How Critical Thinking Works

In the 1000th episode of TechStuff, Jonathan explores the concepts of skepticism and critical thinking and why they are important not just in the world of tech but everywhere.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in tech with technology with tech Stuff from half
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech
Stuffs one thousand episode. I am your host, who has
been on every single of the thousand one thousand. Hi.

(00:24):
I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works.
I've done a thousand of these, one one thousand of these?
How crazy is that? And I debated for a while
on what I should cover for the one thousand episode
of text Stuff because I've already covered a lot of

(00:45):
my favorite tech companies and a lot of my favorite
tech topics, whether it's a specific technology or a person,
A lot of my favorites are ones that I've already
focused on in the past. Plus, choosing one company or
technology or person over all the others seems like a
pretty difficult decision. How could I say that one company

(01:08):
or one technology deserved it more than all the others.
And besides, assigning significance to the number one thousand is
sort of an arbitrary concept anyway when you think about it.
So ultimately, I decided to skip all that and cover
something I think is important that relates to everything in
our lives, not just tech, but also tech, and that

(01:29):
would be the concepts of skepticism and critical thinking. These
are incredibly important tools we should familiarize ourselves with and
use properly and frequently. First, let's define the terms, and
I'm going to start with skepticism because I want to
be clear about what I mean when I use the term,
as opposed to other usages, including common usages of skepticism. Now,

(01:54):
philosophically speaking, skepticism refers to the belief that true knowledge
is difficult and likely impossible for humans to achieve, and
I'm pretty much on board with that. I think it's
impossible for us to know everything. Thousands of years ago,
we had to rely almost solely on our own senses

(02:14):
to figure out how the world works. But our senses
are limited. Even the most keenly cited human can't see
as well at a distance as a falcon, for example,
and we aren't able to see light in the ultra
violet or infrared ranges. We're incapable of directly perceiving electro
magnetic radiation outside of the visible spectrum. The same is

(02:38):
true for our other senses. That we have a limit
uh and what we can perceive sounds below twenty hurts
or above twenty kilo hurts are essentially beyond the range
of human hearing. Our sense of smell is nowhere near
sensitive as dogs, so we are limited by the extent
to which our senses can take in information around us.

(02:59):
There's a lot of information out there that we are
incapable of sensing. Now, as time is past, we have
created technologies that augment our senses and increase our ability
to detect things we otherwise would never notice. But even so,
we still don't know how much we don't know. Cosmological
theories state that dark matter has to exist based on

(03:21):
our observations of how galaxies move in our universe, and
that this matter must make up the majority of all
matter in our reality, but we can't detect it directly.
That leads me to believe that we will never possess
true knowledge of the universe, because I think there's always
going to be something more that's outside our ability to

(03:41):
perceive and understand. Now, that should not stop us from trying.
We should just be aware that there's always more to discover,
and if anything, I think that should make us more
determined to learn. Frequently we will use the word skeptic
to refer to someone who doubts or denies the existence
of something. But when I say it's good to be

(04:02):
a skeptic, I do not mean you should doubt or
deny everything. Rather, I use the word to refer to
someone who applies critical thinking to subjects. They ask questions,
they look for evidence to support claims. They do not
accept a statement without supporting proof, and they look to
make sure that any proof that is offered is of

(04:24):
sound quality. This is why I won't call anyone a
climate change skeptic. In that case, I would use the
term denier rather than skeptic, because there is a mountain
of research and there's a scientific consensus that climate change
is a real thing. It is one thing to question

(04:45):
a topic and demand evidence that I think you should
totally do. However, it's another thing to dismiss the conclusion
despite the evidence. If you don't accept evidence despite a
sidentific a consensus, that's pretty much denial. A skeptic who
would be confronted by sound evidence should be able to

(05:07):
accept that information. So, for example, let's move away from
climate change. Some people argue that that shouldn't count. I
think they're wrong, but let's take something totally different. Let's
say let's talk about ghosts. I do not believe in
ghosts at all. If you came up to me and
you told me a story about how you once saw

(05:28):
a ghost, I might humor you, but I wouldn't believe
you actually saw a ghost. I might believe that you
believe it, but I would be pretty sure that what
you experienced wasn't anything supernatural. I would suspect that something
more mundane had happened, and that over time you had
formulated a narrative that was reinforced with retellings, perhaps even

(05:51):
to the extent that the version you tell no longer
even remotely resembles the thing that actually happened. Because we
you as we do that when we remember stuff. It's
not like our brains are acting like a computer. Right
with a computer, you tell a computer retrieve a file,
it's gonna pull up a file, and that file is
going to be exactly the same as it was the

(06:12):
last time you saved the file. It will be identical
to the last time you saved it. It's preserved perfectly,
assuming that there's not something wrong with your computer. But
that's not how our brains work. When we remember something,
our brains actually form neural pathways. They create connections between
neurons in our brains right, and that pathway resembles the

(06:38):
one that happened when we first experienced the situation that
formed the memory in the first place. So we experience something,
our brain creates a connection that is related to that something.
When we remember, our brain tries to recreate that connection.
But our brains aren't perfect at recreating those pathways. Detours happen.

(06:59):
Our memory areas are faulty. To us. It seems like
the things were remembering our perfect recreations, but in reality,
we are recreating a scenario in our heads, and our
brains are not perfect, so we get things wrong and
sometimes we reinforce the wrong parts. We make those detours
more permanent parts of a pathway. So I'm not necessarily

(07:22):
going to think you're trying to hoodwink me. I'm not
thinking you're lying if you tell me you saw a ghost.
But still I'm not going to believe your account that
you saw a ghost. I'm going to think something else
happened that made you think you saw a ghost, but
in reality it was something more natural and mundane. However,
if someone were to provide to me real evidence of

(07:47):
the existence of ghosts, not an anecdote, but real, incontrovertible
evidence of ghosts. I would have to reevaluate my beliefs.
I would need to reconcile my disbelief in ghosts and
then incorporate a new belief into my worldview. That's my
responsibility as a skeptic. If you came up to me

(08:08):
and you said, here's the proof, and you laid it
out and I look at it and it is undeniable,
I would have to say, you know what I was wrong,
You are right, there are ghosts. This probably would not
be easy for me to do, but I would like
to think I would do it because I would be
confronted by evidence. However, the claim that ghosts exist is

(08:30):
an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary proof. So if
you are confronted with evidence and the evidence seems reliable,
then you should take whatever the claim is and think
this may very well have merit. Climate change deniers do

(08:50):
not do this. They deny this mountain of evidence and
a scientific consensus, so they do not take that and
they incorporated. They instead say this does not align with
my worldview, and so I reject it. That is not skepticism,
that is denialism. Now, one of my favorite episodes of

(09:12):
Tech Stuff was all about ghost hunting technology, and that's
because Chris Palette and I went through the equipment that
is frequently used by people in the ghost hunting professions
and we explained why that technology did not actually prove
the existence of ghosts. For one thing, ghost hunters tend
to use equipment that was intended to do other work.

(09:35):
One example would be a meter to detect electromagnetic fluctuations,
which you would use in order to look for faulty
wiring in a house. For example, if wiring didn't have
proper insulation, then whenever a current runs through that wire,
it would generate an electromagnetic field and you would be
able to pick it up and that would tell you, hey,

(09:55):
maybe we need to fix the wiring here. That's what
those meters are full. Or however, ghost hunters would say, uh,
this meter shows fluctuations. That means there's a ghost here,
But that puts the cart about a mile in front
of the horse. Because at no point that the ghost
hunter actually provide evidence that ghosts exist. They're saying, here

(10:18):
is an effect the cause is this other thing that
I have yet to prove exists. That's not how science works.
You have to prove that a ghost exists first. Then
you have to prove that a ghost can affect or
generate electromagnetic fields. Then and only then can you say
I just found a fluctuating electromagnetic field. One possible explanation

(10:43):
is ghosts. You can't just say because this needle moved,
ghosts exist. That's not how science works. You have to
establish the existence first, then established that they can in
fact produce the effect you claim. Then and you can
use uh actual instances of that effect to potentially detect

(11:08):
the presence of such a thing. So that's the way
that would have to work. Ghost hunting does not do that.
It ignores that. It skips It presupposes the existence of
the thing they're looking for without first establishing that actually
is a thing. Now, I want to stress that I
don't mean to say ghosts definitely do not exist. What

(11:33):
I'm saying is I do not believe they exist. But
as I said at the beginning, I think it is
impossible for humans to know everything, so I could be
wrong about this. However, I have seen no evidence that
cannot be attributed to much more mundane causes than ghosts,
and that would be necessary for me to change my mind.

(11:55):
I would need that extraordinary evidence. I do not deny
the existence of ghosts outright, I just don't believe in them,
because skepticism and denial are two different things. Now, some
skeptics do deny certain things that might be climate change.
There are skeptics who don't believe in it that might
be the supernatural. And some skeptics believe in certain things

(12:19):
that are not supported by evidence as a matter of faith.
They might be uh devout in a religion, and other
skeptics would say, oh, you're not a skeptic because you
actually believe in this religious faith and there's no evidence
to support your beliefs. I don't want to say there's
only one way to be a skeptic. I do think, however,

(12:42):
the application of critical thinking and the scientific method is
really important for everyone, whether you consider yourself a skeptic
or otherwise. Now, when we come back, I'm gonna go
into the scientific method, how it works, and why I
think it's so important, And I'm also going to probably
talk about some other stuff like anti intellectualism and why

(13:04):
it's so demoralizing. Maybe I'll even get around to explaining
why I think the term Boffin's is incredibly insulting. So
tune in Brits because I got a bone to pick
with you guys. But first, let's take a quick break
and thank our sponsor. The scientific method is a process

(13:28):
by which we test ideas to ascertain their validity. So,
in other words, it's how we make sure the stuff
we believe in has some basis in actual reality. The
history of the scientific method is complex. I can't really
go into all of it because you could do a
full podcast series just about the evolution of the scientific method.

(13:51):
It is fascinating, but it is also exhaustive. Cultures from
all around the world developed approaches to testing ideas, so
this was in something that arose specifically out of one
place in the world. Lots of different cultures came up
with different ways to take this approach. However, generally speaking,
we trace the scientific method as we understand it today

(14:14):
back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He gets the credit
for laying out the basics of the scientific method. He
proposed combining empirical measurements and observations with inductive reasoning. Now,
a lot of Greek philosophers before Aristotle essentially said, all
you need is to be able to think. And if
you think, and you think good enough, if you're really

(14:36):
good at the thinking, then you can think the things
that you never thought before and figure out how the
world works. All it takes is just pure thought. Aristotle said,
hang on, what if we see stuff and we measure stuff,
and we take those empirical measurements and we incorporate that
into what we think, so that we can actually see

(14:57):
how the world really works, and by is our knowledge
off of that. This was pretty rebellious among Greek philosophers
at the time. Inductive reasoning, by the way, is where
you take specific points of data and you make generalizations
from those specific points. Contrast that with deductive reasoning. That's
where you start with a general idea and then you

(15:20):
work your way towards specifics. Now, typically scientists use both
inductive and deductive reasoning in order to form hypotheses and
then test them to make sure they are true. The
Islamic scholar even al hath them further developed the scientific method.
His basic steps are pretty much the foundation of the
scientific method today. He said, well, first you have to

(15:42):
state and explicit problem. This would essentially be a claim,
usually based off observations and experimentation. Then you test a
hypothesis through various experiments to see if it holds validity.
You interpret the data from those experiments, and then you
conclude whether the hypothesis held up under experimentation or whether

(16:02):
the experimentation didn't support the hypothesis, and then you publish
what you found so that other people can read it.
The scientific method developed further throughout the Renaissance, also developed
in the Enlightenment and the Modern Age of science, and
basically the principles have remained fairly stable, although the particulars
have obviously changed over time. Now you can't use the

(16:24):
scientific method for absolutely everything, but it does provide a
great model to follow as a skeptic. Basically, you take
a testable claim, and it is important that the claim
is testable. It's a claim that can be tested for accuracy.
If a claim is not testable, then it does not
belong to the realm of science. We used to call

(16:46):
this falsifiable. By the way, if a claim is falsifiable,
then it is scientific. That means if the claim is
such that you could design a test where the claim
is proven to be untrue, then you would say it's
falsifiable and thus scientific. If it's a claim where you
cannot come up with a test that would have an

(17:09):
outcome where the claim could be untrue, it is not
part of science. So, for example, if I claim there
is a pixie that follows you around and it's always
just over your right shoulder, however it is completely undetectable
by any means that we know, that claim is not testable.

(17:30):
There's nothing you can do to see if there's a
pixie there, because I just told you it's completely undetectable.
It's there, but you can't detect it. Well, there's no
experiment you can conduct to test that claim. It does
not fall in the realm of science. But if I
said there's a pixie that floats over your right shoulder

(17:50):
that can only be detected by some particularly expensive piece
of scanning equipment, that claim is testable because you could
go out and secure the appropriate scanning equipment and scan
yourself and look for the evidence, and if there's no
evidence of a pixie there, it would show that my
claim was not substantiated. There was no pixie and I

(18:13):
had told you, hey, if you get this expensive scanner,
then you'll find a pixie. If I'm the one selling
you the expensive scanner, it just means I scammed you,
and I probably changed my claim slightly, because that's how
things often go. It's called moving the goal posts. Where
I make a claim, someone tests the claim, the claim
does not hold up to the test, so I change

(18:35):
the claims slightly in order to make it seem like
it's still valid. That's moving the goal posts. That's not
good cricket, y'all. Anyway, Let's say I make a testable claim,
such as, this extremely expensive sound system can playback a
recording at such high fidelity that it leaves all other

(18:55):
sound systems behind. Now, you could perhaps measure the performance
of this sound system with very precise sensitive measurement devices,
and it might even show that, according to those devices,
my system is outperforming other systems. But it may not
actually matter. And that's because again, our senses are limited, right.

(19:19):
Human senses have limitations. So there comes a point where
replication will be meaningless because we humans are physically incapable
of detecting anything at that level of fidelity or resolution.
So with a claim, like that the way we perceive
sound might matter more than the empirical measurements we gather

(19:40):
from the device. And not only that, but the psychology
of listening to a sound system might matter more. If
I believe I'm going to get a better experience from
a particular sound system, my perception might be that I
did get a better experience, even if objectively, if I
had no knowledge of the quality or back thereof of

(20:00):
the sound system, I might not ever have noticed it.
Brains are funny things. So how can you test a
claim that says this sound system is better than all
others so that it makes sense to us that we
can actually see if there's something there. Well, this is
where formulating a proper experiment is incredibly important. So a

(20:22):
blind experiment helps reduce bias in a process. In a
blind experiment, the subject does not know if he or
she is in a test group or a control group. Uh.
And with a sound system issue, you might be in
a control group sometimes in a test group other times,
and you're recording your responses to a questionnaire. Let's say

(20:44):
this design to see if you detect a difference in
sound quality. Uh. So it might mean that if I
were to design an experiment to test the claims someone
makes about a particular sound system. I might make it
like this. Uh. You are invited to participate in a
test to see if a particular sound system is perceptibly

(21:04):
better than other sound systems. So you're led to a room.
You cannot see the system, or the speakers or anything
in this room. The room is is designed in such
way where the entire sound system is hidden from your view.
You're told to listen to a recording. You do, so,
you listen to the recording. Maybe you make some notes.
Then you're led to a second room and you repeat

(21:27):
the procedure. You you can't see the sound system in
this room. You don't know if you're listening to an
identical sound system or a totally different sound system. You
make notes. Maybe you go to several rooms and you're
asked to rate the audio quality experience in each of
the rooms you visit. Some of the rooms might have
duplicate systems calibrated precisely the same way for their respective

(21:48):
spaces to give you the same sort of uh, replicated sound,
but you don't know that. You don't know that going
from room to room, which one it is and there
might be as many variables eliminated as possible. So you're
trying to, you know, keep the rooms the exact same size,
with the exact same uh sound proofing. Everything needs to
be as close to identical as possible to eliminate variables.

(22:12):
And it might be that rooms two and three out
of seven have the supposedly remarkable system in them, but
the other five have regular sound systems in them. Now, you,
as the subject, don't know that. You're just going through
the experiment. The experimenters will repeat this process with as
many test subjects as they possibly can. The more subjects

(22:34):
you have, the better it increases the sample size. It
helps account for outliers. Then the experimenters collate all the data,
they analyze it, and they draw conclusions. And perhaps the
super relative system really is superior, and people are regularly
and reliably picking it out. They're saying rooms two and
three sounded really good, like better than all the others.

(22:57):
If everyone is saying that, or if enough people are
saying that reliable, then you might say he the claims
that were made seem to hold true people are able
to identify it, or you might find that there's no
conclusive support for the claim, not enough people were able
to tell a difference, or maybe some other people said,
you know, rooms two and six sounded better than all

(23:18):
the other rooms, and you're thinking to yourself, huh, only
two and three had the sound system that was really
good in them. The other rooms had regular sound systems
in them. So if you say two and six, that's
not conclusive. Or if you say five and six, now
that's a real problem because you've picked out two of
the sound systems that we're not supposed to be as good.
So that's one way of testing it. Now, I would

(23:41):
actually suggest you go a step further in your experiment
design and you create what is called a double blind experiment.
In a double blind experiment, the person in charge of
conducting the test is unaware of which subjects are in
a control group or a test group as well. So,
in other words, the person who leads you the subject

(24:03):
from room the room also does not know which rooms
have the really good system in them and which rooms
have normal systems in them. They have no idea. This way,
the person who's leading you from room to room can't
unconsciously introduce bias into the experiment by perhaps giving away
that rooms two and three have the really good system

(24:25):
in them because they don't know. Double Blind experiments, in
my opinion, tend to be the way to go for
testable claims, especially claims that are on the extraordinary side.
You want to design a test in such a way
that you don't influence the subjects to give you the
result you want to get. Whether you want a test

(24:47):
to come out positive or negative, you want to avoid
introducing bias into the actual experiment. Uh, these tests where
you're testing something that's subjective, like the quality of sound,
those are particularly tricky because it's not like it's just
a measurement you can read off a meter. It's the
experience someone is having, and subjective experiences are very difficult

(25:11):
to quantify in a meaningful way. But this is the
way I would go about designing such an experiment. Now,
not everything can be tested. Some things go beyond observations
or empirical measurements. Now that does not necessarily mean those
claims are untrue. They might be true. It just means
we cannot apply the scientific method to test those claims.

(25:34):
String theory falls into that category. Mathematically, stringth theory holds
up if you allow for certain claims such as additional dimensions,
but we have no means of observing or measuring those claims.
There's no way for us to test it scientifically. Mathematically,
it all makes sense, but we can't actually practically test

(25:56):
it or observe it. That's led some people to argue
that strength or is not really a scientific theory but
more of a philosophy. Now that does not mean that
it's untrue. It just means we do not as yet
have a means of testing it to apply the scientific method.
So that's something to keep in mind as well. That
step that uh that we heard about publishing your findings,

(26:19):
that's also very important. A good scientist will submit his
or her work to a peer reviewed journal for publication.
Peer review means that other scientists will take the work,
they'll examine it. They'll look at the design of the experiment,
the claim, how the experiment was designed, how it was
carried through, the methodology that was used to collect data,

(26:40):
the process of the researchers used to analyze the information
that was collected, and then the conclusions that were drawn
by the researchers based on that analysis. Ideally, that weeds
out bad experiments. Now, in reality, sometimes stuff slips through,
at least temporarily, but the purpose of peer review is
really important. It gives a scientists the opportunity to poke

(27:02):
and prode at an experiment to make sure it holds
up to scrutiny. And if it can't hold up to scrutiny,
that doesn't necessarily mean the conclusions are false. It just
means there's a lack of support to validate the conclusions,
and a better experiment should be designed. The publication process
also allows for another important step in science. It gives
other scientists the opportunity to attempt to replicate the experiment.

(27:27):
If an experiment has a proper design and the researchers
did everything correctly, their work should be replicable by anyone
else who follows that exact same methodology. If another scientist
follows your procedure exactly but arrives at a completely different result,
something has gone wrong. Moreover, scientists should be able to

(27:47):
come at the experiment from different angles, and with a
properly designed experiment, their work should arrive at a similar
conclusion to the previously established experiments. There will always be
variability and result, but as long as that variability isn't
statistically significant, or as long as it's not outside the
range of error, it should still be seen as supporting

(28:09):
the conclusions of the first experiment. So you want to
be able to replicate an experiment. You want to be
able to design new experiments to test the same claim
in a slightly different way to make sure that the
claim still holds true. And if all of that ends
up being the case, then you know you're onto something
because you're starting to get consistent results and different people

(28:33):
trying to do the same experiment and coming up with
the same conclusion. That's a good thing in general. Now,
clearly we can't all design scientific experiments to test every
claim we encounter. That's not practical. It's not something that
you and I are going to do on a day
to day basis. It would be silly, it would be
a huge time sync. But we can apply our knowledge

(28:55):
of the scientific method to ask questions either of ourselves
of other pull to look into a matter more thoroughly,
and if we encounter an extraordinary claim, we can look
for the support for that claim. In some cases we
may find the support is logical, it's consistent, and it's sufficient,
And then we might find ourselves able to accept this

(29:17):
new claim, even if it is extraordinary. But in other
cases we might not see any support at all. We
might look and say, you know, the premise that you
have here is faulty, so your conclusion is not really reliable.
Or you might say you don't even present premises to
support your argument, so how do I know your argument

(29:37):
is sound? Then we become less eager to accept a
claim at face value. Well, I've got a lot more
to say about critical thinking and scientific method and skepticism,
but before I go any further, let's take another quick
break to thank our sponsors. Are how do we know

(30:01):
science works? But why have I put so much stock
in science? Well? We know science works because our stuff works.
Our computers work, our smartphones work, cellular technology, satellites, rockets, sensors, medicine.
These things work because men and women have used a
scientific process to develop these over the course of many

(30:25):
years of research and development and prototyping. If science did
not work, we would have a much higher failure rate
on our exploits because without science, the odds of us
ever developing something like WiFi just by pure luck are
astronomically bad. So we know science works because we have
stuff based on science, and that stuff actually works as

(30:49):
it's supposed to. Now, a quick word about some more
terminology like laws versus theories versus hypotheses, because these get
kind of conflated too. So in science, a law is
a generalization about data that describes what we might expect
will happen per a given situation. So the laws of
thermodynamics are generalizations about fundamental elements like temperature and entropy

(31:14):
of thermodynamic systems that are at equilibrium. These laws are
based off of countless observations, and they are well established.
They are not immutable. Scientific laws can in fact change
if evidence supports such a thing, but they tend to
serve as the foundation for much of our knowledge, which
means if we do need to make changes, we also

(31:37):
have to reevaluate all the knowledge we base off of
those ideas. You can think of it as the foundation
for a house. It holds everything else up. This is
one of the reasons why scientifically minded folks are pretty
comfortable saying things like perpetual motion machines are impossible because
for a perpetual motion machine to work, it would have

(31:57):
to violate the laws of thermodynamics, and while it is
at least possible in the strictest sense of the word,
that our understanding of the laws of thermodynamics is not correct.
To date, our observations and tests have all validated those laws,
so it would take extraordinary proof to the extreme to

(32:19):
overturn that, and it would mean that much of our
advances in science and technology over the years has worked
largely by good luck, because if we were off base
about something so fundamental, it would be amazing that all
the things we've built that at least relied partly on
those laws actually works, because our understanding would be faulty.

(32:43):
So our technology shouldn't work if the principles that was
built upon were unsound. Next, we have scientific theories. This
one is tricky because we have different meanings for theory.
In science, a theory is something specific. The University of California, Yeah, Berkeley,
has a really great glossary of scientific terms, and this

(33:04):
is their definition for a scientific theory. Quote in science
a broad natural explanation for a wide range of phenomena.
Theories are concise, coherent, systematic, predictive, and broadly applicable, often
integrating and generalizing many hypotheses. Theories accepted by the scientific

(33:25):
community are generally strongly supported by many different lines of evidence,
but even theories may be modified or overturned if warranted
by new evidence and perspectives. So again, science allows that
we can't know everything, and it may turn out that
one day we find some form of evidence that contradicts

(33:46):
a previously established theory, and that means we have to
test it and make certain that in fact, this anomaly
is a real thing, and if so, we have to
revisit our theory and we have to change it because
it clearly does not reflect reality. Now, contrast this with
the more casual use of the word theory to mean idea.

(34:08):
For example, I have a theory about why the peanut
butter keeps going missing is a different statement than the
theory of gravity, unless you mean the peanut butter jar
keeps falling to the ground because you're releasing it in
mid air, in which case your theory about why the
peanut butter goes missing and the theory of gravity are
actually kind of aligned. The difference causes problems. Sometimes people

(34:31):
might dismiss as scientific claim by saying, oh, that's only
a theory, as if to say, that's just your opinion,
except In science, a theory is an explanation that has
stood up to numerous tests along different lines of evidence.
It's not just a proposed explanation that lacks support. A
hypothesis is an explanation for something. Typically in science, a hypothesis,

(34:55):
a good hypothesis says will explain a fairly limited set
of phenomenon. It's it's narrowly focused. Hypotheses are testable, so
you should be able to take a hypothesis, create a
test that would produce results that either show the hypothesis
has merit or the hypothesis does not apply, and then
you should be able to carry out the experiment and

(35:15):
observe the results and then determine is the hypothesis good
or not. The scientific method is sort of a finely
tuned approach to critical thinking. Critical thinking is all about
trying to be as objective in your analysis as possible
to form a judgment about something, and ideally you should
apply critical thinking too many areas of your life, particularly

(35:38):
when you encounter various claims about stuff. This can come
in many forms. For example, politics is a great place
to apply critical thinking. Politics deals with some incredibly important
aspects of our lives, things that affect us day to
day and affect other people, thousands or millions of people
every day. Political matters are often emotionally charged, and there's

(36:03):
rhetoric on all sides of issues. It doesn't matter if
you identify yourself as being conservative or liberal or whatever.
There's rhetoric on every side. People get passionate. Using critical
thinking is important, not just as in an effort to
try and pick apart the arguments that you don't agree
with philosophically, but also to make certain that those who

(36:25):
claim to align themselves with your own worldview actually do
align themselves to your worldview. So let's say I get
a message from a politician saying I should vote for
her because she believes the same things I believe, And
I might go and look at this politicians voting record
to check and see if that's actually true, and I

(36:47):
might discover that while the candidate aligns herself with a
particular party, one that I identify with when it comes
to voting, their point of view and my point of
view may not be aligned at all. Well, that would
be me using critical thinking, saying, just because she says
that she holds the same beliefs I do, doesn't necessarily
mean that's the case. I should really look into this further.

(37:10):
Or to bring it back around to technology, I might
hear claims about a company saying that they have a
particularly really awesome cable and it delivers superior performance to
any other cable. Let's say it's an HDMI cable. And
to evaluate that claim, I might look at some other information,
such as what are the limits of the pieces of

(37:32):
tech the cable will connect, like a set top box
and a television. Let's say that I've got, you know,
my own setup at home, and I've got a particular
kind of set top box and a particular kind of
TV at home, and they have limits of them themselves,
right They They are not able to accept all forms
of media at all forms of resolution. They have a limit.

(37:55):
Let's say that I've got an HDTV, not a four K,
not two K or anything like that, just an HDTV.
No matter how good a cable is, it's not going
to make my HDTV show video at four K resolution.
That's impossible. The television cannot do that. Now, there are
companies out there that sell the idea of a superior experience.

(38:18):
They're going to say this cable is going to provide
a superior experience to any other cable. They don't actually
have to deliver this promise. They don't have to deliver
that experience, or or maybe the experience they promise is
beyond the ability for humans to perceive, So there's no
way for you to actually tell if that experience is

(38:38):
what they say it is, because you can't discern the
difference between that and the next step down because it's
beyond our ability to perceive it. That resolution, but that's
not what's important to the company that's making the product.
They're selling an idea. The idea is what you are buying.
So the reason I wanted to dedicate an episode to

(38:58):
this topic is that I see a lot of misinformation
out there, and I've fallen for some of it. I'm
a human being. I make mistakes, but I try to
apply critical thinking so that I avoid those situations as
frequently as I can, knowing that I'm not always going
to succeed, but always trying to. I think it's an
important practice. If you practice good critical thinking, you might

(39:20):
find yourself saving money because you're not following an unsupported trend.
You're not just buying a new trendy thing because people
think it's cool. You're actually critically thinking about this thing
and whether or not it really has a place in
your life, whether or not it can do the things
that people promise it can do. You might even improve
your health, or at the very least you might avoid

(39:41):
endangering your health. You could even save a life. Just
be sure to be skeptical without being a denialist. Right
ask for evidence, look for evidence. But if you get
evidence and that evidence supports the claim, don't just deny
the claim. If if you feel the evidence warrants the

(40:02):
claim being true, then you need to incorporate that into
your worldview. And don't be afraid to do a little
digging to verify claims, especially of claims that seemed to
validate your philosophy. That's one of the go twos of
any snake oil salesman. Find out what your mark believes,
reinforce that belief, and claim that whatever you're selling is

(40:24):
aligned with that belief. You need to take claims that
seem to align with your worldview, and you need to
question them just as much as you need to question
the claims that come in that conflict with your worldview,
because otherwise you're just gonna buy into something that may
not be true because it conveniently reinforces what you already

(40:45):
believe in the world. That is unfortunate. That's like at
the very heart of the concept of fake news, which
I hate to even talk about. But fake news, I
mean it is a thing, and it's true for all
different types of use. If you see an article out
there that seems to confirm a belief you already hold,

(41:06):
then you might be less inclined to question the validity
of that article, but it behooves you to do so
because either you're going to question it and turn out, oh,
it's absolutely accurate, it is true, or as true as
anything is that we can determine, and therefore I feel
good about this validating my world view, or you could say,

(41:30):
turns out this is not true, no matter how much
I might wish it to be true, and knowing that
makes it better because I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
use this to support an argument that later on can
get undermined because someone else is going to point to
that thing and say, yeah, but you're citing this as
your source, and that source has proven to be unreliable.

(41:50):
It's better to actually use this practice in all areas. Also,
critical thinking leads to an actual understanding of a subject,
not just of technology, but all sorts of stuff. People
talked about critical thinking in my literature classes when I
was in college. Honestly, that critical thinking concept should have
been taught much earlier in my educational experience, but uh,

(42:13):
you know, it just wasn't. I think for a lot
of kids these days, it's introduced much earlier, which is
great for me. I didn't get into it until college.
But critical thinking allows you to question things and then
through the question get a deeper understanding of the subject matter,
as opposed to just memorizing stuff. Like you can memorize
a list of facts and rattle those facts off, but

(42:35):
if you don't have an actual understanding, then there's nothing
really going on. You're just you're just regurgitating information, you're
not really incorporating that. But when you question, there comes
a point where a little lightbulb comes on in your
head and you get it, and that's way more powerful.
To conclude, I like to recommend some interesting books about

(42:58):
critical thinking and skepticism. Uh, the best one I've ever
read is The demon Haunted World that was written by
Carl Sagan. Uh. There's a great audiobook version of this.
By the way, Carrie Ls of Princess Bride Fame does
the the narration for it. I highly recommend that if
you don't want to read it, you can listen to it. Uh.

(43:18):
Sagan is wonderful and not only advocating for careful critical thought,
but also he is really good at expressing the wonders
of the universe and of science. He's great at engaging
the imagination and grounding us in the real world at
the same time. And I think his message is ultimately
one of wonder and hope, because it's all about how

(43:41):
phenomenal the universe is and how much we can stand
to learn from it. A lot of people, I think,
I think of skepticism is taking the magic out of
the world, but really it's just making sure the stuff
you are putting stock into is real. But that doesn't
mean real. He can't be amazing, it can be. It's

(44:03):
just not magic because magic is not real. Asking the
Right Questions A Guide to Critical Thinking by m Neil
Brown and Stuart M. Keely is also a good read.
Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me by Carol Tigress
and Elliott Aaronson explores why we are so adept at

(44:24):
passing the buck when we make a mistake. It's a
very human thing when we make a mistake, to justify
that mistake or gloss over it, or try to deflect
it so it doesn't seem like we've made a mistake.
It's a very human thing. This book specifically goes into
why is that? Why are we so reluctant to say

(44:45):
I was wrong? Because if we could say I was
wrong more frequently when we are legitimately wrong, then we
could proceed toward the truth much more quickly. But we're
really reluctant to do that in general. Flam Flam by
James Randy is a really interesting book about various hoaxes, scams,
and unsupported claims, most of which are in the supernatural realm.

(45:09):
But I think it is very helpful if you want
to look at critical thinking. Randy is a professional magician,
and as such he has a working understanding of human psychology.
You know, not necessarily a scholarly understanding, but human psychology
is something magicians work on like. They have to understand it.
They have to understand how people think and how people
perceive in order to trick them. So they're all about

(45:34):
misdirection and deception, and a lot of magicians actually have
created really great work calling for critical thinking and using
their understanding of human psychology and misdirection to point out
how we humans are really good at fooling each other
and ourselves. Also, I feel I need to point this out.
Randy is a bit of an irascible fellow. He's grouchy

(45:56):
and it comes across and his writing. Just throwing that
out there because I don't want to be a surprise
to anybody if they pick up the book. Another one
is Pseudoscience and the Paranormal by Terence hinz Uh. That's
a book I've heard recommended numerous times, but I have
not yet read it myself. It's on my to read list.
I just haven't read it yet, but I keep hearing
Pseudoscience and the Paranormal is a very good one, so

(46:19):
I hope it is. That's my next book to read
once I'm done with the one I'm on now. In
my next episode, I'm going to be joined by the
fabulous Mr Benjamin Bolan to cover some of the scams
and hoaxes and flam flam and technology that in cases,
some cases rob people of money. In some cases that
just deluded a person into thinking they had found something

(46:41):
interesting when really they hadn't. In some cases it led
to even worse outcomes. And I really want to do
that to explore again why scientific thinking, Why why skepticism
critical thinking? Why that's so important? And the next episode
is going to kind of illustrate that with a bunch
of examples, but it'll be a pretty entertaining story as well.

(47:02):
Thank you guys so much. We have a thousand episodes
of tech Stuff and there's no stopping. We're gonna keep
on going. But one thousand, I can't believe it. That's
a lot of Jonathan Strickland talking. I feel like I
should apologize, But if you guys have any suggestions for
future episodes of tech Stuff, write me, send me a
message at tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,

(47:25):
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