Lessons on Life (and Death) with Dr. Michael Shermer
For the uninitiated, Dr. Michael Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic. He has written several best-selling books including The Moral Arc: How Science Leads Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom and his most recent effort, Heavens On Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.
He’s also a member of the informal alliance, dubbed by fellow intellectual, Eric Weinstein, as the intellectual dark web’. The ‘IDW’ includes names from across the political and cultural spectrum who are bonded by advocacy for the free exchange of ideas and includes personalities such as Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson.
I had the opportunity to spend over an hour chatting with Dr. Shermer on my podcast, Future Squared, and we explored everything from death and the afterlife, religion, immortality, cognitive biases, tribalism and more.
You can listen to the entire conversation below or find Future Squared wherever you get your podcasts.
I found the conversation quite enlightening, so much so that I decided to capture lessons learned in this blog post.
Life (and Death) Lessons with Dr Michael Shermer
Death, Meaning and the Afterlife
“We just can’t imagine what it would be like to be dead, to imagine nothing, no stars, no universe, not even nothing”.
Quoting the late Christopher Hitchens, Shermer said that “Christian heaven is like a celestial North Korea where the authorities know your every thought”.
What Really Matters in Life
People’s last words often have to do with love, gratitude and religion.
Unfortunately, most people come to realizations around what really matters late in life. Instead, we should do so as early as possible in life. “Nobody lying on their deathbed said they wish they worked 80 hours a week instead of 70”.
On the Shortness of Life
“We have a sliver in the cosmic scale of time. Eighty years if we’re lucky out of 13.2 billion before us and billions more to come after we’re gone. Think of life as a 30,000 seat arena. After you’ve sat in all of the chairs, it’s lights out”.
Cognitive Biases that Plague our Decision-Making
The Hindsight Bias: our tendency to overestimate our ability to have predicted an outcome that could not possibly have been predicted.
Shermer calls this the Biography Bias and refers to the immortalized story of a two-person startup, founded in a Silicon Valley Garage (in the spirit of Jobs and Wozniak) and says that for every successful startup that started this way, thousands failed.
I made the point that many of the companies profiles in Jim Collins’ classic business bestseller, Good To Great, have in fact dropped out of the S&P500, to which Shermer said “it’s not predicting, it’s post-dicting” and unless you can “run the experiment forward” which you can’t, it’s just not as reliable.
The Blind Spot Bias: recognizing the impact of biases on the judgment of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one’s own judgment, even if aware of the concept.
To tackle this, Shermer suggests surrounding yourself with people who are comfortable criticizing you and challenging you, which is a process central to the creative process at Pixar, the decision making of successful hedge fund manager and author, Ray Dalio, as well as the battlefield tactics of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Personal Attribution Bias: (the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others’ behaviors — usually blaming another’s failures on character attributes and their own failures on external circumstances
The Availability Bias: the human tendency to think that examples of things that come readily to mind are more representative than is actually the case
The Biography Bias / The Narrative Fallacy: Some use the justification “they laughed at the Wright brothers” to justify pursuing a crazy idea. Shermer reminds us that “they laughed at the Marx brothers too”.
For every one Galileo, there are 10,000 failures who were just as bold and daring with their visions.
Motivated Reasoning: Shermer found that the number one reason why people think others believe in God is different from why they believe in God themselves. A type of ‘my motives are different to and more rational than your motives’ biased reasoning exists. See religion.
What is True?
Conjecture and refutation in science refers to the testing and non-refutation of hypotheses and findings respectively. If something isn’t falsified we deem it to be true. However, in reality, it is just ‘more true’ and “closer to reality” but not absolutely true, as many ‘black swan’ events will attest to.
On the replication problem in the sciences: 50% of the findings of studies in the social sciences are not replicable. Many of these are foundational and form the basis for teaching in higher education institutes.
This says a lot about the shortcomings of science, that a ‘peer-reviewed’ article doesn’t make it true (peer reviewers, according to Shermer, only have so much time to diligently review articles) and our views on what is ‘true’.
“Most of us are wrong most of the time about our ideas”
Climate science is a commercial enterprise: 97% of 10,000 different studies on climate agree that humans are forcing climate change.
When creationists poke one hole in a scientific theory, the entire edifice comes crashing down for them, but it doesn’t work that way. It’s easy to just scan for anomalies.
God Hypotheses
The creationist justification “God did it” is simply not testable and a meaningless hypothesis.
On taking a multi-variate position: You can’t attribute religion to any evolutionary advantages because there are too many overlapping variables to consider such as the power of belief, fear of death, hope, gratitude, lifestyle habits, community and so on.
On morality without religion: There is a strong correlation between growing empiricism and enlightenment with growing morality across the world. This is manifest in the 50-fold decrease in the homicide rate in Europe since the 1400s.
Speaking of Europe: The dwindling of religious belief in Europe combined with strong social safety nets has resulted in many a European church and cathedral being poorly attended, lying dormant, shutting down or being converted into a museum or some other such venue.
In the United States, sub-optimal healthcare and education safety nets have had the opposite effect, and Dr.Shermer suggests that religious belief in the US is “about a magnitude or two” greater than what it is in Europe.
Immortality
Sorry, technotopians (and Peter Diamandis)…
“We are nowhere near the cellular and genetic breakthroughs required to live forever”
…or so says Dr. Shermer.
On the supposed doubling of the human lifespan: “We don’t live twice as long as we used to, infant mortality has come way down bringing the average way up”. The upper ceiling was and still is 120.
This serves as a simple reminder of how one can fudge the numbers to prove a point, and why we should always be wary of ‘data-driven decisions’ alone.
On the ‘takeoff point’: Ray Kurzweil says that once we get to the ‘takeoff point’, that is, adding one year to the human lifespan for every year we’re alive, we could arguably be in a position to live forever. Shermer thinks the takeoff point is Centuries away.
“Living longer will create new problems we haven’t even had an opportunity to think about solutions for.”
Self-improvement
The number one predictor of someone buying a self-help book is having bought one previously. Self-improvement is like a diet, you’ve got to keep working on it every single day.
Stein’s Law
“If something can not go on forever, it will stop”
This applies to almost anything with a linear growth curve, even population growth on planet Earth which is said to be leveling out.
Tribalism
We’re tribal by nature. Today that tribalism has become more pronounced and divisive because of social media.
On Counterfactuals: For example, if Hillary Clinton had won the election, then the right would be up in arms. Trump’s victory may offer a moment of reprieve and a ‘reset’ which may put the US in a better place come 2020, or dare we say it, 2024.
On Equality in the Workplace
“Optimise for equality of opportunity and let the chips fall where they may”
“Find out what you’re good at and interested in, and just do that”.
Otherwise, we risk being a square peg thrust through a round whole for the sake of meeting quotas. “No good can come of that” insists Dr. Shermer.
“Look at the individual case, rather than the collective”. The former is a much more accurate representation of the reality and is far more assessable.
On the monotony of life
“Most of what we do is boring, the daily grind”.
That it is…like sitting here writing this post for the past two hours.
Whilst I had fun doing it, I’m at a point in life where I’ve sat in 12,800 of those 30,000 stadium seats, so I’m off to the beach. 🤙
Steve Glaveski is an entrepreneur, author of ‘Employee to Entrepreneur: How to Earn Your Freedom and Do Work That Matters, and host of the Future Squared podcast. He likes to attempt a lot of things he’s not predisposed to, like surfing, standup comedy and thinking deeply.
