An evening with Stephen Fry and Venki Ramakrishnan | The Royal Society

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evening

, I am Venki Ramakrishnan, the current President of the Royal Society and it is with great pleasure that I welcome you to what I hope will be the first of the conversations between scientists and people from the arts and humanities to discuss broader issues in science. and

society

tonight. Our guest is Stephen Fry, we all know him as a great actor, he has appeared in many television shows, on the big screen, myself, who grew up with PG Woodhouse and Oscar Wilde and enjoyed his performance in Jeeves and Worcester and in the movie wild is also a widely read author who has written on a wide range of topics ranging from humor to autobiography and, more recently, greek mythology, and some of you may know him as a scholar if you have seen him on qi, but it's here. today, for none of those reasons, it is because he is a scientist with a deep interest in science and rationality and has engaged in conversations and debates with many prominent thinkers, including Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins, and that is one of the reasons why the ones we really wanted to appear on this show, he has also consistently argued against superstition and pseudoscience.

Now this brings me to the state of the science. Today's science is among the most trusted professions and today science is in the news more than ever, but there is also widespread misinformation driven by the With the growth of the Internet and social media, many question both the motives and conclusions of science and promulgate all kinds of nonsense, from the barely plausible to the downright bizarre, so it's nice to talk about the nature of science, how to combat misinformation, and how to build. and maintain the trust that science has in

society

, so welcome Stephen, thank you very much frankie, it is a real honor to be here, it really is that real society represents something very enormous in our culture and, although I know that it never I will be. a guy, I don't have what it takes, I don't have the skills, but it's something to be under your aegis for just an hour, thanks soon, so let's start with the nature of science, I think a lot of people when they think about following the science or the scientific method has a slight misconception scientists know that there is no such thing as this scientific method there is no magic recipe but there is a variety there is a variety of methods with different types of evidence, some of which may be more strong and some not so strong and I was wondering how you as someone interested in science perceive science, it is very difficult to find an all-encompassing definition, you are absolutely right in terms of method, I guess you can talk about science experimental and and so notice the difference between rationalism and empiricism, as philosophers used to describe these two ways of approaching the truth, one by what you might call pure reason, um, which is the equivalent of um, if you They like non-experimental physics or pure mathematics things. that have no application in the real world, but are abstract and yet can be used to discover extraordinary truths.

And I personally have always loved empiricism. I loved it. It's a very strong part of the British era of reason and enlightenment. was that it was always alleviated the reason was always alleviated by the experiment I like to think that uh you know you have this is extreme and you will forgive me if you are French but as a kind of image you have a figure of Pascal that has a piece of paper and numbers and he has a theory of light that is purely rational and we have Newton who takes a piece of cardboard and makes a hole in it and looks to see and that is a very, very crude way of describing a difference in thought, but I always find it has seemed desperately important and the way the two come together because they can seem very opposite and is often used in the psychological sense to describe two completely different types of characters: a rationalist and a racist imp and rationalism can often be superstitious, It can often be something that works purely on its own outside the world and empiricism tends to denounce it in that sense, comedy is empirical and tragedy is rational, if that is not absurd.

From my point of view, you know the comic spirit is always trying things on the anvil of experience and characters like Um Hamlet, you know, just talk about ideas and things without really having common sense, but I would say they both come . together in my definition of science, which is humility in the face of facts, yes, I think I think that, since we are, this is a real society event, uh, it's interesting to note that one of the strengths of real society was that It came down to this. idea that it doesn't matter how beautiful a theory is or how important the person who proposed a theory is, but you know, their motto is nullius and verba, that it doesn't depend on anyone's word, what matters is the evidence and I think that that restored a very healthy balance. between rationality and empiricism and allowed modern science to flourish so that you didn't have this imbalance, as you know, that's another way of looking at it, yeah, and the part of me that can't help but be interested in drama and novel and personality maybe even for above ideas or at least who can only grasp ideas when they are mediated by personality look at a story like um ignas semelweis who was filming in hungary and i was able to go find an ignacio vice museum in buda on the buda side of budapest and um, He had long been a hero to me because he was a truly tragic victim of empiricism in the face of cruel rationalism.

I'm sure you know the story, it's very important in the history of medicine, but most of us know the story of Jon Snow, who, who you know, shut down the bomb in Soho and proved the miasma theory wrong and that was a big step forward again in empirical behavior, but Semelweis was a young man. Figure who faced this terrible problem of women in particular dying of sepsis. Actually, a frightening number of them died in childbirth and were delivered by medical students, but they were large bodies and the babies were born by medical students who had come. straight from the dissecting room without washing your hands, but this is before germ theory, to us it seems like an automatically grotesque idea, but no one had thought that there could somehow be a connection and, in fact, some ice He didn't particularly do it.

He tried all kinds of closed experiments not exactly, you know, double blind, you know, double blind randomized trials, but, as close as he could, he controlled things and one of them was getting a certain number of a cohort of these students to washed their hands and Um and immediately the deaths followed and I won't be surprised to hear it, but the horrible thing was that he suggested that there was something on their hands that was causing these deaths and because microscopy, Pasteur and germ theory had not yet made. came into the world this was considered crazy and laughed at with laughter scorned fired he ended his life in an asylum I mean it was a truly horrific story um and he couldn't have been more right and we find it extraordinary that because there was no evidence that these little girls invisible things existed, except for the fantastic evidence of the drop in the mortality rate, their reason defeated epidemiology in a terrible way and, you know, I think of that as a no as an example of arrogance. from existing science because they did not accept it, but simply from the divided nature of the human way of seeing things in a way that we will not accept something that does not make sense to us, even if there is strong evidence.

It seems that yes, something very similar happened at the end of the 19th century when, uh, Boltzmann, you know the famous physicist, great defender of the atomic theory, but he was surrounded by people who thought that the atomic theory was just a fiction, just a question. That it was something that the chemical was only used for convenience had no basis in reality, people like Ernst Mark and he was actually persecuted for quite some time before the community realized he was right and rallied around him. He committed suicide, but for other reasons he was mentally ill. Yes, but he faced a lot of problems, uh, but it goes to show you that rationality and empiricism have to go hand in hand because empiricism without an underlying conceptual framework won't get you very far. for example, you may know that mortality rates decrease, but unless you know the underlying basis, yes, you can't exactly move forward, you stumble upon the distinction between a correlation and a causation exactly and therefore both are important, but what is it?

The interesting thing about your example is that they are not always in sync, sometimes one jumps ahead and the other has to catch up. They are very romantic stories when they are synchronized, like Eddington going to Africa. Exactly, I was about to say about the bending of light, yeah, you know, and of course you could argue that we're still testing some of the predictions of relativity, for example, gravitational waves, a hundred years later, for example. so sometimes they are out of sync and sometimes as you pointed out. In that beautiful example of the Edington expedition, they can be very synchronized, yes, so I want to move on to another topic about science, which is uncertainty, so scientists always live with uncertainty and doubt, as you know, It is an intrinsic part of science.

I remember a well-known senator who once ran for president, named Edmund Muskey, who said that he only wanted one-armed scientists on his committees because they kept saying, on the other hand, and they could never give them a direct answer and Naomi Orésquez, author of The merchants of doubt, has pointed out how this very natural doubt that exists in science has been exploited by people like the tobacco lobby or the fossil fuel lobby to argue against conclusions that are widely accepted by the scientific community and that are absolutely correct and in a recent debate, uh, Stephen, you've argued against being too sure and in favor of passionate, positive doubt, those are your words and you also said that just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean that don't know anything yeah, that's right because it's one of the maddening things when you're arguing with someone who's doubting science and doubting a pile of evidence, when it comes to almost anything, they'll say, well, science doesn't.

He knows everything, as if that means he allows them to do it. open against science in all degrees so well no, he doesn't know everything but he knows much more than anything else he knows um after all science that the origin of the word science is knowledge ski ray the Latin to know what it is it's about establish what you can know and, like any good philosopher, any good scientist realizes that there are limits to what you can know, but they are not limits big enough to allow all kinds of nonsense to be said and, um, it's one of the big concerns that I was citing I think in that debate uh bertrand russell who said that is one of the sad things in the world that those people that you know who know a lot and think a lot are full of doubts and those people who are stupid are sure and it is a type that has been somewhat refined into the now well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, that the very nature of mental and cognitive incompetence is that it cannot encompass its own incompetence;

I don't know how stupid the problem is with stupid people is that they don't know they are stupid and smart people know the limitations of their intelligence so they allow braggarts and bigots like the American president to behave like they know. . all when they know less, less than you know, the smallest, meanest, uh, educated person, knows it, but uh, they are in no way inhibited by the understanding of their lack of understanding, if you know what I mean, which is deeply worrying and, on top of that, there is a cynical layer of quite capable people who, as in the case of this, um, I forgot her name, you quoted her, who, who, I heard, brings me on the radio talking about the similarity, the congruence of the tobacco playbook and the fossil fuel playbook exactly the same way to muddy the waters of hiring someone in white coats, in fact, I think the tobacco industry called it operation white coats white, what was the name of your first move in '50 when it became clear that smoking was, you know, the evidence was piling up and up and up and up, they called it operation white coat, just look for someone in a white coat at whoever you can pay him and tell him that you are not sure that it is not like that. pretty clear but the evidence is not all in the jury is still out and you can say this over and over again about anything and right now of course it is being said about climate change and the anthropogenic nature of climate change in particular , um, because people look at the medieval warm period and say, see, there are cycles and once you have to stop and go into details, once you have to go, as the popular phrase is granular, people are bored, They don't want to know more, they just like to listen to the Great rhetorical statements and in the 1919s and 60s, when C.P Snow and Fr.

Levis made the two famous two culturesThey debated the humanities against science, as if they were enemies and that there were two ways of seeing the world and one was correct. and truthful and valuable and the other was not and leaving is the scientific method was a cold calculation that controlled human beings it had no human form it was abstract and led to dark forces and dark results while the literary and artistic way of trying to examine it the human impulse, the human feeling and looking at that through the lens of an artist was something that just brought joy, you know, both sides exaggerated naturally.

I think we've moved beyond that two-culture approach, but, still, it still exists in the world the feeling that you can simultaneously appropriate science and discard it, so you use the word uncertainty and, of course, that is a kind of double meaning. publish, you know, publish new physics, uh, language because you think of Heisenberg and therefore you can say look, even even quantum physics says that the world is uncertain, which is a complete misinterpretation of what it is supposed to be. which means, yes, in fact, uncertainty is probably not the best translation, but still that's the word that is stagnant and that's why people say you know and look at chaos physics, there are non-linear equations, everything is turbulent and unknowable, so science is really proving that science is useless and yet the most you know is ridiculous.

Fraud in the sale of crystals, etc., will use words like frequency and energy, which are words that have a very specific meaning in physics, of course, and we will use them for crystals when and if you would like to go and say when. You talk about this frequency, this crystal is emitting, they say yes, I mean, do you remember your quartz watch told the time it was emitting a frequency? Yeah, does this mean that if I take a piece of rock and rub it, you know, and then they? That's right, yes, they are scientific jargon in a context where they have absolutely no meaning.

This is something that scientists really think they despise, but the real problem in returning to uncertainty and doubt is how to convey that doubt to the public and uncertainty is always part of science, but that doesn't mean we don't know anything, yeah , you know, it's a theory, it doesn't mean that something is unstable, you know, the theory of people you know, for example, creationists will say, well, it's just a theory, well, no, that's obvious, yeah, that's the other thing that theory is hypothetical, whereas we think of theory exactly as a conceptual framework, so I think it's like that, there are a number of issues that I'm not sure about.

I'm not sure how to move forward on this problem of doubt and I think it's important that we face it now, for example, with climate change, but as I'll talk about later, we also face Covid, you know, various aspects. of the pandemic and so on, and one thing is that eventually the truth prevails, no one now questions whether smoking causes cancer and, despite years of a kind of rejection, the question is, do you know how we speed up that process? In other words, how can we speed up that process? Do we know that this is an attack on people who are obstructionist or who are somehow somewhat dishonest about their statements?

Well, part of it is that if someone has an ax to grind or a political agenda to present, it's almost always a booze stunt to get their point across and humiliate and discredit their opponents, for example in politics, if someone doesn't change their mind, they are stubborn. uh, but if you like them, they show immense stability and, um, you know, then you could, if you didn't like Margaret Thatcher in the old days, you'd say she would stop it and she just wouldn't change her mind, she was, she was . like a donkey just stuck there wouldn't change and others would say, say what you want about maggie, she stands her ground, you know, that's just an obvious example of how language is used and, similarly, scientists if the people want to discredit a science, then Scientists are arrogant because they state something as a fact and they are just arrogant technocrats in white or if a scientist makes the rhetorical mistake of being humble, then they can simply be trampled, so it really is about of recognizing who the enemy of the truth is at any given time, and obviously we have serious enemies of the truth when it comes to medical science right now, which is something we're all thinking about in terms of the anti-truth movement. vaccines if you can call it a movement um and the idea that you know that vaccination is a hoax, that covid is a hoax um and that the epidemiological and virological ways of trying to explain it are hoaxes, but there are sciences that are halfway there. not pseudosciences, but they are sciences that take a long time to be accepted as sciences, in the same way that sometimes subjects take a long time to be accepted in universities, as it took economics a long time before someone called it a science or study or a discipline, um, and one of the sciences that no one talks about much at the moment, but that I know from friends at court, so to speak, has a seat on the committees of Sage and others and therefore , he has the ear of the government, it's not virology, it's not epidemiology or medical science in general, biology or chemistry or something, he's a scientist, it's a science that we don't really think about much at the moment, it was discredited over the years 60's or late 70's maybe and that's a behavioral science of one kind or Another now what do we mean by behavioral science?

Is it a mix of psychology and is it that kind of BF Skinner conditioning science that you know involved mice? You know, but a long time ago Sherlock Holmes in his second novel, a sign. out of four says quite brilliantly it says you know what and it is one of the most extraordinary mysteries that scientists can predict with an extraordinary order of precision how a mass of people will behave how the average human being will behave under certain circumstances but no one can predict what a individual is going to do and that is one of the issues that behaviorology has to try to analyze, yes, it is a mystery, it is a very interesting point, I mean, when you are in the theater, for example, and you are in a movie reasonably successful. shows that you know that on Monday you will sell between forty and fifty percent of the tickets, on Tuesday it will be sixty percent, on Wednesday it will be eighty percent and then on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, it will be sold out well, why those people, some of whom? go on a Monday, why aren't the 40 sold on a Monday? why don't four weeks sell out all on a Monday and sell out hugely and yet the averages work with individual humans who are all captains of their soul with their own brain and decisions act in predictable ways and yet the Individuals don't do it anyway the point is that companies do, well, Facebook and other companies know very well exactly how we will behave on average and advertising agencies there is a lot of money. is at play in this kind of science, and as we know now, in the last 20 years there's been the addition of behaviorology and psychology, game theory, and all sorts of ways of modeling nudging and behavior, etc., that have been added. used in financial markets. as well as in things like Facebook, as you say, to predict human behavior and push it not only to predict it but to some extent to control it and this filters into politics, as we also know now thanks to um cambridge analytica. and Russian behavior and other interference in the way people vote and think about issues like who will be president of the United States or whether or not we should stay in Europe and here there has been a mix of prediction, nudging and human control. has been used for huge gains, whether political or massive financial gains, yes, and that brings me to the next topic I wanted to bring up, which is misinformation in today's world, you know, when the tobacco company made their efforts to lobbying, there was no Internet. but today you know that we have the Internet, we have the growth of social networks and it is a double-edged sword.

That is, children growing up in India or Africa may have access to the world's knowledge at their fingertips, but it has also fueled the growth of misinformation. i mentioned q anon q anon has acquired an incredible following, even among you know the republicans, it will be a congress exactly yes, and you know a lot of these people and they have all kinds of conspiracy theories, uh, take something like covet 19, it's a Remarkable testament to the power of science, you know, just weeks after the outbreak, people discovered the cause of the virus, you know, and then not only did they discover the virus, but they were able to sequence it, they were able to get a test. capable of identifying modes of transmission and how to suppress them, they are on the way to trying to obtain vaccines and medications, if you compare it with HIV 40 years ago, the progress we have made in less than a year took almost a decade.

Yes, so you know that science has made great progress in this pandemic, but there are people who I would say, as a gay man who lost many friends, that actually the HIV epidemic was instrumental in improving the virology and epidemiology of incredible way. ways to absolutely do it and we're reaping the benefits, yes we're reaping the benefits of that, but yet you hear all these crazy theories about Covet 19, you know, like the whole virus is a hoax, it was artificially developed. by China or alternatively by Bill Gates or it was developed by the pharmaceutical industry because they want you to get sick so they can sell you things and by the way 5G makes you susceptible to this virus so we need to destroy the 5G infrastructure.

All this hits you. To the average scientist, this seems crazy to us and now there is a significant minority of people, the anti-vaxxers you mentioned, who say you know if a vaccine comes out, we don't trust it, we're not going to take it. so I'm not wondering what you think you know in the first place, what your reaction is to this and what you think we could do about it. Well, my reaction, as I suppose most people's should be, is what I hope it is. It's obviously horror and a sinking heart every time I pick up my iPad in the morning, which I stupidly keep next to my bed and really shouldn't, and look at the muse, uh, when I'm up and ready for a shower.

There's already hot lead seeping into my stomach because I think about the horror of the world, but I would suggest this fenki that um science, yes it sounds familiar to you um um the idea of ​​uh

stephen

j gould uh nomi his uh no- overlapping magisteriums, as he said, He was the son of a rabbi and it hit him hard to try to be one when science was aggressive towards religion and he claims that religion did and suggested that there should be non-overlapping magisteria. that it is simply a big world for areas of research for areas of thought; in other words, science should stick to what science was good at and humane at, you know, whether you call it humanities or liberal arts or whatever culture you come from, those kinds of things could and religion can take care of things that science shouldn't take care of, but I think a lot of scientists thought I was a little crazy about it and that it wasn't right and I agree that it wasn't right in part because science has decided that it's not its job. observe things in the human world, that is, apart from the human body, but they look at things that are from nature, essentially the Greek word is, so every scientist is really a physicist that they are looking at. physics, they are looking at the laws of nature, whether in terms of biology, botany and geology, even the planet and the cosmos, and the laws of motion and everything else that seems to cause everything to work.

It works the way it does, but human interaction and human behavior, generally speaking, is the subject of non-scientists; Well, the problem is that a large number of very intelligent non-scientists fill that space and are therefore able to pull the trigger. human beings who have discovered the kind of triggers that Daniel Kahneman, who won his Nobel Prize, for identifying in his excellent book, you know, the biases of cognitive balance, Sadie inspires all the biases that we humans fall prey to. . and of which we are for the most part unconscious and of which there are two types of mind, that he, he, you know, thinking fast and thinking slow was the book that hit the popular presses and made him a charlatan hero in dinners, but there is a He did a lot of extraordinary work showing that science can analyze how people believe and why they believe and why they can be pushed to believe things that are not true and why it is difficult for them to accept things that are not true they want to be It's true and all of this is deeply important and subject to rigorous scientific coding, explanation and design, as is the reason leaves turn red in October.

Yes, this is behavioral science growth behavior. That's right, so I think that's it. Partly I think scientists can't hold back and say: Oh my God, look how stupid humans are, they don't believe us, they should say we've done some science, you say we've worked hard on this, we knowwhy humans. they're being like that and they should and that should be open science and in a sense that's happening but maybe there's more to this uh you know I should yeah, I think you know your hero bertrand russell who you mentioned uh he used to talk about the childhood of The reason and the idea is that we all have a thin veneer of rationality, but deep down we are quite emotional beings and we often reach conclusions based on emotion and then try to justify it with reasoning. or rationality after the fact, absolutely making a choice or forming an opinion and then trying to rationalize it later and the very popular science now of course is evolutionary psychology and that would say that we are right to be the way we are because we have evolved up to need to respond very, very quickly to a threat of danger or the possibility of a big lunch and the reason takes too long if emotion can shorten the journey between exactly the problem and the solution, then thenTake it, yes, at least one question so that know that when scientists argue about evidence or data, they often, as you say, seem cold and logical, yes, you know, a bit like Spark or, at worst, Dr.

Strangelove and Naomi Oreskes. uh, you know, the person who wrote The Merchants of Doubt has published a new book called Why Trust Science and he points out that maybe scientists really should, in order to connect with people, expose their humanity, that scientists They are not individually, we try to be objective, but as individuals we are not objective, science is objective because of the whole process of science of keeping each other in check and providing a kind of scrutiny by the community, but as individuals , we are human beings, we have egos, we have different motivations. She's also subject to the pressures of academia and industry and whoever answers, and she felt that if we were more forthcoming about ourselves and our humanity and our motivation, we would seem more authentic, yes?

Interestingly, I was going to get exactly to At this point, it is as absurd for scientists to talk about science and scientists as it would be for historians to talk about history and historians as if they were a special class and historians are simply people who They have delved deeper into the story than most and The story doesn't make any sense. I'm following the story well. Who is the story? What are your sources? What you know and the science of the courses must irritate scientists every time they hear a politician say the science, but you can see why politicians do it and why.

Politicians are also human and scientists are human, they have two nipples and two legs or they can have more, sometimes it is possible to have more than two nipples, of course, but you know what I mean, the point is that we are all subject to the same pressures, thoughts, desires, guilts and complexities, and one of them, one of the things that scientists, like people in the literary, humanitarian and understanding fields of the humanities, need to be more aware of science , so scientists need to be more aware of the humanities and I think all scientists should, for example, read Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, where he lays out very beautifully how the Greeks understood this.

You talk about Mr. Spock in Star Trek and of course he said what the Greeks understood so clearly. themselves as this fairly new civilization that had done remarkable things was that they were torn between two principles that their own mythology gave them the names of Apollonian and Dionysian in other words, Apollo, the god of reason, prophecy and truth, Apollo golden than they I saw that as part of being Greek they had given the world music, rhetoric, logic and mathematics, all kinds of advances in those subjects, but Dionysus was also a god of frenzy, addiction and desire, and letting go of your feelings and appetites, and that they were as Dionysian as they were Apollonian and their tragedies, their works often represented the contradictions themselves between this and whether we think that the truth, whether the human truth or even the truth of the world , can be expressed by a human being.

Who is exempt from these contradictions? These tendencies in their own personality are deceiving themselves because scientists also desire things. You know, I get quite obsessed with the history of the port of France, which you probably know is one of the most extraordinary stories. of a scientist and I think it acts as a story that covers all of science and, um, he was a Nobel Prize winner because you could argue that he was responsible for saving more lives and giving birth to more people than any human being who ever lived. . He was the man who estimated that the world's population would be about half of what it is now without the port process because of his ability to know the way he found it to make nitrogen available to farmers, etc., before he did it. they did.

I have to get guano from South America and bones from bone yards to try to get the nitrogen into the soil and increase the fertility of his crops and so on and then like you say he's responsible for that but um so in the first. As a good German in the world war, he was also responsible for the chlorine gas, for the gas attacks. In fact, he supervised them and went to the front and taught the men how to best use the wind in order and watched the French soldiers shoot each other. in the head just to kill himself pretty horrible to stop the evil of this burning in his throat and his brilliant wife she yes she was a brilliant chemist herself and she went out and shot herself because she was so ashamed and horrified by what her husband had done who after the first world war produced this new and amazing uh I guess they supplemented the nitrogen with a herbicide type poison um that they called cyclone uh which in German of course is zyklon and um it turned out that that, of course It was the poison that the SS used in extermination camps to kill Harbor's family.

That's right, the irony is that he was exactly Jewish and did not want to leave Nazi Germany. He said that I am a loyal German and you should accept it. Yes, you know. So his legacy is still there because the Monsanto company used the same chemical that was in the cyclone for the rodeo and for, you know, I don't know if you've seen what that documentary is on Netflix, it's very good. the soil and on it, you know the history of soil degradation in the United States from the dust bowl on and so there's an example of the fact that you can't possibly know that it's not possible to take science as something pure It's like everyone knows, it's your application and a pure scientist will say oh, but that doesn't apply to me because I'm not a technologist or an engineer or I work in a factory that makes any product.

I'm purely not wet. science, I'm a blackboard or you know, a blackboard or whatever, now you know, but that's not completely clear, right? and it's actually the port, uh, anecdote that you mentioned, it's actually a lesson that scientists need to learn as well. Not having the kind of arrogance of science because science has been very successful and it's a very logical way of looking at nature in the world. We shouldn't forget the kind of human aspect of why we do science and what it means. I think that's very important, yeah, I mean, if I wanted to start over with colleges, would you know one?

I think you know clearly that ethics has become increasingly important as a topic in both business and science. Bioethics is obviously a very rewarding field. It is a very important field as we move towards this tsunami of new technologies that we face and that we have not yet been able to talk about, but that is one of the big problems and perhaps we can learn from history something that scientists have never learned. been very aware. the good thing to do in the broadest sense is prediction, they can predict events, discrete events that are part of their scientific scope and that is the prediction and repeatability of phenomena, it is part of what makes science work, it is part of the proof of science, of course, but if galvano and um and volta and coulomb and and um faraday and thompson and maxwell if they had all predicted what would be the effect of their beautiful theories and their wonderful science and their wonderful mathematical modeling of this strange force, this electricity that also seemed to be magnetism and yes, it was both and if they could see that as a result of that would come technologies that would transform both the world and in some cases such impoverished areas of it as well as enriching others, I wonder what they would have said because how great their minds are and how logical the results came from electronics, you know, as you go up to the Bell and Shockley laboratories and the transistor and these extraordinary developments, um and then, of course, computing and until now to the possibility of quantum computing and I think Faraday had an idea because I forget if it was the Prime Minister or Queen Victoria who asked him what's the point of this and he said something about the fact that well one day you'll be able to tax it of course , ximena.

He may not have realized that the tax could run into the trillions, you know, but very true, but you know part of the problem is that some of the things that people argue about, like the anti-vaxxers, well, the anti-vaccines. mmr's article was published in a major journal okay before it was retracted oh Andrew Wakefield you mean exactly yes and similarly there was an article on GM crops which also turned out to be flawed. There has been information about whether there are high tension cables. cause cancer in each of these cases there has been an initial finding that turned out to be flawed, subsequently many articles have debunked the finding and yet the original flawed paper appears to be still alive because it was made in this established way, you know, published. in a peer-reviewed journal and so on, so I think the public doesn't understand that there is a provisional nature of science, you can have a finding and that finding could turn out to be wrong and the subsequent findings, you know, is the mass of evidence , uh, what spin do people believe in and it's very, very difficult because there are often scientists, there are often a small group of scientists who still insist that the original finding was correct.

There are still scientists who argue that cold fusion is correct even though I know it's been widely discredited, so sometimes I wonder how to approach that problem and how to restore faith in consensus, trust consensus and part of the problem is that people will argue, well, you know Galileo was against consensus and the case exactly. you know, or quantum mechanics and they don't realize that they're very, very rare and that's why we remember them, they're revolutionary, that's not how science works most of the time, there's also a misunderstanding that people think that the next generation of science cancels out the previous one that somehow uh einstein refuted newton um right, you know and that niels bohr and and others refuted uh einstein but, when it comes down to it mathematically, there are differences or amounts almost unimaginable number of decimal places in the in the results of these two forms of physics, the so-called mechanistic Newtonian, still hold.

You can become a millionaire pool player using only Newtonian mechanics or design a car you know or even a rocket. Exactly, you can't, yes, you can. You can come back from Apollo 13 with people, a pencil and paper, uh, using some Newtonian equations, so to speak, and you certainly can't play quantum billions, as far as I know, on the table, but, um, but anyway, yeah, so there is. this idea that scientists are going to change their minds anyway, that in 50 years there will be another theory that disproves the previous one, which of course is not what the theories mean or how the history of science teaches us, but it is It's very difficult to get that out of people's minds and the other thing is, of course, and this is part of what I said about Daniel Kahneman's business, is that just as we can see the bias in other minds, they can see the bias in ours. o o they think they can, so whenever you defend something as an established scientific consensus, people will always instantly want to read a purpose behind you, o o o big farmer, they'll say oh yeah, that's because big pharma wanted to because um, I mean , I.

I've tried to explain to someone, um, when, when, when they told me, of course, yes, big pharma will be rubbing their hands with joy when they find the vaccine, I'll recover, not really, they'll probably make more money if there wasn't vaccine and over the years people kept getting sick, the vaccine would actually very soon stop making them a lot of money so you know it's not even like that but once you start arguing like that it's very difficult and it's not just arrogance . of science, but it almost seems like the arrogance of knowledge of history and the ability to make an argument is threatened because populism is about dismissing elites and experts in all areas, not just science.

In fact, science is pretty safe by comparison. to those annoying, you know, annoying people who have read books and who follow the details and explaintruths about things and point out what was said yesterday that you are now contradicting and, as we know, every month. It happened to populists and his spokespeople are able to increasingly double down on pure denial and simply say I never said that and now we are in a position thanks to deepfakes that work both ways and can make him look like a politician. be snorting cocaine on the nipples of a prostitute who was never around that prostitute and it seems totally convincing, but they can also allow a politician who actually snorted cocaine to offer nipples to a prostitute to say that's just a deep lie, I was never there, you know, it's nothing.

It's no longer stable, that's all a terrible problem, yes, we, the types of evidence we rely on to establish the facts, are becoming increasingly difficult to convince people that they are right, they are just part of the culture wars, if you're that type. of a person you believe that evidence if you are that type of person you believe that then what do you see as a newspaper article? There have been a couple of questions about whether journalists understand the science they are reporting. Other sufficient scientific correspondence. and the level of debate and information has been of a sufficiently high level and what do you think in general is the role of the press?

And all this, of course, there are some really good science journalists and and we. Do you know that we are the whole culture like indebted to ben goldacre and simon charmer and people like that who have really increased the general public's understanding of what you could call good science and bad science fake science and real science and how to read it and uh the you You know the BBC has the program that looks at the numbers and how they really affect and analyzes and so to speak verifies the statistical claims and counter-statements that politicians make, so much greater access to the truth is available, but, again, you have to want it and it's very easy for us to say, well, we're what used to be called the chat classes and now they're called, you know, the mocking metropolitanity or whatever you want to call this, uh and and.

We are unbearable for many people because we tear down these theories or we want to erect others that they don't like or we are dishonest or I don't know, you know, it's very easy to assassinate the character. and you know the process of someone who is your perceived enemy and let's say the answer is to try to involve everyone in some element of being a part of building a beautiful image that is true and a true image. You know, it's a bit like old-fashioned X-ray crystallography. It took a long time for those incredible scientists, most of them women, because the men were too fickle to have the concentration skills to do it.

You know, to find these different angles. in these different presentations of the truth before a complete picture of a protein or whatever could be established and it was surprising, of course, now it can be done with machines in seconds, but the point is if everyone felt like they were holding a piece of the puzzle and that there was a way in which different intelligences and different ways of seeing the world can contribute to uh uh as I say a kind of multifaceted um uh patterned truth, that would be very useful because I guess part of the problem with science and certainly to me my father was a physicist and whenever I asked him a question his usual instinct was to take a piece of paper and draw a vector and there was x and there was y and there was some kind of wave and then at the top of the wave, in At some point he put uh , but and you scientists who are tuned into this zoom should probably know it's true, but I don't think you understand how stupid we are when it comes to numbers, I mean. i i i think I doubt it I think I'm sorry to tell you that no one is going to confuse you with me I can read a book but two pages later I have to go back to remind myself that this happens to us I think it happens to all of us but I want to return to this point about people who believe what they choose and then they automatically try to discredit the other side and so you know if they don't like a scientist's opinion, views or data, they will start attacking scientists than us.

I've seen that even with the pandemic, you know some of the epidemiologists are harassed, yes, for example, it's been very serious, you know people are issuing death threats and things like that, and even in Britain, you know, our scientists They have often been attacked on Twitter, threatened, etc. and harassed, so this is kind of a disturbing situation and the question is how does it get across to the watching public, science is what it is, don't shoot the messenger, is there a way to explain the motivations? and perhaps we could be more transparent about incentives in science.

Could we change the incentives in science so that people trust scientists more and could this imply a change in scientific culture? You know I could and I think that's part of it and uh. I do not mean to say that the important questions of science should be left unexplored and that the budgets of great science should be reduced. Things like the hadron collider or whatever. They are all obviously immensely important areas of science that one would not touch, so to speak, but in terms of the day-to-day interface of scientists with others within universities and within industry and within other institutions and establishments and society In general, things have been tested in the chair of public understanding of science at Oxford, for example. which is a brilliant idea and unfortunately I say this because he is a friend of mine and we have a lot in common.

Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous holder of that chair, but he was a controversial figure and people will always associate him with something and um. and those who found his uh you know his contempt for religion in particular so um found him fragile and uh angry and uh ungenerous maybe uh and uh so uh and I say this with the greatest respect and love for Richard that in some ways in that he put the brakes on what he was supposed to do, which, far from increasing the friendly nature of science with justin, only seemed to increase the fact that he's strange, you know, because in his writings he comes across as much more strident than he is in person personally and he's very polite and, you know, charming, he's almost warm and open to the mystery and the wonders of the world, which you know, I'd be an idiot if he wasn't, so the idea that he's a cold rationalist It is, of course, nonsense, but uh, yes, it is, but one should not trust it all in that sense, I think you know, I tried it when I was a child and I still attended the Royal Christmas lectures Institute and, you know, it was always the kindly blue two-shoes Peter looking at the middle-class kids who were sitting there with their bright faces laughing and enjoying the experiments they were being shown and, somehow, something else has to do with it. happen and I'm trying to let you know.

Can't I give an answer here and now about how science is going to be integrated into public discourse in a way that allows for, you know, a reciprocal understanding of science and across cultures, etc.? Because well, one thing I think scientists can do is be better prepared for what's coming. The image I have is that we are looking at the sea, which takes up Newton's idea of ​​being in a coma on the beach, maybe we are looking at the sea and there are swells on the horizon of 5 six seven eight nine ten different separate technologies and complete ones that are converging in a tsunami and they are nanotechnology and biotechnology gene editing genomics you know, crispr and so on um brain machine interface um quantum computing new materials graphene and all the rest Um and of course artificial intelligence, unsupervised machine learning , robotics, etc., and bioaugmentation, all of these are coming together and they are on the horizon and it won't be long before all of a sudden that huge tsunami is upon us and each of these technologies.

It is capable of being used as perversely in ways that are not good for human politics and civility if I can use those words as the Internet or social media was, but together the possibilities are terrifying and I would have said 10 years ago that they are. Look how wonderful it's going to be, but now I have a lot of doubts because the fact that all the science and technology can cast a shadow has never been clearer and often the brighter and better it is, the clearer the shadow is. that you know, so I mean in the late '90s, late '80s, early '90s, when I joined the Internet almost as a kind of ham radio, it was just a hobbyist hobby and Tim hadn't even invented Tim Berners ;

Lee hadn't even invented the world. web still and I saw this and I imagined how it was going to break boundaries and dissolve differences and it would be a great university for everyone a resource a library a museum a theater a concert hall a public square it would be the most wonderful thing humanity had ever created and it would end our problems and it's something yes, the opposite happened, yes, and that's it, you know, and of course, I feel stupid so I should have guessed right, I don't remember, I read almost all the books about On the Internet you could read in the early '90s, which was only about three a year, and none of them said, "Be careful, the dark side is going to be dangerous, well, and I think it's a lesson that maybe scientists don't They should just stay offline, yes, but when technologies develop, we have to pull society in, we have to involve them, get them to understand the technology and often they will see things that we, in our narrow technical ways, may not see. , and them and also what people do. with technologies and new science it is really a social problem, it is a question that must be decided by society, not just scientists, and perhaps that is the only way we can address this tsunami is by interacting widely with the public and bringing them along.

I think it's probably going to be more and more necessary as these things develop, I mean genome editing machine learning, those are two very classic cases where society is going to have to decide how these things are used, yes, but no. just the people who develop them and of course we are no longer in the kind of situation the world was in in the 1930s where Oppenheimer and Einstein could write to the president and tell him about a technology he never had knowledge and give him the terrible choice of whether or not to withhold the green light for him to go ahead and for the atomic bomb to exist we all know it, we all know that sharp editing exists, we know that machine learning exists and we know that it exists there is no place to authority there is no equivalent figure who can say yes this is a wise thing to do and we should do it and no this is a terrible idea we shouldn't do it because different nations will do things there is no consensus around the world there is no belief in international organizations or the very nature of internationalism and, for example, in a university, one could imagine that one solution to such a thing and one could expand on this is that in the same way that if you wrote a novel that involved some scientific ideas, you would send the manuscript to the physicist. , to the biologist, to the geneticist, to the various disciplines that the book tried to write about and I would say if this makes sense and they would say no, that's not really how it would be done and oh yeah, that's kind of like that. right, and so on, and similarly, if a scientist has an idea, has made a breakthrough, they naturally publish it and peer review is done, etc., but in the old days, Hardy, Hardy and Whitehead or something like that they would go to see Wittgenstein. or g.e moore or russell of course and say: is there any philosophical ethical problem with this?

This is a bad idea and you know you would trust a scientist to say, "This is what it is and I can explain it to you and you." trust a philosopher to tell you that you realize that when people get hold of this they're going to want to do that with it or that it's possible, you know, because most of philosophy these days is what's called consequentialism, right? It is not like this? You know modern fantasy. The word utilitarianism says that almost all morality and ethics are based on its consequences, is it good or bad? And this is how morality is judged, not by something external like God or conscience, but through consequences.

Well, actually, consequence consequentialism should also be included in all scientific knowledge. advances and ideas that the consequences of new ways of thinking new models and apprehensions of the world new discoveries um the consequences must be thought through carefully and I don't mean that you can never prohibit a new thought or never in the history of technology as a new technology does not is being implemented and therefore you can't, you know you can't sit on it, but maybe you can have an element of understanding that it doesn't exist in isolation as a pure scientific model or idea, but that once it is implemented implements. in the world as a well of pure gas, it will mix with the atmosphere of the human atmosphere and becomesomething else and you know well that this has been a fascinating hour at least for me um Stevens so I want to thank you again for agreeing to do this and I hope that those of you who have listened to it have enjoyed it as much as I have so thank you Stephen and true pleasure venky and thank you and thank you all for tuning in and good luck to all and keep fighting the good fight for truth and honor in a scientific way good night good night joel thank you very much indeed goodbye