Tag Archives: Jonathan Haidt

No, CRISPR-Cas won’t save the day for ag biotech

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You want to know how to drive a scientist crazy? Insist that you believe something that’s not supported by current scientific evidence. Tell her vaccines cause autism, or creationism is just as valid a theory as evolution, or that climate change isn’t really happening, I mean, after all, a monster blizzard hit Washington DC this January! Global warming, pssh…

There’s an old episode of Friends that did a good job of showing how this kind of conversation goes. Phoebe professes not to believe in evolution and Ross, a paleontologist, keeps trying to convince her that evolution is real using scientific evidence and logic. He grows increasingly frustrated and insistent as she continues to deny the basis of his life’s work, finally losing it when she goads him into admitting (like a good scientist) that even theories like evolution are not immune from questioning and testing.

We train scientists to carefully generate, weigh and use evidence. To no one’s surprise, this leads many scientists to generalize and think that in all matters having to do with the physical world we all should and of course will follow the evidence. Yes, sometimes that leads to unpopular ideas, and sometimes the ideas change as the weight of evidence changes. This training can make scientists kind of boring at cocktail parties. Still, the overall scientific process keeps moving forward and it’s because of this reliance on evidence.

But many people (including, at times, even some scientists) don’t always think the same way about things in the physical world. And that’s why I’m pessimistic that CRISPR-Cas technology will peacefully resolve the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) debate. Continue reading →

An Open Standard for APIs Could Lead us to Better Health

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There’s a parable about the elephant and the rider that’s been used by Chip and Dan Heath, and that originated with Jonathan Haidt, to describe how humans make decisions. A person’s mind can be thought of as consisting of a rider, representing the rational part of human thinking, and the elephant she’s riding, representing emotion. Both of these play a role in how a person decides things, and many of us believe the rider–the rational part–is in charge. The rider taps the elephant with her guide stick, and the elephant obediently moves in that general direction or does a specific task, like carrying lumber from place to place.

Except that’s not how a lot of decisions actually get made. Instead, the elephant sees a bunch of bananas, or a herd of other elephants, or a nice cool river to bathe in, and goes that way instead. And the rider…well, the rider can’t do much about it except, after the fact, rationalize how she always wanted to go in that direction to begin with. Yeah, it was time for a bath, sure

This framing has stuck in my mind for years and it’s a really helpful way of looking at many of the odd things that people do or say, ranging from climate change denial, to believing genetically modified organisms are inherently evil, to smoking despite everything we know about the harms that result, to even saying that Paul Blart, Mall Cop II is really, you know, not that bad–really. And it also speaks to one of the more vexing problems we have in human health. Why do people keep doing things they really probably shouldn’t, and know they shouldn’t, if they want to stay healthy?

I’ve touched before on how the power of digital tools can help make it easier for us to make good decisions. OPower is doing this for power consumption and conservation, and with the advent of tools like Apple’s Healthkit and the proliferation of activity trackers, the time is right to do this for health. Continue reading →