Episode 210: The Priming of the American Mind (with Jesse Singal)

You speak the truth, my man. The truth only means something if the.

Person who is listening understands it.

The great and boss has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man.

I'm a very good man.

Good man. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man.

I'm a very good man.

Just a very bad wizard.

Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamar Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, today we have Jesse Single coming on the show. In the second segment, did you hunker down? Are you ready for the tweet shitstorm we're going to get?

I'm afraid I don't like Twitter. Meanness, even just reading Jesse's feed stresses me out.

Because they don't play. They'll fuck you up.

No. Fucking studio gangsters is what they are. Possibly real gangster.

We don't know.

Yeah, possibly real gangsters don't tweet.

Now there's another tweet shit storm. Twitch storm. Like, what's the fucking tweet storm?

Tweet storm.

So that's what we have coming on. In the second segment, we talk about his new book on social psychology. We get into a little bit of a culture war debate, so that's coming up.

But before that, something much less controversial.

Yeah. So last episode, something happened that surprised both of us. I said that I wasn't convinced that there aren't ghosts or spirit entities of some kind. And then you and Paul both first thought I was joking, and then Paul just thought all of a sudden he had transported to some alternate universe or something like and, like, it's funny because I was just as surprised that you guys reacted that way.

Yeah, my jaw dropped.

Yeah. Right. Yes. We've never talked about this stuff, but yeah, I kind of feel like it's almost irresponsible epistemically to be as sure as you guys are.

Well, let's frame this in the right way, because the way you're saying it is like I said, I wasn't 100% sure that goes I'm not 100% sure of anything. But you were, like, ready to blame your glass breaking not on the scientific principles of heat and glass and cold, but on the real possibility that ghosts might inhabit, like where you were.

My house. Okay. No, so that part was a joke. Like, I don't think, having looked it up and seen that glasses do explode, I do have enough Occam's razor in me to think probably that's what happened in my particular house. That's why we didn't move out. White people always stay in the house when there's a ghost. But we are not those white people. We would just move out. It's the ghost house now.

Yeah. And then to your charge of epistemic responsibility, I guess that's what it boils down to. Because if you're saying that you have this looser standard or a different threshold for believing in supernatural phenomena, then I sort of think that once you accept the possibility of those sort of like ghost stories and ghouls and zombies and leprechauns or whatever else you to believe no. Then you sort of open the door. Then you could believe anything. You might as well believe that essential oils cure just there's more evidence of that than there is of ghosts.

Well, I don't know that. I haven't looked at the essential oil Research COVID connection.

So you haven't seen the meta analysis?

I can't comment on that. But I will say that I don't think so. You and Paul mostly you, has been saying, do you believe in leprechauns? No. Those are very specific things that I probably don't believe in. But spiritual entities, supernatural events have been reported for millennia. It goes to every culture. It goes to every period of time. And I think it's crazy not to be open to the possibility. We understand so little about our universe. We don't understand consciousness at all. Pretty much. I think it's just weird to take a strong anti spirit or, I don't know, non material entity stance, given that this has been part of the human race for a long time. And maybe that's because of some weird evolutionary quirk, but maybe not. We don't know. And that's all I'm asking for is.

Just to you're lumping together sort of a class of things like that you're calling supernatural, and you're saying, like, well, there's evidence that or at least humans have believed in this class. Of thing for a long time, but they've believed a whole bunch of different things. And they've also been very superstitious and found, like, sort of believed all kinds of spurious correlations. Let's just take a superstition that arises from a spurious correlation. Like, you put on this pair of socks and you won the lottery. And so from then, you put on the same pair of socks forevermore, and you develop this true belief that socks help you win the lottery. These particular socks help you win the lottery. People have been doing that for a long, long time. People have developing superstitions, but there we just know that that's just poor evidence of a causal connection. I'm confident saying that there's nothing that could cause your socks to make you win the lottery. Just because humans have been believing it for a really long time. It's not enough evidence for me. We've been a superstitious scared lot for a long time.

You mean like jinxing or whatever? Or the reverse jinxing, sort of what you're saying all of those kinds of.

Superstitions that arise, it's hard to come up with a category that would capture it, but I mean, like those things that happen when you put one thing together with another thing just merely because post hoc, ergo, proctor hoc kind of thing. Sure. And the parsimonious explanation for all of those superstitious beliefs is just like some sort of tendency to see patterns where there are none. And I think that all of the things that are claimed to be supernatural, it's striking to me that we've never actually captured any evidence of a supernatural. So what you're saying sounds like you might be saying, like, well, there are parts of the natural universe that we don't know, and sure, I totally believe that there might be.

There might be. There is.

Sorry.

85% of the universe is dark matter, which we don't understand. And it's just like a word or a concept that doesn't right, yeah.

But the people who study dark matter understand it enough to have developed a scientific theory about it. Right. So it's weird to rely on that.

As like, the no, all I'm saying I'm relying on it only to point out our epistemic situation, which is not very good when it comes to understanding the basic nature of reality. Because when it comes to the universe, which we thought we had a much better handle on until people realized that galaxies weren't operating according to the normal laws of gravity. So we posit this thing, which we can't detect in any way, and we have no more evidence for other than its effect or what we presume is its effect. No, really, just the only evidence for it right, is that our other good theories seem to run afoul when presented with this new data. And so it's an epicycle. It's an epicycle. It's like Ptolemy's epicycle thing.

Well, so we have systematic evidence of, say, the motion of galaxies and stars and clusters of stars, and that doesn't conform to the amount of matter that we thought was in the natural universe. So we posit this sort of unknown entity, just like we used to posit atoms before we were able to observe it. Just like we posited black holes to account for just as a purely theoretical thing to account for observations. And then we eventually found evidence of black holes. We will eventually find some evidence of dark matter, and we will keep learning about the physical universe. The step that I don't want to take is to say that there is something above and beyond the science. To posit a supernatural agent is to really say there is a realm. There are agentic forces that are acting in this world, and there's never been, not even like with dark matter, where you have