 Well, this course is called How to Think About Dubious Claims. And it's not clear that most people want to think about them, but if you do, hopefully, I have something to tell you. Two themes I'm going to try to get across in this course. One has to do with the fact that, why is it that smart people can be so stupid? And there are a lot of reasons, I'm a psychologist. We study that. I'm going to give you examples. Some of them are, we're going to talk about some of our top-notch scientists who are not immune to being stupid. And how is that, how is it that someone who's competent in one area can be so incompetent in another area? And that gets us a little bit into what psychologists know about how the mind works, so I think they know how the mind works and doesn't work. So that's one thing, is we're going to work on this psychology, why it is that being smart is no hindrance to being taken in, okay? And the other aspect, the other side of that coin is what to do about it. Assume that you want to do something about it. A lot of people want to have their worldview shaken up or challenged at all, but in case you want to do something about it, you want to be able to think correctly about dubious claims, how can you do it? How can you overcome the various biases and heuristics that the cognitive system is prone to? So I will try to give you a framework beginning lecture four, I guess we'll do that. And I've got the framework in the course guide that some of you have, and those of you who don't have it can get it online. And this is just one framework, but I hope it will be a framework that can help you override the natural tendency to be taken in. So let's begin. We're going to begin with, as you see up there on the screen there, the gala effect, that's the cover of a book actually. It was written by a man named Playfair, we can see that, I moved up a little bit, Uri Gala and Lyon Playfair, one of Uri's great admirers and fans and early in the days. By the way, how many here have heard of Uri Gala? Almost, not all, but one person didn't apparently. But usually in audiences when I'm talking to people today, classes of students or lawyers and stuff like that, only the elderly people have heard of him and the rest haven't heard of him. Although he keeps trying to make comebacks, he's been on television a lot, in Europe people know him, he's quite well known, he lives in England. And this last October, DJ was there as well, and I was there, we were at a special magic convention in Orlando, and it was very controversial, but the person putting on the magic convention had Uri Gala come and talk to us magicians, and he gave quite a stirring talk. I didn't say he was a trickster, I didn't say he wasn't. He plays it, he says he no longer claims to be psychic, that doesn't mean he isn't psychic, he doesn't claim it because it's just controversial. So he now calls himself a, well, something like a performance artist or whatever you want to call it. So he plays it both sides. This, I first came across him in 1972, December of 1972, I got a phone call from Colonel Austin Kibler, who was then head of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department. That's the Buck Rogers part of the Defense Department that was created by President Kennedy to deal with far out stuff, futuristic, anything that, you know, that is very challenging on the borderline or what have you. And Colonel Kibler, I knew because he was a psychologist as well, he was a Colonel in the Air Force, but he was the acting director of ARPA. At that time ARPA was working on what's called the ARPANET, among other things, which they contributed to the world and became the internet. So that put you to some context. But Kibler called me and said, Ray, I was grading exams at the University of Oregon where I was a professor and I'm retired there from there now. And it was December and he said, could you drop whatever you're doing and go down to Stanford Research Institute where they have a psychic in captivity and we'd like you to get your viewpoint on this. And I said, first of all, I said, I mean, we're grading exams, I can't just go. He said, but this is very important. He said, this guy is a psychic, but he's not an ordinary psychic. He can do anything ordinary psychic can do, but then he does even more. And he gave me examples like he bends metal with his mind. So I had this image of the Defense Department wanting to maybe use Kibler at that time as a Soviet Union. We could bend their tanks with his mind, I guess. But anyway, he said, if there's anything to him, we need to know. This is why we should be involved in. On the other hand, if he is not for real, if he's a trickster or a scam artist, we don't want to be anywhere near him. That could affect our budget. There was a Senator Proxmire from Wisconsin at that time who, when Evia gave the Golden Fleece Award to some agency in the government that was misspending government money in a foolish way. And it could affect budgets. And they didn't want to, so Defense Department didn't want to be near him. And they said, we're sending you down here because if he's a phony, you can detect him. We're also sending a pair of psychologists because if he's real, it's going to take a parapsychologist to see if he's real, right? And so they're sending a parapsychologist as well. So actually, it was going to be a three-man committee. They wanted to go down here. There was a parapsychologist, Robert van de Kessel from University of Virginia Medical School, which has a Paris, did have it. They still have a parapsychology department, like all medical schools obviously would like to have it. And there was me, and there was George Lawrence who was representing the opera. So that was our committee. We went down here to look at him. And of course, I report, well, let's not get into that right away. He all then became famous, very famous. And in the 70s and 80s, he was having made major TV shows several times and he appeared on television. And the big thing was, and this is what's called the Galerophic, is that when he was on radio or TV, he would tell people listening in their homes to bring spoons, to bring keys, to bring old watches that no longer go to the television set or to the radio. And while they're not listening to him or watching him perform, maybe something would happen with their silverware, stuff like that. And sure enough, they got thousands of calls every time he was on, people saying, hey, my silverware bent, my key bent, or my clock is not running, that wasn't going. And Gellis was very modest, very modest fellow. And he said, look, don't give me credit for it. It's you, the people out there. We all have the psychic powers. I am just a catalyst. And when you see me do it, it figures it in you. So that's called the Galerophic. And I want to know how many people here, by the way, have actually bent metal with your mind? How many have done it? You succeeded? With your mind? They're not your hands. With your mind? You haven't done it. OK. He says he hasn't done it. But how many have tried to do it, by the way? What'd you do with your life? OK, well. How many of you have actually bent? You try to move needles. OK. I'm going to have a couple of people up here who'd be willing to try it, at least for the moment, even though you're skeptics. And at least you'd be willing to try it. How would you try it? When is your name? OK. I know these things, you know. Kathy, is your name Kathy? Right again. OK, would you two come up here? It's going to be harmless, I hope. And you're going to try to bend the key with your mind. Come over here. You come over here. OK, you can stay over there, OK? And I have here. Here, I guess you open this way. What do those look like? Keys, ordinary keys. Ordinary keys. OK, how do you know they're ordinary? Well, actually, I got them for the years. I've got lots of them. I got them from the security department at the University of Oregon. Every once in a while, they go around and change the door box and they take the old keys. And they don't know what to do with them. So I grabbed a lot of them, OK? And that's what they are. Now, Geller says that if you're going to bend the key with your mind, you're going to put the force of your mind into that key. You have to pick a key that you have a feeling for. Now, you have to be a connection between you and the key. So I want you to pick a key that you have some feeling for, OK? Can I pick it up and put it somewhere? Yeah, just pick it up. Any key at all, OK? I like that one. You like that one? OK, take it. Hold it in your hands. OK. Like that. And what I want you to do is to, because I learned this the hard way, and I've used to do this before, put some mark on it so you recognize that key again with the sharpie. Initials are your phone number or anything like that. Very good. Let it ride, OK? And good. And OK, so now, what I'm going to do, I'm going to show you what to do. I want you to hold the key in the Geller grip, OK? Yeah, the Geller grip, like this. I call it the Geller grip. You hold it like that between these two fingers, OK? Hold it, stand so the audience can see it. Don't ever put your back to the audience, OK? All right. Now you're going to stroke it like this, just like that. Go ahead, that's it. Are you left-handed? No, hold it in my left-handed. Well, you can do it your way. It's OK. You do it your way. You do it wherever you feel comfortable. OK, good. OK. So you're going to stroke it this way, and as you're stroking it, I want you to think bend, bend, bend, OK? And if the circumstances are right, Geller says we all have this power, and he's a catalyst, I'm a catalyst, and so on, it should bend. Sometimes it takes several days, but we don't have that much time. How are you doing, Derek? Yeah. Let me see. It's a little bent, but I guess we want to call it, give it, give it any credit for that. Try another one, because maybe that wasn't a good one for you, OK? It's a little thinner. It's a little thinner, OK. Try that one. How are you doing? Oh, you got much better, but that's not my at all. You can see it? Can you see it, Sven? No. OK. Then take another one, or you can stick with this one. I'll stick with this one. OK, good. She likes that one. OK. Can I finish on it? OK. OK, Kathy, say bend out loud. How are you doing? Now, OK, look, we've got to be, we can't go far for two months. We really want it to bend. Just go, bend, just say, bend, bend, bend, bend. How's it doing? Let's go back to your original one here, OK? Which is your original one? I'll just skip this one. OK, this is your original one? Is this your original one? OK, let me do it. I'm going to, because we're running out of time a little bit here. Say we stay here for a moment, because you've got to be a watch. OK, now, I'm getting a feeling it's bending a little bit. OK, I think it, do you see it bending? It's hard to know whether it's really bending or just an illusion, right? But it has been some, right? It has been, right? It's been. Right? Yeah. And you can hand that around to people. It's not a big bend, but it's hard to bend them your own. Now, don't clap. It's the Geller effect. We all have it. OK, now, I want you to do two things now. You've got to piece, I'll have a piece of paper, right? You may sit down if you want. Thank you very much for helping out. I want you to, first, on one side of your paper, describe what just happened as if you're writing it for someone like Randy, because you want to show it to Randy and say, how did the key get bent? And you want to give him enough information so he could explain to you how it happened. But anyways, write some sort of explanation of just what happened. And once you've done that, I'm going to have you turn it over. And on the other side, I want you to guess how it got bent. That's the two things I want you to do. On one side, you're describing what happened. And on the other side, you're going to describe your best guess as to how it got bent. While you're doing that, I'll explain to you that I have done this since 19, I visited Geller in 1972 at Stanford Research Institute. And since then, in my classes at Oregon and in talks I've given to various associations and stuff like that, I've been doing basically this demonstration. I haven't done it for a long while, so I was a little rusty today. But over a number of years, 30 years maybe, I was doing this on a regular basis. And every time I collected the same information I'm collecting from you, I put it all on computers. I've analyzed it. And I've got, so I'll compare what you've done with what typical undergraduates are, typical lawyers are, typical people out there in the world who have witnessed the same thing that you just witnessed, how they explained it and what they described happened, and so on. What are you still doing? I see people still doing it. You're much more conscientious than a lot of people. I am the graduates. Let me say that what we're dealing with in a way, we're dealing with testimony, observation. And the whole issue of data. Because the most important thing, the most important issue of all, if you're going to think about any kind of claim, is the issue of the quality of the information behind that claim. It's called the garbage in, the garbage out phenomenon. If you're starting with garbage, the best thinking in the world, the best logic, the best books of critical thinking are not going to help you at all. You're going to come out with garbage. So unfortunately, many good books, excellent books in critical thinking, teach you how to think critically about what you have. They don't spend much time telling you how to make sure what you have is worthwhile to think about. And so this is on this demonstration, I hope, is trying to make home the point that the most important thing of all, if you're going to think at all about anything, is to make sure you're starting with good data. And good data is very, very hard to come across, okay? So anyone finish, would someone be willing to tell me, to share what they've just written down with the rest of us? Anyone, okay, what did you write? Ray had two of his cookies. He had one sloper key while he took the old one. Using the other one's key as misdirection, he used two keys together in his hands to bring the bend. By holding the key by the key, the bend isn't apparent and can be teased out as Ray says, bend. Thus the illusion of him bending the key with his fingertips is made. Okay, now what did you say as you guess how it got bent? At the six-teethers side. Okay. I thought that was the same thing. Okay, anyone else? You were fooled, okay, it's all right. Even though I was crude, I didn't do it very well. There's a reason why I didn't do it well, that's okay. But you still were fooled anyway, right? And don't feel bad about being fooled because some people know what to look for and some people don't know it. If you don't know what to look for, then you don't have a ghost of a chance, even if the demonstration is not well done. Kathy, what did you say? So that you were doing it so that the key came in tables and you were still holding on to it. Yeah, I'm doing this, you mean? Yeah, so that softens up at one point and because you're holding on to it. It softens up at one point? Yeah, you're heating it because you're pressing only one direction, so basically it means I hold it up, but it works better with spoons than keys. Okay, now you're getting different ideas about, she wants to be skeptical, but yet she's talking about the key softening, right? Okay, and it's well gonna go through several, several explanations that I got. As I said, I've got hundreds of them and I've sorted through them and I will go through some of them, but first thing I wanna do is now go through a reconstruction of what I actually did and why I did it this way and I just wanted to have something to deal with. The problem you have in making observations, especially when the observations aren't planned. Now you ahead of time, we're gonna do some key bending, but in a lot of times when Geller's doing stuff, he never says in the head, the most important thing about Geller, he's not a skeptical magician. Geller doesn't say I'm gonna bend this key or do something like that. That's almost never what he does. He's an opportunist. He is always looking around the room. He knows where everyone is, what they're looking at and he even rearranges people many times. He has complete control and if he still doesn't think he can get away with something, someone might be able to see what he's actually doing. He won't do that. But he's always ready to bend the key, to bend the spoon or to do something else. It's depending on what he thinks he can get away with at that moment. So he himself doesn't know ahead of time what he's gonna do. Magicians do know what they're gonna do. They have a plot and they do it even though it looks like I can prompt you, but magicians always have a plot when they do this stuff. But Geller is an opportunist. Now, what he's maximizing there is he's making sure that you don't have good data. Because if you think about it, what should you describe here when I ask you to describe this? There's an infinite number of things you can do. Many of these people in my students, in my class over the years, I got things like this one time, nice one out just as we were about to bend the key. Everyone wrote about the lights being out and many people used the fact that that's had something to do with the fact that the key got bent, okay? And it doesn't, you know, if you think about it, it isn't stupid to think that way. You don't know in advance what should be relevant, what's not. And that's very, very important. How do you know what's relevant? There's so many things that could be there. And it's an impossible task if you don't know ahead of time what was supposed to happen. Even if I tell you I'm gonna bend the key, I know now you know something and what to look for, but so I set it up. So why did I have these two people up here? Right, did I have them? What's that? Distraction. Distraction, exactly. Misdirection, we call it. They weren't gonna bend the key. If they did, that would have amazed me. I did have it happen one time. So my key is bent, that's another story. It turned out the key had been bent ahead of time. We didn't know about it. But I don't respect them to bend the key. As I said, I would be amazed if they did. But I'm having that up here because I want to distract you. I need a maximum distraction because I've already announced I'm gonna bend the key, which means I give you an advantage over Gell. Gell doesn't even say I'm gonna bend the key. You don't know what he's gonna do. And I want to have some distraction. So I got this misdirection between them. Now, the reason I have a marker, by the way, I used to do it without anyone marking the key. And the most common explanation was that I switched the keys. By the way, which is a good thing to do. But I wanted to eliminate that possibility, so that's why I haven't signed the keys. Even so, I get a certain number of people still insist that I switched the keys. Then I go through a lot of stuff to do. Now, I didn't do it too well here. I got the problem here because I picked the wrong key, maybe. Most people over the years almost never mentioned the fact that I had a key in my hand when I took your key. He noticed it because I was pretty crude about it. But almost never, I can tell you, thousands of people that I have on my computer baseline, no one ever mentions that I had a key in my hand. When I do it right in synchrony, I have her, she has her key. I have to show them how to bend it. I show them the yellow grip and I do this. This now is invisible in one sense because it's a normal thing we could do. It's natural. If I'm gonna show them how to do it, I have to have a key in my hand, right? Then I should just casually leave the key there like this and not make a big deal about it. And so no one ever mentions I had a key in my hand. Now it's very important to have a key in my hand. I have the right kind of a key. I picked the wrong key, a little bit to make it a little tougher. I pick a key. I make sure I got some keys that have a notch, a hole in it, like this. Why do I want a hole like that? This one would not be too good, okay? This one would not be too good. I want one that whatever keys they have, I can, because I don't have psychic powers. I want to take advantage of what our communities found out about called leverage. If I stick it in there, even the toughest key, which is a little bit like this, remember one time I said we wanted to bend it. I just squeeze and anyone can bend the key that way. Anyone, everyone here, I guarantee you can bend the key. Something a little harder, but almost any key you can bend this way and get a good bend in it. For example, let me show you, this is a tough key here, but let me show you, I'll squeeze like this. And look at that. That's a tough key. Try to unbend it with your hand. You see any you can hand it up. But with this leverage, take advantage of leverage, you can bend any key that way, okay? There are lots of other ways of bending keys, but this is the way I do for this demonstration. But no one ever mentioned that's the key thing. I call this lecture keys to critical thinking, by the way. Okay, but anyway, but no one ever mentioned that because I've structured it so that they're not gonna pay attention to that because a lot of other things to worry about, right? And so I have that, so at the right time now, I've got the key bent, where would I put it? Here it is, okay? It's bent. The worst thing to do now is I should immediately show I got a bent key. It's too close to when it was here in my hand. So we used just some well-known magicians, but I also get others. I'm gonna stretch out the fact and then change when it's supposed to be bent. This is how I was able to get Kathy and Wendy wrapping around it, too. It's really bent now, but I'm not gonna show it now. I'm gonna handle it as if it's not bent. And I said, well, we can't go on too long, so I'm going to do it myself. And I'm slipping here. They don't know for sure whether it's just flipping up and down. In fact, I'm not sure anything's happening here, okay? I mean, gradually I'm letting it slip out. You look at it, it's a pretty good illusion. It looks like it's rubbery now a little bit, but still they're not sure that it's bent. That's fine. But then I run fun, I get to the point when it's really, you know, I show it like that and it's pretty clearly bent. Now you can hand it out and they can't bend it, unbend it by themselves, and that's a miracle, in a way. So this is the reconstruction of what I did. But it's very, let me show you now from people who aren't from the past, from the student stuff, who, what witnesses' name, demonstration youths are. I was much more practiced in those days, but let me show you. You've got this, oh, you have it here. Okay, this is the student number 51, this column. My guess is that he used a higher level of thinking and used more capacity of his mind, not strength, but bend the key, okay? Would you say that's a paranormal explanation or what? But it's. Definitely, it's superstitious. Was that? Definitely superstitious. Okay. Some students, this is the description now. This is what they test for. Some students went to the front of the class and were asked to bend the key, not with strength, but with their mind, like Gower did. At first, nothing happened to either of the keys, so the students switched keys and tried again. This field also, so Professor Heimann tried and bent. He passed it around and sure enough, it was bent. Okay, that's their description. Pretty good description in some ways. Notice that they did mention, and most of the people don't mention it, by the way, that they failed on the first one and then I hadn't taken another key. They don't mention that at all, most people. Is that crucial? So, people don't know what they should or should not include. Lots of things. As I said, sometimes the lights went out. At one time, the bell rang and the last students put the bell ringing in there as important and the prof asked for volunteers. They each labeled a key. Label, okay, not everyone mentions labeling and tried to bend it with their minds. Looked like they held it from the wider end in their left hand and stroked it with a finger willing it to bend. They then got to try it with a different key. When it didn't work for either of them, the prof asked for a key from the female volunteer that had a better feeling to it. He then bent the key by stroking it and asked the two volunteers to unbend it. They couldn't. That's a pretty good description of what happened in a sense. But people vary what they include and don't include. Okay, at first I simply couldn't believe that this could work. Once I saw the concentration that you, Mr. Hyman, used, I did actually believe it. I feel the two volunteers walked up there with a negative state of mind. Not actually believing it was possible and that's why I feel they failed. I believe in concentration. Believing something indeed will happen. You have that strong concentration and positive attitude that was obviously needed to make the key bend. I got a lot of that like that. I'll give you just some typical ones, which I made, but as I said, I got hundreds and hundreds of these. Okay, now this is where I'm not, because I got this reputation among my colleagues as hot hands hymen. This is from the kind of reason I got it. Possibly the heat produced by the way of kinetic energy of the finger stroking the metal key could soften the metal enough for the key to bend. It is true that when many metals are heated, they bend into a shape, non-particular or dissimilar to their original shape. By the way, some of this is true, you know. Thermostat is a good example and so on. So you get this mixture of gobbledygook and real science, something that they throw in there. Now it turns out that most of the students I show it to, they have college students, stuff like that, they notice I'm a skeptic and this is of course on critical thinking when I'm teaching it. And the lawyers also know I'm a skeptic. So the majority, by the way, 33%, essentially clearly say I was psychic. I did it psychically, okay? But then the rest say, no, no, they don't believe in any psychic phenomena. And so they give explanations like this. I got several of them. One of the most popular ones is the heat in my hand somewhere melted the key, to some extent, softened it. But another one where people say they're skeptics and they have given naturalistic explanation is that Professor Hyman studied martial arts. He's a student of martial arts. And he knows exactly how to put the power into the weak part of the key, so it will bend. These are people thinking they're giving a scientific naturalistic explanation, okay? And that's quite common. So a lot of people who say they're skeptics or scientific, who have no sense of science, because unfortunately this is the general state of Longsala College students today. They don't know any science and it's getting worse. But anyway, so you get a lot of that as well. The big point is that for our purposes, this shows the importance of having scientific observation. What do we mean by scientific observation? Well, scientific observation is prospective in the sense that ahead of time you decide you're gonna study key bending. You're gonna watch how someone can bend the key. Whereas most people who witness a key bending demonstration or spoon bending demonstration or some other type of thing, miracles or something like that, they didn't plan to observe that. In fact, the most common expression goes along with this is that this was unexpected. And this is the ideal situation for having bad, bad observation and bad reporting and misinformation. It's contributes to what we call the mind where what we call it contaminated mind where is the right expression. And this is very important because mind where has to do with what we know, our knowledge that we've accumulated. And having wrong information is very bad for you. And having no information is also sometimes bad. We're in a probabilistic area. People just don't understand probability, how to deal with it, how to calculate it, haven't thought well how to do it. And so most of us are probabilistically challenged. And in terms of evolution, somehow it wasn't valuable to learn probability. So probability theory, even a theory of probability only begins about 400 years ago. So the human race didn't have any notions of how that you could deal with probability. I deal with it. Yet the whole world is probabilistic and everything we do in science is probabilistic. And we use statistics and everything else. But human mind is not made to deal with that. So we call that a failure of lack of mind where of that kind. And but some mind where we have is contaminated mind where. And so one of the things we're gonna do with the framework that we developed is to try to fix that up. Now how are we doing on time here? Oh, we got a little bit so good time, good. So let me go on some other things. I talked about information pollution. We talked about garbage and garbage, that's all the same thing. The point we wanna make here again is that if you're gonna have good data, trustworthy data, and that's what science is by the way, the most important feature for me of science that beginning about 1600 but changed the world. And now we have actually improved the world in some ways since science began is that it deals with trustworthy data. And to get trustworthy data, you have to plan your observations. It deals with planned observation. If you plan it, then you can focus on what it is you're looking for. If you don't plan it, you don't know what to focus on, what you should be looking for. And so it's systematic. It's calibrated and sometimes aided to use instruments and use procedures. You standardize things that have been tested. And so it's valid. You know these procedures you're using to observe the stars of a certain kind. Let me give you an example. During the early days of astronomy, there was inconsistencies in the same observatory. Some, and it was traced to a man named Bessell, I think it was, one astronomer. He realized, figured out that the inconsistency with the fact that different viewers, people looking at a telescope had different reaction times. This is a psychological thing. Some would see the transit of the star. It was going by, they were reported a few seconds later than another person watching it, the same transit. So he developed what's called the personal equation. He developed ways of measuring the reaction time of each observer and correcting for their particular biases. And that was the start, by the way, of one of the starts of experimental psychology because this was, this is psychologically a reaction time. I did my dissertation on reaction time. This became a very important thing, how to measure it and what it tells us about the human mind. So science, in many ways, the most important thing is it couldn't be science unless it had very good data. And the more we can work at getting data that fulfills those functions, the more we can trust it and think about it. The less we think about it, and I'm gonna give you an example now, we're gonna go into that in the next lecture. Let's see, when did we start? I've got 13 minutes, okay, good. So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna move on to this, which is like a beginning, getting ready for the next set of lectures, the next lecture. Okay, here's something I got from a book by Jonathan Evans. He's a psychologist and spent his career studying human reasoning. And the biases in human reasoning, especially with the logical problem and stuff like that. Okay, it is, it is, it is, we can, okay, that's good. So from a book he wrote on hypothetical thinking, dual processes in reasoning and judgment, he begins this way. He says, it is evident that the human species is highly intelligent and well adapted. Some of our intelligence, we clearly share with many other animals. We have well-developed visual and perceptual systems, complex motor skills and ability to learn in many ways to adapt to the environment around us. We also seem to be smart in ways that other creatures are not. We have a language system that is complex and sophisticated in its ability both to represent knowledge and to communicate with other humans. We study and attempt to understand a multitude of subjects, including our own history and that of the universe. We have derived systems of mathematics and logic. We design and build a huge range of structures and artifacts. We have constructed and mostly live our lives within highly complex economic and social structures. All of these distinctly human things imply an extraordinary ability to reason, entertain hypotheses and make decisions based upon complex mental simulations of future possibilities. I will use the term hypothetical thinking as a catch-all phrase for thought of this kind. Well, in this course, I'm gonna give you a framework based on hypothetical thinking. But we agree, look at us, aren't we wonderful? He catches himself in the next paragraph because this is the paradox. You can look at the modern things that the human brain can do that no other creature can do. And you list them and they sound fantastic. But then he says, it is equally apparent that evidence of human error and fallibility surrounds us. The world is plagued by wars, famines and diseases that in many cases appear preventable. Stock markets collapse under panic selling when each individual acts to bring about the outcome that none of them wants. Doctors sometimes make disastrous misjudgments that result in disability or death of their patients. Experts often fail to agree with each other and may be shown in hindsight to have made judgments that were both mistaken and overconfident. At the present time, governments of the world are well informed about the likely progress of global warming and its consequences, but seem to be making minimal progress in doing anything to prevent it. Criminal courts continue to make the innocent and acquit the guilty with alarming regularity and so on and so forth. So that's the other side of the coin. By the way, there's a senator in the way. Is that his name? Yeah, no, is that his name? Is he from Hawaii? He's the one who says that global warming is a hoax? No. No, it's another thing. His name, like, that's right. So unfortunately, we even have political people trying to settle things that are scientific politically now. The global warming thing, I remember some Republicans were running on the platform. They're gonna wipe it out, you know? They're gonna, by voting, you can get rid of it, right? And it reminds me that in the late 1800s, very late 1800s, the Indiana legislation, I never knew whether this was a hoax or what. They almost got it to the fore to vote on. They had a vote, they were gonna vote on to change the value of pie, to make it a finite number so that it was gonna, I think you commercially is gonna solve a lot of issues. And so we have this, so you have this confusion with many people politically are trying to, or religiously are trying to change things which are scientific issues, but they're trying to handle it politically. And I suppose that's more of that. There's one other thing here I have here. No, that's it. That's all I wanted to give you from Evans. So the idea is again that we are a complex thing. We are a very complicated brain, complicated. We can think hypothetically. We could do all kinds of wonderful things. And it's not clear that the heuristic, how many heuristics and biases that approach. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist got the Nobel Prize in economics. The third psychologist I think has got the Nobel Prize in economics to the upset of the, maybe it's the second one. But you can't, there's no Nobel Prize in psychology. There is a Nobel Prize for economics. And so Herbert Simon was the first one, I think, psychologist to get the Nobel Prize in economics which upset economists, because why is he getting a Nobel Prize? He's not an economist, right? Herb Simon got it for his notion of, a very simple notion, think about it. Sometimes maybe the best idea is that simple. His idea was on, I'm trying to think of his phrase for it, but basically he said that we satisfied, that's it, satisfying. Instead of trying to maximize evidence for a decision or anything, we satisfied. Because of limited cognitive capacity, we do the best we can with limited amount of data. And we make a decision on, not all the data, but on parts of it, because we are cognitively incapable of handling all of the data. And for that very simple notion called satisfying, he won the Nobel Prize in economics. And now, lastly was Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics, a psychologist for his work on the biases, heuristics and biases, the limitations of the human mind that he keeps coming up with. By the way, these heuristics and biases, they're not necessarily all bad. They have a good place in our thinking, and they have a good role. The question is, under some circumstances, these shortcuts we have to take because we cannot handle everything are very helpful and very useful. Other cases, they serve as a platform as a reason for us being able to be taken in, be scanned, be hoodwinked. And in many ways, the best scammer is the one who can take advantage of the way your mind ordinarily works, and it works usually for good from the situations which it's developed and the situation we work with most of the time, because we cannot completely, logically deal with every problem. And so in the next two lectures, I will be giving you further examples and get more into the theory of why it is that smart people can be so stupid and why scientists especially, some of the best scientists have gone badly astray when they step a little bit outside of their area of expertise. Now we get to expertise itself, the word expertise. Expertise involves what's called automatic thinking. The autonomous mind. You really don't consciously think. You just do it, it just comes to you. And we were talking at lunch, I think Ed and DJ and I were talking at lunch about some of this, and the example I think Ed brought up was that in that some people working both in the, in Denmark or, what's that? England and France, they drive on different sides of the road. So if you're a native of France and you go to England, you drive on one side of the road and you go back to France, you drive the other side of the road. But if you're a Frenchman, you grew up in France and you're doing this thing. In France, it's automatic what you're doing. You don't have to worry to think about it. When you go to England, which is not where you grew up, you still can drive okay, but you have to think about it and consciously be aware of that. And that kind of thinking is not autonomous thinking. And unfortunately, if you're doing that kind of thinking, your mind doesn't have that kind of thinking. That's what we call a system to thinking. It's a slow kind of thinking. Can only deal with one object at a time. It's serial thinking and it's very costly. Takes a lot of effort to think that way. And as a result, we are what's called cognitive misers. We don't like to deploy that kind of thinking very often because it's very costly. So if you're driving a car, like when you first learned to drive a car, you can't pay attention to almost anything else. You have to pay attention to what you're doing and what you had moved to clutch and everything else. After years of doing this, this is automatic. It's not part of your conscious thinking. You can do all kinds of stuff, including I see people combing their hair and eating their lunch while they're driving and on the highways here, it's kind of frightening. And of course, they're doing their texting and everything else. We know that they really can't multitask like that. What they're doing is they're switching back and forth. But because you can automate a lot of things and driving something that's automated, it's now part of your unconscious mind or your system one type of thinking. And that kind of thinking is cheap, relatively cheap, it's not very costly to the human system. It doesn't take up any of our conscious resources. And it's good that we do a lot of that, but it's very context dependent. So that a doctor who is an expert in his or her specialty does rely on a lot of automatic judgments because they have a fixed matrix of things they're dealing with. That same doctor stepping outside of that matrix of where they're usually plying his kind of judgment, oftentimes is still gonna use an intuitive type of judgment and it's not relevant in a new situation. And in those conditions, they can get into an awful lot of trouble. And that's why a lot of medical doctors are among the biggest supporters of paranormal types of stuff as well. You find medical people with MDs who are also doing homeopathic stuff. You find people with MDs who talk about complementary medicine and alternative ways as if there's an alternative to the right way, right? And we're gonna come out across examples of scientists who also, when they get outside their area of expertise, they don't realize that they really are not consciously scientists, they are implicit scientists. Most scientists get into their field, they're post-docs, they work within their field, their apprentices, and they implicitly absorb the constraints that are important in their field, the right rules, the right way to make observations in their field. They don't realize when they step out of the field that those same intuitions are not relevant anymore. So they still feel they're doing good science when they are dealing with a medium who claims to be talking to the dead, like Gary Schwartz, who claims he has good degrees, as his PhD from Harvard, he taught Yale, he has hundreds of professional papers on the brain and stuff like that, yet the last 10, 20 years he's been spending all his time testing mediums like John Edward, you know John Edward on TV and stuff like that, he claims they're real, they really are talking to the dead, okay? He's written books on stuff like that, he's written articles, and he apparently has no, well he believes he's so smart, because he, first time I met him, he told me, first thing he told me was how he got A-plus in his statistics, graduate statistics course at Harvard, how he got an A-plus in his undergraduate physics class at Cornell, and how he got Phi Beta Kappa, all his credentials, and how he has 400 papers, I don't know how many published papers in legitimate science, I call it legitimate science, he didn't make that distinction, he thinks everything he does is legitimate science I guess, and yet it's pretty clear that this man is way off base, he doesn't, I mean this is not science that he's doing when he's dealing with these mediums, and we got five minutes still? I didn't realize, okay, oh this is good, I got a lot more time than I thought, I'm gonna do this, finish the lectures in four lectures, 10, okay, no we got a lot more material, okay, so let me go on then to, what's that? Okay I think we could, because it's a good place to stop here, because I wanna begin on the next segment actually, and I think this is a good place to stop, unless anyone has any questions, yes Cathy? I was trying to think of some rationale by somebody sitting at home in the room. Okay Cathy is asking why someone at home, why their keys would bend? I mean the question is why you get all these reports of bending keys from people, and you do, every time Gala's been on TV, hundreds of people call in, Randy's done it all so similar and people call in as well, so it's easy to get people to call in, now why are they calling in? Well, let me give you an example of what happened to me one time, I was giving a talk, I was a medical doctor at the Stanford Medical Center, called me down at the time of Gala, they had Gala and the people sitting in Gala at SRI, talked to them, and they decided to show some balance, they'd have me come next week, so I came next week and talked to them, and I was feeling a hostile crowd, they were all Gala, everyone together now, Gala was their hero, and who am I, I'm coming to put him down, so I was up there and all during my talk, there was some fellow in the back there yelling at me all the time, he kept interrupting and saying, here bend my key if you're such a great man, bend my key. And I says, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, I don't claim to be able to bend keys, it's Gala who can bend keys, and anyway, wait till afterwards, I'm giving my talk here, and so he kept yelling at me, and I said, okay, I wanna do something to shut him up for a little while, and I said, okay, I'll try, give it a try, don't guarantee anything, I'm standing here, he's right back in the room, I said, I'm gonna concentrate, and I concentrated and I said, bend, bend, bend, and suddenly the guy changed his face, was turned ashen white and he says, it's bent, you did it, and I was a sudden hero, suddenly now I was no longer, I replaced Gala in their eyes and everyone else, everyone in my autograph and they were shaking, it was unbelievable scene, you know, I had bent the key, well, I didn't know what was going on, and so I went up to him afterwards, of course he was still around, you know, after it was a long question, the anti-session, and I now was a hero to everyone, they want my autographing and everything, I've been disguised key apparently from a distance even, so I went up to him, I says, can I see your key? And he brought up the key, and I couldn't tell whether it was bent or not, you know, I says, I had to put it on a table, and I put it on a table, sure enough, you can see it was a little bit of a bendy, you know, if you look at it, it was very barely, I said, you sure it wasn't bent beforehand? He says, oh yes, but not that much. And since then, I then I tried this trick also, where I would come to people's home after I met Geller and saw him do the spoon bending and stuff like that, a few times I would be invited to someone's home for dinner and something like that, I come in at the door front door, I say, wait a minute, I says, you know, I hope you don't mind, but I'm gonna see if I can bend some of your cutlery, and I would say, I'm at the door, I haven't even come in, I'm concentrating, I hope you don't mind, I said, go to the kitchen, almost about 70% of the time, they'd come back and say, you did it, well, now if you go, try it yourself, go to someone's house and go through the cutlery, you'll find at least one or two bent, you know, that the people just don't notice. So there's things like that going on. Okay, the spoons, okay, no, spoons, but spoons are wonderful instruments, the much easier to bend than you think, depends on the spoon, of course, but keys are harder to bend, by the way, but you still can bend keys with leverage and other tricks. Randy's favorite way, and Gara's also, when he's in the chair like you're sitting in, you can shove the key into, I think, between a, no, that's not, some of those chairs are like that. Can you put it in here? Yeah, you can put it, no, you can't, but some chairs like that, you can get the key in between the frame and the seat, and while you're just moving up like that, it bends very easily. It's another leverage type of thing. Randy's, that's one of Randy's favorites. I remember seeing Randy do that lots of times, but Gara does it that way, too. You just quickly, as you're just, you're trying to bend the key and nothing's happening, suddenly you adjust the chair a little bit, you've got a bent now, and you can now pretend that you go through that thing, you pretend, and eventually you show it bent, of course. Magicians are gonna love that. No, no, well, that's okay. Magicians didn't invent this. So it was, and you just have so many ways of bending the key, you know, Gara's a very smart guy, that member that he gave his talk there, he said, no, you people that have bent spoons, by the way, Gara actually bent spoons for us in front of the magicians. He says, no, you guys do it, he's learning the implication ones, he does it for real, but you guys do it in complicated ways, you have wonderful ways of doing it, you know, ways that I never thought of doing it, you know, you've got a hundred ways. I just keep it simple, he says, and then he did it for us, what's that? Oh, no, no, Gara is not sub-deluded, no way about it, he knows exactly what he's doing. I better, okay, we're talking about, unfortunately many things, by the way, when I got these keys, there's some of them were already bent, you know, so you don't notice it sometimes, so you're looking for it. So that's one thing, a more common thing is with the watch bending, Gara would, this is famous for the broken watches, to have them run for years, and he picks them up in his hand, holds them for a while, and then they begin going again. Okay, so we're finished, but I'll tell you this, my friend Jerry Anders and I were on the television show, which you can find on YouTube, but still, but it was 1975, we're on a television show on Gellar, because Gellar was supposed to be on the show with us, he refused to be on the show with me, so they had a separate show, Gellar, then we went on and we duplicated, and we brought broken watches, we got from a jeweler, a whole batch of broken watches, we put them on a table, and we had the host pick up any watch you wanted them to concentrate for a while, holding his hand and concentrating, and we got half of them going again, and it's just an actual thing, like he could be handed oftentimes, we'll get a broken watch with the main spring, go fashion watch, the main spring to get a broken watch. And so while it's just an actual thing, then people just, we'll tell them the same things like that. I used to do a mind wheel type demonstrations to make money, not to agree, but I used to do this, and in the past six years I was a professional mentor, and a lot of times I got sick and had to get what people wrote down in a piece of paper, to get it to me, and what people have allowed you to write in terms, I couldn't read what they said. So the nice thing about being a mentalist is you can, okay, don't do it, but everyone smile at it, just make up something, and 90% of the time, 8% would write on, now it couldn't be write on, I think in those cases these people didn't want me to be wrong, or didn't want to embarrass me on themselves, but I might be wrong, so something like that. So people will lie, I think, as far as I know, that is exactly right. To stand in front of audience sometimes and not get in the seat of the meeting, but just give them meetings, and maybe in terms of, sometimes they say some very confident facts, and many, many times they used to go around with it. You say, yeah, do you write? Okay. That's the end, okay.