“There are many mysteries of the universe to which we have only a few pieces of evidence,” I said. “We don’t have all the tools. Maybe we haven’t done the work yet. It seems like a conception in Flat Earth is that scientists have answers for everything, but if I’m hearing you correctly, you are saying there’s still a lot of room for mystery in this

Imagine you both heard a strange noise; you are scared and searching with your own flashlights. You each have some hunches, but most importantly, you want to share input before, together, you reach a conclusion. Explore the reasoning behind their hunches with empathetic questioning and listening. Ask what justifies their confidence, and how. Then

We do this because we are social primates who gather information in a biased manner for the purpose of arguing for our individual perspectives, in a pooled information environment, within a group that deliberates on shared plans of action toward collective goals. We are lazy, because we expect to off-load the cognitive labor to a group deliberation

It’s useful to think of confirmation bias as the goggles we put on when we feel highly motivated by fear, anxiety, anger, and so on. In these states we begin looking for confirmation that the emotions we feel are justified. Why would we do that? I compare it to camping in a remote area; when we hear a strange sound we take out the flashlight and,

In my interview with the producers of Behind the Curve, I argued that observing how curious, logical, intelligent people get led astray by their own psychological mechanisms—aided by the conspiracy-friendly algorithms of Google and YouTube, and the tribal and identity-stoking context of social media—shows how we are all prone to this kind of

For most people, these disagreements are manageable, because at the end of the day, it’s the notion of a powerful them hiding the truth that motivated them to dig deeper, find one another, and form a community. They can all agree on that. Then group psychology took over; now they are bound by tribalism and reputation management, signaling to one

documentary Behind the Curve, an exploration of motivated reasoning and conspiratorial thinking told through the lives of people who have formed a community around the belief that the Earth is flat.

Often but not every time, a knock leads to a change. He is sure of this, and the research backs him up—maybe not this knock, but eventually that rapping on the door will shatter the status quo and change everything.

The key to changing a nation, or a planet, is persistence. At any one time, for any given system, thousands of us are banging away at it hoping to make the difference that changes the world, but no one knows where the vulnerable cluster is at. No one can will the system to cascade for them. The system must become vulnerable. When it is, with so