by Bill Nye
With this said, we are living in a weird time for critical thinking. Climate change is a prime example. Several decades ago, scientists started seeing indications that the whole world is getting warmer overall. Since then they have gathered enormous amounts of data to verify and quantify the discovery. The claim today is quite specific: Earth’s temperature is rising, and industrial emissions are the primary cause. It is testable, and nearly all climate scientists will tell you that the evidence for human-driven global warming has in fact been tested and thoroughly verified. Yet a determined collection of climate-change deniers has managed to sow doubt here at the testability stage. They question the researchers’ motivations. They question the quality and quantity of the evidence, implying (incorrectly) that there is not extremely strong agreement within the climate-research community. That is why some scientists and science journalists push back, noting that there is about a 97 percent consensus that humans are driving climate change. Their point is not that a mob must be right. It is more an appeal to Occam’s razor. It would take quite an elaborate conspiracy to get that many people to sign on to bad or crooked results. The far simpler explanation is that the researchers are doing exactly what they appear to be doing, gathering the best-available data and subjecting it to the best-possible analysis.
None of the climate counterclaims seem worthwhile to me, but I take the need for critical thinking seriously. This is a great opportunity for you to apply the standard of “prove it” for yourself. I think it is worthwhile to work through how you even know such a basic fact as the roundness of the Earth. So by all means—when it comes to climate change and global warming, I encourage everyone to evaluate the preponderance of evidence and to examine the publications by climate experts. As a critical thinker, you are like a juror in a very important trial, perhaps the most important one ever. The case here is one that will determine the welfare of billions of people.
Have at it, my fellow nerd!
Testing ideas is, so far, the best system humans have ever come up with for building an honest, progressive understanding of the natural world. It is a very effective way of getting around the inherent biases and gaps in the way our brains work. Philosophers will tell you that you absolutely cannot trust your own senses. This goes all the way back to René Descartes and cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am, or the only thing you can really be sure of is that you are thinking. Everything else is subject to question; seeing is not necessarily believing. That concept may sound huge and vague, but it has very real and specific consequences. It is how magicians make a living. It is why science demands repeated observations, independent verification, and falsifiability: An idea can be valid only if there is some logical way to show that it would be invalid. If the Earth were flat, why can’t I see Australia from California? These different kinds of tests are all designed to weed out subjectivity and dishonesty. We also have instruments that can give objective information about the natural world, although that information still requires human collection and analysis.
I’d like to see a society in which everybody understands how the scientific method works and why it is so important. Most people will never use it as professional scientists, but everybody should have access to that crucial part of the nerd tool kit as part of their daily process of information-filtering. Despite one education reform after another, we’re still not there. Science teachers are quite adept at teaching students how to evaluate the quality and reliability of data and how to recognize errors or fraud. To a large extent, we have the right mechanisms in place. That’s an important start. Putting those mechanisms to work requires getting students into classrooms with competent science teachers and expanding the scope of their curricula. But still, that is generally not enough, because it takes time.
Learning to recognize hoaxes, scams, pseudoscience, and the like takes practice. For most of us, it goes beyond the standard school curriculum. It requires a more advanced everything-all-at-once training. One wonderful teaching example is the Web site dedicated to the rare Pacific Northwest tree octopus. This remarkable creature lives in just one small section of the temperate rainforests of Washington State. The tree octopus pounces on frogs or rodents from tree limbs and then crawls back up to safety. It has a mucus coating that protects its body from drying out. It is a true evolutionary oddity: Its aquatic ancestors were isolated on land when the oceans receded in this area, and one isolated population adapted by developing a unique tree climbing ability. Truly a biological marvel. The site even encourages Web visitors to become a “friend” of the Pacific Northwest tree octopus because the poor creature is endangered—what with all those mean-spirited, forest-denuding loggers, and all. The site issues a call to arms: “Together, we have the power to build a grass-roots campaign to save the Tree Octopus.” It adds an additional emotional element to the story, and it is very effective.
What? You’ve never heard of the Pacific Northwest tree octopus? Good. That’s because it doesn’t exist. It is a hoax created by someone who calls himself Lyle Zapato, a devious prankster who has created a marvelously detailed and convincing Web site dedicated to this imaginary creature.
In one test, educators in Connecticut asked a group of 25 seventh graders to look at the tree octopus Web site. Every single one of them accepted it as real. At the time of the test, the students all went to the same fake Web site, found the same fake information, and compared fake notes with one another. Then they all concluded that the fake “facts” were real. They didn’t pursue multiple reference sources. They did not filter the low-quality information, because they had no training in how to do it. Today if you Google “tree octopus,” this site is (naturally) the first that comes up. Now at least there is a debunking Snopes page that shows up as well, but even so, it is easy to get sucked into the seductive falsehood of the Zapato site. The story makes for a wonderful science-class lesson—thank you for that, Lyle Zapato (if in fact that is your real name!). But for me there’s a much bigger message here.
High-quality science education will help vaccinate students against the gullibility that makes the Pacific Northwest tree octopus look credible. And of course, I hope every kid encounters a few passionate, brilliant science teachers on the way to graduation. Still, we all have to recognize that teachers alone cannot deal with the vast scope of the information-filtering problem. There is a society-wide challenge here, and it is on every one of us nerds to pitch in and help.
This inability to think critically is a problem for all of us—kid, tween, teen, young professional, middle-ager, and senior alike. We need to act as ambassadors. We need to impart critical reasoning to our peers, expect it of our parents, and encourage it in our friends and coworkers. Challenge people when they make or repeat an outrageous claim that cannot be logically shown to be false. Too many disagreements devolve into unproductive shouts of “you’re wrong” and “no, you’re wrong.” I’d like to see us all offering the nerdier and more meaningful responses: Where did you see that? How do you know it’s true? What if it’s not? These are commonsense versions of the testability standard I described earlier, and they are very powerful.
Wait, I can break it down further. We come across so much information that we can’t possibly put it all through a tight filter. Here are some flags to tell you when you should be instantly suspicious of a claim, even before you start looking for supporting data and references.
■Is it part of an ad or “sponsored content”?
■Does it clearly benefit a specific person or company?
■Does it have no obvious source at all?
■Does it contradict things you’ve heard before? That doesn’t make it wrong, just suspicious.
■Is it something you really want to be true? If so, you need to be extra careful.
These are simple tests we can all do every day. They don’t require reforming the school system yet again. What they do require is a broad and spreading nerd culture that values honest information—and that scoffs gently at those who do no
t.
One of the most important skills in information-filtering is cultivating habits that keep the most noxious material from hitting your filter in the first place. Some sources are so untrustworthy that they can’t be saved. Especially for those of you who read a lot of news online, I have a simple piece of advice: “Don’t bother with the comments section.” The places where anyone can spout off about an article or a blog post have become notorious information cesspools, where emotions run high and data quality is low or nonexistent. A journalist friend of mine contacted me recently about my criticism of climate-change deniers. She said, “Did you see the comments? You have to respond right away.” I explained, calmly, that no, I really did not. It is consistent with the modern expression “Haters gonna hate.” As a rule, I do not respond to the anonymous combatants who are passionately hovering over their keyboards 24 hours a day, ready to pounce on an odd point that really, really bothers them; sometimes they pounce even when there’s nothing in the original article that’s related to the vitriol they decide to post in the comment section below.
It’s human nature to fixate on criticism, but that impulse creates a distorted view of the information landscape. Angry comments create (often intentional) digital noise that drowns out the scientific papers, steady reporting, and serious commentary that inspired the reactions in the first place. The overblown impact of angry Tweets or online comments is a modern amplification of what is often called “selection bias” or the “selection effect.” Your brain focuses on the few dangerous-sounding comments, written letters, or remarks rather than on the far more common, neutral responses. That problem has probably been bugging us ever since caveman Og was grunting about caveman Thag back in cave-people days. News articles have always gotten angry responses, whether justified or not. In the print era, the reporters and editors were often the only ones who saw the truly crazy or inflammatory letters. With the rise of the comment section and the magnifying power of social media, a few thousand motivated people—along with a few well-targeted bots—can hijack the public perception of a hot-button political or scientific issue. It’s alarmingly effective, and we need to learn how to turn down the volume on the dramatic but probably insignificant squeaky wheels.
Angry comments and hoax Web sites work together to create a dangerous amount of confusion regarding what’s true and how strong each argument is. Some are easy to spot, but others are disguised as academic-style blogs or information resources from reputable institutions. In these sources, there is a different kind of filtering going on—filtering to advance a personal agenda, not to find high-quality information. Climate deniers cherry-pick odd facts and create graphs based on confused or conflated data sources. I cannot help but think of Senator Ted Cruz, a remarkable cherry-picker of temperature data. Writers for the online-only Patriot Post sometimes brazenly mix data from one graph with another, essentially making up their own climate data to prove their (fictional) point. I lump these in with the intellectually bankrupt information sources you can safely ignore.
In essence, comments sections are breaking free and getting a life of their own. Instead of venting on Facebook—or, just as likely, in addition to—some people generate plausible-looking stories full of misinformation or disinformation. And I’m sad to say, they’re not all as much fun as a tree octopus. YouTube abounds with videos showing evidence of NASA’s UFO cover-ups or proving conclusively that the Earth is flat. Climate change has inspired all kinds of sites that advance the denial agenda. We can read them all from our armchairs or phones in a coffee shop.
So let’s cultivate critical thinking, not just in our science classrooms, but every day as parents, friends, and citizens. Develop an instinctive mental checklist that saves you from the feeling of overload. Let’s find joy in filtering information. Enjoy trivia. Listen and read with a sense of irony and humor. Along with a nerd-sharp focus, you can help us shave off the noise with Occam’s razor. We can all learn to evaluate claims and cut to the truth. If a wry, nerdy attitude also adds a laugh to your day, so much the better.
All this filtering and irony-awareness takes time, and it’s creating a need for a big change in the way we interact in the world. So many things happen more quickly today than they used to. And not just finding the atomic number of rubidium; almost every information-related task is far easier than it used to be, and most of our mechanical tasks are more automated than they used to be, as well. Our leisure time is growing as a result—and yet our actual leisure doesn’t feel like it’s growing at all. What’s filling the extra time? Information processing.
Most of us get pretty caught up in processing the parade of emails, text messages, Facebook comments, Instagram posts, Tweets, and so on that come our way every day. A few years ago, I’d often get a phone call at 9:45 a.m. from my beloved predecessor at The Planetary Society, Lou Friedman, asking if I got the email he’d sent earlier in the morning. Nowadays, from other protagonists from other stories in my life, I’ll get a text about their email, followed by a phone call to my assistant regarding the text . . . about the email.
I hope you smiled or laughed just now because you know what I’m talking about. “I’ll resend my email so it’s at the top of your in-box.” Argh! Data can fly around nearly instantaneously, but people cannot make instant decisions. Our brains have to process more information than ever before. I sure hope our modern elected officials and their staffs are getting better at managing the overflow. I worry that they are still stuck in the mindset of assigning equal importance to every message—or, worse, paying too much attention to the wrong information. Without an effective filter in a leader’s brain, any kind of management is almost impossible.
But once you put in the necessary work—the right nerd-filtering and irony—there is great opportunity for all of us, from the average citizens to the top leaders. We are so saturated by the Internet that it is easy to forget just how remarkable it is. Everybody in the world has, or could have, access to everything—essentially all of human wisdom—as long as he or she has a good Internet connection. With a phone and Wi-Fi, you can browse through the Library of Congress; read the original writings of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein; and explore open-access versions of new papers from some of the most influential science journals. Thirty years ago, nobody in the world would have had the time or money to look at all the things you could look at in the next 30 seconds.
The Internet also goes both ways: You can contribute to it as well as take from it. Until now I’ve been focusing mostly on the negatives, the junk and anger that people contribute. Fortunately, there are also great riches.
Along with information overload, the Internet enables information pooling. People can combine their expertise, and it turns out that when you pose a question to a large group something quite surprising happens. The result is you almost always get a better answer, not just faster than what you could get before but also more accurate and more comprehensive. In essence, you are getting the best of all of the bits of common sense and fragmentary knowledge. I saw a demonstration at a TED event in Long Beach, California, that really made an impression on me. The presenter brought a steer, a great big once-male farm animal, onstage and asked everybody in the audience to estimate the animal’s weight. There were about 2,000 people in the auditorium, and they got within 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of the correct answer.
This kind of collective knowledge, often called the “wisdom of crowds,” got a lot of hype a few years back, but it actually has proven its value. The demonstration with the steer worked because the measurements that were being averaged were being made by people who each had a lifetime of experience in estimating an animal’s weight. By this I mean, we all know about how much we and other people weigh, along with how big and tall they are. Steers and people are made of the same materials (yes, we’re made of meat), so our estimates had a pretty good shot at coming out about right. When we averaged the estimates of 2,000 experienced pairs of eyes and brains, the answer came out really right.
; Put enough people together and their collective information filters become kind of amazing. Wikipedia operates along these lines, with an open system of information flow and a top level of directed filtering. So do a large and growing number of citizen science projects that allow any interested person anywhere in the world to participate in data-intensive research projects. For instance, you can sort through radio signals to see if there is anything unusual that could be a message from an alien civilization (SETI@home); or you can examine images of galaxies and sort them by type (Galaxy Zoo). Just like that TED demonstration, these projects combine commonsense wisdom from many people to produce meaningful answers. Only in this case, the resulting insights are genuinely new. The Galaxy Zoo project led to the discovery of a previously unknown class of cosmic objects, called Voorwerpjes (now there’s a great word) associated with active galaxies.
In less formal ways, we are all participating in a wisdom-of-crowds experiment. With more access to knowledge comes more connections, more creativity, and more organization that helps filter and sort information. If you cultivate the impulse to keep learning new things, all of these skills reinforce each other and make our connected world that much more valuable. I hope this will make you feel a little better about all the information-processing you are doing every day. The Internet frees you from a lot of other drudgery so that you are free to expand your nerdy perspective. What it can’t do is teach you to make the connections that lead to creative inspiration and world-changing discoveries.