Episode Details

Conspiracy theories are all crazy, right? Well, maybe not. There's some history as to why so many people believe in them. What we really need is a conspiracy theory detection kit and that's what we have in today's episode.

Our guest today is Dr. Michael Shermer. Dr. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the host of the Science Salon Podcast, and a presidential fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Why People Believe Weird Things and his latest book is Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.

• [1:40] - Dr. Shermer's magazine is called Skeptic Magazine which is devoted to teaching critical thinking skepticism and scientific reasoning.
• [2:03] - None of us are omniscient. We can't know anything with certainty. Most of the decisions we make in life are made with uncertainty. So how best should we best make decisions?
• [2:39] - For centuries, we have developed methods, tools, and technology to help us with this problem of uncertainty.
• [4:47] - Finding the cause of something has many variables and once you start getting into economics and politics, things get messy.
• [5:50] - It is important to separate the correlation between seemingly cause and effect relationships. Dr. Shermer uses the fraudulent connection between vaccines and autism to demonstrate.
• [7:48] - The curse of knowledge is the Hindsight Bias. After the fact, it is clear what should have been done, but at the time it wasn't clear. Dr. Shermer shares several great historical events as examples of this.
• [9:27] - There's let something happen on purpose and make something happen on purpose and it is unfair to place blame on others using the Hindsight Bias.
• [11:40] - There is a difference between conspiracy and conspiracy theory. A conspiracy is something that actually happened and a conspiracy theory is the idea that there is something that is happening.
• [12:08] - The main reason people believe conspiracy theories are true is because many shocking conspiracies have actually happened. They are not so far out of the realm of possibility.
• [12:55] - It is not completely crazy to think that something will happen because historically something similar has happened. Dr. Shermer uses examples from the Kennedy administration.
• [14:49] - Another reason people are quick to believe conspiracy theories is because of the messiness of the world. Our brains are wired to try to simplify things.
• [15:39] - Money is a proxy for power and a lot of people believe that these people who have power are actually more powerful than they are. For example, Bill Gates is the center of some conspiracy theories, but in reality, what power does he actually have?
• [16:10] - This is not unreasonable for people to believe because there have been powerful people with money who have rigged the system.
• [16:58] - It is easier to believe that horrific things that happen in the world are controlled by a small group of people. This is an example of the human brain trying to