 And welcome to another episode of likeable science, a special today. I'm your host Ethan Allen here on the Tuesday afternoon rather than my usual Friday slot. With me today in the studio is Jay Fidel, I think Tech's own CEO. Welcome Jay. Yes sir. Glad you could join me today. I'm happy to be here. Well, that's great. And we're going to talk about an interesting asset or facet of science today. It's not actually necessarily so likeable. The show title I had proposed was Cording Catastrophe, which gives you some sense it might not be exactly likeable. But it was driven by an editorial in a recent issue of science that I saw written by Bruce Alpertz who was the former head of the National Academies and a very distinguished scientist pointing out that our educational system has fundamentally failed to teach the American public what science is all about and the value of science and the idea of science as a process. And he points out this is shown very clearly through our recent election cycle where basically people were told what they wanted to hear by people with no evidence or indeed mountains of evidence to the contrary, but they went right ahead and sort of followed this person who said what they wanted to hear. And despite the fact that you could sort of make very clean, clear, logical arguments against it. This is a very normal human emotion, human tendency to want to go with your cohort and sort of stay in sync and keep the people who are thinking like you. But you would hope and scientists hope I guess and thought that people will listen to a rational argument and go with that evidence based argument and it turns out not to be true. This leads to all kinds of problems as you might imagine, right? Oh yeah, you know my own track on it when I was a kid in high school, we all loved science. Everybody's favorite course was biology and math and physics. I mean everybody loved that stuff and a lot of them, a lot of them, a huge percentage of them went on to achieve in that area. They went to other schools in the northeast, they became PhDs, they went in that direction. But at the same time, I would say there were other places in the country that were coming in that direction and we haven't been aware of that until now about this polarization of knowledge. That's what I would call it, yeah? There's a part of the country that is relatively well educated in this area or professional scientists in this area, but as part of the country never wanted to learn any of that. They weren't good in school, they weren't good in science and so they kind of have a resentment about it and that's the bubble they live in. And when Donald Trump comes around and says why don't you guys dump on science, they're only too happy to do that because they're mad at science. They haven't been treated well by science, they haven't done well, they haven't achieved anything. And so I think we didn't know this, we didn't see it until the Trump campaign and now we see it clearly and it's very, very troubling for the future. Oh absolutely. So this is what Albert points out in his editorials, one of the things is science is not just another belief system. Science is actually an amazing human endeavor of a whole bunch of people getting together and agreeing on sort of a set of rules to try to figure out what makes the world work, how does nature actually perform, what causes the phenomenon that we see and that's very different from a faith-based system where you just, you all agree on some undefinable entity. I think you struck on something really important, I mean a lot of the anti-science sentiment these days within Trump, they may not connect it up politically but in fact it's based on religion, it's based on faith. And faith is not science, sorry it's not science and the Constitution, our founding fathers tried to make a distinction between, well it's a social science of government and religion, keep them separate because you have to have evidence-based thinking and if you don't have that it's very hard to run a country or an economy or a scientific advance. Exactly and science is really one of the sort of inarguable ways you can actually measure progress of humanity, I mean there is no doubt sort of due to science and technology, we are in a much different place today than we were ten years ago or a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. You can't so much make that argument for art or literature or politics, right? We're still doing the same, we're still doing sort of stupid government stuff the way we've always done it. You know art, can you really say that we're better than Rembrandt or whoever you may choose? I mean has there really been progress? But in science and technology, of course we can move goods faster, further we can communicate better, I mean there are sort of a thousand different metrics, you can show real progress. Yeah, it's logarithmic, isn't it? In our lifetimes it's been a joy to be alive and see this progress. But sort of the downside is the consequences if you have policy making that's driven by ideology or religion or anything other than science, this policy then it can fly in the face of fact basically. I mean when you're striding down the sidewalk and your toe catches on a crack in the sidewalk and you're pitching forward, you may wish that the laws of physics didn't hold, you may wish that gravity was really only a theory that wasn't going to catch up with you in the end. But an unseen hand come down from heaven and help you, come on. But no, you're going to smack your face flat on the sidewalk and that's all there is to it. Your wants have nothing to do with it, your belief system has really nothing to do with it, it's fundamentally you're going to be caught up in it. And that's what we're sort of now in a situation where, I mean again this whole business of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and causing the greenhouse affecting and making earth warmer, people treat this like this is some kind of new fancy theory. This was back in the 1850s that the first scientists realized that CO2 was this key regulator of the atmosphere temperature and was a powerful greenhouse gas. And it's been verified countless times since then and no reputable scientists will argue against that. And it goes back to the dichotomy. I mean there have been schools while you and I are growing up, Ethan, where they didn't study science, where they studied it in a faulty way. And as a result now, as adults, those people, those tens, hundreds of millions of people have no clue about this. And so they're vulnerable to arguments that are specious. And I think we have a lot of arguments. People would make arguments that are specious, not only playing on ignorance, but playing on their own self-interest to get people to do things, one way to use their products, even though their products are faulty, whatever it may be. And the problem is that people are vulnerable. And I mean you and I are not going to buy into that so quick, but there are hundreds of millions of people who are untrained. And the problem is that they form a large political constituency. And you can't change them overnight. You and I could have this show, Talk This Talk, for 100 years. We're not going to affect a lot of people who have been trained the other way. So what does the country do? This is really a difficult problem to re-educate people who are ignorant. Yeah, well, this is what Albert sort of was the point of his editorial was. We really need to go back and reshape the way we teach science. And not worry so much about making science a collection of facts, the way it has traditionally been taught. But help everyone, whether they're going to be a scientist, not understand what science really is. It's just a way of thinking about the world. It is a way of making decisions based on clear, observable, inarguable evidence. And really understand that this is a very powerful way to deal with the world. And it makes sense of everything. I haven't thought about this before, but you make me think one thought. And that is this, it is a philosophical thing. It is even a religious thing. On the one side, the faith, where you don't need science, you rely on faith, which is not evidence. On the other side is, we want science to improve our lives. And we are looking for evidence. We are trying to find the best that humanity, that the homo sapiens species has ever learned. We're trying to apply that to our society. Those two are really different. They're different philosophies. They're different ways of life, different ways of thinking. Very hard to bring that together. In order to make the person on this side of the equation agree with the person on that side of the equation, you have to dig it up from scratch. You have to say, wait, stop with this faith business. Let's talk about evidence. Let's talk about rationality. Let's talk about science. Right. It's not. They cannot coexist. People can't. But I think of them as being almost right angles to one another. They have almost nothing to do with each other. And it's possible to be a person of great faith and a great scientific believer, too. So you talk about the kids in school. And he talks about the kids in school. Very nice. But there's a lot of kids in school. And those kids in school are being controlled by people who are already over the hill, if you will, who are the adults who run the schools and the school boards and all that all over the country, or at least in the red states anyway. So how do you get the next generation of kids in school starting this Monday? How do you get them straight on this? You have to change the schools and the teachers and the curricular and the syllabus and all that stuff. And you're not going to do that unless the people who run the schools buy in. But the people who run the schools are already ill-trained. How are you going to do that? Do you remember Mark Twain's famous quote? First, God invented idiots. That was for practice. Then he invented school boards. That was an impossible task. And this really makes you sort of pessimistic about the future of it. Because the country cannot survive without respecting science. I'm sorry. I mean, you're just not going to get very far arguing against things like gravity. You can pretend that evolution doesn't happen. But again, evolution is going to march on and march on regardless of your belief. And the problem is that as we ignore science in our policies, it's almost like trying to turn the clock backwards, which is a really bad thing. So this march for science, hey, this weekend, Saturday. Let's talk about it. Yeah, march for science. It's a march that says science should be a part of everyone's lives. Science should be a part of all of our policy decision. All of our key community decisions should be made with the best available science in mind. And it seems to me like a no-brainer. But it's not being done. Indeed, the recent administrative administrations policies are cranking back and saying, ignore the science. We don't care how much CO2 you're pumping out. We don't care that you're releasing methane into the atmosphere, which is methane. Methane makes carbon dioxide look like a wimp gas. I mean, in terms of power, it's a greenhouse gas. It's a much more powerful environment. And there have been huge methane leaks recently. They had to evacuate that whole area around LAO and the whole neighborhood from a methane leak. Terrible. This is problematic because, is why, because you have an administration, the Donald Trump administration. You showed me another article that was in the same magazine. It's about all the things that he's doing to change the regulations that Obama put in place, or that were in place before, all the environmental regulations. And his change is a world-denying science. Thank you very much. And so little by little, we don't see it. It doesn't appear at the top 20 news articles in the New York Times. We don't see it. But you have to recognize that every day, he's pulling the wings of science out of our government. He's denying science in so many ways. He's rolling all these things back. And you know one thing I'd like to tell you a story. Jack Balkan, who is one of the leading, if not the leading constitutional law professors. He's at Yale. And he has a blog called Balkanization, very interesting. And it's all about the beat, the role, the evolution of constitutional law in this country. He was on our show. And I asked him, this is the time George Bush, W, was president, I asked him, Bush has done a lot of things to roll things back and to go the other way, faith-based, not science-based. Same issue. Can we recover when he's out of office? Can we find a way back to where we were before? Does it snap back? How does the Constitution work? Does it snap back to, for example, the establishment clause, separation of church and state? He said, no, Jay. Everything is on its own effect in history. So George Bush had an effect in history. And when he was done, things had changed on these very issues. And they're not going to go back right away. If they could ever go back, it would be evolving back slowly, maybe hopefully back. But it's much worse with Donald Trump, because he is affirmatively rolling things back hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years in terms of government and public thinking about science. And I think to get, right now, as we speak, the wings are being pulled out on this issue. When we get to the end of his administration, and I surely hope it ends soon, then we're going to find out that you can't go back. It doesn't snap back. You are in a different place. And the damage is done. Why don't we take a break and think about that very incredible. You must have been reading my mind. Just going to say the same thing. We're going to take a brief break. Jay Fidel is here with me. Ethan Allen, special edition of Likeable Science. We'll be right back. Aloha, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Pauline Shakmak-Chen. I'm the host for a new show on think tech Hawaii called Outside In. Outside In will be taking a look at how the external world can help shape Hawaii's future. And I will be starting the show hopefully next year in terms of regularly scheduled programming. And we hope to invite a wide variety of different guests ranging from history, philosophy, art and architectural fields all the way to robotics, biotech, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and the like. So we're going to have a full range of guests to cover many different areas of interest. And I hope to see you next year. Until then, Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. And I'm the host of Law Across the Sea. And Law Across the Sea is a program that brings attorneys who have traveled across the sea and live in Hawaii or are staying in Hawaii for a time to talk about their travels, where they're from, where they're going, and bring it all together because really we're all connected some way although we travel across the sea. So I hope that you'll tune in and watch our program. Thank you very much. And we're back here on likeable science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Jay Fidel is with me today on a special edition of likeable science. And we're talking about the calamities, the catastrophes that we caught by ignoring science at our own risk. Well, you mentioned during the break that on climate change anyway, and there's other things too, but there's a momentum effect. In other words, even if you corrected what Donald Trump has done right now today on a given Tuesday, we would have continuing bad effect for years and decades and years on climate change. We can't stop it. And so what he's doing is making it much worse, much worse. Right. I mean, it's like if you have a smokestack belching out smoke, yes, you can turn off your furnace and stop that smoke, but the rest of the smoke continues to drift around the earth time and time and time and time again, affecting everyone's lives. They're all breathing this in, getting lung trouble, and it turns out probably also getting dementia from it. There's evidence for that. Yeah, yeah. There's a little special thing right now. What's interesting though is that, you know, I talk about faith-based, and well, we both do, and talk about the trying to divide rationality from faith, but it's not just faith, that's the problem here. It's self-interest. Interest of multinational corporations, of large corporations, which are dedicated to a given product or project that is detrimental to us, and that is in violation of good science. Right. And they'll keep on doing it as long as they can. For one thing, they'll try to confuse the public. For another thing, they'll try to affect the government. If the government buys into it, then we're all affected. We're all in this morass of misinformation. That's what's happening. I mean, you look back at the tobacco companies for years, managed to keep cigarettes up and being marketed, even though there was overwhelming evidence that these things are dangerous, that they're costing all of us cigarettes. It's poison, right? But you can still buy a pack of cigarettes. But now at least they're being taxed at a pretty hefty rate, and presumably, you know... Fewer people smoke for sure. It has cut down on smoking, and the non-smokers are not quite left with such heavy tax burden for caring for the health problems of the smokers. So many examples of products and processes of businesses that shouldn't be doing business. I mean, how could he support the coal business when everyone knows how detrimental that is to the society? Right, right. The way they mine coal now by knocking off the tops of mountains is just appalling. I mean, it has huge downstream effects when they push all the rubble down into the streams, you know, as a war, and bury the streams. But it's because, I think, at least in part, that's not religion. That's not faith. No, it's money. That's money. It's money for his campaign, and he's, what did I read? He's got, oh gee, well, it's $20, $30 million already, easy, only 10 weeks after he was inaugurated for his next campaign. Oh my God. So, you know, a problem with that is what, Citizens United? The problem with that is a breach in the Constitution, if you will, to allow Citizens United to be the law. The Supreme Court failed us badly on that. There's no excuses for it. Every judge who voted for that and permitted it to happen should be held accountable for that. That was such a bad move. And it is affecting things. It is making people like Trump possible. And so, you know, what we have is special interest groups, capital concentrations, doing things that are damaging to the public and to us individually and to our world and our society, our environment, with impunity, because the government lets them do that, even when everybody knows it's the wrong thing. It's ruled by special interests. Yes, it's an appalling thing, right? There's not this recognition that we all have to step back, take sort of deep breath, say, hey, we're all in the same, same big blue marble together, right? We're all breathing the same air, we're all drinking the same water. You can just go round and around and around. They go into my lungs, they go into your lungs. And so, you know, if I foul up some air, you're gonna end up paying the consequences for it. So, I guess what this suggests to me is that this is more than just teaching kids in school. And it's more than just, it's more than teaching the kids in school and teaching the school boards. And it's more than healing, you know, this huge polarity between science and something other than science. Because I think that's very hard anyway. It's a legal problem we have. It's a constitutional problem. It's Citizens United. It's super PACs. And it's allowing these large multinationals, which with unlimited resources, to affect public opinion and tell untruths to the public. And cause public opinion to go the wrong way and government to go the wrong way. It's a recipe for disaster. We are on the wrong path. I thought Stephen Colbert had a great job setting up his own super PAC and just pointing out that the sort of absurdity of setting up how sort of easy it was to set up how the rules that guide and regulate super PACs are so sort of easy to flout that he could basically could have started pulling in huge amounts of money to this if he had wanted to do whatever he wanted to do with that happen. So if we began today and if Congress were all rational today, they would fix this, right? But there's no chance they're gonna knock off Citizens United or the Supreme Court is not gonna knock it off. There's no possibility that we'll stop super PACs right now soon. And so this is all gonna continue and that shows like a further problem. Nobody out there seems to be interested in fixing it. So how can we even approach a fix when nobody wants to fix anything? They're all interested in their selfishness. Well, that's what this march of science coming up on this weekend is all about. Zang, no, let's stop and let's demand from our leaders that they make rational, evidence-based policy decisions that are in the good of the people, not just in the good of a few people who paid a lot of money. That leads me to suggest to you, Ethan, that the march for science is much more than a march for science. Exactly. It's a march for other things. It's a march for sanity. Ha ha ha. That's for somebody who needs to carry a sign that says march for sanity. Well, you know, it plays out in so many different ways. The young woman carrying the sign in her pre-march that says, remember Polio, I don't. You know, pointing out that she was, as a young person, has lived in a world that basically is for Polio, two small countries, which they won't let us get into and what our doctors finished vaccination that will wipe Polio off the face of the planet. You know, it's not rocket science in many cases. It's just simple, okay, we now know this, here's a way to deal with it. Let's do it. Yeah. And instead. Easy choice. Right. And yet there are, there's a large number of people in this country, and I say in this country, I think it's a special American phenomenon that don't want to do vaccinations for their children, even though that puts their child at risk and the kid next door at risk and the whole society at risk. And they got some cockamamie reason for that. There's no good reason for that. Science tells us clearly. They have seen now in the first three months of 2017 in England now, they've seen more measles cases, I believe, in their hospitals than they did in the entire last year in 2016, now in the first three months of 2017. Because, yes, they've gotten down because of this belief that somehow vaccines are bad, that they cause autism or whatever. So it's actually getting worse. Yeah, they've dropped the vaccination rate down to a point where essentially measles can get going again now, which it was basically stopped before. You need to keep your vaccination rate at about 90 to 95% and they're down to about 85% and they're starting to see these diseases pop out. Quickly we forget the disasters of previous diseases that we thought we had excluded. So we got, and then we got on top of that, we got a world in which everybody moves around and Hawaii could be victim to this any day of the week. A world where there are vectors and viruses coming from Hither and Jan that could go into a pandemic any day of the week because this is so obvious and you can read so much about it. And yet we are exposing ourselves increasingly to the possibility of a pandemic that will kill millions, hundreds of millions of people in this world. Why do we not apply science to this? Why do we not take steps to protect ourselves? Why do we have our heads in the sand? You know why? Well, there actually are lots and lots and lots of good people working very, very hard to try to stop this. But yes, there's much more that could be done and needs to be done. There are diseases that are evolving very rapidly. Yes, if we would study, for instance, the influenza virus a little more and could figure out how is it that it keeps mutating and changing. This is evolution though. How is the time to do that? But he's pulling money out of NIH. He's pulling money out of medical research. He's pulling. We're going static or backward. And we will pay a hideous price, honestly. Right, right. The environmental regulations are cutting the EPA by 30%. What's this proposal? Or more than 30%. You're just asking for trouble. You're asking for increased pollution that's going to be much more expensive to clean up later. You're asking for exacerbation of problems that are going to be harder to stop because they have momentum. The classic example being the ocean, even if you could cut stabilized air temperature today, the ocean is going to continue to warm for about 50 more years. These things aren't going to go away. They can't be just yanked back the way you were suggesting that they have momentum. And unfortunately, we seem to be right now rolling increasingly fast down the wrong hill, as it were, in the wrong direction. You sound pessimistic, but I want to tell you we did a show yesterday with a few science and we did two shows yesterday with a half a dozen scientists. And at the end, invariably, to close, they said, but we're optimistic. It was hard to find what we call evidence-based optimism there. Well, science has all very, very, very serious problems in the world. And it's taken us, lifted us up by our bootstraps as it were, out of the dark ages, and into this present rather astounding world we have. And just as you said, within our lifetimes, we've seen advances that were just inconceivable. So we do have a reason to be optimistic, and I am actually optimistic. Tell me why. Tell me your analysis on that. Because I do think there are actually a lot of good-hearted, smart people in the world working very hard to make the world a better place. And I think, fortunately, I'm lucky. Without grants, without money, without support from the government, without support from the community. That's why this march is so important, because in the end, I hope, it's the community that determines these questions. Exactly. And there are 500, what do you call it, sympathetic marches around the country and the world on Saturday to make the same point. Again, science is not separate from society. Science lives in a culture supported by a culture and must support the culture in and of itself. And you can't straight the two there if it's impossible. And the flip side is, if you take science away from our society or with our seven billion people, it will collapse for a world. And billions of people will die. And that could include everybody we know. And on that cheering note, we'll end another episode of Likeable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Jay Fidel has been the shining light of optimism here. Happy to be with you, Ethan. Aloha, Jay. Until next week. Aloha.