Well this course is called how to think about dubious claims and It's not clear that most people want to think about them, but if you do, hopefully, I have something to tell you. Two things I'm going to try to get across in this course. One has to do with the fact that, why is it that smart people can be so stupid? And there are a lot of reasons. I'm a psychologist.
We study that. I'm going to give you examples. Some of them are, we're going to talk about some of our top-notch scientists who are not immune to being stupid.
And how is it that someone who's competent in one area can be so incompetent in another area? And that gets us a little bit into what psychologists know about how the mind works. think they know what how the mind works and doesn't work so that's one thing is we're going to work on this psychology why it is that being smart is no hindrance to being taken in okay and the other aspect of the other side of that coin is what to do about it assume that you want to do something about it not how people want to have their world view shaken up or challenge at all, but in case you want to do something about it, you want to be able to think correctly about dubious claims, how can you do it?
How can you overcome the various biases and heuristics that the cognitive system is prone to? So I will try to give you a framework, beginning lecture four, I guess we'll do that. I will, and I've got the framework in the course guide that some of you have and those of you don't have it can get it online and this is just one framework but I hope it would be a framework that can help you override the natural tendency to be taken in so let's begin we're going to begin with as you see up there on the screen there the Gellerer effect that's the cover of a book actually it was written by a man named Playfair we can see that if I moved up a little bit very Gellerer and Guy Lyon Playfair, one of Erie's great admirers and fans and early in the days.
By the way, how many here have heard of Erie Gellerer? Oh, mostly. Not all, but one person didn't apparently. But usually in audiences when I'm talking to people today, classes of students or lawyers and stuff like that, only the people who are about a dozen or so.
the elderly people have heard of him and the rest haven't heard of him although he keeps trying to make comebacks he's been on television a lot in europe people know he's quite well known he lives in england and uh this uh last october dj was there as well and i was there we were a special magic convention in orlando and it was very controversial but the person putting on the magic convention had Gary Gala come and talk to us magicians and he gave quite a stirring talk. He didn't say he was a trickster, he didn't say he wasn't. He says he no longer claims to be psychic, that doesn't mean he isn't psychic, he doesn't claim it because it's just controversial.
So he now calls himself a... Well, something like a performance artist or whatever you want to call it. So he plays both sides. But anyways, I first came across him in 1972, December of 1972. I got a phone call from Colonel Austin Kibler, who was then head of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department.
That's the Buck Robert part of the Defense Department. that was created by President Wendy to deal with far out stuff, futuristic, anything that is very challenging on the borderline or what have you. I knew Kibler because he was a psychologist as well. He was a colonel in the Air Force, but he was the acting director of opera.
At that time, opera was working on what's called the operanet, among other things, which they contributed to the world and became the internet. So that could give you some context. But Kibler called me and said, Randy, I was grading exams at University of Oregon where I was a professor and I'm retired from there now. And It was December and he said could you drop whatever you're doing and Go down to Stanford Research Institute where they have a psychic in captivity and we'd like you to get your viewpoint on this And I said first of all, I said I mean we're grading exams. I can't just go he said but this is very important he said This guy is a psychic But he's not an ordinary psychic.
He could do anything ordinary psychic can do but then he does even more He gave me a He gave me examples like he bends metal with his mind. So I had this image of the Defense Department wanting to maybe use Galatians at that time, it was the Soviet Union. We could bend their tanks with his mind, I guess.
But anyway, he said, if there's anything to him, we need to know. This is something we should be involved in. On the other hand, if he is not, For real, if he's a trickster or a scam artist, we don't want to be anywhere near him.
That could affect our budget. There was a senator, Proxmire, from Wisconsin at that time, who every year gave the Golden Fleece Award to some... agency in the government that was misspending government money in a foolish way and it could affect budgets and they didn't want to so the defense department didn't want to be near him and they said we're sending you down here because If he's a he's a phony you can detect them We're also sending a parapsychologist because if he's real is going to take a parapsychologist if he's real right And so they're sending a parapsychologist as well.
So they actually going to be was gonna be a three-man committee They wanted to go down here. There was a parapsychologist then Robert van de Kastel from University of Virginia Medical School Which has a Paris did have it may still have a parapsychology department like all medical schools obviously like that have it and there was me and there was George Lawrence who was representing opera so that was our committee we went down here to look at him and of course I report well Let's not get into that right away. Gala then became famous, very famous. And in the 70s and 80s he was at every major TV show several times and he appeared on television. And the big thing...
was, and this is why it's called the Gellerer effect, is that when he was on radio or TV, he would tell people listening in their homes to bring spoons, to bring keys, to bring old that no longer go to the television set or to the radio and while they're listening to him or watching him perform maybe something would happen with their silverware stuff like that and sure enough they got thousands of calls every time he was on people saying hey my silverware bent my key bent or my clock is now running that wasn't going and Yaris was very modest very modest fellow alone and he said look don't give me credit for it it's you the people out there we all have the psychic powers I am just a catalyst and when you see me do it it figures it in you so that's called the Gellerer effect and I want to know how many people here by the way have actually bent metal with your mind how many have done it succeeded with your mind Now that's your hands, would you mind? You haven't done it, okay. He says he hasn't done it. He's, um... But, but...
How many have tried to do it, by the way? What do you do with your life? Okay, well...
Magnetopens. You try to move needles. Okay.
I'm going to have a couple of people up here who would be willing to try it, at least for the moment, even if you're skeptics. At least you'd be willing to try it. Would you be willing to try it?
I would try it. Wendy is your name? Yes. Okay.
I know these things, you know. Kathy, is that your name Kathy? Right again.
Okay, would you two come up here? It's going to be harmless, I hope. And you're going to try to bend the key with your mind.
Come over here. You come over here. Okay, you can stay over there. And I have here...
Here, I guess we'll open this way. What do those look like? Keys, ordinary keys.
Ordinary keys, okay. How do you know they're ordinary? Actually, I got them, I got them for years, I had lots of them.
I got them from the security department. at the University of Oregon, every once in a while they go around and change the door locks and they re-key them and they take the old keys and they don't know what to do with them so I grabbed a lot of them, okay, and that's what they are. Now Gellerer says that if you're going to bend the key with your mind you're gonna put the force of your mind into that key you have to want you have to pick a key that you have a feeling for it now you have a big connection between you and the key so I want you to pick a key that you have some feeling for okay that you know that you know that yeah just pick it up any key at all okay you like that one okay take it hold it in your hands okay like that and that what I want you to do is to because I learned this the hard way, I never used to do this before, put some mark on it so you recognize that key again with the sharpie, initials or your phone number, anything like that. Very good. Let it dry.
Okay. Good. And, okay, so now, what I'm going to do, I'm going to show you what to do. I want you to hold the key in the Gellerer grip. Yeah, the Gellerer grip, like this.
I call it the Gellerer grip. You hold it like that between your fingers. between these two fingers. Hold it, stand so the audience can see it.
They'll never put you back to the audience. Now you're going to stroke it like this. Just like that.
Go ahead, that's it. Are you left-handed? No.
Do you want me to hold it in my left hand? Well, you can do it your way. It's okay, do it your way. You do it whenever you feel comfortable. Okay, good.
Okay, so you're going to stroke it this way and as you're stroking it, I want you to think bend, bend, bend. Okay? And if the circumstances are right, Gary says we all need to do it. have this power and he's a catalyst I'm the catalyst and so on it should bend sometimes it takes several days but we don't have that much time how are you doing there yeah let me see it's a little bent but I guess you wouldn't want to call it, give it, get any credit for that. Sure, try another one, because maybe that wasn't a good one for you, okay?
It's a little thinner. It's a little thinner, okay. Try that one. How are you doing? Oh, you got much better, but that's not my at all.
You can see it? Can you see it, Sven? No.
Okay. Then take another one. You can stick with this one.
It's up to you. I'll stick with this one. Okay, good.
She likes that one. Okay. Okay. Kathy, say bend out loud.
How you doing? Thank you. Now, okay, look, we can't go on for too long.
We want to bend. Just go, bend, just say, bend, bend, bend, bend. Bend, bend, bend, bend.
How's it doing? Very good. Let's go back to your original one here, okay? Maybe I'm not a good bend.
Okay. Which is your original one? I'm too skeptical.
Okay, this is your original one? Is this your original one? Okay. Let me do it. I'm running out of time here.
Stay here for a moment, because you have to watch. Okay. I'm getting the feeling it's bending a little bit. Okay. Do you see it bending?
Something's happening. It's hard to know whether it's really bending or just an illusion, right? It is bent, son, right? It is bent, right?
And you can hand that around to people. It's not a big bend, but it's hard to bend on your own. Don't clap, it's you.
The Gellerer Effect. We all have it. Okay, now, I want you to do two things. I'll have a piece of paper, right? You may sit down if you want.
Thank you very much for helping out. I want you to first, on one side of your paper, describe what just happened. As if you're writing it for someone like Randy, because you want to show it to Randy and say, how did the key get bent, okay?
And you want to give him enough information so he could explain to you how it happened. But anyways, write some sort of explanation of just what happened. And once you've done that, I'm going to have you turn it over, and on the other side I want you to guess how it got bent, okay? That's the two things I want you to do. So one side you're describing what happened, and on the other side you're going to describe your best guess as to how it got bent.
While they're doing that, I'll explain to you that I have done this since I visited Gellerer in 1972 at Stanford Research Institute. And since then, in my classes at Oregon and in talks I've given to... or lawyers associations and stuff like that. I've been doing basically this demonstration.
I haven't done it for a long while, so I was a little rusty today, but over a number of years, 30 years maybe, I was doing this on the... regular basis and every time I collected the same information collecting from you I put it all on computers I've analyzed it and I've got so I'll compare what you what you've done with what typical undergraduates are typical lawyers are typical people out there in the world who have witnessed the same thing that you just witnessed how they explained it and what they described happened so on Why are you still doing that? I see people still doing it. You're much more conscientious than a lot of people, high undergraduates.
Let me say that what we're dealing with, in a way, we're dealing with testimony, observation, and the whole issue of data. Because the most important thing, the most important issue of all, if you're going to think about any kind of claim, is the issue of the quality of the information behind that claim. It's called the garbage in, the garbage out phenomenon. If you're starting with garbage, the best thinking in the world, the best logic, the best books in critical thinking are not going to help you at all.
You're going to come out with garbage. So, unfortunately, many good books, excellent books in critical thinking teach you how to think critically about what you have. They don't spend much time telling you how to make sure what you have is worthwhile to think about. And so this demonstration, I hope, is trying to make home the point. that the most important thing of all if you're going to think at all about anything is to make sure you're starting with good data and good data is very very hard to come across okay anyone finished would someone be willing to tell me uh to share what they've just written down with uh the rest of us anyone okay you uh what did you write uh ray had he had one swapper key while he took the old one.
Using the other one's key as misdirection, he used two keys together in his hands to bring the bend. By holding the key by the teeth, the bend isn't apparent and can be teased out as Randy says, bend. Thus, the illusion of him bending a key with his fingertips is made.
Okay, now what did you say is your guess how it got bent? I just took the other side. Okay.
I thought that was the same thing. Okay, anyone else? I was fooled.
You were fooled, okay. Even though I was fooled, I didn't do it very well. There's a reason why I didn't do it well, but that's okay. But you still were fooled anyway, right? And don't be bad.
don't feel bad about being fooled because some people know what to look for and some people don't know what to look for. If you don't know what to look for, then you don't have a ghost of a chance even if the demonstration is not well done. Kathy, what did you say?
And also when you were doing it, you gradually moved your hand down so that the key changed angles, even though you were still holding on to it. Yeah, I'm doing this, you mean? Yeah, so it softens up at one point.
It softened up at one point? Yeah. Okay. You're heating it because you're pressing only one direction.
Specter works better with spoons than keys. Okay, now you're getting different ideas about she wants to be skeptical but yet she's talking about the key softening, right? okay, and Well, I'm going to go through several explanations that I got.
As I said, I've got hundreds of them, and I've sorted through them, and I will go through some of them. But the first thing I want to do is now go through a reconstruction of what I actually did and why I did it this way. And I just wanted to have something to deal with the problem you have in making observations, especially when the observation is renovations aren't planned. Now you know ahead of time we're going to do some key bending. But a lot of times when Gellerer is doing stuff he never says it ahead of time.
The most important thing about Gellerer, he's not a typical magician, Gellerer doesn't say I'm going to bend this He would do something like that. That's almost never what he does. He's an opportunist.
He is always looking around the room. He knows where everyone is, what they're looking at. And he even rearranges people many times. He has complete control and if still he doesn't think he can get away with something, someone might be able to see what he's actually doing, he won't do that.
But he's always ready to bend the key, to bend the spoon, or to do something else, depending on what he's doing. thinks he can get away with at that moment. So he himself doesn't know ahead of time what he's going to do. Magicians do know what they're going to do.
They have a plot and they do it even though it looks like impromptu, but magicians always have a plot when they do this stuff. But Gellerer is an opportunist. Now what he's maximizing there is he's making sure that you don't have good data.
Because if you think about it, what should you describe here? When I ask you to describe this. There's an infinite number of things you can do.
Many of these people in my students, in my class over the years, I got things like this one time. went out just as we were about to bend the key. Of course everyone wrote about the lights being out and many people used the fact that that had something to do with the fact that the key got bent, okay? And it doesn't, you know, think about it, it isn't stupid to think that way. You don't know in advance what should be relevant and what's not.
And that's very, very important. How do you know it's relevant? There's so many things that could be there. And it's an impossible task if you don't know ahead of time what was supposed to happen. Even if I tell you I'm going to bend the key, I know now you know something what to look for.
But so I set it up. So why did I have these two people up here? Why did I have them?
Through distraction. What's that? Distraction.
Distraction, exactly. Misdirection, we call it. They weren't going to bend the key. If they did, that would amaze me.
I did have it happen one time. Simon did. My key is bent.
That's another story. out the key had been bent ahead of time we didn't know about it but that must I don't expect them to bend the key as I said I would be amazed if they did but I'm having them up here because I want to distract you I need a maximum distraction so I've already announced I'm gonna bend the key which means I give you an advantage over Gellerer Gellerer doesn't say I'm gonna bend the key you don't know what he's gonna do and I want to have some distraction so I got this misdirection between them Now, the reason I haven't marked it, by the way, I used to do it without anyone marking the key, and the most common explanation was that I switched the keys, by the way, which is a good thing to do. But I wanted to eliminate that possibility, so that's why I haven't signed the keys. Even so, I get a certain number of people still insist that I switch the keys.
And I go through a lot of stuff to. I didn't do it too well here, I got the problem here because I picked the wrong key maybe. Most people over the years almost never mentioned the fact that I had a key in my hand when I took your key.
He noticed it because I was pretty crude about it. But almost never, I can tell you, thousands of people I have on my computer baseline, no one ever mentions that I had a key in my hand. When I do it right, in synchrony, I have her, she has her key, I have to show them how to bend it.
I show them the yellow grip and I do this. This now is invisible in one sense because it's a normal thing we could do, it's natural. If I'm going to show them how to do it, I have to have a key in my hand, right?
Then I should just casually leave the key there like this, not make a big deal about it. And so no one ever mentions I had a key. in my hand. Now it's very important to have a key in my hand. I have the right kind of a key.
I picked the wrong key, a little bit, so it made it a little tougher. I pick a key, I make sure I got some keys that have a notch, you know, a hole in it, like this. Why they're on the hole like that?
This one would not be too good. good, okay? This one would not be too good.
I want one that whatever keys they have, I can, because I don't have psychic powers, I want to take advantage of what our comedians found out about called leverage. If I stick it in there, even the toughest key, which is just a little bit like this, remember one time I said you want it to bend, I just squeeze, and anyone can bend the key that way. Anyone. Everyone here, I guarantee you, can bend the key.
Something a little harder. but almost any key you can bend this way and get a good bend in it. For example, let me show you. This is a tough key here, but let me show you.
I'll squeeze it like this. And look at that. That's a tough key.
Try to unbend it with your hand, you see, and you can hand it out. But with this leverage, taking advantage of leverage, you can bend any key that way. Lots of other ways to bend keys, but this is the way I do for this demonstration. But no one ever mentions that's the key thing. I call this lecture, keys to critical thinking, by the way.
But anyway, no one ever mentions that because I've structured it so that they're not going to pay attention to that. Because there are a lot of other things to worry about, right? So I have that, so at the right time now, I've got the key bent.
Where would I put it? Here it is, okay. It's bent. I'm going to put it here. Okay.
The worst thing to do now is to immediately show I got a bent key. It's too close to when it was here in my hand. So we used this, well-known among magicians, but also gallows.
I'm going to stretch out the fact, and then change when it's supposed to be bent. This is how I was able to get Kathy and Wendy, rather. It's really bent now, but I'm not going to show it now. I'm going to handle it as if it's not bent.
And I said, well, we can't go on too long, so I'm going to do it myself. And I'm slipping here. They don't know for sure.
whether it's just flipping up and down. In fact, I'm not sure anything's happening here. Okay, gradually I'm letting it slip out.
You look at it, it's a pretty good illusion. Looks like it's rubbery now a little bit, but still they're not sure that it's bent. That's fine.
But then at one point I get to the point when it's really, you know, I show it like that and it's pretty clearly bent. Now you can hand it out and they can't bend it, unbend it themselves. And that's a miracle in a way.
So this is the reconstruction of what I did. But it's very, let me show you now from people who aren't from the past, from former students and stuff who witnessed the same demonstration you saw. It was much more practiced in those days but let me show you. You got this?
Oh, you have it here. Okay, this is suit number 51, let's call him. My guess is that he used a higher level of thinking and used more capacity of his mind, not strength, to bend the key. Would you say that's a paranormal explanation or what?
Definitely superstitious. What's that? Definitely superstitious. Okay.
Some students, this is the description now, this is what they test for. Some students went to the front. the class and were asked to bend the key, not with strength but with their mind, like Gellerer did.
At first nothing happened to either of the keys, so the students switched keys and tried again. This failed also, so Professor Hyman tried and then bent. He passed it around and sure enough it was bent.
Okay that's their description. Pretty good description in some ways. Notice that they did mention, and most of the people don't mention this by the way, that they failed on the first one and then I had them take another key.
They don't mention that at all, most people. Is that crucial? So, but people don't know what the should or should not include. Lots of things. As I said, sometimes the lights went out, one time the bell rang and then the rest of the students put the bell ringing in there is important.
And the prof asked for volunteers, they each labeled a key, label, okay, not everyone mentions labeling, and tried to bend it with their minds. Looked like they had it from the wider end in their left hand and stroked it with a finger, willing it to bend. They then got to try it with a different key.
When it didn't work for either of them, the prof asked for a key from the female volunteer. That had a better feeling to it. He then bent the key by stroking it and asked the two volunteers to unbent it. They couldn't. That's a pretty good description of what happened in a sense.
But people vary what they include and don't include. Okay, at first I simply couldn't believe that this could work. But once I saw the concentration that you, Mr. Hyman, used, I did actually believe it.
I feel the two volunteers walked up there with a negative state of mind, not actually believing it was possible. That's why. That's why I feel they failed.
I believe in concentration. Believing something indeed will happen. You had that strong concentration and positive attitude that was obviously needed to make the key bend.
I've got a lot of that like that. I'm giving you just some typical ones which I made, but as I said, I've got hundreds and hundreds of these. Okay, now this is where I'm not, because I got the reputation among my colleagues as Hot Hands Hyman.
This is from the. the kind of reason I got it. Possibly the heat produced by the way of kinetic energy of the finger stroking the metal key could soften the metal enough for the key to bend. It is true that when many metals are heated, they bend into a shape non-particular or dissimilar to their original shape. By the way, some of this is true.
A thermostat is a good example and so on. So you get this mixture of gobbledygook and real science sometimes they throw in there. Now it turns out that a major... Most of the students I show it to, they're college students, stuff like that, they know I'm a skeptic, and this is a course on critical thinking, and I'm teaching it. And the lawyers also know I'm a skeptic.
So a majority, by the way, 33%, Essentially, clearly say I was psychic. I did it psychically, okay? But then the rest say, no, no, they don't believe in any psychic phenomena. And so they give explanations like this.
I get several of them. One of the most popular ones is the heat of my hand. and in some way melted the key to some extent, softened it. But another one where people say they're skeptics and they have one in that given that to a sick exclamation is that Professor Hyman studied martial arts.
He's a student of martial arts. and he knows exactly how to put the power into the weak part of his key so it will bend. These are people thinking they're giving a scientific, naturalistic explanation. And that's quite common. So you get a lot of people who say they're skeptics or scientific who have no sense of science, because unfortunately this is the general state of almost all our college students today.
They don't know any science, and it's getting worse. But anyway, so you get a lot of that as well. Subtitles by the Amara.org community The big point is that for our purposes this shows the importance of having scientific observation. What do we mean by scientific observation?
Well, scientific observation is... ...prospective, in the sense that ahead of time you decide you're going to study kiben, you're going to watch how someone can bend the key. Whereas most people who witnessed a key bending demonstration, a spoon bending demonstration, or some other type of thing, miracles or something like that, they didn't plan to observe that.
In fact, the most common expression that goes along with this is that this was unexpected. And this is the ideal situation for having bad, bad. observation and bad reporting and misinformation.
It contributes to what we call the mind where, what would you call it, contaminated mind where is the right expression. And this is very important because mind where has to do with what we know, our knowledge that we've accumulated. And having wrong information is very bad. for you and having no information is also sometimes bad.
We're in a probabilistic area, people just don't understand probability, how to deal with it, how to calculate it, haven't been taught well how to do it and so most of us are probabilistically challenged. And it turns out evolution, in terms of evolution, somehow it wasn't valuable to learn probability. So probability theory, even a theory of probability, only begins about 400 years ago.
So the human race didn't have any notions of how you could deal with probability, yet the whole world is probabilistic. And everything we do in science is probabilistic. Statistics and everything else, but human mind is not made to deal with that. So we call that a failure of a lack of mindware of that kind. But some mindware we have is contaminated mindware.
And so one of the things... we're going to do with the framework that we developed is to try to fix that out now how we're doing on time here oh we got a little bit so good time good so let me go on some other things we I thought about information pollution you talked about garbage in garbage out all the same thing the point we want to make here again is that If you're going to have good data, trustworthy data, and that's what science is, by the way, the most important feature for me of science, beginning in about 1600, which changed the world, and now we have actually improved the world in some ways. began is that it deals with trustworthy data and to get trustworthy data you have to plan your observations.
It deals with planned observation. If you plan it then you can focus on what it is you're looking for. If you don't plan it you don't know what to focus on, what you should be looking for. And so it's systematic.
It's calibrated and sometimes aided to use instruments and use procedures. You standardize things that have been tested, and so it's valid. You know these procedures you're using to observe the stars of a certain kind. Let me give you an example. During the early days of astronomy, there was inconsistencies in the same observatory.
It was traced to a man named Bessel, I think it was, one astronomer. He realized, figured out that the inconsistency with the fact that different viewers, people looking at the telescope, had different reaction times. This is a psychological thing. Some would see the transit of the star, it was going by, they were reported a few seconds later than another person watching it, the same transit. So he developed what's called the personal equation.
He developed ways of measuring the reaction time of each observer and correcting for their particular biases. And that was the start, by the way, of... one of the starts of experimental psychology because this was this is psychologically a reaction time I did my dissertation on the reaction time this became a very important thing how to measure it and what it tells us about the human mind so science in many ways the most important thing is it couldn't be science unless it had very good data And the more we can work at getting data that fulfills those functions, the more we can trust it and think about it.
The less we think about it... I'm going to give you an example now, we're going to go into that in the next lecture. Let's see, when did we start?
I've got 13 minutes. Okay, good. So I'm going to move on to this, which is like a beginning, getting ready for the next set of lectures, the next lecture.
Okay, here's... something I got from a book by John Evans. He's a psychologist and spent his career studying human reasoning and the biases in human reasoning, especially with logical problems and stuff like that. Okay, it is a good book. So, from a book he wrote on hypothetical thinking, dual processes in reasoning and judgment, he begins this way, he says, It is evident that the human species is highly intelligent.
and well adapted. Some of our intelligence we clearly share with many other animals. We have well-developed visual and perceptual systems, complex motor skills and ability to learn in many ways to adapt to the environment around us. We also seem to be smart in ways that other creatures are not.
We have a language system that is complex and sophisticated in its ability both to represent knowledge and to communicate with other humans. We study and attempt to understand a multitude of subjects including our own history and that of the universe. We have derived systems of mathematics and logic. We design and build a huge range of structures and artifacts. We have constructed and mostly live our lives within highly complex economic and social systems.
and social structures. All of these distinctly human beings things imply an extraordinary ability to reason, entertain hypotheses, and make decisions based upon complex mental simulations of future possibilities. I will use the term hypothetical thinking as a catch-all phrase for thought of this kind. Well in this course I'm going to give you a framework based on hypothetical thinking but we agree look at us aren't we wonderful.
He catches himself in the next paragraph. Because this is the paradox. You know, you can look at the marvelous things that the human brain can do that no other creature can do.
And you list them and they sound fantastic. But then he says, it is equally apparent that evidence of human error and fallibility surrounds us. The world is plagued by wars, famines, and diseases that in many cases appear preventable.
Stock markets collapse under panic selling when each individual acts to bring about the outcome that none of them wants. Doctors sometimes make disastrous misjudgments that result in disability or death of their patients. Experts often fail to agree with each other.
and may be shown in hindsight to have made judgments that were both mistaken and overconfident. At the present time, governments of the world are well informed about the likely progress of global warming and its consequences, but seem to be making minimal progress in doing anything to prevent it. Criminal courts continue to convict the innocent and acquit the guilty with alarming regularity, and so on and so forth.
So that's the other side of the coin. By the way, there's a senator in Hawaii. Is that his name? Yeah, no, is that his name? Is he from He?
He's the one who says that global warming is a hoax? No, it's another... it's a name like...
It's not. Yeah, that's right. So, unfortunately, we even have political people trying to settle things that are scientific politically now. The global warming thing, I remember some Republicans were running on the platform, they're going to wipe it out, you know.
By voting, you can get rid of it, right? And it reminds me that in the late... 1800s, very late 1800s, the Indiana legislation. I never knew whether this was a hoax or what.
They almost got it to the floor to vote on. They had a vote, they were going to vote on to change value of pi to make it a non to make it a finite number so that it was going to sell it's a thing you commercially that says solve a lot of issues and so we have this so you have It's a confusion that many people politically are trying to, or religiously, are trying to change things which are scientific issues, but they're trying to handle it politically. And I suppose that's more of that. There's one other thing here I have here.
No, that's it. That's all I wanted to give you from Evans. So the idea is, again, that we are a complex thing. We are a very complicated brain.
Complicated. We can think hypothetically. We could do all kinds of wonderful things.
And it's not clear that the heuristics, how many of you have heard of heuristics and biases, that approach? Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, got the Nobel Prize in economics. The third psychologist, I think, has got the Nobel Prize in economics to the upset of the, maybe it's the second one.
But you can't, there's no Nobel Prize in psychology. There is a Nobel Prize for economics. And so...
So, Herbert Simon was the first one, I think, psychologist to get the Nobel Prize in Economics, which upset economists, because why is he getting a Nobel Prize? He's not an economist, right? Herbert Simon got it for his notion of, a very simple notion, think about it, and sometimes maybe the best ideas are simple.
His idea was on... I'm trying to think of his phrase for it, but basically he said that we satisfy, that's it, satisficing. Instead of trying to maximize... evidence for a decision or anything we satisfy. Because of limited cognitive capacity, we do the best we can with limited amount of data.
And we make a decision on not all the data, but on parts of it, because we are cognitively incapable of handling all of the data. And for that very simple notion called satisficing, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And now, lastly, it was Daniel Kahneman who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, a psychologist, for his work on the biases, heuristics and biases.
of the human mind that he keeps coming up with. By the way, these heuristics and biases, they're not necessarily all bad. They have a good place in our thinking and they have a good role.
The question is, under some circumstances, these shortcuts we have to take because we cannot handle everything are very helpful and very useful other cases they they serve as a platform as a reason for us being able to be taken in be scammed be hoodwinked And in many ways, the best scammer is one who can take advantage of the way your mind ordinarily works, and it works usually for good from the situations in which it's developed and the situation we work with most of the time. Because we cannot... completely, logically deal with every problem.
And so in the next two lectures I will be giving you further examples and get more into the theory of why it is that smart people can be so stupid and why scientists especially. Some of the best scientists have gone badly astray when they step a little bit outside of their area of expertise. Now we get to expertise itself, the word expertise.
Expertise involves what's called automatic thinking, the autonomous mind. You really don't consciously think. You just do it.
It just comes to you. We were talking at lunch, I think Edward and DJ and I were talking at lunch about some of this. And the example I think... Edward brought up was that in that some people working both in the network and Denmark or what's that England France they drive in different sides of the road so if you're native of France and you go to England you do You drive on one side of the road and you go back to France, you drive on the other side of the road.
But if you're a Frenchman, you grew up in France and you're doing this thing, in France it's automatic what you're doing. You don't have to worry or think about it. When you go to England, which is not where you grew up, you still can drive okay, but you have to think about it and consciously be aware of that.
That kind of thinking is not autonomous thinking. And unfortunately, if you're doing that kind of thinking, your mind doesn't have that kind of thinking that's what we call. Well, system two thinking, it's a slow kind of thinking, can only deal with one object at a time.
It's serial thinking and it's very costly. It takes a lot of effort to think that way. And as a result, we are what's called cognitive misers. We don't like to deploy that kind of thinking very often because it's very costly.
So if you're driving a car, like when you first learn to drive a car, you can't pay attention to almost anything else. You have to pay attention to what you're doing and how you move the clutch and everything else. After years of doing this, this is automatic. It's not part of your conscious thinking. You can do all kinds of stuff, including I see people combing their hair and eating their lunch while they're driving.
And on the highways here, it's kind of frightening. And of course, they're doing their texting and everything else. We know that they really can't multitask like that. What they're doing is they're switching back and forth.
But because you can automate a lot of things, and driving something that's automated, it's now part of your unconscious mind or your system one type of thinking. And that kind of thinking is cheap, relatively cheap, it's not very costly to the human system. It doesn't take up any of our conscious resources.
It's good that we do a lot of that, but it's very context-dependent. So that a doctor who is an expert in his or her specialty does rely on a lot of automatic judgments because they have a fixed matrix of things they're dealing with. That same doctor stepping outside of that matrix of where they're usually applying this kind of judgment oftentimes is still going to use ...use an intuitive type of judgment and it's not relevant in a new situation. And in those conditions, they can get into an awful lot of trouble. And that's why a lot of medical doctors are among the biggest supporters of paranormal types of as well.
You find medical people with MDs who are also doing homeopathic stuff. You find people with MDs who talk about complementary medicine and alternative ways, as if there's an alternative to the right way, right? And we're going to come out across examples of scientists who also... When they get outside their area of expertise, they don't realize that they really are not consciously scientists, they are implicit scientists. Most scientists get into their field, they are postdocs, they work within their field.
apprentices and they implicitly absorb these constraints that are important in their field the right rules right right way you make observations in their field they don't realize when I step out of the field that those same intuitions are not relevant anymore so they still feel they're doing good science when they are dealing with a medium who claims to be talking to the dead Like Gary Schwartz, who claims he has good degrees, he has his PhD from Harvard, he taught at Yale, he has hundreds of professional papers on the brain and stuff like that, and yet he lasts... 10-20 years he's been spending all his time testing mediums like John Edwardward you know John Edwardward on TV and stuff like that he claims they're real they really aren't talking to the dead okay he's written books on and stuff like that he's written articles and he apparently has no Well, he believes he's so smart because the first time I met him, the first thing he told me was how he got A plus in his graduate statistics course at Harvard, how he got an A plus in his undergraduate physics class at Cornell, and how he got Phi Beta Kappa, all these credentials, and how he has 400 papers, I don't know how many, a number of published papers. papers in legitimate science.
I call it legitimate science. He didn't make that distinction. He thinks everything he does is legitimate science, I guess. And yet it's pretty clear this man is way off base.
He doesn't, I mean this is not science that he's doing when he's dealing with these mediums. We've got five minutes still? I didn't realize.
Okay. Oh, this is good. I got a lot more time than I thought. I'm going to do this, finish the lectures in four lectures instead of ten.
Okay. No, we've got a lot more material. Okay.
So let me go on then to... What's that? We've done a lot of material, but that's also... Okay, I think we should be, because it's a good place to stop here, because I want to begin on the next segment, actually, and I think this is a good place to stop, unless anyone has any questions.
Yes, Kathy. Do people at home ever say that their keys actually bend? I was trying to think of some rationale why somebody sitting at home would bend.
Kathy is asking why someone at home, why their keys would bend. The question is, did they? And the question is, why do you get all these reports of bending keys from people?
And you do. Every time Gala's been on TV, hundreds of people call in. Randy has done it also similar and people call in as well.
So it's easy to get people to call in. Now why are they calling in? Well, let me give you an example of what happened to me one time.
I was giving a talk. I was a medical doctor at Stanford Medical Center. Called me down at the time of Gellerer.
They had had Gellerer and the people studying Gellerer at SRI talk to them and they decided to show some balance. They'd have me come. So I came next week and talked to him, and I was feeling a hostile crowd.
They were all Gellerer. Everyone to Gellerer now. Gellerer was their hero. And who am I?
I'm coming to put him down. So I was up there, and all during my talk, there was some fellow in the back there yelling at me all the time. He kept interrupting and saying, here, Ben McKee, if you're such a great man, you know. I key I says well wait a minute wait a minute I don't I don't claim to be able to bend keys it's Gellerer who can bend keys and anyway wait till afterwards I'm giving my talk here and so He kept yelling at me and I said, okay, I want to do something to shut him up for a little while.
And I said, okay, I'll try, give it a try, I don't guarantee anything. I'm standing here, he's right back in the room. I said, I'm going to concentrate. And I concentrated and I said, bend, bend, bend. Suddenly the guy changed his face, turned ashen white, and he says, It's spent.
You did it. And I was a sudden hero suddenly now. I replaced Gellerer in their eyes and everyone else. Everyone wanted my autograph.
It was an unbelievable scene, you know. I had bent this guy's key. Well, I didn't know what was going on.
And so I went up to him afterwards. Fortunately, he was still around. You know, after it was a long question and answer session, and I now was a hero to everyone.
They wanted my autograph and everything. I had bent this guy's key, apparently, from a distance even. So I went up to him and I says, can I see your key? And he brought out the key, and I couldn't tell whether it was bent or not, you know.
I said, I had to put it on a table, and I put it on a table, sure enough, you can see it was a little bit of a bend, you know, if you look at it, it was very barely, I said, you sure it wasn't bent beforehand? He says, oh yes, but not that much. Since then, I tried this trick also.
I would come to people's homes after I met Gellerer and saw him do the spoon bending and stuff like that. A few times I'd be invited to someone's home for dinner. something like that. I come in the door front door I say wait a minute I says you know I hope you don't mind but I'm gonna see if I can bend some of your cutlery. I'm at the door I haven't even come in and I concentrate.
I hope you don't mind. I said go to the kitchen. Almost about 70% of the time they'd come back and say you did it.
Well now if you go try it yourself go in someone's house and go through the cutlery you'll find at least one or two bent you know that the people just don't notice. So there's things like that going on. Okay the spoons okay. No, spoons are wonderful instruments. They're much easier to bend than you think.
Depends on the spoon, of course. But keys are harder to bend, by the way. But you still can bend keys with leverage and other tricks. Randy's favorite way, and Gala's also, when he's in a chair like you're sitting in, you can shove the key into, I think, between, no, that's not, some of those chairs are like that. Can you put it in here?
Yeah, you can put it in, no, you can't. But some keys. It shows like that, you can get the key in between the frame and the seat.
And while you're just moving up like that, it bends very easily. It's another leverage type of thing. Randy's, that's one of Randy's favorites.
I remember seeing Randy do that lots of times. But Scarron does it that way too. You just quickly, as you're adjusting, you're trying to bend the key and nothing's happening, suddenly you adjust the chair a little bit, you've got it bent now.
You can now pretend that you go through that thing, pretend, and eventually you show it bent, of course. The musicians are going to love that. No, no, well that's okay.
Magicians didn't invent this. It was Geller. And magicians have so many ways of bending the key. Geller was a very smart guy.
Remember that he gave his talk there. He said, you people have bent spoons. By the way, Geller actually bent spoons for us.
in front of the magicians. He says, now you guys do it. The only implication was he does it for real. You guys do it in complicated ways, have wonderful ways of doing it, ways I never thought of doing it. You've got a hundred ways.
I just keep it simple, he says. and that's and then he did it for us what's that this is that self-deluded we really believe that oh no no the other is not sub-deluded no no way about it he knows exactly what he's doing about what we're talking about unfortunately many many things uh by the way when i got these keys uh there's some of them were already bent you know so you don't notice it sometimes so you're looking for it so that's one thing a more common thing is a with the watch bending Gellerer is famous for the broken watches. They have him running for years.
He picks them up in his hand, holds them for a while, and then they begin going again. Okay, so we're finished. I'd like to tell you this. I and my friend Gary Anderson and I were on the television show, which you can find on YouTube, but it was 1975, we were on a television show on Gellerer, because Gellerer was supposed to be on the show with us, he refused to be on the show with me. So they had a separate show.
...showgirls than we were on and we... duplicated and uh we brought uh broken watches we got from jeweler a whole batch of broken watches we put them on a table and we had the host pick up any watch you want and concentrate for a while holding his hand concentrate and we've got half of them going again and it's just a natural thing like the way he gave your hand oftentimes we'll get a a broken watch with the mainspring the old-fashioned watches that mainsprings another yeah and they can get going And so a lot of this is natural. But then people just will tell me, will say things like that.
I used to do mind reading type demonstrations to make money. Not that I agree with it, but I used to do this. And for six years I was a professional mentor, so to speak.
And a lot of times I had to secretly get what people wrote down on a piece of paper. I had to get it to read. And what people have allows you to write a few times. I couldn't read with them. So the nice thing about being a mentalist is you can, okay, don't do it, but every once in a while I would just make up something.
And 90% of the time, he would say, you're right on. Now, I couldn't be right on. I think in most cases, these people didn't want me to be wrong or didn't want to embarrass me on themselves by me being wrong or something like that.
So people rely, I think, as far as I know, to stand in front of audiences sometimes and not get any secret information, but just give them readings. And they sometimes say some very confident facts. And many times I used to go wrong with it. You say, yeah, you're right.
Okay. That's the end of it. Okay.