ASM175 Science

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

why do so many people misunderstand science that's what we're talking about this week on ask sciencemic [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and this week i want to do something i guess kind of like a special episode on science itself why so many people in society seem to reject common understandings in the sciences i think it's really important i also think it could be fun so let's get it started a quick announcement for those of you in boulder colorado or surrounding areas or portland oregon uh some exciting news for you in that michael gunger and i are coming as part of a tour with the liturgists these are our first two test dates to see how the evening goes the event's called tabs and wafers and it's all about what happens after deconstruction and faith transition so so much of science mike and the liturgist podcast have been about taking things apart and this is about trying to put them back together to see what like non-coercive non-judgmental healthy spirituality can look like and what role that it can play in your life tickets are on sale right now and you can go to ask sciencemic.com click on the events tab in the menu to learn all about tabs and wafers and save your spot [Music] so i was watching john oliver the other day he's a comedian uh he's got his start on um the daily show and now he's got his own show called last week tonight on hbo but i was watching john on youtube as is so often my habit and he had this segment on psychics and honestly i watched it and i laughed and howled with delight because i have a problem with people who present themselves as psychics um because we just don't have any scientific evidence at all to support the notion that uh psychics or extra sensory perception or mediums are a thing and uh i'm sure there are nice genuinely kind people who uh work as psychics who believe they have real powers beyond good intuition and an ability to read people's feelings but there's a lot more charlatans who are wildly exploitive and i was kind of reflecting on the zeal um well maybe not the zeal the excitement i felt the validation i felt watching john oliver tear apart this cottage industry of fraudulent presentation and then i started to think why am i so emotionally validated watching this like why does it bring me some measure of joy to see a comedian take apart the psychic industry in america which is a multi-billion dollar industry and i realize that when i see comedians or skeptics take apart what i call woo ideas that are so dangerously unscientific that they're indistinguishable from fantasy but presented as fact that there's some kind of event on my frustration with woo when i see a comedian or a skeptical blogger or podcaster methodically and carefully take apart something that is ridiculous but there's two things i notice as a result of that work number one people still believe in woo at ever increasing levels in our society and uh two there has to be a reason what is happening here why do so many educated people fundamentally misunderstand science because we're seeing that a rejection of basic scientific ideas and an acceptance of non-scientific woo transcends all economic barriers all levels of education all kinds of people love their woo ignorance about the science is common really common in america you need to look no farther than statistics on people believing you know whether evolution via natural selection occurred or not or whether climate change is happening and has uh human activity as a contributing or primary factor when you look at those statistics it will blow your mind because so many millions of americans don't believe commonly held widely validated scientific ideas and i'll admit religious fundamentalists are a really easy target when we talk about this stuff because there's so many wildly unscientific notions in religious fundamentalist communities especially in this case as i'm describing fundamentalism as those who take a highly literal approach to interpreting their sacred text and what do you know ancient sacred texts from all the major faith traditions on earth have wildly unscientific notions in them because well they they were written before science was a thing they are they are social mythologies that help the culture navigate the world and in that i think they are quite beautiful uh but we have a tendency especially here in the modern era to read those texts in a way that was very different than the author's intent because we're using a worldview in a framing that didn't exist when those texts were written and when you read say the bible literally you come up with things like the universe is very young thousands of years old which is wildly divergent from what we understand through observations of the physical universe when you read the bible literally you believe that god created plants and animals whole cloth out of nowhere and that humans the first two humans were formed out of dirt by god's hands which means that there is no room for evolution via natural selection right if god made all the plants and animals they didn't need to evolve from a common ancestor over time and it's easy to wave our hands and say well who cares what people believe about how the earth and the universe was formed like what implications does it have on life today if someone believes in a young earth and doesn't believe in evolution well here's the thing rejecting theories capital t theories in science things that have tremendous evidentiary support behind them and rigorous analysis if you reject those things it lays a foundation to reject other notions in science for example bacteria are a fantastic case study in how evolution works as almost as fast as we can make new antibiotics some bacteria mutate and find an immunity to that bacteria part of evolution is an ongoing arms race between macro organisms like ourselves which have immune systems trying to engineer new solutions to the ever increasing immunity of microbial life like bacteria so when you reject evolution and you believe that disease is something that god created for whatever your theology says then you could say that it's not ethical to take antibiotics or that the earth is round you can reject that notion we're seeing an increasing number of people reject the idea that the earth is round and instead believe that the earth is flat so if he can reject the shape of the earth and the age of the earth then it's a tiny thing to reject that the climate is changing primarily due to human activity and that matters because in republics and democracies in systems of governance where people elect leaders and can vote on public policy a large number of people rejecting the scientific facts around climate change has enormous implications for everyone this becomes a danger to society itself but before you think this episode is about taking down religious fundamentalists especially christian fundamentalists in america it is not just religious folks who reject scientific ideas today i live in the city of los angeles one of the most progressive cities in america politically and one of the least religious cities in america and here in la wu reigns supreme the fact is new age spiritualists and non-religious folks are just as susceptible to buying into woo at the expense of scientific insight as religious fundamentalists anti-vaxxers people who parents who refuse to vaccinate their children are extremely common in los angeles and it's leading to the return of illnesses that we had defeated like measles we're seeing outbreaks in california in non-religious communities from people who reject the scientific findings that vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and help prevent the spread of disease across population groups you see anti-vaxxers are just as common among new age spiritualists as christian fundamentalists and of course here in la you can't drive a block without seeing a palm reader or a psychic or a medium's office open for business and i have seen personally psychics and mediums exploit people for their own financial gain and very often to the detriment of people's relationships and mental health psychics speak into issues that they have no business speaking into issues that affect people's mental health issues that affect people's finances and mediums my gosh the stories i've heard people tell me about what someone claimed that a departed loved one said is horrific one friend in particular went to see a medium about their experience with sexual assault and the supposed medium the word they offered from beyond the grave sent my friend into a terrible emotional spiral psychics and mediums aren't benign they are very often malicious or at least create real harm among those who believe they possess real powers again psychics mediums and extra sensory perception have absolutely never been validated in any study or trial and it's not just people failing to take recommended health steps like vaccination it's not just people accepting ideas from people who have really no qualification to speak into their lives whatsoever people even take really dodgy elective health procedures there's a rage happening in california and across the nation about getting blood transfusions from people younger than you to the point the government has had to issue a statement telling people not to use this service it both diminishes the blood supply for people in genuine medical emergency and carries significant health risks in many of these offices that administer young blood transfusions again this is taking blood plasma from a person younger than yourself as an elective blood transfusion these aren't always administered by qualified health professionals and people can be injured in the process or they can receive blood that has not been fully or rigorously tested you there's a risk with a blood transfusion a non-zero risk of something getting by and and therefore we tend to save blood transfusions for significant events where the potential harms are outweighed by the immediate risk of injury or death of someone an elective blood transfusion is a really bad idea so here we have woo in unscientific thinking uniting religious fundamentalists and new age spiritualists and non-religious people in secular cities so there's no like one group in america that is uniquely unscientific we are a wildly unscientific nation and the misunderstanding or rejecting of basic principles of scientific understanding carries real dangers for people as individuals and society at large it concerns me so i thought i would give you a few ingredients of unscientific world views to help you consider and test ideas in your own life and to empower you to have better conversations with people who are wildly unscientific i think the first thing that comes into play is honestly the dunning-kruger effect this is a psychological phenomenon where when people have a little bit of information on a topic they believe themselves to be experts right so as soon as you feel like you have a full understanding of a topic maybe you've read a wikipedia page or maybe you've read a book on a topic the fact that you now understand that piece of knowledge that theory and moments ago or days ago you were ignorant of it feels like mastery and comparatively it is but my friends i spend a lot of time reading and researching the sciences to the point that i know i am not qualified to talk about climate change and my opinion on climate change is not equal to someone like catherine hayho a friend of mine who is a climate scientist or my other friend david zierden another climate scientist whose insights i defer to every time we talk because he's a climate scientist and uh i'm a guy on the internet and what we find is people who are in the dunning-kruger effect level of knowledge are very very confident they speak definitively on topics whereas people who've advanced further in their knowledge leave the dunning-kruger effect and move often into imposter syndrome i've read enough on the sciences to realize just how little i know of all of what humanity knows and how little humanity knows compared to what all could be known so i tend to speak very humbly on matters of science i tend to offer disclaimers i tend to tell you the reasons i could be wrong offer nuance offer subtlety and to the uninformed observer based on the way human psychology works we are more likely to listen to people who express their ideas confidently but without evidence than someone who presents an idea with less confidence but provides evidentiary support it's built right into the human animal so part of what happens in our social discussions is people who have poor understandings speak confidently and people who have lots of knowledge speak carefully and based on human psychology we tend to believe the confident person gosh do i see this at play in politics a lot of people have deep policy expertise are reticent to speak definitively and a lot of people with really no civic education whatsoever tend to drone on loudly and confidently about their ideas confident that they are the ultimate one right answer and i think in most social situations the idea of one right answer applying to 320 million people or 7 billion people is ridiculous but we like simplicity as a species right so we listen to the person who offers a confident and simple solution to our problems we like people who say they can prove it of course the problem here is you can't prove things using science you can prove things in mathematics science proves nothing it only ascribes confidence based on levels of evidence and when a scientist would admit well we can't prove that someone whose knowledge is actually inferior to a scientist will say ahaha you can't prove it so why should i listen to you it's human psychology another thing that happens to create unscientific worldviews is imprecise word usage and gosh do i see this all the time in our media and not just news media in our mythologies and our stories the word energy is thrown around so much that it's nonsensical when we speak in science about energy we will define what type of energy we are referring to so that scientifically the notion of something i see very often in fiction the idea of a quote pure energy being unquote is ridiculous that's not a thing spiritual energy crystal energy the failure to define a word precisely should always be a red flag that a claim merits further investigation and scrutiny energy is a is a big one toxins is a big one toxin is a very specific medical definition chemicals chemical is a big warning sign for me when someone says they don't eat food that contains chemicals they are lying all food contains chemicals water is a chemical right so you drink chemicals every day the precision of words they take scientific and medical words and they remove their specificity and their rigor that is a basic foundation for an unscientific world view here's another one the over generalization of research and this plays a huge role in news media so there are some problems in science today one of those is that there's no incentive to publish negative results in fact there's a great disincentive when you do a study and you get funding your funder your university your foundation wants a positive result that they can take to the media to get more funding and here's a specific example of how that goes wrong a few years ago i noticed all over the news media people saying science says pregnant women should eat chocolate every day well of course what a wonderful story that is who doesn't love chocolate who doesn't want an excuse to eat more chocolate every time i ate chocolate i feel happy and so they said science says that eating chocolate every day makes pregnant women healthier really is that what science found i actually went through and found the study and the study was not about chocolate making women healthier the study was about the risk of preeclampsia a basically a blood pressure issue for pregnant women in specific terms of pregnancy and a specific type of chocolate high flavonol chocolate that's what they studied and in the study which had a very small sample size here was the result i am quoting the result was that there was no difference in preeclampsia gestational hypertension placental weight or birth weight in the two groups the two groups being those who had chocolate every day that was high flavonol and those who did not let me say that again the media is reporting that science says pregnant women she eat chocolate every day to be healthier the study said and i quote the result was that there was no difference in preeclampsia gestational hypertension placental weight or birth weight in the two groups the study was a negative result but people don't like to publish negative results so check this out here's continuing that quote however the uterine artery doppler pulsality index which is a surrogate marker of blood velocity in the uterine placental and fetal circulations in both groups showed marked improvements that was much greater than expected in the general population so they found one figure in which women who ate chocolate and women who ate high flame and all chocolate every day appeared to have an improvement that may or may not result in a health improvement you had a very narrow finding in a small sample size study and to me it looks like the researcher dug through the data to find some positive result to publish okay and then the media runs with that science says pregnant women should eat chocolate anytime i see something in the news media that says science says i view that as an invitation to dig deeper not as an invitation to change my lifestyle so so far we've looked at the dunning-kruger versus the imposter syndrome as one two imprecise word usage and three the over generalization of research as the ingredients of an unscientific worldview and we have two more number four and this is the big one cognitive bias as humans we naturally and automatically notice evidence that supports our preconceived notions the things we already feel are true and we reject that which counters our preconceived notions automatically psychologically wildly documented the whole point of science by the way is to mitigate our cognitive bias to follow the data where it leads to accept the data as authoritative regardless of what our preconceived notions were and it's really hard to do that science doesn't always succeed at that by the way there are systemic challenges in the sciences related to cognitive biases we have research that shows that even trained scientists can be victims of cognitive bias that's why peer review is so important that's why statistical literacy among scientists is important and kind of a problem today many scientists aren't good mathematicians and certainly not good statisticians and statistical significance is a major marker of confidence in science the fact is science can be scary or even threatening when it challenges our assumptions about the world and our place in it we have seen this happen over and over in history where science paints a new picture of the cosmos or of human life that presses against our notions of being elevated and special in the universe the universe is not exciting to a human if the earth is just one little rock in a random part of one small galaxy that makes us feel insignificant and tiny so of course the idea that the earth was the cradle of life made by god at the center of all there was was a much more comfort comforting ocean right the fact that god formed us with god's own hands is a comforting notion compared to a difficult and even brutal process of selection from mutation over time cognitive bias might be the fundamental ingredient of an unscientific worldview especially when we refuse to admit our cognitive bias studies have shown we readily accept that humans are cognitively biased but don't accept that we as individuals are so basically the fundamental orientation of a human animal is that everyone else is biased sure i can buy that but not me i'm not biased that's why the work of science is so hard it's constantly allowing your assumptions to be challenged and overthrown i'm you know so into social justice issues which i know some of you in the audience are frustrated with you say i've been co-opted um but the reason one of the reasons i'm into that is because of the findings of science science tells me that income in america really is poorly distributed that voter opportunity really is poorly distributed in this country that access to education and economic resources are not equitably or fairly distributed mathematically and scientifically science is constantly forced me to re-examine my fundamental views on the world and continues to do so i've made a commitment to myself to be willing to be corrected and challenged over time to know that any idea that i hold dear today may be proven wrong tomorrow even harmful and to do my best to be flexible which leads us to the fifth ingredient of an unscientific worldview the conflation of scientific ideas with politics and social identity the fact is our cognitive bias is compounded by how much scientific ideas have been politicized and associated with social identity think about it this way black hip-hop artists and white christian homeschool parents are united together by a belief that the earth is flat not all obviously i'm talking about a relatively small number of both groups but a growing number of both groups now let's be real the black community and rural homeschool community are marginalized in wildly different ways but the fact is the same government that shuts down and moves housing projects to empower developers also empowers large capital interests against small manufacturing and farming communities and that same government funds nasa and noaa right if you're marginalized in society you have a great argument that society and society's government marginalizes you so why should you trust a bunch of high educated middle class researchers who work for that same government somehow we've allowed fundamental notions in science to be politicized and then to thumb our noses at those who disagree because in some way they are marginalized think about the cost that accepting evolution via natural selection and human cause climate change could have for an evangelical christian who's a republican living in the southeast just imagine the social cost i don't have to imagine the social cost i went through it when we talk about science and the tremendous social impacts unscientific thinking has on the world we can't forget that when people reject scientific notions they do so for real reasons of social belonging and emotional stability you will never convince a flat earther the earth is round or an anti-vaxxer that vaccines are safe by going over data and approaching them from a sense of superiority the painstaking and difficult work is to step back and look at the underlying social and emotional issues that create the unscientific belief empathizing them understanding them and then discussing common ground solutions in the context of relationship so as much as i enjoy john oliver's snark and i do as much as i enjoy a skeptical blogger tearing apart wu i understand that my work is different i'm a guy who talks about science very often in very conservative religious circles more often in groups that are predisposed towards wu like mainline christians and liberal americans and i think the reason i'm successful with that is uh i never mock people for rejecting science i look at their hearts and i try to imagine how did they get to this point when have i similarly been confused about scientific ideas and what was my journey like to a place where i understood the world more scientifically and how can i emotionally empower this person to take that journey on their own i find very often the solution involves a lot more olive branches than clever snark i'd love to hear your thoughts on science and science education i'm back on social media now if you want to send me a tweet i'll see it uh if you want to send me a facebook post maybe i'll see it i'll definitely see it if you go to social.thelitus.com which is our open source social media project where i hang out and uh talk with people much more frequently yeah so let me know what you think i'd like to keep this conversation going because the world needs more scientific literacy and it needs it now perhaps more than ever before thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week