StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – Why do we believe conspiracy theories? with Michael Shermer

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Why do rational people believe irrational things? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice break down media literacy, the psychology behind conspiracy theories, and how to combat our cognitive biases with author and science historian, Michael Shermer.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free.Thanks to our Patrons Zachary Vex, Alexandru Dolipschi, Chris Knopp, Gianni Gaetano, and D'Angelo Garcia for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: Charlie Duke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me my co-host, Chuck Nice. Chuck. Hey, Neil. How's it going? Welcome back on 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 this. Oh, do we need a whole episode

for that? Because I could clear it up for you right now. Okay? It's called stupid. They're stupid. They're stupid, stupid people.

We live in a nation of stupid people. Thank you. Good night. All right. Anyway. We have, I guess, one of the leading, if there was a patron saint of skeptics, it would be this man, Michael Shermer. Michael, welcome back to StarTalk.

Nice to see you guys again. Oh, boy. Yes. That'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 you may be right, Chuck. No, no, except for Lake Wobegon, where everyone's above normal. That's very funny.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me just get a little of your bio out here. Founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. Yeah. And you've got your own podcast, The Michael Shermer Show. I've been on multiple times. Thanks for inviting me. You're a presidential fellow at Chapman University.

Where is Chapman University? Orange, Anaheim, Southern California. Anaheim, okay. Nice. And you have degrees in psychology, experimental psychology, and in the history of science. Very important topic there, history of science. Cool. You got a book this fall titled Conspiracy, colon,

Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. You see, good thing Chuck didn't write that book. Yeah. He would have just said, you ain't rational if you believe.

My book would have been called Conspiracy. What's up, dumbass? There you go. Oh, boy. All go. Oh, boy. All right. So, Michael.

I love Michael's response. Oh, boy. He's like, it's going to be a long show. It's going to be a long show. So, you are deep in this topic your whole life. Yes. I mean, it's a career. You're a career skeptic.

And I just want to just enter on common ground here with you. There are people who might say, I don't believe the claims of vaccines because I'm a skeptic, right? 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 has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist going down to their pseudolabs to collect pseudofacts to support their pseudotheories, right? They think they're onto 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 i'll accept it 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 in the theory of evolution the germ theory of disease global warming warming is real. Vaccines do not cause autism 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 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 if most climate scientists tell me that global warming is human-caused and real, it's reasonable to accept it because of all the competitive push and pull

in the process to get there in the first place, right? So in the case of conspiracies, it's a little bit different because conspiracy theories are 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 cheat to dodge the regulatory state or government agencies do things behind our backs. And they don't tell you. So there it is. It's a conspiracy. That brings up a very interesting question for me. Okay.

Conspiracies are legitimate 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. Right. Well, so you do have to have evidence. So not all conspiracy theories are equal, which ones have evidence or not. And what would you predict for evidence?

So for example, if WikiLeaks showed, you know, millions and millions of classified documents leaked to the public, not one mention of 9-11 as an inside job, not one mention of the hoaxed moon landing and where it was filmed, and no memos about that, 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 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 Michael, in your book, you speak passionately. Well, you speak passionately in many places, but the one that struck me was when you commented about the reaction of people to your 9-11 analysis that appeared in Scientific American magazine. I mean, Scientific American is 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 wrote about this, one of the little memes going around that, you know, that steel melts at 2,700 degrees, I think it is,

and the jet fuel only burns at 1,800 degrees. Therefore, no melting steel, no collapsed buildings. They must have used internal explosive devices, demolition, intentional demolition. Who did this? It must have been the Bush administration, and you're off and running. Anyway, I just pointed out, I called that Fahrenheit 2777. You don't have to actually melt steel all the way, right? You only have to weaken it.

It doesn't have to become a liquid. It doesn't have to be a liquid. It doesn't have to be a liquid. It only has to be. As blacksmiths know, 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. That's it. Don't melt horseshoes.

That's right, right. Right, and those buildings are heavy. I mean, each floor is really heavy, right? And from there, then, 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 perfect coordination for it to happen? How many people would have to be involved? To plant explosive devices in a building, you have to break through the drywall and wrap this structural support beams 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 it in 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 gonna hit ahead of time to put the explosive devices on those floors because that's where the buildings collapsed.

The collapse started at those floors at an angle. Michael, you're giving rational facts. Why are they even relevant? And by the way, here's the most rational fact. It was the Bush administration. Come on. Yes, right. And the people that believe this, by the way, also think this is the most incompetent presidential administration we've ever had. And somehow they pulled off the most sophisticated conspiracy of all time, right?

And no one that was involved wants to go on 60 Minutes and write a tell-all book, or somebody that knows somebody that was involved in this, not one person. And become wealthy, independently wealthy, thenceforth for having done so. Well, 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 question. For Michael here. This first question. Michael looks all comfortable in his chair there. He looks like my captain's chair. He looks great. This first question. Michael, he looks all comfortable in his chair there. He looks like Captain's chair. He looks great. I mean, that's a good chair.

Let's see if we can destabilize his 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? We don't get to ask questions if you're not a Patreon member? We don't get to ask questions about Patreon members. Oh, that's right.

Okay, I do have a question I want to ask. It's a personal question for Michael, but I'll get to our Patreon members first. Here we go. Kevin LeSemoyer says, 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 in 91, Oliver Stone's film. Oliver Stone. 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's repeating this and it's like, oh my God, he must've got shot from the front, right? And until you dissect the film and you pull out all the mistakes and errors

and exaggerations and incorrect 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 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 is one everyone's so interested in. There's a whole industry of books and films about it. And, but the fact- Michael, you commented that World War I

began in a bit of a, had some conspiracy roots to it. And that's before we have modern media, even before films mattered. Right, right. So 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 plot to kill Caesar and so forth. Or when Rome burned, there were conspiracy theories about, you know, N to kill Caesar and so forth. Or when Rome burned, there were conspiracy theories about, you know, Nero made it happen on purpose, or he let it happen on purpose, right? This is a very old idea.

Even, you know, Roosevelt was accused of letting Pearl Harbor be bombed or making it happen on purpose. Just to get us into the war. Well, because why else line up the ships that way? Like sitting ducks for the bombers, right?

Because 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 instead of my hop or lie hop, I call this cow hop capitalized on

what happened on purpose right so it's not that bush orchestrated 9-11 or let 9-11 happen but he certainly capitalized on it to to follow his own agenda as did roosevelt who 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, you know, and they do so in secret often, you know, and I have old chapters on all the shenanigans the CIA has been up to in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

You know, MKUltra, you know, dosing US 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 in mind control technology or, you know, planting spies in social justice organizations like AIM, the American Indian movement, feminist movement. Are you telling me we fell behind in a mind control gap? Is that what you're saying? 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 an agent of disinformation. They're purposely leaking information that's false that sends us down the wrong track. UFOs are subject to that. an agent of disinformation. You know, they're purposely, you know,

leaking information that's false that sends us down the wrong track. UFOs are subject to that. You know, 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, right. Wow. God. All right, here we go. This is Stephen Somers. Stephen says, Greetings, stargazers.

Please, what are the top three cognitive biases that prevent intelligent people from making intelligent choices? Yeah, so 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 are granting the person the power of rational thought

and then posing the question, how does a rational person believe in such a thing? So 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. We should have known that that memo. By the way, let me add, you know this, but I just want to add because I come from the universe here, that for the shuttle disasters, once you have the disaster, you then look and find the memo from an engineer saying they shouldn't launch for those reasons. 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. But it's very simple. It happens to everybody 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 Elm Street. You say that. I knew I should have taken Elm 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 right. So hindsight bias sounds pretty pernicious. But the questioner asked, is there a third bias that we put at the top of this list? Oh, well, just, I mean, just riff on that one more time because, and by the way, Chuck, Elm Street was one of the streets that the Kennedy,

that JFK turned off of onto, into the Dealey Plaza. So interesting you picked that one, huh? I wonder if that was random. He should have turned on Oak Street instead of Elm Street, yeah, okay. Yeah, exactly. Actually, Michael, before we get your third bias and before you flesh out what you just said,

we're 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 StarTalk. I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, CosmicMugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neilil degrasse tyson we're back star talk cosmic queries michael schirmer patron saint of skeptics not only on earth but across the universe i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure and And Michael is an atheist, so for me to call him patron saint

of anything. So I mean that in a metaphorical sense, Michael. I don't think he's a patron saint. So Michael, the question was, what are the three top cognitive biases that would lead someone to think conspiratorially?

And we left off with the hindsight bias, which is particularly pernicious, right? What else you have going there? Well, then also we missed the events that didn't happen. So there's no conspiracy theories about Hinckley shooting Reagan because Reagan survived. Had he died, there would have very likely been conspiracy theories about who was really behind Hinckley shooting Reagan, because Reagan survived. Had he died, there would have very likely been conspiracy theories about who was really behind Hinckley besides mental illness, something like that. The third one, I'd say proportionality bias. It is, we wanna proportion causes and effects.

They should be roughly equal. If you take a little stone and here's some physics for you and you throw it 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 try to get a low number,

they kind of throw the dice gently. And if you want them to get a high number, they really throw the dice as if like... Really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. It's hilarious. That's really funny.

So if a big event happens... If you gently drop the dice, oh, my God. It's hilarious. That's really funny. So if a big event happens. If you gently drop the dice. Oh, my God. I'm going to get a one or a two. No, I want a five or a six, right? So in terms of conspiracy theories, if a big event happens, so Reagan survived. So, okay, it wasn't that big of a thing. But JFK didn't.

So what's the cause of Kennedy's death? It's got to be the most powerful person in the Western world. It's got to be something equal, right? So Lee Harvey Oswald is a lone nut with some psychopathy and whatever mental issues he had. That doesn't feel right, right? So you've got to add elements, you know, so the KGB and the FBI and the CIA, the Cubans and the mafia and the Russians.

So you're just cranking it up. Right, to make it match. Like the jack of a car until its causes match the effect. Or if you think about the Holocaust, the Holocaust is 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. There's a kind of a cognitive balance there. Or just take, say, 9-11.

You know, you're telling me 19 guys with box cutters managed to pull this off? This is the kind of thing you hear. No, it had to be something massively big because it was massively big. Or Princess Diana, you know, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelts, right? Tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents for those three reasons. But princesses are not supposed to die by the same way that the rest of us, hoi polloi, die, right? So, you know, it had to be the royal family and Prince Charles and the MI6 and so on.

Her brown-skinned boyfriend. Right, yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah, oh man, so proportionality. Chuck had to go there. Come on, you know, that's still a big deal. Everybody thinks that. Still a thing. Still a thing.

So, Michael, we mentioned JFK, mentioned 9-11. 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 might encounter? Well, let's just take the rigged election conspiracy theory, you know, when... Please. You know, you and I, how would I check?

Take it, please. Yes. Were you being Henny Youngman there, Chuck? Yes, I was. He was like, take the rigged election. I'm like, please. Yeah, please, take it. Take it.

Take it anywhere. Just take it. Take it. Take it anywhere. Just take it. 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 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, business interests, and so

on. 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, 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. So what's the take home here? How do you know what to believe? What's true?

What's justified true belief in the definition of knowledge? Well, the justified part. Well, how am I gonna determine if, I don't know, what that van was doing at three in the morning when it pulled up behind that building 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 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. 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 a big problem

for us now. So I want to actually 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? But I want to save that for the third segment. Chuck, why don't you give me another question? Okay, let's go to Ruud van der Linden. Ruud says, hello, Neil. Hello, Chuck. Hello, Michael. Ruud from the Netherlands here. I've got a question. Scientific research after COVID

indicated that people in countries where government trust 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 there a proliferation of misinformation 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 for 2024. And Chuck, what's a common fertilizer? But, you know, bull poop. Bullshit. I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to upset it. I'm sorry. You said fertilize. I said fertilize. Right. Yeah. However, I mean, that just begs the question then,

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 elections are rotten. So very important question there. They're rotten. And this is the, I only complain about the umps when they're. Right, when they call a strike against my team. Against my team, right.

Yeah, that's called a my side bias. It's certainly quite strong. We notice. Damn, Michael has names for one of these bias. I love it. Man. It is so great to put names to this stuff. I wish I was that fluent.

Man, that's my side bias. You cosmologists and astrophysicists, you're not the only one to have cool names. I know. So the my side bias. And every sporting fan probably can admit to my side bias, even though they don't want to. But what normally happens, though, in previous elections is that after a while, the losing side drops the conspiracy theory and they start focusing on the next election.

This is unusual what we're going through now where Trump has kept it alive and only because he still has some political pull in the GOP is anybody saying that there's anything to it. We know from the January 6th 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 it's... Yeah, but wouldn't the conspiracy be

Barr has been bought out or he's... Yeah, there is a conspiracy theory about that. Just to maintain the thought, you have to keep going at it. That's right. Conflicted data. That's right. Yeah. Alright. Well, this is Cicero Artifon and Cicero Artifon... What a name! Oh my gosh! Right?

No, that's the name of an artist in the loo for some reason. Right, exactly. That's not anybody's real name. This afternoon, we shall be surveying the works of Cicero Artifon. Yes. All right. The very first artist to take cubism and impressionism and put them together.

All right, here we go. A Cicero artist. Isn't that great? By the way, just a quick thing. I had an occasion to have a chat with Rob Reiner recently, a meathead from All in the Family. Yeah, anyway, so I don't know if he did this. He had an idea.

It was brilliant. He said he imagined that he was going to make a movie where there's this big institution with big columns on it and stairs that lead up to it, and it's just called They. That's funny. And so they just called they. That's funny. And so they say that, really? And then you go in there, and there's this whole set of committees,

and the typewriter's going away, and out comes a statement. They say that what goes up must come down. And it's the place where they communicate with the rest of us. I thought that was a cute idea. That's pretty funny, actually. That's pretty funny, actually. That's pretty funny, yeah. I like it. All right, so what else you got?

Cicero Artifon says, Hi, Dr. Tyson. Hi, Dr. Shermer. And hello, Lord Nice. Cicero from Toronto, Canada here. 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 self-assess to make sure that we are not falling prey to all these wonderful biases that you have pointed out to us? Yeah, the mirror. Because if I think, 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 pseudoscientist. No one says that. So how do you self-check? Yeah. That might be impossible at some level. 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 see that I personally can't see? So you have to kind of mind read. You have to put yourself in somebody else's, a critic's shoes. You also have to check your ego at the door.

Yeah, right. 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 StarTalk programming. Yes, I have.

So you have issues with your mother, Chuck. Okay, this is interesting. Yeah, it's a whole other thing. Yeah, just don't edge them on, Michael. 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 e-meter readings and tell them about your mother.

Oh, they'll have a course for you to take. It's only $10,000. Oh, I love it. It's only 10 grand? Okay, that's a deal. What a bargain. Okay, a couple other questions you can ask yourself. Like, what would it take to change my mind?

Because almost nobody tries to 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, I'm in complete agreement with that. I've attempted that in a few cases and it really puts people back on their heels

without you coming across as being aggressive, right? If you just say, and 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. 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 go, well, that's it. That's the rule. And it's like, no, that's that's right. And they'll go, 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, 13. And the rule is something very simple.

Just increasing numbers. That's it. A sequence of, right? But no one tries to falsify it. 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 our hypotheses. 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. I like that.

That's tremendous. I mean, that's an exercise I don't think many people are going to want to engage in. Because one, it's arduous. It's really tough on your own psyche. And two— Chuck, if I say, convince yourself that you're not funny. Right! You know, seriously.

You couldn't do that. And my response would be, 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 and say, F you, too. Right, exactly. It's a tough, tough thing to do.

Okay. Man, I got to tell you, this is a great show. Everybody in this country needs to be watching this show right now. All right, here we go. This is Alejandro Reynoso. Rich Corinthian leather.

And let me guess, he's from Monterrey. He is from Monterrey, Mexico. And he says, hello. Michael, he's a Monterrey. He is from Monterrey, Mexico. Okay. And he says, hello. Michael, he's a regular on this. Oh, yes. So we got this rehearsed at this point. Okay. Hello.

So what do you have? Or should I say, hola? He says this. By the way, I'm assuming he's not offended by this. I hope not. Because he keeps writing in. So, I mean, you know. I mean, he has some pretty decent questions, too.

So, you know, anyway. He says, how do you deal with a world that accepts so much pseudoscience and supernatural things, but then denies real science? You know, I don't know. How do you explain that? I don't know. So supernatural, like religions and things? Okay, yeah.

So anything supernatural, whether it's ghosts, whether it's religions, you know, you can say, you know, bordering on extraterrestrials, you know, where there seems to be this willingness, if not a willingness, an almost eagerness to believe things that are mystical and magical and, you know, that are, you know, fantastical. You know, we found the remains of a dragon,

but, you know, when we unearthed it, it turned to dust, but we got this blurry picture of it right here. See? See? See? Like, you know, 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 Shermer a chance to answer that question.

We're going to take our last break, and when we come back, michael schirmer 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 we're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We've got a longtime 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, I think. Of course, I got Chuck Knight. Chuck, we can find you on social media. Yes, sir.

Chuck, nice comic. You're there. Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you. And Michael, share with me briefly your social media footprint. Oh, well, on Twitter, Michael Shermer, and michaelshermer.com for my webpage,

skeptic.com for the magazine. Here's what the magazine looks like. Skeptic available in bookstores. For those who can watch it, yeah. Skeptic.com and so on. Yeah, that's it. That's right. It's in well-stocked bookstores that have sort of periodicals in them.

You can find it there. And I think Barnes & Noble is among them even. So we left off, I think, a very important question, Michael. There are people who just simply embrace mysteries and the unknown. And are you taking this away from them? Are you just a curmudgeon and you're no fun? You know, I want there to be dragons. 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, starvation, it all had supernatural explanations. And we didn't lose anything by getting rid of 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 yearly flu epidemic that sweeps around the world, right? But if it's something huge like COVID-19 or, 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 by the CIA, that kind of thing. Because of Tuskegee and other kind of shenanigans, the CIA was up to dosing American citizens with mind control drugs, as I mentioned. 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 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 kind of extra causal vector thrown in there, a secret conspiracy, a cabal, you know, it was the demons, it was Satan, something like that. So it's a causal explanation. We want explanations for things. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. And 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, it's even more discombobulating to think that-

The crappy job of it? It's even more disconcerting to think that nobody's running the world. Nobody's in charge. It's just mostly chaos and complexity, emergent properties. Why is inflation going up? Well, this guy says this and this economist says that. Who knows? Right?

It's like, what? You mean no one's running the show? It's just us? Yeah. Well, I'm sure you have a term for this because we have to blame somebody or something. Okay. What's your term for that? Well, yeah. I don't think I have a term for that. 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 randomness actually in our minds look like things. So if you get a random, 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 iPod, and they had the random shuffle feature where your music will play randomly.

And people complained to Apple saying, well, it's not random. Certain songs come up more than other songs. That's randomness. If every song came up equally as well as every other song, you'd have to program that. So, Michael, to program that. Right. So, Michael, they changed that. So now random means randomly, but don't repeat a song until you get fully through the list.

Oh, interesting. That option's not available. Interesting. I did not know that. Purely random is not there anymore. Right. Wow. Right.

Look at that. We are so stupid as a society that we forced Apple to change the definition of random so we can be comfortable listening to our stupid MP3 players. Jesus. Okay, never mind. All right, Chuck, let's go lightning round here. All right, lightning round.

Final segment, we can slip in. This is on Internet influence. This is Steve Murphy. Hi, Dr. Schirmer, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. People can research a conspiracy online and probably find just as many articles that support the conspiracy theory as debunk it. Should gatekeepers censor or flag media supporting false conspiracies? If not, if not, what do we do? 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 a good article that supports vaccines

or rigged election claims. So the gatekeeper is a gate tagger basically at that point. Interesting. That's not censorship. That's just more information is good. More information. I love it. I love it, at that point. Interesting. That's not censorship. That's just more information is good.

More information. I love it. I love it. Labeled them. Excellent. Frederick DeCamp says this. 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? I love it. Michael, you can't say yes to that. You just have to say no, and we'll move on to the next question. Next question, please. All right. I don't believe you believe that, Michael. I know, right?

Part of me says he's packing up. He's stockpiling food in his basement. Just in case. So, Michael, just to give a little seriousness to the question, 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 influence governments and society. So, what do you do if such a person gains a following and then they get elected and they do have such power? 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. 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 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, not perfect. So those kinds of people do occasionally get into positions of power, but not often. And as much as it's fun to pound on Trump, he's not president anymore. Biden's in there.

So however bad you think it was, January 6th and so on, we still had a peaceful transfer of power and things are still going along like they usually do. Right. Okay. Wow. For now. For now, yes.

Right. I'm not prophetic. All right. Chuck, keep it coming. All right, here we go. This is Connor Holm. Connor Holm says, hi, Neil. Hi, Michael. Hi, Chuck. I'm going to condense his question. Sorry, Connor. Is there any correlation between education and not believing in science? 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 he believes- So what are 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 does attenuate belief in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and things like that. But attenuate is an SAT word. It reduces the amount of superstitious thinking, let's put it that way, 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, smart people are subject to the my side bias, confirmation bias, the hindsight bias, and so on, just like everybody else. So it helps, but it's not a cure-all. Okay. Okay. And so 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, Neil, that it's teaching how scientists think is probably just as important as scientific facts. Of course, yes, 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? How did they get through Harvard without knowing something basically like that? It's probably online. It's a short educational video called A Private Universe. And it's freshly minted Harvard graduates 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 these are harvard graduates and the title, A Private Universe, is in your own head, you create your own worldview and make everything fit into that worldview. And you will speak with confidence, even not knowing that you're wrong, simply because it fits your worldview. So thanks for remembering that, Michael. That was an important video 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 axis is tilted towards the sun 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. But it's not. They have the opposite run of seasons there. So they were not thinking this through. So right, that's $70,000 down the drain.

I seem to get a couple more questions in. Go. Okay, here we go. Scott W. Peterson says, Dr. Shermer, to answer the book's subtitle, because they are not, in fact, rational. Now, this is my point for the whole show. Thank you.

Thank you. He doesn't need to answer that. But just let's keep going. Then he says, seriously, though, I was thinking the other day that people hold on to fantastic beliefs in the face of mountains of evidence. To the contrary, because 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 got to stick with this game. I got to see this hand through. I already bluffed my way this far, and now I got to go all in. It's a poker game. That's right. Interesting. I bluffed my way in. I bluffed my way this far, and now I got to go all in. It's a poker game. That's right. Interesting. I bluffed my way in.

I bluffed my way in. Now I can't back out. I got to go all in. Right. That would be an example of loss aversion, you know, where we are afraid to give up on something that we're too committed to because we've already lost things. And so you kind of chase after, you know, bad money or stay in a bad marriage or stay in a losing 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 it's a dinner table at Thanksgiving and they bring up climate change or vaccines or whatever conspiracy theory they're into, 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 anymore. I'm in trouble. But you have to make sure that when you're countering their beliefs with facts that go against them, that they don't feel like they have to give up their whole worldview.

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, you're not gonna give them everlasting life. So you have to take that off the table 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, I want to say, so everyone knows, 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, you're adding to the polarization. So I thought you covered that very well in the book.

Thank you. All right. Yeah, listen respectfully, nod, ask questions. Right. He's got a whole set of rules how you do that, which everyone should read before Thanksgiving, definitely. Oh, yeah. That's right.

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. 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 right down the skeptic hole of misinformation?

Is there such a thing as mis-skepticism? In other words, are people sometimes skeptics to a fault? Thank you. Have a great day. I mean, you have to believe things just to get out of bed and get out the door, you know, that society's going to function, my car's going to start, the money's still in the bank. You know, we make assumptions about the world that otherwise you couldn't function. And we do that for the most part, I think, with science. 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, something like that. Or if you're talking to a climate denier or a 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. If this is true, then do I have to give up this other stuff I believe? Absolutely. Oh man, that's just great. Very central. Okay. I like that. I like that.

Guys, I think we're out of time. Oh, this show is so good, it can't be out of time! James, I can't be out of time. God, no! Please! We need one and more, I guess. No, you can buy his book. Buy the man's book. Well, I mean, that is a no-brainer, and everybody hears this better go get this book.

The conspiracy and the subtitle Why Rational People Believe the Irrational. Did I get that right? Here it is. Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. A lot of rational. Alright guys, Michael, it's been a delight to have you back on. Alright boys. Thanks for thinking of us on this book tour.

And the publisher is? Oh, Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins University Press. Good one. All right, guys. Let's hope for a more skeptical future so that civilization can survive itself, where we all have doubts.

But with folks like Michael Shermer running around, maybe there's some hope, I would say. Mike, always good to have you. Chuck, always good to have you too, dude. Always a pleasure, man. All right. Neil deGrasse Tyson here for StarTalk Cosmic Queries. As always, keep looking out.