An Irrational Ape on Chalk Farm Road:A Journey into the World of Critical Thinking.

"He who will not reason is a bigot, he who cannot is a fool, and he who dares not is a slave" - William Drummond of Logiealmond.

It was another Monday evening in The Monarch, Camden and it was another (this time more packed than normal - I had to stand up) fantastic evening with London Skeptics in the Pub. Dr David Robert Grimes (whom I'd had the privilege of seeing speak twice before) was there to tell us (and promote, quite successfully it seemed) his new book, The Irrational Ape:Why flawed logic puts us all at Risk, and How Critical Thinking can save the World, and give us a whirlwind tour of some of the book's highlights and themes.

Eccentric orthography aside (if my only minor gripe about the evening concerns the wildly inconsistent capitalisation of the talk's title that suggests it was an event worth attending), if the book is anything like Dr Grimes' speech it will be well worth reading. In some ways, having him essentially read bits out to us was even better. Grimes is a great communicator. He rattles through his subjects at quite a rapid clip but never leaves us behind, provides background when necessary, drops in little personal anecdotes and quips, leavens the whole thing with a soupcon of self-deprecation, and, most of all, never gets bogged down in anything too technical.

He could have spoke for hours and I seriously doubt I'd have been bored once. But London Skeptics run a tight ship timewise so Grimes crammed as much as he could into his hour and then gave of his time very generously afterwards in the Q&A. I bumped into him during the interval and he told me he had a flight to catch from Stansted at 6am the following morning but would still be around for a chat, and a pint, even after the Q&A should I wish to join him.

What a lovely man - and what a story he had to tell. He began by proposing that not only could critical thinking save the world - but that it already had. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the diesel powered Soviet submarine B-59 was being pursued by the American aircraft carrier USS Randolph in international waters near Cuba. As JFK and Nikita Khrushchev tried to negotiate a compromise on terra firma, those on the B-59, who'd had no contact with Moscow for several days, came to believe that war had commenced and decided to launch a nuclear strike.

This needed unanimous agreement between the sub's captain (Valentin Savitsky), its political officer (Ivan Maslennikov), and the flotilla commander. A man called Vasily Arkhipov. Arkhipov refused his permission for a nuclear launch, reasoning that if they were wrong and war had not broken out then they would be responsible for starting one. As we know now, he was right to do this. This one action, caused by a moment's deliberation for some rational and logical thinking, prevented a potential nuclear war and has been called the most potentially dangerous incident in the entire Cold War and, even, in all human history thus far.

If Arkhipov hadn't employed critical thinking it's possible none of us would be here now. Forty years later, Thomas Blanton, then director of the US National Security Archive, called Arkhipov the man who "saved the world". But he's not the only one. Another incident occurred some years later when the USSR's intelligence services discovered that what they believed were five nuclear missiles were heading their way courtesy of the Americans. While the hawks prepared for revenge attacks, war, and mutually assured destruction one (unnamed) cool head reasoned that if the US were to launch a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union they'd surely send more than five missiles. Maybe they needed to double check this was definitely happening. On doing this it was discovered the reading had come from a faulty detector. Nuclear war averted. Again!

These are examples of where critical thinking has saved people (saved us even) but there are plenty of cases where people have refused to employ it and the results have often been, predictably, disastrous. China 1958. Mao Zedong, despite not being short of genuine enemies, was always eager to find and imagine new foes and punish them for slights perceived or actual. But one of his most bizarre adversaries was none other than the humble Eurasian tree sparrow!

 

The Kill Sparrows Campaign was part of Mao's Four Pests Campaign and the aim was to eradicate every single sparrow in China. Along with all the rats, flies, and mosquitoes. The other three pests. Sparrows were condemned as parasitic members of the bourgeoisie feasting freely on the grain of the proletariat farmers!

They killed a billion of the innocuous looking passerines and, no doubt, the campaign was heralded a great success. Until, that is, it turned out that sparrows are the only natural predators of locusts. Upsetting the ecological balance so significantly was a major contributory factor of the Great Chinese Famine that lasted from 1959 and 1961 and caused the deaths of somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people.

There had been warnings from scientists that this might happen but Mao had not just ignored those warnings. He'd imprisoned the scientists who'd made the warnings - and you thought Michael Gove was a cunt!

It's not just ruthless, murderous, dictators who refuse to employ logic and reason. The church does it too. In fact, the church (all churches) are founded as bulwarks against logic and reason. If they weren't they wouldn't, and couldn't, exist. A Vatican trial of 897 is commonly known as the Cadaver Synod and there's a very good reason for that.

Pope Stephen VI (or VII depending on your view of the Antipopes, Googling this sent me down a Wikipedia wormhole in which I discovered surely the best Wiki page ever, 'List of popes who died violently') was trying his eight month dead predecessor but one, Formosus for perjury and having acceded to the papacy illegally. As Formosus refused to defend himself (primarily because he was dead) he was pronounced guilty by Stephen, had three of his fingers chopped off, and was tossed into the Tiber.

 

This, as was the case of Mao and his sparrow theriocide, was a deliberate refusal to employ critical thinking so as to serve one's own ends. It still happens today. Most obviously with conspiracy theorists who are prone to making what is called a converse error in their thinking. An everyday converse error is to believe that if a dog has four legs then every animal that has four legs is a dog - therefore a cat is a dog. Conspiracy theorists believe that as official reports have, in the past, reported no cover up and proved to be wrong that all reports that arrive at that verdict must, by their flawed thinking, be cover ups.

Examples given by Grimes included various theories about 9/11 being an inside job and the latest belief to really get traction, the idea that 5G can give you cancer. Which it can't. Cancer rates, however, are going up so that leads people, quite reasonably, to believe that there is something about the way we live now that is giving more people cancer.

That there's something out there that's killing us. Microwaves, the wax on apples, Nutella, hair dye, shampoo, cold water, hot water, X-rays, bras, shaving, menstruation, crayons, bread, chips, and even candle lit dinners have been said (mostly by the ghastly Daily Mail it must be added) to cause cancer but the truth of the matter is that cancer is killing more people now because people are living longer and cancer is, for the most part - I lost one of my very best friends at far too young an age to it, a disease (or, in fact, a group of diseases) that predominantly affects older people.

People living longer and not dying of cholera and smallpox means the chances of getting to an age where a cancer diagnosis is more likely has increased. Of course, should the anti-vaxxing movement continue to pick up recruits we could soon see a reverse of that!

These examples (not the Daily Mail ones) show that absence of critical thinking isn't always intentional or malicious, it can often be well-intentioned. But still wrong - and still dangerous. A study of bomber aircraft that had returned from service in a Pacific dogfight during World War II was carried out and found that few planes were returning with damaged fuselages and engines and that, therefore, those parts of the planes were sufficiently strong and needed no further work on them. But there was another reason planes with damaged fuselages and engines weren't returning for inspection. Think hard. Can you work out why?

Grimes looked into how we can apply critical thinking in our own lives as none of us are exempt from cognitive biases and we can all fall, from time to time, for the kind of rhetoric that looks for single reasons for multi faceted problems. It's the kind of reductive fallacy that has brought us our current era of populist demagogues and has delivered us the Brexit impasse/shambles that is turning the UK into an international laughing stock.

One of the bete noires of the Skeptics movement is Andrew Wakefield (a picture of him was roundly booed), the discredited ex-physician who was responsible, in 1998, of claiming, incorrectly, a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. A claim that affected massively the uptake on the vaccine and led to outbreaks of measles and is believed to be responsible for a number of deaths.

Wakefield's claims have been comprehensively disproved elsewhere so I won't waste much time on him but there are two important factors to take in mind when considering the rise of reported cases of autism. There's no autism epidemic but, instead, there has been a change of diagnostic criteria. I'm sure we can all think of somebody we went to school with who, now, would likely be diagnosed as autistic but wasn't.

I certainly can. Quite a few, actually. The other thing to take into account, if you still believe Wakefield was on to something, is that autism is generally first identified when a child learns to speak which, coincidentally, is usually about the same time they receive their MMR jabs.

Some people continue to believe Wakefield's false claims because they've not bothered to, they've neither had the inclination or the time or even both, fact check or they've fallen foul of fake news (which Grimes suggested should be renamed as viral propaganda as that gives a clearer idea of what it is). But others remain wilfully ignorant. Why do people choose to believe things that are demonstrably untrue (even in cases where it could be to their own detriment and to the harm of those they profess to love)?

A host of reasons, it seems. There's the unreliability of our own memory, there are the aforementioned cognitive biases at play, and, most worryingly of all, there are people out there who seek to spread and disseminate falsehoods. There are the conspiracy theorists who never seem to be able find a plot they don't agree with. These are the people who can believe that Princess Di was both killed on the orders of the Queen AND is still alive and in hiding. They can believe that Osama Bin Laden was executed not because of what he'd done but because of what he knew AND that he is still alive and in hiding.

Grimes called them, amusingly, Schrodinger's conspiracy theorists! Politicians, too, are often unhelpful. The Scottish poet Andrew Lang once said that "politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts, for support rather than illumination" and in that he's right. Politicians only need to think about the five (though now descending exponentially) years until the next general election. So they're liable to say things that will get them elected. A soundbite, true or not, plays better with the public than an inconvenient truth or a complicated analysis of a situation.

So politicians trade in soundbites ("strong and stable", "get Brexit done", "make America great again", "for the many, not the few") and people, who have busy lives, remember them more than they bother to read manifestos, fact check, or employ critical thinking.

You can't blame people for not having time to surgically analyse every piece of information that is served up to them. There's simply too much in our age of information overload. But you'd think magazine publishers would be a little more circumspect. When Belle Gibson, an Instagram celebrity and 'wellness guru', lied that she'd made a miraculous recovery from cancer (in fact, multiple cancer pathologies) by forgoing modern medicine and science and curing herself using diet, exercise, and 'alternative' therapies both Elle and Cosmopolitan were taken in.

After she'd set up The Whole Pantry mobile app it was revealed that she'd completely fabricated the entire story and that over $300,000 of the money she'd made from sales from the app that she'd claimed to have donated to worthwhile causes had, in fact, been spent on designer clothes, holidays, cosmetic procedures, an upmarket house, and a luxury automobile.

Belle was a scammer. She was a criminal. She may yet face prison (the most recent information I can find is that she's yet to pay the fines imposed on her for her crimes). It's horrible. But criminals exist - and criminals get punished for their criminal behaviour. But why were Elle and Cosmo giving her column inches to spread this story without first checking its veracity?

Elle, it appears, have refused to even apologise for doing so. Suggesting that it's 'on her' but it's not just on her, it's on them too. They're aides to her criminality and they should hold their hands up and put protocols in place to ensure it doesn't happen again.

All these stories of amoral behaviour, scamming, and lying politicians could have painted a depressingly bleak picture of the world we live in but, thankfully, Grimes finished off with a rather touching story (I'm sure he had a tear in his eye at one point, I wasn't far off) that both demonstrated his point about how critical thinking can save us and showed that people, for the most part, ain't so bad.

In fact, some people are truly wonderful, generous, and inspirational beings. One of those people was Laura Brennan. Laura was just 24 years old when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer stage 2B. She'd be dead before her 27th birthday. Even though her treatment was not able to save her and was eventually of a purely palliative nature, she campaigned, promoted, and advocated the HPV vaccine relentlessly and urged other young women to get themselves innoculated.

This came at a time when, in Ireland (Grimes' home country), vaccination rates had dropped to disturbingly low levels. Laura's tireless work (at a time when she must have been more tired than any of us can even imagine) saw those levels rise again. Laura once said "I am the reality of an unvaccinated girl. What kills me, though, is that all of this could have been prevented" and that quote got through to people in a way that an angry Twitter rant, a piece of viral propaganda, or even a 2,800 word blog could never do.

 

We can never know how many lives that Laura Brennan has saved, or will go on to save, with these words but she showed the power of critical thinking even when it was too late to save herself. That Dr Grimes ended with her story was a testament both to his admiration for her and to his own generosity as a person, thinker, and speaker.

He'd taken us, in less than one hour, on a circuitous, funny, informative, thought-provoking, and, eventually, emotional tour through the world of critical thinking. Its past, its present, and its future. There had been digressions into characters as great as Oscar Wilde, Richard Feynman, Michael Faraday, Harry Houdini, James Randi, Heinrich Heine, Paul Simon, Voltaire, and Bertrand Russell as well as others who have had a more pernicious influence on our public life like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Adolf Hitler, con man David 'Avocado' Wolfe, and, another quack who's got the knack of parting gullible people from their money, Joseph Mercola. A huckster who runs the most profitable pseudoscientific empire on the planet and claims he can cure cancer with baking soda.

He touched on snake oil, straw man theories, UFO cults, eschatology, Satanic child abuse/Michelle Remembers, witches, hypnotic regression, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and cargo cults and yet it never felt too much. Even for the kind of person, who can that be?, who likes to take notes. Some of the stories from 2017's Greenwich Skeptics talk were revisited (and why not, it's mostly a completely different audience) but they were more polished, and funnier, than before.

Dr David Robert Grimes was a good speaker to begin with but he's improved immeasurably. A couple of hours in his company was both delightful and educational in equal measure. I take my imaginary hat off, once more, to both Dr Grimes and to London Skeptics in the Pub and I promise to take on board some of the lessons I learned last night. I promise to try and think better!