- So today's video is a bit of a departure
from my usual ones.
This is a long form conversation
with David Robert Grimes.
David is a physicist
turned cancer researcher
whose work I came across after
basically getting into some
very frustrating conversations
with conspiracy theorists online
and David wrote this
really cool paper that
analyzes using maths and
statistics the likelihood that
various different popular
theories are to actually be true.
And after reading this and
getting to know him a bit,
it was very obvious that
he'd make a great guest
for my channel so,
yeah, I hope you enjoy this.
We get into everything
from freedom of speech
to COVID vaccine conspiracies,
to general rationality and Bayes' Rule
and that kinda thing so,
I hope you enjoy it and you
find it as insightful as I did.
(air whooshing)
So David, you are a physicist by training,
however, you seem to be
spending a lot of your time
at the moment sort of
dissecting various conspiracy
theories on the Internet
and well, defending science in general so,
what's that all about?
- It's an interesting sideline I think.
What start as, I'm a
science writer as well
and a lot of the things I write about
from vaccination to 5G
and things like that
are unfortunately areas where
conspiracy theory is rife,
so many years ago I started
looking at why that's the case.
I mean, why do people
believe these things,
are they viable, how
would they perpetuate?
Because if you really want to
understand modern discourse
around science and technology,
you do need to be cognizant of the fact
that conspiracy theory is a real problem.
- Yeah, it definitely seems like COVID
has sent people's imaginations
into overdrive at the moment.
Are there any new theories
that are particularly
concerning you right now?
- Absolutely, so at the moment
we're in an unprecedented
worldwide situation.
The reason we're having
this chat like that,
not sitting down face-to-face is because
we're all in lockdown
and this is the time when
misconception can really,
to use the wrong term, go viral
and cause serious harm.
The last thing we need is disinformation
and falsehoods to perpetuate
and yet that's already happening.
We're seeing some people
try to link COVID-19 to 5G,
which makes absolutely
no sense biologically
and you're also seeing
claims that COVID-19
is a man-made virus and
was a bio-weapon that escaped the lab.
The funny thing about these claims,
is they're not even original.
The claims being made about 5G,
have been made about
4G, were made about 3G,
were made about Wi-Fi networks,
were made about cellphone
networks in the late 1970s.
There's nothing new under the sun.
Even the stuff about the man-made virus,
when AIDS first emerged on the scene
and it was originally, they
didn't know what caused it,
they called it Gay-related
immunodeficiency or GRID.
There was a rumor then
that it was a man-made virus
and which is still believed
in certain segments,
particularly in America.
So the fact that these myths
exist isn't that interesting,
but the fact they've
kinda combined together
at a time when we are in
an unprecedented situation
is kind of concerning.
- Yeah, for sure.
So before we go into any more
general rationality stuff,
can you help explain why it is
that COVID is unlikely to be
either a man-made virus or
something that's related to 5G like,
fortunately, I've not run into many people
believing the latter but
the former does seem to be
quite a popular idea and
in all honesty, I can totally understand
why people might be wondering that.
So can you explain why it's
unlikely to be the case?
- Yeah, the funny thing is, the idea that
the man-made viruses
causing tremendous harm
is not a new one.
It was said about AIDS in the 1980s,
it was said about plagues
in fact for most of history,
often blamed on Jews, for example,
so another perennial favorites
of conspiracy theorists
but you kind of have to
apply Occam's razor here
and go, well,
is there any reason to,
so this is a big claim,
so what's the onus for this?
The onus for this claim
is on the people making it
and one of the things we know,
is that we know that novel coronaviruses
emerge all the time.
We've actually seen
two related viruses in the past 20 years,
we've seen SARS and MERS,
which are quite similar
and we know where these arise.
They rise at the boundaries
between where animals
are mixing with humans because
these viruses go through so,
we already know all this.
What we'd have to then believe
to subscribe to the other belief
is that there's a lab that's
deliberately manufacturing this
and for what ends?
If something already
arises quite naturally
and already does significant harm
(chuckles) when it arises naturally,
it's an extra layer of complication
to start bringing in this stuff
and in fact, nothing in the
virus's genetic sequence
gives us any hint of it being man-made.
In fact, it's all entirely consistent
with it arising by spontaneous
evolution in nature,
like most viruses do.
- Yeah, it's nice you
mentioned Occam's razor,
it's one of my favorite concepts
but for the sake of our viewers
can you just give it quick definition?
- Sure, so Occam's razor
is a bit of a heuristic
so a rule of thumb I suppose
and it says that you should never
multiply without necessity
and what that means,
it's often paraphrased as
the simplest explanation
is always correct, that's
not actually quite true.
What it means is, the explanation
that requires the least
extra assumptions,
is more likely to be correct and in fact,
that can be looked at as an example of
the idea of conjunction in probability.
If you have to multiply
a lot of things together
it's less likely.
If there are less different
assumptions that have to be made
that is more likely to
explain the situation,
than something that requires
more elaborate, extra caveats.
- Yeah and this almost
seems to stem from physics,
like this idea that physical systems
will typically prefer to do
whatever takes the least energy
to get the job done.
- Energy minimization
all the way.
- Exactly.
Yeah, objects love to take the
path of least resistance or
settle in a place of
lowest energy potential,
like if there's a ball
hanging out between two hills,
it'll always settle in the
valley, wherever it has
the lowest minimum
energy potential nearby.
Is that comparable?
- Yeah, I think there's certainly
an analogous logic to it
and perhaps there's a deeper
mathematical one as well.
Although, like the classic
example I would say is
there's a version of Occam's
razor that's used in medicine
and it's basically called
the zebra theory which is,
when you hear hoof beats,
think horses not zebras
and indeed, 'cause obviously most things
that people present with
are not something particularly unusual,
they're usually something quite common.
And in fact, rare diagnoses in medicine
are often called zebras or zebras,
depending on where you are in the world,
so it's just nice that even Occam's razor
has made it into medicine as well.
So again, the less extra assumptions
you have to make, the better it is.
If your car won't start and you know
that you were very low on petrol,
it's more likely that
you've run out of fuel
than rogue clowns have
stolen your spark plugs.
They're both possible
explanations for what you observe,
one of them requires
a lot of extra assumptions.
- Many more things
to have happened and
many more duck feet have been in a row
in order for that to happen
as opposed to just one single--
- Yeah, absolutely and that's
I guess with conspiracy theories
you're always looking at that as well,
a lot of them defy Occam's razor
'cause often the simplest explanation
is already very obvious
and to actually go through
these other, more elaborate
or archaic kind of ways of doing it,
you have to multiply very unlikely things,
a lot of very unlikely things together
and that's always gonna be less likely
than something with less caveats.
- Which leads on quite nicely
to the 5G-COVID conspiracy
and (chuckle) one particularly
spectacular one I read,
is that it's 5G activated,
chem-trail, smart dust,
which is an absolute masterpiece
'cause it somehow combines
all the different conspiracies
together.
- That is amazing,
I am--
- That is stunning.
- Is that parody?
- No, (laughs) I wish it was but
people really are believing this.
I mean, I found it when I was on some like
weird pit of self-torture
and decided to look up
what anti-vaxxers were saying
about COVID on Facebook.
In fact, I love this so much,
I made some art about it
and I mean, we've talked about
this idea of conjunction,
the fact that the more
moving parts a theory needs,
the less likely it is to be true
and this really is the
perfect antithesis of it
because not only do you
need chem-trails but
you also need it to be a man-made virus
and then on top of that you need,
whoever has built 5G to
have sort of preemptively
set all this up in advance
and then on top of that,
you need to have nano-technology to exist,
which is something that is so
advanced and powerful that,
why would the person who
had it, go to all this
huge and annoying elaborate plan,
when they'd have all the
power that they would need
to control the world anyway.
- They would already
control it, absolutely
and one of the things
that people don't get
and when I was dealing
with this a few weeks ago
with an ardent anti-5G
protestor, I actually asked them,
"Okay, what do you think 5G is?"
And what really struck me, is
that they didn't really know.
They went on about, controlling our mind,
dangerous radiation and my
background as a physicist
and a cancer researcher,
I deal with ionizing
and non-ionizing radiation a lot
and I pointed out, okay, to
try and put in perspective,
I said, "Yeah, 5G is very
slightly more energetic
"than the kind of radio
waves that you're using
"in your home router but not much more."
I said, "But to put that in perspective,
"that the light that we can see outside,
"the visible light that we're seeing,"
and it's a beautiful day
where I am here in Dublin,
"that's about 17,000 times
more powerful at the least
"than the most powerful photon
of 5G you could ever have."
I said, "So if you're scared of 5G,
"you should be terrified
of light bulbs." (chuckles)
And they have something special,
5G had to have an extra
special thing they go,
"Oh no, no, it's obviously
"it's different because it does that."
I'm like, "Yeah, but all the
evidence says it doesn't,"
but the fact they didn't
actually really know what 5G was,
yet were still this adamant about it.
I found it (interviewer
drowns out speaker).
- How did the person respond
when you explained that?
- They do what they usually do.
If you go through my
inbox and you usually get,
the amount of people that will accuse me
of being a shill for,
so this week I've been
accused of being a shill
for the pharmaceutical
and vaccine industry,
for the telecommunications industry,
for big water?
Apparently it's an anti-fluoride person
wrote that one to me.
- Big water! (laughs)
- Big water, yeah, yeah, like I didn't,
and there was someone else that said
that I was a Russian agent
and someone else said I
was an American agent,
so it's like if they can't
deal with what you say,
they will try to diminish you
and that's just common.
- Yeah, maybe that's a
good counterpoint like
you make a Pinterest board
of all the different
accusations you've had
and then present them sorta simultaneously
and being like, "Look,
you all largely agree
"with each other's reasoning but
"see how inconsistent
these different theories
"are with each other."
- Till you've known a bunch
because remember it goes back
to the conspiratorial belief
is motivated by just the fact
there is a conspiracy there.
The consistency in that
belief is irrelevant
so they can absolutely,
simultaneously believe that
all these different
conflicting groups would
be using muggins here.
I mean, in fairness they
could get far more people,
you get Stephen Fry.
If I was running a secret organization,
a cabal that was controlling the world,
I'd have Stephen Fry fronting everything.
I wouldn't have me. (laughs)
It's a very strange mindset but
again, it's explaining away
any details they don't like
and if you come at them with
details they don't like,
you become part of the conspiracy.
- So an experience I
had with a friend who,
I was honestly getting concerned,
he was sort of going down this rabbit hole
of believing more and
more outlandish theories
and when I challenged
him on some of these,
his response was really just a,
I simply wasn't being open-minded enough
to other non-mainstream explanations.
And at face value, that point,
that argument sounds reasonable
but of course then the problem is,
is that you can go too
far with that perspective
and then end up with these
objectively false beliefs.
So I guess the question is how
do we keep a healthy balance
between open-mindedness and skepticism?
- I think that,
I argue this point all the time.
In fact, it's a central
thesis in a book I just wrote.
One of the things that's really important,
is that we need to keep
Carl Sagan's dictum in
our head at all times
and that is, that extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.
So when we come across information,
the first question we should ask,
whether this information
challenges our pre-existing beliefs
or whether it absolutely
stands in defiance of them,
the first questions we should ask,
we should have checklist to go through
and the first one is,
is this from a reputable source?
Is this information likely to be reliable
or is it likely to be
difficult to confirm the veracity of?
And a question that simple
should be our starting point
and it doesn't matter how extreme
or non-extreme the claim is.
We should subject everything
to the same level of analysis.
The problem is we don't,
so yes, you're right,
there are different layers
of more and more outlandish
you can go to conspiracy land
but you can stop it at the first hurdle,
if you ask the question,
is this likely to be true?
And just because you've
gone further than that
and gone to the more
extreme end of the spectrum,
it doesn't mean that even the
seemingly more plausible thing
actually is that much more
plausible, if you apply the same
kind of threshold to it.
- Yeah, and then of course,
we've got the problem of the press, where
initial perspectives can vary massively
from person to person.
For one guy, he might give
5G only a 5% likelihood
of being dangerous and
then to someone else,
they might give it 90%
likelihood of being dangerous
and then when COVID comes along,
to this guy, he's like,
"See this confirms it,
"this is extra proof in my theory."
So I just don't see how we can
all collectively converge
upon a sorta common objective truth.
- Well, I guess what we're talking about,
if we're talking it in
purely statistical terms,
we talking about what
our Bayesian priors are.
And what you're kinda talking about there
is what people, their
preconceived notions,
like how likely are
they to accept something
based on what they already know
or what they already believe.
And I think the deeper
problem for all of us,
is that we all carry around
under-examined beliefs.
I won't say unexamined but
certainly under-examined.
Why does one person give something
50% likelihood of being true
and another one give it 10%?
Because in theory with the same evidence
available to all of us, we should all have
that same prior.
- Come to the same thing.
- Yeah,
so what that would suggest to me,
is that somewhere on the chain,
people are taking some things on faith
and some things are not
subjecting to quite the same level
of rigorous analysis and
that is absolutely human.
For example, we're all proponents
of motivated reasoning,
we love confirmation bias,
we're more likely to believe something
that challenges our preexisting world view
than we are to believe something
that disagrees with it.
But if we want to function
in this modern world
with this weird paradox that we live in,
where we have all the
information in the world
available at our fingertips
and yet we're surrounded by more falsehood
than we've ever come across before.
The only way we can
actually circumvent that
is to subject our own beliefs
to the same level of scrutiny
that we'd subject someone else's too
and that's a big ask.
It's not something that we do
intrinsically or automatically.
- Yeah, it's almost like people
are running the inverse
of extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence,
where the more extraordinary the claim,
the more likely they are to believe it.
It's like flipping
Occam's razor on its head.
I guess this comes from a
complete misunderstanding
of probabilities, like
even basic conjunction.
One of the first things
you learn in statistics is,
the likelihood of A is
always going to be greater
than the likelihood of A given B
and I guess from personal experience,
we tend sort of struggle
with thinking about things
quantifiably and probabilistically,
when we're emotionally
attached to a belief
and then we can't really
sorta reason through it
from these first principles.
- What you've said there,
I'm laughing at 'cause
you have spoken like a
professional statistician
or a professional gambler (laughs)
and you've absolutely, you've
talked about conjunction
and you've talked about
prior probabilities
and all the stuff that we should do.
But all of that stuff is learned
and it's not intuitive to us because
most of the evidence we have
says that we are heuristic reasoners
so for example, we'll often accept,
there was a, I'm trying to
remember the actual study
but one of the things that, I
think was Daniel Kahneman did
was looked at how people made different,
they did conjunction
fallacies all the time.
For example, people were
more likely to accept
multiple statements about a person
rather than a single statement.
Even a single statement is by definition
more likely to be true.
- Yeah, it's something like,
given that Linda is
a regular attendee of
different women's groups,
is it more likely that
she is a bank teller
or a bank teller and a feminist?
And people typically
choose the second option.
- But even though B requires
an extra assumption,
it actually is, by
definition, even if it's
probability is almost one
for the second statement,
it's not one, it's less than one
and therefore it's lower than the,
and people don't realize that
probabilities multiply that way
because we're heuristic reasoners,
because we like to fit
things into a narrative.
We like to jam things into
our mental filing cabinet,
whether they fit in that
particular drawer or not
and that's one of the problems.
The other thing when you're dealing
with conspiracy theorists in particular
and in my book "The Irrational Ape",
I have a chapter which I've
called Schrodinger's bin Laden
and there's reason
(Interviewer laughs)
I've called it that because
this is the most beautiful study
and I had the pleasure of
meeting the author of this study
at an event with Brian Cox
at The Infinite Monkey Cage
a few weeks ago.
Karen Douglas is her name,
wonderful professor of psychology,
but they study people that
were conspiracy theorists
and they gave them two
different narratives.
They gave them one narrative
where Osama bin Laden
had been a CIA agent and was still alive,
death was all faked
and the other one where
he'd been framed by the CIA
and killed.
And people that really
believed in conspiracy theories
believed both of these narratives
equally at the same time.
- Wow.
- That makes no sense.
It makes no sense.
Also people who believed
that Princess Diana
was murdered by the Queen
or that Princess Diana
faked her own death,
equally likely to hold those
two things at the same time.
So the only way that could
be possible realistically
is if you had some kind
of Schrodinger's Princess
or Schrodinger's bin Laden,
that's was alive and dead at the same time
and what Karen Douglas's work showed
and I think it's doing very elegantly,
is what actually motivates
conspiracy theorists
isn't to be consistent in their reasoning
or to have a consistent world view.
It is the idea that they
have some special knowledge.
It's the idea that they know something.
It's the idea that their
world view is confirmed
or supported by this stuff,
so they're not actually
motivated by consistency
and which is why they often, for example,
I'm dealing with a lot of the
COVID-19 conspiracy theorists
who will at same time tell
you that the virus is a hoax
and also tell you it's a
coverup for something else
or it was a man-made virus.
So how are these two things true?
And if you go looking for
consistency in these narratives
you are misunderstanding what
motivates these narratives.
- Yeah, and I guess
some of this partially at least comes from
wanting a sense of belonging because
many of these communities
do seem to sort of
arise out of little pockets
of the Internet where
people who, for whatever
reasons, feel disenfranchised
or even ostracized from
conventional society.
And while for some this,
so yeah, I guess it does at
least partially come from
people wanting a sense of belonging 'cause
it does seem though many
of these communities
seem to arise out of little
pockets of the Internet where
people who for whatever
reason feel disenfranchised
or even ostracized from
conventional society and
yeah, I guess for some they
will be motivated out of
more like egoic and possibly
even like malicious desires but
I think for the vast majority of people
within the conspiracy communities,
I think their motivations
comes from a genuine wish
to contribute something helpful
even though, unfortunately
the consequences typically
turn out negative.
- You're absolutely right.
One of the biggest motivators of,
or biggest reasons why people subscribe
to conspiratorial thinking,
is that it gives a sense
of power to the powerless.
Right, if you feel like
you know something,
some arcane or special knowledge,
why you feel safer in a paradoxial way,
for example, I deal with
a lotta people who think,
there's a secret cure for cancer
and they always think they know what it is
and it's cannabis or it's vitamin B
or it's something, you know?
But it's something they know
and they feel protected and
special because they know that.
Now, unfortunately they do kill patients
by trying to convince them of it,
so I have an issue with
that as a cancer scientist,
that bothers me,
but it is interesting.
The other thing that motivates
conspiratorial thinking
and in particular it motivates
people who evangelize
conspiratorial beliefs, is narcissism.
So for example, if you
have a conspiracy theorist
who is soap boxing an awful lot
and let's say they're anti-vaxxer,
all anti-vaccine beliefs
are conspiratorial beliefs
that is well established,
because to believe in
anti-vaccine narrative
you have to accept that everyone
is complicit in a coverup
so it gets, eh.
So let's say you're
dealing with one of them,
they're quite well studied.
They can sit in a room with
brilliant epidemiologists
or brilliant immunologists,
brilliant doctors
and who can explain to them
at length why they are wrong
about their particular conspiracy theory
and the conspiratorial
thinker can simply go,
"Huh, those idiots, I know
so much more than them."
Despite the fact that person
has never opened a book in their life,
they can argue with
professors of this stuff
and still feel superior
and to some people's egos
that is a very alluring
and intoxicating sensation
and that is why they evangelize
because the more they opine on this,
the more people who listen to them
and the more they think they are special.
That's the David Icke-ian model
of kind of putting things out there
but it is very common online now.
There are always communities of it
and there's always loud speakers.
The problem is they might
be motivated by narcissism
but they can capture unwary
people and frighten them
and confuse their understanding
of a situation, horrifically.
So I always argue that with,
say to parents who don't vaccinate
and I do a lot of work
on vaccination policy,
I guess this is why
this resonates with me,
a lot of parents who don't vaccinate
are not actually anti-vaccine,
they're the victims of anti-vaxxers
because they've come
across frightening things
that these people for
their own narcissistic,
egotistical, ideological
reasons have perpetuated
and they become afraid
and the availability heuristic
is the idea that we weigh
more heavily information
that is easily memorable
and that we can access
and scary claims are
always easier to access.
So it's entirely
understandable that say parents
mightn't vaccinate their children
not because they're anti-vaccine
but because they don't know much better
and they've read something
scary and they think,
again conjunction fallacy, a little bit,
they think, "Oh the
probability is, I'll be safer
"not vaccinating,"
'cause they don't know
the priors, so to speak.
So I look at them as victims
of the anti-vaccine movement,
even though they're not
vaccinating themselves
and I think it's very
important distinction to make.
I think the scientific
literature will call them
vaccine hesitant and they say that
vaccine hesitancy is a spectrum,
but obviously the people
who get caught in the middle
and even with regular conspiracy theories,
they're the people I have
a lotta sympathy for.
- So how common is it for people to be
generally rational but
hold one or two irrational
conspiracy beliefs?
- Believe it or not, that's
less common than you would think
and there's a good reason for that.
So the philosopher W.V. Quine
talked about our web of belief
and this the idea that all
our beliefs are interconnected
and if you start making
serious alterations
to what you accept in one domain,
it has repercussions for something else.
For example, if you
need to accept the idea
that vaccines cause
autism, which they don't
but if you accept that, you
then have to accept the idea
that all doctors and
scientists are lying to you.
It then becomes easier
to accept the idea that
there are people that have
natural cures for diseases
and suddenly, you've quite
substantially altered
a lot of the supporting beliefs
that propped up something.
So what you see with conspiracy
theorists in general,
is that they hold multiple
conspiracy beliefs
and often conflicting conspiracy
beliefs at the same time,
because if you've altered
your web of belief so much
that you can accept one
massive, overarching conspiracy,
it becomes very easy to accept other ones
and in fact, it becomes almost
inevitable that you will.
- And I guess a part of it is,
if you've already developed
enough of distrust
about perhaps, say your original one
that got you into it was,
the moon landings were fake.
That means you have to
have deep distrust of,
not only government but
much of science,
scientists in general, engineers and so on
and so the more scientific
studies that come out
that are presumably,
rigorously peer reviewed
and so on, that's almost like a red flag.
It's like, "Oh, this
has been peer reviewed,
"that means it's bad."
And I suppose, so then
you're left with no choice
but to then sort of start
accepting more and more of these
conspiracy theories because
it's anything that is considered
anti-conventional science
is presumably good in that world view.
- Although oddly enough, you're right.
But it's funny, I noticed that these,
for example, I guess I've
dealt for a long time
with anti-vaccine people
and if they ever come
across a scientific study
that they interpret as
supporting their beliefs
and spoiler alert, they usually don't,
but if they do read it that way
they will be happy to jump with it
and to go, "Ha, see
this proves our belief."
So they very much cherry
pick what they will believe
and what they don't,
which be what you'd expect
but yeah, for sure.
The other thing that
you alluded to earlier,
which is very, very true,
is that we now have,
why, for example, are
we dealing with 5G myths
to the extent we are, right?
When these same myths happened
with 4G and 3G and Wi-Fi
and cellphones, why is it now a problem?
And one of the reasons it's
such a huge problem now,
is that we have social media.
That people congregate in
these ideological echo chambers
and inside them, they
reinforce their beliefs
with other people that are
equally single minded as they are
and that has a weird kind
of amplifying effect.
So it creates these
crucibles where people go in
and become (chuckles) quite radicalized
and evangelize quite aggressively on this,
so I think the other
factor is the social aspect
of conspiracy theories,
to be part of a conspiracy theory
is to think you're part of a club.
Everyone has special knowledge.
- It was definitely viewed
as like the lone wolf before,
where the classic tinfoil hat,
they were the loners, they
lived out in the woods and
they had strange beliefs
about the government
and it was hard for them
for their ideas to disseminate
because by their very nature,
they weren't social people
but now there is actually a way
for previous lone wolves
to talk to one another.
Now in some ways that's not a bad thing
'cause I don't like the
idea of anyone being lonely
and not having a kindred spirit to talk to
but at the same time, it
is extremely dangerous
when these things are left to then
sort of fester and grow.
But then it like, (sighs)
the thing that I always
personally struggle with
is this, I'm a strong
proponent in free speech
and it was interesting,
you were getting heat
earlier today because
your tweet was included in this
article about Eamonn Holmes
who foolishly sort of went
on his national TV show
and talked about how 5G is
related to the corona or
he doesn't, he accepts that it's unlikely
that the two things are related
but he thinks it's wrong that
people should be censored
from talking about it.
And so this raises this really
tough situation where it is,
I think it's crucial that
we still enable free speech
and avoid censorship as much as possible
but at the same time,
what do we do when an idea that is
patently false to anyone
with a brain is being
telegraphed across the world
and it seems like the force of good ideas
counteracting that is just
not enough because this is so,
it ticks all the emotional
buttons that people need
to believe in it.
What do we do about that?
How do we, without
getting into censorship--
- Easily, easily
because it's a false dichotomy.
Firstly, freedom of speech
is not freedom from the
consequences of speech, right?
- Right.
- Freedom of speech is a
most misunderstood concept.
I was writing about this recently.
Freedom of speech means
that you have the right
to believe whatever you want
and no one can arrest you for it
and indeed talk about whatever you want
and not be arrested for it.
It doesn't obligate anyone
to give you a platform
and it doesn't mean anyone
has to listen to you.
It just means you're not gonna be arrested
for believing a certain thing.
Now where this becomes an issue
is that people often mix up
facts and opinion, right?
You have the right to believe
and indeed, to some extent
propagate whatever you wish
but no one else, has to endure it
and we also be aware of
consequences of that,
for example, we have
regulation about hate speech
for good reason, right?
Because if you incite
people with falsehoods
to commit dangerous acts,
you can't just fall back
on excuse for free speech for good reason
and it is the same, and
it should be the same,
with misinformation with say, vaccination.
If someone goes out there and tells you,
"Vaccines are killing
children, blah, blah, blah,"
and they cannot fall back on free speech.
Now you can absolutely
discuss those beliefs
and I've done radio shows over here
where we deliberately
won't do false balance,
we won't put someone who's pro-vaccine
against someone who's anti-vaccine,
because that is to give them
a platform they do not deserve
'cause the evidence only is one way.
But what we can do, is we can have a show
that we discuss the fears that people have
and the things that people have heard
and say why they're not true.
So we're still acknowledging
that people hold these beliefs
and then we're explaining
why they're wrong.
The idea that everything
has to have equal coverage,
just because people hold some beliefs
is the archetypal false balance problem
and it's a real issue because
you're not infringing on
someone's free speech by saying,
that's actually, this
is a matter of fact that
you are speaking about.
You cannot simply make
it up and then demand
that everyone give you a platform for that
because it's simply not true.
- Right and the trouble is,
is that TV is a gross
oversimplification of everything
because even if you have
say a climate change panel
with five people and
the producers are like,
"Okay let's have four
scientists and one denier,"
that's still false
representation because in reality
the ratio's actually something
like a thousand to one
for climate sciences
but obviously that's
not physically possible
to get in a studio so,
I guess what's really needed
is we need to find a way
to quantify the body of evidence
for whatever the theory is,
in a pro and against and then give that
proportional representation but
we can't.
- Yeah,
so I do a lot of media engagements
and one of the things I do a lot,
is I will not engage in false balance
and I often turn down, I will say,
but I'm often asked, "Will
you do a debate with someone?"
And I'm like, "No, I will come
on and discuss it with you,
"I will sit there in
studio and we can talk
"about what people have
said and why it's not true,"
or why something else is true
or discuss people's fears
and that's good public
service broadcasting.
That is a good thing to do
because you don't deny
that these fears exists.
We should look at them and say,
"Well this is why that's
not actually true."
But if you start getting in debates,
you start letting people
vampirically leech off
the credibility of experts
and it's a win even if,
like sometimes I talk to
my more libertarian friends
who are like, "Ah yes,
"but they'll expose themselves in debate
"and they'll foolish," and I'm like,
they will get converts, I promise you.
For them the victory
is getting the airtime.
We can look at an English example,
Nigel Farage didn't win any elections
in his entire career when
he was initially standing
but yet he got airtime,
that's all he needed.
It was always a victory.
- Yeah, now he has this huge following
and again the issue is
that we're sort of assuming
that everybody in audience is able
to assess people's
arguments on the strength
of their argumentation and
plus--
- Not on their
rhetorical skills that
are being displayed.
- Yeah, exactly they're
just very different things.
- The person who wins a debate,
now I'm in an unusual
position, I am a scientist
who has a background in debate
and I will tell you that
the way you win a debate
is with rhetorical flair
and oratorial skills.
You don't win on the
strength of your arguments,
where if it's a scientist is--
- Yeah and charisma.
- Yeah absolutely,
and a scientist has to win on
the strength of the argument,
so it's really unfair,
that why particularly with
and the public think
that, if you think debate
is the arbiter of truth,
you don't understand
how truth is arrived at.
Discussion and dialectics
is a far better way
to go, why do you believe that?
Why do I believe that?
Let's talk, instead of having
a one side and the other side,
which is this kind of
adversarial Punch and Judy show.
- Right it's just zero-sum thing,
where one side wins and
the other doesn't, whereas
when it's the role of an interviewer,
interviewing some experts then
the interviewer themselves
can play the role of devil's advocate,
pushing back, asking the hard questions,
raising the audience's concerns but
from a neutral party perspective.
- Absolutely and I think
those kinda discussions
are so much better for
public understanding
because you're not
dismissing people's fears,
you're not dismissing
people's misconceptions,
they have to be addressed.
We have to talk about these
very openly and honestly.
If people are scared about say
5G or vaccines or climate change,
we need to talk about that.
But we need to talk
about that in such a way
as that we don't amplify falsehood
because otherwise, it's like
we're just turning up the
noise on top of everything
and we're not doing any good for people.
It is much better if we
say, "Well let's discuss,"
and I think we need to start
moving away from debate
and more towards discussion
and one of the nice
things about discussion
is you can change your own mind.
Sometimes the most
rewarding thing you'll find
when you're in discussion with
someone rather than a debate,
is you're halfway through
and you suddenly get it
from their perspective
or they get it more from yours
and you end up far more
- Converging.
- harmoniously converging.
Not necessarily agreeing
but converging or at least understanding
where you're coming from
and there's no anger, it's like,
"Oh, okay yeah I kinda see that,
"I don't fully agree with you
"but I'm now more accepting
of why you got there
"and I think we can see a way
to fixing this in the end."
That's far more conducive
to reason (chuckles) I think
than two people yelling at
different sides of the podium,
exactly opposite points.
- So I first became
familiar with your work
after you wrote this
really fun paper that,
I'll link below in the description to it
for people to check out,
but what it did, was it sort of attempted
to mathematically show why
some conspiracies are more
or less likely to be true than others
and that's to do with
the fact that basically
the more conspirators, secret
keepers a theory requires
in order to keep it secret,
the harder that secret is to keep
and I think you did this
by comparing four of
the most popular ones.
What was it?
The moon landings are a hoax,
one, yeah, you do one of these better.
What are the other three?
- One was the idea that
vaccination was a scam or was bad
and one, climate change was a hoax
and the last one, that there
was a secret cure for cancer
being suppressed by the
pharmaceutical industry.
- So could you explain
the maths behind this?
- Sure it's really quite straightforward.
So these are, just in my
science outreach work,
these are four that I
consistently got bombarded with
and I was in a event actually in Germany
with some colleagues of
mine and we were quite drunk
and we were talking about all the,
they were looking at the emails I get
and we're all sharing them
round, like this is crazy.
And on the back of the
napkin I started saying,
well look, let's play
devil's advocate okay?
Let's say that there is a conspiracy.
How could we keep it a secret?
And this is the genesis of the idea,
and there's a branch of mathematics
called Poisson statistics where
you can kind of work it out,
the likelihood of something that happens
at a particular rate,
if you have enough of these events.
So in this case, you have
very good conspirators
who want to keep a secret,
so you play devil's advocate,
you say, right, everyone wants
to keep this a big secret,
but they're really good
at keeping secrets,
they're really good but
they're not perfect,
so they have some kinda
failure rate, it's very low,
I think I had it as one
in 250,000 chance per year
of someone letting the cat out of the bag,
either accidentally or intentionally.
And then you start going,
okay, how many people would I need
for this conspiracy to work?
So say I wanted the world's scientific
and medical establishment
to lie about something,
whether it's climate change
or whether it's vaccination,
how many people at minimum,
would need to be complicit?
And then you can get numbers for that
and when you put all these numbers in
and you run the simulation over time,
it becomes incredibly
(chuckles) difficult to sustain
any sort of massive conspiracy
and that shouldn't surprise us,
because in the 1500s Machiavelli
was warning people in "The Prince",
he was warning that the
leader he was advising
that you shouldn't engage
conspiracies because
they almost inevitably fall apart
and then it's all recriminations
and finger pointing.
Two centuries later,
Benjamin Franklin said that,
"Three can keep a secret,
if two of them are dead."
And I think the issue is
these massive conspiracy theories,
even if you play devil's advocate
and assume everyone's really good
and really motivated to keep a secret,
which is already a simplification,
they just won't sustain the
kind of numbers you need
to sustain them.
- Right and then it becomes
more and more unlikely
as time goes on because
there's just so many
sorta different failure
points for it to fall apart
but then isn't the flip side of this that
some of the theories that require
much smaller number of people,
like only has two or three
people to keep it secret
are therefore more likely to be true?
- If you and I decided
we're gonna rob a bank,
so let's say after we do this we go,
"Screw it, let's rob a bank together."
That's a conspiracy right there.
That's criminal conspiracy,
that's of two people.
Now let's say we're very good,
we might get away with it.
I reckon you probably could, I'd blab,
(laughter) I'd be bad right?
But conspiracies happen all the time.
People plant to do
things that are sinister.
What this is saying and that does happen,
I mean anyone who schemes to do something
is engaged in conspiracy.
What this research would say
is that if you take any
kind of realistic numbers,
for a big overarching,
scientific conspiracy
that would require scientists
to be complicit in it.
It just has so many moving parts that
it's not sustainable, it's not viable.
Whereabouts if a small group of people,
so basically if you want
to do something nefarious,
do it with a small group of people and
do it where it doesn't
matter if you get exposed
after a certain period of time,
'cause actually you still get
exposed relatively quickly
in most situations.
Do it where there's a half-life
where you can get exposed afterwards
and you don't suffer repercussions for it.
That happens all the time.
It happens in politics when people make
sweetheart deals or whatever else
but real conspiracies like the ones
that conspiratorial thinkers
and conspiracy theorists fantasize about,
not likely, just there's
too many moving parts.
- Just too many people.
Well, fingers crossed your paper
helped change the minds of people
who are deeply believing
these conspiracies
but even if not, it's
certainly helped those of us
who are just trying to
become better rationalists
and be more accurate
in our belief building.
The sort of process that it talks through
and the sort of general
theory behind all of this,
is so helpful and I
found this conversation
absolutely fascinating so,
thank you so much for joining.
- Thank you very much for having me.
- Thanks for watching folks.
I hope you enjoyed this
and found it insightful.
I'm guessing that if you got to the end,
that you did, that's
usually a good sign so
select few of you who I'm
speaking to right now,
if so please do share
and hit that like button
'cause it really helps
more people to find
this and I really think
that the messages that
David is explaining in this
are crucially important because
growing conspiracy belief,
when these beliefs are
objectively false are very,
very dangerous for the world
and it's something that is
concerning me more and more.
So yeah, please let me
know in the comments below
if you have any further questions,
either to me or to David,
I'll direct him to them
and yeah, see you next time.
