by Bill Nye
It is your job to keep yourself critical despite the constant nudges in the other direction from social conditioning and from your brain’s self-deceiving tendencies. Currently there is the continual civic reminder “If you see something, say something.” It’s designed to keep us vigilant against any errant object or behavior that could signal a terrorist attack. Well, much more likely than a terrorist attack is an attack on you by a con artist. So, if you see something—think something! Think! Is what you’re seeing credible? Is the effect a potential charlatan is showing you credible?
Vigilance against ghosts and psychics comes naturally to most of us, but that hardly means you are immune to irrational persuasion. If someone tells you about a remedy “doctors don’t want you to know about,” that person is almost certainly lying or has been misled. What if someone tells you that a compound in red wine is effective at slowing the aging process? Or that a group at NASA has invented a warp-drive rocket engine that can take you across the galaxy in a few moments and doesn’t need any fuel? Or that genetically modified foods cause birth defects? These are all real claims circulating out there, and they all require a more advanced form of critical thinking to evaluate. The baloney-detection standards I described before still apply, but they need to be amped up. The harder someone is promoting a claim, the more vigilant you need to be. Revisit the key points.
■Start with the claim. It’s got to be positive; it can’t just raise vague doubt, for example. (“I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on with the climate.”)
■The claim, or assertion, or statement has to be testable, and the outcome of that test has to be repeatable. Beware of “one study found” claims.
■Question your own motivations for believing a claim. Watch out for those times when you just want it to be true. (Wouldn’t it be great if a daily glass of red wine—even better, two glasses—was the key to a long life?)
Critical thinking is so important for all of us. It’s not so that we can smugly feel better than other people, but so that we can all make a better world. One of the most powerful examples is vaccination against disease. Edward Jenner made the first reliable vaccines in the 1790s. Since then, thousands of researchers have protected us from hundreds of thousands of deadly germs. Vaccinations work. They save lives. They work so well that many people have forgotten or missed what exactly vaccinations do. In skeptical circles, we call this the “paradox of protection.” If everyone around you is vaccinated but you are not, there is still very little chance that a troublesome germ will find and infect you. You think, “I don’t need to get vaccinated.” The anti-vaxxers live off this paradox, but a much larger number of people experience it at a lower level. They think, even if there’s only a tiny risk associated with vaccination, there’s almost no risk in not being vaccinated. Or they think, “If I don’t bother to get a flu shot this season, it’s no big deal.” It seems reasonable.
I went to elementary school with a kid who had polio. Let me tell you, people, you do not want polio. Almost everybody in the United States and Western Europe has been vaccinated, so a disease like polio seems like a relic from the ancient past. But it’s not that way everywhere. On a recent episode of Bill Nye Saves the World, our correspondent Emily Calandrelli went to India and interviewed a young software developer who is wheelchair-bound. He contracted polio before the vaccine was common there. He is thought to be the last guy in the country to miss getting the vaccine. As he and Emily pointed out, there is no anti-vaccination movement in India because you can still see polio victims rolling the streets. The threat of misery from microbes is too real. It is easy to understand risk when it is staring you in the face. It is much, much more difficult when the risk feels remote, as it does in the United States. At that point, critical thinking becomes absolutely . . . well, critical.
From a scientific standpoint, the anti-vaxxers are endangering other people. You have to get vaccinated, and your kids have to get vaccinated. This is provable, substantiated science. The key paper claiming a link between vaccines and autism, on the other hand, has been debunked and retracted. The people who still believe in the link clearly have some reason for wanting to believe, but that reason is not scientific evidence. There is a moral aspect to avoiding deception. I mean, giving in to falsehoods or fantasies just isn’t right. Finding honest information sometimes requires being honest with yourself.
When people tell you they can overcome fire with their minds, be skeptical. When people tell you that all the doctors are wrong and vaccines really do cause autism, be every bit as skeptical again. Internalize the guidelines of critical thinking in their basic and more aggressive forms. And remember that if you allow yourself to be fooled, you are probably not the only one who will suffer. On the other hand, if you contribute to the culture of careful skepticism, you are not the only one who will benefit. Let’s just start there. The Bill Nye nonsense detection kit. Don’t leave home—heck, don’t leave anywhere—without it.
CHAPTER 18
Destiny Be Damned—Full Speed Ahead
Sometimes it seems like I was destined to become Bill Nye the Science Guy. There was my father, an experimenter and inventor who called himself Ned Nye, Boy Scientist. There was my mother, an expert at solving puzzles and cracking codes. At my high school, I was exposed to the joys of playing with an oscilloscope and swinging a three-story-high pendulum with my buddy Ken Severin. In my senior year, I submitted a yearbook photo of me hugging that oscilloscope, accompanied by a quote: “With this I could, dare I say it, rule the world.” Apparently I had mangled or misremembered a line delivered by the actor Boris Karloff. But no matter—that line stuck in my head. Over the years it morphed into “change the world” and became my guiding principle. It made me restless enough to quit my steady—perhaps too-steady—job at Sundstrand, to walk away from the engineering world entirely, and to gamble with reaching a mass audience on TV. “Change the world” became my catchphrase on The Science Guy show. At dinner events with The Planetary Society, I’ll raise a glass of wine and offer: “Let us, dare I say it”—and here my colleagues often chant, “Say it! Say it!”—“Change the world!” I can’t help it. And here we are.
If you want to change the world, though, destiny is a dangerous concept. You need a lot of tools to be an agent of change. Nerd honesty is not enough. Add great design principles and a deep sense of responsibility, and it’s still not enough. You have to believe in change itself—in the idea that you can choose your own direction in life and influence the future, destiny be damned.
An enormous problem for us in the environmental and engineering communities is an opposing view promoted by many climate-change deniers and their allies in business and politics: They admit that the world is getting warmer, but they insist that there is nothing effective humans can do about it. I’m quite confident that they are merely rationalizing their use of fossil fuel energy and their aversion to new, disruptive (and possibly disadvantageous to them) ideas. Still, a small part of me wonders: What if they are right? What if we as a species are just too entrenched in our environmentally destructive patterns to do anything different? What if we can’t change the world? As a science guy, I have to at least explore the contrary hypothesis.
I’ll start by dispatching the easiest and most extreme version of the argument. There is no such thing as the-future-is-foretold destiny. No way, no how. Nerds do not believe in it. There is no prophetic story that says we have to overheat the planet. Destiny (or fate or providence or whatever term you want to use) implies that future events are recorded away somewhere and can unfold in one way only. We know that isn’t true.
First of all, no experiment or observation has ever shown any evidence whatsoever for such a preexisting record of the future—and yes, plenty of people have looked. Second, there is the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, which states that a certain amount of unknowability is written into the laws of physics. The uncertainty principle isn’t merely about the limits of what humans can know; it is a
bout the limits of what can be known based on the structure of physical information. The universe is inherently fuzzy in a way that rules out the concept of a clear, preordained future. And third, there is the matter of the flow of information. In Einstein’s general relativity, information from the future cannot flow to the past; otherwise, effects could precede causes and the whole system of reality would fall apart. Destiny requires acquiring information about the future, and everything we know says that is impossible.
However, there are softer forms of destiny, ones that are harder to sweep away scientifically. A great many people do not feel like they are in control of the future—not because of physical law but because they do not believe that meaningful choices are available to them, or at least are not practical or feasible. There are all kinds of reasons people reject the possibility of change. Some of them think “the system is rigged” by powerful people, companies, and government institutions. Some feel trapped by social, economic, or personal circumstances that leave them with no obvious options. The irony is that in American society we also routinely celebrate the scrappy individual who has pulled him- or herself up by the bootstraps, by working hard and making good choices.
Biologically speaking, there is no question that our human behaviors are constrained. Some neuroscientists go so far as to argue that there is essentially no such thing as free will; it’s just an illusion that covers up the brain’s unconscious decision-making process. On the other hand, every mentally healthy adult has the capacity to understand the consequences of his or her actions. It is part of the legal standard for being fit for a criminal trial. Whether we make use of that capacity is another matter entirely.
For the last 20 years or so, a good friend of mine has come very close to running out of gas in her car, over and over. In psychology this is called “recapitulation,” the tendency to repeat behaviors regardless of the consequences. She’ll freely admit that she could change; she just doesn’t—most of the time. But here’s the thing that gives me hope. Every now and then, she recognizes the recapitulating behavior and fills up the tank early. If the consequences of driving around with an empty tank were worse, and if my friend made a genuine effort to break her pattern of behavior, I’m sure she could do it. Look at how my parents gave up smoking when the impetus became strong enough. That’s the kind of free will I want us to use. I want humankind to do things in new ways because we appreciate that the consequences of not doing so are too dire. The defining attribute of being human is that we, more than any other species on the planet, exert control over our environment and over ourselves. That is our terrifying and wonderful power.
This is where nerd honesty comes back into the picture, because it is key to unlocking control. It allows us to recognize our biases and quirky perceptions. It helps us understand who we are and how we got that way. With that in mind, I started thinking back to some memorable moments in my path to, er . . . uh, absolutely not destiny. Back in the late 1980s, I was working as a freelance engineer and writing jokes, or at least trying to write jokes. Now and then I’d get a week of work as a stand-up comic. I had enough money that I decided it was time to sell my 17-year-old Volkswagen Beetle and buy a new used car—I mean a used car that would be new to me. I bought a Nissan Stanza that was made during the brand’s transition year; it had a Nissan nameplate on the back and a Datsun nameplate on the front grille. Well, it turned out that on the other side of the country, my sister bought the same make and model car, from the same year. Both were four-door hatchbacks, white outside with a red interior. If that’s pure coincidence, it’s an awfully specific one. Then again, I don’t buy the idea that fate intervened in my used-car choice. So I thought back a little more.
When my sister, brother, and I were young, my parents regularly took us on family vacations. To have enough space for everyone, Ned and Jacquie Nye purchased a white 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon. My father had wanted a white car with a blue interior. The car that had arrived at this dealership was white with a red interior. I remember my mom was thrilled. Over the phone to the salesman, she said, “We’ll take it!” We all had great times in that car. We went car camping along the Skyline Drive in Virginia. We drove to the beach in Delaware. My dad piloted slowly around our neighborhood streets as my brother and I delivered the Sunday Washington Post, hopping off the car’s tailgate with a few heavy papers under each arm, then hopping back on.
Our happiest times as a family were in a station wagon that was white with a red interior. Now it’s not so surprising that my sister had copied me when she bought her car. Or did I copy her? No, neither one of us had been in touch with the other about these purchases on opposite sides of the country. We were just attracted to these vehicles, which resembled the one we’d had good times in. It doesn’t say anything about genes or about fate. It does tell me that what we commonly think of as free will is influenced strongly by life experiences already in the bank. We are never really free of our past.
As you (I hope) and I work to become agents of change, it helps to be aware of those experiences and their lingering effects on us. My parents were both college-educated, and they both ended up serving the United States in World War II. My dad had a pretty rough experience in that Japanese prison camp. My mom worked in an underground office as an officer in the Navy. Both became progressives in their politics. They didn’t talk about it a lot, but I’m pretty sure they both saw the war as a tragic waste of humankind’s intellect and treasure. At the same time, they both appreciated the enormous role government could play, not only in conducting a war and repelling an enemy but also in providing a decent quality of life for its citizens. Those values rubbed off on me, too, in ways that are a lot more meaningful than my lingering fondness for a sharp white car with red upholstery. If I turned into a raving progressive—and I’m pretty sure I did—Ned and Jacquie had something to do with that. I know where my values came from, and I feel good about the source.
As for my brother and sister, they diverged over the years. My sister went to college in Danville, Virginia, married her college sweetheart, and raised three kids. She worked for the city of Danville in various capacities, including as a 911 dispatcher. Her family lives close to the border with North Carolina in a quite conservative part of the country. My sister is generally liberal like me, but her kids are not exactly inclined to my style of politics. Although we share a great many gene sequences, they see the world from an almost completely different point of view. They are more than a little resentful of government and its intrusions. Meanwhile, my brother remained in the Washington, DC, area. He raised his family there, and they all share the progressive points of view. Spelling it out: Familial genes matter, but one’s environment and peer influence matter a great deal, too. Nature and nurture are still not destiny, though.
It’s like the white four-door hatchbacks with the red interiors. Our free wills are influenced by the sum of our experiences—family, friends, the social environment, and, increasingly, the online environment, as well. My sister’s kids and I got nurtured differently, and even though our inner natures are largely identical, we ended up with quite different political views. My brother’s kids were raised in the big city, exposed to people and experiences similar to the ones in my life, and ended up embracing a view of the world similar to mine. Within this diversity, interestingly, we still all laugh at the same hilariously funny jokes. (I’d share one of these jokes, but then you’d realize that my jokes are not especially funny. That might affect how you judge my siblings, who are no longer responsible for my humor choices.)
In my family, just as with my dad and his buddies in the prisoner-of-war camp, a shared sense of humor overrides just about anything else; politics-schmolitics. It’s reasonable to me that our sense of irony is a product of the way we perceive the world, especially the way we perceive and interpret the actions of others. Perhaps part of what keeps a family together is what makes them laugh, and for that maybe there is no free will. It strikes me as a worthy hypothe
sis, but testing it would be serious business—I mean it would be no joke. (Uh . . . sorry.)
A great paradox is hidden in this whole discussion of behavior and free will: The researchers who study it (and people like me who follow along) are trying to figure out how our brains work, but the only tool we have to do that figuring is . . . our brains. Brains trying to understand brains.
It’s a subset of the much broader problem of the inherent subjectivity of the human mind. Scientific method was developed to get around that problem by codifying techniques that account for and work around our flawed intuition as best we can. The best chance we have of ensuring that we are not blindly ruled by the strong influences of our family, friends, and social conditioning is to follow that method: Observe, hypothesize, experiment, compare result with expectations, and—most importantly—start over. It’s a way to escape the echo chamber in your own head. It’s a workout routine for exercising your free will.
The scientific method forces us to question our assumptions and weed out the ideas that are based on gossip, opinions, past conditioning, and all the other baggage we carry with us. That approach is closely akin to one of the guiding questions of investigative journalism: What do I know, and how do I know it? Unfortunately, the human brain has a built-in mechanism that directs our behavior the opposite way. It is known as confirmation bias, the tendency to confirm our own assumptions as valid and true.
For a scientist conducting an experiment, confirmation bias is a big, big deal. In this sense, there clearly are limits to our free will. Our unconscious mind can lead us to see the answers that we are conditioned to expect, rather than to find the real ones we are looking for. The consequences can be severe. Medical researchers who were convinced that widespread screening would reduce the rate of breast cancer deaths found that result even when later studies could not verify it. It’s likely that large numbers of women had needless surgery as a result. Such biases crop up whenever we approach a problem knowing what we want the answer to be. If your boss (or child, spouse, friend, etc.) has ever asked for advice but then obviously listened only for the comments that matched what he or she already wanted to do, you know what I’m talking about.
