Speaker 1So, in addition to describing and defining the feared explanation and the pet explanation, Dr. Cohen, as he does with all of his fallacies, offers antidotes that are from philosophy, of course, that kind of help us in pursuing the guiding virtue for each fallacy that I described a little bit earlier, right? So, of course, in our conversation today, we're talking about the guiding virtue of courage, right? So, I really like this antidote a lot because I think it's applying one of the main themes of becoming more confident, which, as I think we, at this point, have covered a couple times, gathering evidence more effectively and examining evidence more effectively. Evidence that, once again, works to, and we'll see this in the antidote, falsify our fears, to test our fears, to examine our fears, just as Seneca suggested we do, just as... Dr. Martha King, Jr. suggested we do, right? We have to confront our fears, as he said, unflinchingly. So, we get a little bit of an antidote here and a suggestion from Karl Popper, right? So, this is through Cohen's eyes. So, one antidote to getting away from or fighting the feared explanation tendency is to arrive at an explanation. Apply a critical scientific method instead of responding out of fear or according to your subjective preferences. So, for Karl Popper... So, for Karl Popper, applying a critical method for solving problems consists of three steps. One, the starting point is always a problem or problem situation. So, we have to characterize the problem, describe it, work to understand it. Right? After we understand the problem, we characterize it, we have to, secondly, attempt solutions to the problem, right? So, the key word there is to attempt, right? So, these attempts always consist of theories. And these theories, being trials, are very often going to be wrong. They will always be hypotheses or conjectures. Again, we don't get certainties, right? So, we have to get good at describing problems, right? And we have to get good at having the confidence to test theories. To attempt is to test, right? So, the third step is to realize that in science as well, right, we learn by eliminating our mistakes, by eliminating our false theories. So, what I think is interesting here, right, this is sort of like a way of being. What if you went out on a daily basis trying to disprove your fears? It's kind of an interesting question here, right? What are fears that are testable? And walk through these three things. Describe the problem or the fear or the situation where you confront the fear. Then we have to be willing to theorize about potential solutions and actually test them through our actions, thinking and feeling as well, right? And then instead of looking for, let's say, confirmation, we're looking to follow the fear. We're looking to follow the fear. We're looking to falsify the fears. When we disprove a fear with relative or let's say with a greater degree of certainty and confidence, right? That's a really liberating feeling, I think. So, we could even, you know, just for a moment, imagine public speaking, right? So many people, it's like the number one fear, right? Fear of public speaking. Of course, the way to conquer, or at least entirely conquer to some extent, to a large extent, public speaking is to speak publicly, right? And a large part of that will involve, I think, moving out of spaces of non-conference. Non-evidence-based imaginary fear, right? Back to Seneca, suffering in our minds. Give the public speech, maybe even mess up a little bit, and realize that nothing actually happens. We can eliminate the theory that if we stumble over a word, the audience will laugh or will criticize us. We can eliminate these theories through characterizing the problem situation, right? More realistically, actually trying to solve it by creating more confident theories, like, okay, maybe this isn't possible. And that's actually a powerful moment, right? Questioning our fears, I think, and this is, for me, this is a profoundly both philosophical and to a large extent scientific idea, right? Because science also starts with questions about the universe, right? And ourselves, for example. What if these are bullshit? Because as we said earlier in the other lecture, right? We don't even give ourselves that sometimes. We act like this is certain. But even just throwing that question, well, what if this isn't certain? What if this is a lie? What if this doesn't have to be this way? I'm acting like it has to be this way. Introducing a positive type of uncertainty. And then we go and we start testing. We start eliminating the mistakes. We start eliminating the false theories. After we maybe take that step, right? So we have to go, perhaps, from certainty that this is bad, certainty that this is scary, into just going, what if it's not? What if I'm making this up? What if this is doxa? What if this is falsely or poorly supported belief? Even that can give us a sense of relaxation and a break from the fear, I think, after we confront it and characterize the problem, characterize the fear. Then we have to eliminate. So Cohen shares a thought. I think it's really insightful. Right? Popper's approach is to see if an explanation can be shown to be false rather than if it can be confirmed. And I also think this is great because a lot of our fears, especially if we're sticking with what Seneca has to offer, that they are imaginary, right? They really, it's impossible to confirm them. But it's also likely because of our lack of ability to obtain certainty, right? It's also likely the case that it's impossible to completely confirm that they're false. Right? It's possible, but that's not where we're trying to live, which is to say the possibility of something going wrong should not, as the barking dog would do, like should not command us to cross the street or totally inconvenience ourselves and destroy our positive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Right? So it's, I think a lot of the fear will exist in the sheer fact that we can't necessarily confirm that it's impossible. Right? The explanation that wins for Popper is the one that can't be falsified. What is distinctive in this approach is Popper's rejection of the idea that we should try to confirm explanations before accepting them. So again, we cannot necessarily often confirm that our fears are false. Right? We cannot confirm that they're true. We can get good at working to falsify. Right? And by confirm, I mean absolutely. We only perpetuate narratives that confirm fears when we're living in a state that's insecure, when we're living in a state of fearfulness. How do we work to shift those narratives? I think these three steps are a good starting point. The three steps I mentioned a few moments ago. Look for evidence that falsifies the fear. Look for evidence that decreases the probability of the fear being true. Now, we're going to next week get into a lecture about bears, and I'll use the example here. Right? Is it possible that you will have a bear encounter in the Bronx? Yes. If you're walking around the Bronx fearful of a bear encounter, you're not understanding what Popper is offering. And that's an oversimplification, of course, but just for the sake of this conversation. Right? Because you could gather the evidence. Wow, I've been living here for 10 years, and I've never once seen a bear. Or you could go in the other direction and say, well, it's possible a bear could come from Pennsylvania or wherever else bears are. Right? So we're working to eliminate by providing adequate evidence for falsification. Right? And, of course, also there are some fears. There are a lot of fears that make. A lot of sense. We're going to get into this Aristotle. Right? Fear can save your life. Fear can, you know, fight or flight. We're programmed like that for a number of reasons. Right? So let's not necessarily saying every fear is false, of course. Right? But we're talking once again, as we did, hopefully, in our meditations about our irrational fears. Start trying to actively prove them false is what I think ultimately Popper saying here, that is a more scientific way of approaching our fears. Then one, of course, confirming them with more imaginary evidence, or B, never searching for any evidence, just making assumptions. Right? Asking new questions of these events, asking new questions of these thoughts, to once again, move towards falsification might be a way to alleviate some of our fears and help us move into confidence. Right? And one thing I want to offer as well, which I think could be really helpful with this. Um, is another antidote that Cohen kind of, uh, compiles from a few different thinkers. Uh, one of which is. the famous notion or ideas, right? The famous notion of Occam's razor, right? Which is to say, if you have a choice between two explanations, both of which equally well explain the facts, then choose the simpler one. And I mentioned this now because I think a lot of times our fears might be very elaborate. So when we're using Popper to kind of cut through to find evidence that falsifies instead of supports and running with the support, right? We also might find that we're creating a lot of elaborations. And what Cohen provides from Elizabeth Beardsley is basically this notion that if we're having, let's say, delusional or irrational fears, okay, they might begin with some type of truth. Okay. But it's a truth that becomes complex. It becomes elaborated upon. It becomes excessive. Which, or it becomes excessive in that, right? It goes beyond what is necessarily rationally required to explain what one might observe or what one might experience, right? So of course, if you're giving a public speech and there's 300 people, it's likely for some reason, this is interesting about being human, right? You might focus on the one person for a minute, at least, who's not paying attention or who makes a certain facial expression. When you say something and regardless of how neutral or how perhaps irrelevant or whatever, what you said in that moment might have been, you start creating stories around why that person made that face. And instead of saying, oh, they didn't like what I said, or, oh, maybe they're just in a bad mood, right? We start creating all these elaborations about how, what we said must have been so horrible. We worry about it after the speech. We cling to that one thing and we create all these, again, elaborations and imaginary details, right? Instead of just saying, oh, they don't like that one line or, oh, they just made a face, right? Which is the simplest thing. Oh, they made a face. Okay. Right? So Occam's razor is asking us to simplify our thinking. And I also think that is a really good piece of advice, right? To choose the simpler of the two explanations, right? If they equally well explain what happened, choosing the one that is the least excessive in detail. It's a way to kind of reel in and control our imaginations, which once again, beautifully connects to Seneca's idea that we suffer more in imagination than reality. A large part of that is because we don't work to simplify what we're imagining. We don't work to simplify our explanations. We allow ourselves to become overly, let's say, overly reliant on our imaginations to move in the world instead of just addressing what actually is in front of us. This is a classic also piece of, or let's say a remark piece of philosophy on overthinking. Work on practicing choosing, confronting different explanations, seeing how they explain things, then working to choose a simpler one and see how life, once again, might become less characterized by fearfulness. And then through that, we can work to act more courageously. Thank you.
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