 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio, 103.9 LP FM right here at Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, October 3rd, 2021. I'm Larry Rhodes, our Doubter 5, and as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat, on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. It took a week of vacation, and now it's just going to be raining all week. Yeah, a lot of rain has come. But, you know, that's good. Our guests today are George Brown, the second and a half from Brooklyn. How are you? I'm good. And you're at Pirate Higgs, all the way from Canada. Hello. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faiths, God's holy books and superstition. Wombat, what are we going to be talking about today? So I wanted to talk about the wonderful joys of going out into fields and picking cherries. And I thought, oh, we also have an atheist podcast. So let's do that as well. We'll talk about cherry picking today. It's going to be a fun one, but before we go into the meat and potatoes of it, or the cherry, the stems and the pits, if you will. We'll throw it up to Rowan Dredd, Pirate Higgs for our own weekly vacation. Vacation? Invocation. Invocation. Oh, our noodley lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the noodle to know the difference. And that's a new one. I like that one a lot. Yeah, that's cool. I like that one a lot. I really do. Dredd, we're going to throw it up at you. How you been since last week, my friend? Not too bad. It's been kind of slow. I've been playing lots of World of Warcraft. So kind of catching up on my tunes. Not bad. Yeah. So, yeah. Your tunes. Is that music? No, my T-O-O-N-S, my characters. Okay. Okay. Okay. Very, very cool. I got a bunch of them and getting to know this new guild I'm in and doing some rating and all that kind of stuff. So you already have a Twitch channel set up. Do you ever stream your playing as well? I don't have a Twitch channel now. You should get a Twitch channel. I thought you live streamed. No. Okay. So you're live. I just live stream on YouTube. Okay. Listen, you can live stream on YouTube playing games as well. Like, hey, if you want more people, like there's a, that's a pretty good audience right there. Some of the concern, we can talk about that. I think it's kind of cool. Larry Rhodes. I did before I go. We have this. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but here in, in BC, we have an adopt a highway program. And so we figured out how to, so there's a difference between groups and individuals. If you're a group, like an official group, you actually have to take out insurance as a group to do volunteer work for this adopt highway program. Wow. So, yeah, I know. It's like 450 bucks a year. Yeah. You know, when you're not making any money, I mean, it's kind of hard to justify spending that kind of coin on, on insurance to do volunteer work. Yeah. If you're an individual, you don't have insurance. Exactly. So what we've, what we've done instead of doing it was the church of the flying spaghetti monster and crew. We just have a symbol of the flying spaghetti monster, you know, this fella and crew. So it's kind of like, it could be Smith and friends. So it qualifies under that sort of low level group, not an official group. So we got a two stretch, a two kilometer stretch of highway, just east of Grand Forks that is going to have a sign post on it with that symbol. It's got a whole bit. Oh, really? Yeah. Very nice. Interesting, interesting. Here in Tennessee, eastern Tennessee, Knoxville area, the rationalists of East Tennessee do that as well. They've had their sign vandalized a couple of times, destroyed once I think, but they keep at it. So who pays for insurance on the sign? Oh, it's a state sign. Yeah. So the state just replaces it or cleans it. Larry Rhodes, doubt or five, how you been? Oh, I'm fine. I took my motorcycle out again this week. It's been so beautiful. I'm taking it out two, three times. It's just really awesome. It has been really, really nice. I hope this rain spit that we're getting right now goes away pretty soon. I'd like to be able to go and travel a little bit this week. Sure. I want to check out the local national area, see new disc golf courses, just try some new food places. And if not, I don't care if I got to play in the rain. I'm out here to have some fun. I took the week off, so I'm just having some time to get my whole self-focused, clean up some of the mess that's behind me that you can see and enjoy some time with my cat. Yeah. George Brown, two and a half. How you been? Well, not so good as of yesterday because I decided to try to take a vacation from coffee. And you all know how devoted to good coffee I am. So yesterday, I didn't have any coffee. And man, was I a space cadet the whole day. Yeah. It was just shot. Are you having headaches? What kind of withdrawal can give you headaches? I didn't have headaches. I just was a space case for the entire day. I couldn't get anything done. So today I'm back at it. You're back at it? How fast did you wake back up? What's that? How fast did you wake back up? I can't remember. No, I didn't. I was, I mean, I just got up, you know. I slept very late. But the other thing I wanted to mention before we were talking last week about narcissistic personality disorder. And I just wanted to mention if anybody is interested in finding out more about this, which I recommend very highly, I want to recommend again a woman named Romani Dervisala. Wow, you're going to show that name. Well, you just have to look up, go on YouTube and look up Dr. Romani. That's R-A-M-A-N-I. And you can do the same thing on whatever search engine you have. She's an especially good, clear explainer of cluster B personality disorders. And a lot about the way these people affect the rest of us. She's wonderful at it. So again, Dr. Romani R-A-M-A-N-I. And if you're of a more of a religious persuasion, George Simon, both of these people are psychologists. They're coming at it from different angles. I love it. I love it. What? I can't wait to read through those reports and cherry pick the information that already lines up with my view on reality. Motions. Yes. Speaking of which, I want to talk about the idea of cherry picking. And before we go into it, maybe we should talk about what we mean by cherry picking before we go into like a full on discussion about it. And so when I say cherry picking, we'll do a quick round table. But when I say cherry picking, I mean letting your confirmation bias drive you towards the information you want to pay attention to and the ones that you don't want to pay attention to. And so like you have a little filter that says I have a established conclusion on something and I'm only interested in the information that supports that conclusion. And anything else? I will happily ignore dread part. What do you think cherry picking is? Yeah, pretty much the same thing. You know, especially if you're doing internet searches, you tend to end up going down rabbit holes if you're really if you've really bought into an idea or a conclusion that you've come to. You tend to confirm that with the searches that you do and leave out the disconfirming information. So why is my girlfriend so mean? I'll give you the only mean. The Google bubble. Yeah, that's right. Larry, sorry. The Google bubble can reinforce that as well. I mean, even without you thinking about it, it will show you stuff that it knows that you're interested in and not show you stuff that you're not. And the scary thing is it's not just Google. It's what news source you prefer to listen to. It's brands you prefer to buy from. It's you know, it's what form of news or like radio TV, whatever any way you choose to inform yourself box CNN has a slant of bias to it and you got to be aware of that. You got to be aware of that. George Brown, the two and a half. What do you what do you how do you feel about cherry picking? Do you have a definition for it about cherry picking? Yeah. Oh boy. I don't have an entry point on that. Except, you know, I don't use Google as a search engine. There are alternatives. You don't have to use Google to do your search. All I just meant any any search engine that pays attention to what you search for and then offers you the same. Well, start page does not and duck duck go does not. But I mean, you are free from surveillance on those search engines until you land on the page you're looking for. And that's a whole other story. But on the top, how can you be sure? Are you just cherry picking that? Yeah. Because of what they say about themselves. George, I want to hear what you think about cherry picking. What do you think it is? What do I think it is? Well, it's it's like what people who said ahead of me, you know, it's it's squeezing the facts through the filter of your own calendar. You know, hey, I like that. I like it. I like it. I like that. And facts out and only filter and I, you know, I press, I have to confess that I think that we all do it. I think I do it. Of course. Yeah. And so while we know we all do it, I think that's facts. I think it's also be I think it's two parts. One, we got to be aware that we do it. And two, we need to have an appreciation for a standard of evidence that's high enough to call us out when we do it ourselves and be willing and maybe a third point, be willing to admit when we're not wrong and acquiesce towards the reality or comport towards reality, right? But here's an interesting example. I want to throw this out in America. It's this really nice country. Why I say America, I mean North America, United States of America, right? Even more specifically, United States, right? There's a government facility called the Pentagon or an establishment called the Pentagon and they hold documents sometimes for long periods of time to make sure that there's not public outcry on particular things. So when police write reports that people have seen something in the IR, Pentagon will be like, we're going to take this report and we're going to make it classified for a period of time, 20 years or so. And so what happened was a large batch of UFO sightings was finally released by the Pentagon. This was back in June, so it's probably not too recent, but we've had time to now be aware that the report was out because the Pentagon is going to make an announcement about stuff like that. And it's sort of like filtered through the Internet and people who are enthusiasts about UFOs and alien sightings and extraterrestrial life visiting Earth have used that report as fuel to say, aha, the government was hiding something. Here's the proof of it that confirms that everything we've been saying about aliens is true. However, the reports themselves. I'll go ahead, Larry. Go ahead. I wanted you to finish that thought. OK, but the reports themselves and which we all have access to and we can even provide a link in the comment descriptions. Even from the title itself basically says, yeah, it's mostly just people saying lights in the air. There's no there's no conclusive information among all these reports. It's still a very nebulous topic. We're not saying no. We're not saying yes. It's just here's a bunch of people saying they saw the end. Right. Larry. Well, people don't realize that there are more than one definition for a word, you know, like faith or something. And but certain people will read that report and every single time they see the word UFO or the initials, they'll think aliens. Yeah. And it's not aliens. It's unidentified flying objects. It could be anything from a weather balloon to a weather phenomenon or a reflected light. It could be. But it could be aliens, Larry. Uh-oh. Everyone froze. Aliens. Per se. They mean what it says. Unidentified flying objects. Sure. Dredd. I got the northern lights. Sorry. I see lights in the sky all the time. Yeah. And they also call he has Christmas lights over his. That's right. The. Yeah. I guess that's important to point out. They also call them UAPs unknown aerial phenomenon. Huh. They've got that alternate name. I had heard that. I've not heard that. Well, because it's not necessary because flying object. Is a misnomer in the sense that. It's an unknown aerial phenomenon. Sure. Like other things other than than flying really flies much as as well. Dredd. That's a very good point. I didn't know about that distinction. Well, you think about Venus. Venus has been missing identified throughout. You know, all known time essentially is at least 1945. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. George. You want to make a comment? Yeah. We have a senator here in the United States. Joe Manchin. I think he's an unidentified flying object. Okay. Oh. That's a good picture. Although. Although. In Yiddish there's a wonderful. There's a wonderful there's a wonderful term in Yiddish. It's love. Mench. Which means airman. Airman. Okay. Yeah. It's nice. Thanks for sharing that. I have seen. I have. So I've gone jogging before and I have looked up into the air and I have seen like a ring of lights in a blue sky. Like I've seen things that I will qualify as like an unidentified aerial phenomenon. And I will look at that thing. And like my skeptical brain is like terrible. That's not a UFO. But I see. Terror. That's not a UFO. But I still don't know what it is. And it's probably just so bright outside that I can't see an outline of something. But it is like a static ring of lights in the air. And I'm like what the hell could that be? And my brain just goes like I really would like to know what it is. But until then I'm happy for it not being. I won't jump to the conclusion of aliens. But I'm just like it's so interesting that I could easily do that. And yet we're all seeing the same thing. And I can see the mania sort of elite towards it. In terms of cherry picking in terms of cherry picking. I could definitely say that if I wanted to believe in aliens I could use that as an excuse. And then go on Google and be like I found ring of lights aliens. And then Google's like oh he's he put these words together. Just show him alien stuff and ring of lights. And then throw in some dog food commercials because we need to sell some dog food. Same thing too. And that's how in my head people fall into like deeper and deeper circles because they'll start connecting with other people who also believe that rings of lights in the air are aliens. And maybe they all have a shared love of dog food. So you know there are the convention and more money keeps going around. Dredd what do you think? You know sometimes that cherry picking too is combined with you know the incredulity. You know argument from incredulity. Yes. Yes. How could it be you know how could it be venous. I mean it was moving too fast. It's too bright. You know it's blah blah blah. There's no way I could be wrong or how you have to prove that I'm wrong before I'm even willing to consider any other options. This is like there's that's the worst place to be in. The default option is not you are right. The default option is you should keep working harder to figure out why you are right. Not. I'm right until I'm proven wrong. It's like why are you right. George. But. Well. Following up on what Dredd Pirat just said I go out walking sometimes at night. And it's like I was looking up in the sky and I saw this small constellation and I thought what's that. Well it when I look with my right eye it's one star. I've got I've got internal reflections in my left eye. You know I'm an old guy. I mean stuff happens when you're old. I like you know my left eye it's a constellation and it's really cool. Too bad it's not real. So in the event of me not worrying about this any longer I actually did look it up on Google to figure out what the ring of lights was but I didn't put alien or anything behind it and it turns out there's a novel community of people who send up weather balloons up into the air and the weather balloons are ribbed and they have sort of like a iridescent surface on the outside such that each rib has a little reflection of light if there's a sun clear day and I said I saw this ring of light on a clear day I had no idea what it was it's a weather balloon that went up into the air and each of those little ribs have a tiny little sparkle sunspot on them and I can't see the outline of the balloon because it's too far away but I can see the bright circle of lights. There it is that's what I saw but I had to look at to look it up unbiasedly to figure that out and whether or not it would be suited or something like that but at least my Occam's razor so let's see if my following Occam's razor you have a least number of assumptions makes more valid argument most of the time let's see I would say yeah that's fair I was fair I'm not assuming aliens have to exist we already know whether balloons do exist I find that's the most simplest and least assumptive approach so yeah I would also say flames only require mundane evidence and we already know whether balloons exist sunlight exists we can put these two together and I can make a better argument for it being just a whether balloon on a sunny day than I could be for an alien force visiting us from another galaxy right? I love stuff like that I love stuff like that let's see Larry you want to talk about that picture in the background that you got oh my my buddy my buddy there you go okay there it is nice 1943 I think during World War Two when a UFO was reported off the west coast California specifically near Los Angeles and it it showed up and we've spotted it we've shown lights on it spotlights like we would if it was an air raid we shelled it with artillery and followed it for wow two hours down the coast never hurting it at all and finally just flew away I mean if you've got a minute and you're interested in this kind of stuff do a search for the battle of Los Angeles and I think it was 1943 but it it makes for good reading anyway so there is something to be said about pressure to come to a conclusion right? like if you're in a middle of a war time and you may need to use cherry picking as a survival mechanism I'm not saying cherry picking so here's my take cherry picking isn't always bad and there seems to exist almost out of an evolutionary out of like a natural need to quickly come to a conclusion that can help to save you if there's a threat and help you understand the environment that you're in but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the most accurate way to come to a conclusion and go ahead sorry yeah I was going to say that reminds me of Daniel fast and slow he wrote a book about that and there's the style A and style B of thinking the style A being arriving at quick conclusions about your environment in order to you know save yourself from I mean if you hear a rustle in the trees or in the grasses assume it's a tiger because if you assume it's the wind well guess what you're less likely to toast less likely to survive that one if it is a tiger so absolutely true George um yeah what do any of us ever search on Google and click that button that says I'm feeling lucky yes sometimes I do it occasionally yeah sometimes I do I've never gotten lucky what happens when you do that you know if I use it it sends you to the very top search sends you to the very top search it sends you automatically to the very very top search it is a funny button but I haven't clicked it in years but I have clicked that button a couple of times but I would also say on on Dread Pirates note um so you have this idea where you have slow thinking which is what we're getting good at now as a society like we are being rational we're being with our you know approach to a lot of problems and being more sensitive to a lot of things and it takes a lot of consideration that's way more complicated but we tend to come out to conclusions that help a great proportion of society right but then we also have this fast thinking which is really really good in terms of like okay we just got to stay alive who cares what needs to be damaged or what needs to be killed it's whatever is the most useful thing just move forward maybe not the best way to control society on a digitalistic basis to at least you know maintain life for a period of time I just want to make one one last thing the evolution of it seems to be that we've had that quick thinking pathway a lot longer than the long the slower pathway thinking and because of that it's still very persuasive to us to do things in the quick thinking fashion including cherry picking mm-hmm well it in it forms the flight or fight it's if you've got you know if your environment dictates that you have to think quick you're going to be looking out for yourself and making decisions based on not reflection right and long considered thought of the facts and evidence and all the rest you're just going to go with what you think is absolutely going to save your skin and so this is why I like escape rooms I don't know if you've ever played an escape room game okay they may have they have some in Tennessee as well but essentially you and a group of friends and maybe some strangers who will join your group or a different group of friends will team up and be blindfolded and be brought to a room where there are puzzles but the theme of the room is like hey you're going to die in a half hour if you don't figure out the main puzzle to solve in this room and they take the blindfolds off and you're like in some weird dungeon or like a medical area or like some museum like saw it's a lot like saw and you're like oh wow everyone's like you know there's like roulette tables here but they all have like weird pictograms on them and you have to figure out where's the pattern what are we trying to figure out here and you are pressured to figure out something as soon as possible and there are obvious threats all around you in the sense of there's timers on the wall there's an announcer saying you got five minutes left I cut fingers off and I'm going to come after you if you don't solve this in time your blood is you know highly pressurized you're freaking out but you have to think slowly and calmly to deduce all of these problems and you have to communicate with people we didn't pass either don't worry but you have to communicate with the people in your team so that everyone can split up properly and start solving their areas in the room and you have to like work together and be like I saw this does anyone have a key because I need a key because I just opened it up and there's a key here it's like I have a key I have a red key and a green key I have a key too I have a blue key because your brain is like fight, flight run or fight and the other side is like we have to figure out how many cities there are in Italy and it just hey what's up Tred what's up well I was going to say it's it's kind of like firefighting too the number one cause the number one cause of panic is not having a plan and that's why you know firefighters constantly are rehearsing and practicing their techniques and whatnot so that when it comes to a situation where you're in you know faced with burning building and you're going to have to do you know an interior search you remain calm because you have a plan and you've practiced it and a lot of it then becomes sort of muscle memory and all that sort of thing so that keeps your keeps your panic button in your back pocket so to speak I love it number one cause of panic is not having a plan and I feel like that is the number one way to probably stop cherry picking if you just plan out your means of understanding information or your epistemology ahead of time and then you'll have a much better way certainly like establishing like you said establishing a standard of evidence yes if you don't have a standard and you're just willy nilly well then you'll take any of that and comes but if you firmly establish in your own mind that you subject evidence to a certain amount of rigor then you can at least have a reliable method for determining what's true and what's not true I love it I love it Larry I think we're at the bottom of the half about time isn't it nice this is the digital free thought radio hour at WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee and we'll be right back after this short break 103.9 FM WOZO radio Knoxville Hello and welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour I'm doubter five and we're at WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee today is Sunday morning October 3rd and let's talk for a second about the 8th society of Knoxville ASK was founded in 9 sorry 2002 and we're in 19th year ASK has over a thousand members and we have weekly zoom meetings during covid but we're again meeting in person downtown Tuesday evenings at Barley's Taproom Pizzeria in Knoxville's old city out on the patio so if it's Tuesday evening you're off work come on down and meet some other atheists you can also find us online on facebook meetup.com or KnoxvilleAtheist.org just look for Atheist society of Knoxville just as simple by the way if you don't live in Knoxville you should still pick us up and do a search for an atheist group in your town don't find one Sar- Don that's right where do we want to pick up? we're finishing up our talk on cherry picking today and I wanted to bring up a new um side topic Boudreau sent us a article actually sent us a citation to a scientific or scientific journal it's what they're called um and what they do is this journal is in toxicology and they issued a report by a guy who was anti-vax basically anti-vaccination of children and he said hey you know most people get vaccines are old or I'm sorry most people get sick from covid are old therefore we shouldn't vaccinate children because why would we even bother vaccinating children and the report looks like someone did have a really good vision and when they don't tell you what is happening there is no way to vaccinate children or people who vaccinate children and thatế with And those are subject to whether or not the editor of that journal would like to publish them or not. And they tend to be more provocative to inspire conversation or sell more journals at the end of the day. Whereas you also have areas for scholarly articles, reviews and reports, which are peer reviewed by other scientists before they even get to the editor. And then that paper is a thoroughly investigated and thoroughly vested scientific article. And the scientifically article, the scientifically weighed articles are not the same thing as the opinion pieces. Yet they are published in the same journals. And the problem with that is that people will look through a journal to find a well established journal to find the opinion piece that matches their cookie conclusion and then point at science to say, and it's backed by science when it's not. It's just an opinion piece that's in a scientific journal. And that's your opinion. I think it's kind of dangerous. George, you have thoughts on that? Take yourself off mute. Well, actually, I wanted to go back to something that Dred Pirin said at the end of the last half hour about firefighters. I like that. He said, you have to have a plan. And, you know, if you're going to come out alive from fighting the fire. And I thought, well, where do firefighters get that plan? And I realized they rehearse. They practice on stuff, you know. And one of the things that I notice when I go around from place to place is those little practice structures that firefighters use. The little villages that they have that they can set fires and then practice putting them out. Yeah. What are those structures called, Dred Pirin? Do you know? Well, they're just fire grounds, you know, practice fire grounds. Yeah. We've got one. We set one up here in Grand Forks with a bunch of sea cans. And, you know, so we've got sea cans stacked on each other. We have. What's a sea can? What's a sea can? I think we're getting a little off topic. I want to just make sure that we're focused right now on picking it and we can get back to conversation later. So the main thing. Let me get back to what I was just going to read the topic, which was, hey, in science, there are people who publish articles that some of them can be opinion pieces and some are not opinion pieces, but people will cherry pick from scholarly articles and then use that as a claim that science supports their misinterpreted conclusion. And that can be very, very dangerous on the number of fronts. George, would you like to talk about the topic? Okay. Well, again, I want to finish what I was saying before, which is that perhaps we need, like the firefighters, work with these practice structures that we need to practice free thought, free thinking to try to catch ourselves in cherry picking in our own minds. One of the things that I've seen online that I'm sure you all have seen too is the outsider test of faith that I think is a good example of that to step out of your little cocoon of information. Consider your religion from the outside, like from another religious view or from an atheist view. And try to pick it apart, try to find what's real, what's not real, what's evidential, what you can support from outside the religion before you just throw all of your faith toward those answers and just accept them. Yeah. So what's that called again? The OTF. The outsider test of faith. Dred, did you want to make a comment? No. Okay. Dred, I'm going to ask you a question. Sure. A theoretical question on sociocratic examination on an and something I've maybe heard that you've maybe heard as well is someone saying science or science agrees with this conclusion that I have. That's clearly not scientific. Right? It's like, well, science says there's no evolution. And when I ask what do you mean by that? What they typically say is, well, there's a lot of scientists who agree that evolution doesn't actually exist. And in my head, that's the the idea of like, ah, scientists are not the same thing as science as right. authority. It's an argument from the computing authority where you cherry picked it to be. Right, right, right. But they still want all the gravitas of saying science, but they don't want any of the actual conclusions from the process. Hey, what's up? We're going to separate the method from the people who practice it, right? From the opinions and the people, exactly. Correct. What I like to say is that when religious scientists are doing science, they're not doing religion and vice versa. When they're doing a religion, they're not doing science. Unless you work for Ken Ham. Even then, I would say it's still done. That's not science. If they're doing it, you know, that's the arts and crafts project that just control it. Ken Ham, I'm lost. It's okay. It's okay. I don't want it. We don't have to talk about that. The less we know about them, the better. That's my point. Google your own rabbit holes on that, dude. But I would also say this. I agree with what you said Larry. I think we do have these things called religious sciences. And often, so way back when the only way you could get funding to do science was by grouping up with a church who would fund your scientific endeavors. As long as it supported what the church wanted, right Larry? Not only if it didn't, not only would they remove your funding if you had it in the first place, but they would destroy your works and sometimes destroy you. Yeah. And kill you at the same time too or imprison you for the rest of your life. Hallelujah. That was a perfect example of that. Oh, there's so many burnouts. Yeah. Punnett was actually the stake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like there are so many great scientists back in the day who were advent or essentially adjuncts of a church. It's the pioneers in science who went against what the church was reporting that gave us some of the greatest breakthroughs. And even those moments were such a struggle on their part because they're like, maybe Earth isn't the center of the universe. We're going to put you in jail for the rest of your life. So yeah, but I still feel like that's the way it is. Put me in job only a little on 40 anyways. Like super way back when I don't care. I don't care. I'm like 37. It's all good. Don't worry about it. But I do feel like that is, I would think we should, how do I put it? Honor the perseverance of people who help to pursue scientific interest and truth. And whether or not those people have people at large have opinions doesn't necessarily influence the process of science, which is combating ideas and opinions and seeing which floats the top. And I feel like that's always the best pursuit. So when people point out like one article that agrees with them, I always like to see what are the other articles saying about that article? Or like what, what are the citations in that article and how do people take those in the grand scheme of things? I would say science is not looking at one journal article and being like, huh, this agrees with my point. Therefore it's true. It's a process where we have records and we investigate those records and we always ask questions and we never accept anything is absolutely true. But we're always willing to say, Hey, does this meet the standard of evidence for the claim or not? And I think that's something we should always have. George, what's up? Well, I was just thinking we live in a democracy and you do two dread pirate in Canada. And I think that the success of a democracy to me depends on the ability of the participants in that democracy to think clearly. And so we think that we are the people who do the clear thinking. And I agree with myself. So there, but how do we get, how do we convince the rest of the guys to come along with us? That's you've asked this question a number of times, but what's your answer that you have as the best answer? I don't have an answer. I'm asking you guys. I think the question is good enough as an answer. I think in my head, if you're asking people, how can you get to us? How can you come to a correct conclusion better? That is the question that you need to be asking, even if you're making statements or if you're questioning statements, because that's how you get better at knowing true things and false things is by questioning. How do I get care in the first place, I guess. Yeah. And that's often a question that's asked of an interlocutor in Socratic examination, interlocutor being your interview partner, is how do you arrive at your truth? What is the method by which you examine the things that you use to support your beliefs? And you know, the weirdest thing I have is for me, I find, and this is going to be the part where everyone's going to cherry pick this clip for me and be like, aha, Taro doesn't care about the truth. But I find the truth to be overrated if it's nominal to what can be useful and understood within a particular model. So like in my head, if I can demonstrate something very well, and I'm off by like 0.0001% and the truth is that 0.0001% away, I'm fine with not knowing the absolute truth. I'm totally happy with this model if it works. And a good example of that, Google Maps used to be like two years ago based on the Flat Earth model because you don't have to, you know, estimate the curvature of the earth if you're just driving from here to McDonald's, right? It's just a straight road and it's 2.4 miles away. Maybe it's 2.47015 miles away because if you include the curvature, it's a little longer. It's like, I don't care dude, just tell me 2.4 miles and how long it'll take for me to drive there. About four minutes. Fantastic. This model works and it's useful. It may not be the absolute truth. It may not be the absolute time that I arrive on time. Maybe there's traffic or whatever, but it works for me and it's at least usefulness mundane capacity. And what the issue is is when people have that low standard of for mundane things and they apply to incredibly extraordinary things like the existence of a God or even take in my head two different standards and say, well, my extraordinary God has told me that it's not necessary for me to get vaccinated. And I'm like, oh, you've compounded a very low standard of evidence to a highly incredible statement and are believing whatever this big statement tells you about mundane things. Like you're kind of this really vicious loop that may actually lead to a needless harm. And so I wish for this cherry picking that we do to at least be acknowledged the fact that like, hey, for mundane things like Google Maps, that's okay because I'm not really hurting anybody if I arrive at McDonald's 30 seconds later than I'm supposed to. But when it comes to interacting with other human beings, I want to have the highest standard of information possible. And so maybe I'll cherry pick less on that and be more comfortable with getting closer to the more absolute truth if I can be Larry. Yeah, all it gets me is that the opposition would say, yeah, it was 99.3% and then they took considerate. Well, they don't want to tell you all this stuff. But now it's 99.9% after they take in whatever else. See, right? Science was wrong. Yes. No, they lied to you. They're either right or wrong. It's one or the other. It can't be both. Dredd. I was just going to point out too, I was listening actually to an episode of the Skeptic Guide to the Universe podcast. And they're a real great group for anyone who's looking for content. But the point was made is that the theories of science are models of reality. They're not true depictions of what we think reality is. They're models. And that's why they can change over time as new evidence comes in and new information comes in. Yeah, Darwin's theory is a good example because he didn't have any knowledge of DNA. Or germs. And he gave us a good model that we could use going forward. Exactly. Yeah. Hey, I'm going to throw this out too. It's going to touch on both of your points, but the idea of science being wrong. I've had conversations on my YouTube channel where people say, aha, they said this drug would work, but then they realized it didn't work. Science was wrong. Science was wrong. And I was like, in my head, that's not an example of science being wrong. That's an example of science getting something right. Because when science figures out something doesn't work, it's the first thing in the line to be like, hey, this doesn't work, right? It's self-correcting. It has a self-correcting feature. When something doesn't work in religion or faith, there's nothing, you're the problem. And you think about how slow the Pope has come to accepting responsibility on behalf of the church for some, I mean, think about Galileo. Apologizing for Galileo. 10 years ago or something. Oh my gosh, that's terrible. Larry, what's that? Back when Edison was working on the light bulb, he'd worked on it for years and couldn't find the correct element that wouldn't burn up. And the interviewer was saying, say you haven't had anything but failure for the last year. He says, ah, but I know a thousand things that don't work. So he could move on from that. It was progress, even though he hadn't reached the right element. Hey, what's up, Dredd? Yeah, just one of our viewers here, his name is Redonk and he goes, absolute truth doesn't exist. Truth is a measure of confidence. Truth is a measure of confidence. We'd have to touch on that. I have to think about that a little bit more. Well, that would explain why religions says they always have capital T truth. They have ultimate confidence in their religion. Right. Absolute confidence. But Edison in his own right is an interesting figure because I feel like, you know, it takes someone who try to make something to realize that when you hit a wall, it's not the end of the project, but rather a better resolution of how to make the project work. Like you hit a wall here. Now you know what to go around or what the next obstacle is in the process of making something. And one, one of the cool things he had a problem with was he was trying to figure out how do I make filaments burn longer for my incandescent lamps. Right. And there was another patent guy, a black dude named Louis Howard Latimer, who made a longer lasting filament for stuff like that. And Edison's like, Hey, I'll take whatever I can get. This guy going to get your stuff is like, I got my patent. It's like, okay, fine. We'll buy your patent. And Tom said, it's not rich as hell. I'm going to get your patent. And that was one of the tricks that, you know, collaboration and working with other scientists figuring out, Hey, what small era are you an expert in? Can we collaborate and can we build a model so I can get over the walls of things that I don't know? And in my head, it's just that collaborative aspect of science that makes the best ideas flow to the top. And it tends to be the case that great ideas don't happen in a vacuum and like great inventions don't happen by just one person. It takes a team of people working together question each other and trying to beat each other with the best information that leads the best things rise to the top. And I love that dread first and then Larry. Yeah. So anyway, Radonc clarifies his earlier statements. Yes, science relies on being false and viable and subject to scrutiny. Yeah, that I agree. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I was trying to say about the teams of scientists working together to find truth. Sometimes the teams of scientists aren't working together. That's how we found the cosmic background radiation. One team was working to find it and they couldn't find it. And another team wasn't working to find it, but they found it and they didn't know it was. They were fairly close together physically and they contacted each other. One group did the other and the bill. We now know a whole lot more about the cosmic background. That's a beautiful story because it does show that science is a objective tool that different parties can use to figure out the same thing even if the intentions were completely different. They point to the same model of reality. It's such an accurate model that two different teams working in two different directions can arrive at the same conclusion, right? And you don't get that with religion because we have the Third Street Baptist Church who disagrees with the Second Street Baptist Church who says they got it all wrong. Well, even one of the parishioners doesn't think that the preacher's right. So he splits off and starts his own denomination. George, what's up? I was just thinking of the example of where I live. The two counties, the two counties here, one is large, one is tiny. And there's a newspaper that serves both counties and they have, they list all the churches every Friday and every once in a while I go and I read them and I count the churches. And so we have in these two counties, talking about the Baptist spin-offs, Larry, we have 167 official Baptist churches. And then we have another 37 unofficial Baptist churches. And then we have the other ones that have split off completely from those. It's an incredible number of churches. It's an incredible number. It is. And here's the thing too, and I want to make sure this is a point before we end the show. Every single one of those people will call themselves Christian, as if it was one thing, uniformly across all those subsections within that denomination. And Catholics will call themselves Christians, Protestants call themselves Christians. And the thing is, I'm not letting that pass for me anymore as an answer. When someone tells me a Christian, I ask them, which kind are what kind, epistological, mythological, Lutheran, Protestant, Catholic, evangelical, Adventist. Like there's so many different kinds. I want to know what brand within this greater band that you think you are, because it's not one thing. And I find like by asking that question, it just helps them to realize, one, I'm not taking whatever you tell me as a grain of salt. And two, I'm aware that there's more versions than you're letting on. And three, where are you in this brand scheme of things? And oftentimes I get, well, I'm not a non-denominational. It's like, oh, welcome to, I still don't know anything. Church of one. I still don't know anything about what you believe or what you don't believe, but thank you for at least picking the one of the best denominations out there, the non-denominational. Anyway, hey, I think we're getting close to the bottom of the half. George, or bottom of the second half, George, are you feeling the top of the hour? Top of the hour. Are you feeling good without your coffee buzz? Is it coming back to you? Yeah, yeah, I'm feeling good. I still want to know how in the world am I going to give up coffee, because I like it so much. I'm hooked. I'm addicted, guys. Help me. It's a thing. It's one of the weird, in our culture, it's one of the weird, acceptable psychotropic that people accept and sell to kids. And everyone thinks it's normal. But there you go. Dred, Pirate, where can we find you at? Well, I'm live streaming as we speak on my YouTube channel, Mine Pirate, which can be, it's M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. And I stream it at AM Pacific Standard Time. So check it out. And I just got one more comment here from Redonk. He says, think a more accurate wording would be that absolute knowledge doesn't exist. It's like infinity, something you can approach but never reach. I thought that was pretty good. As opposed to stupidity. Indeed. Yeah, come check out my channel and please subscribe. I'm six viewers away, or six subscribers away from... Hey, I'll tell you how you do it. You start streaming some video games and people will be like, oh, he plays Fortnite too? Next scene of a 14-year-old to jump in your childhood. I could name it Ultimate Fails. Don't stand in fire. That's great. That's great. She said, what? There you go. I'm going to chat them on YouTube, whatever you got to do to make the algorithm work for you. And we'll be here next week. Larry, why don't you take a sound? Hey, remember this show is on Apple iTunes, Pocketcast, Amazon, and podcasts everywhere. Just search for Digital Freethought Radio Hour. I love that. My content is on digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show, archives, atheists' songs, and many articles on the subject. I have a book. It's called Atheism, What's It All About? And it's available on Amazon. You can find my YouTube channel simply by searching for Larry Rhodes or Daughter5. If you have any questions for the show, you can send them to askanatheistatmuxwellatheist.org. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. This has been the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Remember that everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it when they prove that heavens and hell and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. We'll see you next week. Say bye, everybody.