David McRaney News

You Are Now Less Dumb now out in paperback!

fbbookHere are just a few of the hundreds of new ideas you’ll stuff in your head while reading You Are Now Less Dumb:

*You’ll finally understand why people wait in line to walk into unlocked rooms and how that reveals a universal behavior that slows progress and social change.

*You’ll discover the connection between salads, football, and consciousness.

*You’ll learn why people who die and come back tend to return with similar stories, and you’ll see how the explanation can help you avoid arguments on the internet.

* You’ll see why Bill Clinton, Gerard Butler, and Robert DeNiro all believe in the same magical amulet because they are all equally ignorant in one very silly way that you can easily avoid.

* You’ll learn about a scientist’s bizarre experiment that tested what would happen if multiple messiahs lived together for several years and how you can use what he learned to debunk your own delusions.

*You’ll learn why the same person’s accent can be irritating in some situations and charming in others and you can use that knowledge to make better hiring choices and improve education.

LINKS TO BUY

Amazon – IB –  B&N – BAM – Powell’s – iTunes – Audible – Google

EXCERPTS

TRAILERS

Screen Shot 2013-07-29 at 9.51.41 PM

Screen Shot 2013-07-29 at 9.51.41 PM

Screen Shot 2013-07-29 at 9.51.41 PM

THE STORY BEHIND THE GOOSE TREES

Before I explain where the idea came from, I’d like to endorse the people who did the hardest work. If you need a video, please contact Plus3. They made the trailers above, and they are great to work with. You can visit their website at http://www.plus3video.com.

It’s true. People educated and not so educated believed that geese grew on trees for at least 700 years.

A certain type of barnacle often found floating on driftwood was thought to be a goose egg case because it kind of, sort of, looked like a goose that lived in the same area. According to the naturalist Sir Ray Lankester, nature texts going back to the 1100s described trees with odd fruits from which geese would hatch, and there is evidence to suggest the belief goes back 2,000 years earlier.

Images from goose transformations from Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester
Images from goose transformations from Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester

There was a particular breed of goose that lived along the marshes in Britain, and this goose migrated to breed and lay its eggs. The geese seemed to sometimes suddenly appear in large numbers in the same places where, while the geese were missing for long stretches, the barnacles tended to wash ashore. Wise, learned monks explained to the people of the day that the barnacles were the geese in their early stages of development. Lankester wrote that the belief was further solidified by those same monks who also claimed you could eat a barnacle goose during Lent because, well, it wasn’t a bird. Apparently the belief was well-established and quite popular because in 1215 Pope Innocent III announced that, although everyone knew they grew on trees, the eating of barnacle geese was still strictly prohibited by the church, effectively closing the loophole created by those wily monks.

“They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds; nor do they ever hatch any eggs nor build nests anywhere. Hence clergymen in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they arre not flesh nor born of flesh!” – Gerald of Wales, medieval historian, writing as royal clerk to Henry II in Topographia Hibernica

The idea wasn’t difficult to accept to minds of that era because spontaneous generation was already an accepted truth yet to be torn apart by scientists using scientific methods. People still believed that rotting meat gave birth to flies all by itself and that piles of dirty rags could transform into mice and that most everything else came from slime or mud. A tree that sprouted bird buds seemed reasonable, especially if after 500 years you had never once caught two of the adults mating.

Sometime in the 1600s the myth began to fade because explorers in Greenland discovered the birds’ nesting sites. The second blow came when people finally started poking around inside the weird buds. Lankester writes in his 1915 book, Diversions of a Naturalist, “The belief in the story seems to have died out at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the structure of the barnacle lying within its shell was examined without prejudice, and it was seen to have only the most remote resemblance to a bird.”

You don’t believe in goose trees today not because it’s a silly idea, but because scientists discovered evidence to the contrary and then passed that information around. The lesson here is that silly ideas don’t just go away because they are silly. You need a system to test them.

Science can be difficult to define without explaining a lot of explanations of explanations, but physicist Sean Carroll recently wrote on his blog that science can pretty much be boiled down to three principles (the following is a direct quote):

  1. “Think of every possible way the world could be. Label each way an ‘hypothesis.'”
  2. “Look at how the world actually is. Call what you see ‘data’ (or ‘evidence’).”
  3. “Where possible, choose the hypothesis that provides the best fit to the data.”

Think about how you might apply those same principles in your own life – shopping, eating bagels, discussing politics, choosing a career, and so on.

Remember, without an agreed-upon system for making sense of reality and a network of observers questioning each other’s data and methods, goose trees remained common knowledge for hundreds of years. Imagine what weird, untested things might be floating around in your aquarium of beliefs.

I write about this in You Are Now Less Dumb because you should understand that your natural way of understanding the world is no better than the people who used to believe geese grew on trees. Just like them, you’re pretty terrible at being skeptical. Just like them, you prefer to confirm your beliefs instead of disconfirming them. It’s just the way brains work. You are less dumb because you were born after science became an institution. People have done science for long enough to falsify a lot of old myths.

The scientific method is a tool human beings use to prevent themselves from doing what comes naturally. Without it, you prefer to explain what you observe in reverse: you start with a conclusion and use motivated reasoning to defend an assumption formed through the lens of confirmation bias while committing the post hoc fallacy as you argue for your an explanation couched in narrative supported by hindsight bias and a mixed bag of other self delusions.

Science forces you to see your conclusions as what they usually are – hypotheses. It then makes a zillion other hypotheses and starts smashing them all to pieces with data. Eventually, the hypotheses that survive are more likely than the ones that perish. It’s a method you should borrow. Try it sometime, and after you’ve subjected your own hypotheses to abuse notice how that forces you to draw new conclusions about this strange, beautiful, complicated experience of being a person.

Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester
Diversions of a Naturalist by Sir Ray Lankester

Sources:

  • Carroll, S. (2013) What is Science? http://www.preposterousuniverse.com – http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/07/03/what-is-science/#more-11291
  • Heron-Allen, E. (1928). Barnacles in Nature and in Myth 1928.
  • White, B. (1945, July). Whale-Hunting, the Barnacle Goose, and the Date of the “Ancrene Riwle.” The Modern Language Review Vl. 40, No. 3