Get in tech with technology with tech Stuff from half stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuffs one thousand episode. I am your host, who has been on every single of the thousand one thousand. Hi. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works. I've done a thousand of these, one one thousand of these? How crazy is that? And I debated for a while on what I should cover for the one thousand episode of text Stuff because I've already covered a lot of my favorite tech companies and a lot of my favorite tech topics, whether it's a specific technology or a person, A lot of my favorites are ones that I've already focused on in the past. Plus, choosing one company or technology or person over all the others seems like a pretty difficult decision. How could I say that one company or one technology deserved it more than all the others. And besides, assigning significance to the number one thousand is sort of an arbitrary concept anyway when you think about it. So ultimately, I decided to skip all that and cover something I think is important that relates to everything in our lives, not just tech, but also tech, and that would be the concepts of skepticism and critical thinking. These are incredibly important tools we should familiarize ourselves with and use properly and frequently. First, let's define the terms, and I'm going to start with skepticism because I want to be clear about what I mean when I use the term, as opposed to other usages, including common usages of skepticism. Now, philosophically speaking, skepticism refers to the belief that true knowledge is difficult and likely impossible for humans to achieve, and I'm pretty much on board with that. I think it's impossible for us to know everything. Thousands of years ago, we had to rely almost solely on our own senses to figure out how the world works. But our senses are limited. Even the most keenly cited human can't see as well at a distance as a falcon, for example, and we aren't able to see light in the ultra violet or infrared ranges. We're incapable of directly perceiving electro magnetic radiation outside of the visible spectrum. The same is true for our other senses. That we have a limit uh and what we can perceive sounds below twenty hurts or above twenty kilo hurts are essentially beyond the range of human hearing. Our sense of smell is nowhere near sensitive as dogs, so we are limited by the extent to which our senses can take in information around us. There's a lot of information out there that we are incapable of sensing. Now, as time is past, we have created technologies that augment our senses and increase our ability to detect things we otherwise would never notice. But even so, we still don't know how much we don't know. Cosmological theories state that dark matter has to exist based on our observations of how galaxies move in our universe, and that this matter must make up the majority of all matter in our reality, but we can't detect it directly. That leads me to believe that we will never possess true knowledge of the universe, because I think there's always going to be something more that's outside our ability to perceive and understand. Now, that should not stop us from trying. We should just be aware that there's always more to discover, and if anything, I think that should make us more determined to learn. Frequently we will use the word skeptic to refer to someone who doubts or denies the existence of something. But when I say it's good to be a skeptic, I do not mean you should doubt or deny everything. Rather, I use the word to refer to someone who applies critical thinking to subjects. They ask questions, they look for evidence to support claims. They do not accept a statement without supporting proof, and they look to make sure that any proof that is offered is of sound quality. This is why I won't call anyone a climate change skeptic. In that case, I would use the term denier rather than skeptic, because there is a mountain of research and there's a scientific consensus that climate change is a real thing. It is one thing to question a topic and demand evidence that I think you should totally do. However, it's another thing to dismiss the conclusion despite the evidence. If you don't accept evidence despite a sidentific a consensus, that's pretty much denial. A skeptic who would be confronted by sound evidence should be able to accept that information. So, for example, let's move away from climate change. Some people argue that that shouldn't count. I think they're wrong, but let's take something totally different. Let's say let's talk about ghosts. I do not believe in ghosts at all. If you came up to me and you told me a story about how you once saw a ghost, I might humor you, but I wouldn't believe you actually saw a ghost. I might believe that you believe it, but I would be pretty sure that what you experienced wasn't anything supernatural. I would suspect that something more mundane had happened, and that over time you had formulated a narrative that was reinforced with retellings, perhaps even to the extent that the version you tell no longer even remotely resembles the thing that actually happened. Because we you as we do that when we remember stuff. It's not like our brains are acting like a computer. Right with a computer, you tell a computer retrieve a file, it's gonna pull up a file, and that file is going to be exactly the same as it was the last time you saved the file. It will be identical to the last time you saved it. It's preserved perfectly, assuming that there's not something wrong with your computer. But that's not how our brains work. When we remember something, our brains actually form neural pathways. They create connections between neurons in our brains right, and that pathway resembles the one that happened when we first experienced the situation that formed the memory in the first place. So we experience something, our brain creates a connection that is related to that something. When we remember, our brain tries to recreate that connection. But our brains aren't perfect at recreating those pathways. Detours happen. Our memory areas are faulty. To us. It seems like the things were remembering our perfect recreations, but in reality, we are recreating a scenario in our heads, and our brains are not perfect, so we get things wrong and sometimes we reinforce the wrong parts. We make those detours more permanent parts of a pathway. So I'm not necessarily going to think you're trying to hoodwink me. I'm not thinking you're lying if you tell me you saw a ghost. But still I'm not going to believe your account that you saw a ghost. I'm going to think something else happened that made you think you saw a ghost, but in reality it was something more natural and mundane. However, if someone were to provide to me real evidence of the existence of ghosts, not an anecdote, but real, incontrovertible evidence of ghosts. I would have to reevaluate my beliefs. I would need to reconcile my disbelief in ghosts and then incorporate a new belief into my worldview. That's my responsibility as a skeptic. If you came up to me and you said, here's the proof, and you laid it out and I look at it and it is undeniable, I would have to say, you know what I was wrong, You are right, there are ghosts. This probably would not be easy for me to do, but I would like to think I would do it because I would be confronted by evidence. However, the claim that ghosts exist is an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary proof. So if you are confronted with evidence and the evidence seems reliable, then you should take whatever the claim is and think this may very well have merit. Climate change deniers do not do this. They deny this mountain of evidence and a scientific consensus, so they do not take that and they incorporated. They instead say this does not align with my worldview, and so I reject it. That is not skepticism, that is denialism. Now, one of my favorite episodes of Tech Stuff was all about ghost hunting technology, and that's because Chris Palette and I went through the equipment that is frequently used by people in the ghost hunting professions and we explained why that technology did not actually prove the existence of ghosts. For one thing, ghost hunters tend to use equipment that was intended to do other work. One example would be a meter to detect electromagnetic fluctuations, which you would use in order to look for faulty wiring in a house. For example, if wiring didn't have proper insulation, then whenever a current runs through that wire, it would generate an electromagnetic field and you would be able to pick it up and that would tell you, hey, maybe we need to fix the wiring here. That's what those meters are full. Or however, ghost hunters would say, uh, this meter shows fluctuations. That means there's a ghost here, But that puts the cart about a mile in front of the horse. Because at no point that the ghost hunter actually provide evidence that ghosts exist. They're saying, here is an effect the cause is this other thing that I have yet to prove exists. That's not how science works. You have to prove that a ghost exists first. Then you have to prove that a ghost can affect or generate electromagnetic fields. Then and only then can you say I just found a fluctuating electromagnetic field. One possible explanation is ghosts. You can't just say because this needle moved, ghosts exist. That's not how science works. You have to establish the existence first, then established that they can in fact produce the effect you claim. Then and you can use uh actual instances of that effect to potentially detect the presence of such a thing. So that's the way that would have to work. Ghost hunting does not do that. It ignores that. It skips It presupposes the existence of the thing they're looking for without first establishing that actually is a thing. Now, I want to stress that I don't mean to say ghosts definitely do not exist. What I'm saying is I do not believe they exist. But as I said at the beginning, I think it is impossible for humans to know everything, so I could be wrong about this. However, I have seen no evidence that cannot be attributed to much more mundane causes than ghosts, and that would be necessary for me to change my mind. I would need that extraordinary evidence. I do not deny the existence of ghosts outright, I just don't believe in them, because skepticism and denial are two different things. Now, some skeptics do deny certain things that might be climate change. There are skeptics who don't believe in it that might be the supernatural. And some skeptics believe in certain things that are not supported by evidence as a matter of faith. They might be uh devout in a religion, and other skeptics would say, oh, you're not a skeptic because you actually believe in this religious faith and there's no evidence to support your beliefs. I don't want to say there's only one way to be a skeptic. I do think, however, the application of critical thinking and the scientific method is really important for everyone, whether you consider yourself a skeptic or otherwise. Now, when we come back, I'm gonna go into the scientific method, how it works, and why I think it's so important, And I'm also going to probably talk about some other stuff like anti intellectualism and why it's so demoralizing. Maybe I'll even get around to explaining why I think the term Boffin's is incredibly insulting. So tune in Brits because I got a bone to pick with you guys. But first, let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor. The scientific method is a process by which we test ideas to ascertain their validity. So, in other words, it's how we make sure the stuff we believe in has some basis in actual reality. The history of the scientific method is complex. I can't really go into all of it because you could do a full podcast series just about the evolution of the scientific method. It is fascinating, but it is also exhaustive. Cultures from all around the world developed approaches to testing ideas, so this was in something that arose specifically out of one place in the world. Lots of different cultures came up with different ways to take this approach. However, generally speaking, we trace the scientific method as we understand it today back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He gets the credit for laying out the basics of the scientific method. He proposed combining empirical measurements and observations with inductive reasoning. Now, a lot of Greek philosophers before Aristotle essentially said, all you need is to be able to think. And if you think, and you think good enough, if you're really good at the thinking, then you can think the things that you never thought before and figure out how the world works. All it takes is just pure thought. Aristotle said, hang on, what if we see stuff and we measure stuff, and we take those empirical measurements and we incorporate that into what we think, so that we can actually see how the world really works, and by is our knowledge off of that. This was pretty rebellious among Greek philosophers at the time. Inductive reasoning, by the way, is where you take specific points of data and you make generalizations from those specific points. Contrast that with deductive reasoning. That's where you start with a general idea and then you work your way towards specifics. Now, typically scientists use both inductive and deductive reasoning in order to form hypotheses and then test them to make sure they are true. The Islamic scholar even al hath them further developed the scientific method. His basic steps are pretty much the foundation of the scientific method today. He said, well, first you have to state and explicit problem. This would essentially be a claim, usually based off observations and experimentation. Then you test a hypothesis through various experiments to see if it holds validity. You interpret the data from those experiments, and then you conclude whether the hypothesis held up under experimentation or whether the experimentation didn't support the hypothesis, and then you publish what you found so that other people can read it. The scientific method developed further throughout the Renaissance, also developed in the Enlightenment and the Modern Age of science, and basically the principles have remained fairly stable, although the particulars have obviously changed over time. Now you can't use the scientific method for absolutely everything, but it does provide a great model to follow as a skeptic. Basically, you take a testable claim, and it is important that the claim is testable. It's a claim that can be tested for accuracy. If a claim is not testable, then it does not belong to the realm of science. We used to call this falsifiable. By the way, if a claim is falsifiable, then it is scientific. That means if the claim is such that you could design a test where the claim is proven to be untrue, then you would say it's falsifiable and thus scientific. If it's a claim where you cannot come up with a test that would have an outcome where the claim could be untrue, it is not part of science. So, for example, if I claim there is a pixie that follows you around and it's always just over your right shoulder, however it is completely undetectable by any means that we know, that claim is not testable. There's nothing you can do to see if there's a pixie there, because I just told you it's completely undetectable. It's there, but you can't detect it. Well, there's no experiment you can conduct to test that claim. It does not fall in the realm of science. But if I said there's a pixie that floats over your right shoulder that can only be detected by some particularly expensive piece of scanning equipment, that claim is testable because you could go out and secure the appropriate scanning equipment and scan yourself and look for the evidence, and if there's no evidence of a pixie there, it would show that my claim was not substantiated. There was no pixie and I had told you, hey, if you get this expensive scanner, then you'll find a pixie. If I'm the one selling you the expensive scanner, it just means I scammed you, and I probably changed my claim slightly, because that's how things often go. It's called moving the goal posts. Where I make a claim, someone tests the claim, the claim does not hold up to the test, so I change the claims slightly in order to make it seem like it's still valid. That's moving the goal posts. That's not good cricket, y'all. Anyway, Let's say I make a testable claim, such as, this extremely expensive sound system can playback a recording at such high fidelity that it leaves all other sound systems behind. Now, you could perhaps measure the performance of this sound system with very precise sensitive measurement devices, and it might even show that, according to those devices, my system is outperforming other systems. But it may not actually matter. And that's because again, our senses are limited, right. Human senses have limitations. So there comes a point where replication will be meaningless because we humans are physically incapable of detecting anything at that level of fidelity or resolution. So with a claim, like that the way we perceive sound might matter more than the empirical measurements we gather from the device. And not only that, but the psychology of listening to a sound system might matter more. If I believe I'm going to get a better experience from a particular sound system, my perception might be that I did get a better experience, even if objectively, if I had no knowledge of the quality or back thereof of the sound system, I might not ever have noticed it. Brains are funny things. So how can you test a claim that says this sound system is better than all others so that it makes sense to us that we can actually see if there's something there. Well, this is where formulating a proper experiment is incredibly important. So a blind experiment helps reduce bias in a process. In a blind experiment, the subject does not know if he or she is in a test group or a control group. Uh. And with a sound system issue, you might be in a control group sometimes in a test group other times, and you're recording your responses to a questionnaire. Let's say this design to see if you detect a difference in sound quality. Uh. So it might mean that if I were to design an experiment to test the claims someone makes about a particular sound system. I might make it like this. Uh. You are invited to participate in a test to see if a particular sound system is perceptibly better than other sound systems. So you're led to a room. You cannot see the system, or the speakers or anything in this room. The room is is designed in such way where the entire sound system is hidden from your view. You're told to listen to a recording. You do, so, you listen to the recording. Maybe you make some notes. Then you're led to a second room and you repeat the procedure. You you can't see the sound system in this room. You don't know if you're listening to an identical sound system or a totally different sound system. You make notes. Maybe you go to several rooms and you're asked to rate the audio quality experience in each of the rooms you visit. Some of the rooms might have duplicate systems calibrated precisely the same way for their respective spaces to give you the same sort of uh, replicated sound, but you don't know that. You don't know that going from room to room, which one it is and there might be as many variables eliminated as possible. So you're trying to, you know, keep the rooms the exact same size, with the exact same uh sound proofing. Everything needs to be as close to identical as possible to eliminate variables. And it might be that rooms two and three out of seven have the supposedly remarkable system in them, but the other five have regular sound systems in them. Now, you, as the subject, don't know that. You're just going through the experiment. The experimenters will repeat this process with as many test subjects as they possibly can. The more subjects you have, the better it increases the sample size. It helps account for outliers. Then the experimenters collate all the data, they analyze it, and they draw conclusions. And perhaps the super relative system really is superior, and people are regularly and reliably picking it out. They're saying rooms two and three sounded really good, like better than all the others. If everyone is saying that, or if enough people are saying that reliable, then you might say he the claims that were made seem to hold true people are able to identify it, or you might find that there's no conclusive support for the claim, not enough people were able to tell a difference, or maybe some other people said, you know, rooms two and six sounded better than all the other rooms, and you're thinking to yourself, huh, only two and three had the sound system that was really good in them. The other rooms had regular sound systems in them. So if you say two and six, that's not conclusive. Or if you say five and six, now that's a real problem because you've picked out two of the sound systems that we're not supposed to be as good. So that's one way of testing it. Now, I would actually suggest you go a step further in your experiment design and you create what is called a double blind experiment. In a double blind experiment, the person in charge of conducting the test is unaware of which subjects are in a control group or a test group as well. So, in other words, the person who leads you the subject from room the room also does not know which rooms have the really good system in them and which rooms have normal systems in them. They have no idea. This way, the person who's leading you from room to room can't unconsciously introduce bias into the experiment by perhaps giving away that rooms two and three have the really good system in them because they don't know. Double Blind experiments, in my opinion, tend to be the way to go for testable claims, especially claims that are on the extraordinary side. You want to design a test in such a way that you don't influence the subjects to give you the result you want to get. Whether you want a test to come out positive or negative, you want to avoid introducing bias into the actual experiment. Uh, these tests where you're testing something that's subjective, like the quality of sound, those are particularly tricky because it's not like it's just a measurement you can read off a meter. It's the experience someone is having, and subjective experiences are very difficult to quantify in a meaningful way. But this is the way I would go about designing such an experiment. Now, not everything can be tested. Some things go beyond observations or empirical measurements. Now that does not necessarily mean those claims are untrue. They might be true. It just means we cannot apply the scientific method to test those claims. String theory falls into that category. Mathematically, stringth theory holds up if you allow for certain claims such as additional dimensions, but we have no means of observing or measuring those claims. There's no way for us to test it scientifically. Mathematically, it all makes sense, but we can't actually practically test it or observe it. That's led some people to argue that strength or is not really a scientific theory but more of a philosophy. Now that does not mean that it's untrue. It just means we do not as yet have a means of testing it to apply the scientific method. So that's something to keep in mind as well. That step that uh that we heard about publishing your findings, that's also very important. A good scientist will submit his or her work to a peer reviewed journal for publication. Peer review means that other scientists will take the work, they'll examine it. They'll look at the design of the experiment, the claim, how the experiment was designed, how it was carried through, the methodology that was used to collect data, the process of the researchers used to analyze the information that was collected, and then the conclusions that were drawn by the researchers based on that analysis. Ideally, that weeds out bad experiments. Now, in reality, sometimes stuff slips through, at least temporarily, but the purpose of peer review is really important. It gives a scientists the opportunity to poke and prode at an experiment to make sure it holds up to scrutiny. And if it can't hold up to scrutiny, that doesn't necessarily mean the conclusions are false. It just means there's a lack of support to validate the conclusions, and a better experiment should be designed. The publication process also allows for another important step in science. It gives other scientists the opportunity to attempt to replicate the experiment. If an experiment has a proper design and the researchers did everything correctly, their work should be replicable by anyone else who follows that exact same methodology. If another scientist follows your procedure exactly but arrives at a completely different result, something has gone wrong. Moreover, scientists should be able to come at the experiment from different angles, and with a properly designed experiment, their work should arrive at a similar conclusion to the previously established experiments. There will always be variability and result, but as long as that variability isn't statistically significant, or as long as it's not outside the range of error, it should still be seen as supporting the conclusions of the first experiment. So you want to be able to replicate an experiment. You want to be able to design new experiments to test the same claim in a slightly different way to make sure that the claim still holds true. And if all of that ends up being the case, then you know you're onto something because you're starting to get consistent results and different people trying to do the same experiment and coming up with the same conclusion. That's a good thing in general. Now, clearly we can't all design scientific experiments to test every claim we encounter. That's not practical. It's not something that you and I are going to do on a day to day basis. It would be silly, it would be a huge time sync. But we can apply our knowledge of the scientific method to ask questions either of ourselves of other pull to look into a matter more thoroughly, and if we encounter an extraordinary claim, we can look for the support for that claim. In some cases we may find the support is logical, it's consistent, and it's sufficient, And then we might find ourselves able to accept this new claim, even if it is extraordinary. But in other cases we might not see any support at all. We might look and say, you know, the premise that you have here is faulty, so your conclusion is not really reliable. Or you might say you don't even present premises to support your argument, so how do I know your argument is sound? Then we become less eager to accept a claim at face value. Well, I've got a lot more to say about critical thinking and scientific method and skepticism, but before I go any further, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Are how do we know science works? But why have I put so much stock in science? Well? We know science works because our stuff works. Our computers work, our smartphones work, cellular technology, satellites, rockets, sensors, medicine. These things work because men and women have used a scientific process to develop these over the course of many years of research and development and prototyping. If science did not work, we would have a much higher failure rate on our exploits because without science, the odds of us ever developing something like WiFi just by pure luck are astronomically bad. So we know science works because we have stuff based on science, and that stuff actually works as it's supposed to. Now, a quick word about some more terminology like laws versus theories versus hypotheses, because these get kind of conflated too. So in science, a law is a generalization about data that describes what we might expect will happen per a given situation. So the laws of thermodynamics are generalizations about fundamental elements like temperature and entropy of thermodynamic systems that are at equilibrium. These laws are based off of countless observations, and they are well established. They are not immutable. Scientific laws can in fact change if evidence supports such a thing, but they tend to serve as the foundation for much of our knowledge, which means if we do need to make changes, we also have to reevaluate all the knowledge we base off of those ideas. You can think of it as the foundation for a house. It holds everything else up. This is one of the reasons why scientifically minded folks are pretty comfortable saying things like perpetual motion machines are impossible because for a perpetual motion machine to work, it would have to violate the laws of thermodynamics, and while it is at least possible in the strictest sense of the word, that our understanding of the laws of thermodynamics is not correct. To date, our observations and tests have all validated those laws, so it would take extraordinary proof to the extreme to overturn that, and it would mean that much of our advances in science and technology over the years has worked largely by good luck, because if we were off base about something so fundamental, it would be amazing that all the things we've built that at least relied partly on those laws actually works, because our understanding would be faulty. So our technology shouldn't work if the principles that was built upon were unsound. Next, we have scientific theories. This one is tricky because we have different meanings for theory. In science, a theory is something specific. The University of California, Yeah, Berkeley, has a really great glossary of scientific terms, and this is their definition for a scientific theory. Quote in science a broad natural explanation for a wide range of phenomena. Theories are concise, coherent, systematic, predictive, and broadly applicable, often integrating and generalizing many hypotheses. Theories accepted by the scientific community are generally strongly supported by many different lines of evidence, but even theories may be modified or overturned if warranted by new evidence and perspectives. So again, science allows that we can't know everything, and it may turn out that one day we find some form of evidence that contradicts a previously established theory, and that means we have to test it and make certain that in fact, this anomaly is a real thing, and if so, we have to revisit our theory and we have to change it because it clearly does not reflect reality. Now, contrast this with the more casual use of the word theory to mean idea. For example, I have a theory about why the peanut butter keeps going missing is a different statement than the theory of gravity, unless you mean the peanut butter jar keeps falling to the ground because you're releasing it in mid air, in which case your theory about why the peanut butter goes missing and the theory of gravity are actually kind of aligned. The difference causes problems. Sometimes people might dismiss as scientific claim by saying, oh, that's only a theory, as if to say, that's just your opinion, except In science, a theory is an explanation that has stood up to numerous tests along different lines of evidence. It's not just a proposed explanation that lacks support. A hypothesis is an explanation for something. Typically in science, a hypothesis, a good hypothesis says will explain a fairly limited set of phenomenon. It's it's narrowly focused. Hypotheses are testable, so you should be able to take a hypothesis, create a test that would produce results that either show the hypothesis has merit or the hypothesis does not apply, and then you should be able to carry out the experiment and observe the results and then determine is the hypothesis good or not. The scientific method is sort of a finely tuned approach to critical thinking. Critical thinking is all about trying to be as objective in your analysis as possible to form a judgment about something, and ideally you should apply critical thinking too many areas of your life, particularly when you encounter various claims about stuff. This can come in many forms. For example, politics is a great place to apply critical thinking. Politics deals with some incredibly important aspects of our lives, things that affect us day to day and affect other people, thousands or millions of people every day. Political matters are often emotionally charged, and there's rhetoric on all sides of issues. It doesn't matter if you identify yourself as being conservative or liberal or whatever. There's rhetoric on every side. People get passionate. Using critical thinking is important, not just as in an effort to try and pick apart the arguments that you don't agree with philosophically, but also to make certain that those who claim to align themselves with your own worldview actually do align themselves to your worldview. So let's say I get a message from a politician saying I should vote for her because she believes the same things I believe, And I might go and look at this politicians voting record to check and see if that's actually true, and I might discover that while the candidate aligns herself with a particular party, one that I identify with when it comes to voting, their point of view and my point of view may not be aligned at all. Well, that would be me using critical thinking, saying, just because she says that she holds the same beliefs I do, doesn't necessarily mean that's the case. I should really look into this further. Or to bring it back around to technology, I might hear claims about a company saying that they have a particularly really awesome cable and it delivers superior performance to any other cable. Let's say it's an HDMI cable. And to evaluate that claim, I might look at some other information, such as what are the limits of the pieces of tech the cable will connect, like a set top box and a television. Let's say that I've got, you know, my own setup at home, and I've got a particular kind of set top box and a particular kind of TV at home, and they have limits of them themselves, right They They are not able to accept all forms of media at all forms of resolution. They have a limit. Let's say that I've got an HDTV, not a four K, not two K or anything like that, just an HDTV. No matter how good a cable is, it's not going to make my HDTV show video at four K resolution. That's impossible. The television cannot do that. Now, there are companies out there that sell the idea of a superior experience. They're going to say this cable is going to provide a superior experience to any other cable. They don't actually have to deliver this promise. They don't have to deliver that experience, or or maybe the experience they promise is beyond the ability for humans to perceive, So there's no way for you to actually tell if that experience is what they say it is, because you can't discern the difference between that and the next step down because it's beyond our ability to perceive it. That resolution, but that's not what's important to the company that's making the product. They're selling an idea. The idea is what you are buying. So the reason I wanted to dedicate an episode to this topic is that I see a lot of misinformation out there, and I've fallen for some of it. I'm a human being. I make mistakes, but I try to apply critical thinking so that I avoid those situations as frequently as I can, knowing that I'm not always going to succeed, but always trying to. I think it's an important practice. If you practice good critical thinking, you might find yourself saving money because you're not following an unsupported trend. You're not just buying a new trendy thing because people think it's cool. You're actually critically thinking about this thing and whether or not it really has a place in your life, whether or not it can do the things that people promise it can do. You might even improve your health, or at the very least you might avoid endangering your health. You could even save a life. Just be sure to be skeptical without being a denialist. Right ask for evidence, look for evidence. But if you get evidence and that evidence supports the claim, don't just deny the claim. If if you feel the evidence warrants the claim being true, then you need to incorporate that into your worldview. And don't be afraid to do a little digging to verify claims, especially of claims that seemed to validate your philosophy. That's one of the go twos of any snake oil salesman. Find out what your mark believes, reinforce that belief, and claim that whatever you're selling is aligned with that belief. You need to take claims that seem to align with your worldview, and you need to question them just as much as you need to question the claims that come in that conflict with your worldview, because otherwise you're just gonna buy into something that may not be true because it conveniently reinforces what you already believe in the world. That is unfortunate. That's like at the very heart of the concept of fake news, which I hate to even talk about. But fake news, I mean it is a thing, and it's true for all different types of use. If you see an article out there that seems to confirm a belief you already hold, then you might be less inclined to question the validity of that article, but it behooves you to do so because either you're going to question it and turn out, oh, it's absolutely accurate, it is true, or as true as anything is that we can determine, and therefore I feel good about this validating my world view, or you could say, turns out this is not true, no matter how much I might wish it to be true, and knowing that makes it better because I'm not gonna I'm not gonna use this to support an argument that later on can get undermined because someone else is going to point to that thing and say, yeah, but you're citing this as your source, and that source has proven to be unreliable. It's better to actually use this practice in all areas. Also, critical thinking leads to an actual understanding of a subject, not just of technology, but all sorts of stuff. People talked about critical thinking in my literature classes when I was in college. Honestly, that critical thinking concept should have been taught much earlier in my educational experience, but uh, you know, it just wasn't. I think for a lot of kids these days, it's introduced much earlier, which is great for me. I didn't get into it until college. But critical thinking allows you to question things and then through the question get a deeper understanding of the subject matter, as opposed to just memorizing stuff. Like you can memorize a list of facts and rattle those facts off, but if you don't have an actual understanding, then there's nothing really going on. You're just you're just regurgitating information, you're not really incorporating that. But when you question, there comes a point where a little lightbulb comes on in your head and you get it, and that's way more powerful. To conclude, I like to recommend some interesting books about critical thinking and skepticism. Uh, the best one I've ever read is The demon Haunted World that was written by Carl Sagan. Uh. There's a great audiobook version of this. By the way, Carrie Ls of Princess Bride Fame does the the narration for it. I highly recommend that if you don't want to read it, you can listen to it. Uh. Sagan is wonderful and not only advocating for careful critical thought, but also he is really good at expressing the wonders of the universe and of science. He's great at engaging the imagination and grounding us in the real world at the same time. And I think his message is ultimately one of wonder and hope, because it's all about how phenomenal the universe is and how much we can stand to learn from it. A lot of people, I think, I think of skepticism is taking the magic out of the world, but really it's just making sure the stuff you are putting stock into is real. But that doesn't mean real. He can't be amazing, it can be. It's just not magic because magic is not real. Asking the Right Questions A Guide to Critical Thinking by m Neil Brown and Stuart M. Keely is also a good read. Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me by Carol Tigress and Elliott Aaronson explores why we are so adept at passing the buck when we make a mistake. It's a very human thing when we make a mistake, to justify that mistake or gloss over it, or try to deflect it so it doesn't seem like we've made a mistake. It's a very human thing. This book specifically goes into why is that? Why are we so reluctant to say I was wrong? Because if we could say I was wrong more frequently when we are legitimately wrong, then we could proceed toward the truth much more quickly. But we're really reluctant to do that in general. Flam Flam by James Randy is a really interesting book about various hoaxes, scams, and unsupported claims, most of which are in the supernatural realm. But I think it is very helpful if you want to look at critical thinking. Randy is a professional magician, and as such he has a working understanding of human psychology. You know, not necessarily a scholarly understanding, but human psychology is something magicians work on like. They have to understand it. They have to understand how people think and how people perceive in order to trick them. So they're all about misdirection and deception, and a lot of magicians actually have created really great work calling for critical thinking and using their understanding of human psychology and misdirection to point out how we humans are really good at fooling each other and ourselves. Also, I feel I need to point this out. Randy is a bit of an irascible fellow. He's grouchy and it comes across and his writing. Just throwing that out there because I don't want to be a surprise to anybody if they pick up the book. Another one is Pseudoscience and the Paranormal by Terence hinz Uh. That's a book I've heard recommended numerous times, but I have not yet read it myself. It's on my to read list. I just haven't read it yet, but I keep hearing Pseudoscience and the Paranormal is a very good one, so I hope it is. That's my next book to read once I'm done with the one I'm on now. In my next episode, I'm going to be joined by the fabulous Mr Benjamin Bolan to cover some of the scams and hoaxes and flam flam and technology that in cases, some cases rob people of money. In some cases that just deluded a person into thinking they had found something interesting when really they hadn't. In some cases it led to even worse outcomes. And I really want to do that to explore again why scientific thinking, Why why skepticism critical thinking? Why that's so important? And the next episode is going to kind of illustrate that with a bunch of examples, but it'll be a pretty entertaining story as well. Thank you guys so much. We have a thousand episodes of tech Stuff and there's no stopping. We're gonna keep on going. But one thousand, I can't believe it. That's a lot of Jonathan Strickland talking. I feel like I should apologize, But if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, write me, send me a message at tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The handle at both of those is tech Stuff H s W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot Com

Get in tech with technology with tech Stuff from half stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuffs one thousand episode. I am your host, who has been on every single of the thousand one thousand. Hi. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works. I've done a thousand of these, one one thousand of these? How crazy is that? And I debated for a while on what I should cover for the one thousand episode of text Stuff because I've already covered a lot of my favorite tech companies and a lot of my favorite tech topics, whether it's a specific technology or a person, A lot of my favorites are ones that I've already focused on in the past. Plus, choosing one company or technology or person over all the others seems like a pretty difficult decision. How could I say that one company or one technology deserved it more than all the others. And besides, assigning significance to the number one thousand is sort of an arbitrary concept anyway when you think about it. So ultimately, I decided to skip all that and cover something I think is important that relates to everything in our lives, not just tech, but also tech, and that would be the concepts of skepticism and critical thinking. These are incredibly important tools we should familiarize ourselves with and use properly and frequently. First, let's define the terms, and I'm going to start with skepticism because I want to be clear about what I mean when I use the term, as opposed to other usages, including common usages of skepticism. Now, philosophically speaking, skepticism refers to the belief that true knowledge is difficult and likely impossible for humans to achieve, and I'm pretty much on board with that. I think it's impossible for us to know everything. Thousands of years ago, we had to rely almost solely on our own senses to figure out how the world works. But our senses are limited. Even the most keenly cited human can't see as well at a distance as a falcon, for example, and we aren't able to see light in the ultra violet or infrared ranges. We're incapable of directly perceiving electro magnetic radiation outside of the visible spectrum. The same is true for our other senses. That we have a limit uh and what we can perceive sounds below twenty hurts or above twenty kilo hurts are essentially beyond the range of human hearing. Our sense of smell is nowhere near sensitive as dogs, so we are limited by the extent to which our senses can take in information around us. There's a lot of information out there that we are incapable of sensing. Now, as time is past, we have created technologies that augment our senses and increase our ability to detect things we otherwise would never notice. But even so, we still don't know how much we don't know. Cosmological theories state that dark matter has to exist based on our observations of how galaxies move in our universe, and that this matter must make up the majority of all matter in our reality, but we can't detect it directly. That leads me to believe that we will never possess true knowledge of the universe, because I think there's always going to be something more that's outside our ability to perceive and understand. Now, that should not stop us from trying. We should just be aware that there's always more to discover, and if anything, I think that should make us more determined to learn. Frequently we will use the word skeptic to refer to someone who doubts or denies the existence of something. But when I say it's good to be a skeptic, I do not mean you should doubt or deny everything. Rather, I use the word to refer to someone who applies critical thinking to subjects. They ask questions, they look for evidence to support claims. They do not accept a statement without supporting proof, and they look to make sure that any proof that is offered is of sound quality. This is why I won't call anyone a climate change skeptic. In that case, I would use the term denier rather than skeptic, because there is a mountain of research and there's a scientific consensus that climate change is a real thing. It is one thing to question a topic and demand evidence that I think you should totally do. However, it's another thing to dismiss the conclusion despite the evidence. If you don't accept evidence despite a sidentific a consensus, that's pretty much denial. A skeptic who would be confronted by sound evidence should be able to accept that information. So, for example, let's move away from climate change. Some people argue that that shouldn't count. I think they're wrong, but let's take something totally different. Let's say let's talk about ghosts. I do not believe in ghosts at all. If you came up to me and you told me a story about how you once saw a ghost, I might humor you, but I wouldn't believe you actually saw a ghost. I might believe that you believe it, but I would be pretty sure that what you experienced wasn't anything supernatural. I would suspect that something more mundane had happened, and that over time you had formulated a narrative that was reinforced with retellings, perhaps even to the extent that the version you tell no longer even remotely resembles the thing that actually happened. Because we you as we do that when we remember stuff. It's not like our brains are acting like a computer. Right with a computer, you tell a computer retrieve a file, it's gonna pull up a file, and that file is going to be exactly the same as it was the last time you saved the file. It will be identical to the last time you saved it. It's preserved perfectly, assuming that there's not something wrong with your computer. But that's not how our brains work. When we remember something, our brains actually form neural pathways. They create connections between neurons in our brains right, and that pathway resembles the one that happened when we first experienced the situation that formed the memory in the first place. So we experience something, our brain creates a connection that is related to that something. When we remember, our brain tries to recreate that connection. But our brains aren't perfect at recreating those pathways. Detours happen. Our memory areas are faulty. To us. It seems like the things were remembering our perfect recreations, but in reality, we are recreating a scenario in our heads, and our brains are not perfect, so we get things wrong and sometimes we reinforce the wrong parts. We make those detours more permanent parts of a pathway. So I'm not necessarily going to think you're trying to hoodwink me. I'm not thinking you're lying if you tell me you saw a ghost. But still I'm not going to believe your account that you saw a ghost. I'm going to think something else happened that made you think you saw a ghost, but in reality it was something more natural and mundane. However, if someone were to provide to me real evidence of the existence of ghosts, not an anecdote, but real, incontrovertible evidence of ghosts. I would have to reevaluate my beliefs. I would need to reconcile my disbelief in ghosts and then incorporate a new belief into my worldview. That's my responsibility as a skeptic. If you came up to me and you said, here's the proof, and you laid it out and I look at it and it is undeniable, I would have to say, you know what I was wrong, You are right, there are ghosts. This probably would not be easy for me to do, but I would like to think I would do it because I would be confronted by evidence. However, the claim that ghosts exist is an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary proof. So if you are confronted with evidence and the evidence seems reliable, then you should take whatever the claim is and think this may very well have merit. Climate change deniers do not do this. They deny this mountain of evidence and a scientific consensus, so they do not take that and they incorporated. They instead say this does not align with my worldview, and so I reject it. That is not skepticism, that is denialism. Now, one of my favorite episodes of Tech Stuff was all about ghost hunting technology, and that's because Chris Palette and I went through the equipment that is frequently used by people in the ghost hunting professions and we explained why that technology did not actually prove the existence of ghosts. For one thing, ghost hunters tend to use equipment that was intended to do other work. One example would be a meter to detect electromagnetic fluctuations, which you would use in order to look for faulty wiring in a house. For example, if wiring didn't have proper insulation, then whenever a current runs through that wire, it would generate an electromagnetic field and you would be able to pick it up and that would tell you, hey, maybe we need to fix the wiring here. That's what those meters are full. Or however, ghost hunters would say, uh, this meter shows fluctuations. That means there's a ghost here, But that puts the cart about a mile in front of the horse. Because at no point that the ghost hunter actually provide evidence that ghosts exist. They're saying, here is an effect the cause is this other thing that I have yet to prove exists. That's not how science works. You have to prove that a ghost exists first. Then you have to prove that a ghost can affect or generate electromagnetic fields. Then and only then can you say I just found a fluctuating electromagnetic field. One possible explanation is ghosts. You can't just say because this needle moved, ghosts exist. That's not how science works. You have to establish the existence first, then established that they can in fact produce the effect you claim. Then and you can use uh actual instances of that effect to potentially detect the presence of such a thing. So that's the way that would have to work. Ghost hunting does not do that. It ignores that. It skips It presupposes the existence of the thing they're looking for without first establishing that actually is a thing. Now, I want to stress that I don't mean to say ghosts definitely do not exist. What I'm saying is I do not believe they exist. But as I said at the beginning, I think it is impossible for humans to know everything, so I could be wrong about this. However, I have seen no evidence that cannot be attributed to much more mundane causes than ghosts, and that would be necessary for me to change my mind. I would need that extraordinary evidence. I do not deny the existence of ghosts outright, I just don't believe in them, because skepticism and denial are two different things. Now, some skeptics do deny certain things that might be climate change. There are skeptics who don't believe in it that might be the supernatural. And some skeptics believe in certain things that are not supported by evidence as a matter of faith. They might be uh devout in a religion, and other skeptics would say, oh, you're not a skeptic because you actually believe in this religious faith and there's no evidence to support your beliefs. I don't want to say there's only one way to be a skeptic. I do think, however, the application of critical thinking and the scientific method is really important for everyone, whether you consider yourself a skeptic or otherwise. Now, when we come back, I'm gonna go into the scientific method, how it works, and why I think it's so important, And I'm also going to probably talk about some other stuff like anti intellectualism and why it's so demoralizing. Maybe I'll even get around to explaining why I think the term Boffin's is incredibly insulting. So tune in Brits because I got a bone to pick with you guys. But first, let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor. The scientific method is a process by which we test ideas to ascertain their validity. So, in other words, it's how we make sure the stuff we believe in has some basis in actual reality. The history of the scientific method is complex. I can't really go into all of it because you could do a full podcast series just about the evolution of the scientific method. It is fascinating, but it is also exhaustive. Cultures from all around the world developed approaches to testing ideas, so this was in something that arose specifically out of one place in the world. Lots of different cultures came up with different ways to take this approach. However, generally speaking, we trace the scientific method as we understand it today back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He gets the credit for laying out the basics of the scientific method. He proposed combining empirical measurements and observations with inductive reasoning. Now, a lot of Greek philosophers before Aristotle essentially said, all you need is to be able to think. And if you think, and you think good enough, if you're really good at the thinking, then you can think the things that you never thought before and figure out how the world works. All it takes is just pure thought. Aristotle said, hang on, what if we see stuff and we measure stuff, and we take those empirical measurements and we incorporate that into what we think, so that we can actually see how the world really works, and by is our knowledge off of that. This was pretty rebellious among Greek philosophers at the time. Inductive reasoning, by the way, is where you take specific points of data and you make generalizations from those specific points. Contrast that with deductive reasoning. That's where you start with a general idea and then you work your way towards specifics. Now, typically scientists use both inductive and deductive reasoning in order to form hypotheses and then test them to make sure they are true. The Islamic scholar even al hath them further developed the scientific method. His basic steps are pretty much the foundation of the scientific method today. He said, well, first you have to state and explicit problem. This would essentially be a claim, usually based off observations and experimentation. Then you test a hypothesis through various experiments to see if it holds validity. You interpret the data from those experiments, and then you conclude whether the hypothesis held up under experimentation or whether the experimentation didn't support the hypothesis, and then you publish what you found so that other people can read it. The scientific method developed further throughout the Renaissance, also developed in the Enlightenment and the Modern Age of science, and basically the principles have remained fairly stable, although the particulars have obviously changed over time. Now you can't use the scientific method for absolutely everything, but it does provide a great model to follow as a skeptic. Basically, you take a testable claim, and it is important that the claim is testable. It's a claim that can be tested for accuracy. If a claim is not testable, then it does not belong to the realm of science. We used to call this falsifiable. By the way, if a claim is falsifiable, then it is scientific. That means if the claim is such that you could design a test where the claim is proven to be untrue, then you would say it's falsifiable and thus scientific. If it's a claim where you cannot come up with a test that would have an outcome where the claim could be untrue, it is not part of science. So, for example, if I claim there is a pixie that follows you around and it's always just over your right shoulder, however it is completely undetectable by any means that we know, that claim is not testable. There's nothing you can do to see if there's a pixie there, because I just told you it's completely undetectable. It's there, but you can't detect it. Well, there's no experiment you can conduct to test that claim. It does not fall in the realm of science. But if I said there's a pixie that floats over your right shoulder that can only be detected by some particularly expensive piece of scanning equipment, that claim is testable because you could go out and secure the appropriate scanning equipment and scan yourself and look for the evidence, and if there's no evidence of a pixie there, it would show that my claim was not substantiated. There was no pixie and I had told you, hey, if you get this expensive scanner, then you'll find a pixie. If I'm the one selling you the expensive scanner, it just means I scammed you, and I probably changed my claim slightly, because that's how things often go. It's called moving the goal posts. Where I make a claim, someone tests the claim, the claim does not hold up to the test, so I change the claims slightly in order to make it seem like it's still valid. That's moving the goal posts. That's not good cricket, y'all. Anyway, Let's say I make a testable claim, such as, this extremely expensive sound system can playback a recording at such high fidelity that it leaves all other sound systems behind. Now, you could perhaps measure the performance of this sound system with very precise sensitive measurement devices, and it might even show that, according to those devices, my system is outperforming other systems. But it may not actually matter. And that's because again, our senses are limited, right. Human senses have limitations. So there comes a point where replication will be meaningless because we humans are physically incapable of detecting anything at that level of fidelity or resolution. So with a claim, like that the way we perceive sound might matter more than the empirical measurements we gather from the device. And not only that, but the psychology of listening to a sound system might matter more. If I believe I'm going to get a better experience from a particular sound system, my perception might be that I did get a better experience, even if objectively, if I had no knowledge of the quality or back thereof of the sound system, I might not ever have noticed it. Brains are funny things. So how can you test a claim that says this sound system is better than all others so that it makes sense to us that we can actually see if there's something there. Well, this is where formulating a proper experiment is incredibly important. So a blind experiment helps reduce bias in a process. In a blind experiment, the subject does not know if he or she is in a test group or a control group. Uh. And with a sound system issue, you might be in a control group sometimes in a test group other times, and you're recording your responses to a questionnaire. Let's say this design to see if you detect a difference in sound quality. Uh. So it might mean that if I were to design an experiment to test the claims someone makes about a particular sound system. I might make it like this. Uh. You are invited to participate in a test to see if a particular sound system is perceptibly better than other sound systems. So you're led to a room. You cannot see the system, or the speakers or anything in this room. The room is is designed in such way where the entire sound system is hidden from your view. You're told to listen to a recording. You do, so, you listen to the recording. Maybe you make some notes. Then you're led to a second room and you repeat the procedure. You you can't see the sound system in this room. You don't know if you're listening to an identical sound system or a totally different sound system. You make notes. Maybe you go to several rooms and you're asked to rate the audio quality experience in each of the rooms you visit. Some of the rooms might have duplicate systems calibrated precisely the same way for their respective spaces to give you the same sort of uh, replicated sound, but you don't know that. You don't know that going from room to room, which one it is and there might be as many variables eliminated as possible. So you're trying to, you know, keep the rooms the exact same size, with the exact same uh sound proofing. Everything needs to be as close to identical as possible to eliminate variables. And it might be that rooms two and three out of seven have the supposedly remarkable system in them, but the other five have regular sound systems in them. Now, you, as the subject, don't know that. You're just going through the experiment. The experimenters will repeat this process with as many test subjects as they possibly can. The more subjects you have, the better it increases the sample size. It helps account for outliers. Then the experimenters collate all the data, they analyze it, and they draw conclusions. And perhaps the super relative system really is superior, and people are regularly and reliably picking it out. They're saying rooms two and three sounded really good, like better than all the others. If everyone is saying that, or if enough people are saying that reliable, then you might say he the claims that were made seem to hold true people are able to identify it, or you might find that there's no conclusive support for the claim, not enough people were able to tell a difference, or maybe some other people said, you know, rooms two and six sounded better than all the other rooms, and you're thinking to yourself, huh, only two and three had the sound system that was really good in them. The other rooms had regular sound systems in them. So if you say two and six, that's not conclusive. Or if you say five and six, now that's a real problem because you've picked out two of the sound systems that we're not supposed to be as good. So that's one way of testing it. Now, I would actually suggest you go a step further in your experiment design and you create what is called a double blind experiment. In a double blind experiment, the person in charge of conducting the test is unaware of which subjects are in a control group or a test group as well. So, in other words, the person who leads you the subject from room the room also does not know which rooms have the really good system in them and which rooms have normal systems in them. They have no idea. This way, the person who's leading you from room to room can't unconsciously introduce bias into the experiment by perhaps giving away that rooms two and three have the really good system in them because they don't know. Double Blind experiments, in my opinion, tend to be the way to go for testable claims, especially claims that are on the extraordinary side. You want to design a test in such a way that you don't influence the subjects to give you the result you want to get. Whether you want a test to come out positive or negative, you want to avoid introducing bias into the actual experiment. Uh, these tests where you're testing something that's subjective, like the quality of sound, those are particularly tricky because it's not like it's just a measurement you can read off a meter. It's the experience someone is having, and subjective experiences are very difficult to quantify in a meaningful way. But this is the way I would go about designing such an experiment. Now, not everything can be tested. Some things go beyond observations or empirical measurements. Now that does not necessarily mean those claims are untrue. They might be true. It just means we cannot apply the scientific method to test those claims. String theory falls into that category. Mathematically, stringth theory holds up if you allow for certain claims such as additional dimensions, but we have no means of observing or measuring those claims. There's no way for us to test it scientifically. Mathematically, it all makes sense, but we can't actually practically test it or observe it. That's led some people to argue that strength or is not really a scientific theory but more of a philosophy. Now that does not mean that it's untrue. It just means we do not as yet have a means of testing it to apply the scientific method. So that's something to keep in mind as well. That step that uh that we heard about publishing your findings, that's also very important. A good scientist will submit his or her work to a peer reviewed journal for publication. Peer review means that other scientists will take the work, they'll examine it. They'll look at the design of the experiment, the claim, how the experiment was designed, how it was carried through, the methodology that was used to collect data, the process of the researchers used to analyze the information that was collected, and then the conclusions that were drawn by the researchers based on that analysis. Ideally, that weeds out bad experiments. Now, in reality, sometimes stuff slips through, at least temporarily, but the purpose of peer review is really important. It gives a scientists the opportunity to poke and prode at an experiment to make sure it holds up to scrutiny. And if it can't hold up to scrutiny, that doesn't necessarily mean the conclusions are false. It just means there's a lack of support to validate the conclusions, and a better experiment should be designed. The publication process also allows for another important step in science. It gives other scientists the opportunity to attempt to replicate the experiment. If an experiment has a proper design and the researchers did everything correctly, their work should be replicable by anyone else who follows that exact same methodology. If another scientist follows your procedure exactly but arrives at a completely different result, something has gone wrong. Moreover, scientists should be able to come at the experiment from different angles, and with a properly designed experiment, their work should arrive at a similar conclusion to the previously established experiments. There will always be variability and result, but as long as that variability isn't statistically significant, or as long as it's not outside the range of error, it should still be seen as supporting the conclusions of the first experiment. So you want to be able to replicate an experiment. You want to be able to design new experiments to test the same claim in a slightly different way to make sure that the claim still holds true. And if all of that ends up being the case, then you know you're onto something because you're starting to get consistent results and different people trying to do the same experiment and coming up with the same conclusion. That's a good thing in general. Now, clearly we can't all design scientific experiments to test every claim we encounter. That's not practical. It's not something that you and I are going to do on a day to day basis. It would be silly, it would be a huge time sync. But we can apply our knowledge of the scientific method to ask questions either of ourselves of other pull to look into a matter more thoroughly, and if we encounter an extraordinary claim, we can look for the support for that claim. In some cases we may find the support is logical, it's consistent, and it's sufficient, And then we might find ourselves able to accept this new claim, even if it is extraordinary. But in other cases we might not see any support at all. We might look and say, you know, the premise that you have here is faulty, so your conclusion is not really reliable. Or you might say you don't even present premises to support your argument, so how do I know your argument is sound? Then we become less eager to accept a claim at face value. Well, I've got a lot more to say about critical thinking and scientific method and skepticism, but before I go any further, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Are how do we know science works? But why have I put so much stock in science? Well? We know science works because our stuff works. Our computers work, our smartphones work, cellular technology, satellites, rockets, sensors, medicine. These things work because men and women have used a scientific process to develop these over the course of many years of research and development and prototyping. If science did not work, we would have a much higher failure rate on our exploits because without science, the odds of us ever developing something like WiFi just by pure luck are astronomically bad. So we know science works because we have stuff based on science, and that stuff actually works as it's supposed to. Now, a quick word about some more terminology like laws versus theories versus hypotheses, because these get kind of conflated too. So in science, a law is a generalization about data that describes what we might expect will happen per a given situation. So the laws of thermodynamics are generalizations about fundamental elements like temperature and entropy of thermodynamic systems that are at equilibrium. These laws are based off of countless observations, and they are well established. They are not immutable. Scientific laws can in fact change if evidence supports such a thing, but they tend to serve as the foundation for much of our knowledge, which means if we do need to make changes, we also have to reevaluate all the knowledge we base off of those ideas. You can think of it as the foundation for a house. It holds everything else up. This is one of the reasons why scientifically minded folks are pretty comfortable saying things like perpetual motion machines are impossible because for a perpetual motion machine to work, it would have to violate the laws of thermodynamics, and while it is at least possible in the strictest sense of the word, that our understanding of the laws of thermodynamics is not correct. To date, our observations and tests have all validated those laws, so it would take extraordinary proof to the extreme to overturn that, and it would mean that much of our advances in science and technology over the years has worked largely by good luck, because if we were off base about something so fundamental, it would be amazing that all the things we've built that at least relied partly on those laws actually works, because our understanding would be faulty. So our technology shouldn't work if the principles that was built upon were unsound. Next, we have scientific theories. This one is tricky because we have different meanings for theory. In science, a theory is something specific. The University of California, Yeah, Berkeley, has a really great glossary of scientific terms, and this is their definition for a scientific theory. Quote in science a broad natural explanation for a wide range of phenomena. Theories are concise, coherent, systematic, predictive, and broadly applicable, often integrating and generalizing many hypotheses. Theories accepted by the scientific community are generally strongly supported by many different lines of evidence, but even theories may be modified or overturned if warranted by new evidence and perspectives. So again, science allows that we can't know everything, and it may turn out that one day we find some form of evidence that contradicts a previously established theory, and that means we have to test it and make certain that in fact, this anomaly is a real thing, and if so, we have to revisit our theory and we have to change it because it clearly does not reflect reality. Now, contrast this with the more casual use of the word theory to mean idea. For example, I have a theory about why the peanut butter keeps going missing is a different statement than the theory of gravity, unless you mean the peanut butter jar keeps falling to the ground because you're releasing it in mid air, in which case your theory about why the peanut butter goes missing and the theory of gravity are actually kind of aligned. The difference causes problems. Sometimes people might dismiss as scientific claim by saying, oh, that's only a theory, as if to say, that's just your opinion, except In science, a theory is an explanation that has stood up to numerous tests along different lines of evidence. It's not just a proposed explanation that lacks support. A hypothesis is an explanation for something. Typically in science, a hypothesis, a good hypothesis says will explain a fairly limited set of phenomenon. It's it's narrowly focused. Hypotheses are testable, so you should be able to take a hypothesis, create a test that would produce results that either show the hypothesis has merit or the hypothesis does not apply, and then you should be able to carry out the experiment and observe the results and then determine is the hypothesis good or not. The scientific method is sort of a finely tuned approach to critical thinking. Critical thinking is all about trying to be as objective in your analysis as possible to form a judgment about something, and ideally you should apply critical thinking too many areas of your life, particularly when you encounter various claims about stuff. This can come in many forms. For example, politics is a great place to apply critical thinking. Politics deals with some incredibly important aspects of our lives, things that affect us day to day and affect other people, thousands or millions of people every day. Political matters are often emotionally charged, and there's rhetoric on all sides of issues. It doesn't matter if you identify yourself as being conservative or liberal or whatever. There's rhetoric on every side. People get passionate. Using critical thinking is important, not just as in an effort to try and pick apart the arguments that you don't agree with philosophically, but also to make certain that those who claim to align themselves with your own worldview actually do align themselves to your worldview. So let's say I get a message from a politician saying I should vote for her because she believes the same things I believe, And I might go and look at this politicians voting record to check and see if that's actually true, and I might discover that while the candidate aligns herself with a particular party, one that I identify with when it comes to voting, their point of view and my point of view may not be aligned at all. Well, that would be me using critical thinking, saying, just because she says that she holds the same beliefs I do, doesn't necessarily mean that's the case. I should really look into this further. Or to bring it back around to technology, I might hear claims about a company saying that they have a particularly really awesome cable and it delivers superior performance to any other cable. Let's say it's an HDMI cable. And to evaluate that claim, I might look at some other information, such as what are the limits of the pieces of tech the cable will connect, like a set top box and a television. Let's say that I've got, you know, my own setup at home, and I've got a particular kind of set top box and a particular kind of TV at home, and they have limits of them themselves, right They They are not able to accept all forms of media at all forms of resolution. They have a limit. Let's say that I've got an HDTV, not a four K, not two K or anything like that, just an HDTV. No matter how good a cable is, it's not going to make my HDTV show video at four K resolution. That's impossible. The television cannot do that. Now, there are companies out there that sell the idea of a superior experience. They're going to say this cable is going to provide a superior experience to any other cable. They don't actually have to deliver this promise. They don't have to deliver that experience, or or maybe the experience they promise is beyond the ability for humans to perceive, So there's no way for you to actually tell if that experience is what they say it is, because you can't discern the difference between that and the next step down because it's beyond our ability to perceive it. That resolution, but that's not what's important to the company that's making the product. They're selling an idea. The idea is what you are buying. So the reason I wanted to dedicate an episode to this topic is that I see a lot of misinformation out there, and I've fallen for some of it. I'm a human being. I make mistakes, but I try to apply critical thinking so that I avoid those situations as frequently as I can, knowing that I'm not always going to succeed, but always trying to. I think it's an important practice. If you practice good critical thinking, you might find yourself saving money because you're not following an unsupported trend. You're not just buying a new trendy thing because people think it's cool. You're actually critically thinking about this thing and whether or not it really has a place in your life, whether or not it can do the things that people promise it can do. You might even improve your health, or at the very least you might avoid endangering your health. You could even save a life. Just be sure to be skeptical without being a denialist. Right ask for evidence, look for evidence. But if you get evidence and that evidence supports the claim, don't just deny the claim. If if you feel the evidence warrants the claim being true, then you need to incorporate that into your worldview. And don't be afraid to do a little digging to verify claims, especially of claims that seemed to validate your philosophy. That's one of the go twos of any snake oil salesman. Find out what your mark believes, reinforce that belief, and claim that whatever you're selling is aligned with that belief. You need to take claims that seem to align with your worldview, and you need to question them just as much as you need to question the claims that come in that conflict with your worldview, because otherwise you're just gonna buy into something that may not be true because it conveniently reinforces what you already believe in the world. That is unfortunate. That's like at the very heart of the concept of fake news, which I hate to even talk about. But fake news, I mean it is a thing, and it's true for all different types of use. If you see an article out there that seems to confirm a belief you already hold, then you might be less inclined to question the validity of that article, but it behooves you to do so because either you're going to question it and turn out, oh, it's absolutely accurate, it is true, or as true as anything is that we can determine, and therefore I feel good about this validating my world view, or you could say, turns out this is not true, no matter how much I might wish it to be true, and knowing that makes it better because I'm not gonna I'm not gonna use this to support an argument that later on can get undermined because someone else is going to point to that thing and say, yeah, but you're citing this as your source, and that source has proven to be unreliable. It's better to actually use this practice in all areas. Also, critical thinking leads to an actual understanding of a subject, not just of technology, but all sorts of stuff. People talked about critical thinking in my literature classes when I was in college. Honestly, that critical thinking concept should have been taught much earlier in my educational experience, but uh, you know, it just wasn't. I think for a lot of kids these days, it's introduced much earlier, which is great for me. I didn't get into it until college. But critical thinking allows you to question things and then through the question get a deeper understanding of the subject matter, as opposed to just memorizing stuff. Like you can memorize a list of facts and rattle those facts off, but if you don't have an actual understanding, then there's nothing really going on. You're just you're just regurgitating information, you're not really incorporating that. But when you question, there comes a point where a little lightbulb comes on in your head and you get it, and that's way more powerful. To conclude, I like to recommend some interesting books about critical thinking and skepticism. Uh, the best one I've ever read is The demon Haunted World that was written by Carl Sagan. Uh. There's a great audiobook version of this. By the way, Carrie Ls of Princess Bride Fame does the the narration for it. I highly recommend that if you don't want to read it, you can listen to it. Uh. Sagan is wonderful and not only advocating for careful critical thought, but also he is really good at expressing the wonders of the universe and of science. He's great at engaging the imagination and grounding us in the real world at the same time. And I think his message is ultimately one of wonder and hope, because it's all about how phenomenal the universe is and how much we can stand to learn from it. A lot of people, I think, I think of skepticism is taking the magic out of the world, but really it's just making sure the stuff you are putting stock into is real. But that doesn't mean real. He can't be amazing, it can be. It's just not magic because magic is not real. Asking the Right Questions A Guide to Critical Thinking by m Neil Brown and Stuart M. Keely is also a good read. Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me by Carol Tigress and Elliott Aaronson explores why we are so adept at passing the buck when we make a mistake. It's a very human thing when we make a mistake, to justify that mistake or gloss over it, or try to deflect it so it doesn't seem like we've made a mistake. It's a very human thing. This book specifically goes into why is that? Why are we so reluctant to say I was wrong? Because if we could say I was wrong more frequently when we are legitimately wrong, then we could proceed toward the truth much more quickly. But we're really reluctant to do that in general. Flam Flam by James Randy is a really interesting book about various hoaxes, scams, and unsupported claims, most of which are in the supernatural realm. But I think it is very helpful if you want to look at critical thinking. Randy is a professional magician, and as such he has a working understanding of human psychology. You know, not necessarily a scholarly understanding, but human psychology is something magicians work on like. They have to understand it. They have to understand how people think and how people perceive in order to trick them. So they're all about misdirection and deception, and a lot of magicians actually have created really great work calling for critical thinking and using their understanding of human psychology and misdirection to point out how we humans are really good at fooling each other and ourselves. Also, I feel I need to point this out. Randy is a bit of an irascible fellow. He's grouchy and it comes across and his writing. Just throwing that out there because I don't want to be a surprise to anybody if they pick up the book. Another one is Pseudoscience and the Paranormal by Terence hinz Uh. That's a book I've heard recommended numerous times, but I have not yet read it myself. It's on my to read list. I just haven't read it yet, but I keep hearing Pseudoscience and the Paranormal is a very good one, so I hope it is. That's my next book to read once I'm done with the one I'm on now. In my next episode, I'm going to be joined by the fabulous Mr Benjamin Bolan to cover some of the scams and hoaxes and flam flam and technology that in cases, some cases rob people of money. In some cases that just deluded a person into thinking they had found something interesting when really they hadn't. In some cases it led to even worse outcomes. And I really want to do that to explore again why scientific thinking, Why why skepticism critical thinking? Why that's so important? And the next episode is going to kind of illustrate that with a bunch of examples, but it'll be a pretty entertaining story as well. Thank you guys so much. We have a thousand episodes of tech Stuff and there's no stopping. We're gonna keep on going. But one thousand, I can't believe it. That's a lot of Jonathan Strickland talking. I feel like I should apologize, But if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, write me, send me a message at tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The handle at both of those is tech Stuff H s W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot Com