How Much Credit Do You Deserve for Your Life?

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[00:00:00] Duncan Pritchard
The death is with you on the mountain. There's this phrase. I use it in chapters of the book, which I think is really interesting. It's this idea that when you undertake that kind of activity, you have to respect the fact that you could die at any moment. And that's what it is to respect what it is you're doing, the craft. So the standard view about risk is a probabilistic one. So we determine the level of risk by working out the likelihood of the risk event. So in this case, it would be like falling, dying, or whatever. What's the likelihood he's going to die?

[00:00:24] Duncan Pritchard
So I just think the standard view doesn't capture it. And so, but my view does. So this is where we get to the positive bit. So I think the level of risk is primarily to be understood in terms of what I call fragility. It's the relationship between luck and risk. So I have this view that luck and risk are counterparts. They're not quite the same thing, but they're almost the same thing, but viewed from different perspectives. So risk, I think, is inherently forward-looking, and luck is inherently backward-looking.

[00:00:47] Duncan Pritchard
So think about, you know, like a sniper's bullet, you're on a battlefield and a sniper's bullet whizzes past your ear. Well, viewed forward-looking, you know, you're at high risk of dying. And then backward-looking, well, now you're lucky to be alive. It's like the same fragile event, but one viewed from a forward-looking versus a backward-looking perspective. I'm a big fan of Formula One. You can't really make sense of what's going on there except with the right theory of risk. I mean, what it is for an F1 driver to drive at the very limit, it's not to say that they're going to crash all the time because you're not a great F1 driver if you're crashing all the time.

[00:01:14] Duncan Pritchard
The idea is you're at the very limit, but no, but no further. The skill is all about taking it to the limit. So the fragility is right there. The crash is right there, as it were, next to you, but you don't crash. But the level of the risk, no matter no, no preparation is going to reduce the level of risk. It's in the nature of what he's doing, but it's high risk. The fragility is built into it. As I say, I think this relates to our flourishing as people because there are lots of decisions we have to make, core decisions in our lives where they are inherently fragile.

[00:01:38] Duncan Pritchard
There's no way of knowing in advance things are going to work out.

[00:01:45] Michael Shermer
Hey, everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. My guest today is Dr. Duncan Pritchard. He's a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a University of California Irvine Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. He works mainly in epistemology and has published widely in this area, including the application of epistemological ideas to such domains as religion, law, and cognitive science, the search for truth in all these areas.

[00:02:14] Michael Shermer
We'll get into that in just a minute. He's also the director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology, and Society, devoted to research that approaches epistemological questions from an applied and interdisciplinary angle. Thank goodness. None of this airy-fairy philosophical stuff. We want to know how to apply it. With a particular focus on the application of epistemology to technology, technological and societal issues.

[00:02:39] Michael Shermer
This includes such topics as social epistemology, intellectual virtue, political epistemology. Huh, I wonder what that is. Are there political truths? We'll get into that. Epistemology of law. How do you know what's true? Did the guy really do it or not? Okay, we'll get into that. Medical epistemology, epistemology of cognitive science, knowledge and technology, relativism. That's a problem. Skepticism, that's what we do.

[00:03:02] Michael Shermer
Epistemology of education and of religion, my favorite topic. Okay, but he has a new book out. It's called Tempting Fate, a Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life. All right, Duncan, nice to see you. Thanks for coming on.

[00:03:18] Duncan Pritchard
Thanks for having me.

[00:03:19] Michael Shermer
I saw your book when your publisher sent it to me. I thought, I mean, when I saw it, it's coming out. I got, I got to read this because I'm writing a book about luck. Well, it's called Contingency. It's about, you know, randomness, chance, luck, all this kind of stuff, and how much of lives, I think, depend on this or turn out this way, much more than most social scientists or any of us intuitively think it does. It's nature or nurture. You know, it's the environment, it's my genes.

[00:03:43] Michael Shermer
Well, sometimes it's just luck, right? Or it's contingency. It's chance. It's randomness. Just shit happens. And it's hard to quantify that, right? So I was curious to know how you thought about all that. But before we get into the details of that, what is this Center for Knowledge, Technology, Society? what do you do? Is this a part of your day job? And like, what are you working on this week?

[00:04:04] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, it is. You know what? The thing we that we had one project became so successful that it kind of swamped everything else, which was back to 2019. And what we're trying to do is bring educating for intellectual virtue, intellectual character into the curriculum at UCI. And no one's done this before. It's been done in schools and prisons and all kinds of other places, but no one's ever done it at R1 university before.

[00:04:27] Duncan Pritchard
So we, myself and colleagues in the social sciences and education and sociology, we got together and we started this project. So it's both pedagogical, but it's also a research project. We're sort of building it into the curriculum and then we're studying alongside that the effects, the educational effects. And then we're doing a longitudinal type thing. And it's been hugely successful and it's kind of taken over a lot of what the center started off as just one strand, but now it's become like the main strand.

[00:04:57] Duncan Pritchard
And it has a lot of outreach, a lot of the modules we create get used elsewhere. And the research that it's been producing has been pretty huge. And a lot of people have been coming to study it because, like I say, it's the first time it's been done. There's a whole educational paradigm about educating for character and the importance of educating for character, but no one's done it with this focus on intellectual character at a big public university before. So that's been my kind of, I mean, that's become, it's overtaken.

[00:05:24] Duncan Pritchard
It was like a side thing, and now it's become kind of my main thing. And in fact, we've got a new center. It's just launched, so it hasn't got a website yet or anything. It's the Center for Civic Flourishing. So the new thing is to focus on character, but in the civic sense. So universities are promoting the civic good through promoting intellectual goods. You know, when universities are true to their intellectual mission, the idea is they can promote the civic good and help for example, students to understand, you know, disagreement is part of education.

[00:05:58] Duncan Pritchard
You know, that's what you're there. You're there to be uncomfortable. You're there to think, to learn to think for yourself. And so, yeah, so that's the new exciting thing we're in now, the civic virtues. We call it civic flourishing.

[00:06:16] Michael Shermer
And what does that mean, civic virtues? You mean how to be a citizen in a democracy and participate?

[00:06:21] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah. So whatever kind of character traits you'd need to be good at that. So in the intellectual virtues stuff, we call them the anteater virtues. I don't know. Peter the anteater is the mascot for UC Irvine. But there are things like intellectual humility, intellectual tenacity, curiosity, integrity. So a lot of these things, they govern as we say how you argue. So what is it to argue well?

[00:06:46] Duncan Pritchard
You know, it's to be open to your own fallibility, to listen to others, to focus on the argument, not the person, to try to understand that arguments, that there are differences of opinion and to respect differences of opinion, and to treat arguments as a good, you know, like we could treat them as things. You know, it's not about winning arguments, it's about like as it were, trying to understand each other and trying to understand people's points of view and trying to collectively come together to reach a collective understanding.

[00:07:18] Duncan Pritchard
And these things, of course, are tremendously important in a democracy. They're tremendously important to the civic good. You know, we want students to come out of a university not with a blinkered way of seeing the world, but with an open and inquiring way of seeing the world. And only if they're like that will they be able to participate, it seems to us as good citizens in a democracy. So that's what we're about.

[00:07:42] Duncan Pritchard
And like I say, we're studying this as well. It's not just like a pedagogical thing where we've got people going through this program and then we have this massive database at UC Irvine. It's really interesting. It tracks so many different variables, like students coming here, even things like their click data on the learning platforms and things. We know so much about these students. I mean, it's all anonymized, obviously, it's aggregated, but it means that we can get this really, really fine-grained picture of students and what they're up to and what they're interested in.

[00:08:06] Duncan Pritchard
And we can track them through and we can see how these initiatives are changing their behaviors.

[00:08:13] Michael Shermer
That is so interesting. Duncan, this is really important because I mean, a number of us have noted the shift in the telos of academia from the search for truth to social activism as if they already know the truth. The truth is the following positions on cultural issues and wars and so on. And our job is just to correct you if you don't agree, right?

[00:08:37] Michael Shermer
I mean, just to speak generally, that's been a problem, it seems to me.

[00:08:42] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, the main people who are involved in this, we're very, you know, we're very concerned about the sort of role of activism in universities and how it's usurped the sort of scholarly goal of universities, which is primarily an intellectual goal. And so that's what we're interested in, bringing the intellectual good back into the heart of education, both in terms of scholarship, but also in terms of pedagogy and making that central.

[00:09:09] Duncan Pritchard
And then the thought is that universities only really contribute to the public good, the civic good, if they have that focus. You can see this now. I think a lot of loss of trust of universities is because they see us as, as you say, activists. They don't see us as truth seekers. We need to get back to that.

[00:09:27] Michael Shermer
They do. Absolutely. And there's a good reason for that. Right? I mean, just to pluck one off the headlines, the whole Jason Arday scandal at Cambridge. I mean, how could anybody defend this? And it just seems to be, well, because he's black. It's like, what? He's plagiarizing. He made up, he lied. He's [a fabulist?]. He faked. Isn't that the higher goal?

[00:09:50] Michael Shermer
Truth telling?

[00:09:52] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, exactly. In fact, I don't know. I'm sure you've been following this as much as I have. There's been a whole group of people now who seem to be arguing their defense of him as if you say, well, plagiarism is not so bad. Making up stuff is not so bad. Yeah, it is quite incredible. And like just a failure to understand basic things. Like the, you know, there's this Cofnas guy who was the, you know, the whistleblower.

[00:10:18] Duncan Pritchard
And, you know, there's a letter going around I just signed, which it's just an obvious thing. Whatever you might think about, like him and his research, whatever you might think about, that's a completely separate issue to the idea that he should be punished for whistleblowing. You know, that it seems like as scholars, we ought to be able to keep these two things apart. They should be pretty easy for us to keep apart. But so many people just, I think it's because the activism, this activism idea, the activism usurps the truth goal, that basic distinctions like that just get lost somewhere in the noise.

[00:10:51] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Do you see this more in the social sciences and humanities than say economics or physics or biology or some of the other fields?

[00:11:00] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, yeah you do. i mean it's it's it's it's definitely, there's a kind of, um it's funny, there's a kind of relativism that is, there's... I mean, my view about this is it's actually a small minority, uh but it's a very vocal minority. And so it looks like it's more people than it is. We we had this year, at um the campus-wide theme at uh UCI, uh the year before last was called the Year of Scholarly Values and it the Chancellor, He brought it in specifically to get us back to thinking about what are our scholarly values.

[00:11:31] Duncan Pritchard
And we had lots of events. and I chaired the the committee and we we did lots of things. And it was really interesting going around campuses, going around the campus and talking to lots of people. And I think a lot of people feel this frustration, a lot of academics, about the fact that our mission has been usurped in this way. So it's it's actually, I think, more of a fringe thing. But as I say, the people who who promote this fringe idea, this kind of relativistic idea, uh where you know the politics usurps.

[00:11:56] Duncan Pritchard
Truth, um they're very vocal. So it can feel like there's more of them than there are. But I do trust in universities, a lot of it's down to this.

[00:12:09] Michael Shermer
Yeah, because the people that are more mainstream, they don't write letters to the editor. They don't march with placards. They don't go and make TikTok videos, right? They're quieter, right? The silent majority is. Nixon called him. I think that's probably the case. I used to talk about this when I was giving a lot of public university talks before COVID, when the whole cancel culture thing took off.

[00:12:34] Michael Shermer
And most of the campuses I went in, I never saw anything. If I watch Fox News every week, there's the crazy campus craziness video clips, and they're real. But most campuses, you don't see that, right? It's just students just going about their days, taking classes and going back to their dorms, right? So it's the minority that get the loud voices. Yeah, that's a disturbing thing. Okay.

[00:12:57] Michael Shermer
Well, that's. that. Yeah, I just wanted to ask you about some of your epistemological statements here, subjects you're interested in. Like, how is truth determined in politics since we're talking about that?

[00:13:12] Duncan Pritchard
Well, my interest there actually is more the civic virtues. You know, what is it to argue well in the public domain? Because it seems to me like in a democracy, we've got what characterizes democracy is pluralistic ideas about the common good. And we have to navigate that, and we have to do that in ways that are respectful for each other. And so I think it's really important to teach people how to argue well.

[00:13:37] Duncan Pritchard
Now, arguing well doesn't just mean like the one way [to construe it?] is like winning arguments. But I think it's a different thing. You know, the very idea of liberalism should go back to its original meaning. There's an element of charity there. It's built into the word. Something historians have studied, you know, and this idea of being charitable to your opponent, right? We're a common humanity and we share a common world, and it's not we're not going to get anywhere by winning arguments over each other or being clever or whatever.

[00:14:05] Duncan Pritchard
We have to understand each other and we have to find ways of achieving that common understanding. And I think there, so the truth seeking there, it's not the dangerous to give up on the idea of truth as a good because the nature of the truths are they're not the kinds of things that we're going to easily establish as we can in the scientific case. But I think, no, we have to keep that value.

[00:14:29] Duncan Pritchard
We just have to understand that in certain kinds of domains, it's very difficult to secure. And it becomes more important than how you argue so much as what the conclusions of those arguments are. You know, there's ways of arguing with each other such that we can still, as it were, work together. But there's ways of arguing with each other where it's going to destroy the democracy. I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why it has a [bad rep now?], the sort of Greco-Roman tradition.

[00:14:58] Duncan Pritchard
But there's a reason why we keep going back to that, why democratic societies keep going back to that, because they were struggling with these very, I mean, no other classical tradition didn't have democracy, right? Democracy comes later everywhere else in the world. It's just a peculiarity of the Greco-Roman tradition they had democracy. So they're already struggling with these ideas. And so, you know, that's one reason why I think that tradition is very important to us because it gives us a way of grounding our thoughts about this.

[00:15:24] Duncan Pritchard
Because we've already gone through this. We've had, we have, you know, many centuries of trying to struggle with these ideas and what's important about sustaining a democracy, a republic.

[00:15:35] Michael Shermer
I always like Jefferson's quote: Let friends be wrong.

[00:15:39] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah.

[00:15:40] Michael Shermer
Of course, said friends think you're wrong, and you have to recognize that. So you have to steel man their argument, and they have to steel man your argument. And then, and then what? And then, well, so here's how I think about some of these issues: like, you know, is climate change real? Yeah, okay, we can determine that. What's the data, you know, and so on and so forth. Do vaccines cause autism? No, they don't. And here's the data, and so on. We can get to some of those.

[00:16:04] Michael Shermer
But other kinds of truth, like what's the right percentage of immigration that we should allow into a country? Well, there's no right number. There's, you know, if you're in this party, you think it should be higher. And if you're in that other party, you think it should be lower, right? So, in a way, a democracy election is an experiment. Like, okay, we're going to put these people in power. They're going to change the numbers in this other direction.

[00:16:27] Michael Shermer
And then we'll see how it goes. And if we like it, we'll keep voting them in. And if we don't like it, we'll bring in the other party.

[00:16:33] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah. No, exactly. And I think one thing about this interesting public reason is that it tests like a consistency test. So one thing you want to have in debates is to, I mean, let's say take an issue like a vex issue like immigration. So as you say, people have different views about what the level should be. But people have other beliefs. They have other beliefs about like how much of a safety net there should be, how much of a welfare state, and how much a country can afford and things like that.

[00:17:02] Duncan Pritchard
And all these beliefs intersect with one another. No political belief is in isolation. Famously, if you allow a lot of immigration and you have a welfare state, then of course that's going to cost a lot, right? This is one of the reasons America had free immigration before it had a welfare state. You can have the one, they happily coexist if you don't have a welfare state, you can have as much immigration as you like.

[00:17:28] Duncan Pritchard
And it becomes a problem. So you can try and work through with public reason the sort of consistency test. Like your beliefs over here, your beliefs are there, and how do they fit together? If you want more immigration, for example, are you paying for it? So I think these kind of consistency tests, that's kind of like the bedrock of public reason.

[00:17:51] Duncan Pritchard
We impose those tests on each other. Hopefully we do it in a way that's in good faith. But it's a way of working through, it's a truth-directed way of working through the implications of our ideas.

[00:18:02] Michael Shermer
It seems to me worse now than it used to be. But I want to ask you about that larger perspective. I mean, it wasn't just that the people in the other political party differ from me, it's that they're wrong. And not just wrong, but wrong in an evil way. They want to destroy our community, our country, our society, or whatever. Is that, do you think, is there evidence for this that it's worse than it was, say, I don't know, during Nixon years with Vietnam and Watergate and all that stuff, or in the 50s or, I don't know, a century ago?

[00:18:32] Duncan Pritchard
It's definitely, it's definitely worse. I mean, and I think you see this very much in universities. There was a study, this was years ago, so about when I was in the UK, so it's been well over a decade ago, and it was in The Guardian, which is like a left-wing newspaper. And they polled a lot of academics. And the question was: if you found out your fellow academic voted conservative, would you be willing to go for a drink with them?

[00:18:58] Duncan Pritchard
And it was overwhelmingly that the answer was no, it was only 80%. Now, bear in mind, the Conservative Party is a center-right party. I mean, there are people in the, we've had in recent history who had conservative prime ministers who would be to the left, let's say, of Biden. So, or you know, left of most of the people in the Democratic Party, Obama or what have you, so the Clintons. So, you've got, imagine that you just imagine that 80% of people wouldn't want to have anything to do socially with someone who voted for a party.

[00:19:26] Duncan Pritchard
I mean, it gives you a sense of the sort of extremism there. And it's kind of stupid as well, because we, you know, we need plurality of the viewpoints. I mean, that just seems like that's a healthy thing. We're there to argue. We're not there to sort of confirm our own ideas, right?

[00:19:43] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Well, same thing with the abortion issue. I was teaching at Chapman University down your way. I would ask my incoming students, they're all pro-life or pro-choice, you know, what are the best arguments that the pro-lifers are making? And I think they just really had no idea. Like, I don't know, they're just wrong. You know, or whatever. I believe in women's rights. Yeah, but what are their arguments? Oh, they hate women. It's like, really? You think that's their argument?

[00:20:08] Duncan Pritchard
This is why philosophy, when it's done well, is so liberating. So I have an intro course in philosophy. And one thing I say is, I don't, I'm not going to tell you what I think about anything because it's not relevant. And I don't care about what you think about anything because at this point, it's not relevant. All I care about is the argument. And we're going to take a bunch of issues. And it sort of blows their mind. I don't care. You don't even have to argue for your own opinion. In fact, better if you don't. We actually have ways of trying to get them to argue for a different opinion.

[00:20:33] Duncan Pritchard
And we'll take it like, we'll take an issue like one thing I like is cannibalism. So everyone agrees cannibalism is wrong. But why is it wrong? It's a really interesting question, right? Depending on your moral theory, in fact, depending on the moral theory, maybe it isn't wrong. Maybe it's a bad use of our resources that we don't make use, constructive use of dead bodies and we just bury them.

[00:20:57] Duncan Pritchard
But depending on your theory, there are different views about why it's wrong. And so it's really interesting to think about this. And it's not like we're saying go out and eat people. We're not saying that. It could be that we all agree it's wrong, but we'd have to understand why it's wrong, right? We have to understand the reasons, the arguments. And I think students, once they, this is a certain kind of student never gets into this, but most students, once they get that, if they find it profoundly liberating, because they think that they're there just to defend their opinions or something, then when they realize that's not what we're about, we're about arguments and reasons.

[00:21:29] Duncan Pritchard
Let's drill down to that. And they can see there's a liberatory power to that, actually, because that's really what education should be about.

[00:21:36] Michael Shermer
It's hard to get people to stop moralizing about everything, right? Just what is that position? Can you argue it, right? We have an article coming out in Skeptic by Elizabeth Weiss. She's an archaeologist who's kind of battled against the whole repatriation of grave goods and skeletons and all kinds of stuff. The latest one is the repatriation of feces, human feces.

[00:22:00] Michael Shermer
These are, you know, thousands of years old or whatever. And the argument seems to be that we don't like it that it suggests that because they found in human feces muscle tissue that Native Americans ate each other, they practiced cannibalism. It's like, yeah, okay, so what? They either did or they didn't. What's the evidence? Right? And we know this happens around the, okay, so what?

[00:22:24] Michael Shermer
Yeah, but now it's become a moralizing issue. So if they make it a grave good, then it has to go back to the whatever the local tribe is that's living in that area now and give it to them and the scientists can't study it. So that's her objection to that. It should be part of science, not part of activism.

[00:22:40] Duncan Pritchard
I wonder, by the way, have you seen this really nice TV series a few years back? It's called Chernobyl. I don't know if you saw it, but what was really interesting about that TV series, as I interpreted that TV, it's all about like what happens when ideology trumps truth. And how you can get away with it in the short to medium term, but eventually things stop working, you know, and I think we need to. It's a really important message that we have to remember here.

[00:23:04] Duncan Pritchard
You know, like that, there's a reason why we want truth seekers out there. We want inquiry to lead in these directions in a fearless way.

[00:23:13] Michael Shermer
I did see, I did see that series. Yeah, yeah, that in that the great line was something about, but but but but this nuclear plant is a Marxist plant, right? So it can't be built by true Marxist Leninists. Like, oh, okay, that makes it all right. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's um, yeah, again, that's uh, yeah, that's troubling. Okay, so you also discuss um epistemology in the law.

[00:23:37] Michael Shermer
I love that discussion of um of the ratio, uh, Blackstone's ratio of 10 to 1. All right, so in the law, just to kind of summarize it, um, I'm a, you know, I'm a scientist, so in but in the law, the peer review system is the judge and jury. The lawyers are not after the truth, they're after their job is to win the case for their client, right? And I always like this. I tell the story of that.

[00:24:01] Michael Shermer
Alan Dershowitz gave an interview to Bari Weiss a couple months ago, and she asked him, How many of your clients do you think were guilty? And he said, Well, I'm an appellate attorney. They're all guilty. By the time they come to me, they've already been found guilty. But in terms of what really happened, I have no idea. I don't care. It doesn't matter. My job is to get them off, right? That's the only thing I care about. And he himself tells the story of having dinner with the Prime Minister of Israel in the late 90s.

[00:24:27] Michael Shermer
So the Prime Minister of Israel says, Do you think OJ actually did it? Because, you know, Dershowitz was on the dream team. And he goes, Let me ask you something, Prime Minister. Does Israel have nuclear weapons? He goes, You know, I can't tell you that. He goes, Yeah, I can't tell you that either. That's not my job. Anyway, that was funny.

[00:24:44] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, the legal case is fascinating because, you know, in one sense, it is as we try and explain to people, it is truth-directed, but it's not in a direct, like you say, it's not in a direct way. Like, because we have lots of rules of evidence which are there, they're there for reasons which aren't necessarily truth-directed. So, for example, not mentioning past convictions in certain conditions, that definitely is epistemically relevant, right? If you're trying to determine guilt.

[00:25:09] Duncan Pritchard
But, of course, we also know about what effect that has on jurors, so that's why we restrict it. So, it's kind of like it's a truth-directed environment where we've instituted some rules. And part of the reason why I've instituted those rules is because the environment is such that it's not about getting to the truth simpliciter, it's about getting to the truth in a way, about getting to the truth in a way that serves justice, which is a slightly different thing. You know, it has to be sort of geared towards the innocent rather than the precluding the innocent from being found guilty rather than the guilty walking through.

[00:25:42] Duncan Pritchard
That's the whole Blackstone ratio thing.

[00:25:45] Michael Shermer
Yeah, so we make two types of error: type one error, false positive, or the false negative failing to convict the true criminal. You'd rather fail to convict the true criminal rather than imprison the innocent person. Is it true that studies show that the 10 to 1 ratio, better 10 people, guilty people go free than that one innocent person be convicted?

[00:26:09] Michael Shermer
That that is the kind of intuition of most jurors and most people that serve on juries?

[00:26:15] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, you know, it has a basis. It's in Leviticus, right? You know, if you're in part of this the Judaic Abrahamic tradition, then yeah, it will feel intuitive because it's been in there, you know, for a long time. You know, Blackstone didn't pluck it out of thin air. That's where he gets it from. So

[00:26:33] Michael Shermer
Yeah,

[00:26:34] Duncan Pritchard
And it kind of feels right. I mean, there are these debates in law where people try and put a precise figure on it. But that seems to me like the 10 to 1 is like that's probably about as precise as it's going to get in terms of capturing the intuition there, it seems to me.

[00:26:50] Michael Shermer
An interesting problem in science is what's happened after the replication crisis that began in 2010, in which it was discovered that half or more of all scientific papers that were published probably should have never been published, right? So they met the statistical significance criteria, the p-value of 0.05 or four, three, two, one, whatever. And so they got it published. But then when people try to replicate them, they can't. So there's something going on there, right?

[00:27:14] Michael Shermer
P-hacking and file drawer problem and so on. But the correction there is scientists are saying, okay, we have to do something about this. So now you have to post on this website everything you're going to do, all the studies you're going to conduct, and you're going to report the results of all of them, including the null results, right? So my favorite story of that is that was the Daryl Bem study on ESP, in which he found backward causality and students could anticipate what the computer was going to do before the computer even made the choice of this random number thing.

[00:27:43] Michael Shermer
Anyway, looking at porn images instead of neutral images. And Stephen Colbert called it extrasensory pornception. And anyway, it's a bit of a joke. But it turns out there was some file drawer stuff. He only reported the significant studies and so on. But there, scientists are saying, yeah, okay, now we see this as a problem. We're going to correct it and improve the system, right?

[00:28:04] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, I mean, and like I think publishing the results, publishing that, you know, what it is you're going to do, the protocols in advance, publishing, as you say, the null results, making the data available, it's quite astonishing when you look back now and think that a lot of these, like, they weren't just, I mean, in the social psychology stuff, which had a huge effect on society. I mean, to the extent that a lot of it just became, was just taught as fact.

[00:28:28] Duncan Pritchard
I mean, you have like bias training and so on in universities and schools and things. It just seeped very quickly into the institutions. And to find out that a lot of these studies, the original data wasn't even shared and things like that, it's really quite shocking. I'm amazed that this crisis wasn't spotted earlier.

[00:28:49] Michael Shermer
Are you worried post-COVID of the collapse of trust in the public in government and medical institutions and scientists and so on?

[00:28:57] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, I mean, and I think it's the it's the same dynamic that's playing out in universities, it seems to me, in that we have to be seen, these institutions have to be seen as being non-partisan, right? It's really crucial. Like, you know, public health officials can't, they have to be seen to be above influence, you know, and just as, you know, I think universities have to be seen as truth seekers and not, you know, partisan.

[00:29:25] Duncan Pritchard
And I think a lot of the loss of trust relates to that. Yeah, it's just been fascinating. I mean, obviously I'm not, you can probably tell from my accent. I'm not an American. I mean, I'm an American now. I'm naturalized, but I'm new to your country relatively. But just following some of these debates. Oh, like the Anthony Fauci hearing? Fauci, yeah. Like the diary is really very interesting.

[00:29:49] Duncan Pritchard
But you know, you can see, like, if you're a member of the public, you're reading that. [unclear]. And I think what's different now is that it's going to come out, right? It's not like they can hide it. So, you know, I think best to have full transparency and like try and we need to try and get back to certain kinds of principles that are followed. Yeah.

[00:30:10] Michael Shermer
I would have liked to see these guys when they were giving these public statements back in 2020, 2021, be more Bayesian. Like, here's the thing on masks. We don't know about this. We think it's this. This is our recommendation this week. We may offer something different next week because we're not sure. It's a moving target. But they didn't say that. They're like, here's what we've decided.

[00:30:31] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah.

[00:30:31] Michael Shermer
Like, okay, now that science is settled. Well, wait.

[00:30:35] Duncan Pritchard
But it was so strange as well because it was obviously not settled. I thought the mask stuff was obviously not so. We had like really bizarre things like, you know, with the community, there's a lot of communities in Southern California you've got these outside parks.

[00:30:47] Michael Shermer
I know. Taped off.

[00:30:49] Duncan Pritchard
And like we have people you know, academics here would say, well, it doesn't make any sense because sunlight and so on. In fact, if anything, it'd be better for people to be outside in a park than trapped indoors. But we're told with certainty if anyone questions this, they’re mad. So we had the bizarre thing where the parks were, you know, they were taped off with police tape and things. Yes. And also, no one counting the opportunity, like the costs were measured in such a narrow way.

[00:31:19] Duncan Pritchard
You know, there are people whose livelihoods were destroyed. There are people whose whole lives were destroyed by the lockdown. I mean, it wasn't so bad over here, but in Britain, some of the stories were really shocking. We have friends of ours. A mother who had dementia died on her own. No one was allowed to see her. I mean, it's just great. When you hear about these stories, you think it can't be true. There were parents of children who were dying in hospital and they weren't allowed to see their children.

[00:31:44] Duncan Pritchard
This isn't made up. This is a real thing that's happened because

[00:31:47] Michael Shermer
I know. I know.

[00:31:48] Duncan Pritchard
And it's just like the lack of common sense, I think, was just completely out the window. The closing

[00:31:52] Michael Shermer
Of schools, you know, the opportunity costs. Did anyone do the calculation of closing schools and businesses and what that's going to do in the next 10 years. No, I think it was just precautionary principle. Well, you know, if 100 million people die, then that's on me. So I better just shut everything down. It was bizarre.

[00:32:11] Duncan Pritchard
And it was even stranger in Britain because I was following both news cycles because in Britain we had right next door to Sweden that wasn't closing down. Right. And, you know, like people were reporting on it. Everything was going fine in Sweden. And but it was funny because like you weren't even meant to, like, some people were like, we shouldn't even be reporting on Sweden. You know, like,

[00:32:29] Michael Shermer
Right.

[00:32:30] Duncan Pritchard
The public health demands that we should like show or shield our eyes from what Sweden are doing. But in fact, if, you know, from a scientific point of view, you should be very interested. It's like a, there we go, a little test. There, yeah, let's compare the results.

[00:32:43] Michael Shermer
Yeah, comparative method. Well, yeah, because you can't do a randomized controlled trial for something like that, but you can see what different people do and see what the outcomes are. Yeah. Anyway. All right, let's talk about your new book because Tempting Fate. I love that. I love the cover, by the way, of the little climber up there. So you open with Alex Honnold's famous free solo climb in Yosemite. Of course, I've seen it.

[00:33:06] Michael Shermer
We've all seen it. It's astonishing. And so what is that an example of when you talk about risk?

[00:33:13] Duncan Pritchard
So it was the two things that got me thinking about the book. And the first is watching free solo and watching Honnold do that climb. I mean, I have these views about risk, the theory of risk. But, you know, they're kind of just an academic dispute about how best to understand risk. But watching that made me realize that the standard view about risk just can't capture all what's really going on there and why we value it and why it's important. And then the other thing that got me thinking about the book was just under 10 years ago, I moved here.

[00:33:44] Duncan Pritchard
You know, taking a family halfway around the world, these what I call authenticity risks. Most of us in our lives at some point are going to have to take these big risks. You know, getting married, getting divorced, career, whatever. And there's no guarantee things are going to work out. You know, and Part of what it is to live a flourishing life is to be willing to take these kinds of risks. And I began to see the connection between the two.

[00:34:09] Duncan Pritchard
So let me start with Honnold. So Honnold, as your audience probably knows, free soloist. So there's nothing holding him up on that mountain. He's just there by himself. It's a sheer face of granite. He could fall at any moment. So the standard view about risk is a probabilistic one. So we determine the level of risk by working out the likelihood of the risk event. So in this case, the risk of the unwanted outcome.

[00:34:32] Duncan Pritchard
So in this case, it would be like falling, dying, whatever. You know, what's the risk? What's the likelihood he's going to die? You know, how many times if we repeat this climb, will he die? So intuitively, we want to say it's high risk, but that must mean that it's likely that he's going to die. But if it's likely that he's going to die, it seems to me we wouldn't let him climb. If we really thought it's likely that he's going to die in that mountain, then health and safety should kick in.

[00:34:57] Duncan Pritchard
If that's what we think. And in fact, when you watch the documentary, it's clear we don't think that. I mean, the whole point of the documentary is his skill, his preparation. This is a life lived for this achievement. So, why is that relevant? Well, it seems relevant because it seems he's doing something which, in some sense, makes this risk-taking coherent in a way it wouldn't be if he's just some crazy guy that just tries to climb it, you know, on a whim.

[00:35:21] Duncan Pritchard
So, then on the probabilistic view, or do we say, oh, then it's low risk? But if, you know, the probability he's going to die is low because he's so skilled, he's so prepared. But then that doesn't seem right either, because then, why do we admire what he's doing? Somewhere, I mean, it just seems like a bare matter of fact, right? There's nothing holding me up on that mountain. In fact, climbers, they actually say they have this line where they say that death is with you on the mountain.

[00:35:45] Duncan Pritchard
There's this phrase. I use it chapters of the book, which I think is really interesting. It's this idea that when you undertake that kind of activity, you have to respect the fact that you could die at any moment. And that's where it is to have to respect what it is you're doing, the craft. You know, you're not some devil-may-care person. What you're doing is you respect it. And so you're taking the precautions, you're doing the training and so on.

[00:36:09] Duncan Pritchard
You have to respect the fact that you could easily die there. So I just think the standard view doesn't capture it. But my view does. So this is where we get to the positive bit. So I think risk is primarily to be the level of risk is primarily to be understood in terms of what I call fragility. It goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning about like luck and risk being everywhere. There's this inherent fragility, what I think you're calling contingency in our lives.

[00:36:35] Duncan Pritchard
And the Honnold case brings it, makes it very vivid. You know, okay, he's very skilled. In fact, you know, he's climbed, he's done free... some thousands of free solo climbs. He hasn't died yet. So from a statistical point of view, you know, the odds are kind of in his favor now, I think we would say. But that doesn't change the fact that the level of risk is inherently high for what the kind of activity that he's doing.

[00:36:59] Duncan Pritchard
I mean, it's in the nature of free solo climbing, you know, one finger wrong, you know, rock fall, you know, change of conditions, all sorts of things could happen. And he's dead. And you have to respect that if you're doing that kind of activity. So I think risk is primarily about fragility. It's not about probabilities. It's not the probabilities aren't important. I think what the probabilities serve to do is that they have an effect on what I call the depth of the risk.

[00:37:25] Duncan Pritchard
So as it were, for Honnold, the depth of the risk is quite low. And by depth, I mean like, you know, if he repeats this many times, how many times are he going to die? But the level of the risk, no preparation is going to reduce the level of risk. It's in the nature of what he's doing, but it's high risk. The fragility is built into it. And these kinds of activities interest me. I think there are lots of activities that are like that.

[00:37:49] Duncan Pritchard
I mean, I think a lot of sport is like that. You know, I'm a big fan of Formula One. You can't really make sense of what's going on there except with the right theory of risk. I mean, what it is for an F1 driver to drive at the very limit, it's not to say that they're going to crash all the time because you're not a great F1 driver if you're crashing all the time. The idea is you're at the very limit, but no further. You know, the skill is all about taking it to the limit.

[00:38:13] Duncan Pritchard
So the fragility is right there. The crash is right there, as it were, next to you, but you don't crash. And that's what Honnold's doing. The skill is taking this activity right to its limit, but not dying. And I think a lot of things are like that. And as I say, I think this relates to our flourishing as people, because there are lots of decisions we have to make, core decisions in our lives, where they are inherently fragile.

[00:38:37] Duncan Pritchard
There's no way of knowing in advance things are going to work out.

[00:38:41] Michael Shermer
Just to clarify, by fragile, do you mean it's like it could go one way or the other? I mean, if you decide I'm going to do this career versus that career, you're 21 years old, right out of college or whatever, that's a huge decision. But like at this point in your career, you're not likely to be faced with that. Your career is well on its way and you're married with kids. You're not going to like, oh, I'll just change and do this and that, you know, unless your marriage starts to fall apart or you get fired.

[00:39:07] Michael Shermer
And then now, oh, you're back to that fragile moment where now I got to do this or I got to do that.

[00:39:13] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the 21 maybe isn't a good case, but here are some cases I give in the book. So one is my own, you know, moving here. You just don't know how things are going to work out. Like, you can do all the preparation in the world, like Honnold. You know, it's not like you do these things, you know, in a cavalier way, right? You, you, you do your prep, your research, but who knows? Maybe the kids, you know, the schools aren't what you think they'll be. Maybe you're not happy. Maybe you don't like your colleagues.

[00:39:37] Duncan Pritchard
Maybe the sunshine turns out to be really, you know, boring and dreadful or whatever. You just don't know how things are going to turn out. I mean, other examples I give a friend of ours who switched career had a very nice career as an academic, a scientist, and then decided what she really wanted to do was be a doctor. And so and then decided just quit and go back to medical school, start all over again.

[00:40:01] Duncan Pritchard
You know, this is the kind of thing where if it you hope it works out, and it's not like it was taken on a whim, but if it doesn't work out, there's going to be terrible costs,

[00:40:11] Michael Shermer
Right?

[00:40:11] Duncan Pritchard
It's not that you can go back, just like same with me, it's not that you can just return to have the back to the initial position, and there is no way of predicting. There are so many variables there, no way of predicting how things are going to. I mean, another one I give is people we know who opened a restaurant just before COVID hit. You know, opening a restaurant, it's this big life decision. You quit your job, you save, you know, you and then COVID, who could have predicted that?

[00:40:35] Duncan Pritchard
And then everything's lost. It's all gone,

[00:40:37] Michael Shermer
Right?

[00:40:38] Duncan Pritchard
And the best preparation and planning in the world, no one could have predicted that. But that's the way like it's what Bernard Williams talks about. Bernard Williams talks about this in terms of moral luck. But I argue it's better to think of it in terms of authenticity risk. So he has these examples. He has two that he talks about. One is Gauguin who leaves his family, does this immoral act, he leaves his family to go off to Tahiti and pursue his art.

[00:41:05] Duncan Pritchard
And like, well, he says, well, if it hadn't worked out, it did work out, you did produce great art, but I suppose it hadn't worked out, you know, we would judge his life already, we judge him bad morally. His life would be a terrible failure, you know, if he does this immoral thing and then he turns out to be a terrible artist. But he could have been, right? Maybe the great art needed needed the family. You know, maybe he can't do it without the family. You know, you don't know in advance. And the other one he gives is one where it doesn't work out, which is Anna Karenina.

[00:41:32] Duncan Pritchard
And she pursues her love for Vronsky. And she feels compelled to do it. Feels like if she doesn't do it, the costs are great, just like for Gauguin. But of course, doing it does come at a tremendous cost. She loses everything. She loses her children. Vronsky moves on like nothing happened. But for her, the social, you know, the ostracization and so on, it becomes too much to bear and it destroys her life.

[00:42:00] Duncan Pritchard
So, you know, and I think these are the kinds of decisions we all have to make. They're the hardest decisions anyone has to make in a life. Where these big decisions, these big opportunities, you've got to think to yourself, well, do I go for it? Because if you don't go for it, then there's a huge cost there. And if you do go for it, if you do jump that way, you just don't know in advance how things are going to turn out. And I think what I try and say is: look, the risk here is one of fragility.

[00:42:26] Duncan Pritchard
There are certain kinds of things where it's just built into what it is. It's like Honnold on the mountain. No amount of preparation or, you know, no amount of studying all the different options and working things out is going to remove that risk. You can remove the depth of the risk, preparation, but it can't remove the level of risk because it's built into the kind of activity that it is that's high risk. And I think that's like an important lesson for us all.

[00:42:51] Duncan Pritchard
Just as when we understand Honnold, we have to understand that that's just what he's doing. It's built into what he's doing that it's high risk. Lots of things that we have to make. It's built into the high risk.

[00:43:03] Michael Shermer
But back to this, you know, what society allows, let's say. I mean, you have the Darwin Awards, which are, you know, given to these guys that do crazy things and end up dying before they reproduce. Right. You know, so like, hold my beer while I jump off this roof and see if I can make it to the pool. Right. I mean, they've never done it before. We don't think of what Alex Honnold is doing as anything remotely like that, right?

[00:43:27] Michael Shermer
Or, you know, he just then famously climbed that tower in wherever that

[00:43:31] Duncan Pritchard
Was. Taiwan, yeah, Taipei.

[00:43:33] Michael Shermer
Yeah, in Taiwan, yeah. But obviously, he had permission ahead of time, and it's filmed. Then there was that couple that climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, or no, one of those buildings in New York, and they got married or whatever up there. And they were arrested and so on because they did it without permission. So these buildings, I mean, I assume these are like lawyers telling them, you know, do not allow anybody, you know, unless it's Alex Honnold, who has applied ahead of time and told us what he's doing and so because the risk is too high for us, the responsibility of what happens to people, something like that.

[00:44:10] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, I mean, there is a distinction there. So the way I talk about it in the book is that risk-taking has to be skillful. So that differentiates Honnold, you know, you should stop me from climbing El Capitan, right? I mean, what I'm doing, he's doing high risk, what I was doing high risk, but it's high risk in a different way. I mean, here the depth of risk is also very high. I mean, the statistical likelihood I'm going to die is very high. But what we want is, so the risks have to be skillful.

[00:44:35] Duncan Pritchard
But then the other thing is that they have to be pursued. I think we only admire risks if they're pursued towards a worthwhile goal. So it's very important to Free Solo, that documentary, that we think that Honnold, this is something he deeply cares about, you know, that this conferring some kind of important value on his life, this achievement. We treat people who are just thrill seekers, I think, very differently. Even if they train for their thrill seeking, I think that does not say that if it's skillful, we might still allow it.

[00:45:04] Duncan Pritchard
I don't know. That's interesting. But we certainly don't admire it. For Honnold, we admire it. This is, I mean, I would actually say Honnold, it kind of crosses over into what I was calling an authenticity risk. Because for Honnold, this is a way of life. I mean, if you watch that documentary, back then, he didn't have family or anything. He lives by himself in his camper man. He lives for climbing. So he's made a decision.

[00:45:27] Duncan Pritchard
You know, a very momentous decision to live in a certain kind of way. And it could kill him at any moment. But this is how he wants to live his life. And this is the things that he values. So he's trying to be true to things that he cares most deeply about. And he's in doing activities that are inherently risky. But we can understand the value of what he's doing. And we can understand the skillful nature of the risk taking. And I think those two factors put together is why we treat it very differently to other kinds of risks.

[00:45:51] Duncan Pritchard
And the same, by the way, with our authenticity risks. I mean, you know, someone who quits their job and opens a restaurant and they haven't really thought it through. You know, they're not good chefs or whatever. You know, we don't admire that, we just think that's stupid. And if that all goes pear-shaped, well, then we have a little sympathy. But you know, we understand that some people that this can be their dream, and then we treat it very differently.

[00:46:14] Duncan Pritchard
And we can see that you know, they've really thought about this, put their heart and soul into it. And now we're very, if it works, we're impressed. And if it doesn't work, we're sympathetic because we see it's a different kind of risk taking.

[00:46:26] Michael Shermer
Right. So, after the fact versus before, by authentic, you mean this, I'm following my dream. I need to do this because this is what I truly am, or something like that.

[00:46:38] Duncan Pritchard
It's living in accordance with the things you deeply care about. So, and part, of course, part of the challenge we all face is to work out what it is we deeply care about. So, that's that's hard. You know, like maybe you want to think you want to open a restaurant, you know, your dad's the famous chef, but it's not really your dream. You know, like, you know, you've gone [unclear] to open the restaurant. Now you realize you're living in someone else's dream.

[00:47:02] Duncan Pritchard
So part of the challenge is to work out the things you deeply care about. But then, you know, just with Anna Karenina, you know, like if she didn't pursue that love affair with Vronsky, then her life would feel like a failure. So there's a sense in which she has to do it. She's got to take the risk. She doesn't know it's going to work out. And then, of course, it doesn't work out. But it would actually just as bad, she was kind of doomed, actually.

[00:47:26] Duncan Pritchard
Things would have worked out badly for her. She'd not taken the risk because this is such an important thing. She'd been trapped in this loveless marriage to

[00:47:35] Michael Shermer
Right. Yeah. So the person who's married with kids and decides I need to do something completely different. I'm leaving or whatever. Don't you have a moral responsibility that you've already made this other decision that's momentous for other people? Sorry, you don't get to follow your dream at this point.

[00:47:52] Duncan Pritchard
So yeah, I mean, this is one of the points that Bernard Williams is making in that famous paper about moral luck: when we evaluate a life, we don't just evaluate it morally. Obviously, we do evaluate morally, but it's not just about morality. Like with Gauguin, we recognize, okay, he did something terrible, abandoned his family, but he's also a great artist. And that's a good thing. So we evaluate lives in the round. And morality is one consideration, but it's not the only one.

[00:48:17] Duncan Pritchard
You know, like I said, with Honnold, he's still doing free solo climbing. You know, he has a family now. You can imagine someone saying, well, is that immoral? You know, is it immoral risks like that when you've got people who are going to be devastated if you die? But then we can also, we can trade off. I think this is what it's virtue theory, basically. This is the way we think about character. Morality is one aspect of character, but it's just one aspect.

[00:48:42] Duncan Pritchard
And the good, you know, the moral good is just one aspect of the good. It's one aspect of our flourishing. And we can understand that there are other things that are important in life and that they can also have a bearing on how we evaluate our life as a whole, whether or not someone flourishes.

[00:48:56] Michael Shermer
But it does seem to matter after the fact when we look back on it, you make this distinction in the book. You know, it makes a difference on what happened, right? So then you get the survivorship bias or the successful bias, right? So I talk about the Steve Jobs biography by Isaac Walter Isaacson. Like everybody's reading this, like, what's the secret sauce to being the great Steve Jobs? You know, well, you go to an elite liberal arts college, you drop out early, you go back to your parents' house, you live in the garage with your buddy and you start a company.

[00:49:24] Michael Shermer
And, you know, it's like, really? I mean, how many guys in the 70s dropped out of college, moved back to their parents' house and started a computer company with their buddy? And we never heard of them because they went out of business. You know, most of them.

[00:49:38] Duncan Pritchard
No, absolutely. I feel one thing I talk about in the book is the relationship between luck and risk. So I have this view that luck and risk are counterparts. They're not quite the same thing, but they're almost the same thing, but viewed from different perspectives. So risk, I think, is inherently forward-looking. And luck is inherently backward-looking. So think about, you know, like a sniper's bullet. You're on a battlefield and a sniper's bullet whizzes past your ear.

[00:50:01] Duncan Pritchard
Well, viewed forward-looking, you know, you're at high risk of dying. And then backward-looking, well, now you're lucky to be alive. It's like the same fragile event, but one viewed from a forward-looking versus a backward-looking perspective. And I think this is, you know, this is very to understand that is to understand luck and risk. A lot of our assessments of risk, as you say, are made after the fact. And now luck comes into play because we can think about things as having worked out.

[00:50:27] Duncan Pritchard
But we also need that perspective of looking forward as the risk taken.

[00:50:33] Michael Shermer
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, then there's the problem of however it ends up turning out, it looks like that's the way it should have been. You know, I took this class or I had that professor. I married this person. I followed this career. And now that I look back, it's like, oh, it just was inevitable. It just worked out so perfectly. I did all these things and I had this great life. Could you have led a different life in which you had a completely different outcome?

[00:50:57] Michael Shermer
And you would also say, yep, that's the way it had to be. It all worked out just right. And either way, you're going to justify in your mind that's what was supposed to happen.

[00:51:07] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think we are as human, as the kind of creatures we are. Certainly, if we're upbeat, we're and there's a lot of psychological studies on this actually. I'll give you a little stat. It's quite interesting. The philosophers for many years didn't talk about luck and risk. It's a new topic, but the psychologists do. And really interesting is that whether an event is regarded as lucky or not, and how, whether it's good luck or bad luck, very much depends upon their frame of mind, like whether they have depressive or positive personality.

[00:51:39] Duncan Pritchard
So, you know, the very same someone in a car accident, you know, let's say they're seriously injured. You know, there's a certain kind of person will say there's good luck because they're good luck to be alive. What's the contrast? But another kind of person is bad luck because they're injured. Right. So, and depending on their personality, they can view things very differently. And I think for most of us, if we kind of have a well-ordered personality, we tend to go on the positive side.

[00:52:05] Duncan Pritchard
So we tend to take credit for our successes and we tend to minimize the extent to which luck contributed to our failures. And I think part of what it is, part of what knowing thyself means, and part of what it is having character, is to try and have an accurate perception of these things as much as possible. Be able to recognize the extent to which luck played a role in things working out for you.

[00:52:34] Duncan Pritchard
And try and accurately, as much as possible, determine the level to which your agency played a role and the level to which other factors played a role. Don't just give your agency all the credit when things work out. Don't minimize your agency when things don't work out. That's a really hard thing to do, I think. But that's what people with good character do, I think.

[00:52:55] Michael Shermer
Mean like the Quip, he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, right? He inherited his money and inherited his father's business or whatever, and thinks he's that hard work is what it's all about, right? That's the just world theory that conservatives tend to embrace. Things are the way that they are because the people work hard and they're responsible or whatever. And if you're not, you're poor, then you know, you're a loser.

[00:53:19] Michael Shermer
Whereas opposite, you know, on the left side of things, they see things as much more random and unfair and unjust for most people. And so we have to correct for that.

[00:53:29] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think, yeah, there are these debates playing out now about the extent to which these factors like just, I mean, just your natural endowment, right? Well, I don't mean financial, I mean, just as you know, physically, right? You know, like being, there's lots of studies, like being, being tall is a huge advantage, particularly for a man, right?

[00:53:53] Duncan Pritchard
It's a great advantage. You know, and I, you know, and also I think being good looking, you know, like some people, you can just say, you know, if you know, I know some people are good looking, you see, they breeze through life. Life is so much easier for them. They just don't realize this,

[00:54:07] Michael Shermer
Right? That's a huge effect. Yeah,

[00:54:13] Duncan Pritchard
So I think there's lots of things that, you know, we play down their role, but they actually have a huge bearing on how things are going to turn out for us. Because

[00:54:20] Michael Shermer
It doesn't feel intuitively like that should matter. That's not right. Right? I want to vote for the right candidate with the good ideas, not the tallest guy with the handsome hair. It just sounds so lame. I know, I know. But then, you know, like [unclear].

[00:54:36] Duncan Pritchard
Kennedy, it's not a coincidence that Kennedy came to the fore when televised debates became a thing. Right? He's a guy that looks great on TV. You know, Nixon.

[00:54:46] Michael Shermer
The story behind that is that the people that listened that first Kennedy-Nixon debate, people that heard on the radio thought Nixon won. People that saw it on TV thought Kennedy won. I don't know if there's an actual study but I saw that.

[00:54:58] Duncan Pritchard
I know, well, I've read that. Also, apparently, Nixon hadn't realized to shave. He had the sort of afternoon shadow.

[00:55:04] Michael Shermer
Right. He had the five o'clock shadow. Kennedy just got back from vacation. Yeah, Kennedy, of course. He was a good-looking man. I mean, I was just thinking about this with fashions because, you know, I came of age in the 70s, which is the worst fashion in the last century, right? But you see those pictures of Kennedy touring NASA with the, you know, the narrow white tie, black tie with the crisp white shirt, the dark suit.

[00:55:28] Michael Shermer
It's like, that still looks good.

[00:55:30] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you know, there's some people Robert Redford is another example from the 70s. You know, the 70s is a terrible era, but he looked great all the way through somehow.

[00:55:39] Michael Shermer
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's that whole business of the three sixes I had on a guest talking about this about what women want in men. Three sixes, six feet tall, six-figure income, and six inches of manhood. Right. And so she showed that like studies online, online line, that guys that are like five, nine, five, ten, five, eleven will round up to six. Guys that are actual six or six one, they'll go, I'm six, one.

[00:56:05] Michael Shermer
They'll give the accurate number as long as you kind of meet the threshold. None of that should matter, but I don't know. I guess it does.

[00:56:12] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, no, apparently, I mean, I'm thankfully happily married for many years. I don't have to think about this, but on these dating apps, apparently, it's quite common when they just screen off anyone under six foot. So you better round up because otherwise, you're not even in the running.

[00:56:29] Michael Shermer
Oh, yeah. No, it's no, I'm so glad not to be single. Oh, God, it'd be terrible. I mean, I'm only five eight. Okay, lied. I'm five, seven. I don't know why I like it. Anyway, no, okay. All right. I liked your discussion of existential risk. That's another one of these things. You talk about my favorite movie, Dr. Strangelove you know, showing what could happen. But the question is: so I like that you brought this up. You know, in Dr.

[00:56:52] Michael Shermer
Strangelove you know, you have a wackadoodle general there who loses his mind and gets obsessed with precious bodily fluids and the communists, you know, they only drink vodka. They never drink water because of the fluoride and all that crazy stuff. But that movie was patterned after real people, real events at the time and the belief that this could happen.

[00:57:17] Michael Shermer
And so are nuclear weapons an existential threat? How do you think they're risk? How do you think about

[00:57:23] Duncan Pritchard
It? So what I was trying to get at there was this idea that if you just measure risk in terms of probabilities, then you can leave yourself open to, it's what I call a lottery event. There are all kinds of events where they're low probability, but they could easily happen. So that's the whole thing about a lottery, right? You could easily win a lottery. I mean, the odds are against it, but just a few colored balls have to fall in a slightly different configuration. That's why people play lotteries. It feels, it's close, right?

[00:57:48] Duncan Pritchard
It's a fragile possibility. Someone just like you wins. In fact, the advert back in Britain for many years for the lottery was the slogan was, it could be you. It's not the code of probability, right? Because it's like, I think it was like 47 million to one. So that's not the code of probability. That's the code of fragility. And in fact, the advert confirmed this because he had like God's finger floating around in the sky and all these people walking around with lottery tickets.

[00:58:14] Duncan Pritchard
And the winner gets zapped. So it's someone just like you, right? That's there's nothing different. You know, it's not like a low probability event that's some low probability events, they're not fragile. They couldn't easily occur, but some can. And I think this is why, you know, when you have like existential risks like nuclear catastrophe and so on, or you know, Chernobyl or whatever, you need to have structures in play, safeguards.

[00:58:41] Duncan Pritchard
You need to have a series, you don't just want one structure in play, even if it has a very low probability of failing, because that would make it fragile. Even though the probabilities are in your favor, it could still be a fragile event that it collapses. And that was the thing about Strangelove. They had structures in play, but they didn't have the adequate safeguards because they thought the scenario where this particular structure doesn't work is so far-fetched that they don't have to worry about it. But actually, well, the probability was low, but it could easily happen, right?

[00:59:07] Duncan Pritchard
We see, and indeed it does happen. And I think this is like important. It's important, going back to law, by the way, I think this is why it's so important in a legal context to have, for example, corroborating evidence. So, some jurisdictions, there is a debate about whether you need corroborating evidence. Scotland, for example, it's written into the law that you have to have corroborating evidence. And people try and get rid of it. One of the reasons to try to get rid of it is certain kinds of convictions are hard to get.

[00:59:33] Duncan Pritchard
Assault, particularly sexual assault, is very hard to get if you don't have corroborating evidence. But there's a reason why corroborating evidence is so important. It's that you could build a fragility into the system. Maybe the probabilities are good, but it could be that if you convict only on the source of evidence, that it could easily be the case that the innocent person is found guilty.

[00:59:56] Duncan Pritchard
And I think this is worries some people have about convicting just on DNA alone. Another one is confessions. You might think written confessions are the gold standards. You might think, why even try? A lot of cases don't even go to court if you've got a confession. But actually, there are all kinds of scenarios in which someone might, an innocent person might sign a false confession, particularly in jurisdictions like America, where the police are allowed to lie to you.

[01:00:21] Duncan Pritchard
And not only are they allowed to lie to you, plea bargaining is a thing. So they can tell you, you know, if you confess, we'll get a better deal. If you don't confess, it's going to be terrible for you. So, you know, you could easily imagine a scenario where an innocent person thinks, well, I better sign this. They change their mind after maybe the prosecution doesn't have any other evidence. Could they convict on this evidence alone? Well, probabilistically, it's great evidence, but it's also fragile evidence.

[01:00:47] Duncan Pritchard
Unless you've got corroborating evidence, it's evidence that an innocent person could easily be convicted in. So that's one of my interests, the philosophy of law. I mean, what's interesting in the legal case, I mean, I was thinking of corroborating evidence to help the innocent walk free. But we actually limit corroborating evidence when it comes to putting the guilty inside. I mean, that's past convictions.

[01:01:11] Duncan Pritchard
That's a real clear case of corroborating evidence that we don't allow because we think that as soon as we allow it, people will convict regardless. The legal system, yeah, so I mean, the legal system is geared towards, you know, if all we cared about was the truth, we'd always want corroborating evidence in there, going in either direction.

[01:01:34] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Yeah, I just think about also the bad luck of the negativity bias where people will remember the worst thing you ever did, right? So you mentioned Clinton. It's like, oh, well, you got a blow job in the White House. Really? That's the thing we're going to remember about Clinton the most? This one stupid thing, right? Otherwise, you know, he had good intentions or whatever. The preacher that does some little thing and has an affair. Otherwise, I mean, he was manning the soup kitchens and helping the poor.

[01:01:59] Michael Shermer
And for he was doing all this stuff, saving souls and being a good guy. But we remember him for that one bad thing.

[01:02:05] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a negativity bias. Yeah, no, I remember

[01:02:09] Michael Shermer
That. Is that moral bad luck also?

[01:02:14] Duncan Pritchard
I think so, although it relates partly to problems in our perception, which we could probably correct for. I mean, I think we do have a bias to like negativity bias towards the way we assess people. You know, the one bad thing swamps all the other, all the good things, like you say. I was at the Nixon Museum recently. It was fascinating. And, you know, in many ways, pretty good guy.

[01:02:40] Duncan Pritchard
You look at his life as a whole, right? No one remembers any of that stuff, right? They just remember the fall from Grace.

[01:02:47] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Yeah. It's in Yorba Linda Whittier, right?

[01:02:50] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah. Well, no, it's Yorba Linda Yeah. [unclear]. I recommend it. A fascinating piece of American history. They've got his house there. They've rebuilt it. The house he grew [up in?], his dad built. Oh, they did. Oh, nice. And yeah, and it's an amazing story. This little guy who is an orange farmer, comes from nothing. He gets into Harvard, but he can't go because he can't afford it. So yeah, he has to go to Whittier instead on a scholarship. And it's a pretty impressive life, actually.

[01:03:15] Duncan Pritchard
And then, of course, it all goes wrong. But up until that point, pretty impressive.

[01:03:19] Michael Shermer
Yeah, yeah. I just had a guest on Harry Truman and Hirohito and the dropping of the atomic bomb, James Scott. Anyway, so it's like the luck or the randomness or the chance or contingency or whatever of Harry Truman. I mean, he's just a nobody, a failed haberdasher, worked on the farm, couldn't go to college because he couldn't afford it, right? And that Roosevelt taps him out of a whole lineup of people because he's like the least interesting, the person no one knows anything about or cares about, because that's what we need at this particular for this election, right?

[01:03:50] Michael Shermer
So then Roosevelt dies and all of a sudden Truman's taken in the back room and goes, all right, here's what's going on. Oh, now you have to make decisions. All right, so he rose to the occasion. Yeah. So, I mean, there has to be some, obviously, some talent or other, but such luck. It could have been anybody else. I just wanted to ask you to, I know you got to go in five minutes. I just want to ask you about moral bad luck. I was thinking about this. Is this an example? I forget if this is from one of the philosophers, Nagel, maybe on drinking and driving.

[01:04:21] Michael Shermer
Okay, so I'll just give a personal example. So, you know, I play a couple hours of tennis and have a couple beers afterwards with my buddies, and then I drive home. What if I'm blowing like a 0.09 instead of a 0.08? I'm slightly above and I get pulled over, right? Or I'm out to dinner with my wife and we have a couple glasses of wine. I'm slightly above the point. Now, this hasn't happened. And fortunately, now I have a Tesla Model S self-driving. Thank you very much. I don't even have to worry about this.

[01:04:45] Michael Shermer
Just takes me home. But had it gone the other way, had I got pulled over and then now I have a DUI and everything is different.

[01:04:55] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah. So there's this famous debate about moral luck, Nagel versus Williams. And it's a classic philosophical debate. I love [assigning these?] to students because they're both brilliant papers, but they're talking, although they use the same words, they're talking about two completely different things. It's really interesting. So Nagel's talking about moral luck in a kind of legalistic sense, like the drunk, the famous example of drunk driver, you know, the two drunk drivers identical in every respect, but one of them, you know, has an accident, kills a child, the other one gets home safely.

[01:05:28] Duncan Pritchard
You know, one will go to prison to manslaughter. You know, the other one, maybe nothing will happen to them. But they did the same thing. Morally, they did the same thing. They both drive drunk. They both took the same risk. And the question is, well, is there a moral difference there or is it just a legal difference? I mean, my view is it's just legal. There isn't really a moral difference, right? They both morally did the same thing.

[01:05:51] Duncan Pritchard
There is no difference between them. So that's the sort of moral luck. It relates more to consequences. It's like, as it were, You know, morality is one thing, but how things turn out is not in your control. And how things turn out, like that, that's where the luck gets in there. And suddenly, you know, the very same person does the very same thing and have terrible consequences. And equally like Truman, you know, the very same person does the very same thing, and things work out very well for them.

[01:06:15] Duncan Pritchard
There are things you can't control. And I think we just have to recognize that fact. This is why, in the ancient world, there's this focus on character. Character is, it's not like he's insulated from the world, but character is like that like Truman, for example. You know, presumably he did well when this happened because he had character and his character was brought to bear. And it was just, you know, good luck they chose someone with character who could stand up and actually perform this thing.

[01:06:43] Duncan Pritchard
The Nagel case, though, is different from the Williams case. Williams is more interested in these sort of, as I say, authenticity risks. It's like how to live a life that's true to things you deeply care about, and how do we evaluate such a life and the risks involved in living such a life, which are built into that life. You can't get rid of them. All of us are going to have to make these decisions at some point.

[01:07:07] Duncan Pritchard
We don't know how things are going to work out. We can make decisions well or badly. It's not that. It's just that even if the decisions are made well, like the people who opened the restaurant just before COVID, the world can come along and mess things up, and there's nothing we can do about that. But not taking these risks is also a huge danger. And so that's part of the fragility, what you call the contingency of the human condition.

[01:07:31] Duncan Pritchard
We are in the midst, we're in the midst of a world we don't have control over. And we can confront it with character without character. We can confront it with bravery without bravery. But ultimately, whether things work out won't be down to us.

[01:07:42] Michael Shermer
I was thinking about when reading your book, Thomas Keneally, who I met, who wrote Schindler's List, and I asked him what was Schindler like as a person? And his point is like he was not a special high-moral Gandhi type guy. He's just a regular guy that confronted at that particular moment, he had a decision to make. Am I going to help the Jews or am I going to be just another Nazi? And so he made the one decision.

[01:08:05] Michael Shermer
Now he's a hero, right? But there's nothing special that was predictable about that. That's somewhat random. But he had the character, presumably the character when he made the decision, I'm going to do this.

[01:08:17] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah. And it's interesting. I think it's these little things. I mean, this crops up in Chernobyl. There's the people who actually, in their small ways, make these moments of resistance against the regime. And, you know, that's character in action. It may be, you know, when we think about character, we think about it in sort of grand terms.

[01:08:40] Duncan Pritchard
But actually, I think it plays out in lots of little ways. I'm of the view that William Blake expressed that ethics is in the particular. You know, like, you know, you should be very suspicious of the general. He has some words in these famous Jerusalem writings, but ethics is in the particular. And that seems right to me. Like, you see character in these little ways in which people deal with each other in day-to-day life, and that's how it manifests itself.

[01:09:04] Duncan Pritchard
And you can tell a lot about people, and these little decisions you make, and it may not be anything grand or what have you, it's like Truman, you know, changing the course of history. But that's character flowing out, and these little these little displays that people make, and that's where it that's where you see what people really are.

[01:09:20] Michael Shermer
It's like that CNN used to give that award for heroes, and the stipulation at the beginning was it can't be a first responder, can't be a cop or fire department person or anything like that. It's got to be a regular person, and I guess the reason is what you just said, right? It's a test of your character, and you made the right decision, you saved this person, whatever, as opposed to that's just your job. You're supposed to do that,

[01:09:42] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah, yeah. And it's like the old thing about you, you know, someone's character when they, what they do for people when no one's watching, and it's, it makes no like how they treat people who can't help them in any way, you know, no benefit to them. And then you see a lot about people what they're really like, but that's character, That's what it is.

[01:10:01] Michael Shermer
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why it's good to get to know someone before you marry them, just in case. It takes a while to see some of that character, right?

[01:10:09] Duncan Pritchard
Oh, yes, absolutely.

[01:10:10] Michael Shermer
I know you got to run.

[01:10:11] Duncan Pritchard
We also see what we want to see, right?

[01:10:14] Michael Shermer
Well, there is that.

[01:10:16] Duncan Pritchard
There's a positivity bias there, right?

[01:10:18] Michael Shermer
I always like to tell the story. Tim Minchin, the Australian singer-songwriter, and comedian, he has a song about If I Didn't Have You. So it's a beautiful little love song about his wife. If I hadn't met you, this wouldn't happen. This wouldn't happen. And then it kind of changes shift in the middle. And he goes, of course, if I hadn't met you, I would have met somebody else. Maybe they were funnier than you, but not as smart. Maybe taller, but not as good looking. And I'd be equally happy.

[01:10:43] Michael Shermer
It's so funny. It's like, huh, yeah, it could be true.

[01:10:47] Duncan Pritchard
Yeah.

[01:10:48] Michael Shermer
Anyway. All right. There it is. Tempting Fate. Get it. Check it out. It's a great read. Thanks so much, Duncan. Thanks for your work.

[01:10:54] Duncan Pritchard
Thanks very much for having me on, Michael. Appreciate it.