Tag Archives: minds

This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.

by SantoRoberzkzmv Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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With less than two months until the 2014 elections, the political falsehoods are rolling in. Consider the Colorado Senate Race, between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner. Trying to brand himself as just as green as Udall (a longtime clean energy champion), Gardner recently ran an ad claiming that as a state senator in 2007, he “co-wrote the law to launch our state’s green energy industry.”

But when 9 News, Denver’s NBC affiliate, fact-checked the ad, it found the law Gardner was touting didn’t accomplish much at all to promote green initiatives. Asked for a statement, Gardner’s campaign responded, “Cory says that he co-wrote a law ‘to launch our state’s green energy industry,’ not that launched it.'” (The emphasis is Gardner’s.) In other words, the impression given by the ad is just wrong, as the Gardner campaign winkingly admits! “Folks, we honestly do not know if we have ever seen such a frank acknowledgement of purposeful deception from an American politician,” commented the local politics blog ColoradoPols. You can watch the 9 News segment here.

Gardner comes off, in this instance, as reminiscent of GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. While working for Mitt Romney in 2012, Newhouse infamously declared, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Gardner’s cavalier response, like Newhouse’s brazen statement, raises the fear that despite a voluminous growth of fact-checking in the past half-decade, there’s really nothing the media can do to keep politicians honest. But is that really true?

Not according to Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who has focused much of his research on employing the tools of social science to figure out why fact-checking so often fails, and what can be done to make it work better. The cynical view on fact-checking is “too negative,” argues Nyhan on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I think you have to think about what politics might look like without those fact-checkers, and I think it would look worse.”

Nyhan hasn’t just been studying the fact-check movement; he was there at its origins. In the early 2000s, he co-authored a site called Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan fact-checking outlet. It was the beginning of a wave: In 2003, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania launched Factcheck.org. But the real fact-checking movement kicked into gear in the late 2000s, with the launch of PolitiFact, by far the most widely known of these outlets, as well as the 2007 launch of the Washington Post fact-checker column, now written by Glenn Kessler.

Brendan Nyhan

As a result, in the last few years, a huge volume of claims have been given one-to-four Pinocchios by the Post, or declared “True,” “Pants on Fire,” or somewhere in between by PolitiFact. That includes the repeated debunking of the last half-decades’ mega lies: Birtherism, for instance, and claims about the Affordable Care Act creating “death panels.” So what does the evidence show about this endeavor?

First the good news: Overall, the fact-checkers have reinforced the idea that reality exists, and journalists are capable of discerning what it is. That may seem obvious, but it’s actually worth underscoring that we don’t live in a postmodern nightmare of subjectivity. “The fact-checkers, when they rate the same content, come to the same conclusion a very high percentage of the time,” says Nyhan. “So that’s a good indication that they are seeing the evidence and interpreting it in a consistent way.” For instance, Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Post‘s Kessler all refuted Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claim; PolitiFact dubbed it the “lie of the year” in 2009.

That’s not to say that fact-checkers are themselves entirely unbiased. PolitiFact in particular has been repeatedly criticized for false equivalence in how it treats the left and the right. It’s just to say that they largely agree with one another, suggesting that facts are, for the most part, discernible.

The Backfire Effect

A far tougher issue, though, is whether minds change when fact-checkers make their pronouncements. On the level of individual psychology, repeated studies by Nyhan and others have shown that it is very hard to correct a misperception once it is out there in the media ether. We’ve previously reported on the so-called “backfire effect,” discovered by Nyhan and his colleague Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. Again and again, they’ve found in experiments that trying to correct certain false claims that are highly politically charged—the claim that tax cuts increase government revenue, for instance—often just doesn’t work. Partisans can actually become stronger in their wrong beliefs upon encountering a refutation.

Consider the data, for instance, when Nyhan and Reifler attempted, in a classic study, to get partisans to change their minds about the tax cut claim (which they attributed to George W. Bush). In the experiment, participants were shown a fake newspaper article containing an actual George W. Bush quotation: “The tax relief stimulated economic vitality and growth and it has helped increase revenues to the Treasury.” In one version of the experiment, the article then contained a correction, refuting this claim; in another version it did not. It turned out that conservatives who read the correction believed Bush’s falsehood more strongly than did conservatives who never read the correction:

Backfire Effect: Conservatives became more likely to believe President Bush’s claim that tax cuts increase revenue after reading a correction explaining that it isn’t true. Brendan Nyhan.

And that’s just the beginning of the difficulties related to correcting errors and making the corrections stick in people’s heads. Nyhan also notes that much research suggests that negating a claim (“the Affordable Care Act doesn’t create death panels”) actually has the effect of reinforcing it in our minds (“there are death panels”). “We should be pretty cautious about how high our hopes are for changing people’s minds,” says Nyhan. “Once those myths are out there, it’s very hard to change people’s minds.”

Fact Checking as Deterrence

Such are some of the reasons to question the power of fact checking. So then why does Nyhan think a world with fact checking in it is way better than one without it? The answer is that it’s not so much about changing the minds of the partisans as it is about deterring the politicians. “They’re so often the vehicle for these myths,” says Nyhan. “If they know they’ll be called out publicly, they may not reinforce or disseminate these myths in the first place.”

So what about fact-checking as deterrence? Does it work? After all, no politician wants the campaign narrative to revolve around allegations that he or she is a liar, or detached from reality.

Mother Jones’ David Corn has made the case that in the 2012 election, politicians like Mitt Romney just weren’t deterred. And it may well be that on the national level, and especially on the presidential level, politicians get fact-checked so often, and fact-checkers try so hard to spread around the opprobrium, that ultimately it’s a wash.

However, on the local level, this stuff seems to really matter. Nyhan and Reifler provided data to support this idea in a 2013 New America Foundation study. During the 2012 election cycle, they sent letters to 392 state legislators who had PolitiFact affiliates in their states. The letters simply noted that the politicians’ statements might be fact-checked, and that there were reputational risks associated with getting a poor rating. “We sent them a lot of letters,” explains Nyhan. “Some of them became very sick of hearing from us in the mail, as we sent them letter after letter, reminding them just what a significant threat fact-checking could be to them.” Two other groups of legislators, of similar size, received either no letters or a “placebo” letter saying the authors were studying how accurate politicians are, but didn’t bring up reputational risks or fact checking.

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The study found that the warning letters had a statistically significant effect: Legislators who received them were less likely to have their accuracy questioned by PolitiFact, or by other news sources found in a Lexis-Nexis search. Of course, it was also extremely unlikely for any legislator to be fact-checked at all. Thus, the risk declined from just under 3 percent down to 1 percent:

From Nyhan and Reifler, “The Effects of Fact-Checking Threat: Results from a field experiment in the states,” New American Foundation Research Paper, 2013.

To Nyhan, this suggests that fact-checking can serve as a deterrent, and can be a particularly big deal in local as opposed to national races—which means it matters in 2014. Indeed, in one case, fact-checking already appears to have significantly damaged a campaign. In Alaska, incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Begich ran an ad suggesting his opponent, former state attorney general Dan Sullivan, had not been tough enough on sex offenders, going on to state that one of them got out of prison early and went on to commit a horrific crime—a sexual assault and double murder. But PolitiFact rated the ad’s claims “pants on fire,” finding that Sullivan was not responsible for the suspect’s release. Begich’s campaign soon pulled it off the air.

In other words, the ad itself became an issue, and Begich has had to contend with a major backlash, as well as the black eye of having to pull an ad.

To Nyhan, that’s the whole point. Backfires and biases notwithstanding, there remains the potential for a prominent factual correction to cause a media furor, and, in some case, to damage a politician’s reputation. Partisans may stick with their candidate, but they’ll be sticking with a candidate who has been forced to play defense.

So facts work—kind of. Sometimes. Even if politicians try to avoid them.

“I think fact-checking has caused big important changes in how we cover the news now,” says Nyhan, “and it’s gotten especially the younger generation of reporters much more interested in going beyond that ‘he-said, she-said’ reporting.”

To listen to the full podcast episode with Brendan Nyhan, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of a new study suggesting that religious and non-religious individuals are equally moral, and new research on gender discrimination in job performance evaluations, particularly by men with traditional views of gender roles.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

by OsvaldoTeague Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the 1930s, a Duke University botanist named Joseph Banks Rhine was gaining notoriety for focusing a scientific lens on the concept of extrasensory perception, or ESP. His initial research, which he claimed demonstrated the existence of ESP, consisted of case studies of exceptional individuals who seemed to be able to predict which cards a research associate was holding—even when sitting 250 yards away and separated by physical barriers like a wall—with greater accuracy than simple guessing would yield.

But case studies can only take you so far.

One night, Rhine met with Eugene Francis McDonald Jr., the CEO of the Zenith Radio Company. McDonald offered up his technology for what promised to be the largest and most impressive test of ESP yet: a nationwide experiment showing that telepathy is real.

“The idea was that they would have a bunch of people in a radio studio, and they would try to transmit their thoughts to the nationwide radio audience,” explains science writer William Poundstone, author of the book Rock Breaks Scissors, on this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast. “And then people at home could write down what they think they received and send that in, and scientists would look at it and decide if they had shown ESP or not.” The hope, says Poundstone, was that the participation of millions of radio listeners would produce results that were supposedly “much more statistically valid” than earlier ESP studies.

The first few broadcasts were a dramatic success. Most listeners were correct in their guesses of what the “senders” in a radio station in Chicago were thinking. On one episode, writes Poundstone, the thought-senders attempted to use their brains to transmit a series of five Xs and Os—OXXOX—and a majority of the audience members sent in the right answers. “So this seemed very impressive, and the head of Zenith put out big press releases saying that, you know, there’s no way this could be a coincidence,” says Poundstone.

But while it wasn’t a coincidence, a young psychologist named Louis D. Goodfellow figured out that the experiment wasn’t really measuring telepathy. Rather, it was demonstrating something far more interesting about human nature: our inability to behave randomly. It turned out that Goodfellow, who had been hired by Zenith to work on the show, could predict listeners’ guesses even before they had a chance to make them. He started out with the hypothesis that there is no ESP. In that case, the radio audience had to come up with a random sequence themselves. “And he realized that it’s not so easy for a person to make up a random sequence.” says Poundstone. “When people try to do that they fall into certain unconscious patterns, and these patterns are really very similar for everyone.”

In his own laboratory experiments, Goodfellow found that his subjects preferred certain types of sequences when they’re trying to come up with random ones. When he asked people to make up the results of five imaginary coin tosses, for instance, “he found first of all that the most popular first toss was heads,” says Poundstone. How popular? Seventy-eight percent of the study participants selected “heads” as the first result in their supposedly “random” sequences.

What’s more, explains Poundstone, Goodfellow discovered that “people liked sequences that were very well shuffled.” Indeed, the most common sequence chosen by Zenith audiences was heads, heads, tails, heads, tails (or its equivalent in Os and Xs)—they picked it nearly 30 times more frequently than tails, tails, tails, tails, tails. “It’s not too surprising that the least common ones were just five heads in a row, or five tails in a row,” adds Poundstone. “People figured that just wasn’t random.”

So, mystery solved. When the Zenith program transmitted thoughts that matched sequences that were popular with its listeners, “it suddenly looked like the public had a great deal of ESP,” says Poundstone. “But when the sequences were not so popular, then suddenly the telepaths were off their game.”

More recently, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proposed the so-called Law of Small Numbers, a theory that accounts for human misunderstandings of randomness. Specifically, we wrongly expect small samples to behave like very large ones. So if you toss a coin five times, you assume that you’ll get some variation of a pattern that includes two or three heads and two or three tails. If your coin lands on tails five times in a row, you tend to believe that it can’t be a coincidence. But in fact, the odds of five tails in a row are 1 in 32—not especially common, but not terribly rare, either. “So we have all these sort of false positives where we figure there must be something wrong with that coin, or maybe the person’s got some magic hot-hand in tossing coins,” Poundstone says.

Understanding these pitfalls can actually help you predict, with accuracy above chance, what someone else is going to do, even when he or she is trying, purposefully, to act randomly. These predictions are at the core of Poundstone’s book, which offers a practical guide to outguessing and outwitting almost anybody—in activities ranging from Rock, Paper, Scissors (men tend to go with rock, so you can beat them with paper) to investing in stocks.

Naturally, the larger the dataset, the more accurately a person—or a computer—can predict behavior. With access to Big Data, large corporations like Target have developed analytics that can predict our behavior with remarkable accuracy, even when we think we’re making decisions in the moment. Siri, your iPhone’s talking app, learns about you and the behavior of all the other iPhone users and uses that information to predict what you’re going to ask her even as you are evaluating your own needs.

And sometimes, the Big Data machine is more observant than even the people closest to us. In his book, Poundstone cites the story of a Minnesota dad (first reported by the New York Times) who complained to a Target manager that his teenage daughter was being encouraged by the company to engage in unprotected sex. The store, he noted, had sent her a mailer littered with photos of cute babies, baby gear, and maternity clothing. As Poundstone writes, the manager apologized and promised that he’d suss out the source of the error. In doing so, he learned that Target analyzes purchases made online and in stores that are predictive of the behavior of an expectant mother. When he called the angry father once again to apologize, he realized just how powerful these algorithms can be. As it turns out, this time the customer was apologetic: Apparently Big Data noticed his daughter’s pregnancy well before he did.

Poundstone draws a direct line between Goodfellow’s debunking of ESP and modern efforts to predict consumer behavior. “It basically demonstrated that a lot of the little everyday decisions we make are incredibly predictable, provided you’ve got a little bit of data to work from,” he says. “And that’s become a very big business today, needless to say.”

But does this predictability apply to everyone? Poundstone knows of at least one person who defies the odds. Computer scientist Claude Shannon built the first computer to predict human behavior. And of all the people tested, he was also the only one who could beat the machine at its own game. When asked how he managed to do this, “he said that he had a very simple secret,” reveals Poundstone. “He essentially mentally emulated the code of the machine and did the algorithm in his head, so he knew what the machine was going to predict, and then he did the opposite.” But Shannon is a special case. “For almost everyone else, mere humans,” says Poundstone, “I think it is pretty easy to predict, at least a good deal of the time.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Understanding Randomness Will Give You Mind-Reading Powers

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

by aleidasharrington Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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American artist Deborah Aschheim makes the “invisible visible”: In one series of works, she created room-size installations that allowed art lovers to walk through a nervous system, with each subsequent installation becoming “smarter” than the previous one. The sixth and final piece in the series was the most like a real brain—using motion sensors, closed circuit TVs and baby monitors, the network responded to the movement of its audience, capturing their actions and encoding “experiences” into “memories.” (For images of the fourth installation in the series, see below.)

Ascheim’s work calls into question an idea that was once widely accepted: That no two disciplines differ more greatly than science and art. The scientifically trained British novelist C.P. Snow crystallized this notion in his famed 1959 lecture about the “two cultures.” Scientists and those in the humanities, Snow said, just couldn’t communicate.

But to hear Arthur I. Miller tell it, that’s an antiquated point of view. Miller is a physics Ph.D., a science historian, and a philosopher—and an art aficionado to boot. And in his new book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, he makes the case for the existence of a “third culture” that, today, is mashing together art, science, and technology into one big domain. “There are still people who think science is science, and art is art,” says Miller on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But that is very far from the situation because it is very, very common and meaningful today for artists to indulge in science and technology in doing their work.”

Miller’s argument is supported not only by the myriad examples of artists who, like Aschheim, are highly reliant on science, but also by the surprising symmetries between how artists and scientists go about their work. One of his most important points: Scientists not only appreciate, but are in some cases driven by, aesthetic considerations. And artists don’t just pull ideas out of their imaginations: They engage in detailed work that often resembles scientific research.

“There’s aesthetics in biology: form is beautiful in biology, but it’s form as adapted to nature,” says Miller. “And when one gets into the physical sciences, one can even quantify aesthetics even more, in that, for example, we’ve heard the phrase, ‘This is a beautiful equation.'” Einstein, famously, put it like this: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

At the frontier of this new culture, there is a blossoming of workshops and events in which artists and scientists are thrown together into a room and forced to interact. The thinking is that cross-pollination will occur and new creative ideas will emerge. The CERN laboratory, home to the Large Hadron Collider, even has an artist in residency program.

Here are five artists who are using cutting edge science and technology to change the landscape of contemporary art:

Deborah Aschheim—Neural Architecture. Aschheim‘s installations are inspired by her personal connection to neurological disorders; her focus has been on investigating memory, both autobiographical and collective—in part because memory disorders like Alzheimer’s disease run in her family. She’s worked as an artist-in-residence at several academic institutions, and she immerses herself into the science behind her pieces. (At the University of California, San Francisco, she and I worked together on a piece that explored the subjectivity of neuroimaging.)

Panopticon (neural architecture no. 4). Deborah Aschheim

In the work pictured here, entitled Panopticon, Ascheim used 260 light cells on motion sensors, 23 pocket televisions, 3 DVDs, 3 closed circuit TV cameras, 14 nanny cams, and 4,000 feet of clear PVC tubing to create a series of “cells” in a type of neural network. This work was the fourth installment in her Neural Architecture series, in which each subsequent piece was “smarter” than the previous one—in essence, the architecture was “learning.” As people walked through the Panopticon installation, they triggered motion sensors that altered which cells were “on,” as lights in the nodes would turn on and off depending on the signal from the sensors. (See a video here.) Then, monitors inside the piece screened video footage from external galleries at the college, as well as a live feed of viewers from embedded spy cameras. This installation was not only responsive, it could also “remember”: monitors played short animated “memories” from the previous installation.

Here’s a close-up of the Panopticon:

Marta de Menezes—Modified Butterflies. Menezes creates “designer” butterflies: Not through genetic engineering, but by “interfering with the normal development of the wing, inducing the development of a new pattern never seen before in nature.” Her work of “art,” then, is actually the live animal that was altered by her vision. For examples of these butterflies see the lead image above, or below:

Modified butterfly. Marta de Menezes.

“They’re not genetically modified at all,” explains Miller of Menezes’ butterflies. “That’s the big thing about them. Menezes takes a hot needle and probes into the caterpillar. And out comes butterflies with asymmetrical wings.” Here’s Menezes’s description of her work:

These wings are an example of something simultaneously natural, but resulting from human intervention. The artistic intervention leaves the butterfly genes unchanged. Thus, the new patterns are not transmitted to the offspring of the modified butterflies. The new patterns are something that never existed before in nature, and that rapidly disappear from nature not to be seen again. These artworks literally live and die. They are an example of art with a lifespan—the lifespan of a butterfly. They are an example of something that is simultaneously art and life.

Brandon Ballengée—Ecological Art. Ballengée is an artist, activist and ecological researcher. He participates in biology field studies, works in a lab and uses his art to document the changes that are happening in various ecosystems. His artistic products put his biological specimens on display, and his most common subjects are frogs, toads and salamanders. In his book, Miller quotes Ballengée as saying that “amphibians are a ‘sentinel’ species, the environmental ‘canaries in the coal mine.'”

In some pieces, like the one pictured here, Ballengée uses biological technology to “clear and stain” a specimen, making it transparent and highlighting certain parts. DFA186:Hades, below, was created using more than 10 different chemicals and dyes.

Hades. Brandon Ballengee

According to Ballengée’s website, his work is designed to “re-examine the context of the art object from a static form (implying rationality and control) into a more organic structure reflecting the inherent chaos found within evolutionary processes, biological systems and nature herself.”

Mark Ackerley—DNA Melody. Ackerley is a composer and former employee of 23andMe, a biotech company that pulls genetic information out of a sample of your spit and helps you research your ancestry. While working at 23andMe, Ackerley developed an algorithm that translated snippets of DNA into music. Using four different musical parameters—rhythm, pitch, timbre and key signature—he turned genes into melodies. To hear an excerpt of a DNA melody played by a string quartet, click here.

Ken Perlin—Perlin Noise. At NYU’s Media Research Lab, Perlin invented a new way of making animation more life-like. His technique, called Perlin Noise, is used by animators world-wide, including in Pixar movies. He’s even won an Academy Award for his work. “Which is something pretty good for somebody who has an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in computer science,” comments Miller.

Watch this video to see how Pixar used mathematics and Perlin Noise to create life-like moss in the film Brave:

“When I asked Perlin what he considers himself to be—either an artist or a scientist—he said neither,” recalls Miller. Rather, Perlin identifies himself simply as “a researcher.”

“In other words,” argues Miller, “the labels ‘artist’ and ‘scientist’ are becoming increasingly irrelevant.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short discussion with Joe Hanson, writer and host of the “It’s Okay to Be Smart” video series, about the science of Game of Thrones, what blowing on Nintendo cartridges has to do with your cognitive biases, new evidence disproving Bigfoot, the relationship between seeing UFOs and alcohol consumption, why men born in winter are more likely to be left-handed…and more.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cosmos, How Science Got Cool, and Why He Doesn’t Debate Deniers

by ShelaChoaiv Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last Sunday’s debut of Cosmos, the rebooted series from Fox and National Geographic, made television history. According to National Geographic, it was the largest global rollout of a TV series ever, appearing on 220 channels in 181 countries and 45 languages. And, yes, this is a science show we’re talking about. You will have to actively resist the force of gravity in order to lift up your dropped jaw and restore a sense of calm to your stunned face.

At the center of the show is the “heir apparent” to legendary science popularizer and original Cosmos host Carl Sagan: the impassioned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who appeared on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast to talk about what it’s like to fill Sagan’s shoes (stream below). On the podcast, Tyson discussed topics ranging from what we know now about the cosmos that Sagan didn’t (top three answers: dark matter and dark energy, the profusion of discovered exoplanets, and the concept of parallel universes, or the “multiverse”) to why science seems to have gotten so super-cool again. After all, not only has Cosmos garnered such a reach, but The Big Bang Theory is currently the number one comedy on TV.

“I wake up every morning saying, ‘How did I get 1.7 million Twitter followers?'” Tyson joked while discussing science’s newfound popularity. “Should I remind them that I’m an astrophysicist? Maybe I should tell them, ‘Folks, I’m an astrophysicist. Alright? Escape now.'”

Thanks in part to Cosmos, Tyson is arguably the single most visible public face of science in America today. And as such, he may have to walk a difficult line. Many science defenders want Cosmos to do nothing less than restore our national sanity by smiting all science denial, especially when it comes to the issues of evolution and global warming. It’s an impossible task, but the theme was nonetheless quite apparent at a November Library of Congress gala dedicating Carl Sagan’s papers, where Cosmos producer Seth MacFarlane denounced science’s “politicization on steroids,” and Cosmos writer Steven Soter remarked that Sagan would have been “appalled” by today’s attacks on climate scientists.

Carl Sagan himself often took strong stands on science-based political issues of the day. He clashed with the Reagan administration over arms control and the “Star Wars” program, and the debate over his ideas about “nuclear winter” served as a kind of preview of the current battle over global warming. Sagan also openly debated pseudoscientists like Immanuel Velikovsky, who posited that the planet Venus had started out as a comet ejected by Jupiter, and had caused various events described in the Bible on its way to its current position. Indeed, Sagan even took on Velikovsky in the fourth episode of the original Cosmos, explaining in depth why his ideas were wrong.

By contrast, Tyson made clear on Inquiring Minds that he does not plan to follow in Sagan’s footsteps in this respect (or for that matter, those of Bill Nye the Science Guy, who went straight into the creationists’ den to debate evolution last month, and was faulted by some for doing so). “Carl Sagan would debate people on all manner of issues,” said Tyson. “And I don’t have the time or the energy or the interest in doing so. As an educator, I’d rather just get people thinking straight in the first place, so I don’t have to then debate them later on.” (To be sure, Tyson has on occasion been drawn into such debates in the past.)

Neil Tyson and a universe. Fox

The deniers, of course, are already out in force over the new Cosmos, whose first episode brought up both evolution and global warming, and whose future episodes will tackle human evolution in greater depth. At the creationist website Answers in Genesis, one writer even goes so far as to dispute the show’s treatment of the Big Bang, writing, “The big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned.”

Tyson certainly has plenty of criticism for those who would deny science. “I claim that all those who think they can cherry pick science simply don’t understand how science works,” he explained on the podcast. “That’s what I claim. And if they did, they’d be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.”

But at the same time, and unlike many science champions (such as the biologist Richard Dawkins), Tyson is quite careful not to pit science against religion. For instance, the first episode of the new Cosmos tells the story of Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk who was persecuted and ultimately burned at the stake by the Inquisition over his ideas about the universe, including the notion that there are an infinite number of suns and worlds beyond our own. Some have argued that to tell this story is in effect to pick a fight over science and religion, but Tyson counters that “Giordano Bruno himself was a deeply religious person. In fact, you could argue that he was more religious than the people prosecuting him.”

The stance of Cosmos, Tyson emphasizes, is not anti-religion but anti-dogma: “Any time you have a doctrine where that is the truth that you assert, and that what you call the truth is unassailable, you’ve got doctrine, you’ve got dogma on your hands. And so Cosmos is…an offering of science, and a reminder that dogma does not advance science; it actually regresses it.”

In other words, Tyson’s view appears to be that in an age rife with science denial, Cosmos rises above that fray by instilling in us wonder about the nature of the cosmos and our quest to understand it. And given the breathtaking quality and stunningly wide distribution of the show, there’s much to say for that approach. Every time you pick a fight, whether over climate change or over evolution or over religion, you lose some of the audience (even as you fire up another part of it).

The “ship of the imagination” sails through the cosmos, on Cosmos. Fox.

In the end, however, scientific knowledge, and wanting to do something about the problems that science reveals, are inseparable. And as soon as you want to change something in the world because of science, you inevitably run up against interests, emotions, and denial.

Global warming is the case in point: Just as Carl Sagan worried about nuclear holocaust because of science, so we today worry about the planet’s steady warming. Indeed, that kind of thinking is central to the Cosmos legacy. Asked on the podcast about the warming of the planet, Tyson explained the ultimate message of Cosmos: “You are equipped and empowered with this cosmic perspective, achieved by the methods and tools of science, applied to the universe. And are you going to be a good shepherd, or a bad shepherd? Are you going to use your wisdom to protect civilization, or will you go at it in a shortsighted enough way to either destroy it, or be complicit in its destruction? If you can’t bring your scientific knowledge to bear on those kinds of decisions, then why even waste your time?”

So in the end, we should all thank Tyson—as well as Fox, National Geographic, and the show’s many writers and producers—for making the new Cosmos happen. It will contribute immeasurably to the appreciation of science in America and beyond. It will make kids think harder about pursuing science careers by showing them that the cosmos is intensely awesome, and the act of understanding it is downright heroic. But, can it ultimately stay above the political fray?

Maybe in some universes.

To listen to the full podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of whether bringing extinct species back to life is a good idea, and of new research suggesting that climate change contributed to the rise of Genghis Khan.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cosmos, How Science Got Cool, and Why He Doesn’t Debate Deniers

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