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the jurogan experience um your book the new book is rationality rationality what it is why it seems scarce why it matters it is kind of scarce it certainly seems scarce what has happened to us well it's i yeah i think that this is a lot of rationality inequality yeah you know at the top end we've never been more rational right not only do we have just mind-boggling technology in terms of mrna vaccines and smartphones and 3d printing and artificial intelligence but we have rationality applied to areas of life that formerly were just a matter of of you know seat of the pants guess work and hunches and and you rely on experts so you have things like you know moneyball where some genius thought well if you make decisions in sports like drafting and strategy based on data instead of the hunches of you know some old general manager you could actually have an advantage and so the oakland a's went all the way with a fairly small budget for players because they applied data now every team has a statistician data-driven policing one of the reasons that the crime rate in the the u.s fell by more than half in the 1990s it wasn't that all of a sudden guns were taken off the street it wasn't that you know racism vanished or inequality vanished part of it was that police got smarter since a lot of violence happens in a few small areas of a city often by a few you know hotheads few perpetrators yeah if you concentrate police on where the crime hot spots are you can control a lot of crime without that much manpower we were just having evidence-based medicine yeah you know evidence-based policy and governance so there are areas in which we've applied rationality in areas that formerly were just gut feelings and hunt and hunches i'll give you one other example effective altruism a movement that i'm kind of loosely connected with where do your charitable dollars save the most lives um should you buy malarial bed nets should you buy seeing eye dogs for for blind people it makes a big difference and that's so charity now is becoming more rational so
all these areas policing and sports and charity and government are becoming more rational but of course at the same time you've got you know chemtrail conspiracy theorists you've got the idea that coveted vaccines are a way for building gates to implant microchips in people's uh don't they make you magnetic right um what's interesting to me is that uh there's a thing that goes along with uh irrational thought where you have irrational thought that is confined to your party lines right yes if you are if i mean there's just a blanket statement but if you are right wing you are more likely to dismiss the worries of climate change yeah absolutely in fact that's the that is the main predictor of whether you dismiss climate change has nothing to do with scientific literacy you know a lot of my fellow scientists say oh the fact that there's so much denial of man-made climate change means we need you know better science education in the schools we need scientists becoming more popular and and making the climate science more accessible turns out that whether you accept human-made climate change or not has nothing to do with how much science you know and a lot of the people who do accept it know you know diddly about the science they often will think well yeah climate change isn't that because of you know the the hole in the ozone layer and toxic waste dumps and you know plastic straws in the oceans right really a lot of them are out to lunch whereas some of the climate deniers they're like well-prepared litigators they can find every loophole they know every study they you know a good lawyer can argue against anything what does predict your acceptance of climate change is just where you are on the political spectrum the farther to the right the more denial so abs that's what you said is absolutely right it's not just more denial but this willingness to instantaneously argue it like uh the the subject came up oddly enough in jiu jitsu or after class we're uh like just getting dressed and putting stuff away and someone said man it's
just uh it's just a fact of life that it's getting hotter every year and this guy jumped in immediately with like this defense of this idea that climate change is nonsense and it's like listen it's a cycle it's always been going on like this and like how much research have you done yeah like do you think you don't think people affect it at all i'm like yeah it is a cycle right if you go back and look at core samples and you look at the ice ages and you look at all the various times in the history of the earth the climate has moved we were actually just talking about this yesterday i had someone on who's an expert in ancient civilizations and all these archaeological mysteries that they've found and one of the things we were talking about was the sahara desert that the sahara desert goes through this period of every like 20 000 years or so where it's green and then it becomes a desert again and then it becomes green again and it goes back and forth and 5 000 plus years ago it was very green and now it's a inhospitable desert and you know this guy just like had this like right wing talking point instead of arguing with them i said how much research have you done i'm like what do you think is happening like well it's just a cycle like it's definitely a cycle but don't you think it's extraordinary the amount of co2 we put in the atmosphere yeah there can be superimposed trends there can be a cycle and on top of that it can be the forcing that that we're doing it's both things it's both clearly there's like the the earth varies it has varied forever in terms of like the climate shifting back and forth but clearly like if you look at any like mexico city is a great example i flew into mexico city once and i took photos because i couldn't believe there wasn't a fire i'm like i can't believe this like when you live in los angeles you're used to smoky skies when there's forest fires and wildfires but mexico city had there was no fire it was just pollution like these poor [ __ ] people they have to live in this [ __ ] every day this is crazy no that's true actually what surprised me the most of all the
places i've been is uh africa tanzania and uganda where there is a brown haze everywhere and that's because people burn wood and charcoal oh that's something that people need to realize well they heat up wood to make the charcoal and the charcoal and there is a haze over the landscape uh with nothing like nothing i've seen a lot of the worst unhealthiest air pollution is people uh cooking with open fires in their own houses isn't that wild which is wild you would never think that burning wood outside would have a significant impact on the environment but it really does yeah i mean it isn't forcing climate change it's a different kind of problem right that's another problem it's a different ground but yeah but going back to what we're talking about one of the big conclusions of rationality is that a lot of what we deplore now as you know just crazy uh stuff conspiracy theories and the fake news a lot of it comes from one bias the my side bias which you kind of already alluded to namely you you believe in the sacred uh beliefs of your own clique your own political party your own coalition your own tribe your own sect and you paint the other side as stupid and evil for having different beliefs there's a perverse kind of rationality in being a champion for your cause because you know you get brownie points from all your friends and if you were to defy them if you were to to accept climate change in a hardcore right-wing circle you'd you know you'd be a pariah you'd be yeah it would be social death so there's a perverse kind of rationality in championing the beliefs of your side it isn't so good for whole democracy when everyone is just promoting the beliefs that that get them prestige within their own coalition rather than the beliefs that are actually true yeah it's it's strangely prevalent right like it's so common that people have this ideology they subscribe to the belief system that is attached to that ideology and whatever whether it's left wing or right wing and they just adopt a
conglomeration of ideas instead of having these things where they've thought them through rationally and really like looked at it instead they they have an ideology and whether it's left or right wing and it seems to me it's it's a real shame that we only have two choices in this country politically like if you look at holland if you look at there's a lot of countries that have many many choices and i think if we had many many choices you would have you still have tribalism but at least you'd probably have a more varied idea of what it is we have very polarizing perspectives we have a left and a right and each side thinks the other side are morons and are ruining the country absolutely there has been a rise in negative polarization yeah that is in the sense that the people you disagree with uh aren't just mistaken they don't just have a different opinion but they are evil and stupid so that has risen especially at the extremes it's still true that a majority of americans call themselves moderate but the extremes hate each other more and it's interesting you know why that's happened it's you know the common explanation is you blame it on social media and people being in filter bubbles you know that might be part of it but part of it may also be people segregate themselves in terms of where they live more so you get kind of educated hipsters and knowledge workers in cities and you get less educated people moving out to the outer suburbs and rural are staying in rural areas so people just don't meet people who disagree with them anymore who have come from different backgrounds or less than they used to and some of the ins organizations and institutions that used to bring people from different walks of life together um churches service organizations like you know the elks the rotary club and so on are declining so we tend to hang out more with people like ourselves well even in universities which used to be a place where people on the left and people on the right could debate i mean in high schools even like i remember when i was in high school barney frank debated someone from the moral majority
and i remember um watching it i think i was 16 and we went and sat and watched this debate and watch barney frank trounce this guy and mock him and it was pretty fun uh but it was it was interesting because we got this to hear two very different perspectives but one at the at the time barney frank who's just better at it and had better points was more articulate and had a better argument and we walked away from that having heard both sides and but having heard one side argued more effectively and you don't get that anymore instead now you get one side and when someone tries to bring someone in that as of a differing opinion to debate this person that person gets silenced they try pulling alarms and buildings and they shout and blow blow horns and call everyone a nazi and it's unfortunate because you you miss the opportunity like i got to see when i was 16 where i got to see a more articulate person with better points of view better perspectives argue more effectively that their perspective was was more rational yeah no i think that that that's vital now there is uh some evidence that people who are have really hardcore beliefs can't be talked out of them with any amount of evidence some people yeah some people but exactly so you know people ask me as a question i get asked a lot in uh when i talk about rationality they say well how do you convince a real q anon believer that there isn't a cabal of of uh satan worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles in the the democratic party and and hollywood and the basement of a pizza house and the basement of comet ping pong pizzeria you know the answer might be for some of them you can't it's kind of like the question how do you convince the pope that jesus was not the son of god well you you can't i mean some people will go to their grave believing what they believe but you don't have to convince everyone there are people who are not so committed they might you know they may find a little plausible and but their identity isn't fused with it it doesn't define who they are and they might be open to argument and of course new new babies are being born
all the time and they aren't born believing in in q anon or chemtrails or 9 11 truther theories and some of them can be peeled off by by rational arguments i think it's not tried enough including in issues that i strongly believe in like human-made climate change like safety and efficacy of vaccines and on and on i think that scientists and public health officials have not been willing enough to show their work they've just set themselves up as priests and as said people believe me i'm a scientist well that's like could not be farther from the way science works the whole point of science is there is no authority you've got to show the goods it's data you always might be wrong uh and what made what kind of increased my confidence say in human-made climate change 20 25 years ago i was you know a little bit open to it but then seeing the objections like it's all just cycles or it's just because the temperature measurements were [Music] the cities grew and so the weather monitoring stations were used to be out in the country now they're in the city and cities are hotter that's you know i actually heard this from a nobel prize winner but seeing the counter arguments where there's a site called skeptical science where they take on every one of the objections to human-made climate change and they explain why why it's uh unlikely to be true i find that fantastically convincing and and i think that um that we should not give up on people's ability to to to uh take in evidence seriously this granted there's some people who won't you know that people we all to some extent act like lawyers we argue a cause if there's a counter argument we try to we rack our brains to figure out how we can you know refute the counter argument so there is that especially when the belief is close to your personal identity that's not true of all beliefs for
everyone and public health officials government officials scientists should be prepared to show their work this is why i believe it not just this is the truth