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 Rationalise, speaking the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Today is another one of our very special one hour, all Q&A episodes.

All right. Yeah. Where we entertain tricky questions from our listeners and readers.

So let's jump right in. Let's start with a question from Graham, who asks if you had the opportunity to add one class to general education curriculum with the goal of promoting critical thinking, what type of class would it be and why? Logic, philosophy, statistics, etc, critical thinking.

OK, you want to talk about what you would teach in this book?

Yeah, I actually do teach a course. Well, that's easy for you and well, I mean, there's a reason why I teach that class because I do think it's important.

And in fact, one of the first things I did when I moved to Lehman College at the City University in New York was to try to move that class from a 200 level to 100 level courses so that more people thinking and in fact, it's now one of the general distribution fulfills one of the general education distributions, as you should. I think you should actually be mandatory. But so the reason I answered critical thinking is because it does actually include all of the above is standard class and critical thinking.

You know, people different people think of different ways and using different textbooks. But typically it does introduce a minimum introduction of logic, both formal and informal logics of formal fallacies and informal fallacies. There's a little background in philosophy, but there is also quite a bit about statistics. I spent, you know, several class periods talking about basic probability theory, basic ways of understanding, analysing graphing data, because those are all the ways in which people get fooled by misunderstanding graphs when they're published in the media or misunderstanding statistics and probabilities.

And we talked about a little bit about the basics of the scientific method, the difference between, you know, Blaen and double-blind experimental design, for instance, the idea that, you know, scientific findings are provisional, that the idea of sample size, for instance, and the difference between the sample size and a publish all of these basic concepts of what I would consider philosophical and scientific literacy that are necessary in order to sort of to understand a little better what it is that happens when we're bombarded by all these sort of information from from a variety of sources that we don't know what to make.

That's the whole the whole point of the way I introduce it to my students, because, you know, it's hard to get students interested in something called critical thinking typically. And for me to understand why they wouldn't.

Yes, it's hard.

I'm not being sarcastic. I have a hard time relating to people who wouldn't be like, oh, critical thinking, I hear you.

But unfortunately, that is the empirical observation by people are sufficient. So the first thing I tell them in the first set to be, you know, first class is this is a course in bullshit detection.

That's a nice way to frame it.

It makes them feel like savvy in the know. Exactly. You know, who wants to be taken advantage of? Nobody. So here's a class of where you need to learn to to decrease the chances that somebody's going to take advantage of you.

That's good. But your choice. Well, so the the techniques and the concepts that I was thinking about have a lot in common with what you were describing.

I, I also wanted to include maybe you do and just didn't mention it, but I wanted to include some basic psychology in there and discussion of cognitive biases like the confirmation bias, for example, where you, you know, tend to notice more and seek out information that confirms what you already what you already know and just ways that that your attention can you know, you can have selective attention and not notice things just because, you know, people attribute far too much reliability to eyewitness testimony, for example, because they're not aware of just how fallible are our brains are.

Richard Wiseman has written some great stuff about this. There's tons of studies.

I when I had been thinking about this idea, I'd been envisioning the courses sort of in their traditional divisions, you know, logic, philosophy, psychology, statistics and so on.

And I was just thinking about how I would I would shift the emphasis in each class from the way they're traditionally taught. So obviously in logic, I would want to spend a lot of time on informal, logical fallacies and getting students in the habit of actually being able to recognise them.

So I'd want to I want to get them, you know, every week to have to bring in some example of a logical fallacy or like a story of how they committed they noticed themselves or someone else committing a logical fallacy just so that they get practice, you know, identifying these concepts in the wild, so to speak. Because I think it's so easy for people to compartmentalize. They learn something in school. They get an essay on the test, but they don't think about it outside the context of the class.

In my class, we play a game called Spot The Logical Fallacy. So nice.

Where do your examples come when I take clips? From the evening news, from different different stations, and I show them the same station covering the same item and used to say three three different stations covering the same item news. And then we played this game, the first student and gets the first logical fallacy and can't even name it gets gets credit, which is something, of course, that gets people interested.

And yeah, that's great. The amazing thing is that it takes only a few seconds to spot one very natural habitats.

I was curious why you said you would teach formal logic, because that was something that I had been thinking could could be not dispensed with entirely, but seriously under emphasized, you know, at the expense of the actual logical policies that come up in every day.

Well, I would agree that it certainly is not a big part of a critical thinking course, but at the very least, the formal logical fallacies like, well, for instance, the the common misunderstanding of, you know, if if X, then why not Y, therefore not X, that sort of thing.

Yeah, that those are the those actually come up in everyday life.

They come up because I wasn't thinking of it as a fallacy, but it is, it is from Filoni and so that somebody does come up so only Aliant as far as those are concerned. Yeah. Yeah.

With philosophy I believe students should have some practice evaluating philosophical arguments, defending them and, and, and finding weaknesses in them. And there are a few key philosophical practices that I think that I've found hugely useful outside of philosophy, like the importance of defining your terms precisely and noticing when other people's terms are not defined precisely, or when they're using terms in different ways from how you're using them.

And the idea of dissolving a question, which we were talking about in the last episode, instead of trying to solve it by showing how it's incoherent or ill defined, I think those are a really useful unpacking.

An argument is another concept that is useful in introductory philosophy classes.

Well, for me, I think that that's right. A nice repugnance. It's usually called so nice mental image is right.

But by unpacking an argument, what is meant is, you know, somebody can can give what it looks like an argument, a simple argument for someone.

Right. You know, and abortion is wrong because you fill in the blanks.

But it turns out that that simple answer actually implies a number of assumptions about it implies a number of other sub arguments that you can unpack. That is you can take it out of the box and say, well, baggage, the baggage that you unpack. Exactly. And so you can say, well, wait a minute.

Now, what you said originally actually breaks down into three or four different other concepts. And of those, let's start talking about the first one and see if you make sense or not.

So that sort of carefully open up and make evident the complexity behind some arguments that might otherwise sound very simple. Cool.

Know that. Yeah, that's absolutely useful.

And so sort of general and broad that I wasn't I couldn't see it because I was in it to speak. But and then just lastly for statistics, I was a statistics major.

And obviously I think it's woefully underemphasized.

I mean, at every stage of education should be taught in high school and it should be mandatory. I can think of a number of things that I would sacrifice if I had to to get statistics in there. But but I do think that at least for the purpose of developing critical thinking in the general population, there doesn't need to be nearly as much emphasis on the actual doing of the math and the derivations and the proofs.

I mean, I would emphasize there's a number of concepts I think are incredibly important and that you can get without having to do more than a little bit of basic math. The difference between correlation causation and the idea that you don't know that X causes Y just because they're associated, it could be the other way around, or they could both be caused by some other variable. The fallacy of of generalizing from anecdotal evidence. I would want to make sure they understood the concept of statistical distribution just because I find that a lot of people have trouble with the idea.

Like if you tell them the means of two populations are different, they think that everyone in one population is higher than everyone and the other population and so on.

And also under what conditions you should expect a distribution to be normally distributed because it's such an overused concept.

Yes. Go back to your first on the list.

The difference between causation and correlation, it is so crucial and yet is so under appreciated by people. So the way I introduce the topic to my students is to show them with a graph that there is a absolutely perfect correlation between my age and the expansion of the universe, but that even my ego isn't large enough to actually make me say that I caused the expansion of the universe or vice versa.

And the fact that the universe is expanding causes me to get older. There is a common cause.

It's actually controlling both. Of phenomena. So, yeah, those those are absolutely crucial, but all of those tend to be fat wrapped up into a sort of general critical thinking. All these, including the ones that you were talking about earlier, the behavioral the psychology stuff. So we go from there. Yeah. So, for instance, we go through these really nice video that was actually done at Kuney a few years ago. You know, in a class where suddenly somebody comes into the class and snatches a purse and then students are asked to describe that person.

Oh, wow, that's great. And then they're asked to recognize that person among a certain number of spinouts line up. And it turns out, of course, that it's actually remarkable.

90 percent of the students get at least one of the crucial details wrong and just crucial details like like white hair color, the skin, the length of the the hair, what the guy was was wearing when he got into the car. It's amazing.

And I think it was a well lit class and they were they were stationary and he didn't, like, come up behind them until he was very, very visible.

And so that gets across the point that, well, white witness testimony, although we psychologically, intuitively think that it is the the highest, most high standard of evidence.

Right. In fact, it's one of the lowest. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

Let's go on to a question from Kevin, who asked us for our thoughts on the merits and demerits of Analytica versus Continental philosophy.

Oh, boy. Yeah, I sort of touched on this before, but do you want to just briefly explain the difference?

Well, let's let's see. Historically, the difference between Analytica and Continental philosophy is actually a very recent continental philosophy that refers to a style style of doing philosophy that originated on the continent, meaning Europe, France and Germany, mostly France and Germany, versus analytic philosophy, which is something actually that that with that term involved even more recently than that, it's 20 20th century sort of thing.

And we're talking about people like Bertrand Russell Gilmore. And it's typical it started out in Britain and then the United States. Now, that said, so first of all, what is the major difference between the two? Well, the continental style is more sort of an essay style.

That's really not there is no rigorous argument. There isn't a these are the premises. These are my assumptions. And these are the conclusions that derive from here are the potential kind of arguments. And here's why they don't apply in these cases.

And it's more of an essay. It's a discursive essay. It's based on a lot of anecdotal information. It's based on, you know, there is an argument, obviously, because if you write something, presumably you're trying to make a point and you're trying to make a point by addressing reasons for why you think that is a good point. But it is more, more journalistic in style if you want to. In some sense, it can be very elaborate.

In is very indirect, I find. I mean, I have not looked at it. I looked at just enough to know that I didn't want to look at more. But the argumentation is often pretty and directly. They'll talk for a long time about various things without it really being obvious why they're talking about this. Right.

And there are good examples of it and not so good examples of it. I mean, probably I'm certainly I have to know as a disclaimer, I have to say that I'm much, much more sympathetic to the analytic tradition than than to the continental tradition. But within the tradition, for instance, Nietzsche over or Saat would be, I think, good examples. I mean, those are people that I can read for sure from our perspective and get something out of it.

A little less good examples, in my opinion, are people like Derrida and some, although not all, full cherished writings. So that's just to give you an idea.

Now, that said, however, the the and the decision, even though it's very recent, comparatively speaking, it actually does connect to pretty much all of the classical Western philosophy. I mean, even though we don't think of Aristotle or Plato or any anybody between the ancient Greeks and Bertrand Russell as Analytica probably speaking because of the timbre, is not around. And the contrast was not around with the continental school. The tradition is, in fact, the kind of philosophy, as we said earlier, based on formal arguments and counterarguments and some analysis of the assumptions and so on and so forth that you can really find all the way back to at least Aristotle, in fact, arguably the pre Socratic philosophers.

So it's really philosophy in the sort of classical sense today that we probably should add that the continental tradition, at least some parts of the continental tradition, begin to sound to me a lot like sort of some kind of Eastern philosophy where, you know, for instance, some big Einstein, you know, the late Wittgenstein kind of a mistake.

Yes, exactly. You know, if you read what he wrote, it's a sort of series of short paragraphs.

Without any argument, without any telling coins or parables of us that had this this idea that you did things you were talking about were not things that could actually be stated explicitly, they had to sort of be understood indirectly, like, oh, you know, you can't you can't see something directly.

You have to, like, sit out of the corner of your eye almost. Right. That, to me, starts sounding very, very close to, you know, the classic example from Buddhist literature, for instance, is the sound of one hand clapping stuff.

Right. Which sounds silly. Actually, there is a point there. It's supposed to be there to. Yeah, well, it's allegedly right. You're supposed to be starting thinking in an unusual way about what is the meaning of the of the example. Not the idea is not to provide an answer to the actual question. And it sounds to me like a lot of the world, maybe not a lot, but some of the continental tradition gets veer in that direction, particularly Kansteiner.

Yeah, it's ironic that Wittgenstein has given his mystic leanings inspired, like the most, you know, unmistakeably most concrete, focused and attempted like rigor in philosophy.

And the positive is that.

Yes, you know, that's right. Well, the other thing that I find ironic about the concern is that one of his one of my favorite quotes from the Constancio something underlines that the job of philosophy is to free ourselves from the bewilderment of language. Right.

Right. This is one of the most obscure philosophers at all times. So it's there's some irony here.

But he's the one who I think he was the one who originally came up with the whole idea of dissolving the question. I'm sure he wasn't the first to use that technique, but he was the first to, you know, describe it and like formalize it as a technique.

Well, there is this fantastic encounter, which is sort of it's gone into mythical proportions at this point between Vikan Stein and Karl Popper, who was one of the most prominent ones. Yes, of course, was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, particularly philosophers, science and very mystical. Very mystical. Absolutely. And so the the incident that I'm about to recount is actually explained in great detail, together with the background of both the individuals and their philosophies in a book that came out a few years ago coming by to BBC journalists.

And it's called the book is called Wittgenstein Poker. And the reason for that is because here's how allegedly went. Of course, the journalist actually talk to people who were there and were still alive. And there are different accounts of what actually happened. But here's allegedly what happened. Bertrand Russell, who was in fact the Consigns mentor, had invited for a seminar. Popper and Dickinson showed up at the seminar and there was very well known sort of acrimony between between the two.

They had very different ideas about philosophy and philosophical questions in general.

So between Bertrand Russell Popper and Bob. That's right. And so at some point, the concern apparently became more and more agitated and started playing with these with a poker for the fireplace and then the big iron, the big thing.

Right.

And then pointed it to Popper saying something like, give me an example of a moral injunction or something like that, which Poppit allegedly again answered, Thou shall not threaten a guest lecturer before this.

And I say, oh, so that's the kind of story that's just too good to actually look into. That's right. That's right. But the book is interesting because it does give several reconstructions of the story.

But more importantly, it gives you an interesting background in the whole 20th century philosophy, the split between the continental and in the analytic tradition, as well as the background of the two contenders, because they were both actually from Vienna, you know, one from a middle class family who had to struggle to get to university and so on. Popper another one from a very wealthy family. That was Finkelstein. So it was you know, they grew up in the same area, but they have very different backgrounds, very different personal histories and so on.

But they shall thou shall not threaten lecture this guest lectures book. Its practice really didn't happen exactly the way.

It's just all agree that it did. You know, all of the examples of philosophy that I really admire are analytic.

I'd say, you know, I really value rigour and careful reasoning.

But but the flip side of that coin is that the most frustrating conversations I've had have also been with analytic philosophers.

And I think the meta. Yeah, well, you don't talk to many contain philosophers, so there's a selection bias, but I guess same for me as well.

But but the what's going on there, I think, is that the analytic philosophers are supposed to be playing by the same rules as I am. They're supposed to be playing by the rules of argumentation, you know, logic and and evidence that I'm playing by. They feel like they're speaking my language.

And so when I get into these these just massive. Just fundamental disagreements with them where I think that they're just talking nonsense, you know, it feels like much more of a betrayal of of what philosophy is supposed to be doing than the kinds of philosophies I've already written off. And we go, they're artists.

Let's think about it.

That's not necessarily a good way to put it. Yeah, I experienced exactly the same kind of frustration, especially coming from a science background where you certainly don't engage in that kind of discussion and that sort of way. But but one has to give sort of a charitable interpretation to what's going on there.

Yeah, we have to understand the philosophers, particular analytic philosophers are really people who like they love language and they love logic and they love puzzle solving.

So it's like arguing with somebody who is interested in puzzle solving and you and you very quickly get into very tiny details.

No, I mean, I'm talking about really fundamental, like like I've had conversations with philosophers at tenured positions at great universities who will argue that certain things are inherently good or inherently beautiful.

And if people disagree, then they're just wrong, you know, and I and to me, that doesn't make doesn't make any sense. You can talk about your reaction to things as a reaction of of moral approval or reaction of aesthetic pleasure.

But to attribute that reaction, to verify it like an objectively existing property in the thing.

So you don't think that it is objectively true that Beethoven is a better artist than Britney Spears?

I don't know what you mean by better. OK, we should not have to be a different discussion. That's right. All right. I believe that V..

Let's go on to another question before we start coming to blows.

How about how about this question from in public?

He he gives a thought experiment. He says, OK, imagine that there is a severe drought in the isolated country of example.

Steane, which is great weather. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think they have trollies there to do so. In example, when people are on the brink of dying of thirst to people and be live in a wealthy distant country person a travels to example's down and sells water for 100 dollars a bottle person these days at home. Why do we buy? We assume he means typical people want to condemn person A when person B has actually done less to help the example Stannis. Oh, well, first of all, that is a big assumption right there.

You know, the people actually would condemn a person.

You don't think that's a realistic assumption? I don't necessarily think so.

Now, if you ask is there a name for that, like when natural disasters happen in the US and I can remember the name of this, but there's like a derogatory term that we use when people, you know, go and try to sell blankets to the survivors of a hurricane for profiteering. Profiteering, that's. Yeah, it. Right.

So I would think that that person is definitely a profiteer and therefore not particularly morally sort of showing a positive moral trait.

But I could also argue equally that, well, person B isn't doing anything at all. And he's probably indifferent, let's say, to the to the catastrophe, which doesn't make him particularly good in my my mind either.

Now, if you were comparing person versus see where see somebody who sends 100 hundred dollars to help the population, then then we're talking something serious.

But not perhaps he's right that that that would be a common intuition that people have. And of course, the answer the reasoning behind that intuition is because the person in question, the person A is not going there to help, is going there to make a buck. Now, there is nothing wrong about making a buck, but the idea here is that somebody is exploiting a tragedy and therefore is trying to make a buck out of people who are in a particularly vulnerable situation without water in this particular case, which most people find morally reprehensible.

And it's it's the kind of thing that, you know, I'd rather not hang around with people with personally in this case.

Right. And then and yet we don't have the intuition that it's reprehensible to not even bother to help at all.

Like, no, I think we do. I think it's a matter. That's right. Yes, exactly. It's it's a matter of degree. Right. So I think that if somebody were to say to say person B, well, you didn't send any money to help out. And not only that, but tonight you just splurged a hundred dollars on a fancy dinner that you really didn't need.

Well, I can think that one can make an argument that that person could be a little more concerned.

But to force yourself to think that way, that is not like a natural way for us to think. I mean, given that most people around us live that way and we're not constantly going around automatically feeling condemnatory of other people.

Now, that is true. But but the reason we don't feel compelled and we shouldn't feel compelled to help all the time is because are simply too many opportunities to help and not enough. Resources that we have and put right pretty much all of us have, we're well above the level of resources that, yes, we are, but even but it sounds like the hole you can't solve the problem.

Therefore, you don't need to do anything. That's not what I was going, but that is a good point. A lot of people do think that way. But even somebody like Peter Singer, for instance, who is a consequential, utilitarian and who actually does personally give a lot of his money away for for charitable causes, even he argues that, you know, if it's a matter of of making yourself miserable, you probably in order to help others, you probably shouldn't do it.

You should do whatever you feel comfortable with. And, you know, if you do something, it is significantly better than nothing. So the person was culpable. Here, in some sense, is the person who does nothing under any circumstances. Not in this particular case of example. You know, you can say, well, I'm going to skip examples, but the next disaster or the last disaster, I did help.

If you never do it, then presumably most people would agree that there is some moral culpability there, but not as much as the profiteer.

So one reason that I thought this question was so serendipitous is that it actually is a nice parallel to a discussion you and I were having not on the podcast at dinner a while ago about hiring a maid from another country with a low standard of living, a low cost of living and and paying her low wages.

So like so the question is, if you're providing one argument would go if you're providing an opportunity, you're not forcing anyone to do anything.

You're just saying, hey, if if you prefer taking this low paying job with me to not having a job, then the option is yours. How can that be making someone worse off? If you're just giving them an extra option that they don't have to take, then the other option or the other. Do you point is that I suppose it's exploitative or unfair and therefore morally culpable.

And you said you had sort of a virtue ethicist. I have a perspective on that. Well, first of all, there is the Broadway perspective on that, which is, yeah, there's a famous song. Everybody ought to have a maid.

Oh, right. Funny thing happened on the way to the. I was exactly right. Oh, really? Yeah. I was one of them. No, no. I was one of the Gemini Twins.

Anyway, on Broadway aside, I think the argument can be made that this is certainly this is sort of doesn't rank among the highest moral crimes, you know, to hire a maid or a higher service for that, for that help, for that kind of the kind of service. But it is a form of exploitation because what you're doing is you're taking advantage of the fact that some people have so few resources and, you know, so few availability of other jobs for so little level of education or whatever, or they're immigrants and they don't have resources, no matter what resources that they will take, the kind of job that almost nobody else, in fact, will take, that is a form of exploitation.

So then the question is, is exploitation wrong if you're making the person better off than they were?

That's why it's I counted as a low level, you know, sort of moral, rather low level moral issue as opposed to, say, the profiteering, I think is worse.

Yes. You're helping the person you're still exploiting in, however. So you're doing some good. But first of all, you may not be doing it in order to do good. You're just doing it because you want somebody to do your laundry. So there is a difference about why you do it and how you do it.

But at any rate, even if you are in fact helping somebody who does need help, the argument can still be made that that person needs help because there's some structural problem at the societal level that puts some people in a position of that sort.

You know, that's not your personal fault.

Well, society, it is in part your fault. Yes. It's not entirely certainly not entirely your fault. But from there, you can make a very short stop to step to go into, you know, why not slavery? If somebody says, look, I I'm such a bad situation that I'm willing to become your slave if you just keep, you know, housing and food, does that, why not then?

Well, then they'd be making the decision not just for themselves, but for their future self who may not actually agree with that decision.

Well, the same is true for the maid. The maid. Exactly. Totally different.

Well, but but the maid has to make a decision at this point. Right. And then in the future can revoke that decision. So can the slavery. The slave. It can be indented, can be provisionary, can be it doesn't even have to think.

The idea is like you let me stay at your house and I'll just work for free. That's a slave you're talking about.

Exactly. Or, you know, for a year. And then I put up for a year or five years or whatever it is and I'll be late for that period. Now, I'm not suggesting that those are the same situation, but what I'm saying is it's not that far of a step. And clearly, in the case of the slavery, even that provision on slavery, we would agree that that is an unacceptable level of exploitation.

I don't know. I mean, if you're letting someone stay at your house for free and they don't, you know, and they prefer that to whatever situation they were in, I see that it's the.

That's the problem that you are preferring assumes that the person actually has a as viable alternatives and B is is capable of choosing viable alternatives, neither one of those may apply, right. The person could be, for instance, not educated enough to understand possible alternatives or they may not be other.

Well, it's OK. If they aren't mentally competent in making the decision, then sure.

You know, you can't then all of the arguments about them freely choosing sort of fall apart. But if they I mean to say that they don't have any other.

But I'm not talking just about mental capacity. I'm talking just about education. I mean. That's right. Well, that's why I was sort of that was an umbrella term.

But I mean, to say that that it doesn't count as a free choice if they don't have other options.

I mean, the other option is whatever their state would be if you didn't give them stock options.

I mean, that's that's hardly counts as an option. I mean, what I'm saying is that the whole idea about these kind of problems is often people take it to be that, well, it's her decision. So in some sense that it sort of takes the moral culpability out of me. You know, she she she chose freely. It depends on what you mean by freely and it depends on how free that decision actually was. If the decision is highly constrained because of external circumstances or whatever education, access to other resources, access to other possibilities, then it's really not free.

I mean, if your choice is you eat these these bowl of soup or you jump out of the window, you said, well, you have the choice of jumping out of the window. Fine. But, you know, that's not much of a choice.

Well, I would buy that argument more if it weren't the case that that we don't actually penalize people for for not saving the woman from poverty.

OK, so here's the weird thing is that we don't know that it was convoluted. Here's the weird thing.

The weird thing is that we don't judge someone harshly if they if they neglect to, you know, take the poor starving woman out of poverty and give her money that she needs to survive. But we do judge someone harshly if if that person offers that woman a deal that allows them the woman to get out of her awful situation.

So it just like if you're saying that she's making the choice, doesn't count as a free choice because she's going to starve otherwise.

But you don't actually judge people harshly if they let her starve, then. Right.

So I think that the difference between that's a good point. But I think that the difference between the two cases is one of societal responsibilities versus individual responsibility. So let's say you can say, well, I have a moral responsibility to help homeless people in New York. Yes, I do. But I can't do that individually because there's simply too many of them.

So what I do is I pay taxes and I vote for politicians that actually help funneling funds to solve that kind of problem or at least ameliorate that kind of problem.

So I'm I am, in fact, helping just indirectly, because this is a societal level problem.

But if you're talking about an individual relation, so you're coming to my house and you say, well, I'm starving to death. And I say, OK, well, I can give a piece of bread and a mattress. And as an exchange for that, you're going to be my sleep for the next year. Now, we're entering a personal relationship now. It's not no longer just the societal background. Now it's I am directly exploiting your situation more actively in some sense is the difference.

And which is why I assume, as you pointed out earlier, I'm coming to this from a virtual Otis's perspective in some sense, not not exactly.

But in some sense, this is the same difference that there is between two of the classic versions of the trolley dilemma, the one situation where in order to fight to save the five people, you divert the trolley on a different track, killing one person. But you do that indirectly by pulling a lever. And the second version, you actually throw somebody out of a bridge to block the trolley. Most people, as it turns out, is as a matter of empirical fact, would do that.

The switch, they would throw the switch in the first place, but they wouldn't throw the person out in the second case. The difference between those two cases that the second action is much more personal right now.

As I said, the analogy is only partially in this case because we're actually talking about the case of the maid.

We're talking about a societal sort of societal problem versus individual transaction.

But I think that the same kind of intuition is there more utilitarian thing to do?

You know what? In both cases, you have to save to to save the five people.

If you're you think, oh, sorry, I just meant if your choice is between. Well, yeah, right. Right.

If your choice is between doing this distasteful thing of, you know, putting the man off the bridge or this distasteful thing of offering the woman a very low paying, exploitative job versus not doing anything, the utilitarian thing to do is the former because, you know, people end up better off, but it's really distasteful to us. So I do see the similarity there between the utilitarian and the virtue ethicist.

The difference comes into a matter of personal integrity and the way you deal with it when you relate to other people directly.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I. I think those, generally speaking, a close connection between the kind of character that someone displays and whether they're their actions have a good or bad effect on the world. But then you get these weird cases in which there's a disconnect. And I think that's where we we get into these paradoxical situations. Let's let's change direction a little bit. Now, we got an anonymous question from someone who asked. I recently attended a religious seminar where they made a very compelling argument for the divine origin of the Bible.

I want to hear that. Yes. OK, well, let me lay it out. The argument goes as follows. The Torah says that we are not allowed to eat animals that have cloven hooves and don't chew their cud. And we're not allowed to eat animals that don't have herbs and due to their cud. And the Torah says there are four animals that meet at least one of the descriptions, the pig, the camel, the hare and the rock badger, which I had never heard of.

Interesting looking animal.

So the question is, why would the the person making this argument that I guess the religious scholar or rabbi make this claim, why would he go out on a limb and make this claim which is falsified, would falsify the whole book?

I guess the Torah makes that claim right. So assuming that this claim is actually scientifically true about there only being four animals that fit this description, which, you know, they claim it is, what is wrong with their argument that this is good evidence for the divine origin of the Bible, given that it's this falsifiable prediction that hasn't been falsified?

So there are a couple of things that are wrong. The first one is that, in fact, it is it is a claim is false. I looked into that. There are a couple of places where this is pretty clear for them to still be making it.

Well, it's I think it's pretty sloppy. As a matter of fact, it means that they have read their own book.

For instance, I found a couple of quotes, but one is from Deuteronomy 14 seven, where he says, as the as the camel in the hare and the CONI for the true the cut but divide, not the hoof.

The company is the the rock badger, I guess.

I guess so. But the point is that the hare for the hare, this is wrong on both counts because here down to the God and they do divide the hoof.

They. Oh right. Right, right. So I guess the right. So one of the mistakes was that the book claims that Hares two, they're cut. Right. But they don't.

So, so, so empirically it's wrong. And there are several other examples of other contradictions, both the fundamental one. So it's nice. Yes. Go ahead.

Oh, I found another animal. Well, even if those four animals did actually fit the descriptions, which they don't, I found a fifth, the hippopotamus. It has close enough and does not chew its God. That's right. Take that tree.

And there are several others. You know, our our listeners can easily find other examples because there's plenty of websites on that. So what is wrong? What about the general argument? Right. So the argument is, if everything that this book says is right, that is indication that God wrote or inspired everything or just this claim.

Well, this claim is part of everything. Right. OK, I'm just wondering which one. Well, let's start with this particular claim. OK, if you want to just let me go to that particular claim, although I don't see why the same logic when applied to every other claim in in the in the Bible, in the Old Testament.

Well, how do you think the different strength of evidence if if they make a ton of predictions that all turn out to be true and they had no way of knowing at the time that they would turn out true? That's much stronger than one prediction. And that's right.

So should we give them the best argument possible, which is if all the predictions, all the statements in the Old Testament are true? Oh, that is a pretty good argument in favor of the existence of God, right.

I'd say it's a pretty good argument in favor of the existence of something fishy.

That's right. Well, first of all, by the same argument, if you happen to pick up any book of, say, science in the library. Right. That makes all factual statements that are, in fact, turn out to be correct. What are you to conclude of that of that statement?

Oh, I think the key here was that they had no way of knowing. I mean, they don't travel the whole world. They only, you know, for all they knew, there could have been. So plenty of other animals discovered that, you know, exceeded their list of four.

Right. So suppose that the biologist makes Friday, writes a book about biodiversity and and makes a guess, say, within the book and says, you know, and I think that the number of the total number of species in the world is two and a half million. And he doesn't actually know that that is the case. Turns out that is correct. What would you think about that biologist? I got lucky. Exactly.

Now, as you pointed out earlier, where if you know, if you multiply that by hundreds or thousands of claims, then the argument becomes stronger and stronger means that something fishy, as you put it, was going on. Now, does that therefore say something about God now? Because the book could have been written or inspired by, say, you know, an advanced civilization who just happened to visit Earth and had a pretty good knowledge of zoology of the planet and inspired that knowledge into the law when you violated the.

The actually attractive and and actually wrote the book or the book, right? So this is, in fact, the same exact problem that there is with any intelligent design argument that is typical of the standard intelligent design argument is if I show you that there's something you can not currently explain where, you know, scientific knowledge or common sense or whatever it is, then the inference is there must have been a God that did it or intelligent design.

Yes. Well, there might have been an intelligent design, I would grant you that inference. But that inference is nothing about intelligent design or being a God. No one, and certainly even less so. It implies that the particular the the God is the particular one you like. What if it was just maybe Duesberg the book? Right. Right. Yeah.

And that's one of the more annoying maneuvers that I encounter. That whole, you know. Well, you can explain X therefore. God, yeah. We have a name for that fallacy actually, just because it's so common and.

Well, actually you could describe it as a number of different fallacies, one of which is the non sequitur. It simply doesn't follow. Yeah. Yeah. From from the premises of their argument, the conclusion simply doesn't doesn't follow. So it's a classic logical fallacy.

We should also probably talk about the fact that when you're looking at the ratio of hits to misses of some predictor, you have to take into account what you would have counted as a hit if it had happened.

So, you know, people are pretty good at coming up with ex post facto rationalizations for why, like, oh, that wasn't actually a failure of the theory, you know, like so the hippopotamus, I think. Is it related to the pig? I don't remember. Let's say it's related to the pig and or like distantly related to the pig.

If I wanted to maintain confidence in my theory of the divine origin of the Torah, I could just say, well, it's really the same animal.

I mean, you know, when they said for animals, they didn't mean these four specific species. They meant the four.

Thank you. Yes. The exact biological jargon. But yeah.

So I mean, when you're looking at how how falsifiable a theory is, how much, how much it puts itself out there and and puts itself at risk of being falsified, that that's sort of an important criteria when you you take into account how good its evidence is when it's not falsified.

But if if you know that people are going to be able to easily find ways to explain why, no matter what, it wasn't falsified, then you have to sort of retroactively reduce your, you know, paper had this paper and the paper had a these are print into this argument that I think it's a pretty convincing one about you put it in terms of its important than a theory.

Stick its neck out in my mind. Yeah.

So if you get very specific predictions and a lot of them, that it's a much better test of the theory than if you just make few predictions and the kind of generic of the generic kind. Yeah.

You can always reinterpret before we leave this argument, this particular topic, however, I have another example that actually is only indirectly to do with the question, with the question itself. But it is my favourite stop.

You know, it once it is it is another example of a mistake in the Bible, except in this case it's in the New Testament and it's Matthew 13, 31, 32. It's my favorite example because it's a botanical one. And, you know, my background is in plant biology. Right?

So the quote says, The Kingdom of Heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which is the least of all seeds, but when it is grown, is the greatest among herbs and become if the tree. There's no problem with that. First of all, it's there are there are species, plenty of species of plants that have similar seeds, then mustards, for instance, orchids, significantly smaller, in fact.

And second of all, masters don't grow into trees. That's what I was wondering. I thought of cotton. So much for the biology of the Bible. Yes.

Let's go to a question.

OK, this this is a question, actually a follow up after our last Q&A in which someone asks if it's if it's possible to compartmentalize your rationality. So you have one irrational belief, for example, which you don't question or challenge and then to still be really rational in other domains. So scientists who are religious is one obvious example. And my response at the time was that it makes me trust a person, a person less if I know that they compartmentalize like that, because it means that when they don't like an answer to a question, then they might choose to deceive themselves.

So how do I know that they're not doing that in other cases, too? Whereas someone who bites the bullet and accepts claims for which there is good evidence, even when they wish that things were different, someone like that clearly values having true beliefs very highly. So I have more more trust in their process of reasoning and their conclusions all around. Anyway, that's the argument I gave. And then this commenter named Jim Lippard replied. He said, I have a comment on Julia's position of preference for those who don't compartmentalise at all.

One area where I think human beings value stability and constant consistency, despite evidence is an ethical behavior and in particular, personal loyalty. Successful interpersonal relationships require, I think. A certain degree of tolerance for each other's flaws and faults and placing trust in people where it's probably not fully deserved. So but that wouldn't really affect your argument, right? Yeah.

OK, so the first thing I have to say to that is that I think Jim is conflating two different meanings of the word trust here. When I used to do it in the context of trusting someone's process of reasoning, trusting someone to have true beliefs, whereas he's using it basically to mean trusting someone to be loyal and constant in their love or in their, you know, reliable, basically.

So two two very different meanings.

But but just unpack the concept of trust there and find and pointed out, in fact, that there are two very different meanings of it. And if you use the same word into two different context, then that can generate confusion. Right.

And did you see that with my hand that was making this unpacking motion, becoming a gesticulation? I now see the video part you said.

Oh, but but I did think that he raised somewhat indirectly this important question of whether some amount of self-deception is actually beneficial. So whether being epistemically irrational in an interpersonal relationship, especially, I guess a close one or a romantic one, is actually instrumentally rational in the sense of being in your self interest.

Oh, I think that's true. I mean, there's plenty of evidence that that is the case, you know? Well, there's such there's research on the so-called optimism bias where showing that people who tend to overestimate their chances of doing things or their ability to accomplish things or don't have a positive, more positive view of life than is warranted by the facts, they actually do better.

They are less stressed. They they live longer. A number of years, in fact, longer than than other people and so on and so forth. I mean, you know, the most objective people about the world tend to be depressed, as in clinically depressed.

I've heard that. Yeah, because they have a very good assessment of how bad things really are. So I think that there is a sense in which some level of deception or self-deception is, in fact, adaptive. But I wouldn't call it rational.

Oh, I meant well. I was trying to distinguish between epistemically rational in the sense of, you know, a process that leads you towards the truth about the world versus instrumentally rational in the sense of a process that, you know, improves your maximizes your utility, gets you whatever goals you want.

Yeah, I would have to that, as you know, useful or instrumental. Right.

Well, because again, well, this is a similar problem to the one that you pointed out just a minute ago, which is if we use the same word, but women in very different I mean, you made you made clear what the difference was in your in your case. But often people say, oh, but isn't that right? Oh, my God.

That the word rational. I have gotten burned so many times because people have they have such different definitions, but also different associations with it that I just I'm actually trying to wean myself off of it. I'm so used to using it, but I'm just trying to find synonyms for all of the different meanings and just use those synonyms instead. Exactly.

So in that sense, I think that is a sort of epistemically valuable sense of rationality where you can say, well, it is it is rational to assess the world for what it is, meaning that if you want a rational understanding of the world, you want the facts and you want the closest that you can get you one, the knowledge that is most reliable.

You want the information as as best you can. You can get it. And then what you do with it, it's a different matter. So there isn't yet. There's another difference there between rationality, as in whatever brings you, whatever practices and practices bring you the best information about the world. And then there is a difference with what do you do with that information? You may be the most instrumentally rational thing to do is to ignore it or to, you know, do not take 100 percent for what it for what it actually is and sort of act in a different way.

But again, I want call I really want to use the word rationality there because it has a very different connotation.

Well, you know, that's that's how economists use the word rational in terms of acting in your own thing.

I trust economists matter of trust. Words are defined by how people use them. OK, we won't go down that. No, no.

But for instance, let's it's it is interesting you brought up economics because as you know, we talked about this in the past. There is at least two major ways of doing economic theory these days. The one is sort of the classical way, the classical theory that is based on rational agents, on the idea of rational agents with access, reliable access to information.

Well, and then there is the idea of behavioral economics.

Yeah, but OK, just to be fair to economists that the model of the rational actor who has complete information and and markets are perfectly liquid and all that, that's sort of like the the model that they start with. And then they start tweaking the assumptions to make them more realistic, to see what happens.

But I do think it's still useful to have, like, this barebones model that you then adapt to, you know, how the world actually have to start.

It depends on how you tweak. It depends on how you adapt it. If you adapt and by doing data fitting, then I. I think it's particularly useful, but if you if you're tweaking, if you start from scratch and say, look, actually human beings don't behave rationally in that sense most of the time.

So let's let's take a look from the social sciences. We have data about how human beings actually behave and why don't we do put that into the model to begin with. As it turns out, human beings don't act as right now.

I just I think it's a strawman to say that economists don't know that or that some economists don't know that. I'm not sure that they don't know it.

But the fact that they ignore it for all practical purposes is just as bad.

I'm sure that they that they leave that out of many models when when it would be much better to have it in.

I will. Yes. All right.

Let's move on to a question from Janice, who asks, Does modern technology impact how we think about different issues?

It's pretty, pretty open ended question. So, yes, I mean, I know he's thinking not about like, do we have access to more information than we used to? He's talking about it the actual way we think about concepts or the type of reasoning that we use.

Yeah, I have a favorite example, for instance, here, which is the computation, so-called computational theory in mind.

OK, so the competition to your mind wouldn't be possible without computers? The analogy between a brain and a computer is a particular digital computer.

If we do not have digital computers, people wouldn't think about but those along those lines. In fact, people did not think of anything along those lines.

Not only that, but perhaps more relevantly, there is some interesting literature recently that has started to point out some major, both quantitative and qualitative differences between digital computers and brains. Right. And so it's going to be an interesting thing to see where that this analogy basically basically goes. But now the reason so many people, so many neurobiologists these days, thinkers and philosophers of mind, think in terms of the brain is a computational machine, is because we have digital computers before that.

That sort of analogy would have been as from a mechanical calculator, which you can argue it's a different kind of calculator. Yes. But it has a qualitatively different sort of setup. And of course, even before that, you wouldn't be able before the invention mechanical calculators, you wouldn't be able to think about brains at all in that in that way.

Sure. So that's a nice case study. I think different taking it in a different tack from the way most people usually, or at least the way I've seen people attack the you know, is technology making us think differently, questioning the typical trope is, you know, the the all the different distractions online is reducing our attention span and it's making us 8D.

And, you know, the the fast cutting edge got distracted.

What call form and content on our show. We integrate them.

What was, I think, the word intentional.

Right? OK, yes.

So the the response that I liked the best on this issue was from Steven Pinker. I was just in the New York Times article a while back.

He compared this idea to the idea of of technology impacting the way our minds actually work to these magical beliefs that societies have always had going back to prehistoric times.

I think that if you consume some substance, you take on the properties of that substance, which is why, for example, it's common folklore that if you eat, say, a tiger penis, you will become more virile, you know, there like properties of this item that then get transferred to you.

And so he was using this as an analogy for the way people think about how, well, if you consume media, that has really managed to put the word penis into the podcast.

But go ahead. Legitimate use. Absolutely. I talked about bestiality on an earlier.

I feel like I've already agreed that it's a good idea.

So, yeah, no, that was not my argument, I swear. Anyway, I will make a point about tiger penises. Absolutely. Go ahead.

So anyway, Steven Pinker was saying that people are using the same kind of reasoning in the thinking that if we consume media, you know, MTV, with all its fast, rapid cutting, that our brains will start to work the same way, you know, jumping in rapid cuts from one idea to another, which I thought was sort of a charming way. It is considered it's wrong. Meaning?

Oh, you think it was in fact actually happens? Yeah. There is actually a mounting amount of empirical evidence that that that yes. The use of technologies, particularly things like Facebook and similar, that does in fact decrease attention span and really decrease the ability of people to think for a sustained period of time. Now, to what extent that is a problem? It's another matter.

I'm not a I'm not a I wonder also how lasting it is, like a want without technology for a week, even with these so that we don't know the research in that area is actually at the beginning. And at any rate, you know, you can. Make the same argument for any technology. I'm sure, you know, Socrates famously complained about the invention of writing because he thought that that was going to decrease our memory.

And he probably did.

But, you know, guess what? Who cares? I got books, so if I forgot something, I can just look it up at the library.

Although I was thinking about this with respect to technology, because that also reduces our need to memorize things. We can look them up, you know, just like that.

It's possible that there's this effect where if you have things in your mind, you connections might occur to you. You might make connections between them that you wouldn't think of, you know, if you had to look them up. So that would be a possible effort.

So every technology, I think, comes with tradeoffs. I mean, you can make easily an argument that some technologies do have an annoying side effects. You know, these days I cannot walk in on the sidewalks of sidewalks of New York without bumping into some bumbling idiot who is just texting on his phone instead of looking where he was going.

And I decided that as a matter of personal policy, I will not avoid those people. We just bump into them hoping that their phone will fall on the ground.

But you are the kind of New Yorker that people talk about when they talk about aggressive New Yorkers. That's exactly right. That's me, the aggressive pedestrian. So there are obviously negative consequences to any kind of technology.

And there are advantages that are often unforeseen in the use of new technologies. So you can make the same argument for pretty much everything. And as usual, with technology, it comes actually most of the time, with few exceptions, as a neutral thing. It depends on what you do and it depends on how you evaluate the tradeoffs. If you value memory, don't read books or don't write books. But if you are willing to trade off your personal memory for the ability to do a Google Books, then by all means, I think you should switch to books.

Let's say for our last question of the Q&A, let's zoom out to a big picture question from Pure Luck. Who asks, What do you believe the primary purpose of our species should be? For example, is it to create the best model of reality by meticulous study? Is it to spread life into the lifeless places in the universe?

No, there is no primary purpose for the whole idea. That species have a purpose is called Tell Me. And you know, it's and it's been abandoned in biology for a long time. So we don't we don't have a purpose.

If you're talking about a biological purpose, then then, yes, go ahead and reproduce. But failing that, I think the purpose is a human construct and therefore we make up our purpose at the individual level and the societal level as an aggregation of individuals. But you cannot point to any external sort of source of reference and say, yeah, the purpose of the human race is to do this. Now you can ask you can you can consider those possibilities and ask yourself, what would that be a good idea to put our resources in that direction?

So, for instance, is it a good idea for humankind to spread life into the lifeless places in the universe? Well, maybe, maybe not. We could talk about it as a societal level. And, you know, how much is that going to cost and what what advantages is it going to give us directly or our descendants? And we may decide that that's actually a good thing to do. But I wouldn't call it a purpose. We just call it a project.

Well, that's very dissolving of you. I mean, I, I agree. I don't think the idea of a purpose makes sense except as something that you did someone some intentional entity chooses for himself or for an object.

But I want to quibble a little bit with your claim that that at least my interpretation of pure luck of this question was was not that he thinks that there's some external purpose that was bestowed on humanity.

He I think he acknowledges that we have to choose our own purpose, but I think he thinks that there's a right answer to what purpose we should choose. And I know that this is not an uncommon viewpoint.

I've talked to other people who feel like and although usually they're talking about the individual level, not the society or the species wide level, usually they're talking about, you know, what is the purpose, what should the purpose of my life be? And these are not religious people who I'm talking to in these cases. They don't think that someone created purpose for us. They're just like they except I have to create my own purpose. But what should it be?

I don't have any right in that sense. Again, I go back to my future ethics position. I mean, my my answer to that question is Aristotelian. It's whatever increases your flourishing and you're flourishing as an individual can take different paths because it varies from individual to individual, from situation to situation for circumstances, circumstance.

But whatever makes your life a happy life in the eudaimonia sense of your ancient Greek sense of happy, not just in the sense that you're feeling right now are good. You have a good feeling right now, but in. The sense that you're going to look at your life, you know, when you get to the end and he started with was asking the question, well, when you get to the end of your life, you think this was you look back to it and say, you know, was this a good project?

Was this a good thing?

Did I use my time in a way that was satisfactory for me, that I was doing something interesting, creative, relevant to others, whatever it is, that seems to be what most people want to do with their lives unless they're psychopaths.

Well, I just don't see how you could defend that as being the right answer unless you're using it in the tautological sense of just, you know, whatever pick the purpose.

The right purpose is the one that at the end of your life you feel like was the right purpose for your life.

So how would you defend that that way of living as right about over, say, someone who says the purpose of my life is just to have as much hedonic pleasure as possible, or someone who says the purpose of my life is to increase the utility of other people as much as possible, no matter how miserable I am. I mean, these all you might feel more of an inclination towards one than the other, but how could you sort of prove that one was right and one was right?

So. Well, I actually happen to have an answer to that question. It's not really my answer is it's John Stuart Mill to answer. He said it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a big satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a full satisfied. And if the fool or the pig out of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

What? I've heard that before, but I don't the philosopher doesn't know what it's like to be a pig in the mud. We know, but that's not being a pig. Come on. No, no, no. The idea is not to beat literally a pig.

Would you like to be ignorant now and have no desire for wisdom and self-awareness?

I mean, no, that's not the point of the mill is trying to make. The point is trying to make is if you if let's say that you want to decide on, you know, life is a matter of life long decision, not as a matter of on a day to day basis. Should I just be spending my time drinking beer or should I, you know, read Shakespeare?

The idea is that those are those are what I would call a low pleasure and a high pleasure for male.

Both pleasures should be pursued. But in order to decide which one is more relevant to your life, you have to be the kind of person who actually can appreciate and experience both. If you don't have a good appreciation of both, you cannot make that decision. And the idea is that if somebody is capable of doing Shakespeare, he's also capable of drinking a beer. But that's not necessarily the other way around.

I just don't think I mean, the the pig wouldn't get anything out of reading Shakespeare. So does you're thinking the big thing a little bit?

No, no. We're talking about a human being who is not capable of enjoying what Melville call higher pleasures.

But, well, it sounded like he was making an argument that the the philosopher was actually better off than the let's not say a pig.

Let's just say like a not very intelligent person who, you know, enjoys sensual pleasures but doesn't actually enjoy Shakespeare.

Yes, I do think, in fact, that a person only is capable of enjoying sensual pleasures and not more rarefied pleasures, not an intellectual pleasure, no music, no art, nothing like that is a lower level quality of life.

How could you it sounds like you could only say that just by decree. How could you possibly show that that were true?

I think that's a very, very good argument. But I guess we're going to disagree on that. OK, we don't have time for Socrates in the bag now. We are out of time for this episode. So that 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.