Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with host, Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

One of the hard things to face about the news ecosystem in this country at this time is that no one is coming to rescue us. There will be no Clean Air Act to take the fabrications and misconceptions and provocations out of our tragically polluted newsfeeds. If you want to consume news in a healthy way, not be misled, not trap yourself in a bubble, better understand the world at this moment, you have to take the initiative. On your own. It’s up to you.

This is not, god forbid, an exhortation to “do your own research’ on social media. That will drive you deep down some rabbit holes. But it’s an exhortation to think clearly, effectively, scientifically about what you read, or watch, or listen to.

Michael Starbird is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, who realized that the best way to teach students but how to think. His book The Five Elements of Effective Thinking, is about developing the habits of mind that make you much harder to mislead. And believe us, there are lots of people who want, for all kinds of reasons, to mislead you.

Michael and Eric talk about how to judge scientific claims when you’re not a scientist, as most of us aren’t; how to separate evidence from noise, and why being open to change is not only a personal virtue but a civic necessity.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the flood of claims, counterclaims, and outrage in your news feed, this episode will help you see a way forward.

 

Transcript

Eric Schurenberg (00:01.554)
Michael Starbird, welcome to In Reality.

Michael Starbird (00:04.902)
Thank you.

Eric Schurenberg (00:06.424)
It is great to have you here. Now, as you know, on Indie Reality, we talk a lot about media and the information environment. How does the news get made the way it does and get served to you the way it does? What are the problems affecting the flow of trustworthy information? But that’s kind of largely a supply side issue. There’s also a demand side to the information exchange. That is, you know, what all of us consumers of news, how we receive it and maybe the best defense against being misled by false information is to think critically. Now you call it effective thinking, which is maybe much better branding, but I and the others in the misinformation world might call it making yourself foolproof, but whatever you call it, it’s all about using your own thinking habits to help you identify reliable information so you have the best ability to make good decisions about your vote, about your beliefs about fellow Americans, about your health or your money. Now, you are, as we said in the intro, a much beloved and much decorated math teacher at the University of Texas. And your key realization was that students struggling with math could get better at math by getting better at thinking. And that’s the inspiration for your book, The Five Elements of Effective Thinking, which you wrote with Edward Berger. So we’ll dive deeper.

Michael Starbird (01:26.662)
Yes.

Eric Schurenberg (01:33.808)
into those five elements, but just to get us grounded, let’s list them here. Just tell us what the five elements are with just a sentence of description.

Michael Starbird (01:42.064)
Well, actually, if you don’t mind, I’m going to deviate from your question a little bit to tell you a little about the background of the five elements. Where are they came from? I was asked by a friend of mine to construct a course in mathematics for wonderful honors liberal arts students. And I finally came to realize that they’re not going to use the mathematics per se.

in their everyday lives. They’re going to be leaders of society, but that’s not the fundamental contribution I could make to their lives. Instead, decided I finally, and by the way, it took several years of mistakes before I learned this, I finally occurred to me, I need to be giving them some contribution from this experience that they can use every day in their lives. And that changed the whole shift of the course to saying, well,

What can I teach them that will allow them to do exactly what you just were talking about, make better decisions in their lives, become more successful at everything they do, be able to tell misinformation from reality? So it shifted the entire concept of what my goal of this course was. And the effect was to say, okay, I want their experience in this mathematics classroom to really help them to become better thinkers.

and better able to navigate every single moment of their lives. So that changed the entire focus of the course. And one of the challenges for me was that I had to become specific about, what are the intellectual contributions I can give to my students by virtue of this experience in a mathematics class? And that’s what led to these five elements of effective thinking. That was we had to say, well, exactly what is it

that we think is useful for a person how to use their minds in ways that make them more successful and more able to differentiate reality from bogus things. yeah, so those are the, that’s sort of the background that I think might frame this discussion.

Eric Schurenberg (03:43.944)
Okay, good.

Eric Schurenberg (03:50.938)
Okay, great. Well, thank you. On behalf of all liberal arts grads, thank you for making that pivot. I’ve often thought that consuming news and sort of understanding your environment through the media environment, understanding reality through your media environment is very akin to mathematical and scientific thinking. all right, now that we know the background of the five elements, let’s go through them.

Michael Starbird (03:56.493)
Hahaha!

Michael Starbird (04:14.204)
Sure. Yeah. Okay.

Okay, so the first one, and perhaps, and I don’t like to rank them, you know, they’re all my children and so I don’t want to be prejudiced, but probably the most fundamental one is to understand simple things deeply, is the way I phrase it. And what I really mean by that is to understand fundamentals deeply, to understand the basics of every single aspect of one’s environment.

Eric Schurenberg (04:38.354)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (04:48.236)
particularly in your own expertise, to return frequently to the very fundamentals of that most expertise with the idea that as you push your best skills forward, returning to the basics of your whole subject matter really causes you to see those most advanced issues in a different light. So going back to fundamentals,

Eric Schurenberg (05:12.944)
Okay, all right.

Michael Starbird (05:17.54)
repeatedly, not just once, not getting very good at fundamentals and then moving on, but repeatedly returning to fundamentals of your discipline or your skill. And of course, this is a famous one for athletes, for example, or dancers or artists returning to fundamentals. So that’s number one. Doing scales, exactly. The second one is to, our phrasing is it, is acute.

Eric Schurenberg (05:36.328)
Sure, doing scales, as it were, to use the movement analysis. The second one is embracing

Michael Starbird (05:47.578)
double entendre, fail to succeed. So this one is making mistakes. It’s not the mistakes that lead to success. Mistakes themselves are not beneficial. What’s beneficial is to allow the mistakes by analyzing the mistakes to let them become directive toward better choices. So it’s taking the mistakes and saying, well, what have I learned from

Eric Schurenberg (05:50.76)
Hmm.

Michael Starbird (06:17.628)
from those errors and then use those to push forward. So that’s number two. So the third one is to raise questions, to raise questions. And this is a practice of mind that first of all makes life much more interesting because every time you hear somebody speak, every time you read something, you ask the questions such as where is the evidence for this? Where did this come from?

What are the implications of this? Where is it going to? And then that leads right into the fourth one. And by the way, I should say that the most fundamental of those, the raising questions is asking yourself, what is the real question? What is the real question? And this is just framing that question for whatever it is that we’re trying to accomplish can often be illuminating and shocking,

Eric Schurenberg (07:02.915)
Mm. Mm.

Michael Starbird (07:17.528)
Okay. The next one is follow the flow of ideas. So this is just the idea that every single human thought that we have, we think of this as, you know, things that are natural. Probably not. If we live 30,000 years ago, what you and I are thinking in our minds right now would not have come up in the minds of our ancestors. So every idea that humanity has developed over

time is the process is the end of a process up to this moment. And realizing it’s the end of a process that came from somewhere before. And that that continues so that it’s we’re in the middle of a stream. All of us live our lives. I like to think of it as we’re living our lives in the middle of a movie, right? The movie of experience. And we’re we’re just we’re born right into the middle of it. We live our lives and it continues.

Eric Schurenberg (07:50.056)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (08:14.724)
And having that perspective of things changing and that we’re in the middle of that flow of ideas changes how does we think about our thing, our world. And the final one is change. That the idea of actually viewing ourselves as a work in progress. That we are not going to be the same people in a few years as we are now.

Eric Schurenberg (08:36.295)
Hmm

Michael Starbird (08:42.64)
When I think about teaching, I’m not thinking of taking my students and adding some knowledge. Instead, I’m trying to create different human beings. Rather heavy, heavy, heavy concept. And yeah, so those are.

Eric Schurenberg (08:54.243)
Mm. Mm.

And it implies that, I’m sorry, Michael, it implies that your responsibility as an adult is to continue to see yourself as a changing human being, as a work in progress.

Michael Starbird (09:12.208)
And that’s why I just got out of my tennis lesson this morning. Yeah, top swim rack hand and it’s a problem, let me just say.

Eric Schurenberg (09:17.64)
You’re changing your backhand, are you?

Eric Schurenberg (09:25.576)
Well, yeah, welcome to the club, brother. All right, so let’s go back to element one. So understanding the simple things, the fundamentals deeply. Now, as I apply that to the information ecosystem and sort of understanding what it is that you’re consuming as a news consumer, I think you need to kind of understand what it is you’re looking at. Are you looking at

Michael Starbird (09:29.604)
Right, right.

Michael Starbird (09:38.001)
Yes.

Eric Schurenberg (09:55.184)
a reported article or an opinion piece, or you need to deeply understand the standards of this particular writer or the institution that the writer represents, the sourcing, all that kind of stuff. When you are not a journalist though, and you’re kind of trying to understand deeply the fundamentals of this kind of information exchange, the other side of the exchange.

How do you go about that? What’s your advice there?

Michael Starbird (10:27.578)
Well, for one thing,

Every issue that is presented in what’s called news has a couple of basic problems. One is that it’s a summary. It’s a very small summary. I’m in the university, and I study what I study deeply.

Eric Schurenberg (10:38.546)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (10:55.578)
that my knowledge, I’m in a sub-discipline of sub-discipline of mathematics. When I do research, I’m in three-dimensional, know, geometric topology. This is a little arcane area, and it’s extremely rich, wonderfully interesting and full of interesting things. I appreciate the fact that any significant issue has a background to it and has a depth to it.

that an article in saying what happened yesterday is not capturing. So the idea of being aware that any news article has a depth to it that you’re not seeing is significant. So let’s take, for example, let’s suppose you’re reading about vaccinations. Well, for one thing, there’s science. How do vaccines work?

Eric Schurenberg (11:29.768)
Mmm.

Michael Starbird (11:54.191)
Do you know, do you actually understand how they work? And the answer is no, by the way, for me, the answer is no, I don’t don’t really know. I have friends who have spent their entire lives studying how vaccinations work and vaccines work that I can ask. And I have an appreciation for the depth of knowledge and the strategies that are used to come to the insights that scientists come to. So I have an appreciation for what’s involved in in making a conclusion.

about basically about anything that makes me view a news article as a frankly mostly superficial summary of a little tiny piece of a big story. So that’s that. So one of the things is, for example, you know, if if if I’m interested in a particular thing is to read about the history of it.

Eric Schurenberg (12:44.488)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (12:54.328)
and to try to understand if it’s a scientific thing, try to get some appreciation for what the science actually is behind that. But of course, that requires effort. And that requires expertise and some appreciation for what. I like to see bigger pictures of things. For example, in the case of news,

I often ask myself the question, suppose news sources were produced instead of every few minutes, suppose they were produced every 50 years.

Eric Schurenberg (13:36.989)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (13:38.085)
you’d have quite a different view of what’s happening. You wouldn’t be concerned with, know, who said some stupid thing yesterday. Instead, you might look and say, how are people living now compared to 50 years ago? And that gives a totally different view of what the trajectory of humanity is and has been.

Eric Schurenberg (14:04.456)
Tell me elaborate on that, Michael. So 50 years ago, know, the life expectancy was much shorter than it is now. There were many more people leaving, living in deep poverty. There were sort of fewer technological distractions to people’s behavior. But kind of what is, why did that, what is that analogy or what is that kind of mental exercise come up for you? What does it, what does it say to you?

Michael Starbird (14:33.744)
Well, well, well, to me, it’s, I guess it’s a perspective creator. It says that as, as, you know, humanity has progressed. And by the way, I happen to believe in progress. think, I think human beings over the long periods of time in measured in hundreds of years or in decades that we are in fact progressing that progressing in on many fronts.

Eric Schurenberg (14:39.72)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (15:03.78)
And I like to think that we can look at data to make that persuasive, just as you pointed out. When I was a kid, more than 50 % of the population of human beings on the planet lived at the most severe poverty level that exists. Things like the $1 a day equivalent kind of thing, where any bad weather can cause a famine and people just die.

Eric Schurenberg (15:26.568)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (15:32.653)
Now that number is eight or nine percent. And it’s it’s it’s what an accomplishment. You know, we should be we meaning humanity should be celebrating that incredible positive step that we have taken with respect to that particular issue. And as you say, things like life expectancy, children’s mortality rates.

vaccinations, know, 80 % of one year olds on the planet are vaccinated by with something. And I have to say it’s shocking that for example, the anti vaxxers in this in this country, or it’s it’s, it’s really quite amazing that we’re in this, this, that that kind of thing is a reality for our moment in history. But

Eric Schurenberg (16:05.992)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (16:25.178)
Historically speaking, are, we meaning human beings, are making huge progress that’s demonstrable by evidence.

Eric Schurenberg (16:33.232)
Michael, let me drill down a little bit on vaccines since you brought it up, I expected you to. I will, honestly speaking, not research mRNA vaccines. And I will have to make a judgment about whether I or my loved ones should get vaccinated based on mediated information. Probably from reporters quoting people that they tell me are experts.

Do you have a kind of shorthand, given the five elements of effective thinking, for making judgments about deeply scientific, expert, abstruse questions that nevertheless have an effect on daily life?

Michael Starbird (17:23.228)
Yeah, and by the way, I’m glad you mentioned this, Eric, because it’s just simply true that it’s not practical to become an expert at any of these difficult questions. And so all of us are relying on hearsay. Unless you’re asking me a question about topology, it’s hearsay. My view is hearsay, as is any non-expert. But the thing that I know, living as I do,

scientists, I know what it means for a scientific article to appear in a very respected journal. And I know what is involved in getting, getting a scientific advance stated and accepted by the scientific community. So since I have a very direct understanding of the process, the peer reviewed articles,

the sense of community that people are interacting, the very stringent requirements for getting a paper accepted into one of the leading journals, it’s really rather impressive. It’s reviewed by many experts and so on. the point is that I have an appreciation for the scientific process, and therefore I have confidence in

Eric Schurenberg (18:41.896)
.

Michael Starbird (18:52.432)
which sources are actually very likely to be correct and which ones aren’t. In the case of vaccinations, you know, I mean, in the case of COVID vaccinations, first of all, it was amazing that the vaccinations could have been created that quickly. And everyone involved in making that happen should be applauded for that. The idea that people

Eric Schurenberg (19:06.728)
Yeah.

Michael Starbird (19:21.984)
And I actually wrote about this. It’s really shocking that of the 1.2 million Americans who died of COVID up to now, about 330,000 of them died after vaccines were available for free to them and known to be safe and efficacious. 330,000.

To put that number in perspective, there were 58,000 Americans killed in the 10-year ordeal of the Vietnam War. So five times as many, more than five times as many people died unnecessarily from COVID. The other ones, know, people were dying because we didn’t know what to do. That’s understandable. But the idea that that many people have died unnecessarily is, it’s really…

It’s interesting to me that people aren’t, you know, we should be crying about this. It’s a tragedy and it’s not those individuals’ fault. Let me make that 100 % clear.

Eric Schurenberg (20:32.06)
Yeah, yes. There definitely is some blame to sped around there about people who prospered from misinformation around that. Let’s move on to mistakes because there’s a kind of natural segue, I think. your point, the reason mistakes are part, learning from mistakes is part of the elements of effective thinking is that

Michael Starbird (20:49.116)
Yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (21:02.194)
people have to recognize that making mistakes are part of the process of increasing knowledge. You cannot do that unless you learn from mistakes. You try things, some fail and you learn from them. Journalists make mistakes, scientists make mistakes. For example, for a long time, we were convinced that a daily glass of red wine was good for you. At Fortune Magazine, when I worked there, we put that claim on the cover. so now we believe that no wine is good for you ever.

however frequently you drink it. A lot of people, however, conclude from those mistakes, those missteps that you can’t trust science at all, or journalists, what conclusion should we draw from kind of Pratt Falls, obvious prominent Pratt Falls like that?

Michael Starbird (21:33.916)
You

Michael Starbird (21:58.299)
Yeah, well, first of all.

One of the you you got to understand that I mean this is sort of a mathematical theme that If an assertion is made that say red wine is good for you or red wine is not good for you How good How big difference does it make? That’s it. mean, I don’t I don’t drink but I love chocolate so

Eric Schurenberg (22:21.608)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (22:28.162)
Any article that says dark chocolate is good for me, I’m all over that. But I also realize what is the actual effect? Is it how significant is the claim? And by the way, switching from one side to the other, maybe just a tiny switch to say, well, it’s more, you know, it’s not really that beneficial or it’s a little beneficial to some people. Human beings are different from each other. Some people who have some

physiological issue for which they whatever the effect is of red wine, maybe it’s beneficial to some people and not beneficial to others. I mean, it’s a realizing there’s a distribution of humanity and that little tiny effects. If you study thousands and thousands of people, little tiny effects can use the phrase correctly, statistically significant and yet be not significant whatsoever.

Eric Schurenberg (23:26.44)
Mmm.

Michael Starbird (23:26.542)
And so appreciating that distinction is important. And by the way, I have no idea about the red wine. I haven’t studied that. So I don’t know what the thing was. But people do, you know, there’s no question that scientists make mistakes. And in fact, one of the features of science is that a scientific assertion is one that can be falsified by evidence. That’s one of the features of what we call science.

Eric Schurenberg (23:35.388)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (23:54.723)
And when, when we discover evidence that shows that something we thought was correct is wrong, then that’s great. I mean, we don’t think that’s a problem that that actually is an insight. And of course, if it, if it affects how people have, have lived, then, then that’s a mistake and it is a mistake. But, but the point is, you know, it’s, it’s like the phrase, the race is not always to the swiftest, but

Eric Schurenberg (24:21.896)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (24:22.682)
But that’s how you should vote. That’s how you should bet. that’s the thing is that science is not perfect. But from, from, those topics that are, are studied by, by science, serious scientists, we, that is the best that humanity has been able to do so far in describing how the world works. And that’s what we should rely on.

because you have to rely on something and scientific investigation is quite good. Its track record is excellent.

Eric Schurenberg (25:05.32)
Yes, yes. And I think it’s useful to point out as you just did that what you’re trusting is not any particular person or any particular claim, but the scientific process and the constant peer review. On falsifiability too, I think it’s worthwhile to drill down on that. So falsifiable is kind of the constant state of any kind of scientific assertion. It’s meant to be hung out there for people to throw darts at.

and try to disprove. And the more failures there are at disproving it, the stronger the assertion becomes, but only because it resists those efforts to disprove it. The things that are not falsifiable, say religious dogma, for example, that’s not, that’s, know, it can’t say it’s true or false, but it’s not scientific. Another question about mistakes is that sort of on the,

Michael Starbird (25:45.404)
That’s

Michael Starbird (25:53.691)
outside.

That’s great.

Eric Schurenberg (26:03.564)
What we’ve just talked about is the perception side. So I see people who are authorities make mistakes and therefore should I trust them or not trust them? There’s also a question on the demand side about people’s willingness to admit mistakes. And I think that what you see a lot in so-called filter bubbles is that people are unwilling to admit mistakes, even when facts change, when their identity is challenged or some assumptions are.

our challenge. Can you address that and sort of what are the what are the mental states you need to be able to get over that hurdle?

Michael Starbird (26:39.878)
Yeah. And this is something that is learned and can be changed. One of the things that I do in my own actual classes, you know, I’m teaching classes and I, one of the things that I try to help students learn is to be comfortable in being honest about their own state of understanding and not non-understanding.

Eric Schurenberg (26:45.864)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (27:09.212)
So when I’m teaching an upper division mathematics class, I’ll tell you the strategy I use. It’s sort of fun. And I try to make it fun, by the way. So what I do is I give the students a set of basically what they are is theorem statements, but they’re challenges. And their challenge and their homework assignment is to

Eric Schurenberg (27:29.736)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (27:35.527)
personally prove all of these theorems that are carefully sequenced so that it’s possible for them to do it, to prove on their own without asking any other help. I’m not gonna help them. They’re told not to look on the internet, and they could, but they’re told not to do that. They’re not to talk with each other. And then they come to the class and I say, know, John, Jane, Jose, you do number.

and you three do number 13, you do number 14. Everybody’s up at the blackboard explaining what they have figured out themselves to each other. And the effect is, and then they sit down and I have the first group present what they did.

The effect is that they make mistakes every day because they don’t know how to do this. And by the way, you’re saying to yourself, well, wait a minute, they’re obviously going to look it up anyway, you know, cause they, you know, that’s what they’re that that’s not a problem. The reason it’s not a problem is that then I just say, Oh, how did you think of that? Oh, can you this related thing? Oh, can you do this thing? And in about 10 seconds, you can easily see whether or not they did it themselves. So that, that is quickly.

Eric Schurenberg (28:38.333)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (28:47.728)
off the table and it’s easy to get everybody to buy into this. And I advertise it as this is going to change your life. And the way to change it is not to just look up things, but to try to figure them out on your own. So they make mistakes every single day. A person is going to be explaining because if you are not an expert at something and you’re trying to do something that’s challenging, certainly in mathematics and I think in any other subject.

you’re going to make mistakes all the time. And I celebrate that. And I’ll make sure somebody makes a mistake. And sometimes I’ll have a person will do it correctly on the board. And I will have seen somebody else who got it wrong. And I’ll say, you know, know, Joan, could you show yours? Because it was wrong. And then, you know, Joan goes up and shows it. And we point out what was defective about that thinking, asking people to say, what is defective about that and that that’s something to celebrate.

Eric Schurenberg (29:21.0)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (29:46.427)
because it is a, it’s directive. It tells you what was wrong in your thinking. And that’s a huge arrow pointing in the right direction that you try some different direction. so errors, having people react internally differently to mistakes and being willing to have that be a public part of reality is…

is it’s actually comforting. It means that you’re not constantly saying, I’m making a mistake, that’s terrible. No, no, that is part of the process of certainly anything creative is built on the ash heap of failed attempts. If you are unwilling to make those failed attempts and learn from them, you’re never going to do anything of great significance in my.

Eric Schurenberg (30:30.424)
Mm. Mm.

Eric Schurenberg (30:40.104)
Good, good. The old adage from show business that great plays are not rewritten, or not written, they’re rewritten. moving on to questions. So the third element, just asking questions is now kind of a somewhat poisonous phrase. It’s often kind of a snide.

preamble to promoting a conspiracy theory. like, I’m just asking questions. How can you be sure, say, that vapor trails coming from airplane engines are not part of a plot to poison us? Just asking questions. It seems to me that that kind of line of inquiry really comes down to sort of a question of authority versus sort of open-ended, not necessarily always in good faith.

Michael Starbird (31:10.704)
Hmm.

Michael Starbird (31:19.387)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (31:36.904)
So where do you draw the line? When do you trust an authority and when does a question become not really a legitimate question? I guess would be the way I’d phrase it.

Michael Starbird (31:50.586)
Yeah. Yeah, okay, so.

One thing I teach my students is doubt. And I’m for it. And what I tell people is that opinions, more or less about anything, should come with your own opinion on your own view of yourself. Should have the property that anything that you believe in opinion or a

even a fact, should come with a percentage that tells you how strong you feel the evidence is for that particular opinion. And so I think it’s very healthy. And I say it, it’s sort of humorous because I can’t imagine any politician actually doing this. But what I would love to see is to say, you know, somebody says, well, I think the death penalty is really bad. You know, shouldn’t have that.

Eric Schurenberg (32:29.352)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (32:35.257)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (32:55.13)
And then it should come with saying 80%. You know, and then they hear a lecture and the lecture says, well, I’ve studied the death penalty. And although it doesn’t have a huge deterrent effect on committing murders, it actually does have some deterrent effect. And therefore you could argue that, you know, 50 people would not have been murdered if the death penalty had been in place in this. And then you say to yourself, wow, that’s pretty good.

I think it’s, morally I have problems with it and this and there are other countries don’t do it. And, you know, I still don’t like it, but that’s, that’s evidence. I, I see his point. Okay. Now I’m 70 % against it. You’ve changed. You would vote the same, but you’ve changed. to me, having that sense of your own opinions is healthy.

Eric Schurenberg (33:52.976)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (33:53.211)
because you say then I’m susceptible to evidence. And then you ask the question, well, what things should you, you know, is it so strong that you shouldn’t question, make ridiculous questions? And the answer is that that’s where you have a, this level of percent of confidence. In other words, if you have something that’s, if you take a rock,

And you let it go and you say, it going to fall? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to go, you know, well, there’s so much evidence that what’s the percentage it’s, it’s, it’s basically a hundred percent. So there’s, that is not a sensible thing to, to argue about. And also having people realize where the starting line is. This is basically Bayesian probability, by the way, where I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bayesian probability, but basically you, you start with a.

Eric Schurenberg (34:37.042)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (34:51.548)
a base sense of how the world is. And then evidence is used to adjust that base view. But if your base view is very high, in other words, if you are extremely confident of a particular thing, for example, let’s say the efficacy of the COVID vaccines. And because you’ve seen evidence after evidence after evidence that it’s extremely effective.

then it would require a lot of counter evidence to say, well, no, that’s not true. But if you got some counter evidence, you’d move it a little bit, but not a huge amount. So thinking about what the base case is actually a very healthy thing to do in getting an understanding of the world.

Eric Schurenberg (35:24.445)
Mmm.

Eric Schurenberg (35:27.942)
and

Eric Schurenberg (35:33.544)
the right.

Eric Schurenberg (35:44.518)
Okay, good. is what you’ve just outlined, I think of as the logical razor of, and I forget who it’s attributed to, well, Occam’s razor is one, but there’s another one that is basically, it says that extreme assertions require extreme evidence. So, and then let’s…

Michael Starbird (35:56.324)
Occam’s razor, yeah.

Michael Starbird (36:05.028)
Yeah, yes, that’s right.

Eric Schurenberg (36:11.656)
And then the question of flow of ideas and placing any idea at any given moment in time in evolution from the past to the future. And you use in your book an analogy of New York kind of constantly the buildings in New York can being constantly changing. I’ve also heard you use the buildings on that University of Texas campuses. Would you explain that sort of the

Michael Starbird (36:14.556)
Yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (36:39.976)
the landscape, the cityscape as part of a flow.

Michael Starbird (36:43.868)
Yeah, yeah. And well, so I’ll use the University of Texas just because you’re in New York and so I’ll use Texas. So the University of Texas is a big school, has a big campus. So it has maybe 300 buildings in the campus. So it’s a large, it’s like a whole city. So it has 300 buildings. And one thing that’s extremely annoying is that

Often the roads are closed. are construction going on. It’s always annoying because there’s noise and dirt and so on. Well, let’s think about it. Any building lasts about 50 years, say, before it needs a major overhaul or actually torn down and another one built. So that means if you’ve got 300 buildings, that means that 60 buildings

a year, six buildings a year, 50 into 300. should do a little better on that. 50 into 300 is 60 buildings a year, roughly, already on average need this huge renovation, which leads to road closures and noise and annoyance. So the fact is that the norm for existence

is to be under construction in significant ways all the time. That’s the norm. It’s not the norm to have everything. You can sort of abstractly think, well, the norm should be everything is going well. That’s not the norm. The norm is among all of these features of our lives. And I use the buildings as a metaphor because all of us have all complicated lives. know, we have our health, we have our finances, we have our professions, we have

our relationships with other people. There are lots of aspects of individual life. Well, it’s nice to think the norm should be that everything’s going great, but that’s not the reality. The reality is that some things are, so to speak, under construction and that lead to problems that we need to deal with. And that’s the norm. And to me, it’s comforting. It means that we don’t have to be so, geez, something went wrong. No, that’s the norm.

Eric Schurenberg (38:53.0)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (39:04.748)
Accept it. It’s like mistakes. If you have a different view of when you make a mistake and how to react to it, if you can be comfortable with it and realize that that’s the norm, it doesn’t mean that you don’t, you know, if it’s something that harms somebody, of course you feel bad about that. But on the other hand, you also realize that happens and you take it with the appropriate thing, including making amends.

Eric Schurenberg (39:31.783)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (39:31.824)
You know, it’s more comforting if you realize, you know what, I’m going to make mistakes. And these buildings are going to be under construction and part of my life is going to be needing attention and attention that I’d rather be doing something else with. that, you know, and my backhand is going to miss.

Eric Schurenberg (39:52.392)
So let’s apply that principle, that element, not just to tennis or to construction in Austin, but also to news media. you don’t mind, then indulge me on that. So the industry is in turmoil, I think most people would say. It’s business models that had sustained it for previous decades is challenged and a lot of competition has arisen in a digital landscape.

Michael Starbird (40:00.017)
He he.

Eric Schurenberg (40:22.696)
If you were to take that perspective you described earlier of sort of the 50 year look, how would you place today’s media environment in the flow of norms from the past to the future?

Michael Starbird (40:40.39)
Yeah, well, and first of all, of course, I’m not this is not my area of expertise. you’re. This is certainly an interesting moment in human history. To me, when I look at things like the media and the effect on human beings and I think about these, you know, horrific tragedy of 30000 Americans dying of Covid because.

They didn’t know how to appreciate reality. I view it as trying to come to an understanding of how the human brain works. That if we think of ourselves, it’s easy for us to think that, I’m a completely autonomous being. And if I were brought up in a very conservative county in Texas or Florida,

I would be a progressive person and I would know that it’s, and that’s not true. If we were born and put in those environments, if you sit and listen to Fox News every single day for all day long, it’s the brain, our human brains are susceptible to what we’re told. And I like to think about how humans were like 30,000 years ago.

And, how people live, you know, there are people living in stone age conditions, at least up to 50 years ago in Papua New Guinea, for example, who would completely without any, any worries go and just kill off somebody else in a neighboring tribe for no reason, except they’re not related. And that, was just the norm. And, and people, you know, it’s just wrong to think that you or I would rise above that and have a different kind of opinion.

So when I think of people who are being misled by inappropriate news sources, to me, it’s a representation of how the human brain works. And I think we need to be honest about that in how we take the further steps in

Eric Schurenberg (42:52.232)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Starbird (43:02.434)
in how people are told things. And as I say, I’m not an expert at this at all. you obviously know far more than I. But to me, the problem is that people don’t seem to have a, there don’t seem to be any consequences to saying things that are demonstrably false. If there were even just financial consequences for propagating just purely

you know, clearly wrong statements. It seems to me there should be some sort of way to give disincentives, whereas now the incentives of getting more people watching is so attractive. Apparently people can make money and that kind of thing from just having people pay attention, regardless of whether what’s being said is accurate, that that

That seems to be something where maybe we need.

disincentives that are a little stronger.

Eric Schurenberg (44:08.456)
Yes. Yeah, thank you for that perspective, Michael. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot talking about, you know, my industry. But yeah, there are many sort of pressure points or leverage points that algorithms could be changed so that you’re not you’re not forced to look at things that are that either keep you confined to a particular filter bubble or are designed to outrage you or make you angry or things like that.

Michael Starbird (44:36.048)
Yeah. Well, yeah, I was reading a book about the future of AI. And one thing that they did these experiments, I’m sure you’re familiar with, where they ask an AI to optimize itself toward it, put it on social media and optimize the number of people who paid attention to it and the amount of time they spend on it. And within less than a day, it was spouting conspiracy theories and racist

Eric Schurenberg (44:42.706)
Hmm.

Michael Starbird (45:05.434)
chance, rants and so on, because that’s what caused that, you know, optimizing people who are looking at paying attention. So I think this is a feature of the human mind and the human what’s attractive to people. People like, frankly, things that are bad. They like things that are, you know, rare and bad. And I mean, this is the problem.

Eric Schurenberg (45:32.422)
Yes.

Michael Starbird (45:36.038)
that.

Eric Schurenberg (45:37.138)
Yes, it is a human tendency that we could operate against rather than play into for profit.

Michael Starbird (45:41.309)
That’s right. But also, mean, to me, accepting that that’s a reality about human beings and then developing social practices that accommodate the reality. I mean, to me, reality is, you know, it’s not good or bad. It is what it is. And then dealing with it in a in an optimal way, you know, deciding what your values are and then changing your structures in order to accommodate the reality of the way

Eric Schurenberg (45:57.938)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael Starbird (46:11.26)
You know, we might wish that the human brain were better at distinguishing reality from bogus stuff and were more attracted to things that were true rather than false. You know, if there were sort of a natural tendency to appreciate reality better than misinformation, that would be great. But if that’s not the way the human mind actually works, then we should deal with the way it actually is.

Eric Schurenberg (46:38.3)
Yes, yeah. Let’s wrap up by going to the fifth element, the one that you have sometimes described as the quintessential one about lifelong learning, constantly being open to change. Some of the research that I’ve seen in the misinformation field have pointed out that people who rate high on scores for being actively open-minded are better at avoiding manipulation by false information than other people.

Why is this so important to you?

Michael Starbird (47:09.212)
Well, for one thing, I find it, you know, what is life? What is it that we’re doing here? And I think part of it is that one of the great joys of being a human being is that we are able to change, that we’re able to grow, we’re able to learn new things, we’re able to become better at things. I think…

When people say reach their potential, don’t resonate with that because I think we all have all kinds of possible ways that we can grow and we can choose which directions we want to emphasize. I just find that a fascinating and I just find joy in learning all kinds and struggling with things. I love to…

Eric Schurenberg (47:58.792)
Mm.

Michael Starbird (48:04.352)
You know, one of the things I try to teach my students is to enjoy productive struggle, to really like challenges. And to me, when I think about the challenges that we’re facing and that we’re talking about during these hours, the challenge about misinformation, the challenge about how to get people to become more able to distinguish reality from bogus information. And I think, well, yeah, these are huge challenges. I like challenges.

And some of the challenges that our predecessors have had, like trying to survive, you know, saber-toothed tigers that are attacking us, I’m thinking maybe the challenge of misinformation is one. Let’s embrace that challenge. It could be worse. It could be worse. But to me, part of it is effective education. That if you can get a person to love learning,

Eric Schurenberg (48:50.414)
a good divorce.

Michael Starbird (49:02.596)
I mean, to me, that’s one of the reasons I don’t like the phrase, you know, critical thinking. I like effective thinking better because critical sounds negative, you know, to be critical to find fault. Well, finding fault, that’s one and an important strategy for understanding the world. But there are many more positive strategies such as loving to learn. That is a positive thing. It’s not critical thinking, but it is something that can allow you

to constantly be looking around at our own world and saying, what can I learn about that? How can I become more accurate in my appreciation of the way the world works? So yeah, we’re in for a treat.

Eric Schurenberg (49:48.072)
Well, we definitely face a challenge here, but I am delighted that we could end on a question that you led your led that your answer led by saying, what is the meaning of life? What are we doing here on earth? That’s that is a great send off and also the optimistic to note.

Michael Starbird (49:52.656)
We do.

Michael Starbird (50:06.748)
Yeah

Eric Schurenberg (50:13.126)
I appreciate you. Thank you for being on in reality. Thank you for the work you do at Texas too. I appreciated being a student of yours just for this hour.

Michael Starbird (50:23.004)
Eric, you’re very kind. Thank you so much for having me. I wish you the very best of luck in being as successful as humanly possible in the work that you’re doing. And that I feel like you and I are doing the same work. We’re trying to help human beings to become better able to appreciate our world. Thank you.

Eric Schurenberg (50:47.431)
All right.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Sep 19 2025

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