“You have to balance that ability to be completely comfortable being self-critical, assuming that you’re going to get things wrong — so you’re completely willing to be unconfident about almost any statement you make — and yet you need to keep a lot of confidence that you’ll get to where you need to go.” ~ Saul Perlmutter

Physicist and Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter is every bit as delightful as I remember him from high school. Whip smart, of course, but also warm and optimistic and surprisingly reassuring.

“We live in an experimenting society” he reminds us, “The fact that we can use partial information and do better is actually one of our superpowers.”

Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell and Robert MacCoun takes the optimism and tools of science and helps us apply them to the everyday. They help us think about how we think, taking our values and fears into account.

Part of that story has to do with the difference between coming to a problem out of pure fear and coming to a problem out of the possibilities of solving it…I think there’s a real danger of seeing the world as being absolutely falling apart and dangerous…people tend to hunker down and they lose that experimenting and curiosity-approach to problems…You need to have that sense of confidence that we have some big problems in the world, but they are not problems that are beyond our control.

Listen to Choose to be Curious #233: Curiosity & Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, with Saul Perlmutter

I enjoyed tapping into some of Saul’s curiosity practices:

Consider the possibility that you’re wrong. Make that easier by trying to gauge how confident you are in your argument. 60%? 99%? Just thinking about how strongly you believe some part of your argument allows you to consider the opposite.

Then you can say, “OK, if we got this wrong, then what would we do?” — a really powerful reframe.

To avoid confirmation bias, pick your source first, then see what that source tells you, rather than picking your source because you know or sense they’ll tell you what you prefer or expect to hear.

The practice I have found myself thinking about most is the recommendation that we be more confident in others’ views than we are in our own. That they will help us find our way forward. So hard for me, but so potent!

Check out the Transcript Below

Saul Perlmutter is a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley. His biography for the Nobel Prize is lovely reading.

What happens when a physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist walk into a book: Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell and Robert MacCoun. Tips and tricks ensue.

Want to know why I love The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster? This is a start.

Photo by Jon Schainker. Used with permission.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Celestial Navigation” by Aeronaut, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Transcript: Curiosity & Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, with Saul Perlmutter

Saul Perlmutter: [00:00:00] You have to balance that ability to be completely comfortable being self-critical, assuming that you’re going to get things wrong—so you’re completely willing to be unconfident about almost any statement you make—and yet you need to keep a lot of confidence that you’ll get to where you need to go.

(Theme music)

Lynn Borton: This is Choose to be Curious, a show all about. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it’s conversations about how curiosity shows up in work and life. I’m your host, Lynn Borton, welcome. Come, choose to be curious with us. 

Those of you who have been listening for a while likely know my favorite book of all time is the purportedly children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Jester. It’s a story of a bored young boy who is transported into a weirdly wonderful and utterly baffling series of adventures by a magical toy car and tollbooth. [00:01:00]

There are many, many things I love about this clever, punny book, and I will spare you most of them today, but the story’s punchline bears mentioning. It doesn’t give away too much to share it here. “So many things are possible. Just as long as you don’t know, they’re impossible.”

I thought of that line somewhere in the middle of reading the newly released book, Third Millennium Thinking, Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell and Robert MacCoun.

The authors are no bored young boys. They’re actually a physicist, philosopher, and psychologist, respectively; professors, all. The book is based on their wildly popular Big Ideas course at the University of California, Berkeley. It is, as they say, a primer on how to think critically, make sound decisions, and solve problems individually and collectively using scientists tricks of the [00:02:00] trade.

Meaning: using scientific reasoning to navigate uncertainty and overwhelming information in a world shaped by science and technology. Third Millennium Thinking is, above all else I think, a tribute to the power of what the authors call “scientific optimism”, embracing a kind of can-do spirit that allows otherwise no-nonsense thinkers to fool themselves into thinking they can solve a problem just long enough to actually do so, living out that insight from The Phantom Tollbooth: so many things are possible, as long as you don’t know they’re impossible. 

And these particular scientific optimists are eager to recruit the rest of us to the cause by teaching us their habits of mind and habits of community, demonstrating we can all accomplish with a little third millennium thinking.

My guest today is one of the mighty three behind the book. 

Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate. He [00:03:00] shared the prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He’s a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Full disclosure: I knew Saul a little in high school. I went out with one of his friends for a while, and I’m pretty sure we were all trespassing on a golf course that shall not be named the night of their prom. Shhh – Don’t tell anyone!

Anyway, I think I can be forgiven for literally leaping from my desk squealing, running around the office excitedly telling people “I knew him when”, at the time of that 2011 Nobel Prize announcement.

So, Saul, welcome. It is delightful to have you join me today.

SP: That’s great. It’s great to join you.

LB: It’s been, I don’t know, 45 years. You been up to anything lately?

SP: Yeah, a few things that fit in, in that time, I think.

LB: A few things. So, congratulations on all of this [00:04:00] and, you know, a part of what was exciting to me about scheduling this conversation, and I hope for my audience as well, is that I knew you when, right? You just never know what people are going to do with their lives. So it’s really fun to kind of re-intersect in this way with you doing a series of projects that to me are really, really exciting.

So, Let’s start with a basic one: Define third millennium thinking.

SP: So it was a funny choice for the name. I think it sounds, to me, at least it sounds very pretentious “third millennium thinking”. And I was trying to get the subtitle to be something that would be like, how to save the world and, and choose the restaurant for dinner, you know, to make it clear that it’s not supposed to be taken in that way.

And I hope by the end of the book, we’re making it clear that we aren’t telling people how you’re supposed to think in the third millennium. We’re trying to actually describe what we think is an interesting trend of ideas that actually have been something that makes it possible for [00:05:00] us to make progress together in a way that people may not be aware of.

And, that by bringing it to the forefront and having people think about it, everybody can use it, I hope, collectively together and feel like they’re really moving into an optimistic, productive third millennium in a way that right now the public perception doesn’t really show.

LB: Yeah, yeah. So before there was the book, there was the course. What was the catalyst, what was the inspiration for wanting to assemble big ideas in this kind of multidisciplinary way? I mean, what was the problem you were trying to solve there?

SP: So I remember about 10 years ago, watching our society trying to make sense, just what seems like simple, practical decisions. Like, you know: what should the right debt ceiling be in the government? Um, it’s saying that we’ve just…we’re not treating as a simple, practical problem.

And I was noticing that if you looked at the discussions about how to solve problems — or what kind of problems — people were looking at in a lunch table discussion of a bunch of [00:06:00] scientists, they would just be using a whole different vocabulary of problem solving skills. 

And I was thinking, where did these scientists learn this vocabulary of ideas? It’s not taught in any science course I know of. I don’t think any physics, biology, chemistry course, you know, teaches these scientific approaches to problems. I think [it’s] taught by apprenticeship and osmosis, you know, as people go through research training, typically, you know, as a graduate student or for those who go on postdocs and faculty positions. 

But I was thinking, there’s no reason that you couldn’t take these same ideas… articulate them and teach them — well, first of all — much younger to scientists, because I could have really benefited from learning them in high school, let alone graduate school. 

But then I thought, but there’s lots of people who never will go on to a research training in graduate school, and there’s no reason that everybody shouldn’t have these at hand. 

So that’s where it began. We started saying, well, why don’t we try to articulate them and figure out: can we teach them and how we teach them?

But it became very quickly clear that, you know, if you’re really taking this seriously, [00:07:00] it’s not good enough to be just coming at it from the point of view of what do we learn as physicists. I’ve been joking that if you go to a physics faculty meeting, it doesn’t run, you know, that much more rationally than any other faculty meeting. 

So, clearly we needed some other elements of the story, and so I found a social psychologist, a professor in the Policy School, and a philosophy professor, and both, you know, had a lot to say to this issue of how do you make decisions, and how do you deliberate on problems. 

The philosophy professor, I think, was really important in my mind, because if you’re really trying to make a go out of a difficult problem, at some point or other, it’s not just going to be a question of what are the facts about the world and, and the way the world works that the science tells you. You also need to figure out what are your values and what are your fears and what are your goals and what are your ambitions, you know, and because those are actually driving the decision. 

And if you don’t come up with a really principled way to weave those together with the facts and and the rationality of, you know, the scientific techniques., [00:08:00] then the part that you’re going to end up throwing out is all the facts and the rationality, just because those aren’t the thing that drive you into  decision making. 

And so it became: if you care about teaching all these techniques of problem solving and you want them to stick around long enough to be in decision, then you have to take seriously the question of how do people make decisions together, where you also care about the values of the decision, and the fears and the goals and the emotions that are involved.

LB: I’m glad you brought John Campbell and Robert MacCoun into the conversation. They’re not in the room with us, but they are sort of metaphorically in the room. I wanted to actually invite you to maybe share a story or something on what you’ve found most exciting or influential about working with them because a lot of the course and the book are about trusting and learning from others — and taking the insights and information and frame of reference that others have and using it to test your own thinking.

So, walk the talk. Do you have some stories about that?

SP: [00:09:00] Absolutely. I mean, the style of the course actually ended up being really surprising and fun to teach because we always insisted that all three of us be in the room all the time when we were teaching the course.

LB: Wow. That’s a big investment of everybody’s part! 

SP: Absolutely. And, and so it wasn’t like, you know, we just passed the ball to the other one to take over the next three weeks. We were in the room and we were responding to each other. And that meant that we would point out that actually from a different perspective, you could look at the same topic and see a very different way of thinking about it.

And occasionally we would, you know…we’d have to model for the students what it looks like to, you know, to sort of grapple with the fact that we had slightly different takes on things. 

And I think for the students, that was actually one of the most exciting parts of the course, to see what it looks like, and to enjoy a conversation where you’re trying to figure things out together that you may not come to from the same angle. 

So that was a very big, big part of the activity itself. And it played into the book, you know, we would be writing… we work on the [00:10:00] book and we would end up having these long conversations on Zoom about everything and then we’d realize, oh, wait, wait, we have to get back to the book again, because every topic would lead us into this exploration of what the ideas are, might mean and how each of us were thinking about them.

But some of the elements that people individually brought I thought are so fun to describe is, for example, John (John Campbell), who is the philosopher of our group, I think that because he was the one who was looking at science from the slightly more outsider point of view, he could keep reminding the other two of us the ways in which science looks from the outside. And in our society, you know, it’s very easy for people to think of the scientists as the somewhat arrogant people who are telling everybody what to do. 

And, and of course, from the inside, being a scientist, that’s not at all what it feels like. So that was sort of important to grapple with the role of science in society where people need to feel like the scientists are part of the group and that they’re helping, [00:11:00] just as everybody else is helping figure out the problems — not dictators, which was pretty visible, of course, during the pandemic, that was clearly coming up as a problem. So that’s one element that we were getting from John there. 

I thought that Rob, and that’s Rob MacCoun, who’s the social psychologist, he also had great other angles that I never would have thought of because he did a lot of advising on policy issues and had these studies of things like, what’s going to happen when openly gay people are in the military, or what’s going to happen if we legalize drugs in Oregon, or… and so he’d been consulting on a number of these different areas. 

And it was fascinating to hear the interaction of the way a scientist thinks about a problem where you are often trying to come up with sort of probabilistic understanding of the world, and that you sometimes have to say, we don’t know, you know, this is something that is a wide open question. And, you know, the answer is still not understood, even after we’ve done the study and how that comes [00:12:00] against the need for a policymaker to say, no, no, but really, really, what do you think the answer is?

LB: One of the things that I really enjoyed in the book was you offer some really lovely reframes on things. In one case you said, maybe we need to view problems as something we manage through continuous adjustment, like tending a garden or tuning a guitar, which is such a more gentle, constructive way of thinking about a problem.

But you also talk about this third millennium that we’ve entered as an “experimenting society”, which is part of what triggered my curiosity radar, for starters. But also, it was kind of a relief because it’s like, well, you could kind of see it as just a hot mess, right? 

So talk about the value of thinking about things as “a problem to be managed” or as kind of an ongoing experiment, because that’s part of the frame you’re trying to [00:13:00] get us to it.

SP: Absolutely. And I think that part of that story has to do with the difference between coming to a problem out of pure fear and coming to a problem out of the possibilities of solving it. 

And I think that we happen to be in a period where, and it may cycle around over the centuries, in which people receive information, is often designed to scare you and that it’s the way that people would get your attention.

It’s the way the advertisers can advertise on websites, and it’s also the way that some of the political world tries to drive the votes towards them. 

But I think there’s a real danger of seeing the world as being absolutely falling apart and dangerous — which is that people tend to hunker down and they lose that experimenting and curiosity-approach to problems, which is so crucial. 

That you can’t really solve problems if you’re, if you’re not actually in the game and trying out ideas and experimenting until [00:14:00] you see what works and what doesn’t work. And you need to have that sense of confidence that we have some big problems in the world, but they are not problems that are beyond our control.

The skill that we now know how to solve, and some of them are problems that we’ve dealt with before in civilization and history, and we’ve been able to make great progress on them — but some of them are new and like climate change. You know, I don’t think we ever thought we’d be in the business of trying to manage our climate…

I mean, I’ve been struck by the fact that we are now, I know. for the first time in history, have the tools to address these things. If we work together, and if we’re ready to do the experiments and the effort it takes to get solutions. So it feels to me like it’s a really big part of this story, to have that sense of confidence that this is saying what we are capable of, if we work together.

[00:15:00] Now, you know, nobody’s capable of anything if they’re scared and in their corners and actually not trying to talk together so that they enable things for each other.

If you try to block each other at every turn because it’s just too scary, then it really is scary because then you can’t actually make any progress. But that’s really one of the whole points of the book.

LB: Again, one of the things that I found so interesting about it is that it’s got this interesting paradox around confidence, trust, and self-questioning that we need to have more confidence in one another than in ourselves, really.

SP: Now, absolutely. I think you’ve picked up this: so many of the things we’re talking about are balancing acts that you have to be doing and that we tend to go for one thing or the other. 

But in this case — and in fact, most successful motions through life– are balancing games. And this case where you have to balance that ability to be completely comfortable being self-critical, assuming that you’re going to get things wrong, [00:16:00] assuming that your knowledge is only partial about almost everything.

And that it will have to be corrected and you’ll have to do better and better. So you’re completely willing to be unconfident about almost any statement you make — and yet you need to keep a lot of confidence that you’ll get to where you need to go — and that is such a balancing act. 

It’s among the analogies we do in the book about skiing down a slope where you can’t be rigid in any way. You have to be flexible in order to make it down the slope. And it’s obviously scary, you know, if one doesn’t know what one’s doing, but that sense of being able to maneuver, put up with uncertainty and use it as your tool, that you’re going to actually not take it as just a tool. It’s not just a problem. 

But it’s also the fact that we can use partial information and do better is actually one of our superpowers, and that’s actually where we’ve managed to make so much progress, and the idea that we are going to get things wrong, [00:17:00] and that we aren’t going to see it. 

And that the only way to see it is to work with people who disagree with us — that they are the ones who will help us figure out how we’re making our mistakes — is also, weirdly enough, I think one of the superpowers of science over, over the centuries. And it’s been amazingly successful despite the fact that it’s constantly questioning itself. 

And, you know, the fact that you can nowadays confidently get into a multi-ton metal tube and expect to fly. I mean the idea that we would be saying that would never happen. It comes out of that sense of relentless questioning and working with other people who are going to disagree with you until you actually get somewhere.

LB: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it’s wonderful. 

So one of the things that I do in the show is I collect what I call curiosity practices, things that people can do — large, small — to kind of bring more curiosity into their days. And your book, presumably your class, similarly, are full of kind of little nuggets…. So I’ll be candid: [00:18:00] I worry that when intellectual Titans like the three of you write a book like this, that mere mortals figure that they’re not really up to the task, right?

But your intent is exactly the opposite of that. You really want to help with some of those techniques that anyone can borrow. So, give us a couple of those tips and techniques that anyone could use from science to help us make better decisions, either individually or collectively.

SP: I mean there’s so many of course. One of the ideas of the course and the book was to try to collect a whole bunch of tips and tricks, and then put them into coherent whole. So in the end, there must be like 20 elements that we are trying to get people comfortable with. 

We should point out that we very early on explained that it’s not that we are particularly Titans in this game ourselves, that as we’re describing all of these different approaches and ways that we, We try to [00:19:00] avoid fooling ourselves, which is, of course, a lot of what this is all about, we fall into all these traps ourselves all the time.

So all three of us who are teaching this are constantly making these mistakes. And the reason that we’re trying to teach a class and have a book is because we need a community of people around us. We need a society that helps keep us honest and helps us find when we’re making these mistakes. So that’s sort of the starting point that’s worth mentioning that nobody should feel like they’re out of this game. 

We’re all in this together. And that almost everything we’re doing and everything we’re teaching about and/or talking about in a book like this is something that everybody can do — but we will all keep making those mistakes unless we help each other do it. 

Beginning with that in mind, just very simple examples of things that we discussed that come up in different ways:

I mean, one is that we’re discussing how important it is to be able to consider the possibilities where you may have gotten something wrong, where you may have misunderstood something. 

And one of the tricks of the trade to make it easier to do that is to try to roughly gauge how [00:20:00]strongly you are confident in the parts of an argument that you’re making that you’re saying. Almost as soon as anybody asks you, okay, well, how sure are you about that element and that element and that element of this argument, you start realizing…. Wow. I mean, this one I’m, I’m pretty sure about, but this one I’m, I don’t know, I, you know, I mean, I’d only give it like 60 percent odds of being right, you know, but this other one I’m really pretty confident about, you know, that, that one, you know, I, I, I mean, I bet my life on that particular part of the story,…

Just being able to think about it, how strongly you believe each of the different parts of an argument that you’re putting together lets you consider the opposite. It lets you say, Okay, but what if that one was wrong? Then how would I change everything I’m doing or how would I have to think about this differently?

And it’s not that you know that it’s wrong. In fact, you think that you’re probably right, but just the possibility that it’s wrong makes the whole conversation much more interesting because then you get to what we call considering the opposite, which is a very powerful tool. 

And it’s when you have a group of people working together on a [00:21:00] problem, you actually can sometimes assign somebody in the group to be the devil’s advocate. You know, their job is to keep trying to say, okay, if we got this wrong, then what would we do? And it makes it a much more interesting conversation and also makes for a much more robust decision making that you actually end up with decisions that can handle that’s those places where, we clearly don’t get things right every time in any personal thing or any group thing, so what you would like is to have decisions that can take that into account. 

So this is one of the tricks of the trade I mentioned, which is kind of an unusual one is that, over the years, scientists have started realizing that they fall into this trap of confirmation bias that people have become aware of over the years, you know, where you tend to only see evidence that supports your opinion and you give a critical, hard look at the ones where you  may have been wrong, that may prove you’re wrong.

And what we found over the years is that it shows up in scientific literature [00:22:00] research, if people are not very careful when they’re doing analysis, not to let themselves know the answer while they’re still making the decision. 

And it’s a little harder to explain… but the idea is that: f you’re trying to choose a medical procedure or something, you want to first choose your source and who you’re going to rely on, rather than know ahead of time which medical procedure they represent, and then choose your source.

LB: The sequencing matters!

SP: Exactly, because if you already know what their answer would be, then you may choose the one who will say what you want to hear. And. that’s of course, just not a good way to get information. All you’re doing is confirming the information you already have, which is what you would prefer to hear.

So some of the tricks of the trade involve things like trying to keep yourself honest by not letting yourself see parts of the story until you’ve committed to what you’re going to trust, what you’re not going to trust.

LB: I like it. I like it. [00:23:00] Before I let you go, though, I’m going to ask you to trust this process of things we can and can’t yet see with my Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies. Are you game? 

Okay. Okay. So here I have a literal big jar. It has slips of paper. I’m going to take one for you, one for me, one for the audience, and we’re going to make an analogy to curiosity with whatever is on these slips of paper. Yours is towel. How is curiosity like a towel. And mine is stone bridge. So do you want to go first or you want me to go first?

SP: Oh, let’s see. So, um, now I’m trying to look for…for a good use of the towel metaphor. Well, all right. So let me, let me try a couple of angles on it first and we’ll see whether it’s within the spirit of the game, right? So you can think of a towel either as a protective things that, you know, that, that wrap around yourself, you know, or you can think of it as [00:24:00] a cleansing thing that you use to clean with,… and I’m trying to think…

So curiosity is, so you could argue that curiosity allows you to, in the cleaning metaphor, to go beyond your entrenched views of how things must be and clean off that dirt that’s covering up the truth of what the world is really like. And so that you’re using curiosity to allow you then to go hunting for the truth, you know, by cleaning off all these entrenched views that would be otherwise stuck with.

LB: I love it. Okay. So I have stone bridge. Um,

SP: Hah!

LB: well, um, okay. So a stone bridge is built with, uh, you know, individual stones, which are kind of miraculously … I mean, we grew up in the Keystone State, right? There’s often a stone in the middle that sort of holds the whole thing [00:25:00] together. And I, I think curiosity is something that’s often built from a lot of, you know, discrete pieces, which when sort of cobbled together can span from one side of something to another. I guess that’s how I’ll say curiosity is like a stone bridge. And audience, yours is a ring. How is curiosity like a ring?

SP: Now you have me curious about… I’m trying to think… So bridging from one thing to another, I’m just trying to nail the metaphor. So the curiosity is, is allowing us to bridge from where we, we stand now to some other insight that we  would get?

LB: Yeah. Cobbled together from these bits and pieces. 

And there’s a whole theory in curiosity that it’s a collection of information whose value we don’t necessarily know in the moment. And, and so if we think of a stone bridge as put together by these stones that are sort of randomly collected and then assembled, I, I feel like it is. It’s something [00:26:00] that can get us from one side of something to another. Yeah,

SP: What do the audience get?

LB: They got ring. How is curiosity like a ring?

SP: So I think we’re having a problem that the objects of the metaphors are somewhat closed. Whereas curiosity, we sort of like this open-ended aspect of it and so all three are tough ones to work with because none of them feel quite as open

LB: It would be an interesting challenge to try to think of them in an open way.

SP: Well, I guess you could say bridge is opening up the new territory…

LB: Right. Or what if a ring is not about the closed circle but the space that it creates for the passage of something 

SP: into something else. Yes. Yes.

LB: This is what I love about this jar, here’s not a wrong answer. And if we sat down with these on another day, we could readily come up with very different answers. 

SP: Yes 

LB: Which I think is a wonderful kind of reminder that we ought not get wed to how we see things…but be open to somebody’s idea about it.

SP: I should say that I think that we should absolutely hire you to explain the book to people. You’ve been [00:27:00] capturing some of the main things that we were hoping people would read in the book in a way that you know, it’s wonderful to hear!

(Music)

LB: You’ve been listening to Choose to be Curious. I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Thanks for joining us here today! 

You can find all my shows on my website at choosetobecurious.com.  I hope you’ll follow me here, there, and on social media @choosetobecurious, where you can share your ring analogy,  #analogy.

Many thanks to my guest Saul Perlmutter. Links to his work and Third Millennium Thinking on my website. Thanks, too, to Sean Ballack for our theme music, and this is “Celestial Navigation” by Aeronaut via Blue Dot Sessions. 

I hope you’ll join us again next time. Until then, choose to be curious!