Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Villehuchet, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Masimo, our topic today is celebrities and the damage they can do. We're going to talk about the phenomenon of celebrities using the spotlight to pontificate about things they don't have expertise in and in many cases on which they don't have their facts straight. So defecating.

And that's one of my favorite activities. I borrowed that word from you.

Thank you. Yes. It's usually it's the pope that it you know, that's where the word comes from.

Oh, the pope is the Pontifex Maximus, the man, the one Máximo max duplicator, which adds that extra for some irony when you talk about Jenny McCarthy pontificating.

Uh huh.

So some of the standard examples of the phenomenon we're referring to here come from entertainment. So, yeah, Jenny McCarthy talking about vaccines causing autism or Bill Maher slamming Western medicine. But we're also going to try to touch on people who actually are experts in one technical field who give their opinion about topics outside of their area of expertise. So I'll start out. Masimo, you asked a bunch of questions in the teaser for this episode around this general topic. So to frame this discussion, I organized them a little bit.

I think they fall into three categories. First, why do celebrities talk about things they don't have expertise in? Second, why are they given a platform to speak about these issues? And third, finally, why do people listen to them and why are they influenced by them? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question.

Probably we should start with a little bit of a couple of examples, because as you were saying earlier, there are different categories of this phenomenon. So we go, for instance, from somebody at one extreme. Let me put these two people in the same sentence. Jenny McCarthy and Stephen Hawking.

Stephen Hawking, I guess so, because I think the first time they've been in the same sentence together, possibly so.

I think that there are good bookends to this continuum that we're going to be talking about that obviously Jenny McCarthy is famous for her anti vaccination campaign. So she's convinced because she has an autistic child who became autistic after being vaccinated, she is convinced that modern medical science is wrong and she's correct.

That is a connection. There's a causal connection between vaccination and and and now, as probably most of our listeners know, there is, in fact, no evidence at all for this connection. The the only paper that presented allegedly any evidence of this sort of was published about a decade ago.

It was was retracted by the journal. The paper was based on fraudulent data. There has been plenty of research that has been done since that, in fact, there's found no link whatsoever. So as far as medical science is concerned, there is no link or at least there is absolutely no evidence or link, even though people have looked at it very hard. Nonetheless, we have a situation where about 40 percent of Americans at this point are seriously considering not vaccinating their children, which, of course, could potentially be resulting into a health care catastrophe over the next several years now.

Jenny McCarthy is a clear example, somebody who literally doesn't know what she's talking about. She has absolutely no technical background in medical research, in biology or anything like that. She is speaking out of a single example. She's committing one of the most elementary logical fallacies the postdoc ever go up there after this, therefore, because of that.

So this seems to be to me that that is a clear case where any sensible person will simply look at her claims and say, OK, that woman is OK and we just need to ignore them. Ignore her. Of course, as you know, as you pointed out, people don't ignore in fact, plenty of people are more than happy to follow her lead, whatever it may go.

Now, at the opposite end of that spectrum is somebody like Stephen Hawking. And I think we mentioned in the past year his latest book, which, of course is about cosmology, starts out, I think just the second sentence or the second paragraph with a complete out of hand dismissal of the entire field of philosophy on the ground, that it hasn't made any any contribution to science over the last several decades.

Now, here is somebody who, again, does not actually have any technical expertise in the field.

And Stephen Hawking is, if not a philosopher and who, because of his position as a celebrity of sorts and not the same kind of celebrity that Jenny McCarthy is, but certainly a celebrity of sorts.

And, you know, the guy who sells a lot of books, he has also a reputation, well-deserved reputation as a scientist, makes a comment that is demonstrably, at the very least, questionable. You can't say that that the comment is false in the same sense in which Jenny McCarthy's comment is false, right? Because it's a matter of opinion. First of all, whether philosophy or any other field is relevant or interesting, that's a matter of opinion.

But by the fact that I said I don't think philosophy has anything to contribute anymore because it has been useless to science. That comment makes very clear that he's making a category mistake in a sense, in the sense that follows up the point of philosophy is not to solve scientific questions. So that would be like saying we should do away with literary criticism or painting or or music because it hasn't made any contribution to science. Well, if you were if anybody were to make that kind of comment, you would be laughed out of court for reasons similar to the ones that I think Stephen Hawking should be laughed out of court in that case.

Now, that said, however, it is at the opposite extreme because, as I said, this is a new situation. First of all, it's much more esoteric. We're talking about the relationship between science and philosophy. It's debatable. It's not based on matters of fact. And yet I think that those are on the same those two examples aren't on the same continuum because we are in both cases talking about somebody who is clearly making offhand comments about things that he or she does not know pretty much anything about.

Hmm. OK, I don't want to get too bogged down in the Stephen Hawking example too early on.

But but I say I read that example in the teaser that you wrote and I saw the quote you were referring to in Stephen Hawking's latest book. And I just I can't get behind the idea that he's making a category error. I mean, of course, with some with respect to some friends of philosophy, most branches of philosophy, it would not their point is not to stop scientific questions, but I thought it was clear from context that Hawking was talking about the kinds of philosophy that are trying to answer questions about the fundamental nature of the universe, which I mean, OK, so I went to the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy page on Metaphysics and pretty much verbatim the questions discussed there are does space extend infinitely in every direction?

Is space a substance or a mirror system of relations between things? Are the past and future as real in the same sense as that in which the present is real? Why does space have three dimensions and not for seven? And these are these are all questions about the nature of the universe and their questions, which are central to a lot of physicists work. Right.

So it doesn't seem like a category are to me for Stephen Hawking to say that. But philosophers are this kind of philosophy is trying to answer questions about the nature of the universe and hasn't really contributed much recently.

But first of all, he was not talking about metaphysics specifically. He was talking about philosophy.

But then I was not using a specific enough word.

No, that's like making the mistake a mistake in biology.

With science, it's it's a big mistake. And it's a mistake that an intellectual that the caliber of of our kids shouldn't be making, particularly when writing a book about for the general public that has, in fact, nothing to do with philosophy. That's my first objection.

The second objection is actually if you read recent literature and metaphysics philosophers, you do metaphysics do, in fact take quite a bit from science.

They take from the understanding they don't give to science. That is not true either, because there is a lot of metaphysics, for instance, of of time travel. That is the result of collaborations between mathematicians, physicists, theoretical physicists and philosophers. Because the fact is, as you probably know, that there are interesting paradoxes that have logical paradoxes as far as time travel is concerned, that a paddock's is not going to be solved by physics.

It's going to be informed by our understanding of, say, time, which, of course, has to be the result of our understanding of physics. But whether time travel is physically possible or not, it presents its separate categories of problems, such as logical problems, which I think are the perfect example of how science and philosophy work together.

So, no, I'm not going to be I'm not going to be able to grant Stephen Hawking much of a leeway.

Now, that's fine. I just wanted to register. Yes, an objection. But let's move on it.

But but but that's but your point is interesting, because as you can just as you just demonstrated, we can have a reasonable discussion about how far off the Mark Hawkins was, in my opinion, obviously, is he was way off the mark, in your opinion, perhaps a little less. But we can have effective, reasonable discussion and reasonable disagreement about that. I don't think the two of us can have a reasonable disagreement about how far off Jenny McCarthy is.

Right. Or, for instance, to pick one of our producers. They were the example, Bill Maher.

Now, Bill Maher is an interesting one because, you know, so he's a comedian, of course, as a sort of a background, but he's become a social commentator, just like many other comedians have done in their career. And in fact, I think that's a perfectly fine role, because if you think about it, being a comedian means that you apply your sense of humour to situations and often are, in fact to do with politics or social issues and so on.

Sports so becoming. A commentator, social commentator in the sort of light sense of the term, I think it's perfectly fine right now. I happen to actually agree with a lot of Bill Maher's political opinions. Sometimes I disagree. But even if you agree or disagree with his political opinions, you can see that those are considered usually consider opinions. You can have a reasonable disagreement along the lines of the ones the two of us just had about asking what you cannot possibly have.

A reasonable disagreement is when Bill Maher goes off the deep end and rejects the entire the entirety of Western medicine and thinks that he's not going to get vaccinated against anything because he doesn't want other people. It doesn't want, quote, the government to put extraneous substances in in his blood circulation. That is idiotic. And it what baffles me is that a person that is otherwise very intelligent by any reasonable definition of intelligent can in fact make that sort of completely against the fact sort of statement.

That's what I think it's the most baffling part of these of these questions, although that's not particular to celebrities.

That's baffling question applies to humanity in general. It does. The case of subbies, of course, it comes with more responsibility because they have more access to the public. Sure.

I do think we should probably separate out the question of whether a celebrity has background and has his knowledge about a subject from whether we feel OK with them speaking about it in the public, because there are definitely celebrities that are not experts and in whatever cause they've taken up. But we're fine with it because they happen to get it right, like the celebrity promoting the fight against global warming.

I think Leonardo DiCaprio has set up a foundation for that and he's hosted a couple of documentaries about it and that sort of thing. And he's no expert in climate science any more than an expert in medicine. That's correct. That's fine.

And there are plenty of celebrities who are involved in social issues. For instance, you know, political issues. Even George Clooney has done a lot of work in Sudan and Chad in that area of Africa, and he's done good work.

But in fact, in that particular case, I happen to have so much direct knowledge of that kind of work because I know people that have worked with him and he has done the intelligent thing.

That is, he picked a cause because he wanted to do some good. And then you went to the experts in particular, you went to the organization called the International Rescue Committee, which has a large presence. It's a humanitarian organization, disaster relief organization that has a huge presence in Sudan that has operated there for many years. And he went Clooney went to them to say, OK, I have money and I have access. What should I do?

That is the intelligent thing to do.

So definitely this this discussion should not be taken as a sort of across the board criticism of the idea of a celebrity, for one thing, and certainly not even of the idea that celebrities, you know, shouldn't talk about the about whatever issue they feel like talking about.

The question is, how should should they do it?

And when they do it wrongly, why do people pay attention?

Right.

So let's let's back up a little bit and talk about why they're being given this platform in the first place, because, sure, sometimes celebrities will just, you know, tweet to their followers, whatever their opinion is, on something. So that's not they're not being approached there. But oftentimes they're you know, they're asked questions by journalists or they're invited on a talk show and ask questions about subjects they don't know anything about.

So, I mean, I know that people will often say they don't understand why celebrities are asked for their opinion on on topics. They have no background.

And I I would say the answer's largely simple, that they're asked for their opinion, for the same reason that people ask their friends for their opinion on things that like if you're interested in someone, if you like them, if you if you're familiar with them and you find them entertaining, you're often interested in their opinions, even if you know they're not an expert. So then I guess the question is really where their opinions influential as opposed to why are people interested in hearing their opinions?

Now, that's a good point. I think you're absolutely right. The the whole idea of having a celebrity interviewed on especially in these formats that are becoming more and more popular, where the celebrity goes to a show and you or she sits down on a chair or couch or something. So the whole environment looks like a chat among friends. Right. And so the idea is, of course, that the audience is brought into the same chat and we're all friends.

And while listening to each other. Yes, you're absolutely right. I think that is what's going on there. But of course, I assume that it's not a rational thing to do. If we were having a chat among friends and somebody said to me, by the way, you shouldn't be vaccinating your daughter. And I ask him, well, do you have any background in medicine? And he says, absolutely not. But I know the science better than the doctors.

I would say, well, sorry, but, you know, we're friends, but we're going to I'm going to stay away from that kind of silly advice. So the question is, as you were saying, why is it that so many people. Why it's not why celebrities are asked their opinions is why is it that so many people seem to take that opinion seriously, even though it's pretty obvious that the person in question does not actually have the technical know how to provide a knowledgeable opinion?

Everybody's entitled to an opinion, but there's a difference between being entitled to their opinion and then following somebody's opinion just because. On what grounds? That's right.

Maybe now would be a good time to bring in a comment from one of our commenters named Graham, who actually questioned the notion that celebrities actually do influence people, that the endorsement by a celebrity of an idea is convincing to people to believe that idea.

So Graham says, I'm not sure how much celebrities really convince people to believe in anything.

I think their main function in promoting ridiculous ideas is just increased exposure. For example, I doubt anyone thinks even unconsciously, Jenny McCarthy believes vaccines cause autism. So it's probably true. Celebrities just happen to be in a beneficial position of having media attention so they can talk about whatever they want. And there's a certain segment of the population that's receptive to the ideas. They're just increasing the overall number of people that get exposed to the idea.

And what's so interesting point, but I kind of disagree with that.

Well, I think the important distinction to make, at least, is to keep in mind, because it's true that even if people weren't actually influenced by a celebrity endorsement of an idea, you'd still see support for that idea go up after a celebrity endorsement merely from the fact that people were introduced to the idea. So the question of interest is whether support for the idea goes up more because the celebrity endorsed it as compared to, say, if the same number of viewers are a non celebrity, endorse the idea.

I don't know if that's possible to get at experimentally.

But, you know, that's a good question for social scientists. And I don't know what data, if any, are out there about this, but this is perhaps pessimistic impression that if a celebrity endorses a reasonable notion, that notion isn't going to carry as much as with the public, assuming it's not just unrelated, it's actually negative.

That's right. That's right. But this state is basically saying, well, here's why.

I think that something along the lines of what our commander said is correct.

That is clearly somebody has a platform, whatever that person says is bound to have a broader audience than if your neighbor said it.

But I also think that there is a particular tendency, both by celebrities themselves, of course, not everyone, but by by a good enough large enough number, and especially on the part of the public to present and therefore and to buy in in the case of the public up notions that are contrary to whatever the establishment is supposed to be, it's perceived to be, in this case, the scientific establishment.

So your doctors says that you should vaccinate. And here comes these these personal experiments. Person says, no, forget your doctor is in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry, therefore you shouldn't and believe it. And people seem to relish that sort of conspiracy based rejection of authority, even though, of course, they don't seem to realize that they are, in fact, making an argument for authority, of authority, of a different kind and just believing it non-technical.

You grounded celebrity as opposed to their doctors. But it's still an argument from authority.

Right. And I think that's related to the question of why are celebrities given this platform when they are? Because ideas that are, as you were saying, contrary to sort of the common wisdom, the established wisdom, are just more interesting. And so the media is much more likely to promote those and to splash those onto the headlines of their magazines and their talk shows.

That's right. Which which goes back to the idea that this is the kind of the classical situation where everybody's a culprit. The celebrities themselves, of course, should be much more careful about what they say and how the public should be a little more grounded in critical thinking. There goes an optimistic statement. And but but it's also the media. Right? So the media should be ideally the media supposed to be the filter between the nonsense and and or the authorities on the one hand and the public and on the other hand, more and more larger segment of the media don't play that role.

They play, in fact, in some sense, the opposing role that they go fishing for the most absurd notion. And they present it just because it is absurd, just because it is unusual, just because it is sensationalistic.

So I want to go back to Graham's point that people aren't actually thinking, even unconsciously, that Jenny McCarthy believes this must be true. I think there is actually some evidence against that idea. Or in other words, there's psychological research that suggests that that that sort of thing does happen, that that people are influenced unconsciously, even if they would. Explicitly say that this person isn't an expert and I shouldn't believe them. So there's this well known cognitive bias called the halo effect, in which the perception of one trait of a person or of a thing is influenced by your perception of a totally different trait of theirs.

So the classic example is that we judge attractive people to be more intelligent, which this experimental result has been confirmed again and again.

I always thought you were very bright all along. Just the Halo thing anyway. Necessary. OK, well, that was funny.

So anyway, there's a bunch of experiments that researchers have done where they show people photos of strangers and and the subjects judged the most, the more attractive people as being more skilled, more intelligent, more friendly and a bunch of other positive traits. So it shouldn't be surprising that celebrities who are far more attractive and glamorous than your typical person get a big kickback from the halo effect when they're talking about something even completely unrelated to their career.

Yeah, now that makes sense. That doesn't remind me of another effect that I often mentioned to my students in sort of critical thinking classes, which is I refer to it as the Nobel Syndrome and the Nobel sceneries. I've noticed many, many times over over many years that as soon as somebody wins the Nobel Prize, that person suddenly becomes an expert on almost anything.

And, you know, obviously, if somebody wins a Nobel Prize by all reasonable standards, that person is both accomplished and very, very intelligent. So I don't think there is an issue here, again, of Jenny McCarthy kind of type of situation.

But nonetheless, if you win the Nobel Prize in, say, particle physics, it seems to me silly of anybody to ask your opinion about, I don't know, world peace or politics or economics or anything, in fact, outside of quantum mechanics or whatever it is that you won the Nobel Prize in, you know, and yet that happens actually a lot of the times and in fact, a lot of Nobel winners go around giving sort of general lectures about things that are really not necessarily much to do with the specific research or topic for which they were awarded the Nobel.

I mean, the Nobel Peace Prize most of the time, especially in the sciences, certainly in the sciences, is a very specific kind of reward.

It's for a very specific piece of work that usually has very little sort of general implications outside of the very narrow field in which the Nobel is awarded. That's different, of course, in the case of Nobel, for nonscientific fields to some extent, although even there there is a fine, but particularly in the case of science based Nobel, it's just it's very bizarre. You listen to these people who are obviously intelligent, obviously articulate, talking about things of which they probably know nothing about.

No, it just occurred to me that this people's tendency, you know, the Nobel effect that you're describing is probably related to people's sense that there is this this underlying quantity, that that's just intelligence. It's not that there are different kinds of intelligence. It's just that there's this there's a name for that.

Social science researchers use intelligence agents and and that that other kinds of intelligence are just manifestations of this.

Think that's a good point. Actually, there is a good point. First of all, as you know, there is mounting evidence now in the social sciences and cognitive science is that, in fact, there are several different types of intelligence is of course, there is disagreement about how to measure them.

There's disagreement about how many types that there actually are and how distinct they are. I'm not so sure that I would call some of these types of intelligence intelligences. For instance, there there's talk of emotional intelligence. Yeah, OK.

So they could get the little figure. It is. Yes, exactly.

But I'm not even sure what it would mean to have an underlying single intelligence. Like I don't even know how you could test for that. You can test people on different tasks, but I guess you could test to see if they're all correlated. Right.

And that is exactly how the idea came about to begin with when people were administering intelligence IQ tests, intelligence questions. That's right. That's a fascinating history, which, by the way, it's working very well in in the classic book by Stephen Jay Gould. The measure of men and the origin of that test is interesting because it was introduced by Alfred Binay, a French researcher who's ironically whose objective was actually to identify young children who were lagging behind at school so that they could be helped.

Right.

And, of course, immediately, socially progressive. Right. Was social programs across the Atlantic and came to the United States, was used exactly the other way around, too, as to discriminate against people who were behind for whatever reason. Now, from there, the jump was very quick to assume that somehow IQ had a genetic basis, even though the evidence about that is very controversial, to say the least.

And then from there now and of course, people started to figure out whether they. There was a variety of tests by which you can measure allegedly IQ, and so there were different schools around you measure this way or that way and so on.

So people came up with this idea that perhaps these tests are correlated and the correlation is represented by these underlying factor, the fact that you were talking about earlier. Now, the way they went about it is they used something called factor analysis, which is a multiverse statistical technique which was invented for the purpose. It was invented precisely for these for this question of when you have a bunch of different variables that may or may not measure an underlying similar a similar variable, how can you establish that they do or they don't?

Now, the interesting thing was, of course, that if you measure people on on a variety of IQ scales and then you do a factor analysis, it turns out that you can effect this statistically a common factor.

But the problem is just an artifact of the statistical method, though I don't think that that we can take that as representing some real feature of your brain.

I agree.

But it's actually, I think, an artifact of the tests, not of the statistics. It's an additive and a test in the sense that IQ tests tend to be very similar. They tend to measure whatever they measure. They tend to be constructed in a very similar way. So it is no surprise that if you administer a bunch of tests that have essentially rather minor variations among themselves, people tend to score higher. If people score high, they tend to score high on all of them.

And if they score low, they score and all of them. That does not mean that what you're measuring is an underlying native intelligence.

Right, right, right. Let's bring this discussion back to the question of celebrities being asked for their opinions on things. There's one other psychological phenomenon that I thought was relevant to the issue. So it's related to the halo effect, but it's specifically about the social prestige of the person who's giving an opinion.

So actually, even before looking at the psychological research, you can you could already have guessed that prestige is convincing above and beyond attractiveness, even though celebrities tend to be attractive. If you look at the popular marketing technique of paying celebrities to endorse products. Right. That seems to work at least based on the fact that companies keep doing it. And in those cases, the audience actually knows explicitly that the celebrity is just being paid to endorse the product and they're still influenced to buy products from that company.

So you could imagine that when the celebrity seems to genuinely believe in the viewpoint that he or she is promoting, that the influence would be even stronger.

And there was a cool study in PLoS One recently called Prestige Effects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees, suggesting that this phenomenon is not unique to our particular section of the of the primate map. And so the researchers took a high ranking chimpanzee and a low ranking chimpanzee from the same troupe attempts.

Chimps have a very, very rigid, highly structured social structure, as I'm sure you know. So the researchers trained each of the two chimps to do a trek to collect plastic tokens that are lying around and to put them in a box in exchange for a treat. The trick was the same, but the high ranking chimps chimps box was polka dotted and the low ranking chimps box were striped. And the researchers returned the chimps to the troop and they set up these boxes and they observed what happened.

So the other chimps quickly learned to copy the trick, but they overwhelmingly preferred to put their tokens in the postdated box, which is the one that the high ranking chimp was putting tokens in, even though the reward that they got was the same, no matter which box they put the tokens in, the poker dotted box ended up with 70 percent of the tokens. And then the researchers repeated this experiment and another troop and the figure was even higher. It was the high ranking chimps box got 90 percent of the tokens.

So so the takeaway here is that we copy each other, but we're much more likely to copy prestigious members of our troops than lowly ones, which does make sense evolutionarily. Right, because the prestigious primates in the troupe are more likely to be the ones who are bigger, stronger or more powerful, or they're they're the ones doing something right. Like they're the ones with the good tracking skills or fighting skills or something. So it would make sense to copy them.

And with modern day celebrities, if they're the highest prestige people in our society, then I think it's quite possible that maybe we just aren't making a distinction based on what their procedures for and whether it's relevant to the specific issue at hand. You're right.

It does make sense. Now, we also need to remember that there is a cultural component there, because as you just mentioned in our society and when we're giving the example of of the of the chimps, which I think it is very appropriate in this discussion, for some reason, I was reminded of one of the observation that I made when I was very young and I was just beginning to look into advertisements by American companies. So at the time I was living in Italy and I was into astronomy, amateur astronomy.

And so I was shot. For a telescope, and it turns out that I was comparing advertisements for telescopes that were published in an Italian magazine, an Italian magazine about astronomy and then Sky and Telescope, which is, of course, the premier magazine of astronomy for amateur astronomers in the United States. And I still remember this was, you know, 30 plus years ago. I still remember very clearly when my friends were making these these obvious observation, obvious comment that if you looked at the Italian magazine, despite the reputation of Italians when it comes to advertisements and flashing pictures on the covers of magazines, I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm sure you don't.

The Italian magazine had the telescope, right? Just telescope. Of course. It was in a very good light and color and all that sort of stuff. But there were technical specifications and it was just the telescope. You looked at the magazine have girls.

I'm sure they have some fun, you know. No, no, they did.

They had these beautiful young women just, you know, draped over it. So I was getting and I thought, what what is going on here? Why would I buy a telescope? Because there is an attractive woman. And now, of course, having lived in the United States for more than 20 years, I know that that's the way it works. But it was a very strange observation. So we need to take into account these candidates, these issues of the cultural differences that, you know, celebrity, even celebrity culture might work differently in different countries.

And in this particular case, and I just brought up the example is of a comparison between two Western countries, but I'm sure the differences are even more so if we were to compare. Societies are more and more widely divergent from a cultural perspective.

But the chimpanzee example is very interesting as well, because that tells you how deep the roots actually of these kind of psychological behaviors is.

Right? Right. And I think the another important thing to keep in mind about these effects, the halo effect in this prestige effect, I don't know. That's what I have been calling it. I don't know if that's the official name.

But but the important thing to keep in mind about them is that they they work implicitly rather than explicitly. So people may not even be aware that they're being influenced by those factors. So I I saw a poll recently from CBS that kind of made me roll my eyes. They ask people whose voices do you trust on global warming? And the results were that people claimed to trust scientists a lot more than politicians and celebrities. And the article that was citing this poll concluded, quote, Social research, therefore suggests that star power may not help much when you want to persuade people to change their minds or behavior, end quote.

That's not true. And it's not to all that celebrities don't influence them or they may very well believe that celebrities don't influence them, but that does not mean that celebrities don't influence them. That's right. My problem with a lot of polling and focus group research across the board that what people say about their behavior and motivations is just not a very accurate guide.

And a smart social scientist knows how to tell the difference. I mean, you can you can actually test you can do experiments to test whether whether there is, in fact, a congruence between what people say they're going to do and people and what actually people do.

But now the thing about science is interesting, because in research does show that if you ask a question in the abstract to the American people, science as an abstract idea does have it actually quite a lot of cash in American culture.

It does in the sense that people trusted people, trust and respect that it's a respected institution to respect the type of activity. But then you ask them, you know, do you accept human made climate change or do you accept evolution? And all of a sudden say, well, I respect science, but not that not that part. And if I do, they will even tell you.

Oh, but that's not good science, as you say, actually.

Yeah. This is the No true Scotsman. It's exactly the no true scientist fallacy. No true scientist would make a claim like that.

And this goes back decades and decades. I was just before coming here to tape this episode. I was reading a book on the on the ideological uses of biology over the last from from it's called From the Car to Dawkins. It's an interesting collection of essays. And the essay that was reading Coming Out is by on Numbers, who is an historian, I believe, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has written a lot about creationism. And so each chapter is about the history of creationism.

And it's amazing how as early as the 1910s and 20s, creationists were saying that they absolutely respect science. It's evolution, that it's not good because clearly that's bad science. Right. So the strategy goes back to at least a century in that specific and specific applications where things change, the more they seem.

You know, I think also sometimes the reason why celebrities are given a platform to talk about a field, they're not experts then, is that sometimes it's not actually obvious to a layperson and say to the editor of a magazine or a TV show, which fields are actually relevant to which other fields. So, for example, if you had an empirical economist's comment on research in psychology. That could be perfectly legitimate because the research methods are similar enough that the Economist would be qualified to judge whether the psychologist had used good methodology and good statistical analysis and so on.

But a case in which there's not as much overlap as many people would think is between climate scientists and meteorologists. So, as you know, meteorologists are constantly being asked to give their opinion on global warming. And actually a lot of them have said they think it's a scam. But the science of meteorology is totally different from climate science. It deals with the short term changes in weather. So they're looking at air pressure and water vapor and temperature interactions over the course of days, whereas the models the climate scientists used involve these very different specialized techniques and modeling software, and they're predicting these macro scale global changes in climate over the long term.

But I think it's an understandable mistake for laypeople to make. They think, oh, a meteorologist, they study weather and the atmosphere. They're qualified to weigh in on the subject. And that's why you get these unfortunate articles talking about all the weather experts that don't believe global warming is happening and it threatens to discredit the fields unjustifiably.

Now, the question, of course, and I think a couple of three of our commenters did raise this is what are we going to do about it?

And I didn't bring that up because I don't think you do. Well, I'm not sure that I have good answers. But, for instance, there is something that I found out a couple of years ago when I was doing research for for nonsense and steals the book that came out last year. There's a chapter in there about celebrities. And so I did a little bit of research about not just in the United States, but generally across the Western culture, let's say, how this phenomenon is dealt with.

And I found out that there is an interesting group in the United Kingdom who has come up with this novel idea. I'm not sure how effective it has been, but it is a novel idea. What they did was they they set up a hotline for celebrities only. So if you are a celebrity and you want and you're asked to go on television or radio or whatever, and you want to talk about something because it's dear to you. So let's let's take a positive case.

One of those that you mentioned you were mentioning earlier. So celebrity that wants to do some good in on behalf of, say, climate change. Right. But they don't know anything about climate change. Well, then these group set up these this hotline. They can call the celebrity, can call the number. And the other side there is a member of these essentially skeptic organization who will, in fact, put him in touch with one or more experts in that particular area.

And the experts will give them the celebrities, the talking points, and they will answer the celebrities question so that the celebrity is, in fact, a little better equipped about talking about what he or she wants to talk about. Now, I doubt, unfortunately, that somebody like Jenny McCarthy would actually, of her own accord, call a skeptic hotline before going on television and talking about autism. But that is an interesting point, because at the very least, it makes it puts the burden in some sense on the other side, because if if the group in question started, of course, sending out press releases to the press.

And so in some sense, you also put the the media, the press on alert and saying, look, guys, a lot of these people are actually saying, no, I'm talking nonsense and there are ways to check about this.

And presumably a more effective way to do this is to do something like the Center for Inquiry has been doing for years now, a media watch or, you know, set up so that the media have themselves a one or two or more reference points to go and check if they are actually doing a story. Now, of course, that assumes we're talking about serious media like, you know, National Public Radio or The New York Times and not Oprah, Oprah's TV show.

But nonetheless, I do agree with the point you were raising earlier, that often the media themselves don't know where to turn when it comes to to expert opinion. So that's certainly one thing that can be done. Now, one of our commenters, I believe, raised the point that, well, you know, you can teach critical thinking all you want, but if people want to believe what they want to believe, they will do it for emotional reasons.

Certainly that is the case in a lot of denialism and a lot of the denial of evolution. It's clearly rooted in religious emotion. The denial of of the connection between vaccines and autism is rooted in personal people, people, personal experiences with their children, as well as the general distrust with Big Pharma and that sort of stuff.

So critical thinking, teaching by itself certainly isn't going to solve the problem. Or do I maintain that it would certainly be an improvement on what we have now?

A perhaps more immediately efficacious way to do it is something that I've seen brought up recently precisely within the discussion about global warming, which is why don't we play by the same rules? Why don't we on the skeptics side also use celebrities, go out and seek celebrities to make them our. The carriers of our message, instead of having the skeptic or the scientist who usually are inept at talking to the to the press, they are usually not particularly good looking.

They're usually not particularly whatever tall, whatever that causes the halo effect.

Why don't we pick, on the other hand, approach celebrities and make them do and ask them to do an emotional appeal?

Now, the problem with that, of course, is a lot of scientists and skeptics shy away from that technique because they think that that is manipulation, manipulating the public. It's you know, you're not convincing people for the right reasons. You're convincing them through psychological means while my friends, let's wake up, because that's the way it works.

In the short term, I think that there can be a two two pronged strategy where you can have a short term effect by emotional appeal, as long as it's justified by the fact that it's based on solid understanding of the science and then that bring that gains you timed so that you can actually get people involved in long term educational programs.

I like it. It's a little bit like one of my old favourite plays, Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the.

Yes, the brilliant writer and thinker who isn't all that pretty to look at, writes the scripts which are then read to the lovely lady by the handsome.

But but did the man, let's call it the Serono project, ask our our listeners and skeptics organizations to consider this seriously?

Because I think it might work actually to some extent. All right.

Let's wrap up this part of the rationally speaking podcast and move on to the rationally speaking text.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start as usual with Julia Spik.

Thanks, Massimo. Mine is actually a negative pick this week. I just read.

Well, actually, I read half of Jonah Lares book and the whole thing.

I yeah, I try to give a book a fair, a fair chance, but I put it down after about halfway through. Sorry.

The book is called Proust Was a Neuroscientist and the idea of the book is that a bunch of modernist artists and writers actually discovered important facts about how our brains work well before scientists discovered those facts. So, for example, Leor points to Virginia Woolf style of writing in which it's very fragmented. She writes the internal monologues of characters as being sort of these multiple loosely connected streams of consciousness. And he says that she, quote, knew that the self was too profound to be found.

Well, that sounds very profound.

The whole book is written like that, Masimo, another example here. But he points to the philosophy, the personal philosophy of the novelist George Eliot, who wrote that she believed in free will and she believed that people's personalities aren't predetermined by their genetics. And Lehrer says that, quote, the sprawling realism of Eliot's novels ended up discovering our reality. We are imprisoned by no genetic or social physics.

So I would say we're imprisoned by both factions.

Basically, as far as I can tell, what he did is he started with the developments in psychology, in neuroscience over recent decades. And and then he just went through modernist art and literature and he searched for artists whose whose vision sort of loosely echoed something that turned out to be true about the brain. But that doesn't mean the artists discovered those facts.

First, the parallels he's drawing are really fuzzy and handwaving. And second, they may have believed certain things, but it's not like they had any solid evidence for them. Lots of people believe lots of things, but we don't typically say that they know those things unless they have some good evidence for believing them.

And what this reminded me of was, do you know that book, The Door of Physics? Yes. Yeah. So this was a really popular book. It was in the 70s.

And so, yeah, it was a little while ago and it argued it was biophysicist, I believe Capra. And he argued that Eastern mysticism had actually discovered the truth of quantum physics long before scientists got to them. And he trots out all these examples of mystical texts talking about connections between human consciousness and reality, which, of course, is identical to the way the probability wavefunction collapses when it's observed by a conscious being. Anyway, the point is, if you're willing to take enough artistic license in your interpretation, you can prove that any artist, artist or mystic discovered some branch of science.

Right. And in fact, when you were mentioning the book earlier, I was thinking precisely the type of physics really.

You should you should read a little bit of of of the journal. But just to get a sample of it, not to mention which the book is really obnoxious and its tone towards science, the whole thing is, is dripping with this attitude of those arrogant, soulless scientists. They think they can explain everything, but they can't. So, for example, Leor says, scientists say we're nothing but illume of electric cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world.

This is why we need art. Science doesn't forget that we have subjective experience.

It's just not their job to portray those experiences the way Art does. It's what we were calling only a category mistake.

Yes, actually, that's what I thought of when I was reading it. And he keeps talking about science as if it's opposed to art, the same way romantic poets like Keats and Shelley did.

So even the language he uses, for example, neuroscientists had had have ransacked the brain, but they have not yet found its source ransacked.

Stores like they're destroying the mystery by searching for the sort of thing. Really. I can see why you got upset anyway.

Well, my hometown. That's OK. Well, you give your pick. My pick is mostly positive. I think it's a good book that that people are interested in in certain things. As I mentioned a moment you should read, although it's not an unqualified sort of endorsement, the book is Science Fiction and Philosophy From Time Travel to Superintelligence, edited by Susan Schneider. Now, it is one of these books that has become pretty popular over the last several years, that news, pop, pop, pop culture phenomena, science fiction movies, TV series and so on and so forth to introduce the general public to philosophical issues.

And I think that most of these books are actually fairly successful, some more than others. I contributed to a couple of them. I wrote a chapter for a book on the philosophy of The Daily Show, which was based on the Socratic method. And and then I contributed a chapter that still has to come out, actually will come out sometime later this year, hopefully to a book called The Philosopher Schellekens, which is all about logical thinking, very close to that one.

So that's. Now, this one is about science fiction, the reason I got interested in this is because I'm designing a new course at Lehman College on philosophy and science fiction. And so I think that I think that this is a good a good way to start doing that sort of thing. So the way the book works is that it is divided in sections. Each section with several chapters, of course, in the sections deal with major topics. So the first section, for instance, is about could I be in a matrix or a computer simulation?

And so it's about virtual world. The second one is, you know, do I have free will? And what is the nature of persons? The third part is about mind, both natural and artificial and possibly hybrid minds. The fourth section is an ethical and political issues, and the fifth one is in space and time, particular space time travel.

And most of the essays are very good. Some of them are more controversial than others. Some of them, of course, I had my own opinions about why the other might be wrong, but all of them are thought provoking. They all refer to where set at the beginning of each section. The book lists a number of movies that are loosely connected to the topics treated by the chapters. So one can watch one or more of the movies and then have a discussion informed by the chapter.

So it's a very it's very fun, informative book. I recommend it, although again with a grain of salt, because, of course, the individual essays are, you know, are sort of varying quality, but otherwise the topic is very interesting and it's very well done. So again, the book is Science Fiction and Philosophy From Time to time travel to superintelligence.

Very cool. I hope that the that at least one of the essays covers the question of whether Arnold Schwarzenegger was actually in the dream world in total recall the whole time or not. I really want to know.

Total Recall is listed as one of the movies. All right. We're all out of time. So this concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.