Hubris and Humility – A Conversation With Dr. Stuart Firestein

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses. And sitting in the next box over to me is somebody that I met, believe it or not, Stuart, it was 10 years ago.

Stuart Firestein: Oh, no, it can’t be.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, it was. And I met Stuart – he is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and he had written a book about a little over ten years ago called Ignorance: How It Drives Science. And it led me to a High Holy Day sermon about a text in the Talmud that says, “teach your tongue to say ‘I don’t know’.” And I forwarded it to Stuart, and we had lunch very soon after that. And we’ve been friends for about 10 years. Stuart has been a regular presenter and conversant on all of these questions about intellectual humility, and ignorance, and failure, and what actually happens in terms of science. So, Stuart, it’s wonderful to be sitting with you here this afternoon.

Stuart Firestein: Well, it’s a pleasure for me to be here as well. And I have to tell you, my ability to talk to my mother and tell her that something that I had written had actually been included in a High Holy Day sermon just made her day. So, that was wonderful.

Geoff Mitelman: There’s something that’s very powerful, of the level of questioning that happens in Judaism. I think that’s a real, integral part of what Judaism is. And that actually leads to a great question, because I remember – and I think I quoted your introduction from your book, of when you wrote the book Ignorance, and you were trying to pitch it to some of your colleagues, it was hard to be able to say, like, “Albert, I’m teaching a course on ignorance. I think you’d be perfect.” Ignorance has a very bad rap on it, but you talk about it in a very specific and unique kind of way. So when you talk about ignorance, what does that mean exactly?

Stuart Firestein: Well, of course, yes. To some extent, I purposely called the book Ignorance. And it came out of a class that I’ve started teaching in Columbia, which I also called “Ignorance,” with the intention, of course, of being a bit provocative. But I don’t mean any of the more pejorative meanings of ignorance. I don’t mean stupidity; I don’t mean a callous indifference to fact or reason, or any of those things. I really mean the deepest ideas of what we don’t know – there being so much more we don’t know than we do know, and that most of the interesting things we do in life are about what we don’t know. Certainly, science is based on what we don’t know. And I don’t want to speak for religion, because you’re the expert there, but I think an awful lot of religion is really based on what we don’t know. Even if it tends to try and tell us something more about what we don’t know, it’s still all about the things that are finally unknowable, not just unknown in some cases. Not just unknown, but in some cases unknowable. And we have to learn to live with that, in a way.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, there’s a line – and I can’t remember where I heard it – but the difference between what we might call a puzzle versus a mystery, of a puzzle [being] something that we can solve it. I do a lot of crossword puzzles, I do a lot of trivia – you know, “Here’s the answer, it’s a yes or a no.” “I got this letter and this crossing correct. I got this trivia question right or wrong” – you can solve it. A mystery is something where you can come at it from so many different perspectives and [with] so many different ideas, and there are new questions that come out of it. From what it sounds like you are describing, that science is much more of a mystery than it is a puzzle. And that’s different than how people think of science often.

Stuart Firestein: Yeah, I think that’s a crucial distinction, because often you see this metaphor running around, that scientists are patiently putting little pieces in a big puzzle and will one day figure out the whole universe once they get the last piece stuck in – who knows what will really happen at that moment? But that really is not, I think, an accurate description of the process. For one, with puzzles, the manufacturer has sort of guaranteed that there’s a solution, and I don’t think we have any such guarantee in this particular case, when we’re talking about the universe, as it were.

And so, that’s the difference with puzzles. They have a solution that’s kind of guaranteed. You’d be very disappointed to do a crossword puzzle and find out that actually it’s unsolvable. That would really piss you off somehow or another. That would be a letter to the editor, for sure. And not only do they have a solution, but I think, importantly, they have a single solution, and that’s also not guaranteed, certainly, when it comes to science. There may be multiple solutions, and indeed, many of those solutions may even be – I hate to use sort of a big word, I don’t mean to sound smart because I’m using a big word, but I can’t think of another word – but they’re incommensurable. That is, these solutions may not fit together. They may both solve some essential problem about the same thing, almost, and yet they don’t fit together. Can I use an old Talmudic story about this?

Geoff Mitelman: Sure. Absolutely.

Stuart Firestein: Well, there’s a famous Talmudic story – I believe, anyway – about a rabbi with three students, and they’re going over a passage, and the rabbi calls on the first student, who gives a very long discourse on what it means, and all the rest, as the rabbi says, “Wonderful, wonderful. It’s absolutely right. Absolutely right. Wonderful.”

And the second student then is called upon and gives an equally lengthy discourse, but with the absolutely opposite interpretation – absolutely opposite interpretation, at the end of which the rabbi says, “Absolutely, that’s right. You’re absolutely right. That’s wonderful.” And the third student says, “But rabbi, they can’t both be right.” And the rabbi says, “That’s right.”

Geoff Mitelman: It’s a wonderful story, because so much of our discourse really starts with, “What is the question that you’re asking?” That if you don’t have the right questions, you’re not going to be finding the resources that you’re looking for, or the responses. And in some ways, in science, you have to start with a narrow question, but you can come at it from multiple different avenues, and multiple different perspectives, and trying to – there are going to be wrong answers, for sure, but there are a lot of different ways to approach questions here.

Stuart Firestein: There’s a relatively famous, I guess, I think, underappreciated (so maybe not as famous as I think he is), American philosopher scientist of the late 19th, early 20th century – Charles Sanders Peirce. And Peirce once said about science – he said it’s not like a chain of facts that’s only as strong as the weakest link, but it’s rather like a cable made up of many, many fine fibers. And its great strength is in the number of fibers that it has. And the loss of any of those fibers – of a few of those fibers, at least – would not significantly reduce the strength of the cable. And I think that’s the idea –it’s this notion of a pluralistic approach, that this is a belief system, as I believe, in some ways, the best of religious beliefs may be that are pluralistic, that are really cables of fine fibers of thought, and not just a chain of beliefs that can be broken at some point by some bit of logic, or some new finding or this or that. That’s the real strength. Sorry, go on.

Geoff Mitelman: You were saying at the beginning that one of the things that religion tends to approach is questions of mystery. And I think in a lot of ways, religion is designed to help us approach the questions that are ultimately unanswerable. And yet, as human beings, we need a level of certainty. We need a level of knowledge. Otherwise, we can’t live in this world. Otherwise, we’re stuck between “Is it this, or is it that? Is it this? Is it that?”, as I think a lot of us felt with COVID in the last 18 months. of “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” So, where does the relationship between religion and science come in? Because I don’t want to say that religion fills in the “God of the gaps.” I think that’s a problematic way of looking at both religion and science, that “If we don’t know it now, well, God did it.” But how can both religion and science approach questions of wonder and mystery?

Stuart Firestein: Just before I answer that, I’m just going to mention that while you’re absolutely right that we need a certain amount of certainty in our lives, I also think we need a certain amount of uncertainty. And that’s often not recognized. But we’ll come back to that if we can.

So, let’s talk about where religion and science intersect and where they don’t, because they needn’t intersect or parallel each other, and they needn’t repeat each other. I mean, the nice thing is we have two systems. We have other systems; we have political systems, we have art, we have philosophy. We have all sorts of systems, I think, for organizing knowledge, and for organizing ignorance, if you will – for figuring out what questions are important – what are the big questions? Why do we want to ask those questions, whether we answer them or not?

Actually, it’s always curious to me that in the modern world right now, in the contemporary world, religion and science seem to be sort of in some sort of battle of some sort – not all religion, not all science, but enough of it that it seems to be a battleground – which is curious, because I think science actually grew, to a large extent, out of religion, owes a great deal to religion. I mean, of all the systems of organizing thought that I just mentioned – religion, theology, art, philosophy, politics, economics, whatever you want – science is really the new kid on the block, right? We’ve only been around for a few hundred years, in the way we mean “modern” science. Yes, I know the Greeks had science and the Egyptians and Babylonians and the Mayans and the Chinese and all that, but in the modern sense of science, it’s now a kind of a global effort, that’s only really been around 400 or 500 years, which is a kid compared to everybody else.

And I think it largely grew a great deal in parallel with religion, in particular the Judeo-Christian view of religion, because – and you’ll tell me if I’ve got this wrong, because you’re the scholar in this area, not me – but I think the Judeo-Christian belief was really the first to start with a kind of a linear view of the world, of history. Religions, other religions, and previous incarnations of theological thinking, tended to be circular or recurring sorts of ideas – you know, whether it’s Buddhism or ancient Greek philosophies, they all were based on a kind of a recurring or [circular]… In ancient Greek, the circle was the perfect geometrical shape. There was no linearity in life, really. And therefore, I think ideas about progress, for example, don’t occur. Ancient Greek has no actual word for “progress.” It has a lot of words that you can sort of use around progress, but no actual word for progress.

And the idea of progress, I think, is born, really, in Judaism and Judeo-Christian belief systems as they move on, and again, because of this notion of a linearity, which is absolutely critical to science. I mean, science works in a linear kind of way. It works because we believe in progress, because we believe that we can move on. Things will, we hope, get better. They don’t always get better, but they get some way different and can change, and things don’t just recur. So I think that’s a crucial and fundamental idea for science that began, really, in religious beliefs of a certain sort in the West.

Geoff Mitelman: I think that’s accurate. I don’t know enough – I wouldn’t necessarily claim that Judaism and Christianity are the only religions that promoted linearity, but they are certainly the oldest that still really exist, that are still at work in the modern marketplace of ideas.

Stuart Firestein: Yes.

Geoff Mitelman: As you’re talking about this, and I think a lot, because I get a lot of questions about the interplay of the origins of Genesis in the first couple of verses of Genesis 1 versus the origins of the universe in the Big Bang cosmology and evolution. And I don’t like to look at it as well [like] “If you read Genesis in the right way, you see it matches and everything’s going in the right direction.” But I do think that there is a level of similar language that the origin story, at least described in Genesis starts with – the Hebrew is tohu va-vohu, which is “wild and waste,” or “it was chaos, and God turned chaos into order.” Each day of the steps of creation is turning chaos into order. And the universe’s natural tendency, as a whole, is to go from order to chaos. But there are pockets where we can create a little bit more order, starting with creating stars – there’s a level of order of things coalescing around stars, and then around planets. This is your area of expertise, I know, is, and you can tell me if I’m wrong on this. And then life, and then human life, and a level of intelligence… that is moving from a level of chaos into order that requires a lot of energy into the system. The only way that you can actually transform chaos into order is to actually do that. And so that’s where I see some commonalities, and I think that is because the universe’s natural tendency is to go from order to chaos. Our kitchens don’t naturally clean themselves, right? There are a lot more ways things can go wrong than go right. And so, being able to say, “Let’s put things together,” that’s a lot harder to do than to break things apart.

Stuart Firestein: Yes – well, yes. I’m not sure I would go with the last part of that entirely. I do think that it takes a lot of energy sometimes to break things apart.

Geoff Mitelman: That’s true.

Stuart Firestein:  But that’s also a kind of a disequilibrium, right? I mean, that’s also a kind of – things that get stuck together and just stay still for too long are at a kind of equilibrium that requires a lot of energy to break them apart as well, and to see them again in a different way.

Well, that’s a little bit of a tangent, perhaps, but I think your interpretation is really quite brilliant. I’m really interested in that because I see the very beginnings of modern science as attempting to do much the same thing. You’re absolutely right.

I know right now it’s not so good that we say, “Well, modern science began in the 1600s, the late 1500s, early 1600s, in Western Europe by a bunch of white guys,” and all that. So right now, that’s a sort of a bad rap, I guess. But the fact of the matter is that at that particular period, Europe was the worst place in the world. I mean, it was just a mess, the place. It was a bunch of feudal – not even kingdoms, you could call them just feudal tribes. The homicide rate was the highest on historical record anywhere in the world. At any time in mid 1500s to mid 1600s, Europe – I mean, people just killed each other all the time. There were wars, there was famine, there were droughts, there were plagues. I mean, it was a totally chaotic world, really. It was a mess.

And I think one of the ideas of science – people like Francis Bacon and those kind of – Galileo, Kepler, et cetera – was to try and draw some order out of this apparent chaos, out of this totally chaotic world that people seemed to live in, where things happen for no rhyme or reason beyond “God must be mad at us,” which is really not a very good reason, right? Because then all you wind up with is a constantly angry God, and that doesn’t go anywhere either. Right? So I think that’s exactly right. I think science and religion both have the same idea of drawing order out of what is essentially chaos.

Geoff Mitelman: And how do we also create distinctions? [I was] almost thinking of mentioning Francis Bacon, of inductive and deductive reasoning, of what do we have where we need to lump things together, and where are things where we can break them down, at least intellectually? What’s the difference between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus? And on some level, there’s not a clear line. And at some point, we sort of, as human beings say, “Well, this is where the dividing line is.” There’s no natural dividing line. We’ve just got to say, “Okay, we’re making this distinction right here.”

Stuart Firestein: Yes, well, we do that a lot. And of course, we do it usually to our peril, because these dividing lines, these boundaries, are false. I mean, you look at a map of the world and you can see how bad some of those dividing lines have turned out to be –  I mean, the Middle East being a perfect example of that, but our own country being not a bad example of mean. You know, we’ve drawn up a bunch of different states, as it were, and all of a sudden, now we have to color them in as red or blue, and most of them are neither one or the other, really. And a more granular approach, and a more continuous-looking approach, would be far more useful, let’s say, and much less polarizing, for sure. So that’s the trouble. You draw a boundary, and you’ve made a polarization. We now know that’s not really very effective, a very positive way to go. So how to break that apart is another story.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I’m curious, because right now we’re recording this in November. It’s actually Election Day on an off-year. My town is having a very big mayoral election, but lots of places – there are gubernatorial races, there are school board races, and a lot of the politics that’s happening right now, certainly over the last few years – but I think it’s actually a longer-term trend. There’s a lot of “I’m right, I’m 100% right. Actually, not only am I right, I’m completely accurate on this.” And one of the things that you really advocate for is a level of intellectual humility, to use a favorite line of our common funder of the John Templeton Foundation, of being able to say we need to have a level of recognition of “I don’t know everything.”

And yet, the way that politics is playing itself out right now – that’s a weakness. That’s viewed as a weakness. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, then you’re not going to get reelected, or elected at all. Where can we be pushing for a level of more productive ignorance when it comes to political discussions and political ideas? Because science and policy have become very closely intertwined in the last 18 months, for sure.

Stuart Firestein: Yes, there are just a lot of questions in there – a lot of ways to go. I think the humility argument is very important, but I would also say we should be realistic and face the fact that there’s a lot of hubris. That’s also important. I mean, hubris tends to be another one of these generally pejorative terms. But let me just talk from the point of view of science now – but I think you could probably, if you wanted to, spin out a similar argument in religion, or maybe even politics. But from the point of view of science, I think one of the things that makes science so successful, and such an unusual system that we’ve developed, as I say, recently, is that it combines these two what normally would be seen as antonyms. It combines hubris and humility in a certain balance. And that balance is quite crucial to maintain.

I think the idea that – I don’t think Isaac Newton and Galileo and people like that would have even tried to do what they did, which was try explain how the universe works, how the clockwork, know how the whole machine works, without having a tremendous sense of hubris that they could actually do this – “We could figure this out. We could figure this place out. We could see the mind of the creator,” or whatever their statements were, their ideas were.

And so, I think it takes a great deal of hubris to go into science, and to try it, and to think that we could figure this stuff out. But that has to be balanced constantly by the humility of recognizing that there’s so much more we don’t know. There’s awe and wonder and mystery (even though some of those sound like childish terms, unfortunately, they shouldn’t be considered childish terms), and that we stand in awe of the mysteries that are there. You go outside at night and you look up in the sky, and how can you not feel humble? I mean, the more we learn about the universe, the smaller we become in it, in a way. And yet, we become more important in it because we know more about it.

And so, I think it’s this balance of hubris and humility. You can’t just get rid of hubris, because then – I don’t know, would anything get done? Would we have creativity? Would people take chances and risks and things like that? I think maybe not in the same way that we do now. So that’s the key to me, is trying to find that balance.

Geoff Mitelman: When you talk about that, there’s a concept in Judaism that also gets a very bad rap, almost by definition. I’ll explain what it is in a second. In Hebrew, it’s called the yetzer hara, and it literally translates as “the inclination to do evil.” So obviously, it gets a bad rap both in rabbinic literature and today. And it leads a lot of people towards greed. It leads towards – there’s a lot of sexual sin that’s connected to the yetzer hara. And yet, there’s a line that the rabbis say that “Without the yetzer hara, no one would start a family, no one would start a business.” You have to have a little bit of – I like the word of “hubris,” of people who end up in the rabbinate or working in a clergy profession, alsothere’s a level of, I think, appropriate hubris of saying, “I am going to make a difference in people’s lives. I’m going to make this world better.” And if I didn’t think that I could do that, I wouldn’t go into the rabbinate here. I wouldn’t go into the priesthood or become a clergyperson. And to be able to have that balance of – “and yet I don’t know much about my congregants. I may not know much about what my congregants are going through, what their challenges are. I need to have a level of intellectual humility for myself and a level of confidence.”

And there’s a great line of, “Everyone should have two pieces of paper in their pocket. One says, ‘for my sake, the world was created,’ and the other is, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ And you’ve got to take out whichever one you need at any given time.”

Stuart Firestein: Yes. And there’s no reason why we should consider them separate and incommensurable, or impossible to exist together. They can exist together. They can exist within one person. They can almost exist simultaneously in some ways – you need them. I like to say that things like this are not – people tend to say, “Well, hubris and humility. Yes. Okay, so they’re two sides of the same coin?” No, I don’t think so. I think they’re like two horses pulling a wagon in the same direction. They just do it differently, that’s all. But they’re both critical, they’re both crucial.

And maybe that’s one of the problems with our current politics, our modern politics – is that that balance is gone. And it’s been lost in science as well. I mean, people make a big deal – especially science types and rationalists and all the rest of them – make a big deal about the Enlightenment. And I think the Enlightenment was actually a near-disaster for science. It was actually a pretty difficult time, because I think hubris had in many ways taken over and was out of balance with humility during the Enlightenment. There was this idea that we could figure it all out – that with a few or more laws like Newton’s, which we could now apply to human behavior as well, we could have utopian societies and things like that. But what you get instead is things like eugenics, and all these other sorts of not-so-good ideas that come out of it. And I think that’s because the hubris is out of balance with the humility at that point.

Geoff Mitelman: You know, it’s reminded me one of our friends, Michael Zimmerman, who runs The Clergy Letter Project, [and was] able to get literally thousands of clergypeople to be able to sign a statement saying “evolution is a fact.” Right? “Like, we should teach evolution, not creationism, in public schools.” In religious schools, that’s a different question. And one of the things that Michael has said is that Richard Dawkins, who’s viewed as – certainly views himself as – one of the great science educators, thinks that he’s actually a disaster for science education, because he is so antagonistic and has too much hubris, that religious people are going to push back against him, and push back against the way that he teaches and presents himself. That in fact, if you want to get average, ordinary religious people to accept evolution, you’ve got to go through the pastors, you’ve got to go through the religious leaders. They’re the ones who have the relationship there. And I think that’s an interesting point, that a belief of “We can explain everything,” of this – I think what something’s called scientism, of a belief that “everything we need to know can come through science” can ultimately be a very destructive worldview.

Stuart Firestein: You know, I have to say, this new phrase that we hear thrown around now since the Biden Administration took over, which is “We’ll follow the science” – it just makes the hairs on my neck curl up every time I hear it. I mean, I just think it’s an awful idea. It’s an awful phrase. Science is not prescriptive. It’s informative, but it’s not prescriptive. It doesn’t tell you what to do, or what you should do or not do. It will inform as best as it can, but it’s nothing to be followed. I mean, following it is just a cult. And science as a cult is no better than any other cult, as far as I’m concerned. Which is why I don’t care for Dawkins either, because I think he has a sort of a cultish approach to science – which is a shame, because some of his early science was quite good, and his ability to communicate with the public about science was quite good. But he has, I think, marginalized himself to a large extent by being overly provocative in an area that doesn’t need to be provocative at all.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that leads to another topic, and something else that we’ve talked about a few times about – I think a little over a year ago, you presented for us thinking about the role of risk and reward as COVID started. I think you were in conversation with Professor Emily Oster, who has now become also a very big name and a guest on the show, also thinking about risks and rewards and how science is changing. I think that’s been both fascinating and frustrating for the public a lot, because someone said the public is seeing science as it plays itself out in real time, without it –  usually there’s, God willing, there’s a level of peer review, and then there’s vetting, and then there’s a recommendation.

Stuart Firestein: We polish it off, yeah.

Geoff Mitelman: But we’re seeing like, wait, “Do we do masks? Do we not do masks? What do we do about vaccinations?” If you’re a layperson, [you say] “tell me what to do. I want to know what to do.” And as you’re saying, that’s not science’s role.

Stuart Firestein: No, it’s not. And in fact, the best science now – so, I would say science made a big shift around the time of Darwin, since we were talking about evolution. But I don’t think   – actually, in many ways, for me, the most important contribution of Darwin, even though I’m a biologist by profession, was not actually in biology. I mean, I don’t want to minimize his contribution to biology with evolutionary theory, but I think what evolutionary theory – in many ways its largest effect was that Darwin, for the first time, proposed an idea, proposed a mechanism, by which you could generate tremendous complexity and organization – life, living things – out of a totally random process – a completely random process with a feedback loop, which he called natural selection, not having the word “feedback” available at that time. But that’s basically all it is. It’s a random process with some selection that goes along with it, and you get this remarkable bit of business here – the idea then being that there are no fundamental laws, there is no irreducible certainty somehow, or there is no certainty at the bottom of it. “It’s irreducible uncertainty all the way down,” as we say.

And this is a new view of science, and I think it saves science, because science has become very deterministic. We can figure out all the laws. There’s a famous French chemist and polymath, Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was a great mathematician, great scientist, but who boasted (I think it’s a boast) that “If you tell me where a molecule is now and you give me sufficient computing power, I could predict where it will be in ten minutes and where it was ten minutes ago, and all the way out to the ends of time,” and it’s just a question of computing power. So this was a totally deterministic idea of the universe, that the whole thing was just a machine, that apparently some God set up and kicked into gear and then just lets it run somehow – maybe interferes now and again to help it out a little bit.

Geoff Mitelman: Do a miracle of some kind. (Laughs)

Stuart Firestein: – as necessary, right. I think that has in it the seeds of the end of science, almost, because determinism is really not very interesting. I mean, if we believe that the world is deterministic totally, then why bother? What are we messing with it for? Because it’s just going to be the way it is. I find that a very depressing idea. So a non-deterministic universe, I think, is much more optimistic, but it does carry with it this sense of irreducible uncertainty. How do you deal with that, right?

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, it’s the line (it doesn’t happen so much in the Jewish world, but I’ve heard it in other places) of, “Well, God has a plan,” and that’s always bothered me for that reason.

Stuart Firestein: Yeah. If that’s the case, then let Him tell us what it is and be done with it. Why are we guessing at it? And how uninteresting is life going to be then? This is very problematic, I agree. And it is for science as well. So, I think that one of the difficulties right now with people wanting more certainty from science is that we continue to educate our children and most of our population in essentially a 19^th– and 18^th-century deterministic science. We still basically teach Newton’s laws as if they were the truth, and they work, but they’re you wrong.. Newton did not describe gravity. His description of gravity is wrong. Einstein’s, we think, is right. Maybe it’s not the final word either, but it’s closer to right. So, Newton’s laws work, but they don’t actually explain things the way he would have liked to explain them. Nonetheless, that’s what we teach. And they’re very deterministic laws. “You know the mass, you know this, you know that. Then you know where Jupiter is, tomorrow and forever,” more or less. And that’s no longer, I think, the case, but we teach that. And so people come to expect that, “Well, science, just what’s the formula? Just tell us, what’s the formula? Plug the numbers in and give us the damn answer.”

Except there is no longer a formula. There is no longer a single answer. We live in a very complex world, and we recognize that although there’s regularity, which we can predict and make use of – and we do all the time, I mean, we live in a world of technological wonders and things like that, all of which are produced by knowing certain regularities. But that regularity is actually a very thin layer on top of a broiling, roiling, boiling sea of uncertainty, basically. And it comes out every now and again. It bursts through, and we have to learn to live with that and deal with it and make use of it. And actually, we do.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, Liz Bruenig, who writes for The Atlantic – she wrote a piece just a week or two ago about how medicine is about uncertainty and living with risks. And that’s very difficult, because when it happens to you or your loved one, it’s not a 70% chance or a 30% – It’s either a zero or a one. It either happens or it doesn’t.

Stuart Firestein: That’s right.

Geoff Mitelman: But we’ve got to recognize that there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. I think that’s been very hard in communities and synagogues and churches and all sorts of voluntary organizations – of trying to make some sort of calculus, and what’s the right risk, reward, benefit? Because there are questions of mental health, there are questions of building community, of being able to see each other. It’s very hard to be living in this world of uncertainty. And I think it’s also exhausting. I think it is very tiring for people to have to be constantly making a decision and re-calibrate that decision, always. And that’s how science progresses.

Stuart Firestein: Yes, unfortunately. I’ll take some blame for that in a way, in that I think science, and the very success of science over the last 400 years, has driven us to believe that we’re owed a certain kind of certainty – that life ought to be more certain as we’re technologically more advanced. I actually think that people who lived before the 1500s, through medieval times or even earlier – in so-called “biblical times” or whatever – were quite used to the fact that they lived in an extremely uncertain world. They had no idea if at the end of the day, they’d be dead or alive from 100 different things or 1,000 different things – unforeseen things that could happen all the time. I mean, you would have children and it was totally uncertain as to whether they would live or die – I mean, really uncertain. Yes, I mean now there’s a certain risk. You always have face a certain risk if you have a child, but most of them come through fine, and the mother lives as well, and all the rest of that. But there was a time when that was totally uncertain.

And so you say that it’s difficult for people to live with this level of uncertainty, but I think that’s only because we’ve trained them to live with certainty – wrongly so. We teach them that the world is a certain place because we teach them science, and science has answers. And that’s wrong. Science doesn’t have answers, and it’s based on uncertainty itself.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I’m thinking of Yuval Harari, who wrote the book Homo Deus. He’s written a few books. He was actually just on 60 Minutes a couple of days ago. And there was a line in his book that has stuck with me since I read it five or six years ago, where he said that, “We’ve traded meaning with a capital M for power.” That up until 400 or 500 years ago, we knew what the world Meant, with a capital M. What you did had a Meaning to it. And that was often following religious rules of who you were able to marry, what you were able to eat, what you did on a day-to-day basis. There was a regularity of this: “I know the world is uncertain, but there’s Meaning with a capital M for that.”

And science has actually allowed us to trade that meaning for power. And oftentimes for science, when they say, “Are we playing God?” I think what that really means is both a level of knowledge and power that science has given us. And so, yes, we live of the uncertainty of 600 years ago, 700 years ago. Would you die by plague on Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur? We say the prayer of Unetaneh Tokef, “Who will live and who by die, who will live and who will die?”, and list all the different ways in which you might die in this year, because that was a real thing – it was “Who by fire? Who by water?” A couple hundred years ago, that was a real question, of “Were you going to die by fire [or] die by water?”

And actually, all the different things that we struggle with, even one was “Who by plague?” COVID was not so much of a scientific problem – I think there was, but it was much more of a public health problem, a policy issue, infrastructure, supply chain.  There were solvable problems to minimize the death of what COVID could have been. And I think if people had been able to make some of the decisions earlier on, the death toll would have been much lower. I think that’s why a lot of people are very frustrated. But we’ve taken this uncertainty that used to say, “I live with this uncertainty,” and we had imbued everything with meaning, and we’ve now taken that, and used science to be able to have a level of power and knowledge over our situation.

Stuart Firestein: Yes, it’s not completely false, but it’s an overall false sense. I mean, at least that dichotomy is not a real dichotomy. I mean, you shouldn’t give up meaning by other means. And science is not absolute power. It is a very powerful tool; there’s no question about that. I mean, it’s a golem-like sort of thing. It has all of that quality about it. But nonetheless, it’s not absolute power. It won’t do everything. It can’t do everything, and it shouldn’t be asked to do everything – or pretend that it can, which it does sometimes, and I think that’s also wrong. When you have some scientists get on television and tell you, “This is what must be done,” or “This is how it should be,” or this or that. That’s completely wrong. I think there’s a great lesson.

Of course there are lessons to be learned from the virus. That’s a trivial thing to say. But I think in the broadest sense, even the very bad stuff – one of the things this virus did (which viruses are always very good at, we should respect them for this), is they basically scanned human society and found all the weak points. That’s what it does. That’s what a virus does. It scans through the whole of human society – your body, and the whole political structure of things – and it finds the weak points and it attacks them. So it attacks all the morbidity co-factors that people have, whether it’s obesity or diabetes, because of poor diet and poor health care. It found out that we have a terrible health care system – not just nationally, but internationally. Now we’re learning we have a very fragile supply-chain system, which nobody knew anything about until the virus hit it somehow or another. Indirectly, I agree, but nonetheless, these are all the things we’ve found – every weakness you can imagine in our society. At least we have a good list of them now. Whether we’ll fix them or not is another story, but at least the virus has given us a list of all the weak points and some of the strong points.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, your other book – we talked a lot about ignorance, but your other book, which is great, is about failure. And that’s, I think, something that we don’t celebrate enough. And even as people interview for jobs, and they’ll say, “What’s your greatest weakness?” And they’ll say, “I care too much.” We’re not able to actually say what failure means. And every story of failure, we always hope this – that there’s an end of success, but there’s value in the failure in and of itself. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the role of failure and where its value is.

Stuart Firestein: Well, again, it’s one of those commonly pejorative terms, but which I think when you complicate the idea just a little bit – when you look into it a little more deeply than the superficial way we tend to use it – you find out that there’s much more to it, that much of what’s there is great value.

So, to what you were just saying, I have a favorite quote from the always insightful – if often enigmatic – Gertrude Stein, who said, about failure, “A real failure is an end in itself. It needs no excuse.” And I think that’s very important, because we don’t – I mean, typically, the way we think of failure is in some pejorative sense. “Oh, I screwed that up. Oh, that’s my fault. I messed that up. I’m sorry. I didn’t see that coming,” followed by some meek apology or something like that – “I’ll try and do better next time.” Or at its best, the best interpretation is, “Well, you learn from your failures, and eventually you’ll be successful.” But I think Stein had something much deeper in mind – the idea that it’s an end in itself, it’s not retrospectively valuable, it’s not apologetically valuable. It is an end in itself, and there’s no reason to have it as an excuse. And I think that’s true.

So how is it an end in itself? Well, I think failure creates trustworthiness. If all of my experiments worked, I would be a little suspicious, and you ought to be as well. Fallibility is a very important part of science, because when it does work, we can say, “Well, that’s probably correct, because all the other times we tried it, it didn’t work.” I think also – to connect it to ignorance, if you believe the unknown is an interesting place to spend your time and to try and figure things out that we don’t know – well, the greatest mystery, of course, is what I would call the unknown unknown. What we don’t know we don’t know. There are a certain generation of people listening to this who will immediately connect that to D. H. Rumsfeld, who use this as an excuse for why things went wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq. But actually, the earliest version of it that I can see – and it’s actually a very clever thing to have said in spite of the fact that he was ridiculed for it, because it sounds idiotic; in that context, it was.

But the earliest written example of it that I’ve been able to find is another D.H. – D. H. Lawrence, in a long poem that he published in 1917 called “New Heaven and Earth.” And it was an exploration of moving from this plane of existence to the next plane of existence, whatever mystical plane that might have been – religious, or spiritual, or something like that. And there’s a stanza near the end of it that says, “And now here I was, newly awakened, with my hand stretched out, touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown.”

And that’s the deepest mystery. Well, how do you get to that deep mystery? Well, I think there’s only one way in – and that’s failure, at least in science. So I set up an experiment because of something I don’t know. And I think if I do this experiment, I’ll get to know it. And then the experiment fails. Well, now what I know is that I didn’t know something that I didn’t know, because that’s why the experiment failed right? And so now the game really begins. Now the interesting stuff happens. So I think that’s why failure is so valuable. It gets us into this very deep, deep area of ignorance. That’s where the mystery really lies.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think there’s another valuable piece that links to what we were talking about earlier, about hubris, and how there’s value in the hubris. But there’s also – I think her name is Kathryn Schultz, who wrote a book – I think it’s called Being Wrong, or The Joy of Being Wrong. And she had spoken, actually, at the synagogue where I used to work. And she had a great line (and she gave it as a TED Talk, too), where she started by asking people, “What does it feel like to be wrong?” And it was an, “Ugh, I don’t like it. It’s yucky.” That’s the feeling of recognizing that you were wrong. Feeling wrong feels exactly like feeling right. You don’t know that you’ve made a mistake until the ground falls out from underneath. She describes it as the Wile E. Coyote, who runs out over the ledge, and everything’s fine until he looks down and realizes that there’s nothing underneath him. That leads to a level of humility, of saying, “I think this is going to be correct, I think this is going to be right, and I might be wrong on this.”

Stuart Firestein: Yeah, no. Failure is where you get humility. I mean, 90% of our experiments, on a good day, are failures. But that’s okay, because you’ve learned the things you don’t know, and you just take that.

I think one of the things about failure is that we under-appreciate the amount of failure that’s acceptable. We’re much too hard on ourselves about failure. I use as an example from the natural world – the top predators, you know, lions, tigers, sharks, killer whales, raptors – whatever, who we all think can just, anytime they get a little hungry, just go out and bag a snack for themselves. But in fact, there’s a whole literature on predator-prey relations and all that, which conclusively shows that these top predators are successful on fewer than 25% of their attempts. So, 75% of the time, they fail. And that still puts you at the top of the evolutionary food chain. So, you can fail a lot, and do pretty well. We’re right in the middle of the World Series right now, and baseball is a sport of failure. A batter who hits 300 means that he fails seven out of 10 times and makes $14 million a year doing so. That’s not bad, right?

Geoff Mitelman: And the other thing, too, that I think is why baseball is wonderful to explore also, is the level of randomness. A well-hit ball goes right to the right fielder and a check swing bunt –there’s a level of randomness baked in that we don’t recognize, and we don’t see until after looking afterwards – what’s the aggregate? Where can we find some numbers that at least can guide a little bit, but not necessarily “follow the science, follow the numbers,” because it’s also who’s interpreting it, how are they interpreting it?

Stuart Firestein: It’s interesting that baseball – let’s not get off too far. In attention of sports or baseball – but [there are] more statistics in baseball than in any other sport, more probabilities than all the rest. And yet, as you point out, it’s still fairly random. Look, we have 30 teams in the major leagues. They play 161 games each. And what are the two teams we wind up with in the World Series? Atlanta and Houston – please. Really?

Geoff Mitelman: Right.

Stuart Firestein: Except for two cities, who isn’t disappointed in that?

Geoff Mitelman: As a diehard Yankees fan, it’s been a hard playoff season for me.

Stuart Firestein: I agree. And one full of randomness and humility.

Geoff Mitelman: Mhm. Well, that’s why the work that you’re doing is so interesting and so important, and I always enjoy talking with you, of thinking of how we look at these questions that are perceived in one way but in fact are much richer when we scratch the surface, and recognize the role that religion can play – the role of politics, the role of science, that these are all human endeavors, that we’re imperfect human beings trying to make sense of this world, and how do we do that? And how do we try to advance both our knowledge and the things that we don’t know, and to be able to embrace that mystery? And that’s why I enjoy reading your books and always talking with you.

Stuart Firestein: It’s always a pleasure to talk as well. Geoff, we just have to complicate things. I know everybody wants things to be simpler, but there’s so much more interest when you complicate things and when you do, you learn so much more about them. And I think that’s what you’re good at. So that’s why I like talking to you.

Geoff Mitelman: Thank you. Well, I think both you and I – and I think everyone who’s watching and listening – is coming at it from a point of curiosity. “Tell me about something that I don’t really know, that I don’t understand. I want to know this a little bit more.” And I think that’s an important perspective from science, and from religion, and from politics. And I think we’ve lost a lot of that in all three of those realms.

Stuart Firestein: Yes. Well, they can be regained. I’m optimistic.

Geoff Mitelman: Right. Well, and that’s nicely to be able to say that next week we’re going to be talking with Professor Larry Lesser, who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso, and is part of our Scientists in Synagogues project, and talks a lot about mathematics and where does certainty come in mathematics, and where does uncertainty come in with math and with religion?

Stuart Firestein: I might tune into that myself, then.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, I’ll send you the link.

Stuart Firestein: Please do! I’d very much like to hear that.

Geoff Mitelman: There have been some great conversations with him. I think the question of math and science – there’s a lot of interplay there. For those of you who are listening, you can join us every Tuesday at 2:00pm. Eastern at Jewishlive.org/Sacredscience. You can follow us at @SinaiSynapses, or you can follow me on Twitter, I’m at @RabbiMitelman. But we thank you for taking the time to talk with us here this afternoon, and Stuart, thank you for your wisdom and your time here today as well.

Stuart Firestein: It’s been my pleasure. My absolute pleasure. Let’s not make it ten more years, all right, Geoff?

Geoff Mitelman: A couple of times a year.

Stuart Firestein:  So let’s make it ten more years.

Geoff Mitelman: Yes, that’s right.

Stuart Firestein: For the next ten years.