 Welcome to the 21 convention Tampa Florida today. We are moving into a Philosophy and an idea that the 21 convention is very passionate about you know The being the ideal man and moving towards that has a total integration of self, you know, that's mind body your total expression and Here we are going to bring on 21 convention returning speaker from Austin, Texas 2012 and actually Anthony Johnson the CEO of the 21 convention said it's one of his favorite speeches The Austin, Texas one and let's hope this one is to Eric Daniels. Let's do it. All right All right guys hopefully hopefully you're fully caffeinated ready to go I know it's early, but Jolly looks ready to go. So let's go So the topic that I decided to speak on this year is I'm horrible at titles But I kind of like this one unbridled rationality using reason to flourish So let me just unpack a couple of those terms before we actually get into presentation the idea of reason Right a lot of people use this idea be reasonable Al Gore says be reasonable use reason Basically, what I mean is the use of your mind in thinking Integrating what you get from the world thinking about it conceptualizing it making sense of it rationality just means the habitual Practice of that skill right just like you can practice skills in physical movement You can practice skills in intellectual tasks rationality just means practicing that skill throughout your life and Flourishing that's easy right. It's not just about happiness. It's not just about. Hey, I'm doing all right. I'm not dying It's about flourishing right the idea that Aristotle came up with a view dymania that the whole person Human flourishing means that everything about you is maximized. So how do we do this? This is a skill. You have to cultivate this. So let me just give you a little bit about my basic approach I'm a teacher right. I teach young kids now. I taught in the university for I don't know about 12 years I was trained actually as a as a historian my PhD is in American history But it's actually in intellectual history, which is a slightly different flavor of how historians do history Not a lot of people do this anymore, but it's a little bit similar without all the without all the craziness and the trauma It's a little bit similar what MacGuff was talking about yesterday with being an ER doc an ER doc as he said has to account for the Traumatic situations in every medical specialty. Fortunately, I don't have the trauma But as an intellectual historian what I trained as is someone who could very quickly Get acquainted with and understand the development of an intellectual field whether that's medicine whether that's strength training Whether that's physics whether that's law. I did a lot of work in economics I did a lot of work in legal history the whole goal of intellectual history is being able to get up to speed really really quickly So I taught for a long long time. I teach now. I'm teaching science now same kind of thing How do you teach science? I've spent a lot of time thinking about pedagogy. How do people learn? How do you teach people most effectively? So my basic idea is Watch for characteristic errors. What do people go wrong when you teach especially when you teach college students even more So probably with younger students. You learn a lot about how people make errors And if you're sensitive to that if you actually look at that for me what that's revealed is that there are a lot of Characteristic errors now. I've done a lot of thinking about each of these fields, right? I say, okay You know, what's going on? How do you do it? What does it work? Because guess what? There's no user's manual. Nobody says, okay, you want to get interested in strength training Here's the only thing you need to read if you want to get interested in strength training You want to get interested in optimal health You want to get interested in anything there's going to be a thousand sources out there and they all disagree with each other How do you figure out what's best? How do you figure out? What's useful for you? There's no user's manual You've got to do it yourself. So I've done a lot of tinkering in my life I've gotten interested in a lot of these things in in optimal diet and optimal strength training I've gotten interested in all kinds of stuff Every time I get interested in one of these fields. I find that there is an enormous amount of bad thinking Right you get into these fields you find the good people right? I mean Anthony's done this He's scoured around in in the areas of interest that he has you find the people who actually know what they're talking about Who have the right approach, but it's hard There's a lot of bad stuff out there and it's really really seductive bad stuff It's stuff that appeals to people it's stuff that has the illusions of being good for you when in fact It's actually just short-circuiting that thinking approach. So the most controversial claim I want to make today Brains are not for thinking Okay, the brain the human brain as it evolved Did not evolve primarily for us to think The human brain evolved out of neural networks and nematodes and all sorts of other primitive creatures Primarily as a way of giving us feedback about our external environment Connecting us up with what's going on both outside and then ultimately with the internal nervous system with what's inside Henry Ford you know a guy who Had an ability to say a thing or two about a thing or two thinking he said is the hardest work Which is probable reason that so few people engage in it So when I say brains aren't for thinking what I literally mean is obviously we can think our mind is used to think But the brain as an organ doesn't really do all that well when it comes to a lot of thinking tasks So can computers can robots think outthink us? Sure spend five dollars on a calculator It'll calculate faster than anybody in this room probably about fifty dollars of chess software beats about 99% of the people who know how to play chess in fact a little bit more than fifty dollars You get a chess software package that can beat ninety nine point nine percent of the guys, right? computers Heck they can even play Jeopardy better than we can right just ask Ken Jennings the ultimate Jeopardy champ IBM can program a computer to answer questions read in Uendo understand the subtleties of language Do all of those things better than human beings can't? but I Want to do a little test Everybody raise your left hand Okay, everybody Focus on Anthony go look just look at Anthony. Okay. Now if you're sitting next to somebody shake their hand Okay, you just did better than any robot anybody has ever designed, right? The actual things that the brain does for us the things like how I say raise your hand. How did you do that? How did you actually raise your hand? Think well, I mean, you know my muscles contracted There was a nerve sent a signal down to my muscles my muscles contracted it slowly raised it You know you could kind of analyze that focus your eyes on something. How did you do that? If you really try with some of these things with physical movement You can overcome physical movements You can you can keep yourself from doing things that you almost feel like you have an urge to do you can unfocus your eyes What what does George Washington look like? Right now in all of your brains I I just caused you to think of some portrait of George Washington whether you wanted to or not I said his name boom automatically it comes up in your brain your memory system is incredibly efficient Okay, but the thing about robots computers, etc. The thing that they can't do when you shook that hand You knew exactly in response to the grip of the person next to you how tight to squeeze how to conform your hand Guys spend years if not decades programming computers and robots to try to do that Think about just getting up and you're walking down the street and all of a sudden you break into a sprint Robots struggle with that stuff But what is the stuff that those robots are missing? What is the stuff that the brain does? That's the non-thinking part well brains are primarily organs of homeostatic regulation self-regulation right the brain actually functions to keep us working as Creatures as human beings in a very sophisticated way. That's probably good for us, right? So I said vision memory Basic movement. These are things that are often within our control, but that can also go out of control Right when someone loses their ability to recall George Washington to recall. What does Anthony look like things like that? It's very very difficult But these are things that you have voluntary control over but what about something like proprioception? Knowing where your body physically is in space Your brain processes more data Understanding where your body is in space. You don't have to open your eyes. You know where your hands are You're getting sense data feedback and it's really creepy when it happens to patients Occasionally happens where patients lose proprioception Guess what happens to their arms? They just start floating around. They don't know what to do They look at their arm and it stops and then the other one's just floating around because the muscle control that tells it Stay in space where I want you to goes completely away. It's really really hard to do emotion right try to stop yourself from feeling something when you see or when you've experienced an intense emotion you can control your response to it But your ability to actually control the pleasure pain mechanism that is at the very root of our emotional system You're not going to be able to turn that off again same kind of thing people with brain trauma People with different problems who have that turned off have an enormously hard time doing things like deciding Right, there's a famous story a neurologist tells about a guy that basically had lost all affect It all of his rational faculty there lost all affect. He couldn't make a decision You'd say hey, where do you want to go to dinner and you'd say well? We could go to the one restaurant, but then again, there's that other restaurant and he would debate with himself For hours he had no way of having an afferent kind of response saying like let's do this. This one's better than this one Respiration again you can control this to some degree, but if you try to control it for too long You try to hold your breath for too long You try to do something for too long ultimately your body is going to take over your body controls this in a very very strict way You wouldn't be able to make these choices Imagine trying to process all of the sensory feedback a hundred percent of the time to try to figure out how to regulate your Respiration should I breathe in more should I breathe in less am I getting enough oxygen and my hyperventilating and then start to think about the actual Complex systems of the human body that are regulated by the brain and to current an exocrine function Right, why don't you take conscious control of your hormonal system? Right, how much insulin do you need? How much testosterone do you need? The kind of homeostatic control that the brain actually operates is within such fine parameters That if you were to actually try to consciously control this you would just go off the handle within minutes You would over adjust constantly your response would be like oh, let's do this. Let's do this Let's do this your body would crash think about your blood chemistry, right Think about cardiac function think about thermal regulation right is my body cool enough It's my body warm enough think about things like metabolic function digestive function Think about if you had to actually consciously choose how much should I urinate right now? How much should I you know should I is the peristaltic movement of the food through my elementary canals? It's is it fast enough all of these things are outside your conscious control for a damn good reason You wouldn't be able to do it your brain. However, can And that's one of the great things about brains and it's ultimately why as an organ the brains aren't particularly for thinking now That being said nevertheless I want to maintain that mind-centered action or as I call it mind-guided action is the key to human flourishing all of those things that the brain as an organ of homeostatic self-regulation can do aren't enough Right the neural systems the brains the consciousness of other creatures is sufficient for their survival and indeed for their flourishing for reproductive success for Finding food for creating shelter humans. You don't want to rely just on those automatic functions of your brain You've actually got to assert conscious control of your brain to do any of the really important stuff that adds to the value of your life So if the brain isn't the best thinking organ It's probably because we're unable to survive by this auto regulation thinking however thinking in the way that I mean slow hard Effortful consciously directed thought that in the end is uncertain Right now your your homeostatic regulator your brain can screw up sometimes It can oversecrete or undersecrete it can raise your respiration too much It can raise your heart rate not enough etc. But generally speaking its automatic responses to the situations are appropriate Even if you're dysregulated because of some external stimulus or because of some internal Pathology it nevertheless is responding in the way that it's designed to respond Thinking however is uncertain You can mess up You can think the wrong conclusions you can come up with the wrong answers And so you need to exert much more conscious control over how you do this now Thinking has to be deliberate and intentional unlike what most of your brain does and if you look at the real estate of the brain Right how much tissue is there how many neurons axons all the other rest of their brain? Very little of it is dedicated to this conscious thinking you have to be very very intentional about it And it's driven by your value orientation What are you actually seeking? Brains as I said in the absence of any kind of external Distortions or internal pathology brains as automatic regulators are Working in your interest They're actually choosing the things you know, they're not going to throw your your blood chemistry off They're not going to throw your hormonal regulation off in the absence of any kind of bad stimulus or internal pathology They're going to respond exactly how they should respond thinking Man people can screw up what they're thinking and they can do all kinds of things that are incredibly bad for themselves I mean you don't need to you know when you guys fly out of here and you go to the airport You can just look visually a lot of the things people are doing Consciously are really bad for them So the reality is most people are pretty bad at the habit of actual conscious deliberate thought why? Well because it's hard. It's effortful. It's uncertain But it's also because in a very fundamental way. This is not possible You just say okay. Well like let my brain take care of all those other functions Let me take care of the thinking everybody will be happy I'm like in the driver's seat of this chariot. That is my you know my body I'm gonna do all the thinking but again you can't a good example of this is Thinking about what happens when you go to a foreign country where you barely can get by in the language Maybe you don't even really understand the language But you at least know a few phrases so that you can order food and do things like this and think about what kind Of effort is required for you to do even the most basic tasks. You have to think through. What are what are these foods? What am I about to order? What am I doing? Am I am I following the proper? Cultural protocol am I following the proper language protocol? And it becomes very very difficult and at a point when you're a tourist in a foreign country where you don't know the language You don't really know the culture you become exhausted a lot more easily cognitively exhausted It's hard work thinking through every step that you normally would just do automatically walking through any American city And so that hard work ultimately can't be possible every day all the time So we develop heuristics. We develop algorithms Basically, we develop shortcuts to help us do the things that we do every day And the problem is these shortcuts these habits of thought or these ways of solving the same problem Or the same kinds of situations over and over again Can lead to a very very characteristic error the danger is when heuristics Habits of thought become biases they become ways that we actually short-circuit the process of reasoning so the best understanding of this I mean this this is I think Nassim Taleb said that Dan Kahneman's book thinking fast and slow. He actually said this is a book that's on the level of Tom or Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments, or I think he said Freud's Freud's work. I mean he's very very serious. This is a Nobel Prize winning economist This book, you know Taleb said probably ought to win a Pulitzer Prize I think he's probably right it didn't end up in winning the Pulitzer, but it's it's a really really good book It's probably the best book on this problem that is out there today. Kahneman basically innovated along with his his colleague Amos Tversky who's now dead but back in the 70s They innovated all of this stuff about about cognitive bias and thinking and how to do it now Kahneman in this book presents what he calls the two systems model Okay, and this is basically what I'm talking about with the two ways that you can forget about the auto regulation of the brain That's primarily what the brains work once you start thinking. There's really two systems. He says that you can think through There's an intuitive automatic system what he calls system one. This is the the habits of thought All right, this is the automatic processing of information in a way that makes sense that you've done before that you understand That you can get through very very easily Now this can be both expert or just purely heuristic based so experts as you know famous story about chess players You ask a master chess player to assess the moves on a board you can pull a board out It's got all the chess pieces put into different places and you say okay Take a look you give them like five seconds boom you take the board away And they can tell you basically how the game is gonna go they're experts they can see very quickly and assess the situation think seven moves ahead or whatever it is and Figure out how to play that game you show it to an amateur or somebody who barely has played chess in years like me And I'm gonna say There's some pieces on the board right so I might have a heuristic I might be able to just see Yeah, it looks like I should move my night No better reason than I think I should System two the other kind of thinking that Kahneman talks about is deliberative Effortful it's the kind of thinking when you think about actual hard focus Bringing your mind into a state of conscious focus on problem-solving Okay, now the key here That Kahneman points out and I think that is really at the root of his book is that you have to know when to use which You cannot just say oh, I'm gonna be perfectly rational. I'm just going to use system two all the time I'm going to deliberate with the same conscious effort about whether to order the steak or the chicken as I do about whether to Engage in a whole lifelong process of choosing this career or that career You cannot do that you have to develop these kinds of Systems and be very confident about these systems. So the question is if you have this automatic system Where your brain has this intuitive sense where you just give answers? How do you make sure that you're not short-circuiting yourself? Well, the answer is as I said knowing which is which? Let's take an example from Kahneman's book So if I select at random from a representative sample of Americans a man to describe his neighbor and the man describes His neighbor Steve is very shy and withdrawn Invariably helpful, but with little interest in people or the world of reality He's a meek and tidy soul. He has a need for order and structure and he has a passion for detail Okay, the question is is Steve more likely a farmer or a librarian? Okay, think about that for a second. Guess what the answer is some of you I mean at least if Kahneman's right a lot of you are thinking oh that sounds like a librarian But guess what? Male farmers outnumber male librarians in the United States by 20 to 1 You'd be very poorly advised to judge just because of these characteristics that this guy is more likely a Librarian than a farmer far more likely even if you don't know anything about him is Steve more likely a farmer or librarian Well, he's a guy 20 times more guys doing farming than librarian work more likely 20 to 1 that he's a librarian This is what he calls the representativeness bias or the simplifying heuristic if you tend to simplify things into categories that give you those automatic answers You're going to often be misled by your thinking you're going to easily be seduced into that process of Identifying what you already know in a way that conforms to a certain belief of what you think is representative Let's take another example. This one is this one's a fun one. So in your mind Think of the letter K Okay, and then try to think as of whether there are more words that start with the letter K or More words that have K as the third letter of the word Okay, and if I asked you to start writing down a list Okay, so start writing down words that start with the letter K and then start writing down words that start with any letter But have K in the third letter slot You would not be able to come up and maybe if you're trying this right now Like unless you're a scrabble player right which which like chess players They hone this skill of thinking of words in really really weird ways You think a lot more about the word letter that the letter that a word starts with Rather than what happens to be up here in the third place as it turns out guess what? Way more words with K as the third letter than K as the first letter But you can probably think of a lot more words that start with the letter K Same thing's true if you thought of words with R. I mean you say okay K's kind of a weird letter You know K's don't appear that often. It's it's a high-value tile and scrabble Let's something like RL again way more words with R and L as the third letter than the first But it's a lot harder for you to think about that. Why? availability heuristic It's a lot easier for us to think about things that are immediately available and for us to draw can Illusions about those things based on what's available to us So essentially what evidence is immediately at hand? That's easily graspable when we're considering a problem makes it seem like it's a lot more of the dominant evidence This is the problem if you want to put it that way Of what Donald Rumsfeld was talking about all those years ago, right? You have your known unknowns and your unknown unknowns Everybody made fun of Rumsfeld for this statement because he was talking about you know how the war in Iraq was going But it's in terms of the epistemological problem. It's incredibly incredibly insightful, right? The idea is that there are things that you're aware that you don't know I don't actually know how many words Have K as the third letter But what I really don't know is the stuff that I don't even know that I don't know Right and if I could tell you what that was then it wouldn't really be the stuff that I don't know obviously but there's a lot of Availability in knowing what you know and it even being aware of like okay I don't have the evidence because nobody's ever tested this But I know that if somebody tested it I would expect the results to be x y and z But what about the stuff that you haven't even thought of yet, right? You have to be open to the possibility that you can't just take what's available as evidence to make deep deep conclusions You have to think through what counts as evidence and what might be things that you're not thinking of So when conerman compares these two systems He gives a number of examples, which I've taken taken out of his book here System one this system of automatic intuitive thought. This is where you can do stuff automatically Is one thing farther away or closer than another? What if there's a sudden bang in the room how your your your brain process you think right away? You don't even have to say where did that come from your brain automatically directs your attention to that part of the room Is it a threat? Is it not if I say what's two plus two? None of you have to think about that you've programmed your mind. That's an algorithm. You've programmed. Hopefully basic basic Accounting basic addition and subtraction into your mind. Some of you may have even programmed more sophisticated calculations. It's automatic Now if you had programmed it incorrectly Right if you had programmed something into your mind where you had some, you know Really weird way of calculating things and the programming was off and you habitually said five When someone asked you what's two plus two? That's the kind of example that I'm talking about. It's okay to have heuristics It's okay to have Algorithms in your thinking the problem is when you miss program just like if you miss programmed basic addition Now if I say bread and Yeah, some people I knew somebody would say circuses some people will say butter But one or the other you have this automatically can't help yourself from coming out with that It's it's already in your mind the phrase is so familiar row row row your Yeah, you guys you you could try as you might you will not be able to stop your brain from thinking of that word Right, you could sedate yourself or alter your consciousness in some way Maybe but if you're fully aware you can't help it read words Detect hostility in a voice drive a car in an open road if you've got years of driving experience System two though is that kind of conscious focused system? If I told you on your way to the airport try to count as many women as you can who have just perfectly white hair And if you set yourself that cognitive task you would be incredibly focused you would you would be exerting effort It would be easy to distract you little things could pull you away from that task What about if you brace for a gun at a starter gun at a race? You're focused on the idea of don't move don't move don't move But as soon as that sound happens move as fast as you can or if I asked you to calculate 17 times 24 in your head Right, you you know everything that we your pupils would dilate your walking pace would slow down You'd actually have to think of unless you're one of these human calculator types Count the number of letters a on a page calculate your tax forms Evaluate washing machines for overall value all of these things are deliberate conscious thought where you slow down Right in the thought the title thinking fast and slow where you slow down and actually deliberate and consider these things now a Lot of what grows out of Kahneman's work as well as a bunch of other cognitive psychologists Neuroscientists and others is a set of Thinking biases right so Kahneman's fair ski came up with these in the 70s people have been adding to them There's a lot of easy simple ways that people think the algorithms the puristics that they've programmed into their brains That are incredibly incredibly distorting so one of these is the illusion of precision Okay, so Richard Hofstadter the American historian noted the American mind seems extremely vulnerable To the belief that alleged that any alleged knowledge which can be expressed in figures is In fact as final and as exact as the figures in which it is expressed So there's a story that Charles Seif tells so you're walking through a museum And you're there with you know some kids and everyone oh look at the dinosaurs and look at this and look at that and The docent, you know the tour guide is walking around and one of these teenagers Says how old is that is that skeleton? And the docent says it's 65 million and 23 years old Teenager says how do you know that he said well when I started working here 23 years ago The paleontologist told me that it was 65 million years old Now of course the example is basically an example of the illusion of precision. He thinks that when the paleontology I mean ridiculously thinks that it was precisely 65 million years old when all of you who are laughing and you realize paleontologists when they say it's 65 million years old They mean give or take you know a few hundred thousand years possibly the dating isn't precise So Charles Seif in this great book called proofiness right is a great sort of way to immunize yourself against all kinds of what I Either call enumeracy or just susceptibility to statistical Mumbo jumbo he has these lists of things that people use Potemkin numbers right 78% of all statistics are made up I'm sure about that Right, you can trust me Potemkin numbers if you know the story about Prince Potemkin once created a whole village in Crimea when the Empress of Russia was coming to visit He didn't want her to think that they were just this Po-Dunk little town Which is in fact they were so they literally built a whole street that she could view that had fake Storefronts like a Hollywood set where they just built up this Elaborate town that she could come visit and they took her through just this one part of town And then she left and she thought she had the illusion that it was much bigger much much more beautiful Disestimation right you can make numbers up or you can make the illusion of numbers Disestimation is just that idea that when a number is expressed with more significant figures People tend to think that the number is more precise is more correct if I tell you that this Point your clicker is precisely. I don't know. What is that about? 67 millimeters long You say okay, you know he may be measured if I saw if I tell you it's 67 point three two five millimeters long You're more likely to trust that I've actually measured this and that I've done it with an exact instrument Why because I added three digits to the end But the question is all measurements are subject to error all Measurements are subject to the specificity of the tool. I'm using to measure it Maybe I just used a School ruler and I guess that it was point three seven five. That was my estimation Then there's this this sort of group of fallacies that he refers to as fruit packing Right, there's different ways that you can package fruit and this is this is kind of a grocers trick If you have old fruit that you want to sell how do you do it? Right, so one thing you can do is you can do cherry picking Classic selection bias you find the studies that confirm what you think is going to be true You find the subjects who are susceptible to the kinds of intervention effects that you want to prove You only choose the bright shiny cherries to put out in the front So that people will grab the bunches and then put them in their cart and take them home and realize that the other half Are rotten right you pick out the cherries that are particularly shiny and juicy and good for what? You want them to say to the to the person in this case the client buying the cherries this happens all the time? Medical research is riddled with this kind of thing Exercise research is riddled with this kind of thing people are incredibly susceptible to wanting to find the information The kind of confirmation bias that agrees with their preordained conclusions Right James was telling me one of his students one of his second-year students I think they they wanted to run this trial and they were asking him about all the kinds of statistical techniques They could do with it and all these other things and he said but you haven't run the research yet They said yeah Yeah, but we want to know how we're gonna manipulate the data once we get the data and he said no no You have to wait for the data and then understand the data and then decide whether to run certain tests on it You know you can't actually pre-program. Oh, I'm gonna use this really cool technique. Well Do you need to I don't know so another one of course comparing apples to oranges Otherwise sometimes known as the regression bias regression to the mean right a lot of times people look at intervention effects Without recognizing that the sole intervention effect is going to actually be of an outlier Or it's just gonna be on the higher range or the lower range of what they're looking for this happens in education This is a classic classic school superintendents problem. You're in a district test scores are falling educational outcomes are falling Parents are getting mad so they throw the guy out the new guy comes in the new guy looks at the test scores and says oh man Like our kids can't read and write, you know, so I'm gonna come up with some hokey new program that I'm gonna call whatever you know Race to the top no child left behind who knows what it's gonna be called and I'm gonna say this is gonna improve results And so they contract with the testing company. They write up a new test They test the students claiming to be able to compare these scores to the old scores and guess what they're higher But if you test the students year after year after year on the same metric They're gonna come back down to the mean you may get a year when they go higher You may get a year when they go lower But guess what those students just because you're testing them differently and you're using some hokey program unless you're fundamentally changing something All you're doing is comparing apples to oranges And this happens all the time in as I said in all all sorts of health related medical related research It's very very easy to say oh this group very small very isolated very selected Had this result and therefore it's going to apply to this group Right you see this all the time and not the least of which is mice or you know lab rats or whatever comparing to humans But even different groups of humans with different ages different profiles, etc And then the last one which he calls Apple polishing. This is just distortion bias, right? This is just where you you shine up the numbers you put some fancy charts in you do things to make them look a lot Bigger or more significant famous cases are where they just adjust the axes on a graph This is the very famous Cholesterol intervention with a particular drug cholesterol intervention showed dramatic results When you realize that the scale on the left actually was going by tenths rather than whole numbers Wow, you know those bars went way down every time But in reality in terms of the actual variation it was like that, right? The chart doesn't even change because they've adjusted the numbers to make the bars look way different or sometimes you notice This is the funniest thing. I see this in journals. Sometimes they put it They put a very very very small note that they've done it on a logarithmic scale You think of course that stuff's gonna fly up and there's gonna be huge differences I mean, it's it's how you're presenting the data So the fundamental of course which probably I hope at least a lot of you know is that people mistake that Problem of accuracy for the problem of precision Right and people and then even that people fundamentally don't understand what precision is Pulled this off of Wikipedia. It's pretty good accurate pretty good show illustration of accuracy and precision Accuracy just simply means are you actually getting the correct value, right? If there were some you know Disembodied perfect way, you know perfect world way of knowing now if you say like if I gave a bunch of my Students in in a physics class. I gave them but pots of water and I said okay go determine what the boiling temperature of water is Okay, I understand pressure and and and other conditions I'm pretty sure I know what the the reference value is right now It does depend there are some variations for anybody that's thermal physics knows that there are some variations in the shape and the Composition of the material, but if I give them a standard set of things in which to boil water and ask them with you know Fairly accurate thermometers. I know what temperature water is going to boil out Now if I have five of the kids in different teams come up to me, and they all tell me that water boils at a hundred and eight degrees Celsius One of them says a hundred and eight point two hundred and seven point nine hundred and eight hundred eight point one That's a lot of precision But it looks like my thermometers might be off by about eight degrees Right versus accuracy, which is a representation of is it actually getting the correct answer? Precision can be an illusion Precision simply means repeatability of results But if you've distorted something if you have measurement error if you're doing the same Characteristic thing wrong over and over again. You're gonna get a lot of repeatability. It's like the it's it's I put it up later It's like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy You know guy out in Texas is bored so he shoots up his barn one afternoon And then he decides well, you know There's there's a nice little group right there where the all the bullets are pretty close together Then he goes out there and he paints a target with that as the bullseye He said look at how good a shot I am and all of his friends say oh, yeah, you're pretty good shot Look at all those bullseyes you hit now, of course He just shot the gun randomly some of them happen to group together and he puts the target there precision can be an illusion Okay, now this has real-life consequences. You sound seems awfully academic. What are the real-life applications? Well for people interested in optimal health people interested in optimal exercise programs people interested in Maximizing these things about themselves guess what blood tests research studies things that you do to try to find out what's best for you Have these problems measurement errors Precision problems now you think blood tests. I know a guy He's he's one of these biohacker guys and I've talked to Jolly about this and you know There are people who run their blood work like every month And they run their blood work and as soon as they see something wrong they act Right as soon as something is out of range or what they consider to be arranged they act and they completely ignore the fact that these blood tests have Certain sensitivity right the kinds of changes that they may be noting are actually Smaller than what the blood test is going to run on a time after time after time basis They may not understand the kind of variation that comes in with which lab you send it to right? So this great example the patient goes to the doctor doc My self-stocker 5,000 app has detected I have pre pre diabetes And then the caption says one day the over monitoring alert of dr. Abbott's monitoring monitor became quite hysterical right The problem is that if you fall prey to the illusion of precision the potential consequences are you get a lot of false positives? right if you don't Actually understand what those tests are doing what they can measure how precisely they can measure it and whether or not those Measurements are repeatable The best example of this you have someone okay. You're gonna take your blood You're gonna have let's say some of the guys might be concerned about you're gonna test your testosterone right notoriously difficult to measure if you actually know what's going into measuring free and And testosterone in the blood varies by time of day it varies by stress level it can vary even a lot Just by which lab you have it sent to to do the assay right so you get a lot of false positives And then you act on those right that's the heuristic Heuristic is oh some expert knows how to design this blood test. I'm gonna go act. I'm gonna go do this program I'm gonna go eat this food. I'm gonna do these things because my blood tests said that I have this condition Well, guess what you might not actually have that condition You don't have repeatability, and you don't even know what accuracy is yet Other another problem you may find idiopathic conditions They find variations in your blood work You may find variations in your response to stimulus in a training program or a diet program or whatever that actually is something very very Highly unique to you Right all of these tests that have reference values those reference values are literally just the labs averages over the human population You may actually run a little bit hot You may run a little bit cold on some of these measures as so to speak not literally temperature But your blood work may actually just naturally be higher or lower because some variation in your genetic makeup some variation in how you function So you're gonna find some idiopathic condition that you try to treat That actually isn't causing you any problem, and then the worst possible consequence I wish I wish McGuff were here to hear this because I know he loves this one You might engage in what they call iatrogenesis Doctor-caused pathologies, right? You go to a doctor say doc doc do something the doc does something It's the wrong thing and it makes you worse, right? These are the worst kind of intervention effects when the doctor says oh, you know you're feeling a little bit this You're feeling a little bit that you've got whatever syndrome, and I'm gonna throw you a drug I'm gonna throw you a treatment, and it's actually gonna cause you harm, and then you're gonna be chasing another problem You're gonna be chasing the problem that's been created not by any organic condition But by the doctor or the practitioner themselves So this is a real problem. You have to be very careful about using numbers Using statistics of all the heuristics of all the biases that humans have statistics risk probability All these things are very very difficult for people to have the proper intuitive sense Because in a sense our brains are not are not designed for this in today's world, so Another illusion the illusion of authority Right, this is pretty easy one. You put a brain scan Into a research paper people are more likely to believe the results You can have the exact same text you can have text that says that in Sophisticated language that says that the research doesn't actually have any findings put a brain scan in it and people will believe it Right the the text basically says yeah, we didn't really find anything statistically significant. We didn't find anything But the headline brain scan boom people believe. Oh, if I eat more carrots, my brain will be healthier. Whatever, right? Just graphs alone Right just bar charts alone in research papers in in news articles will give the illusion that something Sciencey is going on Right don't fall prey to this just because someone can quantify something doesn't mean that they have anything good to say I actually pulled this is funny this graph. I pulled this off of I was just looking for public domain You know bar bar charts I happen to find this one This was on a website of a woman who's apparently a science fair consultant All she does is hire herself out for probably hundreds of dollars to kids who are working on science fair projects Man, that's a racket like I need to get into this and this this chart says Oh, you can present the data one way or the other way and I recommend that you present it this way because it it gives more drama between The the two variables. I don't even know what the research is. It's something about the difference between coffee and water the worst kind of Sciencey stuff that you see today Infographics God, I hate these things. I mean they're beautiful. Sometimes they're really really creative But I pulled this one just for James because this happens to be about the number of UK health clubs and gyms And and they've got you know this guy doing a bench press and they've got all these these weights out here That are used to represent the numbers in the size of the plates or the size of the barbells or dumbbells or whatever it represents different variables I looked at this chart. I Figured out maybe five or six different conclusions that I could reach based upon the data presented here Know those conclusions were contradictory and one conclusion I say oh Brits are getting healthier because there's obviously, you know more gym memberships being sold another one I said oh private memberships are on the way down and more people are going to public gyms because there's a Different change in the ethos of British working out It's a more public thing and people are becoming more concerned about it or oh my god You know the absolute number of gyms is dropping and so therefore, you know Brits are no longer concerned about their health No wonder we're all fat Right you can come up with whatever conclusion you want because you just present this data and it looks kind of fancy so it's don't don't fall prey to this the Illusion of authority forget about reading medical journals, right? Oh, well, maybe I'll just go to the experts. I Want the experts to tell me what's best for me? Well unless you're ready to become fluent in how to understand research design how to understand statistics how to understand epidemiology How to be super critical of the fact that I don't know what John Ioannidis says up It's over 50% of medical research is is basically bunk published medical research can't be replicated Statistical methods are so bad that the paper is is so riddled with errors and yet people who reports this stuff the media What do they say about it? They tell you oh my gosh, you know Dr Ross says do this and you'll burn fat do this and you'll do that This is what they call the Murray-Gelman amnesia effect, right? This is actually something that Crichton came up with John Crichton Murray-Gelman was a famous theoretical physicist won the Nobel Prize in the 60s And and Crichton actually named this effect for him because he said I had a conversation with him about it once And he's much more famous than I am so I named it after him because it'll give it a lot more authority I kind of as a joke, but the Murray-Gelman effect is is described basically by Crichton as the following you're reading the morning newspaper You come across an article The article is the journalist is not only just stupid. They've got it backwards wet streets cause rain, right? I mean they literally have cause and effect backwards and you think to yourself What a fool All right This guy is such an idiot and then you turn to the next page and you trust what they have to say the same paper the same Journalist you trust what they have to say about the state of the world in the Middle East Or you trust what they have to say something else the Murray-Gelman effect think about muscle magazines You open up some muscle magazine you open up some men's health journal you open up one of these things and you see that they've got these ads For the most ridiculous claims possible you do you do this one thing and you'll be huge You know or you do this one thing and you'll have better sex you do this one thing all of these crazy Supplements products etc and you think to yourself man What a bunch of nonsense and then you turn to the page about the best way to do a chin-up and you read the You know you read the article and say oh they go that's clearly they know what they're talking about right the Murray-Gelman Amnesia effect is that if somebody lies to you or if somebody's full of shit on one thing You really ought to be skeptical about what they're saying about another thing right in court if somebody lies once their Testimony is all subject to doubt Right, but yet we have this effect where we read the media we read journalists We read muscle magazines. We trust doctors. We do all these things where we say oh You know this guy is totally backwards on this one point But man is he got an interesting thing to say about how to do chin-ups You know he's really right on but maybe he does It's possible. Maybe he does maybe the doctor who says idiotic things in one case knows something about another case But you have to be a lot more critical You actually have to investigate the claims think about them yourselves do the kind of cognitive work that doesn't just account for Hey, it's pretty therefore my my heuristic says you can trust authorities now Probably most of you guys don't just automatically trust authorities at least you wouldn't be here If you did, but you have to understand that it's really easy to fall prey to this I don't trust the mainstream authorities, but I trust my alternative our authorities Well again, you can't give that same kind of credibility just because they're you know They're going against the mainstream there's a very interesting phenomenon if you if you spend some time looking at any Alternate sort of health ideas or alternate whatever it is There's a there's a reputation effect that builds into somebody being able to criticize the mainstream all They they get reputations entirely designed around the fact that hey those other guys are wrong. Oh, wow this guy knows what he's talking about Well, yeah, he knows what he's talking about. He's critical But does his actual positive case have anything to say the more time you listen to somebody just criticizing something Unless you probably think that they have to say positively and then finally the halo effect Right the halo effects probably one you guys know not the game But obviously the fact that the more attractive or the more muscle bound or whatever the more That a speaker or a person or an authority has the features That you think that they're promoting through their product or through their intervention program or whatever the more that they have There's a more likely year to believe that they're true Right and there's no correlation. There's no correlation people, you know, I mean Guy that's been wheelchair bound since he was a teenager is just as capable of figuring out proper exercise methodology as a guy Who's been working out in a gym since he was 12? Right it's all the intellectual thing now. He may not have the same experiences He may not be able to say oh, this is what it's gonna feel like maybe but there's nothing about the speaker Just because he's big and muscle bound doesn't mean that he necessarily knows what he's doing He just knows that hey what I've done has worked for me But you can't necessarily generalize to the whole population One last thing that I wanted to point out this again is from Charles Sykes book on avoid understanding randomness and avoiding randomness Okay, randomness is something that we have a very hard time dealing with Which of these two is random and which of them is human intervention? Okay, the random one is the one on the left Clumps groups big white spots people tend to assume that the one on the right is What's actually random because they're nice evenly spaced everything's kind of scattered out But anybody who's you know if you just drop salt or you do anything where you just let something randomly scatter You know that there are clumps and groups and different things like that This does not this does not compute well with our heuristics if you really think about randomness Right in in study design or randomness in the effects All these kinds of things you realize that people are susceptible to all kind of biases if you guys like the Philosophy dinosaur talks about the gambler's fallacy gambler's fallacy is when one deviation One assumes the deviation from what occurs in the long term is going to be consistent in the short term So people play games of chance. They play poker. They play roulette They assume that if they had a bad luck a bunch of rolls of dice, they've got to have a good role They're due right and I saw this in Vegas ones. I saw a guy at a roulette table and I remember the time in Vegas before they had installed not the roulette tables the recent history Have you guys seen these they put the numbers that have just recently been up and this guy was like studying them when he was Making his bets as though it had anything to do with the next spin of the wheel now assuming that the casino is legit and not corrupt It has absolutely nothing to do with the wheel Doesn't matter how many times 22 has come up. It doesn't mean it's not going to come up the next time so the best example of this is if you take students and I used to do this when I taught college the The younger kids I teach now probably wouldn't be susceptible as much to this because they'd asked me too many questions about why I did it But if you ask students to go home and flip a coin a hundred times in a row and record the results You don't even need to know the students or know their work habits to be able to tell Which of the students would have faked it and which of the students actually conducted the test because students who who fake it and you can even do this the intervention usually is Tell half of the students to just fake it and tell half of the students to do it for real And then you can look at the ones who are supposed to have done it for real and find out which one's actually faked it Because the one on the bottom It's trying to be too random It's trying to have a lot of heads and tails spread out throughout the actual results in reality You're gonna have long strings. I don't know it's hard to count. Let's see one two three four five six seven seven heads in a row Seven tails in a row a hundred flips of a coin is likely to have a string of heads or tails But that doesn't feel random to us. We don't process that through our heuristic as being random So avoid the problem of thinking that random is supposed to look random and recognize that random can actually be something Really really different now. I was talking to some of the guys before yesterday and the day before I Feel like in preparing this material I could teach a whole course on this like a whole semester on all of these biases I just pulled out some of my favorites just for this list, which I barely have time even to talk about There's probably hundreds of these and think about this for a second There are hundreds of these cognitive biases Heuristics algorithms that we process in our minds quickly easily and that lead us astray from good reasoning That doesn't even account for logical fallacies Poor forms of reasoning it doesn't even do that. So there are a lot of these Some of my favorites apophenia. That's the tendency to see patterns where they don't exist Right, this is the oh Jesus's face is in my toast, right, right brains have certain abilities to recognize patterns It's part of our survival advantage the more that you can see patterns the less you're going to get predated upon by big You know big cats and and other bears and things like that seen patterns also helps you see food but if you have this natural tendency to see patterns You're going to start to assume that there are patterns where they don't exist, right or Another one of my favorites Survivorship bias, right? This is a good one just because somebody has lasted doesn't mean you know anything, you know Jim Collins unfortunately had the good to great book anybody ever heard of this this business Guru kind of got good to great studied these businesses that went from average businesses to great businesses published this book Claims that he understood everything that the CEOs and leadership teams did to make them great Published the book made lots of money and guess what some of those businesses ended up failing within the next ten years Right, it's it's a survivorship bias He didn't he didn't study the businesses that didn't make it You know that did the exact same thing, but that failed right because he's selecting out just the ones that survived and saying Oh in order to survive in order to do well you must do this But what about all the ones that didn't survive that did the same thing? So that's not actually isolating the cause of what was successful So a lot of these and you can look these up. I mean I would I would recommend there's there's a couple of good books There's one called you are not so smart By David McRaney, which is a good one, but the ultimate thing is you need knowledge and experience Okay, you actually have to do the hard work the hard thinking to get through it And then I'll just end with this little comparison between the hedgehog and the fox. It's actually an ancient Ancient thing from Arca Lockas, but it was later developed by Isaiah Berlin the Fox knows many things The hedgehog only knows one big thing So the hedgehog has a grand theory of the world the hedgehog is impatient The hedgehog is likely to argue reluctant to admit error Everything has to fit into the box Everything has to fit into the grand unifying theory if it doesn't it must be wrong the Fox Foxes are complex thinkers. They know many little things. They put things together They realize that answers emerge out of complexity They realize that the best part of learning developing growing being the best person you can be is that when you answer certain questions You actually find out what the really or when you answer certain questions. You lead to even more questions more interesting questions That's what life is about. That's what knowledge is about and so in just to wrap up You know try to be more of a fox than a hedgehog. All right. Thank you Daniels guys, so Questions up When I when I go to or you go to your system doctor and they they prescribe Statins for cholesterol if your cholesterol levels at a certain point or yeah, the US government has a food pyramid that's Yeah It's the crux of your speech basically saying don't Maybe they're not right. Yeah. I mean look here. Here's an interesting. Here's an interesting case. My wife You know she hates going to the doctor she hates dealing with doctors So I went to the doctor with her doctor said, you know, it's a decent doctor, right? I mean, she's not horrible But she looks at my wife's blood work and says a few things and I say, okay, you know, I know better I've actually read the research, you know women and statins women all these other things and I told I said look It's I said you want to keep us as patients. It's not gonna happen Whoa, you know and she said well, you know, I'm not sure you're right. I said look I'll just I'll throw you the research. I just pulled up a bunch of articles center the research They're not always right. I mean in a sense, unfortunately Doctors today are practitioners. They're not scientists, right? They learn what is true when they're in medical school It's only the rare ones who are actually thinkers, right? And it's hard to find them I mean, you know today's medical system. I know the kind of regulation and the doctor choice you have etc It's really really hard to find doctors who are thinkers and who are willing to think outside the box But if you do it, I mean if you have the luxury in your life of having concierge medicine great You know pursue that wait where you can choose a doctor and go to a doctor pay You know an annual fee somebody who's actually thinking and I find that more often than not those kinds of relationships concierge doctors Or people kind of outside the medical system are the ones who are willing to look at the evidence to be thinkers You have to identify them though, right? You have to network and find them and you can right? There are practitioners who do this but most medical doctors are Literally, I mean I had a medical doctor once who would just look things up on his little on his little notepad and And and he would do these different things and he would just say oh, you know It's just an algorithm for him and it's not even one that he thinks about it's just one that's on a page So you have to be very very skeptical of just standard practitioners Especially in a field that's so so infused with bad thinking unfortunately medicine It's just I mean when I when I read this study that said that you know over half of medical Literature in top journals journal medical American medical Association Lance at all these things is is is statistically just mumbo jumbo I thought wow, but that's what they learn in medical school And these journals are coming out so fast and so often that they can't even keep up So they just trust what their professors tell them you have to be really really skeptical of what doctors say and and really ask them If they can explain it to you if they can actually give you the arguments and answer the counter arguments Maybe they're a thing but if not, you know, it you know But you but just because I say that doesn't mean you should run out and Google everything yourself You have to you have to make sure that you're not engaged those same kinds of biases and those same kind of errors Yeah another question Thank you for the talk you present a lot of information here I wanted to get back to the beginning which where you were talking about your core beliefs And then you said that there's two ways of thinking basically the the expert versus the effortful Yeah, and for me a lot of my thinking revolves around happiness and What I wanted to ask you was How do you What would be a efficient way to go from where you're at in life and and go well I want excuse me I want more happiness in my life. Yeah, I want to make shifts So that my thinking became more on an expert or a you know Fundamental quick basis. Yeah, where it's it's innate. So I'm doing those behaviors I'm thinking of things in ways to promote this outcome happiness. Yeah, I think I mean depending on you know You know happiness is fundamentally for me It's a function of the main the core areas of your life, right? You know career romance your your Advocations, you know what what you pursue on the side all those things and the way to do it is to seriously think about and seriously sort of Understand the best practices of those areas of your life And then in order to be as you say more efficient at it The thing that you can do is develop those heuristics. Don't be afraid of them, right? As I said, you can't literally think through every decision. Should I kiss her now? How much pressure should I put on her lips? How what should I say afterward? You know, you can't literally go through a Kind of checklist of pros and cons every time you act you have to have that gut instinct The way to develop that gut instinct is to think about those problems And then actually start to try to figure out are these things programmed, right? You already have the programming you can't help it, right? You already have those automatic intuitive answers in those situations What you have to do is you have to spend time and you work on a different problem every couple of weeks or whatever you take Time to step back and in your life actually go through that deliberative process about the things that you normally Automatically do to just double-check yourself. Am I really programmed correctly, right? In the same way that sometimes you check your arithmetic, right? You go through arithmetic you do a problem really really quickly But let's say it's a really important financial decision You say I better make sure I've got these numbers correctly And so you actually slow down you go through the process you think through the calculation And you only need to do that in the context in which you need to do that But if your goal is to program and to make sure you're programming your automatic heuristic thinking is accurate then what you need to do is spend time on some of those decisions and Step back for a while and actually do the long thinking and check yourself Is the thing that I do automatically the same as what I would do if I was consciously deciding it? If it is move on to the next one, but I guarantee I mean I've done this throughout my whole life I guarantee you find ones that you say Why the heck do I do that? You know my automatic response is to think that that's random Like if I really look at the evidence I really look at this I think that's not random so I have to reprogram in a sense I have to start developing those habits of saying anytime I hear the word random. I'm skeptical Right, and then I and I can very quickly because I've learned this stuff I can very quickly start to assess is it actually random or not You just have to step back every once while and focus on one or two issues that you automatized Everybody's automatized these things you can't help it But make sure that you've automatized it in the right way in the way that agrees with your current thinking And then as you do that over the course of your life more and more of those will be consistent with your conscious thinking Because you get these when you're a kid you get these from your parents you get these from pathologies of the ways that your teachers taught you Nobody's gonna have those automatic things always correct So what you want to do is just check yourself and that that's what's gonna make you better at doing those things the more You know and the more you can check yourself the more automatic it's gonna be But you always you know you always have the potential to make mistakes. So you it's a continuous process You know, I would I mean the books are recommended in the talk I can I can give you a couple more later I don't actually have a book on this. It's something that I've thought about I mean as a teacher learning about this kind of stuff that I think actually would be really useful You know the the process of teaching kids in fifth sixth seventh eighth grade You know who are just learning some of these things for the first time and then thinking about well What can I do right now so that they don't have to worry about this later? And then how can I you know kind of digest that? I mean, maybe maybe I'll try to write it up someday I don't have anything that I that I've produced in that sense, but I do you know Connemann's book Charles Seif's book I can I can recommend some others afterwards Just you know just reading that stuff becoming aware of it is a great way of starting to recognize it If you have it in your own thinking and then try to get rid of it Awesome, let's give it up for Eric Daniels Yeah