 A couple of days ago, Linus Torvalds got angry at someone over on the Linux kernel mailing list because this person was one of these anti-vaxxers. He was a vaccine skeptic and he was trying to spread some misinformation, some lies about the vaccine. And Linus Torvalds got angry and responded to the guy and he responded with a whole bunch of facts, well-researched facts. Actually I was a bit surprised because Linus Torvalds, of course, is not a medical doctor, he's a programmer. But Linus came back at this guy with all of these well-researched facts and really just shut the guy down. And then he told the guy to take his lies, his misinformation, his conspiracy theories, take that stuff somewhere other than the Linux kernel mailing list. Now I don't want to really dwell on the story of Linus and the guy on the kernel mailing list. You guys can read about that. There's plenty of news articles that have been written about that story. But today I wanted to take a little time to discuss critical thinking because that is really what is sorely lacking in the modern world. In recent years, critical thinking is not a skill that people embrace anymore. It's not a habit that people try to learn. It should be a part of everyone's life. We don't teach our kids about critical thinking. We don't teach them critical thinking skills. We don't teach them about reason and logic and facts. We don't teach them like the scientific method or anything like that anymore. These days it seems people are allowed to believe whatever the hell they want to believe. No matter how outlandish, how ridiculous those beliefs may be. So one of the things that really changed my life as far as how I think about things. And I'm not even kidding. I came across a journal article many, many years ago. This journal article was published way back in 1990. And it's The Field Guide to Critical Thinking by James Litt. James Litt was a college professor. May still be a college professor. I don't know. But he wrote The Field Guide to Critical Thinking and he talks about how you should be thinking about things. He talks about critical thinking skills. And it seriously changed the way I started thinking about things because I realized that some of the beliefs I had weren't really based in any kind of reason, logic, fact. You start challenging yourself on some of your beliefs. And that's a good thing. That's what everyone should be doing. Because if you actually challenge your beliefs, then the ones that won't stand up, obviously, they get tossed aside. And the ones that do stand up, it just reaffirms those true beliefs even more. Now this article is not very long. I'm not going to read it to you, but I will link to it in the show description. But you know, I did want to hit some of the high points here. Let me zoom in a little bit so you guys can read this. So this is The Field Guide to Critical Thinking by James Litt and he talks about the reason he wrote this article back in 1990, mainly was because there was a rise of popularity of paranormal beliefs back in the United States in 1990. And I'm old enough, I know that especially in the 1980s, yes, you did have a large number of people all of a sudden seeing UFOs, flying saucers, little green men, things like that. And the rise of this popularity probably had a lot to do with the rise of popularity as far as movies, television, cable TV, back then the guy in Hollywood was Steven Spielberg. He was the producer. He was making all the big blockbuster movies, many of his big blockbuster movies involved aliens. He had close encounters of the third kind, then he had E.T., a lot of these people thought they were seeing little green men and flying saucers. What they were really seeing, they were seeing Steven Spielberg. Mr. Litt goes on to write that he thought the rise of popularity of paranormal beliefs in the U.S. back in 1990 was mainly because of the irresponsibility of the mass media who exploit public taste for this kind of nonsense. He's absolutely right. It's the media that exploits this kind of stuff. They put it out there mainly for money for ad revenue as far as print media or advertising revenue on TV especially. And however bad that may have been in 1990, it's 10 times worse here 30 years later. It's the media that stirs this stuff up. He also talks about the irrationality of the American worldview which supports such unsupportable claims as life after death and the efficacy of the polygraph. So he's basically saying the Americans are more irrational than other societies. He's an American. So he's speaking from that point of view. Well, that may have been true in 1990. Remember, this was before the internet, before the worldwide web. But since then, we're all connected, right? The internet has really connected the entire globe. And now I would say that's not the case. You see irrational beliefs from everybody in every country. You see conspiracy theorists from every country on the planet. Professor Led also talks about the ineffectiveness of the public education which generally fails to teach our students the essential skills of critical thinking absolutely. It's not a priority in schools anymore to actually teach people how to critically think. Schools these days don't want people to critically think about anything and arrive at their own correct decisions, right? These days you go to school and instead of, hey, here's how to think, how to arrive at a decision, schools you go to, especially high schools and colleges as you get older, you get, you know, teachers and professors that basically tell you exactly what to think. So reading this journal article a little further, it goes on to state that there are six rules to evidential reasoning. So there are basically six aspects to learning how to critically think. And the very first one is falsifiability. So what is falsifiability? Well it goes something like this. It must be possible to conceive of evidence that would prove the claim false. Now that's going to sound a little paradoxical, but in order for a claim to be true it must be falsifiable. The rule of falsifiability, it guarantees that if a claim is false, the evidence will prove it to be false. And if the claim is true, then the evidence will at least not disprove it. You know, it may not prove it true, but at least it won't disprove it. Falsifiability ensures that evidential reasoning matters, right? That the evidence matters. It's all about the evidence. You know, that's why we make sure any claim must be falsifiable for it to be a real claim. Otherwise it's just a meaningless claim. But conspiracy theorists and paranormalists, sometimes of people making spiritual claims, they love to make non-falsifiable claims. And a non-falsifiable claim is a claim where evidence doesn't matter. There's no possible way to view evidence on the matter anyway. An example of this with a conspiracy theory is, you know, years ago you heard all the time George W. Bush was behind the 9-11 attacks. And then, you know, somebody would say something like this and I would ask them, hey, what's your evidence? Well there is no evidence because it was all covered up by the government. It's all a cover up. You're not going to find any evidence. So they make a claim and then as part of their claim they're also telling me there's no evidence, no evidence that could ever prove it to be false or to prove it to be true. That's a meaningless claim, right? That's a non-falsifiable claim and it's almost, you have to be an idiot to make such a claim when you really think about it. Non-falsifiable kinds of claims from paranormalists would be something like, you know, aliens are all around us. They're watching us. They're testing us. They're probing us. You know, they're doing all these experiments on people and nobody knows. And you say, well, there's no evidence of that. We've never seen any extraterrestrial being. Well, the reason is because this race of aliens, you know, there's so much advance we can't detect them. That's a non-falsifiable claim, right? That's essentially a meaningless claim at that point. Once you go in that direction, you know, if you talk about a spiritual point of view, the creationists love making non-falsifiable claims because the creationists will say things like, you know, that God created the world 10,000 years ago, right? And you say, well, we have observable light from stars that are billions of years old. Well, God created that light already at that position at that age 10,000 years ago. So they just move the goalpost and then you're like, well, what about dinosaur bones, dinosaur fossils that we carbon date and we know they're millions of years old? Well, he created those fossils already millions of years old when he created the world in the universe 10,000 years ago. And it's at that point that you realize that these kinds of people, these creationists, you know, don't bother trying to talk to them anymore because they have essentially told you that whatever piece of evidence you come back with, they are just going to shut you down, right? They're just going to put the hand up and say, nope, don't want to hear it, right? Your evidence doesn't matter. There will never be a piece of evidence that you can come to me with that actually matters because I'm going to keep moving that goalpost forever. So there's no reason to take these kinds of people seriously. There's really no reason to interact with these kinds of people, either whether it be the paranormalist or some of the weird spiritual claims people make, or especially with the conspiracy theorists. You know, these are people that you really probably just shouldn't associate with in real life other than falsifiability. One of the other rules for critical thinking is logic. Logic means that any argument offered as evidence and support of any claim must be sound. So, you know, he gives an example here of this statement here. All dogs have fleas. Xavier has fleas. Therefore Xavier is a dog. Now that argument obviously is invalid because anything with fleas does not have to be a dog. A cat could have fleas as well, right? So that whole train of thought there, that was not based in any real logic, right, where a better way to do this would be all dogs have fleas. Xavier is a dog. Therefore Xavier has fleas. Now that kind of tracks, right? That's, that actually is actually a valid kind of statement. The third rule that we need to discuss is comprehensiveness. And this states that quote, the evidence offered in support of any claim must be exhaustive. That is all of the available evidence must be considered. And this is where, especially when you get into the conspiracy theorist kind of crowd, that kind of mentality that's prevalent today is they don't want exhaustive research into anything. They don't want to really look at every single piece of evidence that's available, right? They want to pick and choose evidence. Anytime somebody makes some kind of extraordinary claim, and then the only evidence they provide is the evidence and support of their claim. And you know, there's evidence that doesn't support their claim out there. You should just ignore that person. The fourth rule is honesty. So part of critical thinking is being honest. That means quote, the evidence offered in support of any claim must be evaluated without self deception. Meaning you come at this, you know, with an open mind being unbiased, right? You actually want to know the truth. And this is something that many people don't actually want to know. Many people make a claim, but they don't really want to know if it's true or false. You know, they say this is true or this is false, but they don't really want to put it to the test. They don't really want to know the truth. The biggest violators of the rule of honesty or the paranormalist psychics, you know, people that believe in psychokinesis and telekinesis and you know, things like that, you know, they believe these outlandish things that there's actually real evidence against like, Hey, there's no way this is possible, right? I can actually prove that the claim you're making is in fact not true. And these people, they're one of these people that kind of move the goalpost a lot. You know, they, they employ techniques like denial, avoidance, rationalization. They like to use multiple outs and just like all the other rules we've discussed so far, somebody makes a claim and you think that they're not being honest, you know, and same thing with comprehensiveness and logic and falsifiability. Somebody makes a claim and you know, they're not, they're not honestly wanting to explore the evidence and find out if their beliefs are true or false. Again, it's probably best just to not have anything to do with that person. The next rule for critical thinking is replicability. Now, what this is, is it's basically the ability to put something to the test. So if the evidence for any claim is based upon an experimental result, or if the evidence offered in support of any claim could logically be explained as coincidental, then as it's necessary for the evidence to be repeated in subsequent experiments or trials. So for those of us that do bug reports on things like GitHub or GitLab, replicability is a big deal, right? I follow bug reports saying, hey, I did this on my computer. I followed these steps with your piece of software and then I got an error. Okay. And then I make that bug report and then somebody that's on that GitHub or GitLab repo, some maintainer or developer, he will try to replicate my steps exactly using the exact same methods that I did to get that error and he'll either get that error or he won't. If he can't replicate my error, then my bug report, it's a real bug report because I did get a bug. But what I think caused the bug wasn't actually what caused the bug. You know, sometimes you get these things that happen that are purely coincidence, right? And people will imagine that some sort of steps led up to that, right? But it's not really what led up to that event. For example, like a paranormalist, you know, maybe they think, hey, I can start a fire with my mind and they just start staring. I don't know it's some electrical device, a TV set or something and, you know, and they stare at it for hours and hours and for days at a time. And one day the TV set actually does catch fire and they think, wow, I caused that. Well, no, it could have been faulty wiring. It probably was faulty wiring because I go by a new TV set and I stick it in front of that person, hey, make this one catch on fire and they can't do it, right? They can't replicate it, right? So the first event was really just coincidence and that's really what replicability ensures is that we can test it over and over again and get the same result. Otherwise, if it's just a one-off event, it could just be a coincidence. And the sixth and final rule for critical thinking here is sufficiency. And this states, quote, the evidence offered in support of any claim must be adequate to establish the truth of that claim with these stipulations. One, the burden of proof for any claim rest on the claimant. And that should be pretty obvious why that's the case. Otherwise, you're just wasting my time. You're wasting everybody else's time. Don't come to people with a claim and expect us to prove or disprove your claim, right? Because you could just say anything ridiculous and then I got to waste my time to prove it false. No, you bring a claim, you bring your own evidence, do your own homework. Two, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. So that's Occam's razor, right? The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Number three, evidence based upon authority and or testimony is always inadequate for any paranormal claim. So sufficiency, this kind of rule here, this is violated all the time, especially from paranormalists and conspiracy theorists. So the burden of proof always rest with the claimant. And the reason it needs to rest with the claimant is for the simple reason that the absence of disconfirming evidence is not the same as the presence of confirming evidence, meaning just because there's no evidence to prove you false doesn't mean that your claim is actually true. That's just, you know, logical thinking. So someone that believes in UFOs and aliens, you know, they might argue something like, Hey, my claims have never been disproved. Therefore, I'm right. That's that's a logical fallacy, right? I shouldn't have to explain the flaw in that kind of thinking. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I think most people understand why that's the case. I mean, you use this kind of critical thinking every day in life. If I said to you, Hey, yesterday I went to the gym. That's a normal kind of claim, right? You're just going to accept that, right? I don't need to bring extraordinary evidence to prove that, right? Because that's kind of a mundane kind of claim. But if I said yesterday, you know, these aliens from planet Zoltar in the Andromeda galaxy, they abducted me, took me to their planet and did all kinds of weird sexual experiments on me, you're going to say, Well, you're crazy and you're just probably going to ignore me, right? Because there's no way you would even consider that that could be true. Anything short of me having one of these Zoltarians next to me, right? You know, you're not going to take that claim seriously at all and you shouldn't. And that's really the problem with all paranormal claims. And really the problem with all conspiracy theories is they're always extraordinary, which means they always need to have extraordinary evidence, you know, to back them up. And of course, you're never going to find a paranormalist or a conspiracy theorist that has any evidence at all, much less extreme or extraordinary evidence. So that's just a little bit of the field guide to critical thinking by Dr. James Lead. Again, I'm going to link to the entire journal article. I'll have a link to it in the show description. Again, this particular article I read it many, many years ago and I've just kept it. I reread it all the time and it really has changed my life. It's kind of changed the way that I just think about things in general. So the next time one of these crazy conspiracy theorist kinds of people come up to you and they start talking about, you know, black helicopters, Illuminati, the New World Order, JFK's assassination, 9-11, Flat Earthers, Obama's birth certificate, RFID chips, Deep State, whatever it happens to be, refer to them to the field guide to critical thinking. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this show. I need to thank Absigay Mitchell, Akami Allen-Chuk, David Dillon, Gregory Irion, Paul Polytech Scott, Steven Smith, Wes and Willie. These guys, they have exceptional critical thinking skills. They're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right guys. Peace. I wonder if Ancient Aliens is on Netflix.