Welcome to the Make It Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Make It Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, there's a lot going on out in the world.
I guess there always is, but in the last 24 hours it seemed especially so. As I'm recording this intro, we appear to be witnessing the complete implosion of FTX, the cryptocurrency trading firm, whose CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been on this podcast, and he's been one of the most visible faces of the effective altruism movement. At the time I interviewed him, Sam was worth over $20 billion, it might have been $30 billion at the time, and had pledged to give virtually all of it away. Cryptocurrency is quite volatile, and as of I think the day before yesterday, he was worth something like $15 billion, virtually all of which appears to have evaporated in the last 24 hours.
It seems along with the holdings of many other people who had their money and trust in FTX. At this point, it's not clear just what degree of malfeasance there was on Sam Bankman-Fried's part, so I will reserve judgment there. No doubt we will all learn more soon, but as to whether or not this is a bad outcome for him personally, for investors in FTX, and for the effective altruism community, there really can be no doubt of that. This was really bad news on all those fronts.
In happier news, we had our first virtual retreat over at Waking Up. Over 40,000 people registered for that on the day. I think we had about 10,000 when Joseph Goldstein and I did a live Q&A at the end. Anyway, both the retreat and the Q&A are now available to be done at your leisure in the practice section in the app, and I think we'll be creating more of those in the future.
Okay, well today I'm speaking with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil is an astrophysicist and the author of the number one bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, among other books. He's also the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he's served since 1996. He has his own Emmy-nominated podcast, StarTalk, and its spin-off, StarTalk Sports Edition.
The man has received 21 honorary doctorates and various other awards. He has an asteroid named after him, and most recently he's the author of a new book titled Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And we focus on the new book. We talk about what makes science a unique human endeavor, the tension between respecting scientific consensus and overturning it, which leads to confusion about paradigm shifts and scientific controversies.
We talk about the social importance of probability and statistics, climate change, our relative blindness to exponential cultural change, social media, social inequality and affirmative action, identity politics and a post-racial future, the wisdom of focusing on class rather than race, and other topics. It's always fun to talk to Neil. As you'll hear, he's always good company. And I bring you Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I am here with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like an old-timer.
Well, you are a repeat and much beloved guest. And I'm pretty sure I've been living with you more than you've been living with me of late, because I digested your last book 100% as an audio book. I tend to balance between audio and hard copy when I really want to get something in my brain. But for you, I just happened to...
There's some great fall weather where I am, and I took a bunch of long walks, and you were walking with me. It was really a miracle of technology and a wonderful use of time. I did narrate the book myself. Yes, as you should, with that voice of yours.
Did you narrate all your books? No, just the shorter ones. I mean, I did a huge book on war. It was 600 pages or so.
And I said, I can't. I just... If I had the time, I would have, but I just couldn't justify it. Plus, you're taking money out of someone else's mouth where they read professionally, you know?
So I figured... Do you find it hard to do? Does it come easily for you? Well, it is, but not 600 pages.
You know, to spend six days in a sound studio or whatever that would have taken. As it is, this book is relatively short. Sprite Messenger's minus the endnotes is 200 pages or so. And the book is a small format.
So I could do that. Plus, a lot of it is in my voice, figuratively and literally, because there's some storytelling that I do in there about events in my life and how it connects to the science and the culture and the geopolitics. So I felt that these are stories no one else can or really should be saying to you as you walk in the fall weather. Yeah, I find it hard to do, though, actually.
And I find that occasionally I have written a sentence that I literally cannot get through out loud and I have to change the wording to it becomes a circus-olée routine for me to try to get to the end of the sentence and I have to rewrite it for the audiobook. Well, you're a brilliant writer and I'm eternally envious, not in a vengeful way, but just envious. In a dark way. In a dark way, thank you.
Your command of words that are just the right words and just the right time and place are brilliant. And what I try to do when I write is have the sentence work not only as words on a page, but as words that you hear in your head so that there's a rhythm and a flow and a balance of what words are used that may be a little challenging versus others that are not. And in that balance, I think it becomes an easier product to read. Yeah, well, you do read it very well, so I recommend audio if that is a person's predilection.
I should say the name of the book here. You said it quickly, but it's Story Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And the subtitle really does capture the angle here because you do think about civilization a lot and so we'll get into that. You've taken a turn slightly toward the political at various moments in the book and I remember last time we spoke, your allergy to striking a political note was palpable and also understandable.
Has something changed on that front for you or what's your thinking around politics? The book basically came to term in the sense that it's been gestating within me my entire life. If I may use uterine analogies here, I remember when I was a middle schooler, early years when I'm thinking scientifically literate way which began maybe when I was 9 or 10 but it didn't really sort of hit a stride until I was 12 and 13 and I just remembered looking around at full grown human beings, adults, listening to what they're saying and watching what they're doing and I was like, what? You're saying what?
You think what? And in one case explicitly there was a comet headed around the sun and it was expected to be very bright turned out that it didn't live up to expectations. That's not what matters here. We astronomers had discovered a comet and it was in all the news.
No one saw it yet with the naked eye. It wasn't bright or close enough yet. And I'm walking out there and there's a man with a placard marching up and down the street saying repent. The comet is coming.
The end of the world is near. And I said, you're a grown up. Don't you have any understanding? And so I've been collecting in me these observations of all the ways people and cultures and civilizations and especially people in power think about the world and how absent it is of science literacy, of numeracy, of especially statistical numeracy is lacking.
And so it was in me and I'm sitting there during COVID and I said, this has to get birthed. This book has to come out and it just got birthed whole. The whole thing just came out of me. I'm on this science reads and someone asked, Dr.
Tyson, when you're writing this book, how did you get through writer's block? There was no writer's block. And so it's been in me. I just haven't had the occasion to write about it.
And in a way, it's my most scientific book because everything about what we see, what we do and what we think, I'm highlighting ways that a scientist would view that. And if you care, I mean, if you don't care, that's one thing. But if you wondered, how does a scientist say about what I'm doing? This is the book for that purpose.
What is it that you think makes science unique? I mean, if we're going to take a bird's eye view of our situation and distinguish science from the rest of human endeavors, how would you distill that to someone who's just considering this demarcation for the first time? also human and they are susceptible to many of the vagaries of what it is to be human. And so where you think your opinion is of higher value than someone else's opinion, you might think your opinion is a fact, even though the evidence doesn't support it.
And all the portfolio of biases that you learn about, the great wiki pages on cognitive bias, the scientist has a susceptibility to it like everyone else. However, there's the expectation that they would try to ferret it out in some way or another. And so to scientists, in an argument, there's an unwritten rule, unwritten, that either I'm right and you're wrong or you're right and I'm wrong or we're both wrong. And I don't know many other arguments the prior arrangement in that conversation.
And by the way, when you have conversations set up that way, at the end you say, you know, I think we need more data. Okay, let's wait until this other result comes in. Oh great, now let's go have a beer. So the arguments between scientists end up in a bar and the arguments between other people even if it's of a similar sort of intensity can in their limit end up in all-out warfare, bloodshed and death because two people do not agree on their worldview of who they should worship, who they should sleep with, what side of a line in the sand you live on, what language you speak, what color your skin is.
And in science, so much of it transcends that that there's a limit to how much we're going to get riled over. And so there's great value to seeing the world scientifically, especially cosmically because it lifts you up and away from so much of what divides us. What are some common misunderstandings of what science is? It seems to me that we're living through a period where the dirty laundry of science or the sausage making, pick your cliche, has been exposed to public scrutiny in a way that has left people pretty cynical about and frankly confused about science.
I'm thinking specifically of our misadventures through COVID. We have changing, and this is something that you touch on some, we have these changes of policy which seem like frank confessions of scientific error that are marks against science as a methodology and science as a source of authority whereas in most cases what you're seeing is just the moving target of scientific consensus and fact finding and debate and the cure for scientific mistakes is just more science, more testing, more data, more scrutiny, more criticism and the process looks messy as we lurch about. We can leave aside for the moment I want to come back to it. There are obviously other problems like bad incentives and corruption and misinformation and fraud and possible contaminants any human conversation and any scientific one but even just the pure scientific process of criticism and uncertainty and further testing that can look like an all too human failure to figure something out for the longest time and I think people now are, science as an institution I'm just taking the temperature based on a few polls I've seen and just a general vibe on social media it seems like the institution itself has lost some of its luster in the eyes of non-scientists over the last few years especially because of what's happened around public health messaging and COVID.
I'm wondering what you think about that. Yeah, I mean this is a very important issue especially in modern times so I think there's several moving parts here and if I can unpack it just a little bit so we live in a time where you don't have to get off your ass and go to a research library to gain access to research articles you can get them online but once you go online to find them you have the mixture of what is authentic research with what people just want to be true because any Google search will find you every other person who thinks exactly the way you do and what it is you're searching for so you have a contamination a noise level of your ability to find that which is authentic and that which isn't that's the first part of it. Second part of it the scientific community is not trained at communicating with the public it is not in our it's not a part I took one class in graduate school about giving public talks something like that it became a mandatory thing I'm old enough so I'm talking about the 1980s so this was early it was like wow why are you doing that when we should be learning what to do in the lab so even that got pushback in its day so now you have people who spent their lives in a lab and they did well and now they promoted to some higher position of institutional authority and messaging and now the press is in front of them and so what are they going to say so we're early COVID and one of them says oh this is not going to be too bad we're going to have it'll be over within a few weeks and the cases will be contained they don't know to say but they should have known or in another world they would say based on these assumptions that we're making on how China is handling and how Scandinavia is handling but if we do the same as they do we will contain this within two months the if then statement is so important but the urge to give a definitive statement to the press so the press can then create a headline is so high it leaves you then susceptible to like you said the bleeding edge moving frontier of one research article versus the next building on the previous one possibly showing that it's not as effective as was intended that's possible on the frontier and so the couching of the advice I think in retrospect I knew what was happening but institutionally they had especially the CDC with their new director said we're going to have to be better at this communication and that is for damn sure so now you have this what is science and how and why does it work you see people watching this edge of science move back and forth and give sometimes conflicting information now they want to apply that to anything else science says so maybe earth is not round or maybe we're not warming the planet because scientists can be wrong and what they're missing is of course when you have a scientific result verified multiple ways by experiment it is not later shown to be false this is a missing piece of this understanding of how and why science works it's not taught in schools it's not taught and you can have people say science people who mean well say science unlike religion will change its mind when the data shows that it needs to change its mind e will never equal mc cubed okay it's mc squared it's not there are things that we're not changing our mind about not because we're stubborn but because the evidence is so overwhelming that we have something in the books that we're not looking to see that's going to be different one day because all experiments have verified it we're on to the next problem so all of these are factors and I'm pretty sure that if science were taught as an enterprise taught as a means of querying nature taught as a possibly unique way to sift that which is you want to be true from that which is true then people would come out of the school systems without this kind of skepticism of the entire scientific enterprise yeah it seems to me there is a if not a paradox something close to a paradox at the heart of the enterprise that understandably leaves people confused and it's around this tension between value scientific consensus and scientific authority and not being blinkered by it because you know obviously almost by definition scientific progress you know any real breakthrough is a breakthrough because it goes against the grain of you know received opinion and by definition expert you know consensus right so it's when you have a you know an Einstein who gives us special and general relativity you know that goes against a prior paradigm and you know to the initial mystification and consternation and and just frank resistance of many qualified experts it even goes further where you know Einstein himself became you know resistant to quantum mechanics right and he famously said you know god doesn't play dice with the universe and debated bore until i guess the end of his days never haven't fully come around and you know the realistic picture of what's going on there is still not resolved but there is this tension because you don't accept something as true just because most scientists believe it or just because the most famous nobel laureate in the given field believes it or says it so that's really not the cash value of the reasons for belief you have to really get to the cash value you have to actually understand the data and the argument and the evidence and you know it's in the math it's in the detail that gives you the reasons for saying it's so right and so just to take the simplest case we believe that that water is two parts hydrogen one part of oxygen not because the most famous chemists have said so but the fact that every chemist on earth you know with a you know who's neurologically intact would agree that it is so that is a surrogate for the real reasons to believe in the chemistry of water and you know we can't there's not a time in a single human life to run every experiment and drill down to bedrock on every scientific claim we have to take received opinion and scientific authority as a surrogate for our own investigation you know all the areas where there's not a pressing reason to do otherwise so there's this dual mode we're in because we do care about scientific consensus and authority and when you know 95 percent of scientists say that something is so the weight of our credence is with them as opposed to the crankish fringe who's saying the opposite and it's also true that the lone voice in the scientific wilderness is occasionally right and can completely upend the scientific consensus based on better arguments and better evidence and it's in the presence of any given minority voice you know the one epidemiologist who says that you know these new mRNA vaccines are going to kill millions of people unless you really understand the field or even sometimes even if you do understand the field it might not be immediately obvious if you're in the presence of a crank or a lone genius right and there's work to do to figure that out and i feel like what we're living through now is a an instance where trust in scientific authority and consensus uh has been dialed way down right the institutions and for understandable reasons and for obviously spurious ones i mean the institutions have also heaped shame upon their heads by being you know obviously politicized on various points you know in debates about you know gender and race and there's just been some crazy stuff happening even in our best scientific journals you've got epidemiologists by the thousands castigating right-wing people for their public demonstrations but then supporting left-wing people for their public demonstrations all within the same pandemic and so people have grown quite cynical but i'm just wondering if you can speak to this core tension between trusting scientific authority and the progress of science being more or less anonymous with overturning authority at least on certain points yeah so there's a caricature of science which has understandable and obvious origins but doesn't represent the typical scientific advance the caricature is everyone believes one thing and then there's a lone genius who's comes up with an alternative idea that would negate or otherwise render render wrong the prevailing view and then they're suppressed and then they finally rise up and then it becomes a new paradigm and that is not how most of this works all right so for example take the discovery of the double helix we did not have a prior paradigm before the double helix it's like we just didn't know right okay we know how it is we're looking up comes the double that's a good one that works and arguably one of the greatest discoveries in science was not the act of overthrowing a previously held idea so and i just want to make it clear that most discoveries in science are of that nature right not of the nature of overthrowing a previously held idea that's my first point second a previously held idea use the word consensus and authority often in those few moments and i don't like the word authority because that implies you should do it because they have some position of power and plus consensus the way most people hear that word it would be opinions the gathering of opinions and you look at what the majority opinion is we also use that word in science but not to reference opinions which creates some of this this disconnect communication disconnect we use it for what is the scientific consensus and what that typically refers to is the research papers on this topic what do they show and the research paper is not a scientist's opinion it is the scientist displaying data and provided they're not themselves biased like i said there's always that risk especially in the scientific fields that involve the measurement and analysis of other human beings they tend to be particularly susceptible to bias that would include all the fields of psychology anthropology and the perhaps the most biased period of any field ever would be like 19th century anthropologists creating the races of man and ranking them and judging them and making that the foundation of the science of eugenics right there's a whole thing you have to like look really carefully when people start ranking other people what is their field what is their motive what are their funders and the like in the physical sciences which is a little more distant from the social sciences and the biological sciences more distant from human beings we're a little bit less susceptible to that and so you look at what does the body of research show we will call that consensus what has nothing to do with their opinions and i assert that if you have 97 research papers saying one thing because the data shows it and one person says no you should bet on you should bet on that consensus because that's how it goes the the one person says do you have data do you have what well i don't think it's that way go check it out you'll find out that they will cherry pick things to fit their needs or their beliefs or their worldview and just because an entire scientific community does not agree with you it doesn't mean you're correct okay so so and and the point with with newton becoming eyesight this is a fascinating chapter here's the towering achievements of classical physics and we have newtonian gravity and newtonian motion oh my gosh it's explaining everything but then wait a minute there's some things it doesn't explain oh okay well there's mercury's orbit and there's weirdnesses and we don't and oh einstein comes along so i got i got this and he introduces special relativity and general relativity which is basically the modern version of motion and gravity and they supplant newton they don't go back into newton's world and say your experiments that you did are wrong no they're still correct what it did was draw a larger circle around the newtonian physics and it said newtonian physics is a special case of einsteinian physics you put low speeds and low gravity into einstein's equation they become newton's gravity so yes it was a new worldview and it took a lot of people to get used to it oh yes but that did not mean the previous worldview was all of a sudden wrong in all the ways that it had been tested we grew in our understanding of the world and einstein's resistance to quantum physics he okay this was his attitude towards it but he contributed mightily to quantum physics some of the most important results came from him he just didn't like the underlying foundations of what could be making it okay but the experiment still did all the talking and so yeah i mean people like to talk about scientists fighting and arguing at any conference that's what they're doing but once it emerged once it comes through through the mill the experimental mill that's not what anybody's arguing about anymore and so so yeah what do we do about our institutions they need to communicate better they need to communicate more honestly they need to not use the word these are the errors in my measurement that's they don't know how people hear that oh they made errors no these are the uncertainties in the measurement and every measurement has uncertainties that's not taught that where do you get that you sort of get it somewhere maybe in one lab class in high school that's it when that's a fundamental feature of what it is to take data and the next experiment needs to reduce those uncertainties so that you can have greater confidence in what's going on and then you look at what all the science tells you and it's what comes this is why we have the national academy of sciences they digest this information and present reports there it is and that's that we're not trying to do that and it's sad because we needed that at the moving cusp of covid yeah i think let's take another pass over the same terrain because i think i want to drag you back into the weeds here because i think it is it's just a mess and uh if we can straighten anything out i think we should so there's a few few other things i'll put into play here one is just an analogy which i think i have from you is that i have a vague memory of you having said this years ago i think we were probably at one of those salk institute conferences and correct me if i'm wrong maybe maybe i'm right and there'll be no way to know you won't remember having said this but i think the analogy when something like you know imagine science is like an apple at the level of the skin of the apple you know the front edge of it there's this area of scientific controversy where we're pushing into the unknown and yes there's you know the whole paradigm could swing in the balance but as you move away from the skin as you go into the meat of the apple and down to the core most of it is no longer in play right and things are not going to be radically overturned and so for instance just to give a biological example it's just not the case that we might wake up tomorrow and discover that dna has nothing to do with biological inheritance right that's not the kind of paparian falsification that may yet await us in science i mean we just it's just too much data to conserve it would be an absolute miracle at this point if dna had nothing to do with inheritance and so that's not the place that's not the part of the apple where there's their big movements are going to occur does that capture your thinking not my analogy but i like it generally when i speak of apples they're falling no other than the newton apple that did not hit him uh that the the earth's atmosphere is to earth as the skin of an apple is to an apple in terms of relative thicknesses so just to put that in context for people who think we're at the bottom of some infinite ocean of air it's actually quite thin that's the only case i would use now but i'm in full agreement with that reference for that reason the term paradigm as introduced and used in the way that thomas kuhn used it for the structure of scientific revolutions is way overplayed okay because a paradigm shift as as people think about it every scientist is thinking this but then some new data comes along and everyone shifts over and they think something different leaving you with the impression that science is a construct of belief systems at any given moment and the last time there was a paradigm shift of that kind was the copernican revolution where no one knew any of this okay but that predates the active engagement of scientific of experimental science where you can say i have an idea but let me test it the testing an idea did not become a routine thing until at least the 1600s and the copernican revolution basically predates that what goes right up to galileo my point is yes we can call that a paradigm shift no i have no hesitation but newton to quantum physics newton to is not a paradigm shift as much as it is a growth in our understanding of the world because nothing shifted it just got bigger and it's a very important difference here so i don't think anything is so strongly held as to be a paradigm if there's insufficient data to support it they're just people's leaning towards one idea or another i would hardly call a paradigm now what do you do about the social problem really it's only an intellectual problem in that we don't always have enough time to drill down far enough and figure it out and do science on on the clock to anyone's satisfaction but what do you do the problem you can always find a phd or an md or you know a collection of them who will take any position on anything right you can find phds will say that you know smoking doesn't cause lung cancer and that actually was a documentary on some of these guys and it was the same ones and then set up shop on other points of non-controversy they move from smoking to i think you know fire retardants in california and other topics but this is something we witnessed during covid you had people who would you can just always find someone to put on a podcast who has the right scientific credentials seemingly and yet is taking this position that is extreme and extremely deranging of the conversation about you know what is plausible or what is worth paying attention to in any given moment how do you recommend people assimilate that fact because it is you know i just noticed you know people who i could name who should be you know connoisseurs of misinformation at this point get quite bewildered in the presence of many of these people and and again this is the thing that makes it so bewildering is that in the presence of a an emerging pandemic there really was a lot to be uncertain about and there were in any given week the facts weren't yet in and as i said earlier it was a moving target and to some degree it still is how do you deal with this as a consumer of information how do you think about the public consequence of basically everyone being able to do their own research and therefore everyone is able to land in the presence of someone who seems to have all the relevant scientific bona fides and yet they're so outside the bounds of scientific consensus on any given point that they should be treated with extraordinary skepticism yeah so the the 900 pound gorilla in what you said is that the people who are selected to give this dissenting view are people whose dissenting views resonate with your politics your religion your culture or your overall desires so you're fulfilling you're finding someone who will fulfill what you want to be true rather than what is true so that's the first part of that another part is that you're i try to address this in the book in the chapter on risk and reward so what i do is i take certain risks and i recast it in another way which is a formally equivalent risk but makes you think about it a little differently so for example for a while the off-quoted number was 97 of research papers show that humans are are warming the earth and in the past 20 years that percent has gotten higher it's probably 99 or near 100 percent so so but let's go back to when it was 97 and that's when everyone was talking about it that's when it first manifested so i said all right let's say there's 100 engineers and there's a bridge just brand new built across this river and 97 engineers say if you drive your car across that bridge it will collapse and three of them say no not a problem just go ahead and do it in fact it'll be safe for you and everyone who follows you like would you drive your car across that bridge like would you and i'm thinking you probably won't even before you investigate are there biases among the engineers you would say you know these are engineers i'm not an engineer but i'm going to go with this consensus so to say i'm going to go with the three percent of the hundred percent of climate scientists who are saying by the many of them are not even climate scientists but they were scientists to say that we're not warming the earth and that fits with my economic philosophies that i'm hoping that when you see these numbers presented in these other ways you might think a little differently about it take smoking for example the last numbers i saw there's an eight percent chance of dying from lung cancer if you're a chain smoker okay and somewhere around there and and of course there are other higher percentages for other diseases but let's take cancer for a moment and then i say all right let's recast that so next tuesday everyone who lights up a cigarette okay will be entered in this lottery so that the moment you light your cigarette take your first puck eight percent of them their head will explode and they'll fall over as a bloody gut gutty mess on the street okay and then everyone else if that didn't happen to you you can smoke the rest of your life are you going to take that chance are you going to risk that and by the way that's a cheaper solution than what reality would be because then you die immediately and there isn't this health care that has to be sustained while you first get cancer and maybe people try to cure you and remove a lung and whatever else happens so there'll be a way cheaper solution in society if that were an act of course it's not but but so i spend a fair amount of pages recasting certain risk factors that people are interpreting in ways that they think don't apply doesn't apply to them and so other than that exercise i don't have a silver bullet here but what i do know is that public illiteracy innumeracy in statistics and probability are at the heart of so much of people's understanding of risk and i'm not the only one who thinks about in oxford is oxford cambridge there's there's a chair an endowed chair called the professor of the public understanding of risk somebody said this is important enough we're gonna make an entire endowed line professor line to address this and so yeah people are making decisions that they think they've thought it through correctly and in fact they haven't yeah well let's linger on the topic of climate change because that is especially difficult to think about as you point out the economic incentives sort of the short-term ones seem to point in the direction of not taking it seriously and it suffers from many of the variables i've mentioned so far there are obvious reasons why the general public has lost sympathy with the consensus opinion because it's been so highly politicized it's um you know in certain cases that you know religion interacts unhelpfully with it but now in recent years it's we have this new face of climate activism which seems to be teenagers with with obvious anxiety disorders and and you know or autism i mean teenagers who need help have in some cases become the most prominent voices of climate activism and in recent weeks i mean this has been going on for longer than that but i just noticed it probably about a month ago you've got people who are gluing themselves to the most famous works of art in major museums or you're throwing paint or soup on um you know priceless pieces of art and uh you know this is turning off the general public for obvious reasons i can imagine your head has been settled on the topic of climate change for quite some time why has this been so difficult to take seriously as a problem it's a mismatch of timescales right you know we have an election cycle that runs on a two year with two years worth of expiration dates and then they get renewed and you know senators are six years presidents are four possibly eight you want to talk about something on a 20-year timescale how's that ever going to show up in your in your stump speech how's that even going to who's going to be listening to you oh the very youngest of the generations who will inherit what it is you do but even then is that enough you get elected on so there's a mismatch between our political system and our capacity to engage solutions for problems that are operating on a timescale longer than the political timescale of what we of what we of the society that we built for it so yeah i mean this is part of the problem by that kind of activism i mean this is you tend to see that with younger people in any level in any topic of activism all right i don't know that 60 year old men and women throw paint on throw soup on paintings it's it's the young generation young generation protested the vietnam war was not the older people's younger people so so it's not a weird fact that we have a social cultural issue in need of progressive change and the next generation is leading that that does not i'm not surprised by that and soup on a painting that got your attention okay people's attention and so you know i don't know what to say other than to say well one day we'll think about solving this that's a recipe for disaster when it involves an existential risk and by the way again i blame people's of the fact that we're not taught probability statistics in school so let's take the bell curve for example okay in my world we call it gaussian curve because he sort of first laid out the fully explored the fully expressed mathematical form of it and what it says is most things that vary uh would be in the middle and and there are fewer and fewer things out on each extreme okay so fewer fewer representations of whatever variable you're measuring okay so now watch they announce there's been a one degree 1.2 degree increase in the temperature and the average temperature of the world celsius increase and this will be devastating and you say to yourself i have more than a one degree variation in the rooms of the home that i live in right within the same room i have a more higher temperature variation than that and then from day to day from and from day to night so you're telling me i'm worried about one degree change in the temperature of the earth well okay well okay because we're not talking about what's in the middle the one degree shift in the average yes that belker shifts a little bit to the right okay temperature increases you shift a little bit looks almost the same except when you go on the tail now you slide off to that tail a one degree shift in the middle has devastating consequences out on that tail and that tail of the distribution is all the action is that people are reacting to with the intensity of the hurricanes and the and the the once in a century flood zone that now floods every 10 years the the epic rainfalls you know right now it's it was 73 degrees out my window today in new york city right and so well that's odd because it's november well it's just a day okay maybe all right but the tail of that distribution carries all manner of extreme weather with it and now we're talking about two degrees by 2030 2050 or i forgot the exact year and we'll just see more and more of this happen if people knew and understood the effects of the tail of a bell curve of data relative to what you see in the middle maybe they react differently i don't know you know everyone in their math classes i will never need to know this as they learn trig identities and so that is definitely a pedagogical mistake that we don't teach probability and statistics to high school students routinely we teach them trigonometry and calculus and and you know if calculus which arguably have much less application to problems of immense social concern so my one conspiracy theory in the book is that the reason why we don't teach probability statistics is because money for education in practically every state is partially fed by lottery tickets so if you taught probability statistics in the school no one would play the lottery so you have the story about uh the scientific convention in vegas where the i think it was the mgm brand the last money that it ever made in history uh the american physical society which my physics peeps in back in 1986 they were going to hold their convention in san diego and there was a hotel snafu and and they said well thank you and the mgm brand they're back in the mgm you know if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe to samharris.org once you do you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the making sense podcast along with other subscriber-only content including bonus episodes and amas and the conversations i've been having on the waking up app the making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now at samharris.org and you can subscribe now at samharris.org