ASM061 Relativity, Social Media, and Calm Controversy

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[Music]

relativity social media and calm

controversy

all that and more on this week's episode

of ask science

[Music]

it's one o'clock in the morning and i'm

in a hotel room in

albuquerque new mexico it must be tour

time

welcome to ask science mike the weekly

podcast where i

answer your questions about science

faith and life

as i mentioned it's going to be a weird

one i'm traveling

kind of tired hopefully it'll come out

okay

i'll know as soon as you do so let's get

it started

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i want to start this week by covering some of the events that are happening soon because there are a ton of them as i record this tonight we uh did the one wild life tour in albuquerque and it was a blast before this show airs we'll do a show in san diego although from my temporal vantage point it hasn't happened yet monday the day this show comes out will be in tucson arizona thursday santa cruz california friday los angeles california saturday santa barbara california and then sunday will be in san francisco california all those dates are with gunger's one wildlife tour it's a wild evening tom crouch comes and opens the show with some songs and then we do some science i talk about the universe in terms of numbers interspersed with music from gunger's one wild life album spirit and soul it's an amazing event lots of fun we do a liturgist q a afterwards we'd love to see you at one of those events and then on april 8th i'll be doing the liminal conference with pete ends so it's me and pete ends for a three-day event in ventura california really excited about that event i've actually heard several people are flying in for that event buying tickets so don't miss that if you're anywhere near ventura california i'm looking forward to it just to hear pete ends i mean the guy is an amazing voice in how to read the bible in a way that is helpful and and helps build your faith rather than tear it down then really exciting for me april 29th and 30th we're doing the first liturgist gathering this is a an expanded version of belong that's a lot less expensive tickets are on sale now you can go to liturgist.com gathering to get more information or for all these events just go to asksciencemike.com and click on the events button the gathering we're trying to do everything people have asked for we're going to more cities more often a lot lower ticket price it's a day and a half event so we'll start friday evening with some music from gunger some explorations of what consciousness is some guided meditations and then all day saturday we'll really talk about what it means to approach the christian faith today at all in an age of skepticism and doubt and looking at things through the lenses of science art and faith i would love to see you there tickets are 99 it's absolutely his bargain basement as we could pull it off we want to make the tickets just as cheap as they can be and it is not a one evening event it is basically a small conference it's a day and a half um so i'd love to see you there there are still tickets available in significant quantities so you're not gonna have any trouble if you go ahead and buy your ticket right now getting into the literature's gathering and there may be surprise guests basically if we sell enough tickets we're gonna bring in some other folks as well if not then it'll just be me and michael and lisa so uh which could be worse you know i don't know if you've heard these gunger folks but uh they're pretty fun to be around and i've got a lot more events that i'll tell you about every week on the show may is really packed and and we're booking out the rest of the year so i'd love to see you at an event there has never been more chances to see me in person [Music] hi mike this is seth from mobile alabama when people encounter opposing viewpoints most people get defensive and will argue and they're not receptive to what you have to say you've mentioned the role of the amygdala in all of this it seems like in this political atmosphere that our amygdalas have doubled in size however i've known people that were particularly gifted in opening minds and creating understanding so what is the scientifically best way to avoid the activation of the amygdala when talking about religion and politics with people of opposing views tonight as we were performing the one wildlife set i was looking on twitter and watching as protesters kind of took over a donald trump rally and watching people's reactions some people were very excited some people were very grieved and this was irrespective of whether or not they supported donald trump let's be honest it probably won't surprise anyone there aren't a lot of donald trump supporters on my twitter feed it's just that's not a big part of my audience and we are not in a situation right now where calm during conflict or confrontation is normal calm during controversy is certainly not now let me be clear sometimes making a fuss is worthwhile martin luther king made a fuss in america about inequality and don't take my answer as a prescription for how people should address controversy especially not how oppressed or marginalized people should handle controversy sometimes anger is the correct response sometimes the only way to create necessary social change is through dramatic actions like protests okay so no one listen to this answer and hear me tone policing or anything like that what i'm talking about is in one-on-one discussions where you are trying to genuinely influence someone's views and in that case there are some science-based approaches that i have found particularly effective do you really have a chance to change their mind is it worth the effort a stranger in a restaurant may not be the best target for uh you know whatever position you're trying to advance but from there the first thing that's important in keeping someone's amygdala from starting up again if people get angry they don't learn they're not considering positions it's purely a defensive reaction as stated in the question so that's why i'm trying to avoid anger in these discussions one is to show empathy for the person to show that you understand their feelings their frustrations their anger and that's on any issue my conservative friends today are very angry my liberal friends are very angry both feel that their anger is justified i'm not judging whether their anger is justified or not when i'm going to have a conversation with someone i do my best to understand their position fully and show empathy for how i can understand their feelings from their reference frame from their perspective from their position and second i affirm the relationship i make it clear that the conflict we're having doesn't call into question my respect for them or the value i place in the relationship since we're social animals we tend to get a little panicky if it looks like our relationships are fraying so if i noticed someone is starting to get angry or feel threatened i take the time to address that and for a really significant conversation i'm gonna assume we might have to have more than one and sometimes the most important thing in that moment is simply to reaffirm the relationship and move on drop drop the topic as you are able to keep someone's amygdala from responding and stay calm you want to honor their identity humans have a psychological need to self-identify as good people and if you call in to question someone's identity as a good person they are going to become defensive if they have any kind of functional psychological makeup so you never want to attack someone's identity instead you want to confront specific issues while affirming goodness i am a white man who talks about white supremacy and i don't do this to make a career out of it i don't do this just to take the platform or voice from people of color as much as possible if you look at my work you'll see i work very hard at amplifying the voices of people of color on topics of racism and other topics using you know my societal advantages as a straight white male unfortunately straightway males today are disproportionately able to address issues of inequality and injustice and i think that's important but when i talk about white supremacy most people who are involved in the kind of systemic supremacy that america exhibits today aren't aware of it they don't view themselves as racist they would never say a racist thing and in their hearts they don't believe there's any difference between people of different races they are simply unaware of the way in many ways the cards are stacked against people of color in america and so when i talk about white supremacy i am careful to affirm their goodness to say that i understand and i know that they care for people of color and that they view them as equal and what i'm talking about is how we can have our actions match those beliefs and i usually do that from a perspective of my own failures my own learnings the things i figured out i am doing wrong i almost always tell the story of white supremacy from my perspective as a person who has benefited from it it was learned from it so i never as much as possible i'm sure someone would say well i saw on twitter one time okay i make mistakes but i try to never come from some position of moral superiority the only reason i understand these issues just to any degree is because people have patiently explained them to me and so i just try to pay that forward i try to patiently explain it to other people and frankly it's easier for me to do as someone who is not under an oppressive system based on societal conditioning white people are more likely to listen to me because i'm a white person and therefore automatically safe so you're going to pick your battles you're going to show empathy you'll affirm relationships honor identity and confront the issues while affirming the goodness of the person those are the best techniques i have off the top of my head it's uh it's a much past one o'clock at this point so i hope that answer was good it was a little bit uh i'm going on stuff i've already looked up i haven't i didn't even do a fresh uh fresh google on that one so a little delirious [Music] our next question came in from the email inbox and it reads hey mike first off thanks for your work i can't overstate the impact it's had on my spiritual life and worldview my question is about relativity on your most recent literacy podcast you talked about disparities between two theoretical points of view and how it can cause the relative now to fluctuate where the viewpoint would be in our past and our future i understand the past part but my mind is having a hard time grasping how any theoretical viewpoint 10 billion light years away could be viewing our future if that were the case it sure brings up questions of free will can you help me sort this out i'm fascinated thanks and the question is from clay well let me catch everyone up with clay for a second in that episode i was talking about space time and relativity and effectively two things can affect the flow of time and einstein's theory of relativity one is intense fields of gravity and two is velocity the closer you are to the speed of light the slower you experience time i explained that in great detail in a recent episode of ask science mike about gravitational waves so if you'd like to catch up go check out that episode and then join us again now what i found out in additional reading was that distance can amplify those effects so if you have two theoretical positions 10 billion light years apart and you have a very minor difference in speed directly towards or directly away from the other point it can cause relativistic fluctuations in the passage of time and can cause the synchronicity between those two viewpoints to shift by more than the span of human history so you can imagine if point b was moving away from point a at say 500 miles per hour a relatively low speed and then it stopped and shifted back and moved towards point a at 500 miles per hour that could shift an incredible amount of time between those two points and yes that does call in ideas about free will and determinism but there's an out 10 billion light years is a long way so for any information to be passed from point a to point b it will take 10 billion light years at which point the fluctuation in the relative nows of those two moments will be greatly outpaced by the time it took the information to be transmitted okay that's it that's what we're talking about the other thing is 10 billion light years you've got the inverse square law that means the amount of information that's going to transform that distance is going to get dispersed anyway because the amount of light or photons that can carry information from point a to point b are going to get really spread out so theoretically yes this does speak to the future and the past being eternal features of space-time but that's in one model of cosmology remember at a fundamental level we know both the standard model of physics and general relativity are incomplete special relativity as well so theory relativity and quantum dynamics are both incomplete and i attempt to replace them like string theory super string theory in brain theory all these things are both known to be incomplete and lack experimental verification so we're talking about theories that are well grounded but not completely fleshed out so don't worry too much about your free will at least not in terms of relativity [Music] [Applause] hey science mike it's keith in orlando my question has to do with some of your expertise in social media i'm trying to get a better grip on how social media changes based on how you interact with it depending on what you like what you share who you follow the information that's delivered to you is customized just for you for instance if if i see someone with a different political view and i unfollow them or if i click on their post and say this offends me similar posts are going to disappear and i'm only going to see stuff that is more in tune with how i already feel about the world how can this affect our confirmation bias how can this create a more polarizing situation particularly in the united states our politics today are are just so polarized do you think facebook or even twitter or some of the other social media programs have anything to do with that and do you think it's going to increase or decrease how polarized and how much confirmation bias we experience in our lives every day thanks and i look forward to your response yeah absolutely that's a real thing so what facebook wants is for you to be on facebook as much as possible which means facebook wants you to like your experience which means facebook tracks your behavior to customize your experience so that you will enjoy it the most now i don't know some people like to fight on facebook so i'm betting the algorithms um in fact i would i'm quite certain that the fights on facebook show up as comments and those are heavily weighted in the algorithm so even if you're showing negative sentiment the fact you're commenting so much you're actually training facebook to show it to you more but to the larger point that machine learning and social media can create basically an echo chamber that's a valid criticism that's a real idea and confirmation bias is unavoidable in humans it's completely unavoidable so you have to be kind of intentional to work against it i am careful to frequently identify and curate high quality thoughtful voices in my life that disagree with me on significant issues and to make sure that i manually search for their posts to make sure that i like things even if i don't agree with them i simply like them because of their thoughtfulness which is also means you don't want to use my likes or favorites as an endorsement of thinking i use those literally to train machines how to show me information but i also think it's okay to cut out the stuff that that makes you unable to sleep at night makes your amygdala fire up we take social media really seriously there are real problems in society and we need to address those problems but like getting worked up about facebook and having trouble going to sleep doesn't solve the world's problems so absolutely absolutely a real problem the social media echo chamber and it's something i try to work against in my own experience i i actually enjoy the diversity that ask science mike followers and the liturgist followers bring into my life they're theologically diverse they're relatively politically diverse let's be honest they tend to be more centrist or slightly left of center maybe than most religious audiences but there's still a lot of people that are more conservative politically or more conservative theologically but are very thoughtful so i would say the best way to work against the machine's tendency to show you things you don't want to see is to curate high quality voices that you disagree with and that can be people that can be publications but then use those same tools to train the machines to check your thinking to challenge your assumptions i get really nostalgic it seems to me in a real way that the quality of public discourse about politics has genuinely declined and there's a tendency we're also biased to look at the past uh with favor and so i've done a little research nothing that i would publish but but enough that i'm trying to not just make baseless assumptions and it seems like the quality of our discourse is going down in this country that we used to have a more you know basically thoughtful discussion about the right way to govern everyone seemed to agree that we needed to figure out how to help people get a leg up economically people seem to agree we were all americans and we just disagreed on the specific approaches to bring forth a very similar vision and today politics does seem very tribal even people whose positions i agree with i can find myself concerned with the vehemence of the echo chamber the intensity of the echo chamber so i agree it's an issue and i think the only way to confront it is to start personally by intentionally very intentionally very frequently finding opposing viewpoints and studying where they come from our next question came in via email and it reads hey science my name is tony and i'm from eugene oregon i have a question about your feelings towards christian apologetics i'm going through a very weird time in my christian walk i grew up a very strict fundamentalist and even worked as a youth pastor for a fundamentalist church after stepping down as a pastor i've gone through a reconstruction of my faith one of the things it seems is like several evangelical churches like to create a separation between faith and science making you feel like you have to check your brain at the door to really fit in i recently listened to your searching for sunday liturgist episode with rachel held evans and you guys seem to speak almost facetiously about the case for christ now it's been years since i read it but i remember it being helpful and informative so my question is what are your thoughts on christian apologetics are they helpful and substantial or are they weak arguments made by evangelicals used to make them feel more secure in their faith i really appreciate your show and thank you for creating a venue where people like me can celebrate both science and faith and be okay with having doubts and tough questions man tony thank you that is a great question i would say my relationship with christian apologetics is complicated first of all i think evangelical christian apologetics helps many people feel closer to god genuinely helps them lead more moral lives helps them be a more positive force in society and it also helps prop up really destructive theologies that harm people create situations for spiritual abuse and even cause christians to believe things that perpetuate oppression from marginalized people groups so it's it's a mixed bag for sure i read the case for christ when i was younger and it was helpful at the time it also set me up for a fall i sometimes wonder if i would have learned a less rigid form of christian faith and practice if my faith would have ever fallen apart if it might have been more ready to deal with and face head-on tough questions about the character and nature of god god's relationship to the bible the sorts of things i talk about all the time now part of when you hear me speak almost facetiously or michael or rachel or any of us uh we're people we're doing our best our very best to be gracious hosts for a conversation but we're people we've got scars we've got hurts i've done a lot of hard work to recover from some traumatic experiences leaving evangelicalism i'm not blaming anyone don't hear that wrong i'm not casting fault at anyone except perhaps myself but it was still one of the hardest experiences of my life to relatively quickly leave a community of people that i'd invested decades in so sometimes that snark that's just a psychological defense mechanism it's also an attempt believe it or not to voice solidarity with other people who have experienced some kind of similar hurt but i would never want anyone to feel minimized or hurt or mocked or made fun of by me using a tone like that it's a very intentional thing for me to try to make as many people feel included and heard and valued as i possibly can now it is impossible to do that with everyone but it matters to me that someone who even is very conservative evangelical could listen to this program and even if they don't agree with me could feel like i care for them that i i believe that they want to achieve good in the world that i believe they really and genuinely love god that is incredibly important to me i got a little emotional it might just be uh i might just be really tired but in the end i don't think a rational defense of the christian faith is what it's all about i'm a mystic we meet god and experience and theology scripture practice is all about helping us move towards a direct experience with god now many you know evangelicals would say that our faith is not built on experience i'm not talking about pure experience by the way i'm talking about an experience that then propels us to action and that is through christian faith and practice that's why we're christians and not you know buddhists or whatever not that i have any problem with people who are buddhists or who are whatever they're not specifically religious at all or not religious at all but i believe god is something we know through love by loving god we come to a knowledge of god but that is not a knowledge that we can put into words i don't think apologetics does that i think apologetics can help people frame their faith when it's first starting out it can help them satisfy some intellectual curiosity but i think ultimately that scaffolding will get knocked down by circumstances by hurt by loss or even by a careful examination of the scriptures and that's why i tend to have kind of a step back a distant relationship with modern christian apologetics god is not something i care to prove god is something that i love [Music] and we've got a bonus question this week it's a quick one from paul it says hey mike what's the best way to pre-order your book is there a seller that is better than another from your perspective did i miss the blog post about it being ready for pre-order thanks for all you do can't wait and i promise that wasn't rigged i absolutely promise you that question was not rigged but i was delighted to see it in the email box first of all no you did not miss a blog post we're still really early in the pre-order process we're really early in the book marketing process believe me in a couple of months you'll probably be sick of hearing about my book this is the big moment this is the this is gonna be the test of the metal whether um science mic is a thing i can keep doing you know for a very very long time or whether it's just a good story i'll tell five or six years from now uh i've written this book it's called finding god in the waves and it's my story of faith lost and found it's about my journey through atheism and then coming back to god and then how i put back together the pieces how i came to have some christian faith and practice despite ongoing doubts despite ongoing confusion about god's character and being committed to accepting scientific ideas about reality the book is done it comes out september 13th of this year you can order it anywhere books are sold i know right now you can buy it at books a million you can buy it at barnes noble and you can buy it on amazon all three have it up for pre-order there's no cover yet there's no copy if you go to those websites but we did launch the book website so if you go to findinggodinthewaves.com you can pre-order the book there and you can also drop me your email address and we are going to have uh some pre-order bonus content that's only available to listeners of ask science mike or the liturgist podcast completely unique stuff just for you guys that is a marketing trigger telling you that exclusive content and i know that but it is also true that we are making things for you extra chapters that weren't included in the book some other things that are going to be really cool that i'm excited to announce a little bit later in the spring or early and the summer but in terms of where you order it believe me i'm thrilled if you order it anywhere i've actually been really surprised how many pre-orders there have been considering that on amazon there's literally just a picture that says cover coming soon it's heartwarming uh how well you all uh support my work man it's a weepy episode today i'm just like i'm starting to cry on every question and this one is like a book marketing question and i'm starting to cry but it's because i have so much gratitude for your support in this work so finding god in the waves.com to learn more thank you so much [Music] well there you have another episode of ask science mike i want to thank a few folks this week all you patrons on patreon a great job picking the questions this week i thought they were exceptional thank you andrew gallucki for picking the questions for the patrons to pick again stellar work andrew you are better at this than i ever was uh greg nordin i'm recording this saturday at 1 26 a.m and monday morning you're going to have a show to listen to and that's because greg nordine works so hard on this program and so this week i would appreciate it if you would uh tweet greg or andrew and just tell them thank you that would mean a lot to me personally because they work really hard on the program and of course my boy jeb i love the ass science mike theme song he wrote it and if you need music done he can write music for you as well i hope next week's show will be on time it is really hard to record the show on tour because i am exhausted and but don't worry i'm not asking for sympathy you know i don't need a bunch of tweets saying oh no mike don't worry i do the show because i know you've set aside time to listen that i don't want to leave you stuck in your car scrambling for a podcast to listen to i value this time probably more than you do the best thing about being on the road and doing all the events i've been doing is meeting you hearing your stories and finding out it's a miracle none of us are alone none of us are alone thank you so much [Music]