#389 – Thinking scientifically: why it’s hard, why it matters, and a practical toolkit

Topics to be covered and goals for this episode [2:00]

• Today, Peter wants to talk about a skill that sits upstream of nearly every decision you make about health, policy, risk, and even how to evaluate other people in this space
• He wants to talk about how to think scientifically
• By that, he doesn’t mean how to run a lab or memorize statistics 
• He means, how to evaluate claims
• How to update your beliefs when the evidence changes
• How to figure out who to trust when you can’t do the analysis yourself
  • Which as we’re going to come to appreciate, is often
  • If you get good at that, you put yourself in the position to make better decisions than somebody who simply knows more facts, but doesn’t know how to weigh them 

We’re going to cover 4 things here today 

• 1 – What scientific thinking actually is beyond spending time in a lab
• 2 – Why it’s so hard for us, which has less to do with intelligence than you might expect
• 3 – What you can do as an individual to get better at it
• 4 – How to find people you can trust when you can’t do the analysis yourself, which is going to be most of the time for most people

One idea is going to thread through this entire episode  

• The goal of thinking scientifically is not simply to be right
• It’s to be less wrong over time
• Science is a process built around that principle, and what Peter wants to do today is help you engage with it more skillfully

Scientific thinking: hypotheses, uncertainty, and the process of ruling out explanations [3:45]

What we actually mean when we say “think scientifically” 

• There’s a common misconception that scientific thinking is something scientists do in labs and the rest of us just receive in the form of results
• But that’s not what Peter is talking about at all 

“Thinking scientifically is a way of engaging with claims about the world, any claims, not just ones that come with a citation attached.”‒ Peter Attia

At its core, it means: 

• Generating hypotheses, possible explanations for why something might be the way it is, or how something works
• It means testing those hypotheses against experimental evidence
• It means updating your beliefs when the evidence changes
• And it means tolerating uncertainty throughout this entire process
• It means separating what you want to be true from what the evidence suggests is true, and recognizing, really recognizing how often those 2 things are intention 
• As Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientific thinkers in history once said, “The first principle is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” 

Peter emphasizes, “Scientific thinking means being more invested in the process that produced a conclusion than in the conclusion itself.” 

It is NOT intuitive: scientific thinking means being more invested in the process that produced a conclusion than in the conclusion itself 

• Most of us evaluate claims by asking, “Is it true?”

A scientific thinker asks a different set of questions first 

• How did they arrive at this? 
• What’s the evidence? 
• How strong is it? 
• What are the alternative hypotheses or explanations? 
• And scientific thinking means understanding that I don’t know, and it depends, are often the most honest, available answers

Peter makes the point, “This idea, ‘I don’t know, is critically important,’ and I don’t think we discuss it often enough.”

• In many ways, “I don’t know,” can always be the first answer to any scientific question
• The second answer is then our best understanding based on the available evidence
• But out of ease, and out of confidence, and out of trying to avoid sounding like a broken record, we often just skip straight to the second answer

We drop the uncertainty, and when we do that, we lose something essential

{end of show notes preview}