Within Reason - #7 — Anthony Magnabosco | How To Change Minds

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Anthony Magnabosco is the founder and executive director of Street Epistemology International, a non-profit organisation formed to encourage critical thinking and scepticism while providing people around the world with the resources needed to develop and promote Street Epistemology. He speaks to Alex about how to get people to rethink their beliefs and discard of falsities they might hold to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of the Cosmic Skeptic podcast is brought to you by you. To support the podcast, please visit patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic. so welcome back everybody to the cosmic skeptic podcast an opportunity to break away from my normal style of videos and have more long-form conversations and usually with interesting guests and today i'm joined by anthony magna bosco who i just met and you may notice if you're watching this on youtube rather than listening on iTunes or something that this is not the place where i usually record my podcasts but you might still recognize it and that's because we're currently at the atheist community of Austin. That's right. Which is great because today I'm going to be on the atheist experience. So you'll be watching this in the future. Check out the episode that aired on the 28th of April.

It's me and Matt De LaHunty. We're going to be hosting the atheist experience. I'm really looking forward to it. But yeah, thanks for taking the time to do this before the shows will start. I'm really honored to be sitting down with you and chatting about whatever we want to chat about. And the hosts here have been really kind to open up the studios to let us do this before talk heathen starts. Yeah.

and before you're on with the atheist experience. Yeah, it's totally surreal to see my logo in the back. I would imagine it's surreal. It's strange. It's gotta be a whirlwind trip for you, I would imagine. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's been such a quick trip out to Texas. And while I've been here, I've been doing so much, and I've been getting some great interviews. And Faithless Forum was yesterday, which went really well, was a great time.

And now I'm here doing this, and then tomorrow it's back to the UK. And I've got an essay to you as soon as I jump on the way. Well, I know we were trying to coordinate something where maybe we can go out and do some street epistemology together. but you just didn't have enough time, I think, in your schedule. We might find time tomorrow, maybe. Possibly, yes. I've been talking to some people at a local university with the Secular Student Alliance in Austin at UT Austin.

Maybe we can go out and do some SET together. That'd be great. Yeah, it depends on the weather and time, but if we get it done, again, people will be watching this in the future, so that might be something that's already... It may have already happened, or... But if not, then the next year, if I come back out for the forum, I'll stay for a hell of a lot longer,

because I've realized that I probably should have done that with all the opportunities that are out here. Okay, so, look, because this was all kind of like throwing together last minute when we realized we'd have the opportunity, I haven't planned at all what I want to talk to you about. However, I trust and I think I have good reason to believe that you're something of a good conversationalist. So, you're, I think, probably most known for your street epistemology. Pretty much. That's sort of my claim. You're kind of like the, you seem to be like the face of street epistemology. I never really said it out to be that

I read a book that told me about street epistemology and I started going out and having conversations and then recording them, putting them online and then a community started forming practitioners started forming we started figuring out ways to do this better ways to have better conversations where you're using questions

to explore sensitive belief claims. Right, yeah, because I mean people listening might not know what it is so street epistemology what are we talking about that? It's not the best term to really describe what we're doing but in a nutshell It's where rather than engaging with somebody

where you're arguing, ridiculing, or maybe giving them facts that might close a person down, it's asking them to explain how they arrived at their conclusion and being patient and listening, repeating it back, so you can fully understand what they're saying.

And oftentimes in the process, if you ever try that approach, you may have, in fact, I'm not sure. What you tend to find is that the person starts to realize that maybe I didn't really think this through. Perhaps the reasons that I'm giving aren't the reasons, or maybe there are better reasons to justify thinking that this is true.

Yeah, so it's kind of like a Socratic method of just questioning, getting people to kind of see their own chains of reasoning rather than trying to point it out. Pretty much, pretty much. I try to look at it as a tool set. I might not actually break out this tool if I was engaging with a street preacher and there were other people listening. I might actually take a more aggressive approach and give them facts or give them a verse that contradicts what they say,

not to help them reflect on their beliefs, but maybe somebody else listening. Right, right. The thing is, though, most of us don't find ourselves in those situations. We're sitting down with our parents who we may disagree with about politics or other social issues or religion or whatever.

And if you try that approach, it's probably not going to end up very well for you. So I was really excited when I learned about street epistemology because I was having bad conversations. Yeah, yeah. And I imagine it's probably vastly improved your ability to have conversations with friends and family,

because you kind of get the practice in almost when you're out on the street. Absolutely. It's calmed me down. I used to be a very aggressive, it might be hard to, most people are familiar with my videos, it might be hard to imagine it, but I have videos where I've gone out and literally harassed street preachers, for example. I can't imagine it. It really has happened.

And when you start to realize how unproductive that is, you start reflecting on what are my motivations, what are my objectives, what am I hoping to achieve, do I very I value that relationship. And if you start to realize that, no, I want to help this person because maybe they're thinking something is untrue. And I value that relationship. So then you really start assessing the tools that are available to you. Yeah.

So epistemology is the study of knowledge. So when you say street epistemology, you're essentially in the street going up to people at random. Like you don't kind of organize it or anything. You just kind of find people walking down the road and you try to make them understand the way in which they come to know things. Is that a good summary of what? The latter part of that, I think that that's correct.

We do want to actually having conversations where we're engaging with people to help them reflect on how they are coming to say that I know that this is true. Yeah. Or that I believe that this is true or that I think that it's true. So epistemology itself, that word is somewhat problematic because I'm not so much interested in what you are claiming to know or anything along those lines per se. Some people say I know Jesus is real

Okay, we can still engage But the first part of that I just want to clarify Very very few people who practice The method of street epistemology Go out and initiate talks With strangers on the street That is unusual, that is weird

Right But there are a fraction of a people who do And our exchanges are probably The most visible that are out there Normally you wait So you're in a car, the Uber driver says something it's an opportunity to engage with them using this method. You're at a dinner with a family,

your uncle makes a comment about Benghazi, you can engage with them using this method. But how do we teach people how to do this? One of the ideas was, well, let's go out and engage with people, record the conversations, put them online and see what happens. Yeah, okay.

So the reason I think this is important for people listening is because, like you say, this is a method that allows you to have more constructive conversations. And that should be the aim of, I think, what we're doing here. doing with this podcast and both of our channels seem to be kind of aimed at that shared goal of making sure that we can discuss ideas in a practically meaningful and productive sense. That's one piece of it.

Ultimately, though, I think the goal is to figure out if we're thinking that something is true when it may not be. So if we discover through the course of a Socratic dialogue or a street epistemology dialogue that the methodology that I'm using to arrive at a conclusion or a methodology that I'm using to validate my justifications is unstable it's unreliable that I might want to take another look at the confidence that I'm placing in my claim right so yes it it's nice to be cordial and have a conversation and have it be somewhat productive but the productive nature of that I think is helping a person reflect on their steps and maybe even backing off of their certainty right maybe even

increasing their certainty I've actually had that happen soles because because they kind of just elucidate the chain of reasoning that they've used to come to a conclusion and they've actually found it to be even stronger when they come away from the conversation possibly or if we aren't forming our beliefs intentionally it's conceivable that maybe we're coming up with reasons to explain why we think something is true on the fly but regardless I still think that the questioning approach is really helpful yeah okay but so do you I mean somebody might criticize you and say like I mean who are you to go out and say hey like you say you know this well let me tell you that that you know you probably don't and let's talk it out like what i mean is this something that

you are able to apply to yourself because i know like it's a it's a it's a goal to strive for like everybody says of course you know i try to challenge my own convictions but it seems like a tricky thing to do because like you say the a lot of the time that the beliefs we hold are kind of unconsciously arise and we don't really know why we believe them or how we know them and that must be the case for yourself as well so like What about when this is happening with you? Are you able to apply that to yourself? Sure.

So you said something really interesting at the start there. You said, let me tell you. And I want to be very clear. I think you'd pick me up on that. Well, there's a common misconception that we're going out and telling people that they're mistaken because we have it all figured out. And one way to be really bad at street epistemology is to walk into it with that attitude. I think we should try to approach the majority of the conversations that we engage with,

especially if we're using an approach like that. Right. is to set aside our biases, set aside the views that we've already formed and really listen to them and hear them out and not tell them. Even if you can discover with them that they don't have a good justification or their methodology is faulty, that's typically where our conversation ends. We don't then go the next step to say, well, let me now tell you, here's a book by Richard Dawkins or have you checked out Cosmexceptor or something like that. Now, sometimes they ask for information. Like, you've really got me thinking, where do you think I can go to meet other people

who think this way, blah, blah, blah. And you tell them Cosmic Skeptic. Give them a link. I can give them a business card. There we go, there we go. Yeah. So you don't, you kind of, like being here and being part of this community,

this is very much a kind of based on religious, religious claims and things like that. But, I mean, you don't have a particular area of discussion. or do you can you can you kind of talk about absolutely anything is that the goal here like when you say you want to go and and find out why people think they know what they know is that kind of any knowledge claim or are you like more comfortable um or will only talk about certain right right um and it's just dawning on me that there was a previous part of your last question that had neglected to answer and i think that was um you were wondering um now it's kind of

Oh, like how to apply it to yourself? Yes. Yeah. And that's a really important thing, too. This is a tool that the practitioners of it ourselves use. And we sometimes even actively seek out conversations with folks where, let's say, I'm thinking about voting for a particular candidate. It's not unusual for people to go to the various street epistemology communities on

Discord, Facebook, Reddit, whatever, and say, you know, I'm thinking about voting for her, but I'm not exactly sure. Is there somebody out there willing to engage with me on this? So while you could even use it on yourself solo Which I do You can kind of pull it out of other people And help them sort of a bit Help me kick the tires on this belief a little bit

And then to go to your next question You can absolutely use this on any claim I think It tends to seem It seems to be more effective When it's about a fact claim that somebody's making Rather than an opinion Right So like let's say you say

Well my favorite ice cream is vanilla That might be kind of tough to SE And yet if you said Well, I think vanilla is healthier for me because it has less calories. Then I think that's a fact claim that we can probably explore together. That's an easier conversation.

But my preference, honestly, I love talking to people about whether they think a God exists or not. Because there are so many other beliefs that are built on that one. For sure, yeah. My stance on pornography, the way that I'm going to vote,

what I want taught in schools, et cetera. Yeah, yeah. So if we can have a really good profound conversation where a person comes to realize, oh my goodness, I don't have a good justification for thinking that there's a god i used a really unreliable process i really need to think this through we can understand the implications of that on these other views yeah so so like how long are the conversations usually that you have out on the street they can vary anywhere from five minutes to

50 minutes my preference is to keep them really brief uh-huh yeah and do you get um have you had much experience with people having almost like a complete u-turn because i know that a lot of the time people will come away saying, you know what, like, yeah, I'll go and think about that. And I imagine that probably fills you with pride to think, like, wow, that person's going to go and think about this now. But have you ever experienced someone really just kind of on the spot, should be like, you know what, man, I got this wrong. It's happened.

And when it does, as a skeptical kind of person, I begin to wonder, are they using a reliable process and good justifications for backing off of their confidence? If they're that willing to move so quickly, then it can. It kind of makes me wonder about their filter, how they are approaching claims. Are they deferring to me because I'm older and maybe they're in their 20s or something? You know, who knows? Or because, like, you know more what you're talking about. Possibly.

Like, people just kind of go, like, wow, I guess you're right. Exactly. Like, they might adjust me as sir and be deferential to me. I don't want people backing off their confidence for bad reasons either. It's like you want to, it's not about necessarily the end goal or making sure that people have true beliefs. It's like the method by which they get there that you're kind of focusing on. Well, I kind of think that if you are discovering that your method is unreliable, you probably should be less confident that what you're thinking is true is true.

Okay. And yet it doesn't mean that that thing is not true. Right? Like if I'm basing my conclusion that Jesus is real on faith and I come to realize faith is unreliable... Yeah, it doesn't mean that the belief that you predicated on the faith is false. Jesus could still be real, but it might cause me to search for better reasons to come that conclusion or if I discover that I don't then I might back off on it.

Right, sure. But yes, I do run into people who come to me in fact, just two days ago I had a wonderful second conversation with a woman. I cannot wait to edit the video and put it on my YouTube channel. Our first conversation was about truth and she said I don't I don't

I'm willing to believe something even if it's not true if I get value and comfort from it and then by the end of a 20 minute talk on camera she said, you know what? I do value truth and even though it might be painful, I'm willing to get rid of beliefs that are not true, that are likely not true.

Oh, no, go ahead. Well, second conversation, she came back. This happened two days ago, and we shifted to a claim. She's roughly 90% confident that spirits are real, to the point where if somebody recently dies and they're a family member, you should leave out water for them

so that they can drink it because they can get thirsty on their journey out. So I listened to her. We explored it. We explored the quality of the evidence that she requires to move down, which the standard was very high, in order for her to be convinced

that those weren't the footsteps of her dead relative. She needed evidence, good evidence. Then we compared it to the evidence that she has to move her up, and she came to realize, on her own, by me asking questions, maybe that's not so solid. Right.

And is it usually the case that when you're having these conversations, the questions that you're asking, because I know you're not making an argument as such, but you could be seen as kind of implicitly supporting a view in order to challenge the view that they hold even just through asking questions

is the view that you're kind of representing let's say usually the view that you personally hold it can be so many times I run into people who share the same views that I have my method for engaging with them does not change at all so I've used this approach with atheists who are well they're maybe are even a little stronger They're 100% sure there's no God.

And I've had conversations with folks like that that have backed off of their certainty. So I don't change my approach. I recognize I have biases. I recognize that I don't think spirits are real. I recognize that it might be helpful for her to probably discover that that's the case. Although I'm open to the possibility

and we really did respectfully and sincerely investigate her reasons. I'm not sure if that answers your question. Yeah, I'm interested. Would you be capable of doing doing it like for an absurd belief that you couldn't possibly hold yourself. Like if somebody said, yeah, what I want to talk to you is about the fact that I believe the Earth is a globe and you want to kind of challenge that.

A globe or flat mean? They think it's a globe and you're obviously to try and make them think that maybe it's flat. Oh, I see. Would you, would the methodology still kind of work there? Would you still be able to employ it or are there some beliefs or some beliefs that are so true that it's so obviously true that you wouldn't be capable of. of presenting a good challenge to that. That's a good question.

I don't think the questions that I would ask and the way that I would go about it would be exactly the same. However, the conversations would probably be shorter. But what would probably happen in that situation is that a person might realize that they are having difficulty explaining why they think the Earth is a globe,

even though it likely factually is true. Right. And that still is healthy. So even recognizing the epistemic humility that one might need for even something that we're sure is true could still be valuable. So it might be a shorter conversation than I might have with somebody who thinks the earth is flat. But I think the outcome could very well be the same. Wow. I really only think that this is true because I was told it or I watched the documentary or everyone else thinks it.

Reasons that are probably not the best things to put forward. And it might cause a person to actually say, you know what, I really need to be. be able to adequately do a test and figure out how we can actually figure out that this is true. When, uh, and this might be a difficult question, but when was the last time you recognized that in yourself? Can you, can you remember the last time that you realized, here's a belief I hold, that actually I'm not entirely sure why I, why I hold it or, um, or if I should be holding it. Mm. It happens a lot and I find myself doing it almost on a daily basis. Really? For sure. Driving down the road.

I see a billboard and I think, oh yeah, that's true, that's going to happen. And then instinctively now I ask myself these questions. But on larger issues, this happens too. So if you were to ask me where I stood on guns, for example, open carry weapons, which you may even see people walking around with guns in Texas, I'm not sure. Not yet, but I mean, it's totally alien to me. It wouldn't be, yeah. And it was alien and I had a visceral reaction to seeing it to the point where I would go out

and counter-protest people who held those views. I started talking with them, asking them questions, and my certainty that that's a bad idea is decreasing. Right. Now, I'm not 100% and I'm not going to be advocating for it, but I can understand the arguments better. So it is shifting my view. To be clear, you mean you were protesting kind of pro-Second Amendment people,

pro-open carry people? I was against open-carry, and now I'm a little bit more in favor of it. Okay, interesting. Yeah, so I'm seeing my views change on that. And how long did that take to kind of move? Two, three years? Right, so it's a long process. Right, right.

In fact, there's a video on my channel with a woman where we talk about that very issue. Yeah, I think I might have seen that one, actually. Oh, cool. Yeah, so, I mean, because you've covered a whole host of... I'm interested to rewind to this conversation you had about truth and the value of truth. Was that you representing a view that you think,

that you believe in yourself, that truth has kind of an inherent value and that we should seek truth regardless of its kind of... regardless of its consequences let's say i think my my presupposition is that the more true things that we believe the better it will be for our lives and for humanity as a whole right and other exceptions to that for you there are sure so i've met some people where i'll engage with them in a conversation and they say this has literally happened where they say i'm suffering from depression i've tried all sorts of medicines for the last five years and it's only the blood of jesus that's

getting me through the day. I'm now able to go to college and study and do well here because Jesus is getting me through it. Now, I don't think Jesus is real. I'm fairly certain that I can engage with that woman in conversation for 30 minutes or an hour, maybe two sessions would be ideal, where there's time in between for her to think. And she would probably significantly lower her confidence in that belief or abandon it. I ended the conversation. So there are situations, Alex, where I don't do it. I've even written a blog post about this, when to abstain. from using this approach when to abstain from using street epistemology and that presumably is in cases when striving after truth is not the principle most important kind of thing

here it's there's something more important than truth that's a good point that's that you're making me think and give me a spider moment here which is usually the result of these questions that ask other people you know it's tricky because it's it's easy to say we should strive for as many true things as possible and I think it's an admirable goal but clearly that can't be, there has to be a line somewhere because the reducte out absurdum of this is to say, well, what if it were the case that there was

a proposition, the truth of which made it such that somebody had the capability to destroy the planet. Do you want them to know that? Probably not. And so obviously that's an extreme example, but you can just make it less extreme and less extreme. And somewhere, there has

to be a point at which we say, this is where we stop valuing truth. And that line may actually be harm because yeah with street epistemology one of the first and there are no formal rules we're in the process of forming a 501c3 formal organization for this oh great to come maybe come up with some standards I don't know but yeah not harming people is a really important goal yeah because I mean for me metorethically speaking I think that the morality breaks down to well-being in a round about I know a lot of people think that I don't agree with many of the ways in which people think it breaks down to well-being,

but I think it ultimately has to. And so part of my ethical framework is the desirability of well-being and the desirability of pleasure. And in fact, the only thing that's desired in itself, as Mill said, is pleasure. And when you say you desire a thing, you actually technically desire the thing that derives from it. So I think that truth kind of falls in that remit. So I see it as the reason we value truth is because the more. truth we have, generally speaking, the more pleasurable our experiences will be, because

a truth is usually conducive to better society, better suffering. Exactly, yes. But so because truth, the value of truth is just a subset of the value of pleasure, or well-being is probably a better word here, when

it begins to conflict and you've got a situation where truth actually isn't a derivative of well-being, then there's no problem with saying, yeah, I don't want the truth here, because you recognize that truth is only a derivative, So you only value it predicated on the value of well-being. That's a really good point. And sometimes during a conversation,

the most recent example is coming to my mind with the woman who was where we had to talk about truth and then later the second conversation about spirits where oftentimes when I meet somebody and it seems, I'm getting the impression perhaps that they have a higher dependency on comfort maybe than most people. I'll sometimes even just ask them, If we continued this conversation and you came to realize that this wasn't true,

what kind of impact on your life are we talking about? And then depending on their, and I try to ask this regardless of a person's age, they could be 90, now I'll still engage with them. If they say, listen, I value truth. It might be painful. It might be, I might hurt my back moving that, you know, metaphorically here, moving that belief that's not true out of the way. But I want to have as many true beliefs as possible, darn the consequences.

And then I'll usually engage with them. Yeah. Are there any issues on which you can see yourself beginning to change your mind and you think that you might be at the beginning of one of those kind of like with the gun advocacy thing? Are there any issues that every time you've spoken about them, you begin to think, you know what, I think I might be beginning to move in this direction. Yes, I'm going through that right now with veganism. Yeah? A lot of people have said that to me. And, you know, my listeners and my viewers, if people are watching on video, are probably going to get incredibly, annoyed at me because every time ever since I've started talking about it it seems that it comes up every single time but there's a reason for that and it's it's because when you talk about ethics

and when you talk about discussing ideas and bad ideas and changing people's minds it's like well the big one is for everyone seems to be veganism and I've spoken to everybody about it since I've been here in in Texas and it's just been a case of people saying you know what like I think someday I just might have to do it like everybody seems to be on this on this road it's really bizarre it's like everyone seems to recognize it and yet nobody's taking that step

what do you think it would Perhaps people just don't know what the next step is or there needs to be some sort of momentum where 40% of the population is doing it and it's not unusual and there's other options that are just as tasty and lab grown meat or whatever there probably just needs to be a cultural shift

and then more and more people will get on board with it. But that is one of those things where I find myself struggling with and wondering about myself. And I would not be surprised at 10 years from now, five years from now I was vegan. What do you think it would take? As somebody who is pretty much an expert in the process of changing minds at this point,

do you have an idea of the kind of thing that it would be necessary to occur for you to say, that's it, I'm changing my life cell here? This isn't so much changing your mind as changing the way your behavior. behavior. Honestly, I think it would just be options. Other options that were available to me. So rather than reaching for this package, I reach for this package. And they're comparable. And price really, I would pay three times as much for a vegan option that tasted just as good. Right. Okay. And so I'll

ask you a question that I actually asked Matt on the previous podcast that people should hopefully have listened to where we talked about veganism in depth actually, which is this. If I could hypothetically create a situation in which every time you went for a meal, you could make sure that your food did not come from a factory farm and it would cost the same and give you the same nutrition and everything. If we could create a hypothetical situation where that was the case, do you think you'd go vegan? You neglect the dimension taste.

Was taste part of the option two? You're hypothetical? I mean, the food tastes good, yeah. It tastes good. Yeah, I think that would probably do it for me. Okay, here's the gotcha moment. We're in that situation. Like, that is the situation we're in.

You can go and have a meal that tastes nice. It might not taste the same, but it tastes nice. It's not bad food. And the thing is, like, even if it were bad food, even if food needed to become just a purely functional thing for me, and I hated every meal I had, I still think the ethical argument is strong enough to say that we should still do it. But not even in that situation.

You can have a nice meal. It can be just as expensive. it can be just as nutritious. That's the situation we're in. And so the reason I'm asking you what do you think it might take to make you do it, it's like, but a lot of those conditions have already been fulfilled.

Now see, I was not aware of that. So what it would take might actually be somebody simply telling me that there are adequate options to meet my current expectations when it comes to food. Right, okay. Well, I mean, so it obviously depends on the individual,

you know, and I don't know, I don't know Texas, nearly as well as I know my home city, but there are plenty of options, and I found it a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. But, I mean, so would you say that you're kind of, because again, we're talking here about behavior rather than the idea, but talking about the idea itself, are you still, like, on the fence, or are you kind of on one side and you think your behavior might catch up to it? Or is it still, like, the actual idea itself is not settled in your mind? Because I'm just interested, it might be a good opportunity to, whichever side of the argument you want to

you want to take to sort of give an example of the kind of conversations that you would have by sort of talking out the issue because obviously I hope my listeners don't think that I'm just rehashing what I did with Matt but when I did it with Matt it was a metaphor ethical discussion but I think it would be interesting

it's a good topic to kind of demonstrate the effectiveness of street epistemology Yeah for sure and what's interesting is that there are people not to get too far off the topic like I think you've actually probably even this short amount of time probably swayed me a little bit in one direction. Already?

Yeah. Well, we're making progress. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if being aware of this approach and the type of flawed thinking that we have might make us more susceptible to reflection, skepticism, perhaps, humility for people that are holding views

that we disagree with, whatever. What's interesting is that there are a lot of people who they discover street epistemology and they also have a side interest like veganism or open carry or whatever, atheism. I mean, this was born in atheism. And then they say, this is a great vehicle.

This is a great technique to engage with people to explore their claims. And then usually they go a step further. This is maybe where street epistemology stops and you start telling people. Like you say, by the way, have you watched this video about veganism? Did you realize the fact of the matter

regarding how much water is consumed in order to raise a cow or something? Yeah, I mean, like the contributions to climate change. It's like, argument there's a climate argument which can become an ethical argument and it's crazy it's like the easiest thing you can do to solve the biggest ethical crisis that we currently that we're currently facing and also the biggest climate crisis that we're currently facing the the easiest way that you can do it is simply when you go to a restaurant say you know i won't have that i'll have that instead

and you can solve all of these problems but by this one thing so i'm interested if you uh as a as somebody who is known for doing this like how would you talk me out of it or how would you try to make myself talk myself out of it how would you make me think like am I right here have I gone because my current position is as simple as we have a duty to minimize unnecessary suffering I think I would approach that topic the same way that I would approach anything

I wouldn't approach it as Alex thinks that this is a way of life I don't like it and I need to change his mind. So what we do with street epistemology is kind of the opposite of what you might see with like a Stephen Crowder where he sets up a table and says, change my mind on some topic. This is more about exploring how you came to your conclusion. Right. And if you could adequately explain it and put forward good justifications that you can back up

that are testable, repeatable. Oh, then your job's done, right? You don't actually need to. Right. Because the whole point is trying to make sure that that reason and justification is there. That's right. Yeah. So street epistemology is not just to top. every belief claim that people make it's to probe it to see what did you base this on and is it solid is it something that i should possibly adopt right i would love to see you sit down with uh with stephen crowder on one of those episodes that would be something to behold i think i think he sets up sometimes in austin if i'm really you should uh you try and make it down there see if you can see what you do i think you like it the thing with street epistemology it seems the venue is really critical so i was at the i was at a conference in cincinnati And there were protesters, there was outside rally,

there were protesters, people promoting a young earth. That was not the appropriate venue. I would have loved to have had a conversation with a young earth creationist to explore why they think the earth is young, why they think the Bible is true. What method are they using to conclude that those reasons warrant a high degree of confidence?

But it was cold, it was rainy, there was a crowd of atheists, there was a throng. It's very hard to help a person open up and become reflective in that environment. So you have to think about the venue, your audience. There's a lot of stake. Me talking to Stephen Crowder on camera, do you think he's going to be pretty guarded?

I would think that he probably would, as opposed to him and I sitting down for coffee, for example, and exploring his stance on gender. Yeah, yeah, sure. But would that be something that you'd want to do with a person like that? Absolutely, for sure. Are there any types of people

or types of arguments that you just, will not engage with. I almost said the pre-suppositionalist argument, but even that I've engaged with people. Because my first need, just in a nutshell for people unfamiliar, it's where you basically assert, listen, I know that this is true because we can know things. That's kind of it in a nutshell, there's different variations and so forth. It strikes me as very disingenuous, it strikes me as a last-ditch effort to maintain a belief. It's even possibly more desperate than faith.

I can simply just assert that it's the case. However, there are some people who are presuppositionalists that I will engage with. Yeah. Okay, so you kind of disparaged faith a little bit there. And I think that's something that happens a lot, probably, in this room. And I'm on your side there. I'm interested, though, to pick your brains a bit, especially because usually when you're on YouTube, it's not you who's doing the talking.

I'm not in the hot seat. Yeah, exactly. I think it's quite fun. and people might not usually sometimes i am um but so you've you've got a you've got a problem with faith well it depends on what well what do you mean when you use the word what did you what did you mean that yes so that's that's the critical thing here is how are people defining it yeah um what's your definition my definition of faith based on thousands of conversations that have had with people and probably 800 or so who have said i think that this is true because of faith

I think it's being defined as untestable trust. Now, when I engage with somebody, I don't even mention this word. This is a slippery word that needs to be unpacked. Because people can say, I'm of the Christian faith. And it means something totally different. Right? The faith is the feeling I get in my heart. Faith is hope.

Faith is this. Faith is Hebrews 111, blah, blah, blah. I've had Muslims say faith, Hindu say faith, Christians say faith, atheists say faith. Right. Yeah. The reason I know that there's a ghost in the kitchen is because I take it in the faith. Yeah, well, this is what I want to try you on, because I agree with your definition of faith there, but the kind of immediate, like the calling it desperate, for instance, which is a commonality, I think.

Well, you said that something else is even more desperate than faith in applying it as a kind of desperation to it. I think a lot of times it does, but I'm interested because, again, it's like with the truth thing we discussed earlier, it's very easy to say don't have beliefs that are untestable but everybody does and I don't just mean that they do without realizing their untestable

I mean beliefs at the very foundation of our knowledge which have to be based on untestable untestable assertions and like I know as a matter of fact I would claim at least that you hold certain of those beliefs

just as I do and just as everybody does things like the trust in epistemology to begin with is an untestable thing the trust of your senses and the trust that these things at the foundation of knowledge

and it's that horrible kind of skeptic spiral that you go into and a lot of people want to avoid it and I'm fine with avoiding it I'm fine with putting that on the shelf the question for me to someone like you would be if we're willing to say

well yeah okay so I can't prove that my senses work I can't prove that induction is actually accurate but let's just put that on the shelf like we all know that they do, let's put that on the shelf and move on. Isn't that just what the presuppositionalists will do with those kinds of beliefs? They'll say, like, I don't know I can't prove this, but we all know it's the case, so let's just

move on. It seems to me that a presuppositionalist might go one step further where, so a presuppositionalist is born. They're a baby. They drink milk, they go to bed, they are making certain assumptions about the nature of the world. They learn to read words. They read holy books, for example,

and they come to the conclusion that now that they can presuppose that their God is real. So all of us are coming with the presupposition that the world as we see it, this is actually reality, it's going to be consistent from day to day. I wasn't just poofed into existence five minutes ago.

These are presuppositions that we all make. It does seem to me that presupposionalists, whether you're a Hari Krishna, and I've actually seen a Harry Krishna precept, Muslim, Christian or whatever, they tend to go one step further and it seems unnecessary. Okay, but outside of that specific example then,

in the context of looking at the beliefs of the foundation of your own knowledge as essentially what you defined as faith, is faith bad? I think that there are lots of things that we have faith in or untestable trust in, and here's the thing, when I discover that I have untestable trust in a claim, my confidence in it doesn't go up. it tends to go down. So how confident are you that I'm here right now,

that you're here right now, that this room exists? Because to me... I wouldn't put it at 100%. Well, I don't think anybody would, but most people, at the very least, have a conviction to put it somewhere quite high up. And it's not so much, it might be the case that this all exists.

It's like it probably is, but there's a small possibility it isn't, but there's actually no way to judge that. There's no way to judge that weighting of probability And so that itself, like even the weighing up of it, is itself an untestable assertion and itself would therefore, by your definition, be based on faith. So if it is the case that the more untestable your assertion is, the less you trust in it, well, these are assertions that are completely untestable.

And so that seems to imply that your trust in them should be near zero. But I imagine it's not. It's probably closer up to like 99%. But why do you think that's the case? I wish I had a good answer for that. I mean, it seems like we don't probably have a choice but to assert that these things are true until they could probably be demonstrated otherwise.

Now, what I find, though, is that there are these base presumptions that we make about the nature of reality and that we're actually here in the same room and join the same reality. It may not be the case. I'm not 100% sure that it is. When we tend to see people who are using faith

for religious beliefs or whatever, whether the ghost really was in the room, and then they mentioned faith and maybe they define it as trust and then maybe we come to realize that they don't have the ability to test it we actually do it seem have the ability to test certain things

like for example I might have faith or trust that my car is still in the parking lot because I parked it there and I actually have the key in my pocket and I'm pretty sure I locked it now it could have been towed is that untestable trust we actually could pause the show

and walk out there and verify Or maybe one of my friends can walk out there and give me a thumbs up that it's still there. So it's like, is it verifiable versus is it verified? So like with induction, for instance, the process of reasoning about the unobserved world from the observed world. So like reasoning about the future, for instance. Like you can't know, as Hume pointed out, the sun will rise tomorrow. It's not possible. But in principle, that is a verifiable claim because it will eventually be verified.

It's just not verified at the time that we've made the claim. It's so funny you say that because I do meet a lot of people, particularly religious folks who say, well, I have faith that it's true. And then we start talking about the testability of it. And it's very common for people to say, well, we'll find out what the truth is when we die. Yeah, it's the same kind of thing, right? Right. But you've got a problem with this line of thinking, which is that all of this, all of this probabilistic thinking is all based on the very thing that we're kind of trying to criticize here, which is this definition of faith. like the whole idea that we can take concepts and have them linked,

like past events being linked with future events, like the fact that every single time this show has gone on to air, I mean, like the atheist experience, the right people have been in the right place, has been a studio audience, the sun has not fallen out of the sky, like that we can reason that because of these things have previously kind of gone together

with the atheist experience show happening, that we know that it's going to happen again. is completely unjustified. Bertrand Russell makes a great example of a chicken, right? You're a chicken and like in a kind of in a farm situation. And every single day, the farmer comes to you and brings you your food. To the chicken, all it's ever known from the farmer is the farmer bringing food. To the chicken, the farmer and the food are probably as inseparable as to us,

something like dropping a pen and it falling to the floor. Like, it's every single time we've dropped any object, it falls to the floor. But for the chicken, every single time the farmer comes, it brings its food. But one day, that farmer's going to come and wring its neck instead. And one day, we might well try to drop something in it just wax us in the face. One day we might try to administer a medicine, and it just destroys the human race. Like, every single belief that we hold in science and the future is completely based on the same logic as the chicken, which is merely, you know, I think it's probably going to happen again.

Like, that seems like a horrible thing to be basing, not just, you know, some beliefs, but all the beliefs that we hold. And some of the most important, too, like the entire construct of science, it's all based upon this. And I find it difficult as somebody who'd want to go out, such as yourself, and challenge people saying, well, let's get down to the basis of why you believe what you believe and what you're kind of basing that upon. When, like, yourself and myself, if we do that to ourselves, we realize that we're in no place to... We're all in the same boat, aren't right? We're on the same boat. We're on the same boat. Like, let's do that to ourselves and we come to a conclusion that we should probably just

have no faith and no trust in the whole, in the entire enterprise. Hmm. The thing is, I don't really see an option. I mean, how would we actually decide to get out of bed if we didn't make those certain assumptions, right? Like, unless we just want to kind of curl up in a ball and just hope it all goes away. Don't you think that sounds a lot like when a religious person says, but if I didn't, if there wasn't a god and I became convinced there was no God, like how am I going to get out of a bed? bed in the morning and I'm just going to curl up in a ball, like, it kind of seems like it's the same kind of thinking, you know?

Possibly, but if you think about it, we hear the same similar claims about completely different deities, right? Like, so a Muslim might tell me the same thing. A Hindu might tell me the same thing. A Christian, for example, might tell me the same thing. And yet the reason that they're putting forward is wildly different. So I think there's probably some value there where you see differences in the explanation for why they can assert that this is going to happen.

Yeah, right. Okay. But to me, it's just one of those problems of philosophy. It's one of those things that is just insurmountable. And in accepting that, I think we have to be a bit more charitable when people do the same thing in other areas of thought. And it might be less justifiable to do it in other areas of thought. But I don't think we can so quickly just dismiss that kind of style of reasoning, like dismissing the idea of faith as defined as assertions. without evidence or verifiability, I don't think we can so easily just say that that's necessarily a bad thing given that we're doing it every single day. But it's one of those intermountable things for me. I don't know if that's as big of a problem to you as it is for me whenever I'm doing philosophy,

I need to constantly seem like I'm bearing this in mind. I need to ensure that I'm not having any kind of inconsistencies in the way I'm criticizing others for their thought. I need to make sure that it's consistent with the own assumptions that I hold. Like, is it a big problem for you or are you willing to kind of just put it on the shelf? I don't know. I don't know if I'd put it on the shelf per se, but I think you've given me something to think about with regards to that.

I don't know. I guess that's probably one of the things I just want to think about to see if that has legs. Yeah, it's worth it, but like everybody thinks about it at some point and like I say, most people just come to the conclusion that it's just not touchable you've just got to find some way to to find the motivation to just move around it we were talking earlier about the harm that these beliefs can cause people yeah yeah and so maybe that's the barometer perhaps where right if um if we are trying to avoid harm and reduce suffering and we realize that we're basing something on faith untestable trust perhaps perhaps that's the barometer I think it might

it might make sense to say let's avoid faith at all costs let's avoid as much as you possibly can kind of like the pre-cept yeah exactly it's like avoid as much faith as possible recognize perhaps that you

there are instances where you have to have untestable trust but try to limit its usage perhaps yeah yeah I think I think so as my friend Steve says you've got to spend money to make money

right you've got to have that bit of you've got to have it going in both directions but I don't know it's tricky and one of the reasons I enjoy talking to someone like yourself about it because you are like a professional conversationalist and it's one of those areas that can only really be engaged with through conversation I agree and perhaps we're not the best people to actually be hashing it out

but maybe this starts a dialogue in the comments section below or elsewhere Yeah, but that's the thing, because like, because you talk on such a wide variety of issues, most of the time you're talking about them, like, you're not an expert. You're just asking questions. Right. And that's sometimes all it takes, right? And actually, I find it somewhat advantageous to be somewhat ignorant on the topic being discussed,

because you can ask what somebody might perceive to be a very basic question. It could actually relax the person because you're asking a very softball question, and yet when they go through the process of explaining it, they may say, well you know what that's such a basic question why am i struggling to answer that yeah and it can be really humbling and you start really rethinking yeah sometimes the whole thing the whole enterprise the simplest question i remember when i was talking about meta ethics with uh with with steve rationality rules he um we were having a big disagreement about it and we've we've hashed out um quite a bit um i'm trying to remember what the

exact question was because he he was like uh he sees morality as goal base and he sees this view of hypothetical norms like if you have this goal then you ought to do it then you ought to do this if this achieves the goal if you have this goal and x achieves the goal then you want to do x like if you want to achieve the goal regardless of the consequences well i just mean as like a as like a general principle like if you want if you've got goal x and why gets you there then you should do y on on the assumption that you want to do goal x and i just ask well why ought you do that which you want. And he just, and if I submit

now, like, no problem, we could talk about it for ages, but it was just, he just kind of went like, hmm. And it's such a silly question. It's like, well, obviously it's not necessarily true that we should ought to do what we want. Like, that's a silly thing to do, but then he was just, and he suddenly realized how that question fit into the

to the system, and it was just kind of funny because we had one of those moments where it was just like, why is this such a difficult question to answer? There's a phenomenon to call the illusion of explanatory depth. I don't know if you've heard of it or not. I don't think so. So, for example, might say, can you tell me how email works? Are you adequately, are you able to explain it?

And most people would say, well, of course. Yeah, right. And then three minutes into your explanation of it, you might kind of realize, I have no clue how this fucking thing works. Yeah, I can't remember who, I can't remember where I heard this, but someone wants sort of brought this up to me by talking about, like, how a toilet works. That's right.

Yeah. I think there's a TED talk out on it. Maybe, yeah. And it just made me think, like, damn, yeah, I have no idea. how that thing works. I don't know what forces that waist down and where does it go and how does the water fall back in? How does it know to stop?

How long does it do? I don't even know that. Exactly. And that's the cool thing about these conversations is that it becomes humbling, not only for the person who's on the receiving end of the questions, but on the practitioner. Yeah, right. It changes you.

So I'm much more, much more tolerable, perhaps, of people who I disagree with because I begin to realize, I could very well be in their shoes if I was exposed to the same stimuli. Yeah. But I think you're right that it's kind of humbling because you can kind of, like, I know you wouldn't say this, but implicitly, it's like you have the ability to sit around and say,

okay, so you know who the creator of the universe is and you know this creator's aims and you know its purpose, but you don't know how a bloody toilet works? Like, are you kidding me? You're right. I think it's totally humbling. Yeah. Yeah, and I think this conversation's been a good one. I think that's probably a good place to wrap up.

I didn't play close attention to exactly what time we started, but I think we're coming up to about an hour. I wasn't noticing the time, and we're kind of expecting someone to whisper in our ear if we're too close to the end. I think it's all good because we've got to get out here so that Talk Heathen can set up and start their show. It's going to be a party, too.

We have a lot of people coming in from out of town just to hang out here. Yeah, because everybody here at the... Everybody's been here for Faithless Forum. We've had a lot of people come down originally to Dallas, and a bunch of us have driven to Austin to come and hang out at the ACA. So there's going to be a whole host of YouTube is here. So there's going to be...

And there's some people here. You guys can hear us, right? Ah, so it's the first ever episode of the Cosmic Skeptic podcast with a live studio audience. How about that? And hopefully not the laugh. Yeah, hopefully not the laugh.

Love the sound of it. Love the sound of it. And I should record that and put it in all of my podcasts. That would be fun. But yeah, it's going to be great. I mean, there's going to be just a room just full of YouTubers,

which is a rarity. I'm not really sure what to expect. We have a lot of people coming down from the faithless forum. Yeah, a lot of local folks.

It's going to be, it's going to be a bit packed, but it's going to be definitely fun. And I'll be hosting the Athex experience, so I'll remind you if you're listening, check it out. Episode aired on the 28th of April. I think it's going to be an absolute blast.

And if it goes really badly, then I'll probably edit this out of this part of the podcast so that none of you ever find it. But hopefully that won't be necessary. But I think, yeah, that's a great place to end it. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's been great. It was really great.

So, yeah, thanks for coming on. So for those listening, with all that said, I've been Alex O'Connor, and I've been in conversation today with Anthony McNabosco. Thank you. Thank you.