Why Hank Green takes pseudoscience seriously

Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy. Understanding why it spreads so quickly is harder. It can teach us why real science works and how to spot the difference between the two. To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix! Guest: Hank Green, creator of SciShow and Crash Course, co-host of Vlogbrothers For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:13Speaker 02

  Earlier this summer, I was scrolling and I saw this epidemiologist saying something wild.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  When they compared sunscreen users to non-sunscreen users, the sunscreen users faced increased risks of all the major skin cancers.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  I was like, wow, okay, sunscreen does what? Have I been lied to as a Florida man? But it's not because of the sunscreen.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  So I looked into it and the study this guy was talking about showed that people who said they used more sunscreen did get more skin cancer. But it wasn't because of the sunscreen. The authors of the study say it's because sunscreen users tend to spend more time outside and they aren't always great at reapplying sunscreen when they need to. It's the sun causing the cancer. It's not the sunscreen. And when you control for proper use, it's pretty clear. But this claim went totally viral, almost 3 million views. And I think it's too easy to just dismiss pseudoscience like this. One, pseudoscience is spreading like wildfire all across social media right now.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  And two, the difference between science and pseudoscience isn't always immediately obvious. Like scientists are wrong all the time. So where's the line here? What's the difference between science and pseudoscience? I wanted to figure this out, so I called up Hank Green. Hank is one of the best people out there at just talking about science. He's done it for almost 20 years on his YouTube channel, on SciShow, on Crash Course. And he does it with this very specific type of fascination and joy. Recently, he's been doing some really interesting reporting on the line between science and pseudoscience.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  So today on Unexplainable, what if the best way to understand why science works is to take pseudoscience seriously?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Hank Green, thanks for coming on the show.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  Hey, thank you for having me.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  So you often do all these kind of weird niche deep dives on your channel? Like missing asteroids or where the atoms in your toilet paper end up?

• 3:43Speaker 04

  That one wasn't very popular.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  It wasn't, it wasn't popular, really?

• 3:46Speaker 04

  No, I thought it was gonna be a slam dunk.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  That feels like a-

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Right out of the park and it was, it was an underperforming for me.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  It was popular with me.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Okay, good.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  But a while back, you made this video that started with a really huge question, which is what is science?

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Which I do want to get to. But in the spirit of going big, why do you like science?

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Well, I'm a very curious person. Or, or possibly I'm an average amount of curious, but have been lucky enough to have had cause to indulge in it enough that that muzzle has gotten strong. And I've seen what, what a joy it is to go down rabbit holes. And what you find is that the reason we know most of the things is in fact that people work really hard to figure them out, usually through traditional scientific structures, but always through interrogating the universe in some way.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  So, so, so let's do the, let's do the big question. What is science?

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Well, there are lots of different takes. I don't want to say that this is the only take, nor do I want to claim credit for this take. This is, this is one of several takes. I think it's really important that we don't think that, that science is the current institution of science. Science is not the scientific method. Science is not the peer-reviewed publication. These are all emergent of a thing. They are, they are emergent properties of a first step. And, and, and I think that science has been being done since before humans were humans. And what science is, is listening to the universe and, and like hearing what it has to say.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  And if it is more than that, then science is intentionally asking the universe questions and then listening when it gives an answer. So if you notice that a red rose grows from the seeds of a red rose, then that's, that that kind of science. But if you have a red rose and a white rose breed, you're asking a question. You're saying, is this going to create white roses or red roses or pink roses? And the, you know, the, the answer that the universe gives you is like, oh, now I know a new thing.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  I mean, you're, you're calling a very broad thing.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  I know. Yes. I think that this is important. I think that it is important to, to start to like, say, this is not something that was invented in 1720, you know? Like it's very tempting, and a lot of people have done this, to say that science was created by some guy recently, to start out saying, okay, there was a day science was created. And this is like, people argue about this. So you're not having like a, like, I, I do want to say, if you had another person on, we'd argue about it. So I like, I'm giving you my take. It's my take.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Like, what is the thing that takes asking a basic question about the universe and turns it into what we, what maybe laypeople think of as science now?

• 6:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the, so the first step is ask the universe a question, try and get an answer. The second step is sharing information and letting it be critiqued and basically opening it up to attack from every angle. Like, please tear this apart. Like as humans, there's this very tempting thing to say, okay, well, this is what I have learned. This is what I've been taught. And then when somebody says, no, it's not that way, the thing you, the instinct is often to say, well, let's fight about that and I will protect my idea with my life. But what happened was at some point, people say, actually, no. The thing that we're gonna do is like, I'm just not gonna believe you if you don't share how you figured this out with me.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  It will not get written in the books unless you let us check.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Check my work.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, check my work. You gotta let me borrow your telescope or I'm not gonna believe that there are moons orbiting Jupiter. We'll have this argument in public. We'll, you know, go and to like have meetings and we'll share our information and then we'll argue and fight and, but ultimately you will open your fist. You will not, you will not protect your information. You will share your information. And we will, like, this will be a much better way to get to truth. And it's crazy, like, like Galileo is a good example of like, people argued with him so hard and for good reason, because these tools were brand new and they weren't very good. And then when they got access to the tools, they were like, actually, yep, nope, there's

• 8:20Speaker 04

  no, really no other way to explain what we're seeing than there are moons orbiting Jupiter.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  So what you're basically saying is the thing that makes science science, the thing that has led to satellites and vaccines and, I don't know, rocket ships, I'm, I'm in a space mode there. But the thing that has led it is this one basic idea of here, please check my work. And everything flows from there.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. It really is like a, like, it's saying, we need to cooperate on this. This isn't just gonna be like, one person is in charge of truth. It's going to be all of us together are trying to get to truth, which is not something that any individual is in charge of. And what emerges from that is just a ton of stuff, like the entire institution of statistics. Like statistics is about helping scientists talk to each other and tear each other's work apart. The, the journal, the Royal Society, the abstract, all of these things, replication, all of these things are emergent from that property. And then you get all of this stuff that's like actually really powerful for uncovering truth about the world.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  So you're pointing at this shift, like you're saying to something communal, right?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Because the only way to get to better answers is to have other people check it. And then the last thing I think you're pointing at is some kind of embrace of doubt or uncertainty?

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  This sort of self-consciousness that I am- Learning a thing, I'm making a theory, but I actually am not sure I'm right and I need the help of my community to check. But it does seem like it's explicitly an embrace of doubt.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, something that actually helped me understand what science is, is looking at what pseudoscience is, because it's not like pseudoscience feels like it's just people being wrong confidently. But it's not just being wrong. It is really the pseudo part. It's the part where it's attempting to look like science.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  While at the same time, never doing the fundamental base unit thing of saying, please tear apart my data.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  Please look at everything I am doing. And if you are right, I will accept it. I'll put my tail between my legs and be like, I guess I was wrong.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Are there any examples of pseudoscience that drive you particularly nuts?

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, the vaccine causes autism thing is really bad because of how amazing vaccines are.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you want to just say a little bit about where that came from?

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there was a guy who did a study. Turns out he had a ton of conflicts of interest. And then from there, like, like, after digging in and seeing how much sort of human selection was at play, it was like, oh, this isn't a very good study. There's doing a lot of things.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  The data was kind of like not convincing, right?

• 10:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was both not convincing and it seemed intentionally altered. I think he was doing it intentionally, but you could make the case he wasn't. And then from there, it just sort of like was wildfire.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  How do you feel about the fact that this kind of thing is the thing that is taking off like wildfire and so many people are ignoring just the mountains of data on how

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  vaccines tend to work and are safe and are saving lots of lives? Like, what does that mean for you as someone who's trying to communicate this stuff to people?

• 11:30Speaker 04

  I mean, a billion things. I mean, one thing that is really important to say is, we should check these things. And so frustrating to be like, okay, so what did we do in response to this? We did so much research. We did so, so much different kinds of research and find the same answer from every angle we hammered at it from. And it's very frustrating and scary to think that now the, you know, the rates of vaccination are going down. It's frustrating that, you know, measles is an eradicated disease. It is possible to eradicate it. There, we could live in a world with no measles. This isn't true of all diseases. Some diseases have reservoirs in other animals, and so they're very hard

• 12:15Speaker 04

  to eliminate. But measles is a human disease. We can get rid of it. It would be amazing if we did. We're not going to do it anytime soon, but we absolutely could. And it's frustrating because I love it, like, the fact that we eradicated smallpox. Oh, my God, like, I can't, like, so freaking cool. Like, you cannot imagine. You cannot imagine how bad smallpox is.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  And it's gone. It's gone. We did that. And the story of how we did that is amazing. It's like a triumph at every angle. It's like such a tremendous human achievement. And I cannot wait for us to get the next one, you know? It's frustrating. Anything that holds us back from, you know, this, this amazing progress that we get to have as humans is very frustrating.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  So what seems interesting to me there is that if the idea of science is to be open to checking and open to your community holding you accountable, by dressing yourself up in those clothes, you're saying implicitly, I'm open to being checked. But then you're not actually being open to being checked. And it allows you almost to

• 13:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  rest on the laurels of that confidence while not necessarily having to do the work.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  It's interesting because it's not, it's not science, and yet it benefits dramatically from the credibility that science has earned. You know, it's, it, and, and I don't want to say that we don't ever like discover that we were wrong. We do. But man, there is a lot of dressing up BS in the clothes of science right now.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  And one of the most like, strong tells of this is that it is always around something that is very easy to pay attention to.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  You know, like, like, it's the aliens built the pyramids. Like, if that's true, wow, that would be a very big deal. That would be like the coolest news of all time if aliens built the pyramids. It's

• 14:11Speaker 02

  I would definitely pay more attention to that than like, the latest Alzheimer's drug that doesn't work.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even an Alzheimer's drug that works a little bit.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  A little bit, which is what most of them do.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  The pseudoscientist is always talking about stuff that's really, like, really easy to pay attention to, fun to go on podcasts and talk about. Because ultimately, we tend to find it easier to believe things. It's a known phenomenon of human brains. We tend to find it easier to believe things when they are easier to pay attention to.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  And it's, it seems like there's also maybe a narrative around there. It's not just that this is true, but that this is who's keeping it from you. It's more of a character and a story, it seems.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  It's a better story. It's like a very interesting story. And I think it's also can be very easy to believe something that will make you into the hero that saves everyone.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  In a minute, why does pseudoscience always seem to end up at aliens?

• 15:17Speaker 01

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• 16:56Speaker 02

  It's interesting that there's two ways, I think, to deal with something like this. One is something that I talk about a lot, which is like, there's the whole going over COVID and who messed up and did we lose trust? And I do think there's like a lot of reasonable stuff to talk about there. You know, I spoke with Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, who's really talked a lot about having too much one size fits all stuff in COVID.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  And he's been going on all these conversation tours and talking to people and building relationships to get them to trust science. That's like one side of the argument. And then the other side is just like, I don't know if it's a trust in science problem as much as a pseudoscience is so interesting problem.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  And I don't know if science could be the most trustworthy thing in the world. People, people would still get excited about they're hiding this from you. People want to have the thing that they think nobody else knows. I don't know. Is it crazy to wonder whether science should embrace any pseudoscientific strategies? Should, should science be like, making journals called like the secret society of, of, of safe vaccines?

• 18:13Speaker 04

  We can't do, we can't do that, but we can learn. I mean, why does this work? Like, I read, I read, like, pseudoscience books to understand them. And I love to, one of my favorite, this is dumb, my favorite thing is just to grab a book, like, a pseudoscience book, pick a random page, find a claim, and then track down where that came from. Because they always come from somewhere. There's always some weird place. And it could be like, it could be like a week long activity.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  What have you found?

• 18:42Speaker 04

  You know, find like crazy things about the world. You know, it can, it can be, you know, they use ground penetrating radar around the pyramids and there was this weird geological formation. And it's like, well, what's that weird geological formation? Maybe we aren't doing ground penetrating radar enough. Maybe we just don't know enough about what the interior of the world looks like. So the first time you see it, you're like, is that aliens? One of my favorite pseudoscience things is like, we've just started to detect for the first time ever, objects from other solar systems or other planetary systems that have entered into our, our solar system. And we could do this now because we have better tools.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  And there's people who have claimed that like, two of the first three of these objects that we've ever detected are like, from aliens.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Very high rate of aliens.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  And I'm like, that's a high rate of aliens. Maybe we just don't know what these things look like yet, because you've only seen three of them. And so maybe they look a little bit weird. Maybe they look weirder than the average, our solar system rock. They have different properties. And so maybe that's, maybe it might be that that's what's going on, rather than two thirds of all rocks in space are alien spaceship parts. But that thing happens all the time. When you start to do these investigations, the first information you can find tends to be quite weird.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  And that, that space where you aren't sure, that's where, like, that's where science is so great. And so immediately giving that thing an answer of aliens is, is a really bad idea, because that, that stops you from continuing to do the, the science. And then you keep doing the science and you find out new and interesting things about the world.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I love that, because I feel like everything we try to do on our show is focusing on those spaces where we don't have an answer.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  And I find them so unbelievably fascinating, because it's crazy to me how little we still know about everything. And I, I just get so excited that there are these huge gaps that we don't know anything about. And to think that someone wants to just fill them in, it's like, it's like generations of people have lived and died trying to fill these in, and you're gonna just Fill this in with aliens, or you're gonna fill this in with, with, I don't know, some, some magic element that doesn't exist.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, and like, it could be aliens. That's, it's actually true. Aliens is just a tricky one because we keep thinking it might be aliens and it keeps not being aliens because aliens can explain anything, which is a real problem for a hypothesis.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  It's usually not aliens.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  So far, it's never been.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Okay, so last thing I wanted to ask you is very weird, but um, one of my favorite things about the way that you present science is the way that you seem so comfortable with being wrong.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  You had this video about what sound thunder makes.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Thunder does not make noise. Thunder is noise.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  And then you're talking about, can a sound make a sound? Can a, can a goose make a, make a honk?

• 21:48Speaker 04

  Now I'm thinking about goose honks, like, can a goose honk squeak?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  And then like, in real time, in the video, you're like, I will die on this hill. Thunder does not make a sound.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  But the thunder does not clap. I'm gonna die on this hill. I will. People will say that the thunder claps, but no, that is a thunder clap. It is a noise. The thunder doesn't clap.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  And then 15 seconds later in the video, you're like, wait, I don't know if I should die on that hill. I think, I think maybe honks can squeak.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no, maybe I'm wrong. A sound can make a sound? I'm, I'm terrified. I'm no longer dying on this hill. The goose has changed my entire perspective on this. Maybe the thunder can clap, just like a honk can squeak.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  I know this sounds like the weirdest example to give, but I actually think that that in some sense is showing people how you think. That, that you're willing to admit that you're wrong, or you're willing to just show us how you think in real time.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  I, I wonder if that is actually, i- is that an intentional thing when you're trying to present science to people?

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's totally intentional. I, I don't know that I'm thinking I'm helping people understand how science works. I think I'm thinking, um, like, people will enjoy watching the thinking happen.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  And I, I used to have this format, I haven't done it in a while, where I would just like have a question and I'd go and figure it out live and record my screen while I do it. I think that people should see it. I think that people should see the process of me struggling. You like get science more when you actually like find a question you want to dig into.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so for anyone out there who is wondering whether something is kind of giving off pseudoscience alarms, or whether it is, you know, real scientific research they're looking at.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  What do you recommend doing to figure out which is which?

• 23:46Speaker 04

  I mean, there actually is plenty to be said for just trusting what is inside of the current system of science. So to, to look and say, okay, well, it's, it's in a peer reviewed journal, it's being said by credible people, it's, you know, people who are experts in that, that area. There's, there's value to that, it turns out, and like, they're gonna be more boring on average.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  And, and then another, and this is so hard, is to understand that like, you're, like, we're all activated by the scary thing. I'm not immune to any of this stuff. But partially, like, I also have to understand that that stuff is traveling more because it's scary.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  And so we have to understand that the hotter the claim, the more important it is to investigate it, and also the more likely it is that we actually have really good data.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  So the scarier the claim, maybe alarm bells a little bit and double check sources.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Right, and one, like, double check sources is so, so weird, because like, the, the thing isn't, like, I think that people are fine at being able to check. What they're bad at is knowing when the red flag should go up. Like, when should I check? If things are confirming your priors, you just don't. I don't, nobody does.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  And so what, what for me now raises a red flag is, is this a just top tier piece of engagement bait? If you see something that's like, oh my God, I cannot believe how messed up the world is. It might be, trust me, the world's messed up. It might be that the world's messed up. I'm not saying it's not messed up, but it's, it's very, like, very often you track down those things where like, they are the most hyper salient claims are the ones that are least likely to be true.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  All right, Hank, thanks for the advice and uh, thanks for coming on the show. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  You got it.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  If you want to see this episode on video, head over to Netflix. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Solotaroff. Our video editors are Shelby Smith and Alex Coles. Our animator is Kareem Correa. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Davon Howard and Joe Nebrous. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala. Music from me. Meredith Hadnot runs the show. And Bird Pinkerton waited for Flaptin to put the finishing touches on the guitar. Finally, he handed it to her. Here, he said, "Good as new. Get this to Platty as soon as you can." And I added something to your beak beaver there. Just press that button on the back if you ever need me.

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