364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure

One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is driven by ignorance, failure, and uncertainty. Some phenomena we understand pretty well, but interesting research happens at the boundary of what we do and don't know. And there is no foolproof algorithm for moving in the right direction; we need to make conjectures and test them against the world. Biologist Stuart Firestein has been advocating for a better public understanding of the true methods of science, most recently in his new book It Could Be Otherwise: Science In the Age of Uncertainty.

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Stuart Firestein received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Neuroscience at in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Sloan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His research studies cellular mechanisms of signal transduction and olfaction. His previous books include Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful.

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Click to Show Episode Transcript

0:00:00.4 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that I often rant about a little bit when I'm talking about science education, how we teach science in elementary school, secondary school, undergraduates, I do try to say I'm not an expert on the field of science education, and I do think that experts deserve a voice here. So I have a limited set of things that I'm willing to rant about. But one of them is that we sort of teach the product of science and not the process of science. As we'll talk about in today's podcast, our guest today is Stuart Firestein, and he brings up a good analogy. It's like you're teaching a history course. Imagine you have an art course in your secondary school, in your high school or whatever, and all they do is show you works of fine art. They don't actually teach you how to paint in your art course, right? Imagine you were trying to learn piano and your piano teacher just showed you a bunch of... Or made you listen to a bunch of beautiful piano solos. You're not being taught the process of doing it. In the science courses that we teach, you're given facts. "F equals MA. Here are the different kinds of rocks. Here is the way that natural selection happens," or whatever. And then you're tested on your knowledge of the facts.

0:01:23.6 SC: But the process of doing science is so different than that. And I do think that our inability to get across the process, even if people aren't going to grow up to be scientists, has led to a real public misunderstanding of how science works. Science is not about facts. Facts are the output, that's true, but we have along the way a whole bunch of ignorance and failure and things we don't know the answer to. And it's important to appreciate both, what we have learned and what we have not yet learned. Because it's not just random. It's not like, "Oh, we don't know anything, anything could happen." We know a lot, there's a lot that we don't know, and that structured ignorance that we're trying to uncover the facts hidden amongst is what science is all about. And different people, philosophers and historians and whatever, will have specific, much more careful and detailed ideas about the process of how science works, and that's great. But I do think that we should try to get that process across to a broader audience much more effectively. And today's guest, Stuart Firestein, as advertised, has been really active in trying to do exactly that.

0:02:37.0 SC: Stuart has been for a long time a successful biologist. He was chair of the biology department at Columbia, working on neuroscience and olfaction, how you smell things. But in the last few years, he's really become really energized in getting people to understand that science is this process that involves a lot of failure. So he has a book on ignorance. He has a book on failure. He has a book most recently, the most recent book is called It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty. And in fact, this book is basically an encapsulation of the Mindscape motto that if you ask a physics question beginning with, "Is it possible that...", the answer will always be yes. And that is what Stuart is saying. He's investigating the idea that there's a lot of things that are possible outside what we know, right? And sort of knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns distinction becomes very important here. So we're going to have a conversation, sort of an informal, rollicking conversation about failure and ignorance and possibility and how these concepts are really, really important for how science is done. It would be nice if everyone in the world understood that that's how science is done, and that doesn't mean that anything goes. Some things don't go, but a lot of things go. So let's go.

[music]

0:04:14.5 SC: Stuart Firestein, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:16.7 Stuart Firestein: Well, thanks for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.

0:04:19.6 SC: I think the audience should know that we're friends, we've met before, and as we were organizing the podcast, Stuart said, as a joke, "I hope we're going to have martinis during this podcast." And I said, with dead seriousness, "Yes, that sounds like a great idea." So here we are. The audience can't see, but here's to you, Stuart. Cheers.

0:04:40.0 SF: Cheers.

0:04:42.7 SC: This could be a going thing, and I'll be thinking, "Wow, this is gonna be a two-martini podcast someday." But this will just be one.

0:04:49.8 SF: This comes about because of an event you held at your place in Baltimore, and you had a table full of martini choices, and I realized then that you are a martini aficionado. And I am in agreement.

0:05:01.6 SC: Everything is better. Yeah, we did a whole podcast episode on mixology that was actually a big hit. Which reminds me, speaking of old podcast episodes, you started your scientific career studying olfaction, right? The neuroscience of smell, which reminds me that Ann-Sophie Barwich was one of our former guests. She worked with you, right?

0:05:25.2 SF: Oh, really? Yes, Ann-Sophie was a postdoc in my lab for nearly four years, and she came, of course, as a philosopher of science. That was her training, and did her thesis on the olfactory system and how it had become a kind of a... How it had evolved from this kind of cul-de-sac of neuroscience to a mainstream part of the field. And she was a tremendous asset to the lab for the four years she was with us. We're still in touch. I was just emailing with her.

0:05:55.3 SC: And of course, it's a credit to you that as a working biologist, neuroscientist, you were welcoming philosophers into your lab.

[laughter]

0:06:04.9 SF: Yes, you're absolutely right. It is a credit to me because the rest of my lab thought I was... There was something clearly wrong with me. They thought, "Alright, the guy has finally... He's gone off, but we'll put up with it, we'll see." But to Ann-Sophie's credit and to my lab's credit, after a while, within three or four months at the most, she had been totally integrated into the lab.

0:06:26.4 SC: Right.

0:06:26.6 SF: To the point where she was late to a lab meeting once, she actually was not gonna make a lab meeting one week because she had another appointment. And one of the members of the lab said, "Oh, well, wait, we shouldn't start 'cause Ann-Sophie..."

0:06:36.0 SC: Yeah.

0:06:36.3 SF: And then they caught themselves, you know.

[laughter]

0:06:39.0 SC: We need the philosopher here to keep us honest.

0:06:42.0 SF: Yes. Yes. Yes.

0:06:44.1 SC: Well, the reason I bring that up is because we're not going to be talking about olfaction. I mean, maybe we will as an aside, but you've started down an additional path in the last few years. I think you have a new book out. Tell us the title of your new book.

0:07:00.4 SF: The new book is called It Could Be Otherwise.

0:07:02.5 SC: Good.

0:07:04.5 SF: And the subtitle is Science at the Edge of Uncertainty.

0:07:08.3 SC: And is this your third book sort of in this... What I think of as an informal trilogy?

0:07:14.7 SF: Informal would be the keyword there. It's the third book. I kind of didn't want it to be a trilogy because maybe there's a fourth book, I don't know. [laughter] So, and you know, the only person that gets to write a four-book trilogy is Douglas Adams, of course.

[overlapping conversation]

0:07:29.5 SC: Isaac Asimov did fine. He made a lot of money doing it.

0:07:32.1 SF: Well, but he never called them trilogies, though, I don't think, right? So it... Sorry, go on.

0:07:37.3 SC: But it's a big departure from olfaction. Now you're talking about meta-science, what science is, how it works. So, I mean, could you just fill us in a little bit on that journey? Like, how did you start being seriously interested, seriously enough to write a book about how science works and should work?

0:07:58.0 SF: Well, this goes back to the philosophy thing, really, and it started with an undergraduate in my lab who was planning on going to medical school, a young woman named Elizabeth, cannot remember her last name, of course, at this point, but it was many years ago. In any case, she came into my office one day and said she was thinking of taking a year off between undergraduate and medical school because she was interested in the history and philosophy of science and wanted to do a master's degree in this at Cambridge University where they have a wonderful HPS, History and Philosophy of Science department. And so, would I write her a letter of recommendations? I said, "Well, of course I would," because she's very bright and easy to write a letter for and all the rest of that. But I said, "But could you give me some information on this program because I want to tailor the letter properly?" So she gave me all this information on this program and the history and philosophy of science and all that, and I thought, "Well, shit, I'd like to do this. This sounds really cool."

[laughter]

0:08:40.5 SC: Yeah.

0:08:59.2 SF: So I wrote her a terrible letter and I applied in...

0:09:01.5 SC: You took... Good. [laughter]

0:09:03.8 SF: I wrote her a great letter, but I did in fact then write a letter myself to the department there saying I was quite interested in doing it. I had a sabbatical coming up and I thought I'd maybe like to do a master's degree in science and in history and philosophy of science. So I actually went and visited there because I had another reason to be in Cambridge at one point, and they talked me out of that and said, "Why don't you just come as a visiting scholar?"

0:09:27.1 SC: Right.

0:09:27.8 SF: I think because they didn't want to have to grade my essays. It would have been really embarrassing, I'm quite sure. So that's how I kind of got into this other track on history and philosophy of science and began to recognize how important it is to the way we do science, the way we think about it, and I think the way the public thinks about it or fails to think about it because we don't tell them enough about it. I think science is something the public loves but remains a huge mystery to them. I mean, I go to dinner parties occasionally with the... I can remember this happened one time with the parents of my daughter's friends. They were in rehearsal for some play, so we all went out to dinner and they were all bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers and I don't... Professionals of one sort or another. And I think I was the only scientist in the room, and it became obvious that what they really wanted to know was, "So, what do you kind of do? What do you actually do all day?" You know?

0:10:27.2 SC: Yes.

0:10:29.1 SF: They couldn't imagine what it was I actually occupied my time with as a scientist. And I realized we are a bit of a black box to most of the public.

0:10:37.5 SC: Well, I'll end up disagreeing with you, I think, later on in the podcast. But let me once again give you your flowers a little bit here because at a certain point in the career of a typical scientist, sometimes one's thoughts turn to the history and philosophy of science. And most of the time, the scientist just starts spouting off. And the fact that you actually went and took courses and talked to the experts is, again, to your credit, I think.

0:11:06.1 SF: Thanks. Well, I mean, it was immense fun. It was the most... One of the most... The most satisfying sabbatical I had ever done. And in fact, two years later, I, by some quirk had another sabbatical that had been stored up, and I wound up doing it with a philosopher of science in Paris. So, Cambridge, Paris is not such a tough deal.

0:11:22.9 SC: You're suffering. Yeah, I know.

[laughter]

0:11:24.7 SF: Yeah.

0:11:26.6 SC: What you won't do for the academic calling.

0:11:28.4 SF: Honestly, honestly.

0:11:30.2 SC: Okay. And then the previous two books in the informal trilogy are about ignorance and failure. And these don't sound very uplifting titles. Tell us how those relate to science.

0:11:42.9 SF: Well, so the attempt in both of those books was to take terms, words that have a generally pejorative meaning, and suggest that in science they're actually quite positive, that they are the kind of things that make science go. Ignorance is subtitled "What Drives Science," and Failure is subtitled "What Makes Science So Successful." Because ignorance... I mean, after all, this is going to sound trivial when I say it, but somehow or another it's not when you actually try and make it explicit somehow. But science is clearly about what we don't know, right? I mean, scientists get together at a meeting and we don't talk about what we know. Nobody cares about that, right? We only talk about the crap we don't know and how we're going to figure it out. Right? And so, but again, the public, I think, never sees that. I mean, even a well-educated public who goes to school for not only 12 years, but all the way through undergraduate, sees science as a set of answers, an accumulation of facts, and never thinks about the fact that every one of those facts actually led to 10 new questions, and it was the questions that interested us. So that's where ignorance came from. And failure, if I may, came from the fact that that's what we do most of the time. [laughter] Most of what we do fails, and that works. That's actually what makes science work, because we're not infallible. We make no claim about infallibility. We renounce authority. That's the idea of science. Show me, as it were, right? I mean, I have to see the evidence. And so we should fail a lot. We shouldn't be infallible. Infallibility belongs to, I don't know, the Pope or whoever, but not us, for sure.

0:13:22.0 SC: And I like that you mentioned the sort of education that a typical person gets here, because I think that that is really the crucial thing. I mean, as working scientists, of course, you hear this, like, of course, there's a lot we don't know. We make mistakes all the time. That almost goes without saying. But then when we teach science from kindergarten to undergrad, it's just, "Here are facts. You had better get right, and if you get them wrong on the test, you will fail."

0:13:48.7 SF: That's right. Not only... And you're right, kindergarten through undergraduate, and I would even go a step further and say even our science majors take courses in which there's a single right answer, and you better get that right. I gave a talk a couple of months ago now, I guess at Penn, to a group of science students, sort of a special program, and one of them raised his hand afterwards and said, "Look, I don't want to be offensive or anything, but I have to say, all of my science courses seem to me like history courses."

0:14:03.5 SC: Yeah.

0:14:18.3 SF: And he didn't mean that in a good way. He didn't mean history of science. He meant they were just history courses. They were names and dates and facts.

0:14:26.3 SC: Right.

0:14:26.7 SF: And that's all he got out of it. And it's not till you go to graduate school, if you go to graduate school in science, that you realize nobody gives a crap about what you know. They want to know what you're after. What are you thinking about?

0:14:38.9 SC: So let's get into the ignorance idea first, because I think it's crucial to what you're talking about that you're not just saying we don't know anything. I mean, you have this lovely idea that ignorance has structure, and that's a key feature of it.

0:14:55.8 SF: Yeah, I mean, there are levels of ignorance. There's different qualities. I mean, there's crummy ignorance, just being stupid or uninformed. That's not what I mean, of course. But I think there are high-quality kinds of ignorance. There's sophisticated ignorance. I mean, I guess you could replace the word ignorance with questions if you wanted to. And I do use the word ignorance to be somewhat intentionally provocative, I admit it. But it is that. I think it was Francis Bacon or somebody like that who, at the very beginning of the scientific revolution, kind of said, "What we're going to do now is create a vast amount of ignorance." That's the first thing science does, because we're going to renounce everything. He has this wonderful quote. I don't want you to think I've read all of Francis Bacon.

0:15:16.7 SC: That's okay.

0:15:37.5 SF: Happened to get lucky and open the page to this one quote, to tell you the truth. But anyway, he says in there, "Previously, truth came from authority, but henceforth, authority will come from truth." And I think that's a massive big statement in so few words, right? It used to be the church, the state, Aristotle, whatever they said, that's what it was. Now, no, no, no, no, we're going to forget all of that. It's a blank slate. It's total ignorance, and we're going to have to build this up. And then he invented the idea of an experiment, which I know people think has been around for forever, that babies do experiments and people... But he meant something different than just trial and error or experience. He meant actually taking a slice out of nature, holding everything else still, as it were, constant, and then he actually said torturing this bit of nature that he had and then hoping that you would learn something from it. So it's the real idea of an experiment. And then, of course, the problem is that I don't think anybody saw this coming, but most experiments fail.

0:16:41.7 SC: Yeah. Right.

0:16:42.3 SF: So, that we were also involved in failure.

0:16:46.3 SC: Well, the failure aspect is important because if you were guaranteed to get the result that you most wanted, it would not be an experiment, right?

0:16:56.9 SF: That's right. That's right. We do the thing because we don't know. And also, I'll say there's a second part of failure that I think is important. So it's easy with the failure thing to say, "Well, sure, you have to make mistakes and learn from them," fail fast, fail hard, as the tech bros' kind of mantra or whatever. But I think the way failure connects to ignorance is that the deepest ignorance, the deepest kind of ignorance, is not only what you don't know, but what you don't know you don't know. I mean, the stuff we don't even know we don't know. So how do you get to that? Well, I think one way you get to that is failure. You start an experiment to try and find something out you didn't know, and the experiment fails, or it gives you some weird result. So now you know, well, gee, there was something I didn't know I didn't know here at the beginning. I've got to go back to the beginning and work this out again. And so I think failure is a kind of a portal into this really deep unknown, the unknown unknown, as it were.

0:17:54.5 SC: And I get this as a way of pushing back against the idea that we get in high school or whatever that there's a series of facts to be memorized. But when we try to get it right, of course, I would.. I hope, I think, maybe you do want to admit that there are some things we do know.

0:18:12.0 SF: Oh, yeah. [laughter] Thankfully, I think so. And we know them... I would say, look, I think there's some things we know, and we know them pretty well, and they're likely to stick. I think there are a lot of things, though, that we know, and I would call them sort of... What's the word? It just slipped out of my head. I would call them not partial truths, but... It starts with a P and I can't think of it.

0:18:24.4 SC: Provisional.

0:18:36.7 SF: Provisional, thank you. Provisional truths. There's a book, in fact, called True Enough by Catherine Elgin, I would recommend very highly, a philosopher of science, in which she says, you know, epistemology, the study of knowledge, seems to not include science because science comes up wrong now and again. It only comes up with provisional truths, not truths with a capital T. But I think, as she says, you can't really dismiss probably the best way of gaining knowledge that human beings have ever invented. So yes, we accumulate a great deal of knowledge, but the question I think we fail to ask in schools is, so what are you going to do with that knowledge? I mean, you spend 20 years in a school, now what are you going to do? And I think the purpose of that knowledge is to ask a better question.

0:19:22.3 SC: So you do have relatively direct and strong kind of advice for working scientists. It's not just for students in high school, right? I mean, I'll let you put it into your own words, but you don't like hypotheses, for example.

0:19:42.0 SF: Well, this is the scientific method rant that I have...

0:19:45.0 SC: Please.

0:19:45.5 SF: Which is probably overdoing it a bit. But yeah, I think the scientific method is a kind of a mistake for a couple of reasons. One is, I don't actually know any scientists that use it, at least directly. Sometimes you use it post hoc, when you've already sort of made an observation or discovery of some sort, and then you want to go back and check it carefully and so forth. But I think it's... I mean, I guess what worries me is the idea that there's a method, that there's a simple recipe for doing science. Follow this method and you will make discoveries, you will get things right, you will do science the way it ought to be done. And you and I both know that that's not the way an awful lot of science happens. The unexpected is there, the accidental thing. I mean, serendipity is another one of my rants. I don't believe in serendipity. I don't think serendipity... You hear this all the time, especially, I have to say, from Nobel laureates who love to say, "Oh, well, it was serendipity," in some false humility. But the fact is lawyers don't make serendipitous scientific discoveries. They make other discoveries maybe in law, but they don't make scientific discoveries. Physicists don't typically make serendipitous biological discoveries, and I don't make serendipitous physics discoveries. You have to be working at something and then open to this counterintuitive view of things, this unexpected result, and not just throw it away because it's not what you thought it should be. So that's why I'm against the method idea.

0:21:15.5 SC: I mean, maybe we need to back up and say what you have in mind when you say the method that you're against. This is the hypothetico-deductive method, I presume.

0:21:25.0 SF: Yes. You make an observation, you come up with a hypothesis, you do some tests, you revise the hypothesis, you do some more tests, and, as they say with shampoo, rinse and repeat. So you just keep on doing that in some sort of cycle. I mean, the biggest problem... Well, there's a lot of problems with that, one is the idea that it's a method. The other is that the crucial thing, which is have a hypothesis, it doesn't really tell you how to do that. I mean, what do you do, go look in the book of hypotheses and pick one? That's the imaginative part of science. That's the place where you're really using some creativity, and it really says nothing about that, does it?

0:22:03.6 SC: Well, indeed it does not, and I completely agree with that part. And I can't resist asking then, does this have something to teach us about AI and large language models?

0:22:14.9 SF: Oh god, I was afraid that'd come up.

0:22:16.4 SC: Because they're getting very good at proving mathematical theorems. They're not really revolutionizing physics or biology quite yet, but maybe that'll be next month. I don't know.

0:22:26.3 SF: Well, I mean, they do do protein structure, which is pretty biological and pretty physics, I'd have to say. So yes, they're gonna revolutionize it. I don't know how. I hope I can stick around long enough to see how it comes out. I'm excited by it. I mean, I know there are a lot of people that are terrified of it or worried about it all. I'd like to remind them that Socrates was famously against writing because he thought... No, he hated the idea of writing. He thought it would ruin our memories. Ruin our memories, which, by the way, it has. But we have libraries, which are better than memories. You know, so I mean, that's kind of the way I think of AI, or I hope AI will turn out. There's so many ways to think about it, so many ways that it could go. And of course, I'm not sure I trust all the people in charge of it at the moment.

0:23:17.0 SC: Well, that's the thing, yeah.

0:23:18.8 SF: Yeah. The governing of it is really going to be the crucial... Like any science, it's how it gets used. It's not the science itself. I mean, we all believe in scientific progress, but we know it goes wrong. So we hate the bomb, but we love anesthesia. So I understand. And so it's the governance of these things that's critical.

0:23:36.9 SC: But I guess the question of hypotheses intersects with the questions of LLMs, right?

0:23:43.1 SF: Sorry, turn off the...

0:23:43.4 SC: Like, if an LLM finds a proof, okay, that is a proof. Like, that's as good as anybody else's. Again, maybe this is going to change in six months, but right now, they don't seem to be as good at coming up with hypotheses as human beings are. And I'm not sure whether you're saying coming up with hypotheses is not important or it's just not algorithmic.

0:24:05.8 SF: Oh, I'm just saying it's not algorithmic. I mean, I think it's incredibly important. We always have some idea. I mean, I don't do things randomly. I don't just mix crap together for no good reason. I mean, I have an idea that something's probably, or I hope it's gonna work out. I mean, it doesn't quite often, but I have a whole bunch of ideas about why it should work out, why this should absolutely be the critical experiment. So yeah, we use hypotheses, but they're not the key thing we do, I don't think. I mean, they're the way you get to everything else. Yeah, you kind of use them and throw them away. They're cheap, I think.

0:24:43.2 SC: Well, this is...

0:24:44.0 SF: And they're given... I'm sorry. They're given this kind of elevated spot in the scientific method.

0:24:50.5 SC: Right.

0:24:51.2 SF: And I think, as scientists, we recognize how cheap they are.

0:24:54.9 SC: Well, I think this gets into something that I truly don't have strong opinions about, believe it or not. I'm fascinated by this question of what makes a good research direction, right? Like you say, we're ignorant about a lot of things. We're asking questions we don't know about. And sometimes, you've had students who've come to you and say, "I have this idea, I want to pursue it," and you're like, "No, don't pursue that one." But maybe they're right. So what right do we have to say that something is more or less promising when we truly don't know?

0:25:28.5 SF: We have absolutely no right whatsoever except the power of the purse. I have a budget, I have grants, and I have to think about that. And to some extent, I think about the student's trajectory and all of that. And I like to have in the lab... Students come in many flavors. I have to tell you, scientists come in many flavors too, as you well know.

0:25:49.5 SC: Sure.

0:25:50.5 SF: There are adventurous ones and there are less adventurous, shall we say, ones. There are risk-averse ones. And I think it was one of your physics guys, I think it was Fermi, but it might have been Bohr. I confuse them all, you understand?

0:25:58.3 SC: I do.

0:26:06.1 SF: Yeah, who said, I think... It was one of my favorite quotes. Used to say to his students, "If you do an experiment and it proves the hypothesis, you've made a measurement. And if you do an experiment and it doesn't prove the hypothesis, you've made a discovery." But it's important to realize that both of those things are important in science.

0:26:26.5 SC: Absolutely.

0:26:27.2 SF: Measurements are quite important. So if students want to make measurements, if that's the track they want to take, I'll support that. If they want to do crazy things and make discoveries, I'll try and support that as well as far as I can go with it. Because you don't know. How can you possibly know? Right? Even the most settled of things, somebody has a new way to look at it and there it is. I mean, Newton and Einstein is the obvious example, but all of biology and then Darwin is another example. I mean, we used to look at all of biology in one way and then Darwin comes along and we look at it a completely different way now.

0:27:04.9 SC: So it was Fermi, not Bohr, and I know that for two reasons.

0:27:08.1 SF: Okay, thank you.

0:27:08.9 SC: Number one, Bohr never made the measurement of anything in his life. He was a theorist.

0:27:12.9 SF: Yeah, that's right. He was a pure theorist.

0:27:16.0 SC: And number two, I read it in your book. It's a quote from Fermi. It's a very good book..

0:27:19.0 SF: Oh okay, okay. I thought you were going to tell me you were a student of Fermi or something.

0:27:23.1 SC: Oh, no. No, I did used to work in the Enrico Fermi Institute, but that's not quite the same thing.

0:27:27.7 SF: Oh okay, okay.

0:27:29.2 SC: But I guess, okay, I'm not going to quite let you completely wiggle out of this because, again, I'm just fascinated by it and there's no right or wrong answer. Like you say, as scientists, we're always working at the boundary of the things we know and the things we don't know. We're trying to push forward. And I know that in my career, the worst pieces of advice I've gotten from senior scientists have been, "Here's why that won't work." I've mostly gotten great advice from senior scientists, and I am scared to death of telling one of my own students, "Here's why that won't work," and being wrong about it. So any... I know this is not an algorithm, this is the perfect example of it not being an algorithm. But any insights or advice about judging when a crazy, counterintuitive idea is worth pursuing?

0:28:19.5 SF: Well, of course, if I did, I'd be in Sweden by now, wouldn't I? [laughter]

0:28:23.5 SC: Right. We'd both be there, yeah.

0:28:26.8 SF: Yeah. So, no, I mean, and that, of course, is part of the excitement, is that I think we have to face the fact that there's just simply no formula for doing this except being hyper-aware in a way. And being... I was gonna say originally, I was going to say, well, I think over the years you develop a kind of intuition and you should trust that intuition. But then I've had a better thought about that, which is... 'Cause a lot of scientists will tell you, yes, intuition played a big role in this discovery or that, or this path or that. And I think what scientists are really good at is counter-intuition.

0:29:00.9 SC: Okay.

0:29:01.2 SF: They're willing to take the counterintuitive pathway. And that's where the real stuff happens. But that's the biggest risk as well. And I mean, I will say one of the biggest problems we have socially, governmentally, not just in our country where it's bad enough, but around the world, is the idea that science is becoming more and more risk-aversive, I'm afraid. Less and less willing to be counterintuitive because the costs are high and the demands are high and all the rest of that. It's a problem, it seems to me.

0:29:37.6 SC: Can you say more about the counterintuitive bit? What does it mean to be good at counterintuitive thought?

0:29:45.5 SF: So I'll give you an example that I got from actually from a magician friend, okay? This is an example that I like to use in talks. I don't believe I used it in the book, but I use it in talks often. And it's... He taught me how to hide a dead body. Now, I'm hoping none of your listeners need to hide a dead body, but look, you never know, you never know.

0:30:03.8 SC: This might be the most popular podcast we've done.

[laughter]

0:30:09.1 SF: So here's how you do it. The first thing is, if you have this dead body on your hands for whatever reasons, you gotta get rid of it. You do not take it out into the woods and bury it in a shallow grave, because it will inevitably be discovered by some wild animal and there'll be a big investigation.

0:30:23.4 SC: Right.

0:30:23.8 SF: No, you take it to Central Park or the village park or village square, whatever, some public park, late at night, of course, and you dig a hole eight feet deep and you throw the body in. And then you fill it up to about four feet deep and you throw in the body of a dead dog. And then you fill it up the rest of the way. You don't make it too nice, you pat it down. The next morning, the police are out looking for that body. They see what looks like a grave of some sort dug here. The cadaver dogs come, they're barking, they start digging, and at four feet they find the body of the dead dog. And they go away. They go, "Oh, somebody came out and buried their dog," and off they go. So that cadaver is going to be there a long time. How many of those cadavers are in our lab? Because our intuition said, "Oh, the dead dog, somebody buried a dead dog, their pet." We had a hypothesis, that looks good, on we go. And that's how magicians fool us all the time. And that's how we fool ourselves all the time, I think. So that counterintuitive thing is, let's dig a little further. Let's dig a little more. Let's not just take this result that looks so good we should get a paper out right away.

0:31:27.9 SC: Well, I think one way that that shows up is, again, something that is sort of a hobby horse of mine, even though I don't know how to solve it.

0:31:36.3 SF: You're no good at all at this, right? [laughter]

0:31:38.8 SC: I'm really not. I'm just dumping all my problems on you, Stuart.

0:31:42.3 SF: You have a lot of questions and no answers.

0:31:43.3 SC: Yeah. That's why it's good to be the interviewer. Look, we have things in physics where you would say, okay, here's two theories on the table. They're both kind of reasonable, but one seems much more promising. Let's say there's a 90% chance that theory one is right, 10% chance that theory two. You're going to hire a new faculty member. Who are you going to hire? Someone who works on theory one or someone who works on theory two, right? And you're going to hire someone who works on theory one. And 100% of the physics departments are going to hire that person, right? So it's not like 10% of them are pursuing theory two. I don't know how to institutionally and structurally support that kind of plausible but minority pursuit.

0:32:34.0 SF: I mean, I don't know either, except to say that you hire the theory one physicist and 10 years later, he or she becomes the theory two physicist. [laughter]

0:32:46.8 SC: Right.

0:32:47.6 SF: And it's too late to get rid of them, so now.

0:32:50.7 SC: Well, that's an excellent idea and probably easy for theorists, but hard for experimentalists, because we also don't do a good job of letting people change their research direction, right?

0:32:59.2 SF: No. No, I agree. That's very tricky. I mean, largely because it's just incredibly expensive to do so most of the time. I mean, trying to retool a lab, no matter what kind of lab it is, if it's experimental, is just massively expensive.

0:33:14.2 SC: I do want you to give an opportunity to say an anecdote that you did put in the book, which was also based on magicians and what the magician told you about Occam's razor.

0:33:25.4 SF: Ah, yeah. Another one of my hobby horses. So Occam's razor is this idea that we should always, I mean, more or less take the simplest explanation available and that that's likely to be the right one and there's no need to necessarily complicate things. And that's, as you know, what we tell all of our students in the lab. I mean, Occam's razor is one of the great principles of laboratory science, that the simpler explanation is the more likely one and so forth. So I was at a dinner one night with a friend who's a professional magician, in fact, and also, by the way, a philosophy undergraduate major. He has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from, I think, Haverford College or something.

0:33:47.1 SC: Dangerous.

0:34:08.9 SF: Right. Yeah, you're gonna have a magician philosopher? That's really a bad idea. Talk about sleight of hand. So we were having this discussion and Occam's razor just came up somehow or another. I know that this doesn't sound like a typical dinner conversation, but with this guy it is. And so somebody said Occam's razor and he blurted out, he said, "Oh yeah, Occam's razor, the magician's best friend." And I thought, "What? How could that be? I mean, how could it work for both?" I mean, I love magic as much as the next person and all the rest, it's entertaining, but the purpose of a magician is to deceive and theoretically, at least, the purpose of a science is to enlighten, right? To reveal. So how could Occam's razor be serving both purposes? Well, it kind of goes back to the dead body thing in some ways. It's the same idea, really, right? The magicians work by exploiting our idea of what the simplest explanation is, which we jump to immediately in some sort of, "intuitive bias" if you will, but they just do something that's not intuitively obvious. I mean, how many times have you learned a magic trick from a magician? 'Cause occasionally they'll tell you how to do one of their simple crappy ones, you know.

0:34:46.8 SC: Right.

0:35:24.7 SF: You learn how they do it and you go, "Come on, that can't really be that dumb, right? Could I really have been that stupid? Was it that easy to fool?"

0:35:35.2 SC: Well, 100%. In fact, I have this sort of process subroutine going on in the back of my mind when I see a magician that I think to myself, like, whenever they're doing all these manipulations, I'm trying to figure out what they're doing and part of me goes, "Well, it can't be that." And so you should always first think it could be that, 'cause they probably just did the simplest thing. That's usually what they want to do.

[laughter]

0:35:58.0 SF: Yeah, if they've convinced you that it's complex, they're doing the simplest thing.

0:36:02.8 SC: Yea, they are really just doing...

0:36:04.2 SF: If they've convinced you it's simple, they're doing some other sleight... Just all it takes is one little tiny bit of complexity in there to throw you off completely.

0:36:10.8 SC: The ball was in their hand the whole time. It's really not that involved. Okay. But good. But so anyway, that was, I loved that story just because I do think that Occam's razor is the magician's best friend. And the thing that we hope for as scientists is Einstein's opinion that nature is subtle but not malicious. Like, the magicians are malicious. That's the difference, right?

[laughter]

0:36:37.0 SF: That is true, yes. So, and I think that's probably... I think it's correct. I mean, I don't think nature has any particular drive to be one way or the other, I suppose. But it does seem... Well, I guess this is part of one of the themes in the book, and I think you would largely agree with this, since we're both Santa Fe Institute, whatever you call us.

0:36:40.5 SC: We're fractal.

0:37:03.8 SF: Yeah, that's right. We're fractal faculty, right? Are we both fractal faculty?

0:37:08.7 SC: Yeah.

0:37:09.0 SF: Do you know what that means? Well, we'll talk about that.

[laughter]

0:37:10.0 SC: No one knows.

0:37:12.8 SF: That's right. Okay, good.

0:37:14.7 SC: But it feeds into the idea of hypotheses that we were talking about before.

0:37:19.3 SF: Ah, yes. Okay.

0:37:21.0 SC: Because there's the idea that once you have a hypothesis, that changes how you look at the world, right?

0:37:26.8 SF: Yes.

0:37:27.4 SC: Like the data, you're confirming some things, you're disconfirming others, rather than just objectively looking at the world.

0:37:33.1 SF: Well, that's the other great danger of the scientific method and hypotheses, to go back to our earlier conversation, is, yes, I think it does tend to bias you. I mean, your hypothesis is your cutest, best idea of how something works, and so you'd love it to be true. And so there are always ways of avoiding the data that don't fit and things like that. Well, we got that data on Tuesday, and experiments never work on Tuesdays, do they? Whatever it is. We are among the most superstitious lot in the world of scientists, or can be. It's terrible. So I think that is a problem. I mean, we have to guard against that all the time, those sort of easy biases that take you down a path. So it's not nature that's malicious, it's your own brain. That's the problem.

0:38:23.1 SC: Yeah. Well, I think so far we've mentioned how maybe students learning about science could think about the whole big concept better. We've mentioned how scientists can sort of try to be a little bit more open-minded. The other big place these issues come in is in the public understanding of science and trust in it, right? And we're just sort of relitigating here in the United States. I always like to think that there'll be people 500 years from now listening to these podcasts and wondering what was going on. So we're somehow relitigating the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think that part of the... I mean, I'm on the side that the public health officials did pretty well, but maybe you could argue that they were a little bit overly cautious in letting the public know about their uncertainties. That's a really tough line to draw.

0:39:22.1 SF: Yes. I mean, this again goes all the way back to education, I think, as well, however, but also the media and the way scientists deal with the public, either under some pressure or perceived pressure or, I don't know, just the difficulty of making a public statement and admitting your uncertainty. But that's what... Listen, the most uncertain people in the world are the best experts. Whoever has the most expertise in some field is also the person most uncertain about that field, because they see all the holes, they see all the other possibilities, they see the competing theories, they see the missing data. So they understand that they haven't got the whole story yet. I mean, they have that humility about them, which is crucial. But to make that public seems to somehow or another undermine your expertise. So the question really is, how do we get the public to recognize that uncertainty is part of expertise, and in fact, a desired part of expertise? That somebody who's got the right answer, somebody who claims to have the answer, that's the one you should not be trusting. That's the person you should vamoose quickly, right?

0:40:31.8 SC: I remember something that struck me very strongly. I read a small memoir of someone who had been very active in the New Age movement, and it sort of flipped over to become a skeptic and this sort of scientifically minded person. And she said that the moment of transition for her was when she realized that when she talked to scientists, they would occasionally say, "I don't know." But when she talked to her New Age friends, they would never say that. They would always have an answer for it. And she thought, "Well, that seems unlikely that they would have all the right answers right there."

0:41:08.4 SF: Yes. I would say, as you know, that this has been a deep philosophical question, a science philosophy question for years, how to tell the difference between pseudoscience and real science. They called it the demarcation problem or something like that. And it has plagued philosophers of science. Well, Karl Popper started it with infallibility and all these things. And nobody's ever really been able to come up with a precise way of figuring it out. And I don't want to claim to have, but I do think one of the things that we now should recognize that wouldn't be easy to recognize before, I think, or at least not since the last couple of decades of scientific work, is that the difference between science and pseudoscience is science is uncertain and pseudoscience is certain.

0:41:32.0 SC: Yeah. I think that's great.

0:41:55.6 SF: And so if you can't pick up uncertainty, you're not in science. You're doing something else. The interesting thing is people love... So we say people have come to mistrust science or are suspicious of it, but I think that's not entirely true. I think people really love science.

0:42:04.1 SC: Yeah.

0:42:12.7 SF: They trust science. They're just not able to figure out what's good science and what's crappy science or what's not really science. I mean, still... I mean, even these imitators, the charlatans, the pseudoscience types, the New Age types who want to sell you something or another, they all claim to be scientists. I mean, the flat earthers claim to have scientific evidence. They believe that science is the way to do things. The best advertising slogan you can come up with is still, "It's scientifically proven that our product is 99% better than the other schmo," right? So people believe in science, I think. It's just that we've given them the wrong idea of what science is, and what you can get from science, and what the right things to ask about science are.

0:43:01.1 SC: It's just like every country wants to be labeled a democracy, whether or not they are, because we've won the public relations battle there, and I think science has won that public relations battle, yes. But you're right, and I'll put it in a slightly different context. When I get emails from people on the street with something to say, and people ask me like, "How can you tell which ones are the crackpot emails and which ones are sincere?" And it's actually pretty easy. The sincere people ask questions. The crackpots just want to talk at you, and they're not interested at all in what you have to say.

0:43:36.7 SF: Yep. Yep, that's it. And somehow or another, they get away with it. I mean, the imitators are good. The charlatans are good. And that's the problem. And we're not so good at it. And we have a much harder thing to do. We have a much harder thing to tell people.

0:43:49.3 SC: Right.

0:43:58.4 SF: That, we know about 80%, but I'm sorry, we can't do much better than that. It's not because we're lazy. It's because you just can't do any better than that. Sometimes it's just not gonna be an answer, or at least not a single answer.

0:44:12.3 SC: Well, I struggle with this because, of course, you're right. I mean, of course, there's lots of things we don't know. That's where all the fun is. That's where the excitement is. And, of course, we should be more clear to the public about that. But I worry now that the pendulum has swung the other way a little bit. And I'm just thinking about this because literally earlier today, I saw on social media somewhere an interview with a pitcher for the Seattle Mariners. And he was just asked like, "What do you folks talk about in the dugout or in the bullpen when you're not pitching yet?" And he's like, "Oh yeah, we talk about everything, like, "Our real thing now is we don't think that Babe Ruth ever existed.

0:44:52.3 SF: No.

0:44:55.1 SC: Yeah. No, no...

0:44:55.5 SF: No.

0:44:56.7 SC: You can look it up. This is a known conspiracy theory. Babe Ruth never existed. There's only one video of him. And so it'd be too easy to fake that, and his numbers are not believable. So we've done our own research. He doesn't exist anymore. And it just drives home how really difficult it is to express and convey that line between being skeptical, being doubtful, and yet not ignoring the actual evidence or not concocting a much more complicated theory. Occam's razor still has a place to play here, I think.

0:45:31.5 SF: Yes, yes. So, yeah, these are really tough problems. I agree. And it does begin... The issue is where do we go to solve them? And of course, part of the problem is, I think, you and I are trying to solve them here on a podcast or to listeners that are probably fairly well-educated.

0:45:52.8 SC: Right.

0:45:53.4 SF: I mean, listen, everybody's well-educated these days to some extent. I mean, anybody with a high school education knows more science than Isaac Newton did, probably, right? So it's not like we're science illiterates or anything like that, or we're total idiots. Well, some people are close, but for the most part. So, I mean, they know the word evidence, right? They know the word, "I've done my research." They know the word research, at least. They know there's a value in research. So the question is how do we instill a different attitude towards it? And I think it's at our level, as much as I'd like to do it here in the university and will do it, we need to work on this in kindergarten. Well, or just past kindergarten. I mean, in the second and third grade, all the kids love science, the boys and the girls. They do experiments and they get a big kick out of it and all the rest of that. And by 12th grade fewer than 5% of the students want anything to do with science or believe it or this or that. So we have somehow or another found a system that's maximally effective at turning off the largest possible number of people. And those are the science students, let alone the poor kids that have other interests in the world and get some crappy science course that's meant for somebody who doesn't want science.

0:47:11.9 SC: So there's an important adjacent question here, which is: What is the role of experts and authorities? We've already agreed that truth is not defined by what the authorities say, like it used to be back in the day, but we don't want to completely ignore the experts either.

0:47:30.9 SF: Right. That's also, I think, part of what we like to call critical thinking. And we think we teach critical thinking, but I don't think we do, somehow or another. But that's part of it is, I mean, experts disagree. And that's where you have to take some responsibility. That's where there's an individual responsibility to make some sensible decision or come to some decision or talk to people or be a critical thinker. There's a wonderful anecdote about Harry Truman, the president, who's not a very colorful president, so there aren't many anecdotes about him, but he was the first president to have a science advisor at a very high level, not quite cabinet, but almost a cabinet. He inherited him, I think, from Roosevelt. Anyway, he was once heard to exclaim, "I need somebody to find me a one-handed scientist." And the reason was that he would get all this advice, you see where this is going, he'd get all this advice from some scientist who at the end of it would say, "Well, on the other hand..."

0:48:27.9 SC: Yeah, it's very [0:48:29.2] ____ of that.

0:48:29.6 SF: And give him a completely different set of... [laughter] But of course, it's also true that two hands are better than one, right? So you want that. This is one of the... If I may plug it a touch. This is one of the issues that I try and bring together in the book. This notion of what I call pluralism, which to philosophers is an old term.

0:48:49.0 SC: Sure.

0:48:49.3 SF: You say it to philosophers, they go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, pluralism is trivial," or whatever. I don't think it's trivial, but they've known about it for years. But if you say it to a scientist, they look at you like one of my colleagues, they look at them and blank stare. What is that, any relativism or diversity or interdisciplinary? It doesn't mean any of those things. It means that there's potentially more than one answer to a question. There's more than one solution. And they may not always fit together. They may not... Like, relativity and quantum physics don't fit together exactly, right? So you can see that as a problem, or you can see that as the famous philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who's a personal hero from the last century, about pluralism especially, but you can see that as he saw it as human flourishing. We are lucky to have multiple answers to questions. Why do we think there should only be one answer? I don't think it's anything goes. It's not relativism. It's not, "Sure, anything is fine." But more than one thing could go, and then it's our responsibility to place a value on these things, to decide what's the percentages, what are the probabilities, what's the likelihood that this will be the better answer, or in this context, this is the better answer, and in another context... I mean, you physicists have been fighting over waves, whether they're particles, or over light, whether they're particles or waves for years, and apparently have finally decided, "We don't care. Sometimes it's a particle, sometimes it's a wave. We'll do with it, we'll use it the way we want to use it when we need it the way we want to use it." And it works! And [0:50:28.0] ____ about that. All right.

0:50:30.2 SC: Some of us care, but I get the... The analogy is a very good one. But I think that this is maybe... This is exactly where I wanted to go, so thank you for segueing here. This pluralism issue, I think, is philosophically rich and fraught and worth really thinking about carefully. So it's one of my favorite attitudes, pluralism. I'm a pluralist about most everything. But I do think there is a bedrock reality, right? I think there is a single physical world that is sort of univalent. It's only one thing. There might be different ways of talking about the world. And so that's one of the things I wanted to ask you, because I'm not sure when I... Some philosophers, I think, are a little bit cagey about this. Do you think when you say pluralism in science, do you think that there's multiple compatible ways of talking about the same underlying reality? Or is it more radical than that?

0:51:32.5 SF: It's a little bit of both. It's more radical, but I do believe there's an underlying reality. I don't think we currently have access to it, or much of it, and I'm not sure we ever will, and I'm not sure we need to to be successful. So in some ways, I'm with you that there's an underlying reality, but I don't care. [laughter] You know what I mean?

0:51:53.4 SC: Okay. I mean, I get that. I get that. But when I read, like, Nancy Cartwright, for example, who you mention in the book...

0:51:58.0 SF: Yeah.

0:52:02.5 SC: I still believe in the distinction between in principle and in practice. And in principle, there might be a single unified theory of everything, right? And in practice, we might never get there, but in practice, we might. And so what is the good of sort of loudly proclaiming that we'll never get there?

0:52:24.4 SF: Oh, there's no good to it at all. Only that it's worthwhile to not think about science as that being its final target, as that being the only thing we would call successful science.

0:52:33.0 SC: Sure.

0:52:41.6 SF: That there's plenty of successful science well before we get to the ultimate. I agree, there may be some ultimate truth, but how close are we to ultimate? And do we have to worry about that at the moment?

0:52:54.7 SC: Yeah.

0:52:56.1 SF: It's a good direction to move in. It says, yes, this may be one way of deciding whether something is a reasonable way to go or a ridiculous way to go. I mean, you look out in the solar system and you see nothing but round planets, and so a flat Earth would be sort of awkward, right?

[laughter]

0:53:13.8 SC: More than a little awkward, yes.

0:53:15.3 SF: Yeah, yeah, to say the least. So you wouldn't go there. I mean, that's a painfully obvious example, but nonetheless, that's kind of what I mean. So yes, there are underlying... I think there is an underlying reality, and I think we see little bits of it. We see in the Nancy Cartwright kind of idea, we see these little islands, I think she calls it a dappled reality or something like that. We have these little islands of great predictability, which we have exploited to no end with science to great benefit of mankind, I think, on the whole. I always ask people, would you rather be sick today or 25 years ago? If you're not so sure about science, let me know. [laughter]

0:53:56.5 SC: Right.

0:53:57.7 SF: We can use the 25-year-old medicine if you prefer it. So I think there is this underlying reality. I think in line with sort of Santa Fe Institute ideas, things get very complex very quickly, and there may be an irreducible kind of complexity or an irreducible uncertainty that comes from this complexity. And not only living with that, but exploiting it is what science does best right now. I think that's where its frontier is. And that's also what we have failed to communicate to the public. This is what we have not done the job with, communicating this notion that unsettled science is not unsound science.

0:54:41.5 SC: Sure, good. I mean, I do think that one of the things that the public sometimes gets wrong is that, and I think that there's even a name for this fallacy, but they think that the only probabilities are 0, 0.5, and 1. So if you say, well, we think that something is probably true, but we're not sure, they either read that as we have no idea or we are sure. And it's like, yeah, the 80% realm is actually super-duper populated in science, right?

0:55:13.2 SF: Yes, yes, yes. There's a writer, and she's not exactly a scientist, she's sort of an independent worker, Annie Duke, who's a good friend.

0:55:19.2 SC: Oh, sure.

0:55:25.2 SF: Your listeners will know her as the world's first female champion of poker, with which she made a gazillion bucks. But she also writes a lot of books, and she has a brilliant mathematical mind about probability especially. And she'll tell you regularly about 80/20 probability. I had a conversation with her one time. She said, "You know, I see 80/20 hands in poker all the time."

0:55:36.9 SC: Right.

0:55:48.7 SF: "And I play them. Of course I play them. And 20% of the time, I lose. I still play them!" [laughter]

0:55:56.1 SC: It's funny because I was going to mention a few minutes ago that when I first started playing poker, 'cause I'm a poker player also, one of my flaws was that I gave too much credence to unlikely probabilities. Like I would say, well... Someone would say, "Obviously that person has a pocket pair," and I'm like, "Well, I don't know. I could see it any other way," right? I was trying to be very broad. Like, "No, actually, that's what they had." You have to be a little bit more definite about it.

0:56:27.4 SF: Yes. Well, and of course with poker, and this is where AI may or may not have an edge on us yet, it's not just the math. It's the math plus a certain kind of intuition or counter-intuition and a certain kind of social sense as well.

0:56:45.2 SC: Right.

0:56:45.8 SF: Annie Duke would say regularly that one of the reasons she won so well is she was the only woman at the table, and all these jocks, pretty easy for her to take advantage of, they were very beatable.

0:56:57.6 SC: We're not fundamentally rational creatures sometimes. Okay. I want to give you a chance because the most recent book, you already mentioned the pluralism, which I think is crucially important, but you frame it as a fundamentally optimistic take.

0:57:05.7 SF: Yes.

0:57:12.1 SC: Explain why that is true.

0:57:14.1 SF: Well, so for one, after Ignorance and Failure...

0:57:19.0 SC: Right, where were we gonna go? How much deeper could I get into this? And it occurred to me that science is indeed a really optimistic pursuit. Now, I want to make it clear, by optimism, I do not mean a psychological disposition or a cheery mood or a happy face or any of those sorts of things. They're all fine. I'm not against optimism that way. But I'm trying to develop a kind of a philosophical optimism, a way of coming at the world, a way of thinking about the world that I think is very scientific in nature. In fact, I go so far in the book, and this is maybe a little crazy, as to say I believe science invented optimism, philosophical optimism. I do like to point out that the word optimism did not exist, did not exist before 1759. The word was invented by Voltaire for his novel Candide, or Optimism. And so, yes, so it hasn't been here. People tend to think, "Oh yeah, optimism, people have always..." but they haven't. I mean, they've had, "Yes, it's the best of all possible worlds," which is really to me a kind of resignation, or make lemonade from lemons, or I would say margaritas personally if you have that. But that's a kind of resignation, or you might say faith or hope, but I think those are kind of... They're kind of soft a little bit. They're kind of, "Well, maybe it'll work out that way." Whereas I think science has a much more muscular kind of optimism, and I use the phrase throughout the book, "It could be otherwise," which is how it became the title. Because really, if you think about it, human beings with brains just like ours have been roaming this planet for 250,000 years, and it's only in the last couple of hundred, since the scientific revolution, I'd like to say, that we have been able to look at something and say, "That could be otherwise. That could be different. We could change that."

0:58:15.7 SC: Yeah.

0:59:17.2 SF: We don't always get it right. Okay. But on balance, we have mostly gotten it right. And the point is the opportunity is there, the possibility is there. And that's what I think is optimistic. And that's what's optimistic about uncertainty. It's possibility. And pluralism, it's possibility. It's more than one possibility. And the more possibilities you have, as long as they remain reasonable possibilities, the better you are. The more optimistic one should be about the world, the more optimistic a view it is as far as I'm concerned. The way you stay reasonable, because I know that's your next question, or should be, is I think you, at least what has worked for me, and this is what I got from being in Cambridge and with somebody who I'll mention in a moment, is I think the American school of philosophy known as pragmatism. So John Dewey and William James and lesser known, but most important in my opinion, Charles Peirce, who started this school of philosophy. And it kind of sounds like pragmatism, "Well, just do what works," but that's not really the case. It's do what allows you to achieve your goals. And it doesn't matter necessarily if everything about it is completely true or proven. If it achieves the goal, use it and then go back and figure out where you need to fill in. So Hasok Chang, who's a philosopher of science at Cambridge, has done the best work in this area, and he uses something called an operationally coherent activity.

1:00:04.3 SC: Okay.

1:00:51.4 SF: It's a philosophical thing. But in other words, you want to do something, it should be coherent. It shouldn't be some crazy-ass, "I'm gonna save the world with this or that" kind of thing. But something that's operationally coherent. And that's a kind of a pragmatist view. I mean, he admittedly gets that from the pragmatists. He's trying to revive a kind of interest in pragmatist philosophy. And I think that's the way you deal with pluralism, with how it's not anything goes, how it's not relativistic. It's some things go, and those choices have to be made. And you make them based on this idea of operational coherence or pragmatics, if you will. Does that make sense, or have I really gone off the deep end?

1:01:33.1 SC: No, no, this is exactly where we go at the end of the podcast. That's okay.

1:01:36.4 SF: Off the deep end.

1:01:37.8 SC: Yeah. The deep end is our favorite place to swim.

1:01:40.3 SF: Me too. Me too.

1:01:42.8 SC: I learned about pragmatism in my first ever philosophy course as an undergrad when I was a philosophy minor, and the motto at the time was "the cash value of ideas." So it was sort of a reaction to the sort of metaphysical principles that philosophers love so much. And the Americans, Peirce and Dewey and William James, were like, "What's it get me? Like, what does it buy me? Show me the money. Like, what can it do?" And I'm actually, I've never really dug into that seriously, but I think it is an attractive attitude. It's like, what matters is what matters at the end of the day, what you can do with it.

1:02:23.3 SF: Yes, but it's also important, I think, with the pragmatists to recognize that that's not all they were about. That's kind of what you get in an introductory philosophy course, I have to say. And that's what most people take away from it. But for example, Peirce in particular, but Dewey as well, were huge champions of the notion of uncertainty. I mean, Peirce in particular was a firm believer in the fundamental quality of uncertainty, and that possibility came from uncertainty. And Peirce was very involved in measurement. I mean, he was a scientist himself who made all these measurements about gravity and all this kind of stuff. But he recognized that what came to be known as kind of chaos theory almost 100 years later, he recognized that tiny little changes in a measurement, tiny little imperfections in a measurement, will lead to tremendous uncertainties later on. And that's a great part of pragmatism, the recognition of uncertainty. Dewey was a great champion of Darwinian evolution, Darwin's ideas, which are based largely in uncertainty and randomness. You won't like this because you're a physicist, but I believe that the biggest change in our sort of philosophical, scientific attitude towards the world was not Einstein or quantum physics, but Darwin. Because Darwin, who's easily known as the father of biology, but I think he was more important to science in general, because it was Darwin who first showed that you can get tremendous complexity and organization from fundamentally random events, mutation and natural selection, both of which are kind of random. And the interaction of those things not only gives you organization and complexity, but a tremendous diversity of forms and means and ways that an intelligent designer could, I'm sorry to say, never have thought of, in my opinion. I don't care how intelligent.

1:04:24.0 SC: No, I'm actually happy with that. I mean, certainly in terms of our place in the universe as human beings, Darwin did more to affect that than Einstein or Newton did. But it's again a super good segue. I wanted to ask you about this quote. I think, I don't know, it's in my notes as a quote. I guess it's from your book. "Ours is not, in fact, a mostly predictable world run by scientifically discoverable laws." Does that sound like something you would say? [laughter]

1:04:56.2 SF: Is that in quotes. Yeah, I think so. But this has happened to me a couple of times. I've said something that I was sure I got from somewhere, and I would cite it, and then a copy editor, this happened during the book, a copy editor came back and said, "I can't find the source for this. The source you claim, I can't find it." So I went and looked for it, and looked for it, and looked for it, and I realized finally, "Nope."

1:05:19.1 SC: You made it up. Right. Yeah. That's why I'm being very, very careful, 'cause it's in quotes in my notes, but I'm not exactly sure that it's from your book. But what do you think about this idea that we're not a mostly predictable world run by discoverable laws?

1:05:34.8 SF: Oh, okay. So I think that is the case, but I don't think that's worrisome. I think we... There are these big islands of predictability that we've exploited, as I said earlier, and I think that's what science does extremely well. But I don't think overall, probably, we live in an incredibly predictable place. I think a lot of random shit happens. Am I allowed to say it?

[laughter]

1:05:51.1 SC: Yeah, that's okay.

1:06:07.5 SF: And I think that's good. I mean, I think that's the optimistic view, that we don't live in a predictable world. Do you really want to live in a totally predictable world run by immutable laws and just have a clockwork ticking along? So I try and make this distinction in the book about two kinds of probability. The original kind of probability, which is based on fitting new data to a large chunk of data from the past that has a normal distribution and looks predictable and all the rest of that. And that probability was in the service of a deterministic worldview. That is, the universe was run by laws, some of which we don't know, which is why some things are not predictable.

1:06:28.2 SC: Yeah.

1:06:48.8 SF: But we will know them one day. We could discover them. There's no reason not to be able to discover them. We just have to work at it. And we know that because, you know, heights of people in some area have a normal distribution. We don't know what governs height exactly or entirely or why it should have this normal distribution, but it does. It's very predictable, so there must be a law. Then I think there's a newer kind of probability, I guess to some extent Bayesian but not entirely, which says that probability is actually a fundamental feature of the universe. The best that we can do with it is it's probabilistic. We can get good with it at some points, and at other points it's gonna be really random and hard to figure out. And biology is that way. There's a lot of it that's fairly predictable and a lot of it that's mistakenly not, genes being one of the great examples of that in Mendelian genetics, where this idea came about that genes are destiny, and that's clearly not the case.

1:07:46.0 SC: I think that we have... Again and again, I always end up in this place where there's one hand and then the other hand. It's the Harry S. Truman thing. You know, we did have my evil twin, Sean B. Carroll, the biologist, on the podcast a few years ago. He wrote a whole book on contingency and randomness and how it played an important role in life. And I've had other people on the podcast who've emphasized convergence and inevitability and it's gonna turn out a certain way. And at the end of the day, maybe this isn't an accident that it's not so easy. This is a very Santa Fe Institute kind of lesson, right? Like, we live on the edge of in between order and chaos in some very real sense.

1:08:32.0 SF: Yes. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I think that's the best way to say it. You're exactly right with that. And we should exploit both is the point. We shouldn't favor one over the other. They're both, in a truly pluralist view, one would accept both views as being valuable in different times and in different ways.

1:08:54.4 SC: Okay, so we can wrap things up by getting programmatic. You've been a very effective working scientist. You've also thought very carefully about the bigger questions. The bigger picture in the history and philosophy of science. So what are the marching orders? How could we be either better scientists or better educators or better public advocates for science given these insights?

1:09:21.8 SF: Yeah. Well, I wish I had a nice simple answer to this. I don't, of course. I think the key is education and thinking about that. I think the biggest problem the education thing is, I mean, we all sit here and we kind of know what we should be doing educationally. I mean, we know that we shouldn't be just teaching lots of facts, have kids memorize stuff. We know that's kind of useless now. We even know now that writing essays is probably useless.

1:09:49.3 SC: Now it is, yeah.

1:09:50.7 SF: Because Claude is gonna do that instead. So we have to rethink a lot of that, it seems to me. And it's not that that's... So a lot of that's kind of obvious. And frankly, it's been there since John Dewey said half of these things 120 years ago. So the question in my mind is, what are the obstacles? What's stopping us from changing this educational system that we all know is not doing what we want it to do? I'm not one of these people who pounds on education and believes that it takes curious people and turns them into idiots or something like that. I mean, uneducated people, they're not as interesting as educated people. I don't care what the system is. And we all think that education is a fundamental human right. We're appalled by any society that doesn't educate all of its citizens. So I'm not pounding away on the schools. I just think we all know there's a better way, including the people in the system. I think the obstacle is evaluation and assessment. We don't know how to evaluate the way we'd like to teach things. We know how to evaluate how well you can memorize stuff, we know how to evaluate how well you can piece an essay together along certain rules, but we don't know how to evaluate how good you are at asking a question, how good you are at formulating a question. These are the things that... And I think it's a scientific question. I think we should be working as scientists on thinking about better methods of evaluation and assessment. Because I think they're critical. I mean, we need to evaluate and assess. And I think we could learn things from... We could learn things from the art world. We could learn things from farmers. Farmers have a way, they can look at a two-year-old sapling and say, "That tree ain't worth it. I'm pulling it out." How do they do that?

1:10:45.6 SC: Yeah, no idea.

1:11:40.5 SF: Right, right. But we could learn something from them. We could learn something. I love to go to auction houses, the auction houses here in New York before they have a showing, because you see paintings, you see great pieces of art that may then disappear into somebody's private collection. But beyond that, they all have a number on them. "Here's the opening bid." And I'm thinking, I know a lot of it's market forces, but some of it is some art historian has thought, "Yeah, this Cézanne is worth two million and this one is worth three and a half million." To me... I don't know.

1:11:56.3 SC: Yeah.

1:12:12.1 SF: But I think we can learn something from some of these people. I think there are a lot of ways we could do this. I think probability ought to enter into things more. Not statistics, but probability. I think we should teach probability, for example, separate from statistics. And we don't really do that. We just teach statistics, which is, as you know, different. So there are lots of places, but I think that's where we have to... That's the point, that's the possible point of change, in my opinion.

1:12:40.9 SC: I worry a little bit. I mean, I know that you wrote the whole most recent book in an optimistic vein, and I'd like to end the podcast on an optimistic note. You've made me a little pessimistic by what you just said. I mean, I'm thinking back to the people who don't believe Babe Ruth exists or whatever. And you walk into the auction house and see that there's different prices on different paintings and go, "Wow, they see something I don't." And I think there's a bunch of other people who would go in there and think to themselves, "What do they know that I don't?" Like, "I know better than they do." And I don't know how to fix that, right? I don't know how to fix that sort of insecurity that ends up being the driver for so many people's opinions.

1:13:29.2 SF: Yeah, I don't know how to fix that either. I mean, at some level, you're not going to fix everything, Sean.

1:13:32.7 SC: Yeah. I'm gonna try. [laughter]

1:13:36.3 SF: We have to fix what we can fix.

1:13:37.9 SC: Yeah.

1:13:39.5 SF: Some of it's really just too far gone. But I think the Babe Ruth thing comes from, I mean, I think people wouldn't think that way if they had the right kind of schooling to begin with. Or they would say, "You know, it's an interesting question. How do we really know there was a Babe Ruth?" That's a whole other way of approaching it, right?

1:13:59.5 SC: Right.

1:14:01.2 SF: I mean, I would be happy to entertain that question. How the hell do we know there really was? Is there really only one video of him?

1:14:08.0 SC: It's not even a video.

1:14:08.8 SF: Nobody's alive that was alive then.

1:14:11.2 SC: It's a film.

1:14:12.2 SF: It's some crappy film, right?

1:14:14.0 SC: Apparently, when you see a video of Babe Ruth, it's always exactly the same one.

1:14:19.3 SF: Yeah, yeah. This is probably true.

1:14:20.1 SC: This is what I'm told. I believe it. But no, actually, that's a brilliant... Like, that should be your next book, Stuart. "How Do We Know Babe Ruth Exists?" [laughter] Because honestly, it's... Even though Babe Ruth did exist, my credence is very, very high, but it's super relevant and interesting to really go through, okay, what do we take seriously? Who do we trust? What evidence do we have? How do we judge it?

1:14:47.0 SF: Yeah, yeah. So it's that's not an illegitimate question. It's the way it's being asked that's not right, you know? That's the problem. And that we can change. That we can teach people about, I think. And that's what science does. And if we just would let it out of the laboratory a little bit more and be a little bit more open and honest about how we don't know it all. One of the issues in the book that I try and bring out is that science is this interesting amalgamation, as it were, amalgam of hubris and humility. We have the hubris to think, "Yeah, we could figure this stuff out. We could figure out how all this works," and the humility to know, "Yeah, it's not likely to happen in our lifetime, if ever."

1:15:29.2 SC: Long-time listeners of Mindscape, the ones who listen to the Ask Me Anything episodes, will tell you that if they ever ask me a question that begins with, "Is it possible that?" The answer is always yes. And I'm glad you've written a book to make it very, very clear why that is the correct answer.

1:15:47.8 SF: It is. You're absolutely right.

1:15:49.3 SC: It is. So Stuart Firestein, thanks very much for being a guest on the Mindscape podcast.

1:15:53.9 SF: Thank you, Sean. This was a great conversation. I really enjoyed this. Thanks so much.

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