The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we’re alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. But once you look for life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life?

As founding director of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger has built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In Alien Earths, she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth’s history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview – planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and others with more than one sun in their sky! And the best contenders for Alien Earths. We also see the imagined worlds of science fiction and how close they come to reality.

With the James Webb Space Telescope and Dr. Kaltenegger’s pioneering work, she shows that we live in an incredible new epoch of exploration. As our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, Dr. Kaltenegger shows how we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars and how we could spot life there. Worlds from where aliens may even be gazing back at us. What if we’re not alone?

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Kaltenegger serves on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), and on NASA senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA’s TESS Mission as well as the NIRISS instrument on James Webb Space Telescope. Kaltenegger was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian magazine, an Innovator to Watch by Time magazine. She appears in the IMAX 3D movie “The Search for Life in Space” and speaks frequently, including at Aspen Ideas Festival, TED Youth, World Science Festival and the Kavli Foundation lecture at the Adler Planetarium.

Shermer and Kaltenegger discuss:

• Carl Sagan and his influence
• Sagan’s Dragon
• ECREE Principle
• How stars, planets and solar systems form
• How exoplanets are discovered
• Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope
• What is life?
• The Origin of Life
• Fermi’s Paradox: where is everybody (the Great Silence, the Great Filter)
• SETI
• Biosignatures here and there
• Technosignatures here and there
• Dyson spheres and other technosignatures
• Will aliens be biological or AI?
• Interstellar travel
• Kardashev scale of civilizations
• Communicating with aliens: Arrival
• Aliens communicating with us: Contact
• Order of the Dolphin: how to talk to aliens when we can’t even talk to dolphins
• Deities for Atheists, Skygods for Skeptics: aliens as gods and the search as religion
• Why alien worlds matter.

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One winter evening in 2014, Stuart Russell, a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, was riding the Paris Metro. He was on his way to a rehearsal for a choir that he had joined while living in the French capital during a sabbatical from Berkeley.

That evening, he was listening to the piece that he would be practicing, Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, the composer’s choral arrangement of his haunting Adagio for Strings. Swept up in the sublime music, Russell had a breathtaking idea. AI should be built to support ineffable human moments like this one. Instead of delegating an objective to a machine and then stepping back, designers should make systems that will work with us to realize both our complex, shifting goals and our values and preferences. “It just sprang into my mind that what matters, and therefore what the purpose of AI was, was in some sense the aggregate quality of human experience,” he later recalled. And in order to be constantly learning what humans want or need, AI must be uncertain, Russell realized. “This is the core of the new approach: we remove the false assumption that the machine is pursuing a fixed objective that is perfectly known.”

Talking with me by video call one day in the fall of 2022, Russell elaborates. Once the machine is uncertain, it can start working with humans instead of “just watching from above.” If it doesn’t know how the future should unfold, AI becomes teachable, says Russell, a thin, dapper man with a manner of speaking that is somehow both poetical and laser precise. A key part of his Paris epiphany, he says, “was realizing that actually [AI’s] state of uncertainty about human objectives is permanent.” He pauses. “To some extent, this is how it’s going to be for humans too. We are not born with fixed reward functions.”

A few weeks later, I meet up virtually with Anca Dragan, an energetic Berkeley roboticist who is a protégé of Russell’s and one of a growing number of high-profile scientists turning his vision for reimagining AI into algorithmic reality. CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

We all want to be happier, but our brains often get in the way. When we’re too stuck in our heads we obsess over our inadequacies, compare ourselves with others and fail to see the good in our lives. In The Science of Happiness, world-leading psychologist and happiness expert Bruce Hood demonstrates that the key to happiness is not self-care but connection. He presents seven simple but life-changing lessons to break negative thought patterns and re-connect with the things that really matter.

• Alter Your Ego
• Avoid Isolation
• Reject Negative Comparisons
• Become More Optimistic
• Control Your Attention
• Connect With Others
• Get Out of Your Own Head

Grounded in decades of studies in neuroscience and developmental psychology, this book tells a radical new story about the roots of wellbeing and the obstacles that lie in our path. With clear, practical takeaways throughout, Professor Hood demonstrates how we can all harness the findings of this science to re-wire our thinking and transform our lives.

Dr. Bruce Hood is an award-winning Professor of Developmental Psychology at Bristol University and the author of several books including SuperSense, The Self Illusion, The Domesticated Brain, and Possessed. His course, The Science of Happiness, is the most popular course at Bristol University. He has appeared extensively on TV and radio, including co-hosting the BBC podcast The Happiness Half Hour in 2021. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the British Psychological Society.

Shermer and Hood discuss:

• Psychedelic drug taking of his youth
• An operational definition of the “good life” or “happiness” or “well being”
• Emotions and happiness
• What are emotions and how can they be measured?
• Love, Hate, Anger, Fear, Disgust, Pleasure/Pain
• Hunger, Thirst, Lust, Attraction, Desires, Passions
• Emotions in the EEA—Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness—what are they “for”?
• Are there universal human emotions?
• The nature and nurture of emotions
• Happiness as an emotion and a social contagion
• eudaimonia (the pursuit of meaning) versus hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure)
• Genetics and heritability of happiness
• Cultural components of happiness (individual vs. collective)
• WEIRD people and happiness
• The Big Five (OCEAN) and happiness
• Marriage and happiness (mate selection)
• Health and happiness
• Walking, exercise, stress reduction and happiness
• Religion, happiness, and the good life
• Variety (as the “spice of life”), stability, and happiness (sexual variety?)
• How to live the life you want—not necessarily the life expected of you
• What the ancient Greeks got right about living the good life
• How failure may actually be a key to more happiness.

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The discipline of rhetoric was the keystone of Western education for over two thousand years. Only recently has its perceived importance faded.

In this book, renowned rhetorical scholar Robin Reames argues that, in today’s polarized political climate, we should all care deeply about learning rhetoric. Drawing on examples ranging from the destructive ancient Greek demagogue Alcibiades to modern-day conspiracists like Alex Jones, Reames breaks down the major techniques of rhetoric, pulling back the curtain on how politicians, journalists, and “journalists” convince us to believe what we believe—and to talk, vote, and act accordingly. Understanding these techniques helps us avoid being manipulated by authority figures who don’t have our best interests at heart. It also grants us rare insight into the values that shape our own beliefs. Learning rhetoric, Reames argues, doesn’t teach us what to think but how to think—allowing us to understand our own and others’ ideological commitments in a completely new way.  Thoughtful, nuanced, and leavened with dry humor, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself offers an antidote to our polarized, post-truth world. 

Robin Reames is associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in rhetorical theory and the history of ideas. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary and ancient rhetorical theory, language theory, rhetorical criticism, political rhetoric, writing, as well as courses in literature and literary theory. Her research is guided by an interest in the visceral and primordial power of human speech, for which ancient rhetoric serves as a first theory. Her book, Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory examines how Plato used rhetorical theory to forge the primordial distinction between seeming and being—the foundational fissure from which Western metaphysics emerged, and the very grounds of the opposition between true and false. Her new book is The Ancient Art of Thinking For Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times.

Reames and Shermer discuss:

• What is rhetoric?
• How has rhetoric changed her life?
• Rhetoric vs. facts (rhetorical truths vs. empirical truths)
• Is the point of reason to understand reality or to persuade? (Hugo Mercier/Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason)
• Canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery
• “Through thinking rhetorically about our ideological commitments it is possible for people from radically different orientations to have different, better, and more productive conversation.”
• Logos (authority), pathos (feelings), ethos (ethics), hubris (pride)
• Bullshitters vs. liars
• What is reason?
• Induction and deduction
• What is truth?
• Can you reason people out of beliefs they didn’t reason themselves into?
• Thinking rhetorically rather than ideologically
• Thinking metaphorically: “war on poverty”, “government as family” (George Lakoff)
• Thought and language
• Thought, language, and ideology
• How language is processed (thoughts vs. pictures)
• How to disagree with people/debate hot issues (guns, abortion, immigration)
• Culture wars: war between two different cultures—liberal and conservative
• How to have impossible conversations
• Toulmin scheme: data, claim, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal
• Facts and values
• Value hierarchy
• Warrant: linking data to a claim
• Syllogistic reasoning/deduction
• Conspiracy theories and why people believe them
• Birtherism and Trutherism.

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Bedbugs. Just mention of the word is enough to give people the heebie-jeebies and send shivers down their spines—or start scratching. Beginning in early fall of 2023 and coinciding with Paris Fashion Week from September 25 to October 3, fear of the unhealthy vermin swept across Paris. There does not appear to be one incident that triggered the scare, but once the cry of “Bedbug!” went up, it quickly went viral online and in the Parisian media. A wave of YouTube and TikTok videos showed the proliferous pests crawling on bus seats, in trains, riding the subways, lounging at Charles de Gaulle airport, and taking in the latest plays in Paris theatre district the “Grands Boulevards.” Some anxious residents even refused to sit during their daily commutes. One British newspaper saw the humorous side of the panic, carrying the headline: “Coming Soon to a Cinema Near You? The Return of the Bud Bug.”¹

Within days, the humble bedbug Cimex lectularius was being portrayed as public enemy No. 1. Politicians began holding press conferences on “the bedbug crisis” and vowing action. By September 29, the Deputy Mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, ominously posted on X/Twitter: “No one is safe.”² One MP, Ms. Mathilde Panot, carried a test tube filled with bedbugs into the French Parliament, complaining that pesky parasites were “making the lives of millions of our fellow citizens a living hell.”³

While they may give people the creeps, bedbugs are more of an annoyance than a major health threat. These small, reddish-brown insects have an affinity for feeding on the blood of humans as they sleep. During the day they love to hide in the cracks and crevices of headboards, box springs, mattresses, and bed frames next to their human prey, hence the name. According to the Mayo Clinic, they are not considered to be a serious health issue as they do not directly spread disease, although they can trigger allergic reactions and skin conditions, and scratching the bites can lead to infection.⁴ CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

We push ourselves toward the highest-paying, most prestigious jobs, seeking promotions and public recognition. As Adam Gopnik points out, the result is not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with no way out. Except one: to choose accomplishment over achievement.

Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside.

Accomplishment, by contrast, is the end point of an engulfing activity one engages in for its own sake.

Shermer and Gopnik discuss:

• mastering the secrets of stage magic (Gopnik’s son worked with David Blaine and Jamy Ian Swiss)
• accomplishment in music
• family and mentors
• the concept of the 10,000-hour rule vs. natural talent
• Adam’s new book All That Happiness Is, which offers timeless wisdom against the grain.

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Paris to the Moon and The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.

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Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.

Annie Jacobsen is an investigative journals, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and New York Times bestselling author. Her books include: Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon’s Brain, Phenomena, First Platoon, and Surprise, Kill, Vanish. Her book Nuclear War: A Scenario, has been optioned to be made into a dramatic film.

Shermer and Jacobsen discuss:

• So much has been written on this subject…what is new? (Richard Rhodes’s nuclear tetraology (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly, Twilight of the Bombs, Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, Fred Kaplan’s The Bomb, Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon, Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine, Carl Sagan’s and Richard Turco’s A Path Where No Man Thought)
• How much more is classified that we still do not know?
• Why we have a nuclear triad (land missiles, submarine missiles, bombers)
• Competition among military forces and increasing budgets for more weapons
• How many types of nuclear weapons are there now, and how many total?
• Why humans engage in aggression, violence and war
• The Prisoner’s dilemma, Hobbesian trap, Security Dilemma, the “other guy” problem
• Balance of Terror, Mutual Assured Destruction, Logic of Deterrence
• Close calls: Cuban Missile Crisis, Nuclear sub/Vasily Arkipov (1962), Damascus Titan missile explosion (1980), Able Archer 83 war exercise in Europe, Stanislav Petrov, etc.
• Surviving a nuclear explosion/war
• What happens in a nuclear bomb explosion
• Short terms and long term consequences of a nuclear exchange
• Nuclear Winter
• Nuclear protests & films (On the Beach, Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, War Games, The Day After)
• Getting to Nuclear Zero: Stockpile reduction, No First Use, No Launch on Warning, shift taboo from not using them to not owning them,
• Reagan and Gorbachev and arms reductions
• North Korea, China/Taiwan
• Göbekli Tepe and post-apocalyptic world.

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On October 17, 2005 the talk show host and comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the word “truthiness” in the premier episode of his show The Colbert Report:¹ “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth— the truth we want to exist.”² Since then the word has become entrenched in our everyday vocabulary but we’ve largely lost Colbert’s satirical critique of “living in a post-truth world.” Truthiness has become our truth. Kellyanne Conway opened the door to “alternative facts”³ while Oprah Winfrey exhorted you to “speak your truth.”⁴ And the co-founder of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, has begun to regularly talk to his podcast guests about objective external truths and subjective internal truths, inside of which are historical truths, political truths, religious truths, literary truths, mythical truths, scientific truths, empirical truths, narrative truths, and cultural truths.⁵ It is an often-heard complaint to say that we live in a post-truth world, but what we really have is far too many claims for it. Instead, we propose that the vital search for truth is actually best continued when we drop our assertions that we have something like an absolute Truth with a capital T.

Why is that? Consider one of our friends who is a Young Earth creationist. He believes the Bible is inerrant. He is convinced that every word it contains, including the six days of creation story of the universe, is Truth (spelled with a capital T because it is unquestionably, eternally true). From this position, he has rejected evidence brought to him from multiple disciplines that all converge on a much older Earth and universe. He has rejected evidence from fields such as biology, paleontology, astronomy, glaciology, and archeology, all of which should reduce his confidence in the claim that the formation of the Earth and every living thing on it, together with the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, all took place in literally six Earth days. Even when it was pointed out to him that the first chapter of Genesis mentions liquid water, light, and every kind of vegetation before there was a sun or any kind of star whatsoever, he claimed not to see a problem. His reply to such doubts is to simply say, “with God, all things are possible.”⁶

Lacking any uncertainty about the claim that “the Bible is Truth,” this creationist has only been able to conclude two things when faced with tough questions: (1) we are interpreting the Bible incorrectly, or (2) the evidence that appears to undermine a six-day creation is being interpreted incorrectly. These are inappropriately skeptical responses, but they are the only options left to someone who has decided beforehand that their belief is Truth. And, importantly, we have to admit that this observation could be turned back on us too. As soon as we become absolutely certain about a belief—as soon as we start calling something a capital “T” Truth—then we too become resistant to any evidence that could be interpreted as challenging it. After all, we are not absolutely certain that the account in Genesis is false. Instead, we simply consider it very, very unlikely, given all of the evidence at hand. We must keep in mind that we sample a tiny sliver of reality, with limited senses that only have access to a few of possibly many dimensions, in but one of quite likely multiple universes. Given this situation, intellectual humility is required.

Some history and definitions from philosophy are useful to examine all of this more precisely. Of particular relevance is the field of epistemology, which studies what knowledge is or can be. A common starting point is Plato’s definition of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB).⁷ According to this JTB formulation, all three of those components are necessary for our notions or ideas to rise to the level of being accepted as genuine knowledge as opposed to being dismissible as mere opinion. And in an effort to make this distinction clear, definitions for all three of these components have been developed over the ensuing millennia. For epistemologists, beliefs are “what we take to be the case or regard as true.”⁸ For a belief to be true, it doesn’t just need to seem correct now; “most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.”⁹ And we can’t just stumble on these truths; our beliefs require some reason or evidence to justify them.¹⁰ CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

Nick Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller. It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong. But what if things go right? Suppose that we develop superintelligence safely, govern it well, and make good use of the cornucopian wealth and near magical technological powers that this technology can unlock. If this transition to the machine intelligence era goes well, human labor becomes obsolete. We would thus enter a condition of “post-instrumentality” in which our efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, at technological maturity, human nature becomes entirely malleable. Here we confront a challenge that is not technological but philosophical and spiritual. In such a solved world, what is the point of human existence? What gives meaning to life? What do we do all day?

Bostrom’s new book, Deep Utopia, shines new light on these old questions and gives us glimpses of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future.

Nick Bostrom is a Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom is the world’s most cited philosopher aged 50 or under. He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked a global conversation about the future of AI. His work has pioneered many of the ideas that frame current thinking about humanity’s future (such as the concept of an existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the unilateralist’s curse, etc.), while some of his recent work concerns the moral status of digital minds. His writings have been translated into more than 30 languages; he is a repeat main-stage TED speaker; and he has been interviewed more than 1,000 times by media outlets around the world. He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy.

Bostrom and Shermer discuss:

• The Future of Life Institute’s Open Letter calling for a pause on “giant AI experiments”
• Eliezer Yudkowsky Time OpEd: “Shut It All Down” — “Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”
• Utopia, Dystopia, Protopia
• Would it be boring to live in a perfect world?
• If we lived forever with everything we need, what would be the purpose of life?
• Trekonomics, post-scarcity economics
• The hedonic treadmill and positional wealth values—will people never be satisfied with “enough”?
• Overpopulation of the 1960s and today’s birth dearth
• Colonizing the galaxy (von Neumann probes, O’Neill cylinders, Dyson spheres)
• The Fermi paradox: where is everyone?
• Mind uploading and immortality
• Examples of Technological Maturity
• Google’s Gemini AI debacle
• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• The alignment problem
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?

On Mind Uploading and Replicating / Resurrecting Everyone Who Ever Lived

(An excerpt from Michael Shermer’s 2018 book Heavens on Earth.)

The sums involved in achieving immortality through the duplication or resurrection scenarios are not to be underestimated. There are around 85 billion neurons in a human brain, each with about a thousand synaptic links, for a total of 100 trillion connections to be accurately preserved and replicated. This is a staggering level of complexity made all the more so by the additional glial cells in the brain, which provide support and insulation for neurons and can change the actions of firing neurons, so these cells better be preserved as well in any duplication or resurrection scenario, just in case. Estimates of the ratio of glial cells to neurons in a brain vary from 1:1 to 10:1. If you’re not a lightning calculator, that computes to a total brain cell count of somewhere between 170 billion and 850 billion. Then factor in the hundreds or thousands of synaptic connections between each of the 85 billion neurons, adding approximately 100 trillion synaptic connections total for each brain. That’s not all. There are around ten billion proteins per neuron, which effect how memories are stored, plus the countless extracellular molecules in between those tens of billions of brain cells.

These estimates are just for the brain and do not even include the rest of the nervous system outside of the skull—what neuroscientists call the “embodied brain” or the “extended mind” and which many philosophers of mind believe is necessary for normal cognition. So you might want to have this extended mind resurrected or uploaded along with your mind. After all, you are not just your internal thoughts and emotions disconnected from your body. Many of your thoughts and emotions are intimately entwined with how your body interacts with its environment, so any preserved connectome, to be fully operational as recreating the experience of what it is like to be a sentient being, would also need to be housed in a body. So we would need a warehouse of brainless clones or very sophisticated robots prepared to have these uploaded mind neural units installed. How many? Well, to avoid the charge of elitism, it’s only fair that everyone who ever lived be resurrected, so that means multiplying the staggering data package for one person by 108 billion.

Then there’s the relationship between memory and life history. Our memory is not like a videotape that can be played back on the viewing screen of our minds. When an event happens to us, a selective impression of it is made on the brain through the senses. As that sense impression wends its way through different neural networks, where it ends up depends on what type of memory it is. As a memory is processed and prepared for long-term storage we rehearse it and in the process it is changed. This editing process depends on previous memories, subsequent events and memories, and emotions. This process recurs trillions of times in the course of a lifetime, to the point where we have to wonder if we have memories of actual events, or memories of the memories of those events, or even memories of memories of memories…. What’s the “true” memory? There is no such thing. Our memories are the product of trillions of synaptic neuronal connections that are constantly being edited, redacted, reinforced, and extinguished, such that a resurrection of a human with memories intact will depend on when in the individual’s life history the replication or resurrection is implemented.

In his book The Physics of Immortality the physicist Frank Tipler calculates that an Omega Point computer in the far future will contain 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10¹²³ zeros), powerful enough, he says, to resurrect everyone who ever lived. That may be—it is a staggeringly large number—but is even an Omega Point computer powerful enough to reconstruct all of the historical contingencies and necessities in which a person lived, such as the weather, climate, geography, economic cycles, recessions and depressions, social trends, religious movements, wars, political revolutions, paradigm shifts, ideological revolutions, and the like, on top of duplicating our genome and connectome? It seems unlikely, but if so GOSH would also need to duplicate all of the individual conjunctures and interactions between that person and all other persons as they intersect with and influence each other in each of those lifetimes. Then multiply all that by the 108 billion people who ever lived or are currently living. Whatever the number, it would have to be even larger than the famed Googolplex (10 to the power of a googol, with a googol being 10¹⁰⁰, or 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰) from which Google and its Googleplex headquarters derived its name. Even a googol of googolplexes would not suffice. In essence, it would require the resurrection of the entire universe and its many billions of years of history. Inconceivable.

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When Robert Zubrin published his classic book The Case for Mars a quarter century ago, setting foot on the Red Planet seemed a fantasy. Today, manned exploration is certain, and as Zubrin affirms in The New World on Mars, so too is colonization. From the astronautical engineer venerated by NASA and today’s space entrepreneurs, here is what we will achieve on Mars and how.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are building fleets of space vehicles to make interplanetary travel as affordable as Old-World passages to America. We will settle on Mars, and with our knowledge of the planet, analyzed in depth by Dr. Zubrin, we will utilize the resources and tackle the challenges that await us. What we will we build? Populous Martian city-states producing air, water, food, power, and more. Zubrin’s Martian economy will pay for necessary imports and generate income from varied enterprises, such as real estate sales—homes that are airtight and protect against cosmic space radiation, with fish-farm aquariums positioned overhead, letting in sunlight and blocking cosmic rays while providing fascinating views. Zubrin even predicts the Red Planet customs, social relations, and government—of the people, by the people, for the people, with inalienable individual rights—that will overcome traditional forms of oppression to draw Earth immigrants. After all, Mars needs talent.

With all of this in place, Zubrin’s Red Planet will become a pressure cooker for invention in bioengineering, synthetic biology, robotics, medicine, nuclear energy, and more, benefiting humans on Earth, Mars, and beyond. We can create this magnificent future, making life better, less fatalistic. The New World on Mars proves that there is no point killing each other over provinces and limited resources when, together, we can create planets.

Robert Zubrin is former president of the aerospace R&D company Pioneer Astronautics, which performs advanced space research for NASA, the US Air Force, the US Department of Energy, and private companies. He is the founder and president of the Mars Society, an international organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars, leading the Society’s successful effort to build the first simulated human Mars exploration base in the Canadian Arctic and growing the organization to include 7,000 members in 40 countries. A nuclear and astronautical engineer, Zubrin began his career with Martin Marietta (later Lockheed Martin) as a Senior Engineer involved in the design of advanced interplanetary missions. His “Mars Direct” plan for near-term human exploration of Mars was commended by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and covered in The Economist, Fortune, Air and Space Smithsonian, Newsweek (cover story), Time, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, as well as on BBC, PBS TV, CNN, the Discovery Channel, and National Public Radio. Zubrin is also the author of twelve books, including The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, with more than 100,000 copies in print in America alone and now in its 25^th Anniversary Edition. He lives with his wife, Hope, a science teacher, in Golden, Colorado. His latest book is: The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet. The next big Mars Society conference in Seattle August 8-11.

Read Zubrin’s discussion of his paper on panspermia for seeding like on Earth.

Shermer and Zubrin discuss:

• Why not start with the moon?
• What’s it like on Mars? Like the top of Mt. Everest?
• Was Mars ever like Earth? Water, life, etc.?
• How much will it cost to go to Mars?
• How to get people to Mars: food, water, radiation, boredom?
• Where on Mars should people settle?
• What are “natural resources”?
• Resources on Mars already there vs. need to be produced
• Analogies with Europeans colonizing North America
• Public vs. private enterprise for space exploration
• Economics on Mars
• Politics on Mars
• Lessons from the Red Planet for the Blue Planet
• Ingersoll’s insight: free speech & thought > science & technology > machines as our slaves > moon landing. “This is something that free people can do.”
• Liberty in space: won’t the most powerful people on Mars threaten to shut off your air if you don’t obey?
• Independent City-States on Mars
• Direct vs. representative democracy
• America as a model for what we can create on Mars
• Are new frontiers needed for civilization to continue?
• The worst idea ever: that the total amount of potential resources is fixed.

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In 2021 the CDC issued a grim statistic: more than one million Americans had died from overdoses since 1999 when it started tracking an opioid epidemic that began with prescription painkillers and is now dominated by fentanyl.¹ Since that sobering milestone, another 300,000 have died.² That is roughly the same number of Americans who died in all wars the United States has entered (1.3 million) combined, including the First and Second World Wars and the Civil War.³ The opioid epidemic is, aside possibly from obesity, the biggest health crisis of our time.

Most know about the frenzy of finger pointing, lawsuits, bankruptcy filings among pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors, national pharmacy chains, medical associations, and the Federal Drug Administration. There is plenty of blame to go around. What is not often discussed in the extensive media coverage about the epidemic is how we got here.

The story of how the opioid crisis got underway and who is responsible is a tale of greed, poor government regulation, and many missed opportunities. It began with good intentions based on bad data and later became a movement in which profits took precedence over morals. It is a tragedy that was largely preventable and, as such, one of the most infuriating chapters in modern U.S. history.

History of Pain

Chronic pain affects 50 million Americans, more than those with high blood pressure, diabetes, or depression.⁴ Developing a medication that alleviates pain without too many side effects has been one of the drug industry’s holy grails. The market is enormous, and most people are long-term patients. Opiates were isolated as effective pain killers in the 1800s. At the turn of the 20^th century—the drug industry’s Wild West days—they were dispensed over the counter. Over time, opiates earned a notorious and deserved reputation for addiction. German giant Bayer patented and marketed Heroin as, incredible as it now sounds, a cure for morphine addiction. CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible. This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them. Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, healthcare, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image.

Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future.

Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition. She has written extensively about issues at the crossroads of science and society, including stem cell research and regenerative medicine, aging and longevity, medical implants, transhumanism, robotics and AI and bioethical issues in leading-edge medicine. Previous books include Stem Cell Wars and Beyond Human, and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Vice, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, among others. She’s a frequent contributor to the online science magazine, Leaps, and is the recipient of the 2019 Arlene Eisenberg Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Shermer and Herold discuss:

• What happened to our flying cars and jetpacks from The Jetsons?
• What is a robot, anyway? And what are social robots?
• Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler, and the female doll
• Robot nannies, friends, therapists, caregivers, and lovers
• Sex robots
• The uncanny valley: roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970
• Robots in science fiction
• Psychological states: anthropomorphism, effectance (the need to interact effectively with one’s environment), theory of mind (onto robots), social connectedness
• “Personal, social, emotional, home robots”
• Emotions, animism, mind
• Emotional intelligence
• Turing Test
• Artificial intelligence and natural intelligence
• What is AI and AGI?
• The alignment problem
• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• Robopocalypse
• Robo soldiers
• What is “mind”, “thinking”, and “consciousness”, and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes?
• Westworld: Robot sentience?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• The self and other minds
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?
• Does Watson know that it beat the great Ken Jennings in Jeopardy!?
• Self-driving cars
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it.

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Thousands of religions have adherents today, and countless more have existed throughout history. What accounts for this astonishing diversity?

This extraordinarily ambitious and comprehensive book demonstrates how evolutionary systematics and philosophy can yield new insight into the development of organized religion. Lance Grande―a leading evolutionary systematist―examines the growth and diversification of hundreds of religions over time, highlighting their historical interrelationships. Combining evolutionary theory with a wealth of cultural records, he explores the formation, extinction, and diversification of different world religions, including the many branches of Asian cyclicism, polytheism, and monotheism.

Grande deploys an illuminating graphic system of evolutionary trees to illustrate historical interrelationships among the world’s major religious traditions, rejecting colonialist and hierarchical “ladder of progress” views of evolution. Extensive and informative illustrations clearly and vividly indicate complex historical developments and help readers grasp the breadth of interconnections across eras and cultures.

The Evolution of Religions marshals compelling evidence, starting far back in time, that all major belief systems are related, despite the many conflicts that have taken place among them. By emphasizing these broad historical interconnections, this book promotes the need for greater tolerance and deeper, unbiased understanding of cultural diversity. Such traits may be necessary for the future survival of humanity.

Lance Grande is the Negaunee Distinguished Service Curator, Emeritus, of the Field Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Chicago. He is a specialist in evolutionary systematics, paleontology, and biology who has a deep interest in the interdisciplinary applications of scientific method and philosophy. His many books include Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums (2017) and The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time (2013). His new book is The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions.

Shermer and Grande discuss:

• Why is a paleontologist and evolutionary theorist interested in religion?
• Evolutionary systematics and comparativism in evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the history of religion
• What is a comparative systematicist?
• E. O. Wilson’s consilience approach
• Agnostic approach: not addressing the truth value of any one religion
• What is religion?
• Variety: 10,000 different religions: Christianity (33%), Islam (23%), Hinduism/Buddhism (23%), Judaism (0.2%), Other (10%), Agnosticism (10%), Atheism (2%)
• Evolutionary trees of religion
• Biological vs. cultural evolution & diversification: Lamarkian vs. Darwinian
• Historical colonialist progressivism and social Darwinism
• Frans Boaz, Margaret Meade, historical particularism
• Rather than focusing on differences, focus on similarities
• Nature/Nurture & The Blank Slate in anthropology & the social sciences
• Early evolutionary origins of religion: the cognitive revolution, agenticity, patternicity, theory of mind, animism, spiritism, polytheism
• Gobekli Tepe as the earliest religious ceremonial structure
• Machu Picchu and Inca religion
• Human sacrifice and religion
• Apocalypto
• Pizzaro, Atahualpa, and Spanism/European colonialism & eradication of New World religions
• Time’s arrow and Time’s cycle: Asian Cyclicism
• Dharmic religion (India), Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Shinoism (Hirohito)
• Old World Hard Polytheism (vs. Soft?) & New World Hard Polytheism (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Celtic, Greek, Old Norse, Siberian totemism, Alaskan totemism
• Colonialism and missionaries extinguished many polytheistic religions
• Linear Monotheism: Atenism, Zoroastrianism, El, Yahweh, Jehovah, Monad, Allah (linear time: one birth, one life, one death, one eternal afterlife; dualistic cosmology: good vs. evil, light vs. dark, heaven vs. hell); proselytic: conversion efforts
• Abrahamic Monotheism 6th century BCE Second Temple Judaism and Samaritanism
• Included prophets: Noah, Abraham, Moses (60% of all religious people today)
• Tanakh sacred scripture 6th century BCE: Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, Quran
• Jesu-venerationism (1st century CE): Ebionism (Jesus as prophet but not divine), Traditional Christianity, Biblical Demiurgism (primal good god Monad, evil creator spirit Demiurge; saw Jesus as the spiritual emanation of the Monad), Islam
• Reformation: Catholicism split into Protestantism, Anglicanism
• Islam: revered 25 prophets from Adam to Jesus, ending with Muhammad
• Expansion of Islam through conquests in the 7th and 8th centuries CE
• 4 Generalizations:
  • Organized Religions are historically related at one ideological level or another (illustrated by trees);
  • Largest major branches today were historically intertwined with major political powers;
  • Authority of women declined with the rise of male dominated pantheons, empires, clergies, caliphates;
  • Religion played a role in our species’ early ability to adapt to its social and physical environment: tribalism was a competitive advantage for early humans in which communal societies that developed agriculture, commerce, educational facilities, and armies out-competed less communitarian groups.

Show Notes

How We Believe

In my 2000 book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, I defined religion as “a social institution that evolved as an integral mechanism of human culture to create and promote myths, to encourage altruism and reciprocal altruism, and to reveal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of the community.” That is, there are two primary purposes of religion:

1. The creation of stories and myths that address the deepest questions we can ask ourselves: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What does our ultimate future hold?
2. The production of moral systems to provide social cohesion for the most social of all the social primates. God figures prominently in both these modes as the ultimate subject of mythmaking and the final arbiter of moral dilemmas and enforcer of ethical precepts.

From Shermer’s book Truth

“Jesus was a great spiritual teacher who had a profound effect on many people,” writes Lance Grande in his magisterial The Evolution of Religions, admitting that “he became what is probably the most influential person in history.” But this says nothing about the verisimilitude of the miracle claims made in Jesus’ name. In fact, as Grande notes, neither during his own lifetime (4BC-30 CE), nor in the earliest writings of the New Testament by Paul, were miracle claims made in Jesus’s name. Even Paul’s mention of the resurrection of Christ was described in 1 Corinthians (15:44) as a spiritual event rather than a literal one: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.” In Paul’s writings about Christ, says Grande, “he speaks of him in a mystical sense, as a spiritual entity of human consciousness.” Many contemporary groups, in fact, “saw Christ as a spirit that possessed the man Jesus at his baptism and left him before his death at the crucifixion” (called “separationism”). But since political monarchs in the first century CE were treated as divine, Christian proselytizers began to refer to Jesus as the “King of Kings,” and so came to pass the deification of an otherwise mortal man. Here is how Grande recaps the transformation:

Reports of specific miracles only began to appear several decades after the death of Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark (65-70 CE) and in later gospels (80-100CE). This suggests that stories of miracles (e.g., controlling the weather, creating loaves and fishes out of nothing, turning water into wine, healing the sick, and raising the physical dead) were layered into the story of Jesus as expressions of an ultimate God experience.

And as is typical of myths in the making, in the retelling across peoples, spaces, and generations, layers of improbability are added as a test of faith:

Once the stories of miracles began to appear in early Christianity, they were retold repeatedly, until they became ingrained beliefs. More stories were added, such as miracles about singing angels, stars announcing earthly happenings, and even a fetus (that of John the Baptist in his mother Elizabeth’s womb) leaping to acknowledge the anticipated power of another fetus (that of Jesus in his mother Mary’s womb). These details, many of which probably began as metaphorical lessons, gradually became accepted by many followers as literal historic truths. It is probable that some of these stories were never intended as documents of historical fact.

From metaphorical lessons to historic truths. Perhaps this is what the author of the Gospel of John meant when he wrote (John 20:31): “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”

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In an era of terrifying unpredictability, we race to address complex crises with quick, sure algorithms, bullet points, and tweets. How could we find the clarity and vision so urgently needed today by being unsure? Uncertain is about the triumph of doing just that. A scientific adventure tale set on the front lines of a volatile era, this epiphany of a book by award-winning author Maggie Jackson shows us how to skillfully confront the unexpected and the unknown, and how to harness not-knowing in the service of wisdom, invention, mutual understanding, and resilience.

Long neglected as a topic of study and widely treated as a shameful flaw, uncertainty is revealed to be a crucial gadfly of the mind, jolting us from the routine and the assumed into a space for exploring unseen meaning. Far from luring us into inertia, uncertainty is the mindset most needed in times of flux and a remarkable antidote to the narrow-mindedness of our day. In laboratories, political campaigns, and on the frontiers of artificial intelligence, Jackson meets the pioneers decoding the surprising gifts of being unsure. Each chapter examines a mode of uncertainty-in-action, from creative reverie to the dissent that spurs team success. Step by step, the art and science of uncertainty reveal being unsure as a skill set for incisive thinking and day-to-day flourishing.

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her pioneering writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Winner of the 2020 Dorothy Lee Book Award for excellence in technology criticism, her book Distracted was compared by FastCompany.com to Silent Spring for its prescient critique of technology’s excesses, named a Best Summer Book by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and was a prime inspiration for Google’s 2018 global initiative to promote digital well-being. Jackson is also the author of Living with Robots and The State of the American Mind. Her expertise has been featured in The New York Times, Business Week, Vanity Fair, Wired.com, O Magazine, and The Times of London; on MSNBC, NPR’s All Things Considered, Oprah Radio, The Takeaway, and on the Diane Rehm Show and the Brian Lehrer Show; and in multiple TV segments and film documentaries worldwide. Her speaking career includes appearances at Google, Harvard Business School, and the Chautauqua Institute. Jackson lives with her family in New York and Rhode Island.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

In a special double segment that is reminiscent of The National Enquirer in its heyday, 60 Minutes has aired another dramatic story on Havana Syndrome. If it had been a sporting event, the score would have been 8-0: eight people interviewed and not a single skeptic.

Billed by CBS News as a “breakthrough” in their five-year-long investigation, the episode that aired Sunday night, March 31, 2024, raises many important questions—not about the existence of Havana Syndrome, but the present state of journalistic integrity. As someone who has followed this saga from the beginning, the new 60 Minutes report was a case study in fearmongering and selective omission. The program was filled with misleading statements and circumstantial evidence that were used to gin up a story that is on life support after the U.S. intelligence community concluded last year that “Havana Syndrome” is likely a condition that never existed.

In the leadup to the broadcast, CBS News teased the segment with the headlines “Targeting Americans” and “Breakthrough in Havana Syndrome Investigation.” Yet in the report it was described as “a possible breakthrough” and there was no conclusive proof that Americans, or anyone else, have been targeted.¹

60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley featured an interview with Gregory Edgreen, a former American military intelligence officer who oversaw the Pentagon investigation into “Havana Syndrome.” He told Pelley that the present situation is dire for American security as “the intelligence officers and our diplomats working abroad are being removed from their posts with traumatic brain injuries—they’re being neutralized.”² CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

As one of the few black students in his philosophy program at Columbia University years ago, Coleman Hughes wondered why his peers seemed more pessimistic about the state of American race relations than his own grandparents–who lived through segregation. The End of Race Politics is the culmination of his years-long search for an answer.

Contemplative yet audacious, The End of Race Politics is necessary reading for anyone who questions the race orthodoxies of our time. Hughes argues for a return to the ideals that inspired the American Civil Rights movement, showing how our departure from the colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment marked by draconian interpersonal etiquette, failed corporate diversity and inclusion efforts, and poisonous race-based policies that hurt the very people they intend to help. Hughes exposes the harmful side effects of Kendi-DiAngelo style antiracism, from programs that distribute emergency aid on the basis of race to revisionist versions of American history that hide the truth from the public.

Through careful argument, Hughes dismantles harmful beliefs about race, proving that reverse racism will not atone for past wrongs and showing why race-based policies will lead only to the illusion of racial equity. By fixating on race, we lose sight of what it really means to be anti-racist. A racially just, colorblind society is possible. Hughes gives us the intellectual tools to make it happen.

Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy and applied ethics. Coleman’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The City Journal and The Spectator. He appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2021.

Shermer and Hughes discuss:

• If he is “half-black, half-Hispanic” why is he considered “black”?
• What is race biologically and culturally?
• Race as a social construction
• Population genetics and race differences: sports, I.Q., crime, etc.
• Base Rate Neglect, Base Rate Taboos
• The real state of race relations in America: surveys, call-back studies, search data, etc.
• George Floyd, BLM, Ibram X Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Isabella Wilkinson, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the neo-racists
• Institutionalized neo-racism: the academy and business
• What it means to be “colorblind”
• Viewpoint epistemology and race
• Affirmative action and correcting for past wrongs
• Lyndon Johnson’s famous quote, June 4, 1965, Howard University: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
• Why are there still big gaps in income, wealth, home ownership, CEO representation, Congressional representation, etc.?
• Myth of Black Weakness
• Myth of No Progress
• Myth of Undoing the Past
• The Fall of Minneapolis
• Reparations
• The future of colorblindness.

Read Michael H. Bernstein’s review of Coleman Hughes book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Several years ago, I came across an imaginative essay entitled “Explaining Affirmative Action to a Martian.”¹ The author, who I had never heard of, described a fictious interaction where a human explains the rationale of affirmative action to an alien. Among its gems is the following interaction:

Earthling: Black people were enslaved and subjugated for centuries, so, sometimes they get special dispensations. It’s only fair…

Visitor: So those black kids…were enslaved and subjugated, so they get to score 450 [standardized test] points lower than Asians?

Earthling: Well these particular black students didn’t experience slavery or Jim Crow themselves… But their grandparents might have experienced Jim Crow.

Visitor: Might have?

Earthling: Well, around half of black students at elite colleges are actually the children of black immigrants so they have no ancestral connection to American slavery or Jim Crow…

Visitor: … I’m utterly confused by you creatures.

The author of this essay was Coleman Hughes, a Columbia University undergraduate at the time. In the intervening years, Hughes has been one of the leading voices on race. As a long-time listener and fan of Hughes, I was eager to read his first book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. It did not disappoint.

Hughes has a gift for clearly and dispassionately evaluating one of our most explosive social topics. Oftentimes in today’s world, the political left exaggerates the prevalence of racism while the political right a priori assumes that all such accusations lack merit. What we so desperately need is a middle ground: An analysis that deals honestly with the racism which does exist without inflating it. This is what Coleman Hughes does. CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” —Sherlock Holmes

The “game” of my title refers to the one played by media outlets and podcasters for the past seven years interviewing rogue scientists and conspiracy theorists to spin tales of Americans being zapped by nefarious foreign actors with sonic or microwave weapons. This includes the authors of studies suggesting that there were brain and inner ear injuries suffered by many victims of Havana Syndrome when those studies were clearly flawed and any competent mainstream scientist who read them would have seen these shortcomings. Indeed, they did—there were at least two classified studies that found no evidence of such attacks, instead emphasizing the likely role of stress.^{1, 2, 3, 4} Publicly, these politicians and pundits were referring to the events in Cuba as attacks, yet gave no hint of the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies.⁵

On March 18, 2024, the National Institutes of Health released two studies that failed to find any evidence of brain or inner ear damage in victims of Havana Syndrome—a mysterious array of ailments that have befallen U.S. Government personnel in Havana, Cuba, since 2016.^{6, 7} The results were published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are in stark contrast with two earlier studies published in the same journal in 2018 and 2019 that purported to uncover brain anomalies in American diplomats and intelligence officers who served in Havana.^{8, 9} While some media outlets are portraying this discrepancy as a deepening mystery, it is nothing of the sort.

The earlier publications were riddled with flaws.¹⁰ In fact, the editorial board of the European journal Cortex called for the authors of the 2018 study to clarify their methods or retract the article.¹¹ Their attempt at clarification did little to quell the controversy.¹² The NIH study was more comprehensive and took great pains to have a well-matched group of control subjects. The studies were conducted over a five-year period beginning in 2018. Sophisticated MRI scans were taken of the brains of Havana Syndrome participants and compared to a healthy control group of government workers in similar jobs. Some of the control subjects even worked at the American Embassy in Havana. CONTINUE READING THIS POST…

Order the Artificial Intelligence issue of Skeptic magazine (in print or digital format).

Looking ahead to the 2024 election, most Americans sense that something is deeply wrong with our democracy. We face extreme polarization, increasingly problematic candidates, and a government that can barely function, let alone address urgent challenges. Maxwell Stearns has been a constitutional law professor for over 30 years. He argues that our politics are not merely dysfunctional. Our constitutional system is broken. And without radical reform, the U.S. risks collapse or dictatorship.

In Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, Stearns argues that we are in the midst of the biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, and that the roots of the crisis are in the U.S. Constitution itself. The Framers never intended a two-party system. In fact, they feared entrenched political parties and mistakenly believed they had designed a scheme that avoided them. And yet the structures they created paved the way for our entrenched two-party system.

From the start, our systems of elections and executive accountability thwarted the Framers’ expectations. In the information age, it has spun out of control, and the result is a hyperpolarized Republican-Democratic duopoly that has poisoned our politics and society and threatens to end our democracy. The two-party system now undermines our basic constitutional structures, with separation of powers and checks and balances yielding to hyper-partisan loyalties. Rather than compromises arising from shifting coalitions, we experience ever-widening policy swings based on which party takes control of the White House in increasingly combative elections. The restrictive nature of the choices voters face in each election cycle encourages battles for the souls of the Democratic and Republican Parties, with more moderate voices on one side and more ideologically strident ones on the other. This two-party stranglehold on our politics is exactly what the Framers feared.

To survive as a democracy, we must end the two-party deadlock and introduce more political parties. But viable third parties are a pipe dream in our system given the current rules of the game. Stearns argues that we must change the rules, amend the Constitution, and transform America into a parliamentary democracy. Unlike our two-party presidential system, well-functioning parliamentary systems have multiple political parties that represent an array of perspectives, giving voters more choices that better align with their views. In such systems, parties compete in elections and then, based on the results, form a majority governing coalition. In contrast with the endless hyper-partisanship that pushes Democrats and Republicans further and further apart, coalitions represent the nation’s ideological core, capturing views of multiple parties, accommodating competing positions, and moderating the most extreme ideologies or partisan commitments. This improves the outcomes for citizens, which helps to explain why surveys have found that voters derive greater satisfaction and the governments are more responsive in parliamentary systems.

Achieving a robust parliamentary democracy in the U.S. requires amending the Constitution. Although this is difficult to do, Stearns explains why his specific set of proposals is more politically viable than other increasingly prominent reform proposals, which cannot be enacted, will not end our constitutional crisis, or both. What does he propose doing?

1. Double the size of the House of Representatives, with half continuing to be elected by district, a new cohort elected by party, and the entire chamber based on proportional representation. This reform will allow us to end the two-party duopoly and create space for thriving third-, fourth- and fifth-parties that better align with voters’ values/worldviews.
2. Transform how we choose the president and vice president. Power to choose the president will shift from individual votes processed through the Electoral College to party coalitions within the House of Representatives. They will select the president and vice president from party slates by inviting up to five party leaders, in descending order of representation, to negotiate a majority coalition.
3. Provide a new mechanism for ending a failing presidency. The House can remove the president with a 60 percent no confidence vote based on “maladministration.” This standard is lower than the requirements for impeachment, and the amendments leave the impeachment clause intact. These reforms infuse parliamentary selection, proportional representation, and coalition building into the U.S. constitutional system while retaining and preserving our most essential institutional structures. The proposal would end the two-party system, create space for multiple parties, end partisan gerrymandering, moderate the most extreme ideologies, reduce polarization, and incentivize negotiation and compromise.

Maxwell L. Stearns is the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. He has authored dozens of articles and several books on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the economic analysis of law.

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In the Political Accuracy and Divisions Study (PADS), we conducted an extensive survey of over 3,000 American adults to assess their accuracy about a variety of controversial topics including, abortion, immigration, gender, race, crime, and the economy. So much of our political discourse revolves around these topics—but how much do we really know about these issues and the views of our fellow Americans? How informed are the loudest, most politically confident voices? We will examine the prevalence of misconceptions across the political continuum, and in doing so, we hope to offer a means by which to improve the quality of our national discourse.

For additional information, please feel free to contact the Skeptic Research Center by email: [email protected].

DATA BRIEFS

Additional data briefs that were shared on Twitter (X)

1. Do Hispanic Americans Identify with “Latinx”?
2. Are Voter ID Laws Racist?

REPORT (PADS-011)

Younger Generations are Least Accurate About Police Shootings and Least Trusting of Police

Eleventh report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Amidst the George Floyd anti-police riots, the Skeptic Research Center showed that Americans’ anti-police attitudes were influenced to a significant degree by their ignorance about the number of unarmed Black men shot by police (McCaffree & Saide, 2021; Saide, McCaffree & McCready, 2021). Probably due in part to mainstream media’s constant portrayals of police as bloodthirsty racist killers (e.g., Balko, 2022; Thompson, 2021), we found that Americans identifying as “very liberal” were extremely misinformed, with nearly 54% believing 1,000 or more unarmed black men were shot by police in 2019, and with over 22% of “very liberals” believing the number was 10,000 or more (the actual number is around 10). Given Americans’ continued fledgling trust in police–64% of Americans reported high levels of trust in police in 2004 compared to 43% in 2023 (Gallup Polling, 2023)—in this report we ask: how does Americans’ accuracy about policing vary by generation, and how does being inaccurate about policing relate to trust of police?

Download Report (PADS-011)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2024). Younger Generations are Least Accurate About Police Shootings and Least Trusting of Police. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-011.

REPORT (PADS-010)

Are Americans Losing Their Trust?

Tenth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Public opinion polling has revealed unprecedented drops in Americans’ institutional trust for several years now, and institutional trust reached a new low in 2023 (Jones, 2022; Saad, 2023). Americans’ trust in government, for example, is hovering at its lowest point since Pew polling began measuring it in 1958 (Pew Research Center, 2023). In 1973, 58% of Americans had “a great deal”/“quite a lot” of confidence in public schools—by 2023, this had fallen to 26%. Also in 1973, 42% of Americans had “a great deal”/“quite a lot” of confidence in Congress—by 2023, this had fallen to 8%. In 1975, 80% of people had “a great deal”/ “quite a lot” of confidence in the medical system, but by 2023, this number had fallen to 33% (the decline began long before COVID). And also across many other American institutions (see Gallup Polling, 2023). Some polling also suggests Americans have been losing trust in each other (not just in abstract institutional “systems”). For example, Pew polling found that 64% of Americans felt that trust in one another has “been shrinking,” (Rainie et al., 2019). In light of these concerning trends, we looked back through two of our own polls (one conducted in 2021, the other in 2022) and asked: how have Americans’ trust in institutions and each other changed?

Download Report (PADS-010)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2024). Americans Are Losing Their Trust. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-010.

REPORT (PADS-009)

Being “Liberal” in America

Ninth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Analysts have recognized for decades now that the world is becoming more liberal. It seems that the more removed people are from basic survival concerns, the more liberal their worldviews become, in the sense of being more accepting of cultural differences and more protective of civil rights. Some analysts have noted how paradoxically intolerant and dogmatic this trend has become in Western societies (i.e., the societies most removed from basic survival concerns): amongst many Western progressives, for example, all group disadvantages are assumed to always be a result of oppression, with oppression always being driven by white people (and usually men). Thus, it would seem that at the extremes, liberalism and the human tendency towards tribalism interact to produce both a demand for equality and justice as well as an insistence that one demographic group (white/European people) is accountable for most or all of the oppression and corruption in the world. In light of the controversies and nuances inherent in identifying as a modern liberal, in this report we ask: how do rates of identifying as “liberal” vary in the United States according to peoples’ generation, sex and race?

Download Report (PADS-009)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2024). Being “Liberal” in America. Skeptic Research Center. Political Accuracy and Divisions Study, PADS-009.

REPORT (PADS-008)

The Essence of Americans

Eighth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Part of human reasoning involves reducing people, animals, and things to their core essence, a tendency beginning in childhood (Ahn et al., 2001; Gelman, 2003). We define dogs and cats by different essences, for example, and we do the same for people when we define them by their sex, race, age, and the like. Though helpful as a crude way of categorizing things in the world, essentialism makes us prone to error. Believing, for example, that water is defined by the essential element of “wetness” will fail to recognize ice as water; or, believing that those with recent European ancestry are defined by the essential element of “whiteness” will fail to recognize variations in cultural background or individual experience (Roth et al., 2023). While essentialism feels useful in its simplifying of an otherwise complex reality, it can lead to negative stereotyping. Given that essentialist reasoning typically produces rigid categorizations of people, and that rigid categorizations of people might be conducive to political misinformation, conspiracism, or extremism (e.g., Buhagiar et al., 2018; Kurzwelly et al., 2020), in this report we ask: how common is the tendency to essentialize amongst the American public?

Download Report (PADS-008)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). How Commonly Do Americans Essentialize Each Other?. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-008.

REPORT (PADS-007)

How Accurate Are Americans About Economic Mobility?

Seventh report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

According to economists at Stanford University, economic mobility is a “fading American dream.” Richard Delgado, a founder of critical race theory, calls upward mobility a “myth” and suggests that, “the myth of upward mobility enables the wealthy to justify favorable treatment for themselves and cutbacks for the rest,” while reminding us that, “study after study shows that class membership in our society is relatively fixed.” In agreement, the Huffington Post regards economic class in America as “suffocating,” Mother Jones insists that America is a “thriving aristocracy” maintained by “powerful-yet-obscure entities,” and the New York Times informs us that class in America is a “caste system,” and that “the hierarchy of caste is… about power — which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources — which groups are seen as worthy of them, and which are not.” These claims are not new. As far back as 1897, Carrol D. Wright, the first commissioner of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, noted that, “the assertion that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer has…taken more complete possession of the popular mind than any other.” Yet, Wright went on to say that this assertion “is a false one, false in its premises and misleading in its influence.” Is poverty ubiquitous in America? Do people have any chance of improving their economic circumstances? To assess these claims and what Americans think about them, in this report we ask: how accurate are Americans about economic mobility?

Download Report (PADS-007)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). How Accurate Are Americans About Economic Mobility?. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-007.

REPORT (PADS-006)

Depression and Political Ideology

Sixth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Is life in America hopeless? In a peer-reviewed article entitled “Fuck the patriarchy: Towards an intersectional politics of irreverent rage,” sociologist Helen Wood suggests that, “with climate change [and] widening inequality… we are truly fucked” (Wood, 2019). In 2020, Chad Wolf, acting U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary, declared white supremacy to be the most persistent and lethal domestic threat to the United States (Behrmann, 2020). A recent New York Times feature article described one professor’s struggle to remove “whiteness” from universities given that the study of classic literature, “has been instrumental to the invention of ‘whiteness’ and its continued domination” (Poser, 2021). Some popular academic theories even doubt the possibility of moral progress (Seamster & Ray, 2018). But in 2021, a Manhattan Institute report found, among other things, that reading social justice scholarship significantly reduced Black Americans’ hopefulness and motivation (Kaufmann, 2021). The author of the report speculated that, though intended to empower women and racial minorities, misleading characterizations of America as a white supremacist patriarchy may do the exact opposite. In light of this possibility, in this report we asked: “How is mental health related to believing this popular political rhetoric?”

Download Report (PADS-006)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Depression and Political Ideology Skeptic Research Center, PADS-006.

Follow-up to PADS-006

Posted on Twitter on August 3, 2023

Download “Depression and Political Ideology” (PADS-006F)

REPORT (PADS-005)

How Informed Are Americans About Women’s Opportunities?

Fifth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

Feminist academics argue that “patriarchy,” or the oppression of women in society by men, affects both public and private life. They argue, for example, that male managers exploit their female colleagues in the workplace, male script writers perpetuate demeaning views of women and girls on television, husbands force their wives into near-constant subservience in the home, and that patriarchy not only prevents women from succeeding in society but also causes numerous other problems (Bates, 2021). One activist wrote, “We need…to deconstruct and exorcise patriarchy – which is the root of so many other forms of oppression, from imperialism to racism, from transphobia to the denigration of the Earth” (Ensler, 2021). In apparent agreement, the American Psychological Association now regards masculinity as “harmful” (APA, 2018). Additionally, according to leading sociologist Barbara Risman and others, “challenging men’s dominance is [also] a necessary condition of ending the subordination of lesbians and gay men,” and that, “If as feminists, we believe that gender is socially constructed and used to create inequality, our political goal must be to move to a post-gender society” (Risman, 2004; 2009). Due to the alarming nature of these claims, in this report we ask: “How informed are Americans about women’s achievements and opportunities?”
Download Report (PADS-005)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). How Informed Are Americans About Women’s Opportunities? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-005.

REPORT (PADS-004)

Are “White People” Morally Deviant?

Fourth report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

For decades in the U.S., and particularly in the last few years, journalists and intellectuals have suggested that “white people” are socially or morally deviant. Time magazine, for example, published the claim that white supremacy is the “foundational principle” of culture in the U.S., preventing non-whites from having “perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect grades…[or regarded as a] perfect employee and colleague.” In 2020, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture claimed “rational thinking” and “hard work” are white supremacist ideals that oppress non-whites. In a recent opinion editorial, Savala Nolan, the Executive Director of the Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law, said “white people…disappoint me. They frustrate me. They make me sad.” Meanwhile, books describing the immorality of white people, such as Caste, How to be an Anti-Racist, and White Fragility have all soared to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. Given these strong opinions, in this report we ask: what does the public really think about the (apparent) immorality of white people?
Download Report (PADS-004)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Are “White People” Morally Deviant? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-004.

Follow-up to PADS-004

Posted on Twitter on June 13, 2023

Download “Noble Savage Myth and Education” (PADS-004F)

REPORT (PADS-003)

Update: How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing?

Third report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

“Defund the police” was the rallying cry of liberals in the Summer of 2020, motivating “mostly peaceful” protests that led to property damage in excess of two billion dollars across at least 20 US states (Johansmeyer, 2021). To better understand the motivation behind these protests, in 2020, we surveyed people about their estimates of the number of unarmed black men shot by police in 2019 and found a shocking degree of inaccuracy, particularly amongst progressives. In this report, we present an update on these data and ask: have people become more knowledgeable when it comes to the available data on fatal police shootings of unarmed black Americans?
Download Report (PADS-003)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Update: How Informed are Americans about Race and Policing? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-003.

REPORT (PADS-002)

Trans, Identity and Institutional Controversies

Second report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

A particularly salient culture-war issue in contemporary American society concerns the relationship between gender identity and biological sex. While some insist that peoples’ subjective interpretation of their sex is paramount, others insist objective markers (like chromosomes) are practically more relevant. Most recently, this issue has been enflamed by two central institutional controversies: biological males identifying as women competing in women’s sports leagues and sex/gender-oriented material being taught to young children in schools. Disagreement abounds, with liberals sometimes downplaying the severity of these controversies, and conservatives doing the opposite. In this report, we ask: what do Americans really think about these issues?

Download Report (PADS-002)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K., & Saide, A. (2023). Trans, Identity and Institutional Controversies. Skeptic Research Center, PADS-002.

REPORT (PADS-001)

What Do Americans Believe About Abortion and How Accurate Are They?

First report in the Political Accuracy & Divisions Study (PADS)

In this report, one of a series of reports on controversial topics in American culture, we investigated the degree to which partisans in the United States hold accurate beliefs about abortion and about each other. Herein, we covered three central questions in the American abortion debate:

1. What abortion policies do Americans really prefer?
2. How accurate are Americans’ beliefs about the prevalence of abortion and the recent Supreme Court ruling, and what variables influence their accuracy?
3. How accurate are Americans regarding the abortion beliefs of other people?

The over-arching goal of this report was thus to contribute to our collective understanding of what Americans really believe, as well as how accurate they are about the topic of abortion and about one another.

Download Report (PADS-001)

Suggested Citation: McCaffree, K. & Saide, A. (2023). What Do Americans Believe About Abortion and How Accurate Are We? Skeptic Research Center, PADS-001.