business interests and so on our RP our government did that right so it's not unusual for people it's not unreasonable for people to be a little suspicious of that and if you look in past elections almost every time the every every losing party thinks that the other party was up to something there were some Shenanigans there in Ohio or there was some quirky thing in Iowa and so on oh by the way I just because it's fresh in my head I recently saw Citizen Kane and in it uh Kane runs for office and but is caught in a trist and so he loses popularity he ends up losing the election and but he controls the newspaper so the next morning's headline was that the election was rigged uh against him interesting yeah yeah wow nothing citizen came oh my God what an interesting tidbit of trivia nothing new Under the Sun I guess yeah I know right these things are old and go way back okay so well what's the what's the take home here how do you know what to believe what's true what's Justified true belief the definition of knowledge well the Justified part well how am I going to determine if I don't know what that van was doing at three in the morning when it pulled up behind that building in in Georgia somewhere and there was a grainy video of this and you can't quite make out what's going on but it looks like they were bringing in boxes of votes maybe there was something to it I wouldn't even know who to call right so I uh but but so you have to have some trust in institutions that do confirm these things that do look into these things right so when attorney general Bill Barr appointed by Trump himself and who is a lifelong Republican and who would be motivated to find some kind of fraud couldn't find any and said we didn't find anything the election was totally legit that should have been the end of the story when Society is normally structured in a way where you trust institutions like that but that's not the world we live in at the moment you know people don't trust science like they used to or the CDC or scientists or professors and they certainly don't trust politicians anymore so that's right save that for the third segment because we want to know we need some positive thoughts at the end of this how do we rebuild confidence in institutions uh but I want to save that for the third segment Chuck why don't you give me another question okay let's go to Rude Van Der Linden rude says hello Neil hello Chuck hello Michael rude from the Netherlands here I've got a question scientific research after covet indicated that people in countries where government trust was not was high got vaccinated more often if this is true for misinformation as well does high distrust equate to more misinformation circulating or you know he's basically is is there a proliferation of misinformation uh when the ground is fertilized by mistrust basically is what he's saying yeah indeed it is right as the example I just gave if you don't trust any voting institutions to run a legitimate election no one's going to believe it so I am worried about that and Chuck what's a common fertilizer but you know bull poop obviously I'm sorry I said it I'm sorry you said fertilize you said fertilizing right yeah however I mean that just begs the question then um why don't I believe like if you're talking about an election why don't I believe that it was rigged when my guy won if the whole thing is crap to begin with so if you don't trust the institutions that means the institution of um elections are uh right so very important question there right and this is this is the it's I I only complain about the umps when they're right when they call a strike against Mighty against my team right right right yeah that's called the my side bias it's certainly quite strong we notice yeah Michael has names for him it is so great I wish I was that fluent man that's my side bias you you cosmologist and astrophysics you're not the only one to have cool names every sporting fan probably yeah to my side bias even though they don't want to but so what normally happens though in previous elections is that after a while the losing side drops the conspiracy conspiracy theory and they start focusing on the next election this is unusual what we're going through now we're or Trump has kept it alive and only because he still has some political pull in the GOP uh or any is anybody saying that there's anything to it we know from the January 6 hearings that none of the top people believed the rigged election they believed Barr when Barr said there was nothing to it then that was it but wouldn't the conspiracy be Barr has been bought out or how he's there there is a yeah there is a conspiracy theory about just to maintain the thought you have to keep going at the conflicting dates right yeah that's right never liked him they got to him they don't know just as I do so do you we all know okay it's always and it's always there isn't it they did it they yeah it was the day who is that right who are they right they killed Kennedy who the CIA Who and the CIA who did it right you know and this is so again another one of these you know how do you know if a conspiracy theory is true or not is you know can you act if it was a criminal trial could you even get a grand jury to agree to try this person is there enough evidence pointing to that certainly for Lee Harvey Oswald unquestionably but who else if there's a conspiracy who else was involved and and no one has ever come they've come up with something like 214 different names but there's no evidence for any of them I think there was like 42 organizations and 214 different people who were involved in the assassination of Kennedy I mean you know it would you'd fill up a stadium full of people that had to be involved and not again not one of them wants to talk about it or no leaked memos about it nothing like that right so yeah my side bias and and those kinds of things are are very powerful normally the sides move on but um not not at the moment fantastic all right well this is Cicero artifan and Cicero artist what a name oh my gosh right no that's that's the name of an artist in the Louvre something exactly that's not anybody's real name this afternoon we shall be uh surveying The Works of Cicero artifan um yes all right the very first artist to take cubism and impressionism and put them together all right here we go Cicero officer conspiracy isn't that great oh by the way just a quick thing I had an occasion to have a chat with Rob Reiner recently meet him from from All in the Family yeah anyway so I don't know if he did this we had an idea was brilliant he said imagine that there's he was going to make a movie where there's this big uh institution with big columns on it and stairs that lead up to it and it's just called they that's funny and so so well they say that really and then you go in there and this is whole set of committees and the typewriters going away and out comes a statement they say and that's it's a it's the place where they communicate with the rest of us that's pretty funny actually that's pretty funny I like it okay so what else you got Cicero artifan says uh hi uh Dr Tyson hi uh Dr Shermer and Hello Lord nice Cicero from Toronto Canada here um what kind of questions should I make when I'm dealing with a situation that I would like to avoid being biased on an issue so how do we how do we self-assess to make sure that we are not falling prey to all these wonderful biases that you have pointed out to us hear the mirror yeah how do you because if I think if like you said Michael if you think you're rational like you said no one ever said I'm going to my pseudoscience lab to find pseudoscience results so that I can be a pseudos no one says that so how do you self-check that might be impossible at some level um well it's not impossible because it does happen we know that scientists are subject to all these same biases but they can't let themselves get away with it because their colleagues will call them out on it right so you have to think if I was reading my paper here or my research as a Critic what errors would I find what mistakes of reasoning would I uh see that I personally can't see so you have to kind of mind read you have to put yourself in somebody else's but you also have to check your ego at the door right or or just have my mother as your mother don't worry she will tell you all the stuff you did wrong and every single place you failed Chuck has continued his therapy sessions into Star Talk programming so you have issues with your mother okay yeah a whole other thing yeah just don't don't Edge them on Michael just let let that run oh I'll tell you what you should do Chuck you should go to your local Scientology Center and tell them this while you're holding the little cans doing the uh the eater readings and tell them about your mother oh they will they'll have a course for you to take ten thousand dollars it's only ten Grand okay what about yeah yeah what a bug okay couple other questions you can ask yourself like what would it take to change my mind because almost nobody tries to dis kind of falsify their own beliefs it's almost impossible to do people find a pattern and then they find search evidence to fit it Michael agreement with that I've attempted that in a few cases and it really puts people back on their heels without use coming across as being aggressive right if you just say and what they're quick to say well what would change your mind but I don't go into that question unless I have an entire Litany of things that would change my mind and so there's research by a psychologist Peter Wasson so this is one of the Wasson tests so if you give subjects like a series of numbers like two four six what is the rule so people go I think the rule is probably increasing numbers by two even numbers so then they'll go like all right 10 12 14 and the guy goes yep that's correct okay 56 58.60 yep that's right and they'll think oh well that's it that's the rule and it's like no that's not the rule and no one ever says like well one seven thirteen and the rule is something very simple just increasing numbers that's it yeah sequence of right but no one tries to falsify it you know they go well I think I figured it out it's two four six so it's increasing even numbers by two that's the rule why didn't you ask some other sequence just to see if that would violate the rule and so Watson's conclusion was is we only try to confirm a hypotheses it's it's very difficult to get people to try to falsify their hypotheses and this is what you have to do okay wow I like that that is that's tremendous I mean that and what a I mean that's an exercise I don't think many people are going to want to engage in because one it's it's it's it's arduous it's really tough on your on your own psyche and and right chuck if I say convince yourself that you're not funny my response would be uh there are audiences all over the world who have done that for you but whether or not that's true you'll come back to me say FU too it's a tough tough thing to do okay okay man this I gotta tell you this is a great show everybody in this country needs to be watching this show okay all right here we go uh this is Alejandro Reynoso it's rich Corinthian leather let me guess it remind he's from Ponte he is from Monterrey Mexico and he says hello he's a Michael he's a regular on this so we got this okay like rehearsed at this point okay so what do you have what should I say hola um he says yes and by the way I'm assuming he's not offended by this because he keeps writing it's writing in so you know I mean he's he has some pretty decent questions too so you know anyway uh he says how do you deal with the world that accepts so much pseudoscience and Supernatural things but then uh denies real science um you know I mean I I I don't I don't I don't know I I don't know how do you explain that I don't know where am I so Supernatural like religion okay yeah so anything Supernatural whether it's ghosts whether it's religions you know you can say you know uh uh uh bordering on extraterrestrials uh you know where there seems to be this willingness if not a willingness and almost eagerness to believe things that are mystical and magical and you know that are uh you know Fantastical you know we found the remains of a dragon but you know the uh when we Unearthed it it turned to dust but we've got this blurry picture of it right here that's a blurry picture see like you know what what is it in US is there something in us that makes that like happen when we come back we'll try to give Michael Shimmer a chance to answer that question uh we're gonna take a last break and when we come back uh Michael Shermer it would tell us about his his recent book A book that it sounds like like required reading for anyone who is a citizen of the world how about that how's that for a prerequisite I love it all right we'll be right back Star Talk we're back start talk Cosmic queries we've got long time friend and someone I deeply admire Michael Shermer who's as I've said the patron saint of Skeptics on Earth and Across the Universe and I've confirmed that Michael you can put that on your resume I think of course I got Chuck Knight Chuck we can find you on social media yes uh Chuck Nice comic uh you're there yes sir thank you thank you and Michael uh what share with me briefly your social media footprint oh well on Twitter Michael schermer and uh michaelshermer.com from my webpage skeptic.com for the magazine here's what the magazine looks like for those who can watch bookstores and skeptic.com that's right it's it's in in well-stocked bookstores that have sort of periodicals in them you can find it there and I think Barnes and Nobles among them you know and so so we left off I think a very important question Michael uh there are people who just simply Embrace Mysteries and the unknown and are you taking this away from them are you are you just a curmudgeon and and and you're no fun you know I want there to be dragons I want uh I want the aliens to have come I want all of this why are you taking away my fantasies well first of all doesn't the truth still matter I think so and you know 500 years ago everybody believed pretty much the entire world was ruled by demons and gods and angels and so forth and witches and I call it the witch Theory of causality Everything was caused by witches of some sort or another demons and so on and you know diseases accidents storms droughts uh starvation it all had Supernatural explanations and we didn't lose anything by getting rid of all most of those there's still Mysteries to be solved and here is where the mind fills in the Gap with something you know the god of the gaps argument it's God or in the case of conspiracies if it's a big event like no one who has a conspiracy theory about the the yearly flu epidemic that sweeps around the world right but if it's something huge like kova 19 or uh you know the AIDS epidemic you know for a while that was thought to be you know targeting the black communities or the gay communities you know by the CIA that kind of thing because of Tuskegee and other you know kind of shenanigans the CIA was up to dosing American citizens with mind control drugs as I mentioned you know if the CIA could do that maybe they planted AIDS in inner city but no one has conspiracy theories like that for again the flu or you know antibiotics why are there no antibiotic Skeptics like there are vaccine Skeptics right it just depends on the effects and the bigger the effect the more likely it is you're going to get some some kind of extra causal Vector thrown in there a secret conspiracy a cabal you know is the demons it was Satan something like that so it's a it's a way it's a causal explanation you know we want we want explanations for things it's you know uncertainty is uncomfortable and you know as as discombobulating as it might be to think that there's 12 people called the Illuminati running the world and doing a crappy job of it uh it's even more discombobulated it's even more disconcerting to think that nobody's running in the world nobody's in charge it's just mostly chaos and complexity emergent properties uh you know why why is inflation going up well this guy says this and this economist says that who knows right it's you know it's like what you mean no one's running the show it's just us isn't that I'm sure you have a term for this but because we have to blame somebody or something okay what's your term for that well yeah I don't think I have the blame game yeah okay how about that well actually there is one you know so I call this agenticity or intentional you know the kind of hyper agency detection that is we tend to see patterns in random noise and Infuse those patterns with agency there's somebody behind the scenes making that happen right so much of the world operates randomly there's just a lot of statistical Randomness that explains things but it's hard to see Randomness right so you know just take the stars in the sky that's what Randomness looks like it looks like big Dippers and Little Dippers and scorpions and fish and horses and things like that right the patterns of of Randomness actually in our minds look like things so if you get a random uh you know cancer clusters as they're called you know those are mostly just random but people see the pattern of that somewhere or the example I like to use is when Steve Jobs first came out with the eye pod and they had the random shuffle feature where your music will play randomly and people complain to Apple saying well it's not random certain songs come up more than other songs like that's Randomness you know if every song came up equally as well as every other song you'd have to program that yeah so Michael they changed that so now random means randomly but don't repeat a song until you get fully through the list that option is not available Chuck let's go lightning around here this is our final segment we can slip in okay here we go here we go here we go um um this is on internet influence this is Steve Murphy hi Dr Sherman or Dr Titus and Lord nice people can research a conspiracy online and probably find it uh find just as many articles that support the conspiracy theory as debunk it should Gatekeepers censor or flag media supporting false conspiracies Michael that's a whole freedom speech thing but be quick yeah well my lightning round quick answer is no we shouldn't censor those ideas okay and media companies can just tag them like they are with you know vaccine questions vaccine articles that doubt it you know here's here's a good article that supports vaccines the gatekeeper is a gate tagger basically at that point interesting I mean that's not censorship that's just in more information is good more information I love it I love it label them excellent Frederick DeCamp says this hello my name is Duchamp it's a Duchamp no actually it's d-e-s-c-a-m-p oh okay so he says um hey I love this podcast I listen all the time my question is do you think that science denying people will lead us all to Extinction Michael you can't say yes to that dude you just have to say no and we'll move on to the next question no next question please leave that Michael I know right right part of me says he's packing up yeah he's stockpiling food in his basement um so Michael just to give a little seriousness to the question uh generally in my public rhetoric I say that I don't mind what people think anything the problem comes about if such people rise to power over laws legislation and and influence governments in society so what do you do if if such a person gains a following and then they get elected and they do have such power mm-hmm well that's why you should vote right this is why we should have a voice in a democracy like that that's all really all we can do and try to keep people like that out of power um you know in a free Society they can have a web they have their own podcast or you know like an Alex Jones type person he's unlikely to you know be the uh the lead anchor on ABC News right so you know there are those Gatekeepers keep people like that out for a good reason you know they're not following the rules of rationality and fact checking and editing that you know journalism has so or in politics hopefully but our political system is you know it's not perfect so those kind of people do occasionally get into positions of power but not often and it's you know much as it's fun to pound on Trump you know he's not president anymore Biden's in there so however bad you think it was January 6 and so on we still had a peaceful transfer of power and things are still going along right like they usually do okay wow for now okay for now for now yes right I'm not prophetic all right all right Chuck keep it coming here we go this is Connor home Connor Holmes says hi Neil hi Michael hi Chuck um I'm going to condense his question sorry Connor uh is there any correlation between education and not believing in science uh I've found that my undergraduate degree taught me how to determine a source's credibility while my graduate degree taught me how to better understand the actual science and its significance so clearly the data show Michael yeah like high school there's a whole section in your book on this so why don't you just tell us where you went there yeah so education um does attenuate belief in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and things like that sat word reduces the amount of superstitious thank you thank you okay put it that way uh and other irrationalities but not as much as you might think right so having a graduate degree is better than having a ba and having a bachelor's degree is better than having just a high school diploma in terms of the kinds of things you would believe that turn out to be nonsense but not that significantly as I mentioned you know smart people are also really good at rationalizing beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons and you know they're subject to smart people are subject to the my side bias confirmation buys the hindsight bias and so on just like everybody else so it helps but it's not a cure-all okay okay and so it's it's a is there any understanding as to why it's not should we teach different things in school for example well in terms of Science Education yes of course you know this uh Neil that it's teaching how scientists think is probably is just as important as scientific things of course yes you remember that study showing that some significant percentage of Harvard grads couldn't explain why we have seasons they thought it was how close the Earth is to the sun right now how did they get through Harvard without knowing something it's probably online it's it's a short educational video called a private universe and it's a freshly minted Harvard graduates they still have their robes on and they're asked uh you know how do we have why do we have the seasons and they're up there saying oh well because the Earth's orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle sometimes we're closer and that's what makes it hotter and there's a Harvard graduates and the title a private universe is in your own head you create your own world view and make everything fit into that world view and and you will speak with confidence even not knowing that you're wrong simply because it fits your world view so thanks for remembering that Michael that was an important idea made some few decades ago the takeaway here people Harvard a waste of money okay and just to be clear maybe this audience doesn't need it but we have our Seasons because of whether our access is tilted towards the sun right or away from the sun because consider if we just because what the Harvard graduates embarrassingly didn't think about was if it was summer because we were closer that means it would also be summer in the southern hemisphere that's right but it's not they have the opposite run of Seasons there so they were not thinking this through okay so right that's about 70 000 down yeah I can tell yeah it's really direct rays of the Sun from what I learned from Neil direct Neil deGrasse Tyson yes Chuck I'm going to get you an honorary degree for for all of this for what you've learned I see we get a couple more questions in go okay here we go Scott W Peterson uh says um Dr Shermer to answer the book subtitle um because they are not in fact rational this is my point also thank you thank you he doesn't need to answer that just let's keep going then he says I was thinking the other day that people hold on the Fantastic beliefs in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary because they uh do other to do otherwise would mean admitting that they are wrong maybe they're too embarrassed ashamed or something else so is there a psychology behind this that says hey look man I I gotta stick with this game I got to see this hand through I already bluffed my way this far and now I gotta go it's a poker game that's right interesting I've left my way in left my weight in now I can't back out I gotta I gotta go all in right that would be an example loss aversion you know where we are afraid to give up on something uh that we're too committed to because we've already lost things um uh and so you kind of chase after you know bad money or stay in a bad marriage or stay in a a losing uh business or hold on to losing stocks because you know we're already in so in terms of beliefs the more committed somebody is to their religious belief or their political position or whatever it is the harder it's going to be for them to give it up so if you confront somebody say at the dinner table at Thanksgiving and you know and they they bring up climate change or vaccines or whatever conspiracy theory they're into you know you can't just say you're an idiot first of all you can't just say you're an idiot to believe this right because then they're not even going to be listening to you and but uh but you have to make sure that when you're countering their beliefs with facts that go against them that that they don't feel like they have to give up their whole world view like the example I use if you give people a choice between Darwin and Jesus and they're Christian they're not picking Darwin right he's not gonna he's not gonna give them everlasting life so you have to take that off the table uh and just talk about Evolution as a science and here's the evidence maybe this is God's way of creating diversity of life and so on and by the way Michael just I want to say so everyone knows um that's a very important component of your book How The sensitivity that you need and should have when you're having those conversations otherwise it's Paul you're adding to the polarization so you I thought you covered that very well in the book Thank you all right yeah listen listen respectfully nod ask questions right he's got a whole set of rules how you how you do that which everyone should read before Thanksgiving definitely oh yeah actually read it after Thanksgiving because I love that argument at the table all right here we go this is the artist formerly known as James Smith uh he says hello all this is James from Indianapolis here so Dr Shermer what do you have to say to those flat earthers out there do you think that people just follow the skeptic train write down the skeptical of misinformation is there such a thing as Miss skepticism in other words are people sometimes Skeptics to a fault thank you have a great day Michael that reminds me uh one of the skeptic societies I don't remember which it might have been yours but I don't think so there's a button and it just says I doubt it that was the only thing on the button and then and saying they're a skeptic and I just thought to myself that's so uh I I don't know that it doesn't allow non-doubt uh so right right well that would be nihilism or cynicism right right like this I mean you have to believe you have to believe things is to get out of bed and get out the door you know that the society's going to function my car is going to start the money's still in the bank you know we make assumptions about the world that uh otherwise you couldn't function and and we do that for the most part I think with science you know we most people accept most of what scientists tell them without themselves knowing much about it it's only when it bumps up against again like a religious belief I don't know about that Evolution thing because do I have to be an atheist to accept evolution because I don't want to be an atheist you know something like that or you know if you're talking to a climate uh denier or climate skeptic you know I find myself usually all of a sudden we're talking about free market capitalism and the American way of life and it's like how did we get from CO2 gases to capitalism because that's what they're really concerned about right if this is true then do I have to give up this other stuff I believe absolutely oh man that's just great very sensitive okay I like that I like that guys I think we're out of time maybe one and more I guess no you can buy his book buy the man's book well okay that is a that's a no-brainer and everybody who's here's this better go get this book The Conspiracy and the subtitle why rational people believe the irrational did I get that why here it is why the rational believe the irrational right and by the way people have found of course this spells out conspiracy but people point out also spell c i a c i a and also Soros s-o-r-o-s and there's other patterns Kanye West here come on I know wait wait no I'm old enough to remember just might have been just before for your time Chuck Michael and I would Michael would certainly remember this when people were sure that there were messages on Ritz crackers uh on the on the the salt and the dogs crackers yeah and they would all kinds yeah people nah nah nah now let me tell you something I'm not going to believe there's a message on the brown cracker if there's going to be a message on any cracker it's going to be a Saltine now Chuck you took that right up to the edge you say if this message on the crackers you went right to the edge on that one Chuck all right guys let's let's uh hope for a a more skeptical future so that Civilization can survive itself yeah where we all have doubts and uh but with folks like Michael Sherman running around maybe there's some hope I would say mike always good to have you uh thank you Chuck always good to have you too always a pleasure man all right Neil deGrasse Tyson here for our talk as macquarius as always keep looking up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 636,696

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Michael shermer, Conspiracy theories, conspiracies, media literacy, Joe rogan

Id: Ggqe0Pa69d0

Length: 56min 13sec (3373 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022