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Speaker 3Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that I often rant about a little bit when I'm talking about science education, how we teach science in elementary school, secondary school, undergraduates, I do try to say I'm not an expert on the field of science education, and I do think that experts deserve a voice here, so I have a limited set. I have a set of things that I'm willing to rant about, but one of them is that we sort of teach the product of science and not the process of science. As we'll talk about in today's podcast, our guest today is Stuart Feierstein, and he brings up a good analogy. It's like you're teaching a history course. Imagine you have an art course in your secondary school, in your high school or whatever, and all they do is show you works of fine art. They don't actually teach you how to paint in your art course, right? Imagine you were trying to learn piano, and your piano teacher just showed you a bunch of, or made you listen to a bunch of beautiful piano solos. You're not being taught the process of doing it in the science courses that we teach. You're given facts, F equals MA, you know, here are the different kinds of rocks, here is the way that natural selection happens or whatever, and then you're tested on your knowledge of the facts. But the process of doing science is so different. And I do think that our inability to get across the process, even if people aren't going to grow up to be scientists, has led to a real public misunderstanding of how science works. Science is not about facts. You know, facts are the output. That's true. But we have along the way a whole bunch of ignorance and failure and things we don't know the answer to. And it's important to appreciate both what we have, learned and what we have not yet learned, because it's not just random. It's not like, oh, we don't know anything, anything could happen. We know a lot. There's a lot that we don't know, and that structured ignorance that we're trying to uncover the facts hidden amongst is what science is all about. And, you know, different people, philosophers and historians and whatever will have specific, much more careful and detailed ideas about the process of how science works. And that's great, but I do think that we should try to get that process. across to a broader audience much more effectively. And today's guest, Stuart Feierstein, as advertised, has been really active in trying to do exactly that. Stuart has been for a long time a successful biologist. He was chair of the biology department at Columbia, working on neuroscience and olfaction, how you smell things. But in the last few years, he's really become really energized in getting people to understand that science is this process that involves a lot of failure. So he has a book on ignorance. He has a book on failure. He has a book most recently. The most recent book is called It Could Be Otherwise, Science in the Age of Uncertainty. And in fact, this book is basically an encapsulation of the Mindscape motto that if you ask a physics question beginning with, is it possible that, the answer will always be yes. And that is what Stuart is saying. He's investigating the idea that there's a lot of things that are possible outside, what we know, right? And sort of known unknowns and unknown unknowns distinction becomes very important here. So we're going to have a conversation, sort of an informal, rollicking conversation about failure and ignorance and possibility and how these concepts are really, really important for how science is done. It would be nice if everyone in the world understood that that's how science is done. And that doesn't mean that anything goes. Some things don't go, but a lot of things go. So let's go. Stuart Feierstein, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
Speaker 4Well, thanks for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.
Speaker 3I think the audience should know that, you know, we're friends, we've met before, and as we were organizing the podcast, Stuart said, as a joke, I hope we're going to have martinis during this podcast. And I said, with dead seriousness, yes, that sounds like a great idea. So here we are. The audience can't see, but here's to you, Stuart. Cheers. It could be like, this could be a going thing. And like, I'll be thinking, wow, this is going to be a two martini podcast someday. But this will just be one.
Speaker 4This comes about because of an event you held at your place in Baltimore and you had a table full of martinis. You had two martini choices, and I realized then that you are a martini aficionado. Everything is better.
Speaker 3Yeah, we did a whole podcast episode on mixology. That was actually a big hit, which reminds me, speaking of old podcast episodes, you started your scientific career studying olfaction, right? The neuroscience of smell, which reminds me that Anne-Sophie Barvich was one of our former guests. She worked with you, right?
Speaker 4Yes, Anne-Sophie was a postdoc in my lab for nearly four years. And she came, of course, as a philosopher of science. That was her training and did her thesis on the olfactory system and how it had evolved from this kind of cul-de-sac of neuroscience to a mainstream part of the field. And she was a tremendous asset to the lab for the four years she was with it. We're still in touch. I was just emailing with her.
Speaker 3And of course, it's a credit to you that as a working biologist, neuroscientist, you were welcoming philosophers into your lab.
Speaker 4Yes, you're absolutely right. It is a credit to me because the rest of my lab thought there was something clearly wrong with me. They thought, all right, the guy is finally, he's gone off, but we'll put up with it, we'll see. And Sophie's credit, and to my lab's credit after a while, within three or four months at the most, she had been totally integrated into the lab.
Speaker 5Right.
Speaker 4To the point where she was late to a lab meeting once. She actually was not going to make a lab meeting one week because she had another appointment. And one of the members of the lab said, oh, well, wait, we shouldn't start because that's Sophie. And then they caught themselves, you know.
Speaker 3We need the philosopher here to keep us honest. Yes. Yes. Well, the reason I bring that up is because we're not going to be talking about olfaction. I mean, maybe we will as an aside, but you've started down an additional path. In the last few years, I think you have a new book out. Tell us the title of your new book. The new book is called It Could Be Otherwise. Good.
Speaker 4And the subtitle is Science at the Edge of Uncertainty.
Speaker 3And is this your third book sort of in this, I think it was an informal trilogy.
Speaker 4Yeah, informal would be the key word there. It's the third book. I kind of didn't want it to be a trilogy because maybe there's a fourth book. I don't know. So, and you know, the only person, I think, that gets to write a four book trilogy is Douglas Adams, of course.
Speaker 3Isaac Asimov did fine.
Speaker 4He made a lot of money doing it. Well, he never calls them trilogies, though, I don't think, right? So, yes.
Speaker 3But it's a big departure from olfaction. Now you're talking about meta science, what science is, how it works. So, I mean, could you just fill us in a little bit on that journey? Like, how did you start being seriously interested, seriously enough to write a book about how science works? How science works and should work?
Speaker 4Well, this goes back to the philosophy thing, really. And it started with an undergraduate in my lab who was planning on going to medical school, a young woman named Elizabeth, cannot remember her last name, of course, at this point. But it was many years ago. In any case, she came into my office one day and said she was thinking of taking a year off between undergraduate and medical school because she was interested in the history and philosophy of science and wanted to do a master's in medicine. And I said, well, I'm going to do a master's degree in this at Cambridge University, where they have a wonderful HPS, history and philosophy of science department. And so when I write her a letter of recommendations, I said, well, of course I would be. She's very bright and easy to write a letter for and all the rest of that. And I but I said, but could you give me some information on this program because I want to tailor the letter properly? So she gave me all this information on this program and the history and philosophy of science and all that. And I thought, well, shit, I'd like to do this. This sounds really cool. yeah so i wrote her a terrible letter and i applied and he took good i wrote her a great letter but i did in fact then write a letter myself to the department there saying i was quite interested in doing i had a sabbatical coming up and i thought i'd maybe like to do a master's degree in science and in history and philosophy of science so i actually went and visited there because i had other reason to be in cambridge at one point and they talked me out of that and said why don't you just come as a visiting scholar i think because they didn't want to have to grade my my essay it would have been really embarrassing i'm quite sure so that's how i kind of got into this other track on history and philosophy of science and began to recognize how important it is to the way we do science the way we think about it and i think the way the public thinks about it or fails to think about it because we don't tell them enough about it i think science you : is something the public loves but remains a huge mystery to them i mean you know i go to dinner parties occasionally with like the i can remember this happened one time with the parents of my daughter's friends they were in rehearsal for some play so we all went out to dinner and they were all you know bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers and i don't want professionals of one sort or another um and i think i was the only scientist in the room and it became obvious that what they really wanted to know was so like what do you kind of do what do you actually do or you know yes they couldn't imagine what it was i actually occupied my time with as a scientist and i realized we are a bit of a black box to most of the public
Speaker 3well i'll uh i'll end up disagreeing with you i think later on in the podcast but let me once again give you your flowers a little bit here because uh i mean at a certain point in the career of a typical scientist sometimes one's thoughts turn to the history and philosophy of science and most of the time the scientists just start spouting off and the fact that you actually went and took courses and talked to the experts is again to your credit i think thanks well i mean it
Speaker 4was immense fun it was the most one of the most the most satisfying sabbatical i had ever done and in fact two years later i by some quirk had another sabbatical that had been stored up and i wound up doing it with a philosopher of science in paris so you know cambridge paris is not such a tough yeah
Speaker 3i know yeah what you won't do for the academic calling honestly honestly and so and then the the previous two books in the informal trilogy are about ignorance and failure and you know these don't sound very uplifting titles like tell us how those relate to science
Speaker 4well so the attempt in both of those books was to take terms words that have a generally pejorative meaning and suggest that in science they're actually quite positive that they are the kind of things that make science go ignorance is subtitled what drives science and failure is subtitled what makes science so successful because ignorance i mean after all this is going to sound trivial when i say it but somehow or another it's not when you actually try and make it explicit somehow um but science is clearly about what we don't know right i mean scientists get together at a meeting and we don't talk about what we know nobody cares about that right we only talk about the crap we don't know and how we're going to figure it out right and so but again the public i think never sees that i mean even a well-educated public who goes to school for not only 12 years but all the way through undergraduate see science as a set of answers and accumulation of facts and never thinks about the fact that that every one of those facts actually um actually led to 10 new questions and there was the questions that interested us so that's where ignorance came from and failure if i may came from the fact that that's what we do most of the time most of what we do fails and that works that's actually what makes science work because we're not infallible we make no claim about infallibility we renounce authority that's the idea of science show me as it were right i mean i have to see the evidence and so um we should fail a lot we shouldn't be infallible infallibility belongs to
Speaker 3i don't know the pope or whoever but not us and i like that you mentioned the sort of education that a typical person gets here because i think that that is really the crucial thing i mean as working scientists of course like you hear this like of course we're we there's a lot we don't know we make mistakes all the time that's almost goes without saying but then when we teach science from kindergarten to undergrad it's just here are facts you had better get right and if you get them wrong on the test you will fail
Speaker 4that's right not not only and you're right kindergarten through undergraduate and i would even go a step further and say even our science majors take courses in which there's a single right answer and you better get that right i had a i gave a talk a couple of months ago now i guess it penned a group of science students um sort of a special program but one of them raised his hand afterwards and said look i don't want to be offensive or anything but i have to say all of my science courses seem to me like like history courses yeah and you didn't even know that you and you didn't mean that in a good way you didn't mean history of science he meant they were just history courses they were names and dates and facts right and that's all he got out of it and it's not till you go to graduate school if you go to graduate school in science that you realize nobody gives a crap about what you know they want to know what you're after you know what
Speaker 1are you thinking about i actually blocked off my lunch break for a fitness class today now i need to figure out how i'm getting across town before the cancellation window kicks in but what is a ride going to cost me and that ride might be more expensive than the class itself oh wait let me check lift too real quick before i book that's less than i thought i guess those savings can go towards booking next week's slot too so when you need to get downtown taking a few seconds to check lift when you book your next ride could save you money
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Speaker 3is busy see terms so let's get into the ignorance idea first because i think you know it's crucial to what you're talking about that you're not just saying we don't know anything i mean you have this lovely idea that ignorance has structure and that's a key feature of it yeah that's um i mean
Speaker 4that there are levels of ignorance there's different quality i mean it's crummy ignorance just being stupid or uninformed that's not what i mean of course but i think there are high quality kinds of ignorance is sophisticated ignorance i mean i guess you could replace the word ignorance with questions if you wanted to so and i do use the word ignorance to be somewhat intentionally provocative i admit it but um but it is that i think it was francis bacon or somebody like that who the very beginning of the scientific revolution kind of said yeah what we're going to do now is create a vast amount of ignorance that's the first thing science does because we're going to renounce everything he has this wonderful quote i don't want you to think i've read all of francis bacon that's okay i just happened to get lucky and open the page to this one quote to take you the truth but anyway he says in there previously truth came from authority but henceforth authority will come from truth and i think that's a that's a massive big statement in so few words right it used to be the church the state aristotle whatever they said that's what it was now no no no no we're going to forget all of that it's a blank slate it's total ignorance and we're going to have to build this up and then he invented the idea of an experiment which i know people think has been around for forever that you know babies do experiments and people but he meant something different than just trial and error or experience he meant actually you know taking a slice out of nature holding everything else still as it were constant and then he actually said torturing this bit of nature that that he had and then hoping that you would learn something from it so it's a real the real idea of an experiment um and then of course the problem is that i don't think any result is coming but most experiments fail so yeah right now we were also involved in failure well the failure aspect is
Speaker 3important because you if you were guaranteed to get the result that you most wanted it would not
Speaker 4be an experiment right that's right that's right we do the thing because we don't we don't know and also i'll say there's a second part of failure that i think is important so it's easy with the failure thing to say well sure you have to make mistakes and learn from them you know fail fast fail hard as the tech bros kind of mantra or whatever but i think the real i think the way failure connects to ignorance is that the deepest ignorance the deepest kind of ignorance is not only what you don't know but what you don't know you don't know i mean the stuff we don't even know we don't know so how do you get to that well i think one way you get to that is failure you start an experiment to try and find something out you didn't know and the experiment fails or it gives you some weird result so now you know well gee there was something i didn't know i didn't know here at the beginning i got to go back to the beginning and work this out again and so i think failure is a kind of a portal into this really deep unknown the unknown unknown and i get this as a way
Speaker 3of pushing back against the idea that we get in high school or whatever that there's a series of facts to be memorized but when we try to get it right of course i would i hope i think maybe you do want to admit that there are some things we do know oh yeah thankfully i think so and we
Speaker 4know them i would say look i i think there's some things we know and we know them pretty well and they're likely to stick right i think there are a lot of things though that we know and i would call them sort of um what's the word just sit out of my head i would call them not partial truths but um it starts with a p and i can't think of it provisional provisional thank you provisional truths um there's a book in fact called true enough by katherine elgin i would recommend very highly a philosopher of science in which she says you know epistemology the study of knowledge seems to not include science because science comes up wrong now and again it only comes up with provisional truths not truths with a capital t but i think but as she says you can't really dismiss probably the best way of gaining knowledge that human beings have ever invented so yes we accumulate a great deal of knowledge but the question i think we fail to ask in schools is so what are you going to do with that knowledge yeah i mean you spent 20 years in a school now what are you going to do and i think the purpose of that knowledge is to ask a better question so you do
Speaker 3relatively um direct and strong kind of advice for working scientists it's not just for students in high school right i mean you i mean let i'll let you put into your own words but you don't
Speaker 4like hypotheses for example well this is the scientific method rant that i have which is probably overdoing it a bit but yeah i think the scientific method is it is a kind of a mistake for a couple of reasons one is i don't actually know any scientists and i don't know any scientists that uses it um at least directly sometimes you use it post hoc when you've already sort of made it an observation or discovery of some sort and then you want to go back and check it carefully and so forth but i think this i mean i guess i what worries me is the idea that there's a method that there's a simple recipe for doing science follow this method and you will make discoveries you will get things right you will do science the way it ought to be done and you and i both know that that's not the way an awful lot of science happens the unexpected is there the accidental thing i mean serendipity is another one of my rants i don't think i don't believe in serendipity i don't think serendipity you hear this all the time especially i have to say from nobel laureates who love to say oh well it was serendipity and some false humility you know but but the fact is lawyers don't make serendipitous scientific discoveries right i mean they make other discoveries maybe in law but they don't make scientific discoveries physicists don't typically make serendipitous biological discoveries and i don't make serendipitous physics discoveries you have to be working at something and then open to this counterintuitive view of things there's an unexpected result and not just throw it away because it's not what you thought it should be so that's why i'm against the method idea i mean
Speaker 3maybe we need to back up and say what you have in mind when you say the method that you're against this is the hypothetical deductive method i presume
Speaker 4yes you know you make an observation you come up with a hypothesis you do some tests you revise the hypothesis you do some more tests and you know as they say with shampoo rinse and repeat so you just you know you keep on doing that in some sort of cycle and um i mean the the biggest problem well there's a lot of problems with that one is the idea that's a method the other is that the crucial thing which is have a hypothesis that doesn't really tell you how to do that i mean what do you do go look in the book of hypotheses and pick one i mean that's the thing that's the thing that's the imaginative part of science that's the that that's the place where you're really using some
Speaker 3creativity and it really says nothing about that does it so well indeed it does not and i completely agree with that part and i can't resist asking then does this have something to teach us about ai and large language models because oh god i was afraid that they're getting very good at proving mathematical theorems they're not they're not really revolutionizing physics or biology quite yet but maybe that'll be next month
Speaker 4i don't know well i mean they do do protein structure which is pretty biological and pretty physics i'd have to say i mean you know so um so yes they're they're going to revolutionize it i don't know how i i hope i can stick around long enough to see how it comes out i'm excited by it i mean i know there are a lot of people that are terrified of it or worried about it all i'd like to remind them that socrates was famously against writing because he thought yeah no he hated the idea of writing he thought it would ruin our memories yeah ruin our memories which by the way it has but we have libraries which are better than memories you know so i mean that's kind of the way i think of ai or i hope ai will turn out i there's so many ways there's so many ways to think about it so many ways that it could go and of course i'm not sure i trust all the people to charge of it at the moment well that's the thing yeah yeah you know the governing of it is really going to be the crucial like any science it's how it gets used it's not the science itself i mean you know we all believe in scientific progress but no it goes wrong so we hate the bomb but we love anesthesia so i understand and so it's the
Speaker 3governance of these things that's critical but i guess the question of hypotheses intersects with the questions of llms right like sorry lm finds a proof okay that is a proof like that's as good as anybody else's again maybe this is going to change in six months but right now they don't seem to be as good at coming up with hypotheses as human beings are and and i'm not sure whether you're saying coming up with hypotheses is not important or it's just not
Speaker 4algorithmic oh i'm just saying it's not algorithmic i mean i think it's i think it's incredibly important we always have some idea i mean i don't do things randomly i don't just mix crap together for no good reason i mean i have an idea that something's probably or i hope it's going to work out i mean it doesn't quite often but i have a whole bunch of ideas about why it should work out why this should absolutely be the critical experiment so yeah we use hypotheses but um but they're not the key thing we do i don't think i mean they're the way you get to everything else yeah you you kind of use them and throw them away they're cheap i think well this is and they're given i'm sorry they're given this kind of uh elevated spot in the scientific method right and i think a scientist we
Speaker 3know how cheap they are well i think this gets into something that i truly don't have strong opinions about believe it or not like i'm fascinated by this question of what makes a good research direction right like like you say we're ignorant about a lot of things we're asking questions we don't know about and sometimes you know you've had students who've come to you and say like i had this idea i want to pursue it and you're like no don't pursue that one but but maybe what right do we have to say that something is more or less promising when we truly don't know
Speaker 4we have absolutely no right whatsoever except the power of the purse i have a budget i have grants and i have to think about that and to some extent i think about the student's trajectory and all of that and you know i like to have in the lab you students come in many flavors i have to tell you scientists come in many flavors too as you well know sure there are adventurous ones and there are less adventurous shall we say one there are risk averse the ones there you know and i think it was it was one of your physics guys i think it was fermi but it might have been poor i confused them all you understand i do yeah who said i think uh was one of my favorite quotes used to say to his students as students if you do an experiment and it proves the hypothesis you've made a measurement and if you do an experiment and it doesn't prove the hypothesis you've made a discovery now but but but it's important to realize that both of those things are important in science i mean measurements are quite important so if students want to make measurements if that's the track they want to take i'll support that if they want to do crazy things and make discoveries i'll try and support that as well as far as i can go with it because you don't know how can you possibly know right you know even the most settled of things somebody has a new way to look at it and and there it is you know i mean newton and einstein is the obvious example but but all of biology and then darwin is another example i mean you know we used to look at all the biology in one way and then darwin comes along and we look at it in a completely different
Speaker 3way now so it was fermi not boar and i know that for two reasons uh number one boar never made the measurement of anything in his life he was a theorist and number two i read it in your book it's a quote from fair so yeah that's it i thought you were going to tell me that i thought you're
Speaker 4going to tell me you were a student of fermi
Speaker 3oh no no i did used to work in the enrico fermi institute but that's not quite the same thing but i guess okay i'm not going to quite let you completely wiggle out of this because i again i'm just fascinated by it and there's no right or wrong answer um like you say as scientists we're always working at the boundary of the things we know and the things we don't know we're trying to push forward and i know that in my career the worst pieces of advice i've gotten from senior scientists have been here's why that Like I've mostly gotten great advice from senior scientists. scientists and I am scared to death of telling one of my own students, you know, here's why that won't work and being wrong about it. So like any, I know that this is not an algorithm. This is the perfect example of it not being an algorithm, but any like insights or advice about judging when a crazy counterintuitive idea is worth pursuing? Well, of course, if I did, I, you know,
Speaker 4I'd be in Sweden by now, wouldn't I? Right. We'd both be there. Yeah. Yeah. So, so no, I mean, and that of course is part of the excitement is that I, I think we have to face the fact that there's just simply no formula for doing this except being hyper aware in a way and being, and being, I was going to say originally, I was going to say, well, I think over the years you develop a kind of intuition and you should trust that intuition. But then I've had a better thought about that, which is, because a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, I've had a better thought about that, which is, because a lot of scientists, a lot of scientists, will tell you, yes, the intuition played a big role in this discovery or that, or this path or that. And I think what scientists are really good at is counter intuition. They're willing to take the counterintuitive pathway and that's where the real stuff happens, but that's the biggest risk as well. And, you know, I mean, I will say one of the biggest problems we have socially, governmentally, not just in our country where it's bad enough, but, but around the world is, you know, the idea that, I mean, science is becoming more and more risk aversive, I'm afraid, less and less willing to be counterintuitive because the costs are high and the demands are high and all the rest of that, you know, and it's, it's, it's a problem. It seems to me. Can you say more about the
Speaker 3counterintuitive bit? Like what, what does it mean to be good at counterintuitive thought?
Speaker 4So I'll give you an example that I got from actually from a magician friend. Okay. This is, this is an example that I like to use in talks. I don't believe I used it in the book, but I use it in talks often. And, and it's, he taught me how to hide a dead body. Now I'm hoping none of your listeners need to hide a dead body, but look, you never know. This might be the most popular podcast we've done. So, so here's how you do it. The first thing is if you have this dead body on your hands, for whatever reasons, you've got to get rid of it. You do not take it out into the animal and there'll be a big investigation. Nope. You take it to central park or the village park or village square, whatever, some public park late at night, of course, and you dig a hole eight feet deep and you throw the body in, and then you fill it up to about four feet deep and you throw in the body of a dead dog. And then you fill it up the rest of the way. You don't make it too nice. You pat it down. The next morning, the police are out looking for that body. They see what looks like a grave of some sort of here. The cadaver dogs come, they're barking, they start to eat. They find the body of the dead dog and they go away. They go up. Somebody cannot bury their dog and off they go. So that cadaver is going to be there a long time. How many of those cadavers are in our lab? Because our intuition said, Oh, the dead dog, somebody buried a dead dog, their pet. We had a hypothesis that looks good on we go. And that's how magicians fool us all the time. And that's how we fool ourselves all the time. I think so. That counterintuitive thing is as let's dig a little further. Yeah. Let's dig a little further. Let's dig a little more. Let's just take this result that looks so good. We should get a paper out right away.
Speaker 1I actually blocked off my lunch break for a fitness class today. Now I need to figure out how I'm getting across town before the cancellation window kicks in. Well, what is a ride going to cost me? And that ride might be more expensive than the class itself. Oh, wait, let me check lift to real quick before I book this lesson. I thought I guess those savings can go towards booking next week slot too. So when you need to get downtown, taking a few seconds to check lift when you book your next ride could save you money. Save the money. Check lift.
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Speaker 3Well, I think one way that that shows up is, again, something that is sort of a hobby horse of mine, even though I don't know how to solve it. You know, if you're not good at all at this, I'm really not. I'm just dumping a lot of questions. Yeah, that's why it's good to be the interviewer. Look, we have things in physics where you would say, okay, here's two theories on the table. They're both kind of reasonable, but one seems much more promising. Let's say there's a 90% chance that theory one is right, 10% chance is theory two. You're going to hire a new faculty member. And who are you going to hire? Someone who works on theory one or someone who works on theory two, right? And you're going to hire someone who works on theory one, and 100% of the physics departments are going to hire that person, right? So it's not like 10% of them are pursuing theory two. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how to institutionally and structurally support that kind of plausible,
Speaker 4but minority pursuit. Yeah. I mean, I don't know either, except that to say that you hire the theory one physicist, and 10 years later, he or she becomes the theory two physicist. Nice. And it's too late to get rid of those now. Well, I think that's an
Speaker 3excellent idea, and probably easy for theorists, but hard for experimentalists, because we also don't do a good job of letting people change their research direction, right?
Speaker 4No. No, I agree. That's very tricky. I mean, largely because it's just incredibly expensive to do so most of the time. I mean, trying to retool a lab, no matter what kind of lab it is, if it's experimental, is just massively expensive.
Speaker 3I do want you to give an opportunity to say an anecdote that you did put in the book, which was also, based on magicians, and what the magician told you about Occam's razor.
Speaker 4Yeah. Another one of my hobby horses. So, you know, Occam's razor is this idea that we should always, I mean, more or less take the simplest explanation available, and that that's likely to be the right one, and there's no need to necessarily complicate things. And that's, as you know, what we tell all of our students in the lab. I mean, Occam's razor is one of the science that the simpler explanation is the more likely one, and so forth. So, I was at a dinner one night with a friend who's a professional magician, in fact, and also, by the way, a philosophy undergraduate major, an undergraduate degree in philosophy from, I think, Haverford College or something, right? Yeah, you're going to make a magician philosopher. That's really a bad idea. Talk about sleight of hand, you know. So, we're having this discussion, and Occam's razor, just came up somehow or another. I know that this is not like a typical dinner conversation, but with this guy, it is. And so, somebody said Occam's razor, and he blurted out, and he said, oh, yeah, Occam's razor, the magician's best friend. And I thought, what? How could that be? I mean, how could it work for both? I mean, I love magic as much as the next person and all the rest of that. It's entertaining, but the purpose of a magician is to deceive, and theoretically, at least, the purpose of a science is to enlighten, right? To reveal. So, how could Occam's razor be serving both purposes? Well, it kind of goes back to the dead body thing in some ways. It's the same idea, really, right? The magicians work by exploiting our idea of what the simplest explanation is, in which we jump to immediately in some sort of, quote, intuitive bias, if you will, but they just do something that's not intuitively obvious. I mean, how many times have you learned a magic trick from a magician? Because they'll tell you how to do one of their simple crappy ones, you know? You learn how they do it, and you go, come on, that can't really be that dumb, right? Could I really have been that stupid?
Speaker 3That easy to fool? Well, 100%. In fact, I have this sort of process subroutine going on in the back of my mind when I see a magician that I think to myself, like, whenever they're doing all these manipulations, I'm trying to figure out what they're doing, and part of me goes, it can't be that. And so you should always first think it could be that, because they probably just did the simplest thing. Like, that's usually what they want to do. Yeah, they've convinced you that
Speaker 4it's complex, they're doing the simplest thing. Yeah, they're really just doing... If they convince you it's simple, they're doing some other slight, just, all it takes is one little tiny bit of
Speaker 3complexity in there and throw you off completely. The ball was in their hand the whole time. It's really not that involved. Okay. But good. So slightly more, but so anyway, I loved that story I do think that Occam's Razor is the magician's best friend. And the thing that we hope for as scientists is Einstein's opinion that nature is subtle, but not malicious. Like, the magicians
Speaker 4are malicious. That's the difference, right? That is true. Yes. So and I think that's probably, I think it's correct. I mean, I don't think nature has any particular drive to be one way or the other, I suppose. But it does. Well, I guess this is part of one of the themes in the book. And I think you would largely agree with this since we're both Santa Fe Institute, whatever you call us. We're fractal. Yeah, that's right. We're fractal faculty, right? Are we both fractal faculty? Do you know what that means? Well, we'll talk about that later. No one knows. No, that's right.
Speaker 3Okay, good. But it feeds into the idea of hypotheses that we were talking about before. Ah, yes. Okay, right. There's the idea that once you have a hypothesis, that changes how you look at the world, right? Like the data, like you're confirming some things, you're disconfirming others rather than just objectively looking at the world.
Speaker 4Well, that's the other great danger of the scientific method and hypotheses to go back to our earlier conversation is, yes, I think it does tend to bias you. I mean, your hypothesis is your cutest, best idea of how something works. And so you'd love it to be true. And so, you know, there are always ways of avoiding the data that don't fit and things like that. Well, you know, we got that data. You know, on Tuesday, and experiments never work on Tuesdays, do they? You know, whatever it is. You know, we are among the most superstitious lot in the world. That's true.
Speaker 5Scientists.
Speaker 4Yeah. Or can be. You know, it's terrible. So I think that is a problem. I mean, we have to guard against that all the time, those sort of easy biases that take you down a path. So it's not nature that's malicious. It's your own brain. Yeah. That's the problem.
Speaker 3Well, I mean, I think so far. And we've mentioned how maybe students learning about science could think about the whole big concept better. We've mentioned how scientists can sort of try to be a little bit more open-minded. The other big place these issues come in is in the public understanding of science and trust in it, right? And we're just sort of relitigating here in the United States. I always like to think that there'll be people 500 years from now listening to these podcasts and, you know, wondering what was going on. So we're somehow relitigating the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think that part of the, I mean, I'm on the side that the public health officials did pretty well. But maybe you could argue that they were a little bit overly cautious in letting the public know about their uncertainties. That's a really tough line to draw.
Speaker 4Yes. I mean, this again goes all the way back to education, I think, as well. However, but also the media and the way scientists deal with the public, either under some pressure or perceived pressure or, I don't know, just the difficulty of making a public statement and admitting your uncertainty. But that's what I mean. Listen, the most uncertain people in the world are the best experts. Whoever has the most expertise in some field is also the person most uncertain about that field. Because they see all the whole. They see all the other possibilities. They see the competing theories. They see the missing data. So they understand that they haven't got the whole story yet. I mean, they have that humility about them, which is crucial. But to make that public seems to somehow or another undermine your expertise. So the question really is, how do we get the public to recognize that uncertainty is part of expertise? And in fact, a desired part of expertise. That somebody who's got the right answer. Somebody who claims to have the answer. That's the one you should not be trusting. That's the person you should vamoose quickly.
Speaker 3Right. I remember something that struck me very strongly. I read a small memoir of someone who had been very active in the New Age movement. And it sort of flipped over to become a skeptic and this sort of scientifically minded person. And she said that the moment of transition for her was when she realized that when she talked to scientists, they would occasionally. Occasionally say, I don't know, but when she talked to her New Age friends, they would never say that they would always have an answer for it. And she like she thought, well, that seems unlikely that they would have all the right answers right there.
Speaker 4Yes, I would say, as you know, that this has been a deep philosophical question, a science philosophy question for years. How to tell the difference between pseudoscience and real science. They called it the demarcation problem or something like that. And it has plagued philosophers. And science, well, you know, Karl Popper started it with infallibility and all these things. And nobody's ever really been able to come up with a precise way of figuring it out. And I don't want to claim to have, but I do think one of the things that we now should recognize that wouldn't be easy to recognize before, I think, or at least not since the last couple of decades of scientific work, is that the difference between science and pseudoscience is science is uncertain and pseudoscience is certain.
Speaker 5Yeah.
Speaker 4And so if you can't pick up on certainty, you're not you're not in science. You're doing something else. The interesting thing is people love. So we say people have come to mistrust science or are suspicious of it. But I think that's not entirely true. I think people really love science. Yeah. They trust science. They just don't. They're just not able to figure out what's good science and what's crappy science or what's not really science. I mean, still, you know, I mean, even these imitators, the charlatans, the pseudoscience types. The ones, the new age types who want to sell you something or another. They all claim to be scientists. I mean, the flat earthers claim to have scientific evidence. You know, they believe that science is the way to do things. The best advertising slogan you can come up with is still it's scientifically proven that our product is 99 percent better than the other schmo. Right. You know, so they so people believe in science, I think it's just that they don't we give them the wrong idea of what science is. What science is and what you can get from science and what the right things to ask about science are.
Speaker 3It's just like every country wants to be labeled a democracy, whether or not they are, because we've won the public relations battle there. And I think it's science has won that public relations battle. Yes. But but you're right. And I'll put it in a slightly different context when I get emails from people on the street with something to say. And and people ask me, like, how can you tell? Which ones are the crackpot emails and which ones are sincere? And it's it's actually pretty easy. The sincere people ask questions. The crackpots just want to talk at you and they're not interested at all in what you have to say.
Speaker 4Yep. Yep. That's that's it. And and somehow or another, they get away with it. I mean, you know, the imitators are good. The charlatans are good. And that's that's the problem. And we're not so good at it. And we have a much harder thing to do. We have a much. Harder thing to tell people that, you know, we know about 80 percent, but I'm sorry, we can't do much better than that. It's not because we're lazy. It's because you just can't do any better than that. Sometimes it's just not going to be an answer or at least not a single answer.
Speaker 3Well, I struggle with this because, of course, you're right. I mean, of course, there's lots of things we don't know. That's where all the fun is. That's where the excitement is. And, of course, we should be more clear to the public about that. But I worry now that the pendulum has swung the other way a little bit. And I'm just thinking about this because literally earlier today I saw on social media somewhere an interview with a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners. And he was he was just asked, like, what do you folks talk about in the dugout, you know, or in the bullpen when you're not pitching yet? Like, what do you and he's like, oh, yeah, we talk about everything. Like our real thing now is we don't think that Babe Ruth ever existed. No, no, no. You can look it up. This is a known conspiracy theory. Babe Ruth never existed. There's only one video of him. And so, like, it'd be too easy to fake that. And his numbers are not believable. So we've done our own research. He doesn't exist anymore. And it just it just drives home how really difficult it is to express and convey that line between being skeptical, being doubtful. Yeah. Ignoring the actual evidence or not concocting a much more complicated theory. Occam's razor still has a place to play here, I think.
Speaker 4Yes. Yes. So, yeah, these are really tough problems. I agree. And it does begin. I mean, the issue is where do we go to solve them? And, of course, part of the problem is, I think, you and I are trying to solve them here on a podcast or to listeners that are probably fairly well educated. But, I mean, listen, everybody's well educated these days to some extent. I mean, anybody with a high school education knows more science than Isaac Newton did probably. Right. So it's not like we're science illiterates or anything like that or we're total idiots. Well, some people are close, but but for the most part. So, I mean, they know the word evidence. Right. They know the word. I've done my research. I mean, they they know the word research. At least they know there's a value in research. So the question. The question is, how do we instill a different attitude towards it? And I I think it's at our level as much as I'd like to do it here in the university and we'll do it. It we need to we need to find we need to work on this in kindergarten. Well, or just past kindergarten. I mean, you know, in the second and third grade, all the kids love science, the boys and the girls. They do experiments and they get a big kick out of it and all the rest that. And by 12th grade, fewer than five percent of the students want anything to do with science or believing. it or this or that. So we have somehow or another found a system that's maximally effective at turning off the largest possible number of people and those are the science dudes let alone the poor kids that you know have other interests in the world and get some crappy science course that that's meant for like somebody who doesn't want science i actually blocked off my
Speaker 1lunch break for a fitness class today now i need to figure out how i'm getting across town before the cancellation window kicks in but what is a ride gonna cost me and that ride might be more expensive than the class itself oh wait let me check lift too real quick before i book this lesson i thought i guess those savings can go towards booking next week slot too so when you need to get downtown taking a few seconds to check lift when you book your next ride could save you money save the money check lift hey it's ryan reynolds here from mint mobile now i was
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Speaker 3important adjacent question here which is what is the role of experts and authorities we've already agreed that truth is not defined by what the authorities say like it used to be back in the day but we don't want to completely
Speaker 4ignore the experts either right that's also i think part of what we like to call critical thinking and we think we teach critical thinking but i don't think we do somehow or another um but that's part of it is uh i mean experts disagree and that's and that's where you have to take some responsibility that's where there's an individual responsibility to make some sensible decisions or come to some decision or talk to people or be a critical thinker what was it is a wonderful anecdote about harry truman the president who's not a very colorful president so there aren't any anecdotes about him but he was the first president to have a science advisor at a very high level not quite cabinet but almost a cabinet though he inherited him i think from roosevelt anyway he was once heard to exclaim i need somebody to find me a one-handed scientist and the reason was that he would get all this advice you see where this is going he'd get all this advice and he'd get all this advice from some scientists who at the end of it would say well on the other hand yeah but of course you know it's also true that two hands are better than one right so you want that this is one of the if i may plug in a touch this is one of the issues that i try and bring together in the book this notion of what i call pluralism which to philosophers is an old term you say it to philosophers they go yeah yeah yeah pluralism it's trivial or whatever i don't think it's trivial but they've known about it for years but if you say it to a scientist you know they look at you like one of my colleagues they look at them and blank stare oh does that mean relativism or diversity or interdisciplinary it doesn't mean any of those things it means that there's potentially more than one answer to a to a question there's more than one solution and they may not always fit together they may not like you know i mean like relativity and and um and and quantum physics don't fit together exactly right so so you can see that as a problem or you can see that as the famous philosopher isaiah berlin who's a personal hero um from the last century uh about pluralism especially but you can see that as he saw it as human flourishing we are lucky to have multiple answers to questions why do we think there should only be one answer i mean why i i don't think it's anything goes it's not relativism it's not sure anything is fine but more than one thing could go and then it's our responsibility to place a value on these things to decide what's the percentages what are the probabilities what's the likelihood that this will be the better answer or in this context this is the better answer and in another context i mean you physicists have been fighting over waves whether they're particles or over light whether they're particles or waves for years and apparently have finally decided we don't care sometimes it's a particle sometimes it's a wave we'll do with it we'll use it the way we want to use it when we need it
Speaker 3the way we want to use it and it works some of us care no some of us care but it's it's a i get the the analogy is a very good one um but i i think that this is maybe this is exactly where i wanted to go so thank you for segwaying here um this pluralism issue i think is like philosophically rich and fraught and and worth really thinking about carefully so it's one of my favorite attitudes pluralism i'm a pluralist about most everything but i do think there is a bedrock reality right i think there is a single physical world that is sort of univalent it's only one thing there might be different ways of talking about the world and so that's one of the things i wanted to ask you because i'm not sure when i some philosophers i think are a little bit cagey about this um do you think when you say pluralism in science do you think that there's multiple compatible ways of talking about the same underlying reality or is it more radical than that
Speaker 4um it's a little bit of both it's more more radical but i do believe there's an underlying reality i just don't think we i don't think we currently have access to it or much of it and i'm not sure we ever will and i'm not sure we need to to be successful so in some ways i'm with you that there's an underlying reality but i don't care
Speaker 3okay i mean i get that i get that but when i read like nancy cartwright for example who you mentioned in the book yeah um i i still believe in the distinction between in principle and in practice and in principle um there might be a single unified theory of everything right and in practice we might never get there but in practice we might and so what is the good of sort of loudly proclaiming that we'll never get there
Speaker 4oh there's no good to it at all only that it's um it's it's worthwhile to think about to not think about science as that being its final target as that being the only thing we would call successful science sure that there's plenty of successful science well before we get to the ultimate i agree there may be some ultimate truth but how close are we to ultimate and do we have to worry about it yeah moment you know i mean it's a good direction to move in it says yes this may be one way of deciding whether something is a reasonable way to go or a ridiculous way to go i mean you know you look out in the solar system and you see nothing but round planets and so a flat earth would be sort of awkward right more than a little awkward yes yeah yeah to say the least so you wouldn't go there i mean that's a painfully obvious example but but see but that's what i mean so yes there are underlying i think there is an underlying reality and i think we see little bits of it we see in the nancy cartwright kind of idea we see these little islands i think she calls it a dappled reality or something like that we have these little islands of great predictability which we have exploited to no end and with science to great benefit of mankind i think on the whole i mean i always ask people would you rather be sick today or 25 years ago you're going to be sick today or 25 years ago you're going to be sick today or 25 years ago you're not so sure about science let me know yeah i you know we can use the 25 year old medicine if you prefer it um so so i think there is this underlying reality i think in line with sort of santa fe institute ideas things get very complex very quickly and there may be an irreducible kind of complexity or an irreducible uncertainty that comes from this complexity and not only living with that but exploiting it is what science does best right now i think that's where its frontier is and that's also what we have failed to communicate to the public this is what we have not done the job with communicating this notion that unsettled science is unsettled science is not unsound science sure good you know i mean i do think
Speaker 3that one of the things that the public sometimes gets wrong is that and i think that there's even a name for this fallacy but they think they're wrong and they're wrong and they're wrong and i think that the only probabilities are 0.5 and 1. so if you say well we think that something is probably true but we're not sure they either read that as we have no idea or we are sure and it's like yeah the 80 percent realm is actually super duper populated in science right yes yes yes um
Speaker 4there's a writer and and um he's not exactly a scientist should have an independent worker annie duke and he's a scientist and he's a scientist and he's a scientist and he's a scientist and who's a good friend oh sure your listeners will know her as the world's uh first female champion of poker which she made a zillion bucks but she also writes a lot of books and brilliant mathematical mind about probability especially and she'll tell you regularly about 80 20 probability she said well i had a conversation with her one time she said i you know i see 80 20 hands in poker all the time right and i play them of course i play them and 20 of the time i I still play them it's funny because I
Speaker 3was going to mention um a few minutes ago that when i first started playing poker because i'm a poker player also one of my flaws was that i gave too much credence to unlikely probabilities like i would say like well like someone would say like obviously that person has a pocket pair i'm like well i don't know i could see it any other way right like i was trying to be very broad like no actually that's what they had you have to be a little bit more definite about it
Speaker 4yes well and of course with poker and this is where ai may or may not have an edge on us yet it's you know it's not just um it's not just the math it's the math plus a certain kind of intuition or counter intuition and and a certain kind of social sense as well right i mean annie duke would say regularly that one of the reasons she won so well is she was the only woman at the
Speaker 3table oh yeah and all these all these jocks pretty easy for her to take advantage of we're not fundamentally readable creatures sometimes okay i want you to give to give you a chance because the most recent book you already mentioned the the pluralism which i think is crucially important but you frame it as a fundamentally optimistic take yes uh explain
Speaker 4why that is true well so for one after ignorance and failure where are we going to go how much deeper could i get into this so i and it occurred to me that science is indeed a really optimistic pursuit now i'm going to make it clear by optimism i do not mean a psychological disposition or a cheery mood or a happy face or any of those sorts of things they're all fine i'm not against optimism that way but i'm trying to develop a kind of a philosophical optimism a way of coming at the world a way of thinking about the world that i think is very scientific in nature in fact i go so far in the book and this is maybe a little crazy is to say i believe science invented it optimism philosophical optimism i do like to point out that the word optimism did not exist did not exist before 1759 when it was invented was invented the word was invented by voltaire for his novel candide or optimism and so yes so it hasn't been here i mean people tend to think oh yeah optimism people have you know but but they haven't i mean that had yes it's the best of all possible worlds which is really to me a kind of resignation you know or make lemon like lemonade from lemons or i would say margaritas personally if you have that but but that's a kind of resignation or you might say faith or hope but i think those are kind of they're kind of soft a little bit they're kind of well you know maybe it'll work out that way whereas i think science has a much more muscular kind of optimism and i use the phrase throughout the book it could be otherwise which is how it became the title because really if you think about it it's a kind of optimism it's a kind of optimism about it so human beings with brains just like ours have been roaming this planet for 250 000 years and it's only in the last couple of hundred since the scientific revolution i'd like to say that we have been able to say look at something and say and that could be otherwise that could be different we could change that yeah we don't always get it right okay but on balance we have mostly gotten it right and the point is the opportunity is there the possibility is there and that's what i think is optimistic and that's what's optimistic about uncertainty it's possibility and pluralism it's possibility it's more than one possibility um and the the the more possibilities you have as long as they remain reasonable possibilities the better you are the more optimistic one should be about the world the more optimistic of you it is as far as i'm concerned the way you stay reasonable because i know that's your next question or should be um is i think you i at least what has worked for me and this is what i got from being in cambridge and with somebody i'll mention in a moment is i think that the american school of philosophy known as pragmatism yeah pragmatist so john dewey and william james and lesser known but most important in my opinion charles purse right who started this school of philosophy and it kind of sounds like pragmatism which is do what works but that's not really the case it's do what is what allows you to do what you want to do and that's what i think is the most important thing to achieve your goals and it doesn't matter necessarily if everything about it is completely true or proven if it achieves the goal use it and then go back and figure out where you need to fill in so hassock chang who's a philosopher of science at cambridge has done the best work in this area and he uses something called um an operationally coherent activity that's a thing yeah but in other words you want to do something it should be coherent there shouldn't be some crazy ass you know i'm going to save the world with this or that kind of thing um but something that's operationally coherent and that's a kind of a pragmatist view i mean he admittedly gets that from the pragmatist he's trying to revive a kind of interest in pragmatist philosophy and i think that's the way you deal with pluralism with the how it's not anything goes how it's not relativistic it's some things go and those choices have to be made and you make them based on this idea of operational coherence or pragmatics if you will i remember or have i really gone off the defense no no this is exactly where we go at the end of
Speaker 3the podcast that's okay off the deep end yeah the deep end is our favorite place to to swim me too me too i learned about pragmatism in my first ever philosophy course as an undergrad when i was a philosophy minor and the motto at the time was the cash value of ideas so it was sort of a reaction to the sort of metaphysical principles that philosophers love so much and the americans purse and dewey and and william james were like what's it get me like what does it buy me show me the money like what what can it do and and i'm actually i've never really dug into that seriously but i think it is an attractive attitude it's like you know what matters is what matters at the end of the day what you can do with it
Speaker 4yes but it's also important i think with the pragmatists to recognize that that's not all they were about that is that's kind of that's kind of what you get in an introductory philosophy course i have to say and that's what most people take away from it but for example purse in particular but dewey as well were huge champions of the notion of uncertainty i mean purse in particular was a firm believer in the fundamental quality of uncertainty and that and the came from uncertainty and you know purse was very involved in measurement i mean he was a scientist himself who made all these measurements about gravity and all this kind of stuff and and but he recognized that what came to be known as kind of chaos theory almost 100 years later he recognized that that tiny little changes in a measurement tiny little imperfections in a measurement will lead to tremendous uncertainties later on and and that's a great part of pragmatism the notion of uncertainty dewey was a great champion of darwinian evolution darwin's ideas which are based largely in uncertainty and randomness you won't like this because you're a physicist but but i believe that that the biggest change in our sort of philosophical scientific attitude towards the world was not einstein or quantum physics but darwin because darwin who's easily known as the father of biology but i think he was more important science in general because it was darwin who first showed that you can get tremendous complexity in organization from fundamentally random events mutation and natural selection both of which are kind of random and the interaction of those things not only gives you organization complexity but a tremendous diversity of forms and and means and ways you know that an intelligent designer could i'm sorry to say never have thought of my opinion i don't care how intelligent
Speaker 3no i'm actually happy with that i mean certainly in terms of our place in the universe as human beings darwin did more to affect that than einstein or newton did um but it's again a super good segue i wanted to ask you about this quote i think i don't know it's in my notes as a quote i guess it's from your book ours is not in fact a mostly predictable world run by scientifically discoverable laws you
Speaker 4I think so but but this has happened to me a couple of times i've i've said something i was sure i got from somewhere and i was cited and then a copy editor this happened during the book a copy editor came back and said i can't find the source for this the source you claim i can't find it so i wouldn't look for it and look for and look for it and i realized finally well you made it up right
Speaker 3yeah that's why that's why i'm being very very careful because it's in quotes in my notes but i'm not exactly sure that it's from your book but uh yeah what do you think about this idea that we're not a mostly predictable world run by discoverable laws
Speaker 4oh okay so i think that i think that is the case but i don't think um i don't think that's worrisome i think that's um i think we there are these big islands of predictability that we've exploited as i said earlier and i think that's what science does extremely well but i don't think Overall, probably we live in an incredibly predictable place i think a lot of random shit happens that's okay and you know and um and i think that's good i mean i think that's the optimistic view that that we don't live in a predictable world do you really want to live in a totally predictable world run by immutable laws and just have a clockwork ticking along and i mean so you know i try and make this distinction in the book about two kinds of probability the original kind of probability which is based on fitting new data to a large a large chunk of data from the past that has a normal distribution and looks predictable and all the rest of that and that probability was in the service of a deterministic world view that is the world the universe was run by laws some of which we don't know which is why some things are not predictable yeah but we will know the one that we could discover that there's no reason not to be able to discover them we just have to work at it and we know that because you know heights of people in some area have a normal distribution we don't know what governs height exactly or entirely or why it should have this normal distribution but it does it's very predictable so there must be a law then i think there's a newer kind of probability i guess to some extent bayesian but not entirely which says that probability is actually a fundamental feature of the universe okay the best that we can do with it is it's probabilistic we can get good probability we can get bad probability we can get good probability with it at some points and it's other points it's going to be really random and hard to figure out um and biology is that way there's a lot of it that's fairly predictable and a lot of it that's that's mistakenly not genes being one of the great examples of that in medellin genetics where there's this idea came about that genes are destiny and that's clearly not the case
Speaker 3i think that we have you know again and again we i always end up in this place where there's one hand and then the other hand this is harry s that's the harry s truman thing um you know we did have my evil twin sean b carroll the biologist on the podcast a few years ago he wrote a whole book on contingency and randomness and how it played an important role in life and i've had other people on the podcast who've emphasized convergence and inevitability and it's going to turn out a certain way and you know at the end of the day maybe this isn't an accident that it's not so easy this is a very santa fe institute kind of lesson right like we live on the edge of in between order and chaos
Speaker 4in some very real sense yes yeah no i think that's exactly right i think that's the best way to say it you're you're exactly right with that um and we should and we should um exploit both is the point we shouldn't favor one over the other they're both kind of in a in a truly pluralist view one would accept both views yeah as being valuable in different times and in different ways
Speaker 3okay so we can uh wrap things up by getting um programmatic like you know you've you've been a very effective working scientist you've also thought very carefully about the bigger picture in the history and philosophy of science so what are the marching orders like how could we be either better scientists or better educators or better public advocates for science given these insights
Speaker 4yeah well i wish i had a nice simple answer to this i don't of course i think the key is education and thinking about that i think the biggest problem the education thing is i mean we all sit here and we we kind of know what we should be doing educationally i mean we know that we shouldn't be just teaching lots of facts have kids memorize stuff we know that's kind of useless now we even know now that writing essays is probably now it is yeah because claude is going to do that instead so so we have to rethink a lot of that it seems to me and and and it's not that that's so a lot of that's kind of obvious and frankly it's been there since john dewey said half of these things 120 years ago right so the question in my mind is what are the obstacles what's stopping us from changing this educational system that we all know is not doing what we want it to do i'm i'm not one of these people who pounds on education and believes that it takes curious people and turns them into idiots or something like that i mean uneducated people they're not as interesting as educated people i don't care what the system is and we all think that education is a fundamental human right we're appalled by any society that doesn't educate all of its citizens so i'm not pounding away on the schools i just think we all know there's a better way including the people in the system i think the obstacle is evaluation and assessment we don't know how to evaluate the way we'd like to teach things we know how to evaluate how well you can memorize stuff we know how to evaluate how well you can piece an essay together along certain rules but we don't know how to evaluate how good you are at asking a question how good you are formulating a question we don't these are the things that and i think it's a scientific question i think we should be working as scientists on thinking about better methods of evaluation and assessment because i think they're critical i mean we need to evaluate an assessment yes and i think we could learn things from we learn things from the art world we could learn things from farmers farmers have a way they can look at a two-year-old sapling and say that tree ain't worth pulling it out how do they do that yeah no idea right right you know but we could learn something from them we could learn something i love to go to auction houses the auction houses here in new york before they have a showing because they you see paintings you see great pieces of art that may then disappear into somebody's private collection but beyond that they all have a number on them here's the opening bid and i'm thinking i know a lot of its market forces but some of it is some art historian has thought yeah this is on is worth two million and this one is worth three and a half million to me i don't know yeah but i think we can learn something from some of these people um i think there are a lot of ways we could do this um i i think probability ought to enter into things more not statistics but probability
Speaker 3i think we should teach probability for example separate from statistics and we don't really do that we just teach statistics which is as you know different um so so there are lots of places but i think that's where we have to that's the the point that's the possible point of change in my opinion i worry a little bit i mean i know that uh you wrote the whole most recent book in an optimistic vein and i'd like to end the podcast on an optimistic note you've made me you've made me a little pessimistic by what you just said i mean i'm thinking back to the people who don't believe babe ruth exists or whatever and you walk into the auction house and see that there's different prices on different paintings and go wow they see something i don't and i think there's a bunch of other people who would go in there and and think to themselves like what do they know that i don't like you know i know better than they do and and i don't know how to fix that right like i don't know how to fix that sort of security that ends up being the driver for so many people's opinions
Speaker 4yeah i don't know how to fix that either i mean at some level you're not going to fix everything yeah i'm gonna try we have to fix what we can fix you know yeah some of it's really just too far gone but but i think the babe ruth thing comes from you know i mean i i think people wouldn't think that way if they had the right kind of schooling to begin with or they would say you know it's an interesting question how do we really know there was a babe ruth that's a whole other way of approaching it right i mean i i would be happy to entertain that question how the hell do we know there really was is there really only one video of them i mean it's not even a video it's a lie
Speaker 3that was alive then it's a film crappy film apparently when you see a video of babe ruth it's always exactly the same one this is what yeah this is what i'm told i believe it but but no actually that's a brilliant like that should be your next book stewart i'm gonna uh you know how do we know babe ruth exists because honestly it's even though babe ruth did exist i'm not you know my credence is very very high but it's super relevant and interesting to really go through okay what do we take seriously who do we trust what evidence do we have how do we judge it yeah yeah so it's
Speaker 4that's not an illegitimate question it's the way it's being asked that's not right you know that's the problem and that we can change that we can teach people about i think and that's what science does and if we just would let it out of the laboratory a little bit more and be a little bit more open and honest about how we don't know it all and you know one of the issues in the book that i try and bring out is that science is this interesting amalgamation as it were amalgam of hubris and humility we have the hubris to think yeah we could figure this stuff out we could figure out how all this works and the humility to know yeah it's not likely to happen in our lifetime you know long time listeners of mindscape the
Speaker 3ones who listen to the ask me anything episodes will tell you that if they ever ask me a question that begins with is it possible that the answer is always yes and i'm glad you've written a book to make it very very clear why that is the correct answer so it is you're absolutely right it is so stewart fires line thanks very much for being a guest on the mindscape podcast
Speaker 4Thank you, Sean. This is a great, great conversation. Really enjoyed this. Thanks so much.
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