Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show. His new book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Michael Shermer discuss conspiracy theories from the plausible to the wild, how to assess whether a conspiracy theory is accurate, and discovering the truth in a convoluted world.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I’m really interested in learning all about the truth, which you expound upon in your new book. But there was something that interested me about you, which is that you spent an enormous amount of time looking into conspiracy theories and arguing with conspiracy theorists. You’re kind of the self-appointed Batman. If somebody comes up with a terrible conspiracy theory somewhere, you rush in to put them right.
Michael Shermer: The previous book, Conspiracy, and the new book, Truth, are sort of a two-book project. Conspiracy asks why the rational believe the irrational. Truth is basically why anybody believes anything at all and what we should believe.
Conspiracies have always been in the wheelhouse of skeptics and scientists who study fringe ideas, because they’re always right on the margins. You can’t quite make out what’s going on. If it’s obviously a government operation or a corporate scam, then it’s not really a conspiracy theory. It’s just a scam or an operation. So conspiracy theories are always like—we can’t quite make out what’s going on, here’s what I think might be going on. It’s a little bit like the UAP/UFO phenomenon. The pictures are always blurry and grainy. It’s always on the margins, on the borderlands.
Many conspiracy theories are like that. You can’t quite figure out what’s going on. Therefore, that opens the door for anybody and everybody with their personal opinions. So I just undertook to explore why that is. Since we started Skeptic back in 1992, we’ve been covering JFK and moon landing conspiracy theories, all that stuff ever since, because it’s super popular.
Mounk: What drew you to that? These theories are out there, and it’s tempting for a smart person to ignore them and to say, these are just crazies going around making up all of these stories. Certainly back in the day, they probably felt less central to the political discourse than unfortunately they do now. So why doesn’t it make more sense to just ignore them and actually focus on the stuff that’s true and that matters in the world? What’s the case for actually going to battle with conspiracy theorists and trying to engage them in the details—often in the weeds of the claims they make about the world?
Shermer: It matters what’s true. I embrace universal realism—there is a reality, we can figure out what is, more or less, small-“t” truth. That’s true with conspiracies. Conspiracy theories are theories about actual conspiracies, whether the theory is true or not. There are real conspiracies. Watergate was a conspiracy. Iran-Contra, all the MKUltra and all the CIA shenanigans in third world countries in the 50s and 60s and 70s—these are all true, and they were covered up. These were not approved by Congress or the president, who may not have even known about many of them.
So one of the things I’m debunking in Conspiracy is that calling it a crazy conspiracy theory, or calling someone a crazy conspiracy nut, is not an answer. The question is: but what if he’s right? He may be a nut, but what if he’s right? So what’s the actual truth?
When we started Skeptic, I was initially debunking the creationists—evolution deniers. Then the Holocaust deniers came on the scene and they were making the rounds on major talk shows. I thought maybe that’s something we can look at in Skeptic. So I went around to some Holocaust scholars and historians with a list of things that these Holocaust deniers were saying are not true. How many bodies can you burn in 24 hours in a crematory at Auschwitz? Why does the door not lock at the gas chamber at Mauthausen? They had a list of like 39 unanswered mysteries and anomalies about the Holocaust. A lot of these historians would just tell me, they’re just a bunch of anti-Semites. That may be, but what’s the answer? Most of them didn’t know the answer.
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It reminded me a little bit of biologists who would debate creationists. They would lose because they didn’t realize the creationists are doing something different. The Holocaust deniers are not actually studying the Holocaust—they’re doing something different. They’re challenging the narrative because it’s based on Israel and American foreign policy, and that’s really what it’s about. It has nothing to do with calculating how many Jews exactly died, how many were alive in 1939, how many were alive in 1945. That actually isn’t what they’re interested in.
In addition to exploring their motives, I wanted to ask: what is the answer exactly, what do we know? The Holocaust denial claim—that it didn’t happen, or didn’t happen the way we think it did—is a kind of conspiracy theory, the theory being that the Jews made up the story to gain sympathy or funding from Germany, or whatever the theory is. So the question is: is it true or not? In addition to, what are their motives? I just apply that to everything. What actually happened with JFK? What happened on 9/11? Why do people think the Bush administration pulled it off—not just that they’re anti-Bush or anti-Republican, but what is the explanation for why Building 7 collapsed? What do we know about the early purchases of airline stocks? That kind of thing.
Mounk: I have two competing responses to this. One response is that they’re making factual claims. One of the interesting things about conspiracy theorists is that often they know a lot of details—they’ve studied a lot of elements of this, and so they’re able to make all of these claims about the world. As somebody who is generally motivated to understand the truth about the world, when somebody makes a factual claim, that’s something that is worth responding to and worth looking into—the claim that it would take much greater heat to make the World Trade Center collapse, for example. Presumably, if you go and talk to a physicist or a material scientist, they can help give you answers to those questions. Those answers are either convincing or not, and that seems like a sensible response.
There is a competing instinct, though, of: what is actually the purpose of this? Do you find that some of the time you’re able to convince people in these discussions—that these conspiracy theorists end up saying, now that I’ve heard from Professor So-and-so at the Department of Material Science at Caltech that the point at which a steel beam melts is actually this degree of Fahrenheit rather than that degree of Fahrenheit, I think you’re right? Or do they just make up the next claim—that obviously Caltech is bought and paid for and this professor is a liar, and so on and so forth?
What is actually the purpose of this conversation? Is it just to have some counter-speech in there so that people who have not yet made up their mind can see that there are responses? Or do you think the people with whom you’re engaging are actually going to change their mind? What is the end goal for you?
Shermer: The end goal is to convince the undecided voters, as it were. The hardcore conspiracy theorists are not going to change their mind—they never do. I had Oliver Stone on the podcast and he basically almost hung up on me when I challenged him with specific facts. He’s not going to change his mind. But the average person who is aware of the JFK conspiracy theories, or 9/11 was an inside job, or whatever—they might be thinking, what is the explanation for that? They go to Skeptic Magazine, just like they go to Snopes or PolitiFact or any of these fact-checking sites. That’s what we do.
As for the alternative—I’m a big free speech advocate, so I don’t want the government to censor David Irving and his claims about Auschwitz. I defend his right to speak. He was actually arrested in the early 2000s in Austria at the airport, for going there to give a speech to a group of right-wing neo-Nazi types about the Holocaust. I thought, well, that’s not right. He should be free to speak his mind and I should be free to debunk him. I have debunked him many times. I would rather have people go online and see, here are David Irving’s claims and here’s why he’s wrong, as opposed to not being able to find David Irving online at all because he’s been censored.
The reason I defend free speech absolutism is this: in America, there’s a debate about how many Native Americans died after Columbus. How many were here when Columbus arrived? How many died two centuries later from guns, germs, and steel, as it were? The extreme claims are something like 100 million; the much more moderate claims are more like 10 million. If I side on the side of thinking it was only 15 or 20 million, am I a Holocaust denier? That’s a legitimate debate. We should be able to have those debates. I don’t want people labeled a “denier” just because they don’t go with the mainstream—just in case the mainstream is wrong.
Mounk: Let’s think a little bit more systematically. You were saying earlier that a conspiracy theory in the literal sense is just a theory that some kind of conspiracy happened. Of course, there have been conspiracies in the history of the world, so just because something is a conspiracy theory doesn’t mean that we can debunk it. Part of the answer is to look into each conspiracy theory in detail—actually go and call up all of the experts and try to research the factual claims that people on the internet make about them. For ordinary citizens, that’s not going to be possible. We’re busy people, we have jobs, we have families to raise. We’re not going to be able to look into every conspiracy theory that’s out there.
So one thing we can do is outsource our judgment to institutions that we might trust, like Skeptic Magazine. But of course, people who are quite inclined to believe in conspiracy theories are going to think, “Places like Skeptic Magazine are just CIA ops to obscure the truth.” Is there a principled way of distinguishing between allegations of conspiracy that are worth taking seriously and allegations of conspiracy where, without even looking into the details, you immediately say, that smells kind of off?
One obvious point—one that I apply when I think about the world—is to ask: who is the collective agent who is supposed to have committed this conspiracy? If the idea is that this company suddenly had a bunch of money missing in its accounts, to say, perhaps there’s a conspiracy by the CFO and some kind of accountant to steal a bunch of that money, doesn’t seem crazy. It only takes a few people, they have a very clear self-interest, and it’s easy to imagine that they could solve the collective action problem of actually acting in concert.
When you’re saying all journalists are going along with some kind of crazy lie about the 2020 election, I can imagine that a lot of them would go along with that—stretching it a little bit. But if you break the story that the U.S. presidential election really was stolen, you go into the annals of journalism as one of the greatest investigative reporters ever. Out of the thousands of journalists in the United States, not a single one is going to break rank, not a single one is going to pursue the very clear self-interest to break the story—over whatever political preference they have, or over whatever fear of being looked at weirdly at a dinner party. That’s a conspiracy theory that’s much harder to sustain. How do these thousands of journalists coordinate? Why does nobody break ranks? Do they all actually share the same interests? That seems much less plausible.
Is that how you think about it as well? How do you eyeball a conspiracy theory before you’ve looked into all of the specific detailed claims—to distinguish the kind of circumstance under which a conspiracy might plausibly happen in the world from the kind of circumstance in which it’s very, very unlikely that people could carry off a conspiracy?
Shermer: I do make a distinction between realistic conspiracy theories and quite fringe, lunatic, or grand conspiracy theories—that Bill Gates is trying to control the world, or that there’s a group of 12 people in London called the Illuminati running the world’s economy. That sort of thing doesn’t merit our attention as much as more realistic conspiracy theories.
Take the claim that big pharma makes money off of drugs—well, they do. They’ve captured the regulatory state, like in the opioid crisis. That actually happened. Just like big tobacco, we now know that they knew these drugs were addictive and they lied, and then they hired the regulators themselves to work for the company. That’s a real conspiracy. The conspiracy theory turned out to be true, and the government then did something about it through the regulatory state and lawsuits against the Sackler family, just like with big tobacco. Those are important because they matter to millions of people.
On the question of offloading—yes, all of us offload most of what we believe about things, because who has time to fact-check everything? In the case of the 2020 rigged election conspiracy theory, what convinced me was that Attorney General Bill Barr—a lifelong Republican, someone who voted for Trump twice—said, as head of the Department of Justice, we’re going to look into this. We have the resources to do it. I looked into it, we spent months examining all this stuff, and we didn’t find any significant fraud at all. The election is over. To me, I don’t have to go myself to Atlanta or to Phoenix to look at that building—that grainy video on YouTube of a truck pulling up at two in the morning pulling boxes out. The Department of Justice has the resources to do that. I don’t have to worry about it.
Christopher Hitchens once famously said: when the Pope says he believes in God today, you think, well, that’s the Pope, he’s doing his job. If the Pope says, I’m beginning to doubt God’s existence, you think, well, he might be onto something, because he’s supposed to believe in God. So when Attorney General Bill Barr says, I looked into it and didn’t find anything, that’s him doing his job. If he had said, there are some questionable things here, that would get my attention. That’s all offloading, and that’s mostly what all of us do.
Mounk: Tell me more about the structural features of these different kinds of conspiracy theories. You said you distinguish between realistic and unrealistic conspiracy theories, and we probably each have an instinct for what is a potentially realistic one and what is one that just seems off the bat. But do you have a more systematic way of thinking about the criteria you apply to determine what is a potentially realistic conspiracy theory and what is an obviously unrealistic one?
Shermer: One criterion is: how many people would have to be involved? Real conspiracies don’t involve that many people. The more people that are involved, the more likely they are to screw up, or tell somebody, or whatever. Take JFK—all the people that would have to be involved or accused of being involved: the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, the mafia, the Russians, the Cubans, and so on. Not one of them wants to go on 60 Minutes to tell their story. Not one of the women who slept with one of the guys who knew about the assassination of JFK wants to tell the story. It’s the same thing with all these UFO/UAP whistleblowers—I saw the spacecraft, or I know somebody. Not one of them wants to go on 60 Minutes or tell a journalist. This would be the breaking story of the century, or the millennia.
Mounk: Even if they might be afraid of being killed, what about one of them who doesn’t have children, who’s on his deathbed, right?
Shermer: That’s the funny thing, Yascha—they always say they can’t speak out because they’re afraid of being killed. But they go online and post videos and articles, and they freely speak to podcasters all the time about this. Why aren’t they afraid of being killed for saying this? Because they’re not. That’s not actually going on.
But back to your original question, because I think this will interest you. I originally got interested in this when I was in college. I went to Pepperdine University in Malibu—I was in the first graduating class of the Malibu campus, in 1976. It was fairly conservative. I was a Christian at the time, in a Republican leadership crowd. President Ford came to speak there, everybody was reading Atlas Shrugged, and I got into objectivism and all that stuff and kind of became a libertarian. Then I started going to libertarian-type meetings and reading a lot of their literature, and a lot of it was just nonsense. My roommate and I went to one of these you don’t have to pay income tax seminars—the whole thing was a fraud, the premise being that the IRS doesn’t actually have the legal right to tax your income. It may have even been a sovereign citizen kind of thing, though I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I remember getting back to the dorm room thinking, if this was actually true, nobody would pay their taxes and there’s no way the government is going to allow this. My roommate disagreed—he didn’t file for like 15 years, and they caught up with him and he got penalized pretty heavily.
Then I started reading things like climate change is a hoax, big pharma and all the doctors want you to be sick, there’s a carburetor that gets 200 miles to the gallon but the oil companies are keeping it secret—all these kinds of things. I thought, well, it could be true, but this is too big, too grandiose. There’s never anything to it. Nobody goes on 60 Minutes and says, I found the carburetor, here it is, it gets 200 miles to the gallon. A lot of the stuff I was discovering as a libertarian was not serving me well. There’s a lot of nonsense in it for a political agenda. I’m still a small government kind of guy, but you have to temper this with reality.
Mounk: What do you think attracts people to conspiracy theories? Obviously, different kinds of conspiracy theories are likely to serve different kinds of psychological purposes. Whether you are inclined to believe in conspiracy theories probably depends in part on how far you feel from centers of power. It’s much easier to think everybody in the U.S. government is in on the same thing if you’ve never been very close to Washington, D.C. and don’t know anybody in the U.S. government—you think they’re all kind of similar types of people who are very different from you and me. If you’ve lived in D.C. a little bit and you know some of those people, you realize, first, that they’re not really competent enough to pull off this kind of large-scale conspiracy, and second, more importantly, that they all kind of hate each other and disagree with each other and are trying to get ahead and run over each other. The idea that they can all agree on this very complicated set of actions and nobody ever defects just seems wholly unrealistic. But that’s easy to say when you’re in those circles and you know some of those people. When you’re very far away from it, it’s easier to imagine.
The other point is that at least some of these conspiracy theories are actually quite comforting. To think there are 12 people sitting in London who are the Illuminati and who are running the world is superficially scary—these evil people are making decisions about the world. But in a more profound sense, I think it’s reassuring, because it’s an explanation for why things are scary in the world, for why some things don’t work. If only everybody could agree to recognize the existence of the Illuminati, dethrone them, and put good people in place, suddenly everything is going to be much better. There’s actually something very comforting about a lot of these conspiracy theories.
Shermer: One of my favorite quotes in the book is about this idea—it was something to the effect that 12 guys running the economy is a little scary, but at least you’ve identified the enemy. What’s scarier to most people is the idea that no one is running the economy, that no one’s in charge. That’s even worse than having identified the enemy.
There are a lot of motives. I was on G. Gordon Liddy’s podcast in the 90s—Mr. Watergate, the guy himself. I asked him about this, and he basically said people are incompetent and they can’t keep their mouth shut, and once you work in government you realize most people can’t do much of anything.
In terms of the motives for why people believe in conspiracy theories, there are several. There’s what they call “conspiracy theories are for losers”—that is, the losing party usually thinks the other party cheated. That’s very common. Trump is not unusual that way. Hillary thought something like that happened.
Those out of power tend to think that people in power have more power than they actually have, both in government and in corporations. People that are low in status think that people higher in status are pulling things off. People who are more anxious by personality and temperament, or more risk averse, feel that something’s going on and that they need a more predictable future. The future is largely not predictable, so those who need higher structure are more likely to think conspiracy theories are true. There’s also a big power dimension—a lack of trust in authority.
My favorite paper on this is called Dead and Alive. People who tick the box in surveys saying they think Princess Diana was murdered are also more likely to tick the box saying she faked her death and is still alive. Well, she can’t be both dead and alive. She’s living in South America with Elvis.
Mounk: What’s going on is that if you have a general inclination to believe in conspiracy theories, you’re just more likely to say things aren’t as they’re telling us, things aren’t as they appear. Even if those two things are mutually exclusive, you’re more likely to say, who knows? All I know is they’re lying to us—perhaps they’re lying to us because she was murdered, perhaps they’re lying to us because she’s still alive, but something’s got to be different from what the official story is.
Shermer: I wrote about the Deep State and QAnon and the Pizzagate business—that ping pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Do Republicans really think Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks and Beyoncé are running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria? I don’t know if they really believe it. One guy did—Edgar Welch. He went there with his gun to break up the pedophile ring, got to the pizza place, and there was no basement, which is supposedly where the pedophile ring was operating. It’s just people in there eating pizza. He shot up the place, no one was hurt, he went to prison for a couple of years, and he apologized later.
I suspect the average Republican voter didn’t really believe it, but they were operating more along the lines of what I call proxy conspiracism. It’s a stand-in—well, maybe Hillary didn’t do that one, but it’s the kind of thing the Democrats would do, and so that’s why I don’t like them. A lot of conspiracy theories are like that.
My type specimen is the OJ trial. OJ was acquitted based on a conspiracy theory that the LAPD planted the bloody glove and the blood evidence on the car. But if you look at the history of the LAPD’s interaction with African Americans post-World War II, through the 1950s and 60s, it’s pretty bad—they did do things like that. So when a black jury in the 90s hears this conspiracy theory, it’s a stand-in. I don’t know what was going through their minds, but it’s something like: well, I don’t know if OJ did it or not, he probably did, but planting evidence against blacks by the white LAPD is the kind of thing they have done and probably could have done, so I’m going to stick it to them. That’s a kind of proxy conspiracism.
Mounk: The interesting thing about the Pizzagate controversy, I just realized, is that it has a remarkable similarity to one of my favorite news stories of recent weeks—which also involves a kind of conspiracy. The police force in, I believe, Adams County, Ohio, was told that a well-known local resident, an artist by the name of Afroman, had kidnapped women and hidden them in his basement. They raided his home in ridiculous fashion, only to find that there was no basement in which he was holding the supposedly kidnapped women.
This set off a hilarious set of responses by Afroman, including the wonderful Lemon Pound Cake—a song describing, over video surveillance footage of the raid that he captured, the moment in which the sheriff of his county does a double take towards the lemon pound cake sitting on the kitchen table, which he clearly has a desire to eat. It’s a wonderful song; I recommend you look it up on YouTube after listening to this episode. The police then sued him for defamation and emotional damages, and Afroman delivered a wonderful and passionate speech in defense of the American right to free speech—and won on all counts.
Shermer: That’s one more motive—and it cuts across left and right. The left thinks the government is up to no good against their causes, and the right thinks the same. During the Obama years, for example, there were claims that the government was making concentration camps in Texas for gun owners. Whatever your political causes, you think the other side is up to no good and trying to take them away from you. Both sides are equally conspiratorial that way.
Mounk: Let me ask you one last question about conspiracies, and then I want to get into what I suppose is the obverse of conspiracy theories—which is the truth, the subject of the new book. I think I have a very sophisticated audience: highly educated, an audience that really seeks out in-depth conversations about pretty demanding topics. I’m sure that nobody in this audience thinks of themselves as being particularly drawn to conspiracy theories. But the temptation, I think, is always there. So what are the warning signs for smart people—people who are usually responsive to evidence—that something is just so tempting that they may themselves be giving it a pass, that they may be falling foul of conspiracy theory even though, on most days and about most subjects, they are rational thinkers?
Shermer: I have a chapter on this—a conspiracy detection kit. It’s essentially a signal detection problem. You have a two-by-two matrix: the conspiracy is true or false, and I believe it’s true or false. That gives you four options. The problem is that we’re fallible and we’re often wrong about these things, so it depends on the facts and the evidence in each particular case. Some might be true, some might not be true.
As I said, the more realistic conspiracy theories are ones like my type specimen: Volkswagen cheating the emissions standards in Europe. It’s obvious, it’s targeted, they do it for an obvious reason—to make money. Companies often try to cheat the regulatory state in all countries; it’s pretty common, as with big tobacco and big pharma, as I mentioned.
Mounk: That presumably actually involved a lot of people. The number of people involved is one criterion, but another criterion is how organized they are. It’s easier for 50 people within a secret service agency to coordinate—50 employees of the CIA, for instance, find it easier to keep a secret, in part because there may be crimes involved if they tell somebody else. That’s different from 50 people randomly drawn from the population. It’s also somewhat easier to convince 50 employees of a company to go along with a conspiracy than 50 journalists who are all working for competing outlets. But still, in the Volkswagen case, presumably a lot of people were involved in building the machine needed to fool the regulators into understating the emissions figures.
Shermer: A lot of employees of both corporations and government agencies are siloed—they may not know what’s going on. You don’t have to have that many people involved to pull off a conspiracy. Usually, what happens when we find out about them is that some insider whistleblower comes forward. That’s how we know about scientific fraud, for example—it’s always some grad student who works in the lab, not an outsider examining the data sets. It’s usually not the regulatory state that discovers a corporation cheating. It’s usually some insider, a whistleblower, which is why we need whistleblower laws. That’s also why I don’t think the UAP/UFO thing is going to pan out—we have whistleblower laws, there are lots of opportunities for these people to come forward, and no matter how siloed some government agencies may be, there’s surely somebody who will come forward. That’s usually how we find out about these things. It’s always a matter of: what’s the paper trail, is there some evidence?
This brings up what’s called the problem of anomalies—anomaly hunting. If you don’t have positive evidence in favor of your conspiracy theory, you fall back on well, how do you explain X? There are always half a dozen weird things you can point to about JFK or 9/11 or the moon landing or whatever, and so you just point those out as if that’s evidence. But anomalies are not evidence—they’re just anomalies. No theory of anything, no scientific theory or any kind of theory, explains every last thing. There are always going to be some weird things that you can point out. But those aren’t positive evidence in favor of your theory; they’re negative evidence against the accepted theory. You then have to ask: if your theory is right and the accepted mainstream theory is wrong, can you explain all the facts that the mainstream theory explains, in addition to the anomalies that your theory explains? The answer is usually no. Science is fairly conservative because most alternative theories to the accepted one simply don’t have much evidence in their support. So we set them aside.
Mounk: We’ve talked a lot about conspiracy theories—let’s talk about the truth. Truth is strange because it’s such a simple concept, such a fundamental concept to how we talk about the world. Is this true?—these are words we use without deep reflection in everyday conversation all of the time. Yet the moment you think about it from a philosophical point of view, it turns out to be much more complicated. What is truth? What is the right definition of truth? How do we know what is true? These are questions that have deeply shaped philosophical fields from epistemology to ontology and so on.
Once you raise it to that level, a lot of ordinary people who may not be doing a lot of academic philosophy, and who perhaps don’t think of themselves as particularly philosophically inclined, start to say, well, is there really such a thing as the truth? Suddenly popularized forms of postmodernism—“my truth” and “your truth”—become a big part of how people think and talk about this. A lot of people therefore end up being somewhat incoherent: on the one hand, they take for granted relatively straightforward conceptions of truth, and then, in certain contexts, they suddenly say, well, nobody can really know the truth—there’s really only such a thing as my truth and your truth.
How should we think in a more systematic, rational way about what truth is and what kind of role truth claims should play in our political discourse?
Shermer: I define truth as something confirmed to such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent. “Provisional” is key—it’s truth with a small “t,” it could be wrong. I do endorse universal realism: there is a reality out there, there is a truth to be known. But we also embrace fallibilism—we could be wrong about what we think is true, and therefore we need a system in place by which we can all agree on the route we take to get to the truth as best we can.
From there, you can start building on evidence. In epistemology—the study of knowledge—knowledge is defined as justified true belief. What is justified? Evidence. What should I believe is true? Evidence. The more evidence you have, the more likely it is you should believe something; the less evidence, the less likely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and ordinary claims require ordinary evidence. This goes back to David Hume. I take a Bayesian approach—that is to say, never put a one or a zero on any proposition, never 100%, never 0%, somewhere in between. Most propositions are somewhere in between, and that allows you some epistemic humility to say, at the moment, I believe with 60% probability that X is true, but I’ll change my mind—just show me some counter-evidence and I’ll make it 50% or 40%. In other words, it allows you to be flexible instead of being so committed in your identity to a particular thing being true that, if it’s not, it’s going to shatter your sense of self and you feel compelled to defend it.
Most of the cognitive biases—motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, hindsight bias, my-side bias—are based on this un-Bayesian approach to truth, where my truth is something I’m going to defend to the death. There’s another distinction to be made here, between internal subjective truths—“my truth”—versus external objective truths, what’s actually true. When I say I like dark chocolate and you say you like milk chocolate, these are just internal preferences, subjective tastes—there’s no way to determine the right answer. That’s very different from what all of us want, which is objective external truth.
My example is this: if you say meditation makes you feel better, that’s an internal subjective truth—good for you. But people like Deepak Chopra and others claim that meditation actually works under specific conditions: 20 minutes a day, six days a week, producing measurable effects on health, lowering stress hormones and blood pressure. That’s an attempt to move from meditation makes me feel better to it actually works for most people under these conditions—an attempt to make that transition from internal subjective truth to external objective truth.
I’ve been applying this idea to the trans movement recently. When somebody says, I feel like I was born in the wrong body, I feel like I’m a woman—an adult man in their 30s, let’s say—that’s an internal subjective feeling or truth: this is who I feel like I am. The problem that’s happened in the last decade or so is that people have attempted to make that an external objective truth—that you can actually change sex, that it’s a real thing. That’s where scientists like me say, hang on, that’s not the case—here’s what the biologists tell us and here’s what we actually know. You can’t make that transition from internal subjective truth to external objective truth.
The same goes for consciousness and altered states. People take ayahuasca or magic mushrooms and say, I went to this other place, I had this completely different experience. My sense is: good for you, if it makes your life better, that’s fine. But that’s still an internal subjective truth. When they say, but it’s really there, you’ve got to try this—how do I know that this other world exists, that the doors of perception have been opened and there are spirit beings out there? They say, well, if you take the ayahuasca, you’ll see I’m right. But if I take the ayahuasca, I’m still in my head—it’s still an internal subjective truth. This is the problem we all face: we want to know what’s externally, really true, something we can point to that both of us can see, with agreed-upon methods for verifying it—versus these other things that people get confused about. I feel like my truth is...—okay, that’s nice, but how can we tell if it’s really true?
Mounk: There are a lot of really interesting things in there, and I think I broadly agree with you on the philosophical approach. But let me try to steelman the other side of this. You’re saying there’s an objective reality that doesn’t depend on my truth or your truth or on the way that we look at the world. Let me make two arguments that I think are right insofar as they go—and then explain the inference that people draw from them, which is that objective reality doesn’t exist in the way you’re saying. I think the inference goes perhaps a little bit too far, but you’ll have to explain to us why.
The first is this: it seems like I perceive the world in a very clear way. Unless I’m really drunk or on drugs, I look around my room and I see that there’s a lamp to my left and my glass to my right, and there’s an objective reality that I seem pretty able to recognize—a pretty immediate, reliable, and perhaps complete guide to what’s going on in the world. But we know from scientific studies that there are lots of things we don’t perceive about the world. The room seems very quiet to me right now, but there are sounds too high-pitched for humans to hear that a dog would absolutely hear. If my dog is going crazy and acting weird and I insist there’s no sound, I may simply be wrong—there may be a sound that is audible to my dog that is absolutely real, but my sensory apparatus doesn’t allow me access to it. This is an old problem in philosophy, predating Immanuel Kant, but a lot of Kant’s ideas about the world are based on this distinction between the phenomenal realm—the world as I have access to it—and the noumenal realm—the world as it really is. Perhaps there is a reality out there, but are we humans actually able, in any meaningful sense, to get access to it? And if not, what follows from that?
The second objection is this: perhaps there really is such a thing as an atom out there, or a rock, or a tree. But a lot of the time when we talk about truth, we talk about social entities, which are somewhat more complicated. Is this a democratic institution? Is the way in which this politician is acting democratic or not democratic? When the ancient Athenians talked about democracy, they had something very different in mind than we do today. When people in Germany have democratic elections, the way in which they organize those elections is very different from the way we organize them in the United States. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to go around saying their country and their system is democratic—as they do—how can I say that I understand objective reality and that this is just objectively wrong?
How do you take these two points—which I think are true insofar as they go—and resist the inference that a lot of people draw from them: that the world is a lot fuzzier than we realize, that we can never really know what’s going on, and that the moment we get into any interesting social or political question, we’re just in the world of social constructs where my truth is as good as your truth, and we can throw up our hands and collapse into vulgar postmodernism?
Shermer: The problem with vulgar postmodernism—just throwing our hands up—is that if I say so, then you’re telling me the Holocaust denier’s theory that the Holocaust didn’t happen is just as good as mine that it did. Most postmodernists will say, well, let’s not go that far, and find a place to draw the line. As I point out at the beginning of the book, even the claim that we cannot know the truth is itself a truth claim. The moment you open your mouth to make that argument, you’ve lost it—because you’re saying there is a truth, namely that there’s no truth to be known. This is the old liar’s paradox problem.
That’s why I like the Bayesian approach, because everything you said could be true. Maybe atoms don’t actually exist—although I think at this point we’re pretty confident they do. Same thing with the Big Bang Theory, which has been well settled since I was in high school. Now the James Webb telescope is finding galaxies that are fully developed a billion years too early for what the Big Bang Theory says, according to inflation theory, about how long it takes elements to form into stars, then planets, then galaxies. Now people are saying maybe the Big Bang Theory is not correct. And that’s just within my lifetime. Five hundred years from now, who knows—what we think is obviously true today, the theory of evolution or the germ theory of disease, could all be changed. If you go back 500 years, pre-Newton, pre-Copernicus, pre-Galileo, pre-Scientific Revolution, pre-Enlightenment—the medieval worldview was just so wholly different from ours that it’s hard to even imagine what they were thinking. Our descendants centuries from now may look back at us the same way. That’s why it’s good to acknowledge fallibilism: recognize there is a reality, recognize we could be wrong, and hold that this is what we think at the moment.
Now, you’ve also touched on something else. The physical and biological sciences are much easier in this regard. But take something like IQ in the social sciences—people immediately equate it with intelligence. They cite the Flynn effect: IQ scores going up three points every decade for almost a century, though that has now stopped and is actually reversing slightly. But what do we mean by IQ? It’s a score on a test. What is the test? It’s a constructed, human-made thing that reifies intelligence in the brain—and it may not actually capture that. So there are legitimate challenges to those kinds of social constructs. Gender and sex, and some of these other things, would fall into that category as well, and so would democracy.
But here’s how far I push it in the book. Take immigration: what percentage of foreigners should a nation allow to become citizens? There’s no right answer per se. In a way, democracy is a kind of experiment—we put these people in power for four years, they run the agenda they told us they wanted, and we see how it goes. If we don’t like it, we throw them out and bring in the other party. There are 50 different states in the United States, each with different gun control laws. Social scientists use the comparative method and natural experiments—we can’t force people to buy guns or not buy guns, but we can look at which counties have more guns, which have fewer, which have more crime, which have less, controlling for socioeconomic variables and other factors. It’s an attempt, and it’s better than saying nobody knows. So we don’t want to go there.
As far as I can tell, there is a centuries-long moral progress toward more democracy and less autocracy, and for good reason. As I put it in the book:
It is my hypothesis that in the same way Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature in society that really do exist. Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits—given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else—scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry. For example, that democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries, and most poignantly, that blacks do not like being enslaved and that Jews do not want to be exterminated.
From there, I ask: why don’t blacks want to be enslaved? Why don’t Jews want to be exterminated? Maybe there’s some society in which blacks want to be slaves, or women want to be lorded over by men, or Jews want to be shoved into gas chambers. Maybe—but I doubt it, because look at history. Look at what people actually do, look at how people vote and vote with their feet. Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather have lived in East or West Germany before unification? Everybody knows the answer. How do they know? Because it’s in our nature to want to be satiated rather than hungry, to be free rather than enslaved, to be healthy rather than diseased. That’s in our human nature, which we evolved. So I’m claiming that we can actually discover things about the social world that are really true, based on human nature. That’s my argument.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Michael discuss what it means for something to be a social construct, whether conspiracy theories pose a threat to society today—and which conspiracy theory is most likely to be true. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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