SGU 10-Hour Show Part 5

SGU 10-Hour Show
2nd May 2015
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SGU 511                      SGU 512
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
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Part 5: https://youtu.be/VT8-vrwHI68

Interview with Julia Galef (0:00)

Note: This page is not transcribed, but it has been summarized, and statements of the rogues has been paraphrased in order to provide limited searchability. Text is in gray to distinguish it from normal transcription.

Transcript of interview with Julia Galef is copied from SGU Episode 513

S: Hi Julia

J, B, and E: Hey!

JG: Hey guys! Whoo! Happy ten year anniversary! I made you guys something. I made you a present. I looked up online what the gift was for a ten year anniversary; and it was tin or aluminum.[1] You know that?

B: I knew that, but I forgot it.

JG: It's not my best work, but I made you this tinfoil hat to celebrate, and also to protect my brain from alien (inaudible)

(Laughter)

B: Oh wow.

S: That's excellent.

E: Fashionable and practical. That's great!

JG: Thank you! Thank you! I'll send it to you after the show's over.

J: Yes, feel free to send that to Bob.

S: Yes.

(Laughter)

JG: He needs it most, right?

S: Of course.

B: Promise me you'll wear that for this entire interview, though. Oh yeah.

JG: I'm ... why would I not?

J: What a fashion statement, is she.

S: So, Julia, you are a fellow skeptical podcaster – Rationally Speaking. How many years are you into, with your podcast now?

JG: It's almost exactly five years. We just celebrated our five year anniversary at NECSS. So, we are exactly half as old as you,

S: Well, this year anyway.

JG: which is kind of cool

(Laughter)

JG: Yeah, yeah, this year. We do it bi-weekly. And we've taken a few summer breaks, which I suppose reflects our more academic attitude, that we feel we deserve a summer hiatus.

S: You could call that academic, yeah.

JG: Yeah, you guys are work horses. And I don't know if, maybe some of your audience already knows this, but Massimo and I have been co-hosts from the start. We co-founded the podcast together. And as of this month, Massimo has decided to officially retire, and move on to bigger and better projects, I imagine.

J: I heard that he's too cool for podcasting.

E: Yeah, that's right. Podcasting is...

JG: That's what we think.

(Laughter)

JG: Maybe the rest of us got cooler, and …

E: He didn't see the tinfoil hat. Maybe he would have stuck around if he saw the tinfoil hat.

JG: Yeah, he left a little bit too...

S: Maybe he just shot his wad. There's nothing left to …

B: Nothing else to say. He said it all.

JB: I forgot how colorful this podcast is. We try to keep things classy on...

J: Whoa!

JB: No, no shooting of wads over at RS.

S: Well, he did sort of talk about his philosophy, right?

JB: (Inaudible) And our intrepid producer, Benny Pollak records and edits every episode.

S: Since you bring up changing your mind...

JB: As I often do.

S: We were chatting about that a little bit at NECSS, and I thought it would be a good topic of discussion. What's interesting is that – and I think we've had this experience too – is that we certainly acknowledge that it's necessary to be open to changing one's mind. I think we all feel that we would be perfectly willing to change our mind if confronted with a better argument, or better evidence on any particular point.

And you're like, “Oh, great! Tell me about something which you have changed your mind.” And I've had that challenge put to me as well. And of course, nothing comes to mind when you get asked that question.

JG: Right.

S: Because I think that, well, you tell me about it. What are your thoughts on changing one's mind. Why is it so hard to think of examples of it happening? Does that mean we're hypocrites, or something else?

JG: So, I originally thought it's because we're hypocrites. That was my original hypothesis, because, as you said, I kept having this experience of talking to leaders of the Skeptic movement, proponents of rationality and critical thinking who would wax rhapsodic about how important it was to change your mind; and how should all change our minds all the time; and it's not shameful; it's admirable! And then I would ask for an example, and they would go, “Uh....”

And so, originally, I thought, “Yeah, we're all talking the talk; and we're not walking the walk.” And then I started noticing that after that moment, when people failed to produce an example of changing their mind, literally, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes later in the conversation, they would just organically bring up something that their views had shifted on.

I had this experience with Randi, recently. He was one of our more recent guests. He, again, was talking about how everyone should change their mind; and how it's important for the scientific mindset. And I asked him for an example. And he said, “I can't really think of one.” And then ten minutes later, he ended up talking about – well, I guess Massimo brought up the blog post that Randi wrote about global warming. Yeah.

And in that post, Randi had said, “Yeah, you know, it's not really clear to me either way.” And after so much backlash, Randi sort of acknowledged, “Yeah, well, maybe the consensus is stronger than I realized. Maybe I have more of a leadership role, and therefore more moral responsibility to investigate the consensus before I post about my ignorance than I realized.”

And he even shifted his opinion in discussion with us in that podcast episode, when I brought up an analogy to the alleged vaccine-autism connection; that if someone in Randi's position had said, “Well, I just don't know if there's a connection between vaccines and autism. I don't know! I'm not taking a position,” that people would rightly say, “Hey! The evidence is clear. And if you claim that it's not clear to you, then that's actually taking a position.”

And Randi agreed. So, I think that was a great example of him sort of changing his mind on the spot, despite having been unable to produce examples.

B: You caught him in the act of shifting his position.

JG: Yeah! Yeah, it was great, actually. And I really do think it's wonderful, and I told him so at the time. And so I think part of what's going on with our inability to call up examples on the spot, is that mind-changing is usually not a very discrete event, right?

Usually, there's this – this is so meta. I'm sorry guys, I always do this, but my example of how I used to think that people were hypocrites, and then gradually, I started noticing examples where, in fact, they did have examples of changing their mind. They just didn't realize it, when asked. That was a gradual process where I just had to be on the lookout for examples that contradicted my assumption. And eventually, I started to notice those examples accumulate. And I sort of stepped back, and I was like, “Wait a minute...”

But that was gradual, and so, I think it's not like a “Boom” moment that gets seared into your brain. Like, February tenth, 1992 was the day that I changed my mind about whatever. So, it's sort of harder to do that search query, and come up with examples, because they're not tagged as such.

S: It's the assumption about, how do you define changing your mind?

JG: Right.

S: And I think people think of it as, well I was way over here, and then I had to make a massive shift, and alter my way of thinking in a completely different direction. But that is not how we function. And psychologists have demonstrated this for decades, that essentially we follow a Bayesian approach.

And a Bayesian approach is, we have a certain belief system about whatever. Any fact, any thing. And we gradually update it when new information becomes available. Of course, if you're emotionally invested, you resist that process. You sort of get anchored.

JG: There's some friction there, yeah.

S: It's the motivated reasoning. You anchor yourself to the position. But, if you're not highly emotionally invested in the outcome, we just happily update our beliefs and our thinking and our knowledge about things as new information comes in. And it is a step by step gradual process. What we don't do is take one piece of information, and then shift all the way over to that. We just gradually move in that direction. We add it to our existing beliefs and body of knowledge.

So there's this slow shifting. And I realize, if you have changed your mind about anything, if you think about it in a broad sense, it's like, yeah, every day. Every time I read a news item, I'm changing my mind about something. I never thought that the universe was expanding; now I believe it is expanding. I changed my mind on that because new evidence came into play.

B: True.

S: It's not like I believed it wasn't expanding. I just didn't believe it was expanding, if that makes sense. Or medical treatments. Every day, I'm reading new studies, and altering what I think works, or doesn't work. I used to do lots of things that I don't do any more in medicine. So, each one of those is changing my mind about a treatment. A study was done, and showed that the preliminary evidence showing maybe it worked. Now we have evidence showing it doesn't work. Okay, I change my practice based upon that new evidence.

B: Part of the problems here, I think, is when somebody asks us that question, our go-to knee-jerk reaction is, you think of skepticism, and of course, ESP, Bigfoot, UFO's, we're not gonna change our mind about any of that, because we know it's all bullshit.

S: But we could. We could...

B: We could give a scenario about how we could change our mind, but we haven't. Ever since I've been an activist, we haven't. But that's, whoa, wait, I didn't change my mind about anything.

S: Because we're dealing with issues that are easy, in a way.

J: So, if there was something fundamental about, say, homeopathy, where we know it's wrong. And the amount of evidence that we would have to be given, and the amount of change that would have to take place, or something brand new coming up that no one's ever thought of. But, as an example, I've been reading quite a bit about the riots that happened recently in the United States.

JG: Yeah.

J: Yeah, the Baltimore riots. And when I first saw the news, without getting too deep into any politics, I had a very strong belief about, “Ah, okay,” I don't wanna say.

S: Initial reaction.

J: I had my initial emotional reaction. Then I'm on Facebook; I'm looking at news. And I read a couple of news items. And I'm like, “Oh, I didn't think about that.” And then I felt a big shift in where I was going with it. And then I found that I had gone to about four or five different positions. It's not even like, it's not black or white. There was all these nuances of different positions that I'm starting to read, until, now, I'm kind of settling in to what I think my assessment is. But it's evolved on a daily basis since it happened.

JG: Right. Evolving might be a word that better describes what happens, and indeed, what should happen, and makes it sort of – and I forget if I was telling you this, Steve – but I think that this confusion over, of this implication of changing your mind as being discrete and sudden is not only leading people to have a hard time calling up examples of having changed their minds, but I think it also prevents them sometimes from evolving their mind the way that they should.

My theory is that when people encounter a new argument or evidence that challenges one of their worldviews, and they think their options are either, “I have to agree that this evidence is correct. And I have to instantly change my mind about this deeply held world view.” Or, “I have to find a reason why this evidence is somehow flawed, so that I can reject it, and not change my mind.” And when it's binary like that, it seems so absurd to have to relinquish an entire worldview because of one piece of evidence.

You feel like you don't have the option of shifting, gradually evolving your beliefs. Then, honestly, the more sensible option really is to reject new evidence and arguments. And I think it's only when the availability of that third way, that gradual evolution is made salient to you, that you're able to do that.

S: Again, slowly evolving your opinion based upon evidence and ideas, is what we do, and it's actually the way to go. But also, suspending beliefs, suspending judgment, saying, there are topics that come up, I'm going to assume that I don't know enough about this to really have a firm opinion. I just feel like I don't know enough about this. So I'm going to not have a strong opinion about this until I learn more. That's legitimate.

I mean, it's a cop-out if you're using that to evade taking an opinion on something you very well have enough information about. But legitimately, I'll give you an example. And again, this comes up a lot, practically week to week for this show. For example, I remember we would occasionally get questions about recycling. And I had to make a decision whether or not to talk about recycling on the show.

And for two years, I decided not to talk about it because I felt I didn't understand it well enough where I felt comfortable discussing it, and unavoidably taking a position on it until I had wrapped my head around it enough.

JG: So, I don't know in what domains you're actively seeking out and open-mindedly considering new evidence. If those domains are mainly about skepticism and science and medicine, and the things that you have a lot of practice thinking well about those things. Then I think it's probably correct not to expect there to be radical shifts, because you're in your element, essentially.

When I look at the things that top scientists and top skeptics are, I think, clearly wrong about. Of course it's all relative. But, the things that I think they're wrong about, they're mostly not in those peoples' areas of expertise.

S: Yeah, exactly.

JG: So, look at the top skeptic heroes. Look at Feynman, and Neil deGrasse Tyson … I can see things that I think they're wrong about. They're just not in physics, say. I think Feynman was wrong about women. I think he was wrong about to what extent women have the capacity for intelligence and moral worth. I think Neil is wrong about atheism to some degree. We have philosophical disagreements.

S: Yeah, so Neil deGrasse Tyson's a great example of that. He's brilliant in anything in astronomy and physics. But the farther away you get from that, then obviously, the more out of his element he is. So, he has commented on alternative medicine in a way that makes the medical skeptics cringe a little bit.

JG: Yeah.

S: But, to his credit, when we explained to him, it's like, “Well, maybe we weren't expressing that in a way that really captures the essence of what's really going on.” He was open to it, and happy to evolve his thinking about it.

All right, Julia, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much!

JG: Yeah! I enjoyed this!

S: Thanks for spending some time with us.

JG: Thank you guys! Happy ten year anniversary!

J: Thank you so much! We'll see you soon!

JG: Here's to ten more!

J: Absolutely.

B: I want that had A.S.A.P!

E: Great hat, yeah, the hat.

(Paraphrasing from this point on, since this part of the interview was not in the podcast version: (18:00))

S: When you're just talking about scientific topics with no political motivation, we take it for granted that we will change our minds. Once there is emotionally invested science issues like global warming, it's a big deal.

JG: The topics that have emotional friction to them is a large set. Most topics have an association with us to something important to us. Does a low carb diet produce better results? That's not just a scientific topic. I've heard attacks on the Paleo diet from people who associate it with Silicon Valley attitudes about optimizing everything.
The Paleo diet is bound up with all these associations with the people that espouse it.

S: There's often a lot of hidden ideology. Part of scientific progress is identifying those ideologies. Racial research confirmed the biases of the researchers. If we have a bias, we have one toward the notion that science has lots of cool things. We have a lot of faith that technology will solve problems.

JG: I want to see Jay's proof that science is cool.

''(Jay holds up a toy robot)'' 

J: See? Science is cool.

B: Iron Giant.

J: From top-down, we can see that science has had a profound effect on the quality of life. It's allowed us to grow our population. It lets us do things we weren't able to do before. But it also causes bad things.

B: It's a tool.

JG: Every decade, the level of IQ required to destroy the world goes down.

S: That's scary!

J: What was the movie where all the people are in chairs?

B: Wally!

S: Well, that was an extrapolation. The ultimate couch potato.

JG: Sci Fi is something I've changed my mind about. The first time was Sci-Fi's ability to bias us about the future. I keep seeing Sci-Fi cited as an argument about the advancement of AI or nanotech, or any complex argument about whether a technological event will be good or bad. My reaction originally was, “These are fiction!” They are designed to be entertaining. Citing them as evidence seems crazy.

J: But you could write an edgy story, and there might be some value in those thoughts.

S: It's a thought experiment.

JG: You anticipated what I was going to say. It's partly an outline of how things could go that you might not have considered, instead of an airtight proof. Sci-Fi is great at generating interesting new hypotheses. It also helps us decide what kind of society we want. It helps us realize our values.

S: It's putting a thought experiment in narrative form. It reflects lots of aspects of civilizations. Entertainment vs thought experiment are not mutually exclusive.

J: So speaking of Sci-Fi, what is your favorite Sci-Fi movie?

S: There's only one right answer.

J: For aesthetic reasons, the movie Dark City is underrated. The ending was bad. It had a trope that really annoys me, where the way we triumph is through the power to love, which is something only humans can do. All of our power is love. Setting that aside, I thought the movie was noirish.

S: For Sci-Fi movies with aesthetic, I like Dune. This is a super-advanced super-technology that is completely analogue. I've seen other versions of Dune, where everything was digital. They completely missed the vibe of that whole world.

JG: Yeah, that's great. We don't have to have new technology be digital.

J: I'd like to have a movie where the blasters are solar powered ... That movie's like the guy who's getting run over by a steam roller, and he yells no-o-o-o-o!

JG: I asked Randi about ... he's retiring to some degree, and I asked him what our wins have been on society. Randi cited examples of individuals who changed their minds.

J: Skeptics have changed perceptions on vaccines, particularly in Australia.

S: I think we turned the tide on 9/11, vaccines, absolutely. I hope we're having an effect on alternative medicine. Maybe we're having some impact.

J: We are kicking ass with global warming. Education wise ... well the big win, I think, is we are constantly keeping up with the latest nonsense, and putting the truth out there. Rational thought is out there.

S: Richard Wiseman made an observation to me that as a community, we are having a disproportionately large impact. Our numbers are small, but we impacting society.

''(Show freezes for about thirty seconds at the 35 minute mark)''

S: and he has pointed out that we serve a lot of roles. We are the people that remember all the crazy shit that went before as people try to rewrite history. Creationism is another huge win. I hope it's true that we're this plucky band of individuals having a huge impact. And think about the number of issues we address. How many hardcore skeptical activists are there? And we are fighting large, well-funded giants, and we are holding our own! Part of it is that we're magnifying our numbers thanks to social media. Our impact has been large considering our size. It's the power our position, I think. We have a transparent, intellectually open process that gives us an inherent advantage.

JG: I have this other idea. I agree with everything you said. There's definitely been a shift in the last fifteen years in how America sees the nerd. I watched some old episodes of Friends, and Ross is the nerd to some extent. It felt very retro. Whenever he talked about science, his friends would start snoring, and that's just what you did. It's not like that any more. There's a bit on Big Bang Theory.

S: Bit it's definitely affectionate now. I had the same experience watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you knew how to use a computer, you were a nerd, and you deserved mockery. When they brought out the super nerds later, they were total social misfits. The ripping on the Big Bang Theory is nothing like that.

J: Are we super nerds?

S: We have a science podcast.

JG: Yes, you are. And this means something different today than it used to. There's events like Nerd Night, the Secret Science Club, where people celebrate nerdiness. Now, people talk self-deprecating about being nerdy, but it's really bragging. And that's how you know that it's come into its own.

J: This guy used to have a puppet dog, and he went to Star Wars movie one, and he interviewed hundreds of people waiting to see the movie. And I was looking at those people, and I was like, “Whoa! I am not like those people!” I drew a line in my head. But I did Larp. So I think we're about as bad as you get.

B: Please tell me we're cooler about it.

JG: Cool people sit around and talk about how cool they are.

J: I just do whatever I like.

S: I think there has been a shift though.

B: I think we're more geeks than nerds. What's the difference though?

JG: A nerd has intellectual interest and prowess. A geek is a hobbyist, and there's a standard set of things geeks are obsessed with that are not always intellectual, like comics. Geek has broadened beyond science fiction and gaming. 

E: May 2nd is Comic Book Day.

J: Geeky to me has an infusion of social awkwardness.

JG: That's dork. I think that the skeptic movement has shifted the attitude toward science.

S: What's in the near future for you?

JG: I'm excited to infuse this meme of what a rational debate looks like. I'd like to talk about topics outside of skepticism. I think skepticism can be applied to policy issues like immigration, or effective altruism. It's a movement whose focus is about how do we help the world more effectively, like when you give to charity, how much effect are your dollars having. What is the gold standard evidence for which charities and causes can translate dollars into lives saved, et cetera. These are hard to quantify, but we know more than nothing. The default approach is inefficient.

S: I see one of the goals of the movement is just about making society more efficient. That's what being science-based is all about. It's getting rid of baggage. So I think that is right along with the core of skepticism.

JG: I worry that efficiency will bring up the straw Vulcan image. It's a weak image of skepticism that's easy to knock down. There's plenty of examples of this on TV. They're the logical people that sniff at people for having fun, and they never save the day. I tread carefully to avoid that association.

S: But among skeptics, a lot of it comes down to efficiency. It isn't sexy, but inefficiency causes harm. We are biased against unsexy solutions. Imagine where our society could be if we were just more efficient. It drives you crazy if you think about it. Julia this has been fantastic, thank you for joining us.

JG: Happy ten year anniversary. Here's to ten more!

J: Wait, wait! She's gone! On the YouTube stream, some one said a Swedish nerd is a nord.

S: We've been asked how we are monetizing our event. What's different now is we already have our membership up and running and built in. This took a Herculean effort, and funding. You can support the SGU by becoming a member. At the eight dollars a month level, you get access to premium content.

Orthorexia nervosa: (53:00)

S: Because Julia brought up the the Paleo diet, I did have a news item. Have you guys ever heard of the term orthorexia nervosa?

E: It's a dinosaur.

J: You are a mouth-oriented nervous dinosaur.

S: You've probably heard of anorexia nervosa, where people restrict their caloric intake to lose weight. They think they're fat, even when they're thin, and they can starve to death. So, ortho means straight. It's not a recognized disorder. The term was coined in 1997. So it's a proposed disorder.

It's obsession with purity and cleansing in the food that you eat. So eating gluten free, whole foods. The obsessions are not evidence based. It may not raise to the level of anorexia, but it's interesting that ... a lot of eating disorders have a huge cultural influence.

Our culture has an obsession that is partly marketing, having a cultural obsession with purity and cleansing food, which can become an unhealthy obsession. I do think that eating gluten free is an obsession with emotional things.

So the obsession with getting toxins out of our body, I'm fascinated about that. These things all tie together nicely. People may spend huge amounts of time and money avoiding GMO's, or eating raw, to the point that if they believe that they had eaten something impure, it could make them physically sick.

E: So we shouldn't tell them that all food has been modified over thousands of years.

J: When you say that organic food does more environmental damage than non-organic food.

S: There is a dedication to the concept of natural and pure first, and then they backfill the justification. The justification is not the reason. If you ask people why they're anti GMO. In surveys, they says it's because it's unhealthy. Well, then they change their reason if you show they're wrong. They always have some other reason that they go to. They're just looking for justifications. They just have a disgust reaction to impure things.

J: To me, it's a little scary. I understand it, and there's something inherently kind of scary about that, even though I do ...

Part 6: