with guest David Detmer, PhD
Substack, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon
joe: [00:00:00] Hey Welcome back to the Rabbit Hole of Research down here. That is
nick: is a true statement.
joe: down here
mary: here in a
joe: basement studio.
You’ve got me Joe. Feeling good.
nick: You got Nick.
mary: You
joe: got Nick. We’ve got Nick Georgia. We got Georgia.
mary: We got Georgia. You got Mary. We got Mary.
nick: Hey, I think we got a special guest with us today.
mary: What you
joe: do have a special guest please.
david: My name is David Detmer. I’m a retired philosophy professor from Purdue Northwest, where I taught for 35 years.
joe: Nice. That’s gonna be perfect. ’cause today we’re gonna be talking lassoing the truth serum.
nick: Thank you for being here with us today.
joe: Yeah.
nick: Actually live in the studio as
joe: Yeah, we get in the studio, not Zoom or some other
mary: Yeah, it’s great.
joe: Mistruths
nick: great. We have a full
joe: So yeah, full table. this is a pretty cool space, so I’m glad I’m here rather than some remote location.
Yeah. Whatever it is.
mary: Yeah,
joe: Yeah.
Yeah. You ready to get into it?
nick: Yeah
geo: I would thought you were gonna start.
You’re a little monologue.
joe: I am. I’m not [00:01:00] even
nick: she’s not even lying about that.
geo: You know what, if it’s up to Mary though, she’s gonna Yeah. Cut
mary: that’s right.
geo: Cut you off.
joe: unless she has one ready to go and
mary: No. I’m here for the ride.
joe: Yep. It’s just set the stage a little bit.
Wonder Woman has a golden lasso that forces anyone it touches to tell the absolute truth. And depending on your perspective, this is either the most powerful weapon in the comic universe or the most terrifying, because here’s the question, no one ever really asks, what if the person she lassoed is telling her the truth completely, sincerely with everything they have, and they’re still wrong.
The question isn’t whether you can tell when someone else is lying to you. The real question is whether you can tell when your own mind is.
This was shown in the most extreme way, a man with a very specific kind of brain damage, connection and communication between his left and right hemispheres were severed.
When scientists showed his right brain and image his left brain couldn’t see, then ask him to describe [00:02:00] it. His left brain didn’t say, I don’t know, and invented a perfectly reasonable explanation, and he delivered it with complete confidence as absolute truth. The researchers called this the left brain interpreter.
It’s a system your brain runs constantly making sense of the world by reconciling new information with what was known before, stitching your experiences, impulses, and reactions into a coherent story. It doesn’t always wait for all the facts and fills in whatever fits and keeps the narrative moving. We all have this, it’s running right now.
As you listen, your own brain is interpreting reality, not as a faithful recorder, but as a writer, making things up for you to believe as truth.
geo: And trust me.
joe: So
mary: I don’t know whether to believe you. That’s right.
joe: Me.
You
gotta believe yourself now.
nick: I mean, we do tell ourselves lies all the time, and eventually we will start believing them and it. It comes to the point where is this a truth or not? Like [00:03:00] your brain reiterates what happens in the past from your own perspective.
joe: So
mary: what
nick: one person’s truth is, it’s not always someone else’s. ’cause if they’re watching the same thing, they’re seeing it from different angles and
joe: mm-hmm.
nick: I think that would be where it would get the gray line of, right, you telling the truth? Yeah, you are, but it’s only in your own eyes.
joe: But I guess , it also lines up with fact, right? ’cause how do you prove something is true? And once that proof is established, then if you keep believing your own reality or your perspective is that where it becomes a falsehood. I think there is disinformation and misinformation, right? So I think that’s where that line Nick, you’re kind of getting at a little bit.
nick: Yeah. I was actually thinking about that episode of Malcolm in the Middle, which Yeah, I know, throwback right there.
joe: I know.
geo: Can you give us a little more about that
nick: Yeah. So I think it was I can’t remember her name.
It was the mother, she ended up [00:04:00] getting into a car accident and no one believed her that she was not at fault. And they pulled from a security camera that didn’t prove her right, but she kept fighting for it and fighting and then they found another footage from a different angle and it actually proved her right.
And she was like, no one was believing me, even though I know I was right. I, she didn’t think that she was going crazy, but everyone else saw what they saw and thought that she was wrong and it was like, oh yeah.
mary: Interesting.
david: I would say that we don’t want to go too far with this and Georgia I thought your comment was right on the money when you said to Joe, why should we believe the story he was telling
is true?
You know?
It can’t be a kind of complete skepticism. There has to be a way of trying to figure out what the proof, sorry, what the truth is, and we’re living in a period when, especially in the political realm. It’s just full of [00:05:00] lies. And it seems to me there are many cases where you can figure out what the truth is and we don’t have to be worried about, you know, the left brain, right brain stuff.
You know, it’s very transparent. So here’s an example I like to use ’cause it goes sort of right back to the beginning with our president, Donald Trump. So he has claimed repeatedly that he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania tops in his class.
Now he’s never released his transcript and it would be illegal for the University of Pennsylvania to release it without his permission.
But we have the program from when his class graduated,
and so it lists the people who are Summa cum loude he’s not on that list. People who are magna cum loude he’s not on that list. The people who are CU Laude, he’s not on that list. Remarkably he is on the list of graduates. So there is
that.
And moreover, there’s a dean’s list that would come out [00:06:00] regularly and he’s not on it. So it seems to me, if you put those facts together. We know with something very close to certainty that he in fact did not graduate. first in his class. So yeah, there are all sorts of reasons to say that certainty is hard to achieve.
There. There’s always possibility that, you know, you’re being fooled in one way or another. There are all sorts of not just the one that Joe mentioned. There are lots of things about how our brains work that make us prone to error, but there’s also such a thing as learning some techniques, learning some skills to fight that a bit.
It’s not like you can completely say, oh, now I can determine the truth of everything, you know, but there, there are things you can do to try to overcome some of those cognitive problems that we all have.
geo: And I, so is it
nick: possible that he’s told himself that he’s topped his entire time and like he [00:07:00] actually truly believes it At this point?
david: possibly.
But one thing I’ve read now here, I guess is not something I can claim. I know for a fact. ’cause it’s just something I’ve read that people who know him have said that he has, you know, told his lawyers and everything and other people in his circle to sort of do everything in their power to not have the university ever release his his grades.
So I suspect he knows that he wasn’t a great student but nonetheless, it is a phenomenon. You know, that sometimes when people lie to themselves over and over again, they start believing
it.
nick: I do that all the time.
david: Oh, okay.
joe: Oh,
Okay.
nick: For the longest time, I didn’t know what Tums did, and I told myself that it did everything.
mary: Tums
nick: cured everything for me for the longest time
geo: a longest time. It’s kind of a placebo.
nick: yeah,
geo: placebo effect,
nick: I placebo myself knowingly. And it worked
mary: That’s fantastic.
geo: I guess that’s a good point.
Like the grades are the thing that is the known thing that we don’t know, [00:08:00] but it’s like he either got a C average or D average, or. A average, whatever it is that it exists. Yeah. He had classes and grades and that is the thing that exists. So it doesn’t matter what our perspective is, that is the truth.
nick: I mean,
geo: you know what I’m saying?
joe: truth, right? Yes. But I think you didn’t have just tethers into , the social truth where you can start to convince and people then will buy into that as true, even with compelling and overwhelming evidence because they want to fit into some tribe, they wanna fit into some societal kind of norm and fit in.
So I think that’s the other thing that we’re playing with, especially at, in a super kind of social media playing this oversized role in media, playing this oversized role in culture. Now you’re seeing this kind of amped up that if you can get into the minds of people get your quote unquote truth out there, then you can, no one’s even asking [00:09:00] for these documents.
People are just going along and saying, okay you know, and some of that could be, there are bigger issues to at hand then if your first, second, third, or last, you know, who cares when people are, being mistreated. The economy is, not doing well and bigger political geopolitical kind of the world at large.
So I think that also factors in some of this is,
mary: although
david: would say that the example I used, even though it’s nowhere near the most important issue, it gives you a framework for viewing everything that Donald Trump does. So you’ll notice he’s constantly claiming, oh, he’s created the greatest economy in the history of the us.
He’s been the most transparent president in the history of the US et cetera, et cetera. And so he’s just always lying. He even cheats at golf regularly. There was a whole, there was a whole, there was a whole book written about that and maybe some of you saw in the news a few months ago he was caught [00:10:00] cheating at golf right on camera or on video where his caddy got ahead of him.
And then as he’s walking along, he just sort of casually drops a golf ball
And
then Trump comes
up and hits that ball,
you
mary: know, so
david: Mm-hmm. So he’s just a huge cheater and liar. And there are all sorts of barriers to exposing that the media kind of doesn’t know how to do it. Because if they were to report on things objectively and accurately, they would just be saying that all the time.
And the media ethic is sort of, oh, that would not be objective. You know, that would mean we’re being one-sided and so on. So I think there historically, maybe it’s not as much true Now. The media landscape has changed, but historically the media had this ideal of objectivity, and I think they got objectivity wrong.
If you think about the concept of objectivity, it has to do with [00:11:00] fidelity to the object. You’ve described the object accurately, whereas the media tended to. Interpret it as being fair to both sides, being sort of in the middle, being neutral. So if there’s a one-sided phenomenon and you describe it accurately, they see that as being not objective.
’cause you’re not kind of arriving in the middle, you’re not describing both sides sort of evenly. So
the,
nick: do you,
geo: it’s hard to describe something like. Picturing someone doing something that’s so black and white as, you know what I’m saying? Yeah.
nick: You guys think that it’s because all the news corporations are being conglomerated into like major networks?
We don’t have that local news as much as we used to. So back then we were able to have local newses that some might be absolutely bonkers with their reporting, but a lot of [00:12:00] them had very straightforward facts on what was going on. Yeah.
mary: Yeah.
geo: the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.
david: Yeah.
That’s an interesting point.
There’s a book I would recommend, it’s by Ben Bagdikian he was a journalist and a journalism professor, and he wrote a book called The Media Monopoly, and the first edition came out, I wanna say 82 or 84 or something like that. And he was pointing out that like the 500 biggest media outlets in the country, and that includes newspapers, magazines, television networks, television stations, movie studios, et cetera.
The 500 biggest ones, they were all owned by, I wanna say something like, I don’t know, 22. Companies. And so the next edition came out two or three years later. Now it’s 17 companies, two or three years later it’s 12 companies.
And I think the most recent edition, it was something like six companies. So they, the big corporations keep buying up the smaller corporations, and that does hurt with the diversity of [00:13:00] opinion, especially to Nick’s point about the local news, because there, you know, the big power players aren’t quite as concerned about what’s going on locally, so there’s more room for accuracy. And so one of the effects I remember reading, I think it was in his book or somewhere else at one point, there was some weather disaster hitting South Dakota and South Dakota had no radio stations where people were in South Dakota.
They just played tapes that came in from some big sort of thing. So I think the, you know, these media issues go into the obscuring of truth quite a bit. Yeah.
joe: Yeah. But I think, I mean, the other thing is this money that factors in quite a bit, especially when
geo: you’re, oh, money, always money
joe: And news and media, because, that was the other big change was that news was independent of advertising. The night the news would just come on, it would run, and then, commercials and things were in the other programming.
And then at some [00:14:00] point that switched. And so money then became the big factor. And having these kind of putting out these truths or even now editorializing the news, I think then opinion comes in, and Dave, you, me mentioned that about opinion and how that isn’t truth.
Mm-hmm. You know, that it, I mean it can be, but generally that’s your opinion of the truth
or of,
mary: can be,
geo: But it can be, but it can be an informed opinion. Yes. You know, and I mean,
joe: It’s still the observation, right? So you’re making an observation of something and then drawing conclusions and then that’s, that’s technically your opinion, right?
That, I mean, you can do that. So you can go out and say the sky is green. And then go about
nick: That’s just like your opinion, man.
joe: That’s
right. Exactly. And so
Is that, where’s the truth? And that, you know, that gets in, I think misinformation, disinformation, and malformation. You start to play with those kind of
Using
truths and non-truths at this, shell game.
And if it’s about making money, I think then you’re gonna play it up.
nick: That’s where the 24 [00:15:00] hour news cycles came through.
joe: Mm-hmm.
geo: And that also money even gets into like scientific discoveries. I’m sure. Now, I mean, you right? I mean, you’re supposed to be doing your science blind and not have a agenda.
But I, my guess is money is getting more and more something
joe: some point that’s when it’s careful to look at studies, especially like I would say nutritional studies. So if it, someone comes out and says, grape juice is the greatest juice of all the juices, and they publish on paper. I would look at a, how many people were in the study,
uh, and then B like look at who funded it.
So if, you know, I’m not picking on any company.
Exactly. If they, gave the money to the researchers, then you gotta imagine there’s some level of pressure to massage the data. Maybe not outright tell a non-truth. And this gets into that.
Was this malformation, so it’s true and that, but that spreads harm?
Or is it misinformation? Was it truly false? And, you know, it doesn’t,
geo: you keep you are bringing up [00:16:00] several words, disinformation, misinformation. And what’s the other one? So disinformation I
joe: I have as false and accidentally spread disinformation, , false, and deliberately spread and malformation as true and used out of contect and spreads harm.
david: So you can say something that’s true, but also deliberately quite misleading.
You could,
uh,
And example, since I was picking on Donald Trump I’ll.
Try to be fair and pick on a Democrat
now.
nick: I mean, you don’t have to, we’re not getting paid by anyone
joe: yes. We
have no sponsors yet. But if that could change
david: Bill Clinton was really good at this. And one example is in, I think it was when he was running for his first term in his debate, his opponent was accusing him of being a big tax guy.
He’s gonna really tax you like crazy. ’cause that’s always the Republican playbook against Democrats, that they’re taxers. And so Clinton’s response was to say the people of my state, [00:17:00] Arkansas. On average, they have the second lowest tax burden of any state in the nation. And this was completely true, but what he left out of that is the reason they paid so few taxes is that they were desperately poor.
You know, it was a po poverty stricken state. You know, it used to be that politicians were sort of masters at that saying things that were technically true, but totally misleading. And one of the things that’s interesting about the Trump phenomenon is he doesn’t go in for that kind of subtlety.
It’s just bold faced lies and typically things that are obviously lies. And yet somehow he’s able to fool millions and millions of people. It’s an interesting
joe: I think he’s a, I think he’s just a personality, right?
So I think he’s this very showman actor kind of mentality. And so if you’re a showman, that’s, if you’re like an actor, that’s their job to go in and convince you that, you know, to be empathetic with them, to hate ’em, to whatever. And they can be a totally different and usually are in real life, but that is their [00:18:00] job.
So if you put someone that into the political arena, and that’s, I mean, that’s an attribute of it, that you have to be a good showman. You have to sell yourself, you have to be likable, you have to, and , you can start to get, and people will. Overlook or you know, or not really pay attention to these things.
And especially if they see ’em as minor that’s just a minor. You fudged a little bit. It’s not a lie. Okay. You were 10th instead of first, eh. Okay. I mean, it’s a long time ago. People forget a little bit.
geo: He wasn’t,
I’m
mary: saying that.
Well, I’m
joe: just saying
once Once you have that kind of narrative, people are gonna point out other people because as you said. That this is a game Politicians play is massaging the facts. So can you then go, and if you got the better personality, the more you’re more bombastic. People seem to like that.
nick: See, but on the opposite end of that scale are comedians. They will tell the truth and have you laughing along with it to the point where you don’t know if it’s the truth or not.
But they have openly said some of the most hidden secrets in [00:19:00] public, and we just laugh at ’em as, oh, that’s funny. ’cause it’s a joke. And it’s
geo: I think you’re able to put people like, kind of let their guards down. You’re more accepting of it. You’re Yes. When it’s like a comedy and like someone’s giving this, it’s not so much in your face, I’m yelling this I’m making you laugh.
I mean, oh, some of them
nick: them are yelling it,
geo: but maybe I’m really telling the truth. You know? And I think the great example is the Great Dictator by
david: Charlie Chaplin. Yeah.
geo: I mean, so
nick: I mean, I was gonna go John Stewart over here, but Yeah,
david: George
joe: Carlin, I mean,
nick: exactly. All
geo: but, but Charlie Chaplin was telling like these very important things about what was happening at the, at that time.
But I think the way he was able to do that is he was kind of a clown and people were laughing, but it’s wait, what are he saying is really. True. You know?
joe: Yeah.
mary: [00:20:00] I have a question. I wanted I more of a comment. So you were a professor David for many years.
david: That’s right.
mary: So what kind of criteria did you develop for your students to help them? Figure out whether something was true or not.
david: So one of the courses I taught was just called Critical
Thinking.
And so we would do various things. We would talk about the classical logical fallacies that have been developed since the time of Aristotle, know, so, And logical fallacies are common mistakes in reasoning. And so one thing I would say is, and this may shock some of you that I would say this, most of the time people think fairly logically and we kind of don’t notice that. ’cause we take it for granted.
mary: Mm-hmm. People
david: are able to walk down the street and not smash into each other. People are able to put their clothes on in the morning.
You know, people are able to navigate most things thinking rationally. So logical fallacies are common mistakes in reasoning. So we talk about some of those and we [00:21:00] talk about some things in scientific reasoning, like I mentioned before, not confusing correlation with causation. Yeah. I have a rich fantasy life.
I sometimes would love to question RFK Jr. And just ask him what’s the difference between correlation and causation. Because I notice almost all of his arguments are just based on a very uncritical application of correlations. Mm-hmm.
So we do that. Then we do a unit on. Sort of psychological fallacies, you might say.
Like one of the most common ones, probably most of you’re familiar with this, is what’s the word I’m looking for? A confirmation bias. And one of the things that makes that so insidious is one version of confirmation bias. It has to do with simply what you notice. So when you’re out in the world looking at things you’re gonna notice some things and not notice other things.
So like a lot of prejudices, racial prejudices, gender prejudices, ethnic prejudices are sort of based on [00:22:00] that. So if you’ve got some kind of bigoted view about a certain group, so anytime you see a person in that group who’s doing something that fits that stereotype, you notice it that way. Ah, there, there’s another one.
Doing that thing,
mary: you notice it more because you’re primed to notice it,
david: And so when
When you meet someone in that group who doesn’t fit the stereotype, you don’t notice it as say, that’s a counter example to my thinking.
mary: It’s And aberration.
david: Yeah, it’s an aberration. So we go through these sort of psychological fallacies.
We do some stuff about the media. Sort of some media criticism about what are some of the distortions you find in the media and so on. And we talk about certain sort of things you can try to discipline yourself to do. So going back to confirmation bias, one of the things I try to teach is that it’s a useful exercise to think in advance what would count as counter evidence to my views on various subjects.
And then actually look for that, you know,
[00:23:00] because you can always find evidence to support any belief you might have, you know? And so the important thing is to try to look for counter evidence. Just one more example, I realize I’m rambling on a bit
nick: No, you’re all
mary: not at all. This is great. Thank you.
david: So there’s a famous experiment that sort of shows this problem where the experimenter will tell people, I’m gonna give some numbers.
In order, and I’m following a certain principle in the order, and I want you to guess what principle I’m using as a person will say, okay, here we go, 2, 4, 6, 8. And then what’s the next number? Everybody will say 10 and and he says, okay, that’s right. What might the next number be? They’ll say, 12. What’s the next number?
- So they’ve already decided that the right principle is you’re going up by two. They don’t even test if it might be another principle. So in fact, the principle I’m following is I just give a larger integer, you know? So [00:24:00] 15 could also be, but they won’t test to see if it might be that. So I try to suggest, you know, that’s a good tool.
You’ve got a belief, you find evidence that supports it. Now consider some other hypotheses and also go with that. And also what would count as sort of counter evidence. So those are some of the things.
joe: You’re nailed there with the scientific method, right?
Yeah. Because that is the idea that you would iterate through testing hypotheses to see if it checks out and didn’t do experiments to actually test if you’re right or wrong. So you would ask, you would say 15 and get a wrong and then you would move on. But I think the other thing is that people in general like to be right.
david: Oh, sure.
joe: And so if you’re telling someone that they’re right they’re not gonna challenge their own belief system because they’re being told that they’re correct and you’re doing this, you’re doing a great job. Keep it up. And if the if the instructor or the examiner is saying, good job, then they’re just gonna keep.
They’re gonna go, yeah I’m a genius. I got this. You know,
nick: Thank you.
joe: first try, I, I’m the best of the best.
geo: I think [00:25:00] that gets at the reason it’s so hard to convince someone that they’re believing something that’s not true.
That’s right. You know what I mean? Because they’ve put stake in the fact they believe that is true. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.
mary: wrong. You know that you feel that, you know. Yeah, exactly.
joe: So doing some research, what is, what exactly is truth? And came up with these three, maybe four-ish theories.
And maybe, one is the correspondence theory, that the truth matches reality. And this kind of theory, it requires you to independently. Assess your perceptions to check your own match, that what you’re actually seeing is what really matches reality.
Which is hard to do
david: well
geo: because
nick: so many people nowadays get stuck in an echo chamber.
Right?
Like you get on social media and you’re part of
geo: never gonna
nick: you only see what goes on between the same people of your like mind.
joe: So have the
mary: yourself sometime and go to somebody else’s house and go see what their [00:26:00] YouTube Algorithm looks like.
joe: don’t do that. I don’t know if you wanna
do that.
mary: it’s, I know it granted, I mean, yeah.
You might think different things about your, but no. You get to see somebody else’s reality and like the things that, that they get
geo: might never wanna talk to that person again.
david: from,
joe: oh, so I just sometimes you could just watch goofy stuff and then you’re like, oh, oof is what you watch.
I
nick: watch some wild shit on there.
joe: I didn’t have the co coherence theory where your truth fits a system. So it fits consistently with the system of other beliefs. And so you fit in there. That’s sounds nice, but a well-constructed delusion is inherently coherent. So you also can make this construct.
So trying to find this truth and the pragmatic theory, the truth
nick: Wait, can you give us ex an example of the other one? Is it like the people who believe flat earth?
joe: Yeah. I mean it’s just, your access to reality. So if something is true, if it doesn’t contradict everything else, you know, so you’re right.
So Flat Earth would potentially fit that because everything you [00:27:00] know about Earth probably if you don’t really assess it that much, you can convince yourself that the earth is flat.
nick: Don’t even know how they do that anymore. They keep using words like round. People all around the world know
mary: but David, you wanna
nick: and it’s you know, you just said round,
joe: goes
against the correspondence theory. That matches reality. Yeah. So you have these, so
mary: you wanted, you, David, you wanted to, and I, you look like you wanted to say something there.
Yeah. I
david: to say something about the flat
mary: earth.
joe: Oh, go for it.
david: So, So
I read a book a while ago by a philosopher named Lee McIntyre, where he took it upon himself the project, if you will, of attending conferences of various people who have wacky beliefs like that.
Okay? And so one of them was a Flat Earth Society conference. So first of all, I learned something fun. I wanna see if any of you know this. What word do the flat Earthers use for people? I assume all of us who think the earth is round, what’s their name for us?
mary: Oh gosh. It can, it can’t be good that
joe: The
mary: [00:28:00] theist
david: Globe tarts. So that was one thing. And the other thing that I thought was really funny, in a way, I have a kind of respect for some of these people because, you know, it’s an actual conference where they’re getting up and making arguments and so on. And so one guy, he had a proof, if you will, that the earth is round and so sorry that it’s flat.
And here was how
nick: it’s okay. That’s just how they said it too.
mary: right? Uhhuh?
david: Exactly.
mary: I knew it. So
david: they said we all know that most of the earth is covered with water. We all know that. I’m gonna prove to you that water will not stick to a globe. So he took a beach ball and spun it and poured water on it, and sure enough, the water came off and went to the
ground.
So it, it wasn’t factoring in the whole gravity
thing. you know, but
joe: That’s right. Yeah.
geo: I have I know you’re in the middle of your list, but this is making me think of something. And Joe,
joe: the list is for.
geo: That’s a lie.
david: You, you you sent me something on Instagram and I’m not gonna be able to [00:29:00] like, credit it at all. I mean, we hopefully will put in the show notes, but sometimes I lie and sometimes I lie and say it’ll be in the show notes and it isn’t. But it was this woman going over the map, the world map and talking about the sizes of the different,
joe: That’s been done by a few
geo: And that blew my mind because I just took the, I took the regular map as just, that’s as true as
joe: and usually
geo: true can be the story
mary: They,
geo: But the con but the continents the Latin American continents were much smaller and they really should have been bigger. And I mean, I don’t remember. That’s
joe: is much larger as a continent than, you know, Greenland is huge. It sits there and it’s like you,
geo: Yeah. And it was, United
joe: States is usually the lar like one of the largest, you know,
nick: they try to put it right in the center
geo: Yeah. And it was just so fascinating. It’s wow I just, that was, that really opened my eyes that like
nick: that gets through
geo: something
that’s been around for a long time and just [00:30:00] always just assumed is right.
And it’s no, that, you know that who, that’s
joe: who tells the story. And they can perpetuate their truth, right? So that’s like any, , historical event. If you get to write the book, if you’re the,
nick: you’re alive to tell the story, you’re putting yourself as the hero,
joe: as the hero, right? The winner always writes the better story and the loser muley they lost, they’re losers
nick: They’re probably not around.
david: Well See,
this is why you need people who will make a conscientious effort to put in what’s not there. So
joe: that’s
right.
geo: And that’s why so much of like history and everything else, people want to, , erase it or not tell those stories, you
joe: think this, The third kind of theory was the pragmatic theory, and this was it’s truth that works. William James and John Dewey. They argued that a belief is true if acting on it produces useful results. And so that’s a, it’s a pretty powerful philosophical statement when you think about it, that if you can do it, but it really means that something can be true in one [00:31:00] context and very false in the other.
And this probably more fits the political arena where this happens a lot. But it is if it leads to a great, outcome Yeah, let’s roll with it.
geo: I’m
david: I’m dying to respond
to this.
joe: for it. No,
mary: Yeah. I
joe: I, can,
see that,
mary: I, I
joe: I’m, that’s why
I was like,
I’m going to wait.
That’s,
mary: Oh I’m right here in the splash zone. I can’t wait.
joe: this is a list.
david: So, So here’s what I would argue you, you are absolutely correct. Those are the three major theories of truth that we find in the history of Western philosophy.
joe: have one more, but you
david: Oh, no, go ahead. With the fourth one.
joe: Oh I was gonna, and I don’t know if it’s a theory, but it was deflationism.
Oh yeah. And it’s really it’s, I mean, it’s kind of basically saying that True isn’t a deep property at all. Yeah. That it’s just a made up construct. And an example for Nick here, the one that in reading this, it is true that the sky is blue.
It’s nothing to the sky is blue. And so stating truths is meaningless. And so we should just, and I guess it could make you, it’s your word and you use it any way you [00:32:00] want. It’s like love, like we, , we don’t, we need more words to parse through all the emotions,
mary: wanted. You wanted to talk about the three theory or the theories.
Yes.
david: I’ll leave the fourth
joe: can lead a fourth one. That’s
really not a theory. It was just a fun.
david: So what I would argue, so the correspondence theory, the first one you mentioned, where a statement is true, right? If it accurately reflects reality, that goes back to Aristotle.
Aristotle, over 2000 years ago, he said, to save a thing that is, that it is true to save a thing that is, that it is not, is false. He sort of goes through stuff like that. And what I would argue is that the other two theories, the coherence theory and the pragmatist theory unwittingly. D really rely on the [00:33:00] correspondence theory, because if you think about it, if you wanna say, okay, my belief is true because it coheres with all these other beliefs, what’s the status of the claim that it coheres with them?
It looks like that’s gonna have to be the correspondence. I claim that they cohere, that’s only accurate if it does go otherwise, you ha you get, you go off on a on an infinite regress. And that’s easier to explain with the pragmatist theory. So let’s give an example. So somebody like William James, he would say that Chicago is east of here.
It’s true what makes it true, if you act on that belief, you’re gonna succeed. Whereas if you think it’s south, you won’t
But notice the claim that it’s useful to believe Chicago is north of here. That has to be true in the correspondence sense. Otherwise you have this regress. It would have to be.
It’s true that Chicago is north of here because it’s useful to think it is. Alright. How do we know that it’s [00:34:00] useful to think that it is? We have to think that it’s useful to think that it’s useful to think it is. And you’re off on an infinite regress.
joe: You could, I mean us to add something there, you could think and give a truth that it’s useful because north is the shortest distance.
Like you could get to Chicago going south ’cause it is a globe but it’s not useful to go south. So could you make the argument then, so you can find maybe a reason you could say that, that
david: The two u the two usually align, in other words, believing things to be true that actually are true in the correspondent sense is usually also useful, but maybe not always.
And so you mentioned William James. He has a famous piece called the Will to Believe, and he essentially defends religious belief on the, those grounds. He’s kind of admitting you can’t get there using regular evidence, scientific or otherwise. So it’s, he’s gonna argue it’s useful for many people to believe in God in the afterlife.
And so that’s just true, you know? So that’s sort of where he [00:35:00] wants to go with it
joe: And define that.
But then I was there, one other thing kind of looking all this up was the Tars ski problem, the Liar’s paradox and it’s a statement. So this statement is false, so logically, if it’s true, then it’s false.
If it’s false, it’s true. And so you get this kind of logical kind of mess with statements like this and this kind of you know, these very interesting brain twisters that you can kind of go through and,
david: Yeah, there are lots of things like that. I used to have a t-shirt that said this shirt contains three errors and it did have two spelling errors, but no other errors.
So then you can say, ah, that’s the third error. But then if that’s the third error, then it’s true
that there are three errors And
so you go back
geo: forth
joe: You
nick: but couldn’t it also be the person wearing it?
Is the error There you
david: you
go.
Yeah. Yeah.
nick: I’m not calling you an error, but like[00:36:00]
david: no,
nick: just saying, if I saw that, I’d be like that’s a third error.
geo: I think this
joe: But I think this opens up that
idea of handling, kind of handling truth is very, ’cause you get into these kind of paradox
geo: You know what I was, I thought you were gonna say that. That gets to hand wa
david: w
joe: you. Does get the, it does get the hand hand Rium fixes these problems, right?
’cause you, we can hand wave ’em away. Like something like the Mandela Effect,
nick: you know what isn’t a hand waving him? Mk Ultra conspiracy stuff.
mary: Some what,
nick: MK Ultra was the truth serum that the what was it the CIA that was trying to create, why are you shaking your head at me?
part of that is a lie?
joe: I mean, I think a lot of the truth serum drugs,
nick: it was a, it was them trying to create a
joe: They were trying, right? Yes. But they
geo: probably were trying.
joe: they were trying,
geo: then that’s the true thing.
joe: ’cause they didn’t get it.
nick: I mean, they didn’t get it, but they gave a lot of people drugs.
joe: drugs make you feel just more relaxed, right? So that’s kind of all the classic truth serum kittens into that little [00:37:00] area, because I think that opens up, truth is hard to define.
But then actually, how do you make someone. Tell a truth in, you know, in, in the
geo: like, how did Wonder Woman’s lasso really
joe: That’s right. How did It how did it work? That’s
mary: it was full of LSD
nick: and I will believe this until DC tells me otherwise.
joe: it could it could work something like, I mean, you’re right, but it was one interesting thing I’ve found was the bogus pipeline and it’s a it’s kind of a psychologist trick that if you tell someone that this thing will do something, so if you go, this device will tell me if you’re lying.
mary: Mm-hmm.
joe: And then the participant will go, really? Then you have set this all up with kind of other anonymous kind of forms and things and then you can bait ’em in, give ’em a little bit of juice ’em up, you know, give ’em a few facts and prove them out in lies. And then they get convinced that they are, that this machine can tell the truth and they better not lie because [00:38:00] that you’re gonna find out.
So the lasso can work. It could be more psychological trip that this lasso will, you know, give me the truth and then bait ’em in. And then they just tell their truth. Also, because it, , as I, in my opening, it might not be the truth.
geo: So that’s kind of like a lie detector.
nick: just seems like a lie in general. Joe, I’m sorry.
joe: Yeah. And the lie, I mean, a lie detector is interesting also, right? Because that really just measures physiological response to kind of,
geo: and you get more nervous when you’re telling a lie.
joe: And that’s FMRI. So functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Most people are familiar with MRI going in for DI Medical Diagnostics once again using magnetic information as your imaging source. Talked about that. Some of that in the electromagnetic episode, a little plug in there. But, functional, you’re actually looking at blood flow so you can actually have people and question them and do imaging.
So this very real time imaging and see how their body’s [00:39:00] responding at the kind of internal level to see if they’re lying and things like that. But they’re all these have problems because Georgia said, if you have white coat syndrome, and so you get nervous when you go and interact with medical people that’s gonna skew the result.
Or if you’re just really good at controlling your, physiology, you know you’re breathing and you got meditation and you can do that, you can, probably lie your butt off and pass money.
nick: Or if you’re constantly fidgety just like
joe: or if you’re constantly fidget
nick: even tell
joe: or if you really believe the thing that you’re being asked about, right?
So we’ve talked about all these little, paradoxes and theories and loopholes, but if you really go in believing at some core level that you were number one at when you graduated, then you’re probably gonna pass the lie detector test. I mean, you’re probably not gonna, you know, and being lassoed the lasso was really had a lot of power.
david: Yeah.
I read that this isn’t exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s sort of close that supposedly a different part of your [00:40:00] brain li lights up when you are seeing a place you’ve never seen before, as opposed to when you’re seeing a place you’ve been in
before. And so there’s a controversy as to whether this should be allowed in crime investigation. So like the suspect says, no, I’ve never been to that person’s house. You know, where they were murdered. Supposedly you could take ’em there and see what part of their brain yeah.
pictures
joe: of it. Yep. That’s right. And that’s how the functional MR mri, I think it works
similar to that. Yep. Yep. That you go on and you’re doing that kind of analysis to see, but you’re right, the brain is weird and wired and as we talked about, , that right and left, like your right is like reasoning. The left has a
geo: no.
That left right thing that sounded a lot like hallucinations in AI like you just make something up. You don’t just say, I don’t know you, you make up an answer.
joe: you’re, I mean, so hey, they get the AI and we could probably touch on deep fakes also and how that impacts all this. But remember, AI is a prediction machine, and so it’s [00:41:00] just making mathematical predictions.
So really the underlining is this math. And so it’s just even with writing a sentence, it’s just with the training data, it knows which words are closely related enough that they should go
geo: But what about would do that when it makes up stuff about things,
joe: right? I mean, it’s making it up because, so some of that I think, , you get into and we’re, we have a episode, on chat bots and talked a little bit about this, but just to rehash that is that you’re a lot of the AI they want to please and they’re designed to please the human, person is asking the question.
So if you ask it for 10 things. It is gonna try, its best to give you 10 things, even if it has to make up seven of them. It’s just going to, it just wants to give you that list. And then it assumes that you, as the human will be able to go, no these are all wrong. We should scrap these seven and move along.
And so you do have this thing where that’s some of that [00:42:00] hallucination that it’s asking. You’re saying, give me that. The other part is that it is predicting. So if you put in, give me, all of David’s publications and then it gives me a list, and then some of ’em are right. Some of the dates are, titles are right, but the dates are wrong.
It’s just predicting what it should go there. And it didn’t really do an exhaustive search of all the data and figure this out. It’s just now predicting that, you wrote this book in, 1999, you know, you wrote this one in 2000 and Oh, I see, , it has the information or it’s missing.
But it wants to give you that information, so it’s gonna make it up. So I think you have some of this hallucination is just it, trying to predict what you’re looking for and then fit that in if it can. If it doesn’t really know, then it goes, you know what, this is what I think you, this is what I’m predicting you want.
And
david: so toward the end of my teaching career was when those AI chatbots really came in a big way and they were a real problem.
More so than just the ordinary kind of plagiarism where a student might just, you know, [00:43:00] download something off the internet. They take my prompts and put ’em in the chat bot. And the big problem with that in philosophy is that the way philosophers often write is they’ll mention some theory and then go on to critique it.
And the chatbot cannot figure that out. It just sees, here’s the name and here are these ideas. And so they’ll frequently, the essay that the student will turn in fraudulently claiming it’s theirs, it’ll have the philosopher defending the thing that these violently arguing
You know? So it’s sort of comical.
geo: accountable.
mary: I wanted to ask you, David, about, critical thinking. Yes. And you were a professor. So you taught undergraduates, right? Correct.
david: Uh, yes.
Yeah. At P N W they don’t have a graduate program in philosophy, so undergraduates
mary: you know, and so in many cases you’re talking to many students who are quite young or early in their career.
Yes. So you have a unique opportunity to help them [00:44:00] develop their critical thinking skills. So how did you go about doing that?
david: It I used the techniques I was describing in my earlier answer. Mm-hmm. But I’ll just say this. I would say that I had. Only medium level success.
So let’s take the logical fallacies, for example. Okay. Okay. One of the really common logical fallacies, it has a Latin name, it’s called ad hominem. Most people are familiar with that. And so the fallacy is when you try to dismiss someone’s claim or argument by simply attacking them personally, right?
Okay. And so I found I had tremendous success at getting the students to understand that basic concept, but I tried to go one step further because these are common mistakes. And the reason why they’re common, I think is that. For most of them, there are occasions where something similar to it is [00:45:00] not fallacious.
It’s legitimate reasoning. So I tried to emphasize, look, it’s a crucial component that they’re trying to dismiss someone’s claim or argument by attacking them personally. But what the students would do is, let’s say someone applies for a job as a cashier. And so when he says, no, we shouldn’t hire you, you’ve been in prison three different times for theft.
They say oh, ad ho fallacy. And it’s not a fallacy because you’re not trying to refute a claim or argument. That’s not the issue. And so I found that pattern over and over again. I could get them to understand the basics very well, but most of them had real trouble with sort of the second level.
And that might be because it’s just the one course and as you say, they’re primarily young students, But you know, what I would do is in class we would go through lots of examples, you know, sort of real examples and sort of analyze them. And one of the papers I assigned was I asked them to [00:46:00] monitor what’s going on in contemporary rhetoric in the world, in politics, in advertising, articles on the internet, whatever it might be, and identify logical fallacies that you find.
Mm-hmm. And they tended to do a good job of being in the ballpark, but they would sort of miss these sort of subtleties, you know? So I think it takes more than one course of study to really get there.
mary: Absolutely. And I think it’s something that we develop over time.
I mean, I’m not the same person that I was at 18th, thank God. You know? You know, we’ve had a chance to grow and change and we have more life experience and we have more things to compare it to. Yeah. I wanted to ask, oh gosh. I wanted to ask you too about this, not even ask out, I wanted, it’s more of a comment about when I was a kid or when I was in high school, grad college do you Mortimer Adler?
david: Oh, yeah,
mary: yeah. I remember at the time, you know, he was very, I think he was very into talking about objective truth.
david: Yes.
mary: [00:47:00] And. I remember that as a kid just really wrangling me.
david: Oh, is that right?
mary: Yeah. Like the idea that I felt like his truth, you know, I felt like maybe some of that might be also opinion.
On his just a for folks out there. Yes. And even myself. Who was that?
Mortimer Adler. He’s a philosopher. Oh, go. He’s a philosopher.
david: Yeah. So he was what do I wanna say about him? He was sort of a popular philosopher, you know, he’d go on PBS and things like that.
And most philosophers tend not to think of him as a very good philosopher in an academic sense. He was able to speak clearly. He was able to communicate ideas well.
mary: Mm-hmm.
david: But what I would say about that most of the things that he thought were objectively true, I thought were not true. So in
that, and so there’s that, but I do agree with him that the concept of an objective truth is a legitimate one and a very important one.
Yes.
And basically all it means [00:48:00] is. You have accurately described the object. So whatever object you’re talking about, you’ve described it accurately, that would then be objective truth. So when I say Donald Trump did not graduate first in his class, that is objectively true. That’s
mary: That’s correct.
david: So in other words, so it’s always possible to be mistaken in thinking that something is objectively true.
We all make mistakes like
that, But
that doesn’t discredit the general idea of objective
joe: It be your subjective truth then that it’s what you believe to be true.
david: Yeah. Yeah.
That,
joe: that would then, so you would have that and you would defend that, as if it was objective.
geo: And that gets back to perspective,
joe: right, and
I gets back to
geo: and and perception
nick: also go along with the un unreliable narrator,
joe: Unreliable. And then memory errors. So our memories are very malleable. And so every time
nick: I brought up earlier in the episode,
joe: you recall a memory?
geo: Oh, I don’t remember that.
nick: Oh, of course neither of you two do. I
joe: remember
geo: that.
david: But see what I would say, all of those [00:49:00] kinds of causes of error in my view, should not discredit objective truth. They rather simply show how hard it is to come by it, you know?
joe: Yes. right, But, but it can lead to defending it. So that’s the problem with it, that if you’re there, you will dig
geo: that’s why the scientific method is so important.
david: See,
there, there
are some people who are really good at this. So Bertran Russell, he was, you know, a very important 20th century British philosopher, also won the Nobel Prize for literature, which is pretty hard to do if you’re a philosopher.
So he was a really good writer and so he was world famous. And one time he published an article with some new theory in logic. He did a lot of work in logic and a young unknown assistant professor found a flaw in his reasoning and wrote a critique and sent it off to. Publication that Russell had published in and they published it, and Russell immediately sent the guy a letter and say, thank you so much for finding the error in my [00:50:00] article.
I will notify the publication. You know, they should put a big announcement that I now recognize he’s right and I’m wrong. So that’s admirable, but rarely found, you know? No
joe: The problem, you also have that in that issue in reporting especially about like science stuff that, , their article comes out that has, misrepresent something and says, oh, this is, , the end is near, you know, dah.
You know, big font and the follow up. Oh, we were wrong on that. It’s usually like in the
geo: this little tiny,
joe: not, you know,
nick: isn’t this something we do all the time with our Mini episodes,
geo: is
joe: We try to
nick: We call Joe out anytime he’s wrong.
joe: Yes. So we
try to be
good about that because I think it is important because that’s not done enough where, you know, the splashy headline comes out, you know, we found life on wherever, and then it’s no, we didn’t.
That’s a, that’s usually buried, like no one, and everyone goes along and just says, oh, we found life already. No, we, we didn’t,
david: And I think here again, journalism is partly to blame because if there’s a scientific study [00:51:00] that is published that has some splashy conclusion, they’ll run with that.
And then when subsequent studies fail to replicate it, that’s not news. And so people get this idea of scientists, they’re just wrong all the
time.
And they’re not understanding that one article. Is not science. Science is a whole process, which involves replication and so on.
joe: Peer review, the whole nine.
Yeah. That
geo: me think of back, I think it was in the eighties or the nineties, there was this some study and it was about math and women learning math. Mm-hmm. And then they just wrote all these articles about this, about, and I’m not representing this totally accurate because I don’t remember, but it was like they picked up on just some very small random study and then they made this huge deal and it was like on Time magazine and all these things, and all these women felt like, oh, it’s just nature that women are not as good at math, you know?
joe: Yep.
david: You know, the [00:52:00] president of Harvard a few years ago, Larry Summers. He made a comment like that at a scientific conference. ’cause he was challenged on why are there so few mathematicians who are women at Harvard? And he said something like it probably has to do with the differential ability at the highest level, or something like that.
So I took a certain amount of pleasure that he’s in the Epstein files and had to had to resign from a bunch of,
joe: Oh, you have
mary: you know? I wanted to ask you too David, about this is something that I’ve noticed. Many times over the years when somebody has caught out on a lie, they’ll say it was taken out of context. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I don’t think that they don’t know what context means.
david: I was just mentioning to my wife the other day ’cause Jesse Jackson died
and I remember one little scandal he got into was, he was in New York City, this is when he was running for president.
And he was talking to a reporter and he referred to New York City as [00:53:00] Jaime Town, which of course is a slur against Jews.
Mm-hmm.
And I remember seeing a talk show where somebody was just vehemently defending him, and she kept saying that comment was blown out of context. And my thought was blown out of proportion would mean you’re making it more important than it was taken outta.
The context would mean it doesn’t exactly mean that when you put in the context
mary: like putting the bigger picture. Yeah. Yeah. When you put in the bigger picture, what does it say? Yeah. Yeah.
david: so
something being taken outta context, that’s a real thing, but people just indiscriminately use it without any kind of explanation.
They’ll just say it was taken out, it, you know, it’d be helpful if they said, look, here’s how it was taken out of context.
mary: How did you, how did we take it out?
Yeah, exactly. And yeah it, I think maybe we’re getting at like the idea of not a truth, but a process of discovering the truth.
joe: Mm-hmm. Yep. I was gonna say too, with the, just to go back to the lasso or devices to get ah, [00:54:00] truth out of people, the other thing is
mary: going back to LSD again.
joe: get some,
nick: can’t wait for that episode.
geo: Hey, was that the test they did that the Duffer Brothers based inspired Stranger Things? No,
nick: but it’s one of the tests that probably did help with that.
geo: Oh, okay. Sorry.
mary: No. Anyway, no mo moving forward. Okay. Okay. About Lassos, right? Yeah.
joe: I was gonna ask, of the legal and ethical kind of considerations if you did have such a device. So David, you now have the truth device, you’re gonna just go
geo: lasso it.
It’s a little tricky to use.
mary: truth.
joe: out. Yeah.
It’s a
nick: be slightly
geo: You gotta get in around the person.
joe: knots. I mean, there’s books about how to do that, but that’s a,
the
nick: bondage books.
joe: but yeah, I mean there’s, , the Fifth Amendment, self-incrimination, , coercion, there’s all these kind of things. I mean, it is interesting when you start getting down to truth and how you would navigate that.
Would it be, could you even use something like that? I’m looking at David, but it’s an open [00:55:00] question you know,
nick: are you having a lawyer do this or is it the justice system
joe: I don’t know. I mean, or is it Judge dread us out in the street? You know, or
nick: wait, the judge, head of the lasso.
geo: vi vigilant,
joe: A vigilante, right?
mary: What were you gonna say? You had a
david: you
mary: at, you’re gonna say something
david: you’re really good at knowing when I wanna
say something.
I’ve noticed that
mary: I’m
joe: sitting right next to you, so
mary: Yeah. That helps too.
david: I I was just gonna say, and I think you indicated that in your commentary, there are ethical questions about compelling someone to tell the truth.
However, there are things short of that, that I think should be done. So one thing that I find absolutely infuriating is at these when people are testifying in Congress, how they will just evade the question and say something irrelevant. So this,
nick: Dow is at $5,000.
david: We should
be talking about
the Dow.
Yeah. You wanna talk, to the attorney,
general about the Dao. But even going back to that, to [00:56:00] her confirmation hearing, someone asked her, this is Pam Bondy, we’re talking about the attorney general. Someone asked her. If you become Attorney General and President Trump asks you to prosecute one of his enemies, but there’s not any evidence they’ve committed a crime, would you go ahead and prosecute them?
And so she said that would never happen. He would never ask me to do that. That’s not answering
the
So then the person said you know, suppose that he did, as unlikely as that may be, hypothetically, she said, I would follow the law. And again, that doesn’t answer the question.
You know, we don’t know what she thinks or might claim the law is. So in a criminal trial, if you’re a defendant if a, you can be compelled to answer. You can be ordered by the judge to answer and be held in contempt of court. If you don’t, and there’s a legal sanction for that, and if you give an answer that is non-responsive.
The lawyer will say, objection, nonresponsive. And the judge will sustain it. So they ought to do that in the Senate. So
Yeah.[00:57:00]
You know, Pam Bondy will say something completely nonresponsive and then the questioner will say, you’re not answering my question. And just say you just don’t like the answer.
No, it was not an answer. You know,
nick: I think we need to start bringing rotten tomatoes to these, start throwing ’em every time they do this.
david: You
remember the guy who threw a subway sub
and they couldn’t convict him.
joe: Yeah.
david: I
mary: I would like to make a plug for a book that first of all, David, first of all, David has a book here that did you wanna talk about?
david: I brought it along just in case I needed to refer to it. It’s a book called Challenging Postmodernism Philosophy in the Politics of
mary: Mm-hmm. Very cool
geo: and written. Written by yourself. Yes. Oh,
Oh
mary: yep. This this book I was thinking of is, it’s called Killer Underwear Invasion. And it’s a book about the about critical thinking for little kids. Oh, nice. It’s a really cool
geo: underwear invasion. Okay. And
mary: And the title is Provocative on [00:58:00] Purpose because it talks about this idea where we can take things that start to start with a half truth, and you marry a half truth to another thing.
And, you end up with some amorphous beast, and it talks about,
nick: so the game of telephone.
david: Yeah.
mary: a little bit like telephone and it also talks about white why do people spread so much?
disinformation
or misinformation on social media
nick: it’s fun
mary: and it’s profitable. It’s very, it makes a lot of money,
geo: And usually the most interesting,
joe: And no one follows up either. So
nick: one’s going back and Yeah,
mary: but this not actually, yeah, but it, yeah. But this book is about critical thinking for a little kid. Like the, kinda like the, like a first start, you know, of that. And I think that it’s really great just for a, just an opening, argument for
I
geo: I
mary: just truth. I maybe we’re, and also tagging onto that. I feel like maybe we’re gonna go [00:59:00] through, every movement is a reaction to the one that came before it. Maybe someday we’ll just, , end up into this, , scientific, like this golden age of critical thinking because we’ve just been drowning in bullshit for so long.
joe: I think people have to be curious, right? To go and investigate their world and the ideas that are presented to them.
Yeah. And the another thing, they need to be able to understand how to navigate the changing landscape of information
geo: be scared of,
joe: I think that’s, that, that’s gonna be a bigger hurdle. So you are curious. You go, you do Google searches or whatever if you have the right SEOs in there. You are, you’ll come up to the
mary: What’s an SEO?
joe: Search engine optimization.
Okay. And so it’s things you can put into your website
geo: like what Google wants you to see. So the top results.
nick: even though even if you do Google it, you can still find misinformation.
geo: That’s right.
nick: Just because someone [01:00:00] goes, is the earth flat? They can skim through and then be like, this one agrees with me.
I’m gonna click
joe: click this.
Yeah. No. So I think it’s also, it’s just questioning and using common sense, thinking about the sources
geo: don’t be scared of science.
That’s
joe: right. Don’t be scared of science,
mary: of science or the s Yeah. The scientific method.
joe: challenging your own ideals.
david: You know, going back to your point just a moment ago about how you have to be curious, you have to want to know the truth. So we were talking earlier about how people don’t wanna be refuted, you know, they take that very personally, but also I’m inclined to think a lot of people aren’t particularly interested in knowing the truth.
You know, they might wanna believe something that, you know, is comforting. Something that makes them feel good. And also, you know, we were talking about the pragmatist before, and I was criticizing them an earlier pragmatist, Charles Sanders Purse. He made the argument that people are just very irritated by doubt.
And so they just want to have a belief. You know? So it’s if I have a doubt about something or I don’t know, I might [01:01:00] just grab the first belief that comes at me because then I can feel like I know something, you know? Oh,
joe: You know?
mary: Some like some something. Sure. You know, something stable
joe: and your brain,
mary: even if it’s wrong,
joe: Your brain then will start to filter through that and we, that’s what we’re talking about, that your brain’s really good at that. So once it latches on, then it will fill in all the rest.
So it’ll make the story for you very pretty and
happy and comforting and Absolutely. You’ll love it.
david: it. I
geo: Mary, a fellow children’s librarian, and that would make making me think about some of the earliest things that make us question things.
Our picture books. Yeah. And they do such a great job because you’ll have a picture and then the words on the page don’t match the picture at all. And then it’s okay, how do I navigate
mary: Mm-hmm.
joe: you can watch the Beast Games. And so
mary: You could do that
nick: you plugging that again? Jeez, Louise.
mary: No. So
nick: doesn’t he have enough money, Joe?
joe: Maybe he’ll just sponsor. We can be the Beast Game [01:02:00] sponsor.
david: So
mary: I have a, I another question for David. Have you, did you ever have a flat Earth in your class without naming names?
david: I don’t think it ever really came up. I mean, I did tell that thing about Globe tarts just ’cause
joe: it’s funny.
mary: Sure.
david: but We never had a serious discussion about flat earth theory, so I have no idea if I did or not.
mary: or did you ever have a student and you were like, oh, no, you know, did, or do you, would you, I guess just,
david: okay.
mary: Talk about the scientific method or critical thinking or
david: here’s
the scariest moment I ever had in teaching.
mary: Okay, sure.
david: So a student. And he was a big muscular guy and he was recently in the Marines.
He was a scary guy.
And he he said as Einstein taught us, we only used 10% of our brains. So I knew that Einstein had never said that, And it’s not
true that we only use 10% of our brains. And so as gently as I could, I said actually, you know that that’s not [01:03:00] right. He didn’t say that.
And to try to. To ease that. I did say that’s a very common misconception, so I can understand why you might think that a lot of people say that, and he just argued back, no, it’s absolutely true. Einstein did say that, and it is true. And then I made the blunder of using the word myth. I said it’s something of a myth.
And he got up out of his chair and took a couple of steps toward me,
mary: Oh my
david: you know, are you calling my belief a myth? You know?
And but fortunately he thought better of it and sat back down. So that’s the closest I ever came to something like that.
geo: Wow.
nick: Very
mary: Yeah.
joe: yeah, that’s
nick: David, we’re we’re gonna be wrapping up here in just a moment. Do you have anything you’d like to plug for us?
mary: Sure.
david: So my most recent publication, it’s on a completely different topic. It’s on the 1960s and seventies, singer songwriter Phil Oaks. Have any of you ever heard of him? He’s not that well known, is he? It
mary: he the, it
geo: sounds familiar, but
nick: is he part of Hollow Os
david: No.
no.
mary: [01:04:00] Is he for the
joe: You’re right, yeah. He
mary: It’s not the fogs, right?
joe: Not
david: No.
mary: no. Okay. Don’t, no darn.
nick: The
mary: No. I
nick: glad you did that.
david: so it’s, you could easily find it if you’re interested. It’s in current Affairs magazine. Oh, And it’s, it’s, it’s not behind the paywall. So if you like type in current affairs, Phil Oaks, OCHS, you’ll find my
joe: put a link to it in the show notes for
people to find it. So of send it, then
david: And then I guess the other book that I might recommend that’s a magazine article, but we’re gonna recommend one of my books that’s sorta of, related to some of what we’ve talked about. I have a book that came out in 2018 called Xenophobia, and it’s about the historian Howard Zi.
You guys familiar with Howard Zinn? He wrote a People’s history of the United States.
geo: Oh,
nick: Oh, I do know him.
david: Yeah. Okay. And basically the genesis for that book is that Mitch Daniels, who was the president of Purdue, he an email he had written, surfaced where he had said, we’ve gotta ban this book.
We can’t let it be [01:05:00] taught anywhere in Indiana for credit. And so I wanted to just first write an article about the censorship angle, but he then tried to justify it by saying, oh, there are a whole lot of, you know, great scholars who say, Howard Zinn is terrible. You don’t have to take my word for it. So I started looking into what those guys wrote, and it was all wrong, you know, lies or fallacious arguments or what have you.
So I wrote a book called Xenophobia, sort of exposing that. So I recommend that one.
nick: Absolutely. I can’t wait to read that one. Yeah,
mary: yeah.
nick: Sorry I, that one was me geeking out.
joe: I know. Yeah. And then just also in the wrapping up, like kind of one of the missions of the podcast, we probably mostly adults that listen, it’s kinda getting them to be curious.
Do you have any advice, like from your teaching experience that the listeners out there they can take with them as they listen to this podcast or other podcasts or other truths and kind of, navigating the philosophical truth
david: that, that’s a tough one. It really is. I mean, I would say, especially [01:06:00] since we were talking about the media landscape, you know, be mistrustful of what you find on the web.
There’s lots of true stuff, but a lot of fake stuff, a lot of false stuff. So try to check it out. Don’t just rely on one source, you know? And there’s a lot of AI generated photos and videos and everything, so it’s very tough.
nick: it’s getting good.
joe: getting good.
david: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they
geo: They don’t have six fingers.
joe: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
nick: I mean, you still can’t talk for anything, but, you know.
joe: Yeah.
geo: Yeah. Yeah.
joe: But yeah, no, this is a great conversation.
nick: Thank you again so much for being here
david: Oh, my pleasure. I enjoyed it.
joe: So thank you. Yeah. We’ll have to have you back and I’m sure there’s other, we probably get talk for another hour or two on
mary: Oh, it’s a fascinating subject. Yeah.
joe: cool. All right. You have me, Joe.
nick: Yeah, I got Nick.
joe: got Nick Georgia. We’ve got Georgia. Yeah,
mary: got Mary. We
joe: We’ve got Mary.
nick: And we went down some holes.
joe: We went down some very truthful holes. We really did. We love you. Stay [01:07:00] curious.
mary: e.
joe: Be safe.
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