 It's Sunday, June 6th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason. I'm DJ Grohthy. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation, an international non-profit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. My guest this week to continue the conversation from last week is Massimo Pilucci. He's professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. He's written a number of books. He also writes for Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic Magazine, and Philosophy Now. He's been involved for a long time with the skeptics movement, very involved with New York City skeptics. And again, he's joining me to continue our discussion about his book Nonsense on Stilts, How to Tell Science, from Bunk. Welcome back to For Good Reason, Massimo Pilucci. My pleasure as usual. Massimo, this is an excellent, excellent book. I want to begin by broadening our discussion away from just talking about who's an expert and how we decide who an expert is, and talk about science in general and faith in science, or, you know, buying into science too much. Maybe you object to the phrase faith in science. Do you think that we believe in science too much or too little? In the Academy, so you have postmodernists who, as radical skeptics of all knowledge, they think of science as just one mythic narrative, among many others, but you also find folks in the Academy who are not just scientific, but whom I would refer to maybe as scientific. They think that every question is ultimately a scientific question and that only the truth of science will set us free. So in those two extremes, where do you come out? I find this a fascinating topic and one in which I can easily get in trouble on both counts, because there are people that have accused me of being too strong a defender of science. There was one of the early reviews of the book, was in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where this philosophy professor accused me of being a science warrior, in other words, of being scientific essentially to use the term you've used. But at the same time, several reviews and commentaries on blogs, especially in the data culture, they accused me of not being enough of a supporter of science and being too critical of certain public figures in science and how they present science in the public. So apparently I got it wrong on both sides. The idea is that, once again, the situation inside is actually fairly complicated. And the answer to your question, do we trust science too much or too little, is both. Two of the chapters in the second half of the book are about the so-called science wars. And the first, which is never-ending discussion about whether science, what's the relationship between science and religion, science and the humanities, and so on. So you think the answer is some sort of Goldilocks formula. Don't trust science too much nor too little, but just right, just the right amount. Exactly, and there are two chapters in the book that have exactly those titles. Do we trust science too much and do we trust science too little? And those chapters, again, on the one hand, belong and somewhat abusing history of scientific blunders. I mean, scientists got it wrong a lot of the time. And some of that of those times actually had significant impact on society. We go into some detail in the discussion of the history of eugenics, for instance, which was not just bad science, you know, badly done, but it actually affected the lives of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. People don't realize that eugenics really got its start in the U.S. and later in Nazi Europe, rather than the other way around. Exactly. So there are those examples, which, of course, cautionary tales about science in particular about what happens when science gets wrong in terms of science policy. But on the other hand, there's also the fact that not enough Americans understand and trust science as much as they should. And this goes back, of course, to the discussions that we've had about vaccines and climate change and so on and so forth. So ironically, we have this really interesting situation where, in some sense, our society trusts science too much and it yields too much power to science. And in some other sense, we don't trust it enough. So not only it's a question of finding the right middle, it's also a question of finding a more nuanced, more complex understanding of what science is and how it works. And the question is which science to trust, because there are these debates within science and if you're a non-scientist, you have to figure out who is right. And that's the discussion we had about experts and figuring out who the right experts to listen to are. That's right. And for some scientific debate, it doesn't really matter to most of the rest of us. So frankly, whether string theorists or loop quantum theorists are right about the ultimate theory of everything probably makes very little difference to most of us. Whether there is a connection between autism and vaccines or HIV and AIDS, yes, that does matter. And there we do want to develop a good understanding of science. So in evolution, yes, buy into evolution even if you don't know who's right, Dawkins or Gould, on punctuated equilibria and all of that stuff. So the small skirmishes, fine, if you're not an expert, you're kind of giving people a pass on that. They can ignore that. But the overall, the bigger picture, that's kind of your call for people just to learn more about science. Correct. And you mentioned, you know, Gould versus Dawkins, which of course has been one of the great, in some sense, scientific debates of the latter part of the 20th century. But as you pointed out, really as far as the general public is concerned, there was a minor debate on some minor issues about the scope of natural selection versus other forces in evolution. I mean, those things are interesting to scientists. They don't really change the big picture, which is, yes, we did evolve. Yes, we are closer related to other primates. Yes, natural selection is a major mechanism by which evolution occurs. It is in general, for instance, of creationists and intelligent design proponents, to point to those disagreements among scientists and say, see, even they disagree among themselves, they don't know what they're talking about. Right. That's simply, I think, a willful misconception or misrepresentation of what science is and how it works. Masimo, I want to talk about fringe science versus pseudoscience. You don't really get into some of the, I think, interesting fringe science topics in your book because you're really talking about bunk. But seems to me we shouldn't be against fringe science, science on the cutting edge, since that's where all the advances are coming from in science. But many skeptics dismiss some areas of fringe science, say transhumanism or life extension technologies as pseudoscience, but instead they're just on the fringes of science, right? So I give fringe science a little more of a pass in that way. Yes, to some extent you're correct. The problem, of course, with fringe science, or even if you don't want to do the word fringe with the frontiers of science themselves, is that, you know, likely, if you look at the historical record, likely most of those ideas are going to turn out to be wrong. And the problem is, of course, that while those ideas are developed, we don't know. Some of those ideas may very well turn out to be correct and we'll all enjoy the benefits of it, and others will turn out, most of them will turn out to be wrong. So the question about fringe science is really where do we place our best bets? Now let's talk about transhumanism, for instance, for a minute. Now there are several notions there that I think are perfectly reasonable. Several others that I think are not quite that reasonable. And then there are some issues that don't deal at all with science, but are more a matter of ethics. So briefly, let me give you a couple of examples. Well, and first, for our listeners, we'll define transhumanism, which is almost the faith in future technologies to ameliorate social and human problems and to radically extend our life expectancies and to kind of connect us with computers so we'll be kind of cyborgs. And all this science fiction stuff, there are thinkers who say it's actually impending science fact. Right, and to some extent transhumanism is a modern version of what used to be called futurism at the beginning of the 20th century. So as you pointed out, it's a sort of an almost extreme version of science optimism that given enough time and resources, and in fact not even that much time, many wonders will take place because of the ability of science to solve problems. Okay, well, so let's talk about life extension. There's no doubt that life can be, human life in particular, can be extended. It has been already by leaps and bounds over the last century. And that's just by enacting some basic public health measures. That's not even high science. That's just diet and sanitation and stuff like that. Correct. So we can imagine that if and when we're going to be successful in routinely implementing, for instance, genetic engineering in humans, we will be able to do much better than that. And I don't see any theoretical reason why we shouldn't be able to do it. We know that genetics is a science, a well-established science. We can do genetic engineering on other species. In human beings it's more complicated and there are many more possible outcomes because human behavior is complex, because the individual and human organism is complex, but those are matters of degree. There's nothing in principle that says, no, we cannot do that. So that is one of the things that we can do to what extent and how much life extension that would actually give us. It's not a matter, but it certainly can be done to some extent. What I don't think can be done is this idea of downloading or uploading human consciousness to a computer. And I could be wrong, of course, but the reason I think that is because I think that that idea is based on the misconception of how human brains work, how human consciousness work. Let me give you an example. Essentially, the idea of uploading our consciousness to a computer assumes that all that is important about human consciousness is the form of the thought, the formal aspect of the thought, not the actual biological implementation, not the particular materials in which thought actually happens. In other words, not the brain. So you can abstract the formal characteristics of thought and upload them to a computer. Well, imagine trying to do that with a different kind of biological phenomenon. So imagine that you were to ask me, is it possible to formally simulate the process of photosynthesis inside a computer? And I will say, well, yes it is, because the process of photosynthesis is based on a series of chemical reactions. We can represent the chemical reactions inside a computer from a logical formal perspective. And we can therefore get a computer to simulate all the possible outcomes of photosynthesis. But that doesn't mean that a computer is doing photosynthesis. Exactly. The only thing you don't get out of that simulation is sugar, which is in fact what photosynthesis is all about. I have a strong suspicion and we don't have a lot of time to get into it, but there's very good reasons based on some interesting theories in philosophy of mine to think that thought is akin to photosynthesis. That is, it is something that cannot be done abstractly. It has to be done in a particular biological sense of doing, thinking like, just like to do photosynthesis you need certain chemicals because otherwise you're not doing it, you're just simulating it. I think that the same thing is also true for thought. So in that sense, thought is biological and not just mechanical. It's not just something with zeros and ones in a processor. It has to be biological. So that's why you're a little skeptical of some of the transhumanism, but I have to say I'm gratified to hear that you're optimistic about, say, radical life extension. These kinds of topics are the only thing as a skeptic. I'm not allowed to talk about it at a cocktail party because I sound like I'm in a cult or something. But speaking of that kind of skepticism, that actually raises a question about, you know, like global warming in the skeptics movement. So the skeptics movement generally dismisses transhumanism. You did not just do that, but also a lot of high-profile skeptics dismiss consensus views in climatology like human-caused global warming. So I want to ask you about that. Why do you think so many of these high-profile skeptics are skeptics of global warming, human-caused global warming? Yeah, it's a very good question. And of course the example that comes to mind most prominently is Ken and Teller who famously did a whole episode of their show on climate change and they dismissed it. Or Shermer to some extent, or James Randy has spouted off about it. Yeah. Correct. Now, I am disappointed because all these people are either friends or colleagues who I have a very, very high esteem of, but that doesn't mean that just because somebody is very smart always gets it right. And in this case, you know, let's take the case of Ken and Teller, for instance, which is a very good example of it. It seems pretty clear to me, and in fact I do treat that in the book in some detail, it seems to me that their dismissal of climate change, of human-made climate change, is in fact motivated or grounded in their political opinions. If you look at, in particular, in their libertarianism. They don't want a big government solution to the problem of global climate change and therefore they kind of start with this skeptical stance. That's correct. And in fact, if you look at that information, in my opinion, episode of bullshit, they bring up so-called experts which turned out to be spokespersons for the Cato Institute of which Ken is a fellow and the Cato Institute is, of course, a big libertarian thing then. You're talking about the Cato Institute in D.C., a libertarian think tank in one of most influential public policy houses on Capitol Hill. Exactly. Now, again, that doesn't imply necessarily, of course, that Ken and Teller are wrong on that topic. I think they are. But it doesn't just follow from their conflict of interest. But it does, I think, go a long way through explaining why they did that show to begin with. And of course, the same is true for my friend Michael Shermer, who is, in fact, also a libertarian and also skeptical of big government influence and things of that sort. Now, what I find troublesome when we're about it is that one can easily be skeptical of big government solutions to a problem without necessarily having to deny that there is a problem. And that is the part that I honestly have a little bit of trouble understanding about both Shermer and, in fact, even Randy, to some extent, and Ken and Teller. I suspect there is another mechanism of play there, but this is only a suspicion on my part. And the idea is that we as skeptics get used to the pleasures of questioning the common wisdom or the accepted wisdom. You're saying there's kind of a knee-jerk skepticism. It becomes habitual. That's right. And there's also, to some extent, a fine pleasure in being skeptical. Because there is the pleasure of pointing out where a lot of other people may be going wrong. Sometimes those are the people, in fact, are big experts in a particular field, and you get to sit back and say, well, no, I don't think it works this way. I don't know to what extent that psychological mechanism is at play in the specific examples that we're talking about, but I have experience in myself. I mean, I caught myself a few times saying, well, wait a minute, slow down. You really need to work on this and figure out things a little more before you have these knee-jerk reactions. So I suspect that there is some of that going on as far as skepticism by credentialed skeptics about things that, frankly, are pretty well established. The big question I have with that kind of knee-jerk skepticism, you know, the kind of seduction of skepticism, that people loving the pleasures of skepticism and kind of just falling into it in a knee-jerk way, the reasoning that I've heard from some global warming skeptics who are high-profile figures in the skeptics movement is really identical or almost point-for-point analogous to say skepticism of evolution. You hear people say, now, I'm not an expert. This is just my opinion. I haven't studied it. I think he himself kind of spoke this language. He said, you know, I admit that I don't really know this topic, but I'm a skeptic. So you have a lot of people who deny evolution who say, admittedly, I'm not a biologist, but on the face of it, it just doesn't seem like that's explanatory, right? That's a great point. And I think that that point really goes straight to the heart of what it means to be a skeptic. Everything seems to be active in the skeptic movement, which at last 13 years basically since I originally moved to Tennessee and I got involved in the evolution and creation force. I thought that being a skeptic meant two things. It means a commitment to furthering critical thinking among the general public, which is sorely needed. I think we all agree. And also a defense of science, which is equally sorely needed in American society. It does not mean that all of a sudden, somebody with no technical background can become a general arbiter of a scientific dispute. And it certainly does not mean anything like, well, I don't know much about this, but I'm going to be skeptical because my default position is that I don't believe unless I have proof. I mean, that seems to me that some of the people you mentioned, and again, that group includes both people who are close friends or friends of mine, and also people who I have really a high degree of esteem for. I use Penn and Teller's clips from their shows in my classes on critical thinking. So I think highly of them. I write for Skeptic Magazine edited by Michael Shermer. So these are all people that I definitely have quite a bit in common with. But I do think that, again, the situation comes out of, in some sense, immediate understanding of what skepticism is supposed to be about. Skeptics cannot really rise to the level of arbiters of specific scientific notions. They just don't, and most of them do not have the expertise to do that. What skeptics are supposed to be doing is the two things that I said earlier. Help out with the critical thinking among the general public and defend science, and therefore, obviously, help the bunking pseudoscience. But the reason we can say, to use your example, the reason we can confidently say, well, you know, I'm skeptical about ghosts and telepathy and so on and so forth, is because the empirical evidence is out there. There is no, in fact, empirical reason to think that ghosts exist. There is empirical evidence against the existence of telepathy and so on and so forth. So the science is on our side. But when we as skeptics turn against the prevailing scientific opinion, then we find ourselves in rather shaky situations. Now, this is not to say, I have to listen to qualify this, it's not to say that I think that we should trust science and scientists no matter what they do. It's far from it. But if you want to be a critic of notions such as global warming or any of the others that we've been discussing, you better be prepared to put the years of effort they take to understand and really make yours that kind of scientific discipline. So somebody like Randy Orschermer or Penenthaler will come up and say, well, I don't know anything about this, but I don't believe it. Well, that seems to me to now become a cavalier attitude toward science, which is the entities of what the skeptical movement should be about. I'd consider it kind of irresponsible to have the big megaphone as a leader in the skeptics movement and then try to couch it in this nonchalant way of saying, well, I'm just giving my opinion, right? I haven't studied the topic. I'm not an expert. I'm just telling you I don't believe in it. Well, if someone like Randy or someone else so prominent expresses that kind of skepticism, he does it with a kind of force that really politicizes the thing and gets people who are Randy boosters maybe calling into question human-caused global warming in ways that if some Joe on the street says, well, I don't know one way or the other so I'm withholding judgment, well, it wouldn't result in that circumstance. Absolutely. I mean, with power comes responsibility. I was about to say with great power, except that, of course, nobody in the skeptic movement really has great power. But some of us do have power in the sense that we have access to the public airwaves, we write books, we do podcasts and TV shows, we talk to the media to an extent that, of course, we have some degree of power to influence public opinion. I mean, that's why we are into this thing to begin with, right? It's not like most skeptics are, again, into the business of influencing for the better public opinion, of furthering public understanding of science and critical thinking. We're not there really to do research. I mean, we don't actually do scientific research. And yes, we do the occasional experiment showing that 1000 doesn't work yet again. But yeah, there's only so many times that you can do that before really establishing that, yep, 1000 doesn't work, period, let's give up on it. We keep doing it, not as an actual experiment in research, not that anybody seriously expects that the next dozen is gonna get it right. We do it as an exercise, again, in public demonstration of how science works and so the science doesn't work. And I think that is the proper role of a skeptic. Again, that doesn't mean that skeptics should not be questioning science at all or should be accepting everything that scientists say. But if you want to go that way, you're not talking about ghosts and doubting anymore, you're talking about a large community, a well-funded, a well-established expert in a certain area. If you want to engage them in discussion, you have to do it at their level. You can't get away with a simplistic, well, I don't know, therefore I'm not gonna believe. So, last question on all of this, your book, Nonsense on Stilts, How to Tell Science from Bonk, we haven't really gotten into how the roadmap for separating science from Bonk that you outline in the book, how it equally applies to the things you just mentioned, ghosts or gods or monsters or psychics. Your book really focuses on the big issues, global warming, vaccines, stuff like that. But I think the same toolkit that you share in the book about expertise and should we trust science more or less than we do, all of that serves us equally well with these other questions in pseudoscience, paranormal, the supernatural, correct? That's correct. You can think of the book almost as a roadmap or a territory map to the complex landscape of science, non-science, pseudoscience, and French science. And if you think of it in terms, you know, in broad terms, I'm suggesting throughout the book that there are two major characteristics or criteria that you want to look at when you examine the difference between science, French science, and pseudoscience. One is, is the theory sound? Do we have solid theoretical reasons to think that this particular notion may, in fact, be true? And, you know, you've got one end of the spectrum you get, you know, the standard model in physics or evolutionary theory or things like, oh, you're in string theory. Those are theories that are very sound. Those are very well-established. They're based on a theoretical treatment that is very serious and very established. At the opposite end, you have notions like astrology and the connections between vaccines and others. Those are theoretically shaky. There's a chapter in there where I go into the theoretical reasons why astrology couldn't possibly work. I mean, we have very good reasons to know, even before you do the experiment, why astrology isn't going to work. But the second dimension, of course, because we're talking about science, it's not all, it's not all theory. The second dimension is empirical content. So what about empirical content of this theory? Well, that second dimension separates even some of the sciences from some of the free science. So, you know, astrology, for instance, came out on the low end of theoretical soundness. It also comes out on the low end of empirical content because it turns out every time we've done the experiment, they turn out to be wrong. Or just that there's no data, there's no evidence to support the claims. That's what you mean. On the other hand, we have things like, you know, again, evolutionary biology or the standard modeling in physics where the empirical content is high. There's a lot of very well-established empirical evidence in terms of observation experiment. But then there are the interesting situations like the string theory we were talking earlier where there is a high degree of soundness in terms of the theory. It's a very good, very sophisticated mathematical theory. But the empirical content is almost zero. In fact, it is zero. There's not a single experiment, you know, prediction that has been made by string theory that has actually been confirmed. And then there's things in between, like evolutionary psychology, for instance. Evolutionary psychology is a discipline whose theoretical foundations are well-established because it's just a branch of evolutionary theory. So, just as it's just as established theoretically as evolutionary theory is. But the empirical claims are very difficult to test because for a variety of reasons that we're not going to get into it right now, but it's very difficult to actually test empirical claims about the evolutionary human behavior. Or maybe not only that it's difficult to test, but that it's just a new science. It's kind of nascent. It's not really well-developed. So, give it a few more decades and maybe there will be more data, more evidence to support the claims of evolutionary psychology. Perhaps. But that's what's said at the moment in what I would consider a fringe science. So, as fringe science, it may turn out that they are, in fact, correct or largely correct. And it will, in that case, it will fall into evolutionary biology and it will become just a normal branch of evolutionary biology. Or it may turn out as Colchrusion did, which did have a shot of becoming a standard part of physics or chemistry, but it turned out to be wrong and it's been abandoned largely. So, it's a fairly complex landscape which depends on the combination of soundness of theory and empirical content. And that's what makes it, I think, fascinating. It's not easy to tell where a particular theory lays because you have to actually look at a series of issues that deals with the core foundations of what it means to do science. Massimo Piliucci, what a fun discussion with you. Thanks for joining me again on For Good Reason. It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. To get involved with an online conversation about today's show, join the discussion at ForGoodReason.org. If you want updates throughout the week about the kinds of things we talk about on the show, find me on Twitter and on Facebook. Views expressed on For Good Reason aren't necessarily the views of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at ForGoodReason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. For Good Reason's music is composed for us by MA Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Christina Stevens contributed to today's show. I'm your host, DJ Grothe.