Everything All at Once: How to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity, and solve any problem

by Bill Nye

  That is why critical thinking and smart filtering are so important. If you can sort through the onslaught of information effectively—if you understand how to exploit all this connectivity and connectedness without getting caught in the web of hoaxes and arguments—you have access to a deeper level of understanding than any of the billions of people who lived before you. That’s it, the express lane to everything all at once, and it is potentially available to everyone on Earth. So question what you see there. Use nerd honesty as your touchstone. Weed out tainted and unclear claims. Look suspiciously at conspiracy theories and other too-complicated explanations. Seek out testable, repeatedly verified ideas. Hold on to “prove it.” Encourage the people around you to be as critical as you are. Don’t tell them what to think; show them how to think. You can do this. You can be a critical-thinking citizen of the future.

  Critical thinking is a global issue every bit as much as information overload is—or it should be. I often make the case that Internet access should be considered a human right, much like access to electricity and clean water. Nerd minds exist around the world, but the only way to unleash them all is to tie them in to the same information hive and to educate them in the ways of smart filtering. If we succeed—if we can make the Internet into a global commons with effective access for everyone—the Earth will be in a different and better place than it ever has been before. Who knows what ideas will emerge, what kinds of change will be possible? Get connected, and we will see.

  CHAPTER 17

  A Vaccine Against Deception

  Have you ever walked on fire, striding over a bed of coals as if you were invulnerable? I have, and I am not. Have you ever seen four young girls running back and forth through a hallway to escape a ghost, which, apparently, had the ability to turn a light on and off? I have, and it did not. Have you ever been convinced by news commentators that since carbon dioxide is only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, it couldn’t have any connection to changes in Earth’s climate? I have not, despite their best efforts, and it does.

  Take these as cautionary tales. Even after we have mastered the nerdy skills of thinking critically and filtering out bunk, we are not done. As I hinted in the previous chapter, we are facing twin information challenges these days: both one of perception and one of active deception. There are plenty of people ready to take advantage of anyone with flawed filtering. They are specifically trained to create claims that sound plausible enough to get past lax defenses, and to defeat the unaware with a façade of authenticity. Fortunately, nerds have had a lot of time to prepare for the deceivers. The glut of information may be new, but the tendency of some people to lie and deceive for personal gain certainly is not. Each new information technology provides new pathways to deception. Gutenberg’s printing press helped spread anti-Semitic libels; sensationalized 19th-century newspaper stories helped spark the Spanish-American War. But some basic ploys to play on the gullible, like palm reading and faith healing, clearly go back at least thousands of years.

  When I wander around my hometowns of Los Angeles and New York, I still see signs for palm readers and psychics on every block, faith healers in “clinics,” and aisles full of faux diet supplements in even the fanciest grocery stores, where the (supposedly) better educated among us shop. If we had the kind of critical-thinking skills that could stand up to manipulation, we wouldn’t have these things. Neither would we have parents mobilizing against vaccination, nor would we have climate-change deniers holding sway over our government. We all—yes all, even those of us who imagine ourselves above it all—need to sharpen the defensive information filters I’ve described into something that can stand up to an offensive wave of deceit. The place to begin is by knowing your enemy and understanding how he or she operates.

  For fun, I’ll start with fire walking. This is a classic example of how charlatans and scammers take advantage of people by exploiting our human tendency to believe rather than to question. I’ve fire walked a few times for television shows to prove that there is nothing supernatural about it. Here’s how a typical fire-walking demonstration goes: The sponsors begin by explaining that your spiritual preparedness is the key. (This preamble is designed to draw in the audience, and also to kill time while the coals ash over.) You will walk barefoot across a wood fire, but your inner something or other will enable you to set your skin directly upon burning logs without injury. It’s quite a claim, and it sure looks impressive. After all, we are talking about real fire. As a Boy Scout cooking over an open wood fire, I have suffered a couple of unpleasant second-degree burns. My skin formed blisters in an instant. But here’s the significant point: I’ve had only one very minor burn while walking on fire. That’s not because I practiced any of the mumbo jumbo psychobabble in which I prepared my psyche or called upon a greater power or anything like that. It doesn’t sound or seem as though it would be possible, but it is because of a great big little thing called physics.

  I can strip away the mystery. Generally, the sponsors of the fire walk build the fire on grassy ground. Twice, in two different television-studio parking lots, I watched as the sponsors brought in fresh sod just for the demonstration. They arranged it in long strips to form a rectangle, like a picture frame with the fire in the middle. The producers claimed that the sod was there to keep the fire from spreading, which is rather unlikely since the fires were built on asphalt. The real purpose of the sod is to hold water: Whether out on a lawn or in a parking lot, the producers always make sure that the surrounding area is soaked. After the fire has been burning long enough to produce glowing embers, they spread the embers with metal rakes to create an 8-centimeter (3-inch) thick walkway of orange glowing coals. Each fire walker starts on the wet sod or grass, takes a deep breath, and walks over the hot coals. It takes about five long steps to reach the patch of wet ground on the other side of the rectangular fire.

  If you don’t know what’s going on, you are generally amazed. You might be so amazed (how amazed would you be?) that you sign up for the sponsor’s $4,495 life-coaching course. But let me save you the cash by revealing the not especially well-kept secrets of how you can do the exact same thing using nothing but science.

  First, you walk quickly. When you watch videos of people walking on fire, you can see that they’re not messing around. They hurry, which means there isn’t much time for the heat to penetrate their feet. Second, there is an effective cooling layer of water on the bottom of your (or their) feet that’s been picked up from the wet grass; that’s the real reason the producers soak it beforehand. The water becomes steam when your feet alight upon the hot coals. It takes a lot of heat energy to drive water molecules from liquid to gas, what’s known as a “phase change.” While the water is vaporizing, it will not go above 100°C (212°F); this is the same reason a boiling pot of water cannot get any hotter than that.

  Third, burning wood is not a good conductor of heat. When you stir a pot of oatmeal or sauce, you probably use a wooden spoon for just this reason. Very little heat flows from sauce to spoon to you. It turns out that heat does not travel especially well from fiery wooden coals to your feet, either. Finally, there is perhaps the most surprising feature of fire walking: The bones and muscles in your feet are basically shoe-size pieces of meat that can soak up quite a bit of heat energy without your skin being much affected. As a result, you can walk quickly across a low fire and your feet hardly even feel warm.

  There is one more not altogether insignificant effect. When most of us get ready to step onto a fire, we are a little, uh, anxious. For an ancient evolutionary reason, the blood vessels in our extremities tighten when we are afraid. The medical expression is “vasoconstriction.” You literally get cold feet. It takes the fire a moment to warm your feet back up to your standard body temperature. If you were to get a cut or an abrasion during a fight or an encounter with an angry bear, you would not bleed as much because of those tightened blood vessels. Cold feet are good for fire walking.

  Now, if the conditions aren’t right, cr
edulous fire walkers can get a lesson in critical thinking the hard way. Some people walk too slowly and run out of muscle to soak up the heat. Some walk across a fire bed that is too long and get burned near the end, or accidentally kick coals onto the tops of their feet, where the skin is thinner and more sensitive. People sue when they realize that fire walking has nothing to do with the spirit world or extraordinary mental preparedness. But in my opinion, those clients were complicit because they were not thinking well. They didn’t stop to think that the situation is susceptible to analysis and experimentation. They didn’t consider that the mystical power of the fire walk had more to do with the physical than with the metaphysical, nor did they stop to appreciate just how cool the physics of a fire walk well done could be. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a true nerd would not get burned.

  In case you are wondering, the one time I got burned doing a fire walk happened because the person who built the fire for a TV show got started too late, so the coals had not burned for long enough. I was doing a shoot for Bill Nye Saves the World, and we were working on an aggressive schedule. I had to take my walk before the crew went home, which was long before the fire had fully settled. There was a lot more coal and a lot less ash than there should have been, but we had to finish the shoot, so I walked anyway. My feet sank in and absorbed too much heat. I’m sure some unscrupulous life coach would be happy to say that it was a failure of mind over matter. In reality, the matter was doing exactly what it always does. Fire walking is a trick of science, not of mind.

  “But Bill,” you say, “I was already a critical thinker, and after reading that last chapter, I’m sure I’ve got this figured out. I don’t fall for any hoaxes or superstitions.” At least, I like to imagine that a lot of you are saying that. I hear things like that all the time. But I have to ask: Are you sure? Have you never had an irrational feeling about a certain place or a certain date associated with bad luck? Have you ever joked about how it will surely rain if you plan a picnic? We all have problems with critical thinking, is all I’m saying.

  Recently, I was visiting longtime friends right after they had moved into a new house in Burbank, California. Their kids were half-joking that there was a ghost in the hallway. I say half-joking because the younger ones looked genuinely concerned. The lights turned on whenever they ran through one area of this new house, and they couldn’t think of any regular reasonable explanation. So naturally, they concluded that a ghost was responsible, and that the ghost was probably why the previous owners had to leave. They were just kids, true, but they were bright kids, and they sure did jump to the ghost conclusion quickly. The reason, I think, is that there are so many ghost stories in our culture. Even if we know they are fiction, they creep into our consciousness, making the idea of ghosts seem somehow plausible. And their parents, my friends, didn’t know what to do beyond insisting that ghosts are not real.

  I didn’t launch into a diatribe about the absurdity of ghosts. Instead, I wanted to drive home a much bigger point. I wanted them to feel empowered to seek out explanations for anything they didn’t understand in their lives, including and not limited to seemingly supernatural occurrences. They were young kids, and I wanted them not to be scared of anything like this. So, I worked with them to develop a hypothesis. I suggested that perhaps there was something wrong with the house’s wiring. I encouraged them to consider that a connection might be loose somewhere. Perhaps an electrician had failed to tighten a “wire nut,” an internally threaded metal tube held in a plastic cone. I explained that to connect wires in modern houses, you strip the insulation for a few millimeters off their ends, twist the wires together, fit a wire nut over the twisted bare ends, and tighten the nut the same way you tighten a bolt.

  Then we tested to see if we could reproduce the phenomenon. I began stepping on the floor in about the same place where the kids had been running. The lights flickered like crazy. I opened a door to the outside on the off chance that an electrician might have connected the lights through another access point in the exterior wall. After a moment, I decided that such exotic hypotheses were unlikely (Occam’s razor!). I discovered a second light switch in the same room. I saw that a pile of moving boxes had been stacked higher than the switch’s position on the wall. As the kids ran through the hall, the floor flexed; the boxes rocked and tapped against the second switch; the switch turned the lights on and off. We had a testable, reproducible explanation. It took the kids only a moment to see that the mystery was solved, no ghosts required. They got on board with critical thinking—but only after I practically held their hands and walked them to the light switch. I reassured myself, and the parents, that the longest journey starts with but a single step.

  In science, we want to develop hypotheses and experiments that show something to be false, rather than a hypothesis or test that only shows something to be true or that a specific expectation has been met. A non-falsifiable hypothesis isn’t very useful. For example: If I claimed that this book just instantaneously disappeared and was replaced with a lap-sized, fire-breathing dragon . . . and that just now, the dragon disappeared and the book reappeared—and it all happened so quickly that you could neither see nor feel it—well, that would not be a useful hypothesis. The part about “too quick to see” obviates and tosses out the whole silly thing, as there is no way to prove it false. You might respond, “Well, what if I have a high-speed camera?” I would say, “Even your camera isn’t fast enough.” You might counter with, “Well, what if I have a heat detector that can sense the dragon’s fire?” I’d say, “The fire dissipates too quickly, even for your sensitive gizmo.” I could create responses like that indefinitely. With this in mind, I encourage you to try coming up with your own non-falsifiable hypotheses. It’s a fun and enlightening exercise.

  We nerds have to make it our mission to encourage those around us to question and test the “evidence” that other people present as fact. We need to teach them the nerd mindset because we need as many allies as we can get. The abundance of supernatural ideas all around creates a self-reinforcing situation: If so many other people believe in irrational things, maybe they are not so irrational after all? In my neighborhood in Los Angles, there are 14 psychics within 10 kilometers (6 miles) of me. A psychic is trained to induce her client to tell her all the facts necessary to piece together a convincing “reading.” Once the psychic has the confidence of the client, she can deliver just what he or she wants to hear. The word “confidence” is the root of the term “con man.” How do all those people manage to make a living? People pay them. And who pays them? In this neighborhood, we’re talking mostly about college-educated, very successful people who probably do not think of themselves as superstitious citizens.

  As a counterforce to all the predatory deceivers, several skeptical organizations fight the good fight for science. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, get it?) and the Skeptics Society are two of the leading lights. They seek out specific claims, evaluate them, and publicize their versions of the process that I went through with the kids and the ghost. Both CSI and the Skeptics Society put out magazines that promote the aggressive form of critical thinking needed to immunize us to fakery. Prominent members like Joe Nickell and James Randi have put out fascinating articles and books exposing exactly how psychics do their job. I encourage you to support organizations like these.

  Your brain is wired to confirm a previous belief about cause and effect. In other words, we are naturally predisposed against critical thinking. Maybe horoscopes truly are harmless, but the analogous biased viewpoint is very dangerous when it crosses over to other claims and concepts. Kids are dying because of parents who have developed an unwarranted fear of vaccines. We need to be part of a system that pushes back against irrational interpretations and guides us toward the ones that reflect the genuine rules of reality. This is a challenge even for nerds, as shown by the various hoaxes, frauds, and published retracted results in scientific publications.

  In science, the mechanism for p
ushing back is a terrific tradition called peer review. To get your research findings published in a mainstream science magazine or journal, you have to arrange for other scientists in your field to read and review it before the publisher will accept it. Peer review is a robust system for weeding out bad procedures, faked data, and other deceptions. Can we import some of that process into everyday life? Sure we can. We can make “prove it” a standard part of the learning method in our classrooms—not just in science but in history, social studies, and literature. We can cultivate a kind of informal peer review in our daily lives. When you come across an improbable or outrageous claim, ask the friend or coworker who you think would know the most about the topic. Let your friends know that you’d welcome them asking you, too. Social media and text messaging make these kinds of interactions fast, easy, low-maintenance. Fire walkers promote a culture of credulity. We can promote a culture of skepticism.

  But you can see that being a fully engaged nerd in this way is not going to be easy. Confirmation bias comes naturally to us. It’s a shortcut that lets your mind move on to the next agenda item in your life. But our scientific method requires us to come up with hypotheses and to design tests to prove our beliefs wrong. It calls on us to constantly question our assumptions about what is “obviously” true. Only after we work very hard to show that something is not true, but keep confirming it, can we truly trust our answer. We have to walk through a very different kind of fire—an intellectual burn that can be really painful in its own way—to get to the kind of enlightenment that really means something. That is the essence of critical thinking.