CS: Oh, there are so many competing candidates. In fact, in this
book I list some of the times where I've been dead wrong; in past books
I've tended to stress the cases where I've been right, like the
greenhouse effect. I suppose that's a natural humaning, but I've tried to
make up for it a bit. Mistakes, wrong guesses, invalid conclusions are
not disasters in science. In many cases they spur others to disprove or
to check you out. And so it advances the field. The greatest scientists
have made mistakes.
But one of the beauties of science is that it has built-in
error-correcting machinery. Science, unlike many other human endeavors,
reserves its highest rewards for those who disprove the contentions of
its most revered leaders. Think, for example, of religion. How foreign
that scientific point of view is from the religious idea, which so often
is to uncritically accept whatever the founder of the religion said. It's
not a tragedy that scientists make mistakes, and I certainly have made
some in my time.
PT: Coming as you do from a hard-science background, how do you
think psychology is doing as a field? A lot of the issues in your book
are big areas in psychology.
CS: I'm not a psychologist. I don't have a comprehensive
surveillance of the whole field, so all I can do is give you an offhand
impression.
The thing I've been most appalled by is the sense of so many
psychotherapists . . . that their job is to confirm their patients'
delusions rather than help them find out what really has happened. It
took a long time to convince myself that's what's happening, but it
certainly is happening. I don't know whether it's more likely among
social workers than Ph.D.s in psychology, or more likely among the Ph.D.s
than the psychiatrists, who have medical training. But I do find it
astonishing that anybody in psychology should be ignorant of the most
elementary precepts of skeptical scientific scrutiny.
As someone who spent a lot of time reading Freud and his followers,
I also am distressed by the absence of a systematic effort to demonstrate
that psychoanalysis is more useful than going to your priest or rabbi. Or
whether there is such a thing as repression. It's always very dangerous
when the error-correcting machinery is not working and there aren't
systematic attempts to disprove what the revered founder of your field
maintains.
On the other hand, I see spectacular potential in imaging analysis
of brain function. That is an amazing development, and you can see really
major understandings of brain function coming out of that. Also
tremendous]y exciting is the work on neurotransmitters, work on
endorphins, and on the small brain proteins. Those are all tremendously
exciting, and all of them, by the way, tend to support the idea that the
mind is merely what the brain does. There's nothing else, there's no soul
or psyche that's not made out of matter, that isn't a function of 10 to
the 14th synapses in the brain.
PT: As someone who has argued so eloquently about the role of
evidence in making decisions, what is your reaction as a citizen and
scientist to the O.J. trial?
CS: There are a lot of studies of juries that suggest that people
make up their minds in the opening arguments, selectively remember the
evidence that supports their initial judgment, then simply reject the
contrary evidence, put it out of their heads. I suspect that did happen
here.
The fault lies with prosecutors for relying on complex scientific
and mathematical arguments without explaining it in a way the average
person can understand. It was a failure to understand what is necessary
in talking to the public about science. When we hear that the chance of
this blood being someone other than O.J. Simpson's is one in 100 billion,
and there are only 5.5 billion people on the planet, and that is intended
as a knock-out punch . . . . If somebody has no knowledge of elementary
probability theory, the prosecution has an obligation to explain it step
by step, from there being one chance in two when flipping coins, to
highly improbable events.
Likewise, I think many jurors, many Americans anywhere, have little
sense of what DNA is. They need some background on what DNA is, what are
its unique characteristics, why it is different from person to person,
the role it plays in determining heredity. There was none of that.
PT: Can that be accomplished in a trial?
CS: Sure. You do it in a very effective, humorous way with
excellent visuals. It's pointless to bring to the public scientific and
mathematical evidence if no one going to understand what you're
saying.
PT: You've done that as well as anyone.
CS: I'm often asked by colleagues what's the secret. Many
scientists who are superb practitioners of their field claim that they're
no good at explaining science, but I just don't believe that. I think
there's only one secret. And that is, Don't talk jargon. Don't talk as
you would to colleagues. Instead, talk as you did to yourself at the time
when you yourself didn't understand. You have to explain to people what's
true in ordinary language, not technical terms. You have to respect the
intelligence of your audience, but remember that they haven't had the
advantage of the same technical education that you have.
PT: In looking for intelligence and originality in people, what
earmarks do you use?
Tags:
best friends,
Carl Sagan,
demon haunted world,
dominance hierarchies,
evolution of humans,
genetic predispositions,
human emotions,
human intelligence,
imperfections,
inner space,
intelligent life,
life on earth,
litany,
mistakes,
new departure,
outer space,
present times,
prudence,
public,
repressed memory,
Science,
space,
tendencies,
ufos
