 If there was a topical jail that may people believe that ghosts exist, would it be an anti-skeptic? Richard Feynman was a brilliant and charming physicist who was one of my heroes. He was a fantastically eloquent public speaker and teacher. He contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of atomic power and quantum physics. He played bongos, he was a safecracker, the list goes on and on. However, I'm going to focus on something specific that he said that's going to be more important for you and me than it has for any human beings who have ever existed. According to Feynman, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and that you are the easiest person to fool. Now, don't get offended, he's not talking about you personally. But when Feynman said you're the easiest person to fool, he was talking about how it's very easy for human beings to convince themselves of things. This is partially due to a pretty well-established principle in psychology called confirmation bias. Basically, when we get an idea in our heads, our brains tend to pay very close attention to stuff that supports that idea and sort of snooze through the things that don't. That means that our brains are wired to believe things, and to believe them with greater and greater certainty over time, even if there's evidence that they're not true. That sucks. What especially sucks is that we live in a period in history that has more stuff to believe than any human beings have ever had to deal with before. I mean, just check your Facebook feed. Oh my god, the radiation from Fukushima is mutating fish in California. Hashtag apocalypse, hashtag moving to Kansas. A lot of these are just funny hoaxes and things for the Mythbusters to explode in their very special way, but they're far from harmless. The way that viral media spreads without anybody checking to see if it's true, that's a precedent. By reposting headlines without thinking about them, we're basically saying that it's better to be first than it is to be right. That has far-reaching implications. Like, people will put their children at risk for fatal diseases because a friend of a friend has a cousin whose daughter supposedly became autistic the day she was vaccinated. That's probably not as good a reason as the hundreds of independently verified scientific studies demonstrating that there is no correlation whatsoever, but it is more exciting and dramatic. So people pay attention when they hear it, and confirmation bias allows them to ignore all that research. So how are we supposed to not fool ourselves? I mean, our brains are apparently wired to hold on to even the most unreasonable ideas, and we're swimming in more of those ideas than anyone ever has before. One potential answer is skepticism, a very old philosophy concerning what you should believe. Skeptics kind of have a reputation as being buzz kills, but when the buzz is anti-vax, they're nice to have around. When I say that skepticism is old, I could be talking about any number of philosophers from ancient China, India, or Greece, but I'm actually talking about this guy, Piro. Piro started off his life as a painter, then he became interested in philosophy, traveled the world with Alexander the Great writing poetry, studied with ascetic yogis in India and Magi in Persia, and got honorary citizenship to two countries that thought that he was an awesome guy. I don't always think clearly, but when I do, I prefer Piro of Greece. In his travels, Piro heard a bunch of really different answers for big philosophical questions like, why are we here? What's the purpose of life? Coke or Pepsi? The yogi said the purpose of life was inner peace. The Magi said that it was to do good deeds to get into heaven, and the Greeks said it was to achieve excellence. Piro recognized that there isn't a really great way of telling which of those answers is right, or if any of them are right. So, instead of choosing one and convincing himself that the other ones didn't make any sense, he decided instead that it would be better to suspend his judgment. He suggested that it was better to simply embrace the fact that we don't and can't know the answer to those questions, and just not worry about them. A state that he called epikei. If you asked Piro what the meaning of life was, he would just shrug and say, no, that might sound lazy, but it actually takes a lot of effort to maintain that sort of suspension of judgment. Remember, our brains are wired to believe stuff. Skepticism can insulate us from the barrage of random ideas that are trying to find their way into our confirmation bias engine. But what about the ones that are already there? How are we supposed to know if we are fooling ourselves? Piro never actually wrote any of his philosophy down, but this guy did. Sextus empiricus, a physician and a philosopher with a pretty good answer to that question. Sextus advocated empiricism, the idea that experience and evidence should be the primary sources of knowledge. This actually flew in the face of a lot of existing philosophy at the time, most notably the works of Plato who thought that you could figure out how the universe works just by sitting around and thinking hard and taking his word for things. We already know why that's a bad plan. Confirmation bias means that the first bad idea that we have is going to skew the rest of our thinking. In contrast, empiricism is one of the foundations of science and partially why science is such a robust system. You can't just publish a paper titled, hey guys, I really think that subatomic particles are made of jam. You have to publish some sort of experimental subatomic jam data for other people to look at and hopefully replicate. But you don't have to be a scientist to practice empiricism. You do it right now to some extent. If you wouldn't buy a Ferrari off of Craigslist without actually seeing the car and driving it around, then you're an empiricist, at least about Ferraris. It's really just about demanding objective proof of ideas before accepting them, and keeping an eye on the world around you to make sure that there's no evidence that conflicts with those ideas. That goes very well with pure and skepticism which says if you don't have any good reason to believe something, just don't. Skepticism and empiricism might be less dramatic than the exciting media blitz that we're used to, but they do help to combat confirmation bias and can keep us from fooling ourselves or others. Feynman would approve or play some bongos. If you've got any interesting suggestions for future show topics or thoughts on skepticism, empiricism, or my terrible accent, please leave a comment and keep thunking, my friends. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.