The Superskeptic

As our world becomes more technologically complex, we're less able to understand what makes it work, and that worries longtime Columbia astronomy professor David Helfand. "We shrink from confronting challenges because we don't like numbers and are more comfortable with beliefs than with rational thought," Helfand writes in his new book, A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age. In the face of climate change and related challenges, he says, our natural preference for binary thinking serves us especially poorly. "When there isn't one right answer, that's very uncomfortable for people," he says. He hopes his book, which urges scientific habits of mind as a bulwark against nonsense, can help stem the tide.

Why is our comfort with quantitative thinking so low?

It's the way we're taught. A colleague calls it "third-person learning." Someone figures something out, someone else goes to school and learns how to do it, and then that person comes to students and says, "OK, this is how you do this problem. This is the pattern. Now do 10 more like it and that will mean you have mastered it." This can transfer technical competence in doing certain stuff, like for the SAT. But it provides no understanding and no sense of how the result came about. So when you're asked a question that doesn't appear in exactly the same format, you're at a complete loss.

It's increasingly clear that we can't trust many of the statistics politicians throw at us. How do they get away with it?

Dan Kahan's research at Yale shows that people use their cognitive reasoning ability to reinforce their group identity, not to analyze data in a rational, dispassionate way. As he says, in a pluralistic democratic society this is an unmitigated disaster.

Because it leads to undeserved confidence?

Yes. For some reason, the word skepticism has a negative connotation, but to me, it's sort of exciting. We read a number and ask, "Could this be right?" Sometimes it is. You think about it and say, "That's an amazing number; I wouldn't have thought of that." And sometimes it's nonsense. I never read a number without thinking, Does it make sense? A shockingly large number of times, it doesn't.

One word you dislike is "know," especially when it comes to debates about climate change.

I'm not criticizing the "Save the Earth" people, but they are, for example, the biggest opponents of nuclear power. And we are never going to get to those limits agreed to in Paris unless we go on a crash program of building nuclear power plants. Every year, about 2 million people die of pollution from coal-fired power plants, and about 59 people have ever died directly from nuclear power. It's no contest. But we rationalize our group identity: This is what my group believes, and to be a part of this group, I have to believe it. So if you're a "save the planet" type, you're also an antinuclear type. They go together because it's a part of the identity.

Why do we cling to beliefs that just don't hold up to scrutiny?

We elevate our own experience to an extremely high status of credibility, but it just turns out to be wrong most of the time. On the plains of the Serengeti, if you ate the bad berries, you died; you were out of the gene pool. And if you ate the good berries, you shared them with everyone. Your experiences were very constrained and an accumulation of anecdotes could lead you to a general rule; we are good at finding patterns. But in a complex, technological world, there's an infinitude of patterns we can find. So things that happen to us are elevated to a high level, and we make them part of a pattern. But unless you do an experiment with control samples and repeatability, you can't know if the pattern is true. We just feel it to be true because it happened to us.

Why do we still hold on to beliefs that were widespread in ancient times?

Consider a young woman who believes that the moon is not up in the sky in the daytime. There's no need for her to discard that primitive belief, because when she sees the moon, it's at night. This belief doesn't impinge on her everyday life. Everyone doesn't have to understand Newton's law of gravity to be a fulfilled human being. A lot of these things don't matter. It's the things that do matter, the things that have an impact on our exploitation of this planet, and that are going to lead to a human—not a planetary, but a human—disaster, that we need to worry about.

There are those who have faith that scientists will "figure something out" to address climate change, and so we don't need to make major changes in how we live. Is that irrational?

It's a function of the wealth of the society. No one in the Maldive Islands has faith that scientists will figure out how not to drown their islands. It's true that this society will be the last to be badly affected by climate change, because we will build dikes around New York and we will pump as much air conditioning as we need because we have the resources, and so we will increasingly isolate ourselves in a world that's going to hell.

So in a way, that is rational thinking?

These people are rational in saying "We'll figure it out." We'll lose some farmland but other farmland will emerge, and our money can flow where the wheat is. We don't have to care about those farmers in the Midwest who will all starve. But if you care about the species, not just about yourself, it's a very different discussion.