Okay, thanks very much all of you for joining. Am delighted to have you here. I'd like to begin the discussion by talking a little bit about this idea that moderate skepticism is driving scientific inquiry as opposed to the idea of radical skepticism and relativism as being presenting challenges to scientific inquiry and since we have two scientists here, I would like to throw discussion open, maybe Dave if you'd like to begin. Yeah. So, I think moderate skepticism is at the root of science. So, subjecting yourself to peer review, for example and getting skeptical comments from your colleagues who anonymously can provide them sort of unabashedly to you. So, it's kind of the core principle by which science works. Interestingly, it has fallibility. So, there's skepticism about the scientific method right now in terms of increasing attention to whether studies are reproducible, for example and people are now, "Jerry and new scientific field of, can I reproduce these results?". In one recent study, did 100 psychology experiments again and found they can only reproduce about 40 percent of them. So, that's an example of how science, I think it's sort of a moderate level of skepticism progressing and say how can we improve now on our past methods which have some faults to them. It's interesting to see the response of the research community, NIH is now published new guidelines for grants and journals have new guidelines for reporting. But you can see certain elements of the community even sort of verging towards then, this more radical skepticism where if we can't reproduce science, then what's the value of science? And so even at high level journals, for example nature, here's a commentary that said that copious peer-reviewed support can be found for whatever position one wants to take. A condition that justifies calls for still more research. So, you see this kind of cynicism that science can't produce, so it's intention and I think that we all live with a scientist to sort of promote and be optimistic and try to make discoveries and yet that's intention with sort of being self doubting at the same time. Yeah. That's really interesting. So, if you are looking for think of science is being sort of the better conviction. Right. It's not, it's a dogmatic even and here we have an example of science I actually generating its own skepticism about itself. That's right. So, itself reflected in that way. Yeah. How does science prevent itself from slipping into radical skepticism, if there are these large-scale changes to it? Yeah. Well, I think one of the places that really helps us understanding the scale of the science we are doing. So, if I start with physics, where there's a few areas where I think we really have convictions that are quite solid and reproducible over centuries now. That helps to let you know that you can get things right, and I have to go, because we're all from UCI with the UCI example of discovering the neutrino. Experimentally, people started to see what they thought were violations of conservation of energy and momentum, a bedrock principle of physics and instead of throwing out that principle, you actually had people proposing," Well, there must be a particle we can't detect yet". Which sounds really bizarre to propose. But when you have something that survived the test of time for so long, the right choice I think is to keep some confidence in that until you really exhausted all options and eventually Reines did discover the neutrino and got the Nobel Prize for it and a building named after him at UCI right. So, understanding when you- then move to psychology which we haven't had the same length of time, the same quantitative tools, the problems are much more complex. You would expect to see reproducibility to be a bit more challenging and as experiments get more expensive, there's that challenge in the scientific community of how do we take the time to reproduce things the way the system really wanted to do so we can have that confidence in the results. So, I think the skepticism is not about the underlying method which has proven itself over time, it's about are we really effectively applying it in a new set of spaces where the systems are more complex, the experiments are more expensive, and it's really hard to do the type of experiments over and over that we'd done in simpler, less expensive areas of physics. I think one thing that's really interesting is this idea of scientists overtime claims and get more and more well-grounded, more more well embedded, but they are always in principle open to challenge. Yes. That's kind of built into the very idea of a scientific claim, isn't it? It is, and I think it's the hardest thing for the general public to understand is that weird dichotomy that scientists keep, I know this is right and true but if it ever there's proven wrong, I'll change my mind. Right? That's just like an odd tension to hold as you're doing your research. My advisor, the best advice he ever gave me is," When you finally get the answer you think you should get is the time you should look most carefully at your experiment to see what you did wrong". To follow up on that too, I think when you get sort of dogmas, it becomes a challenge to other scientists. Yeah. Especially, if the dogmas are skeptical. For example, in my field, there was a dogma that neuroplasticity is very limited in adults and then adults with neural injury. And this almost became a target. So, they're radical sort of skeptic hypothesis about neuroplasticity became almost a target for other scientists on a call to see if you could defeat it. And so there's this kind of weird dynamic where even as scientists get more dogmatic or radical then, it stirs up other scientists to say," Well, wait a second, I think there that you're not telling the full story. Yeah. Well, there are two real challenges frames with mind that can challenge scientific inquiry. One is radical skepticism because what is the point if nothing is knowable or you can never figure out grounded reasons for belief? But science grew out of actually in opposition to dogmatism, theocracy, and the like. And So, certitude, which is almost the opposite of radical skepticism is a kind of twin assault on what we view as the kind of grounded rationality we associate with science. When the Royal Society was first created in the 17th century, there Latin motto was, "Nullias in Verba" which more or less translates into, nothing because you say so or not because you say so, and the whole idea was, just because people in authority say for example, that the sun goes around the earth, I'm not going to take that for granted. So, science itself is rooted in a skepticism about un-anchored claims of certitude and belief, but it's also committed to not taking any one's word for it, and I think that's the sort of healthy tension that allows the practice to continue to unfold. I mean, the birth of Royal societies is fascinating historical lessons isn't it? Because we need a way of sort of having this impression of who is the expert? Who can we trust? This is new science is emerging. Suddenly, now there's a proliferation of people who are representing themselves as experts as opposed to a previous order where there was the theocratic truth which we could all sort of accept and say," Now we need a way of credit to them" The royal societies is one way of doing that because now we do it through, economists and through peer-reviewed journals, and things like. I think that's the other challenge for the public and looking at science is unfortunately, as the issues we have addressed have become more and more complex and harder to understand, we run the risk of becoming the authorities, telling people to just believe it. Yeah. And without that real ability to engage them in the reason, the rational grounding as to why we are putting this position forward. In physics, it's particularly challenging because it's so complex and mathematical to explain it to a lay person, it's very difficult. So, that's sort of mediation is inherent to it, it seems like the average person can't learn the math needed to understand the result. Yeah. That's why I think science communication is important and many campuses have training for scientists but also for non-scientists to figure out how to communicate scientific findings in a way that doesn't reduce their complexity or overstate their claims, but make scientific literacy something tangible for the public. Right. And of course we do this with their GE requirements as well and we expect students to have a certain understanding of science but also of philosophy, and writing, of different forms of reasoning because our citizenry needs these in order to make good decisions about the future of our planet. Yeah.
