transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. K-Pop Demon Hunter's Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
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Speaker 4:
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Speaker 5:
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Speaker 6:
[01:14] Life is a risky business. Whether we're climbing a ladder or failing to use sunscreen at the beach, we take risks all day long. But even though just about anything we do entails risk, we only occasionally think of our behavior in such terms. And as the great freak out over the Chinese spy balloon showed, emotions often trump facts when we assess danger.

Speaker 7:
[01:36] It will be in the end our feelings about the facts, not the facts alone, that lead to how scared we are.

Speaker 6:
[01:43] Do you hesitate to get on a plane if there's been a crash in the past week? You take into account that, you know, from a statistical point of view, driving to the airport is far riskier than getting on a plane once you're there. In short, what factors influence how accurately you assess risk? This is Big Picture Science and I'm Seth Shostak.

Speaker 8:
[02:03] I'm Molly Bentley. In this episode, an extended conversation with a psychologist who specializes in how our perception of risk guides our decision making. This episode of our regular look at critical thinking is Skeptic Check Feeling Risky.

Speaker 6:
[02:30] We're throwing caution to the wind and having an extended conversation with this guy about taking chances.

Speaker 7:
[02:37] Hi, I'm David Ropeik. I'm a retired Harvard instructor. I used to teach and consult in the psychology of risk perception, why we fear things the way we do, and an author about those sorts of things. And before that, I was a television reporter.

Speaker 8:
[02:51] Dr. Ropeik's experience with the media is highly relevant, as you'll hear, in helping us understand what influences our assessment of danger.

Speaker 7:
[03:00] What I taught at Harvard and offered folks, from my friends to clients, is an understanding of what the emotional or psychological language is that's going to make something feel more or less scary.

Speaker 8:
[03:12] That's right. Although our species homo sapiens means wise man, we're not bundles of rationality, in case you hadn't noticed. We are instead a confluence of emotions vying for dominance. Whether it's joy, angst, fury, sorrow, or love that motivates us, our feelings guide the decisions we make. For example, Exhibit A.

Speaker 7:
[03:34] So you're driving along and let's say you have the hands-free device, where you can just talk while you're using the steering wheel with both hands, and the phone rings. Is it an important call? Are you waiting for a call about that job offer or the proposal of marriage, or is it probably spam? That's going to change the value, the benefit versus the risk of answering the phone.

Speaker 6:
[03:57] And of course, if we do take that call while driving, even though it's a little risky, we'll find a way to justify doing so. But does this apply to the other guy on the road? Well, here's exhibit B.

Speaker 7:
[04:10] The person next to us is on the cell phone driving, and they've got the phone to their ear and they're driving horribly, right? And you get incensed at them while you're talking on the phone, in your car driving, doing the same thing.

Speaker 8:
[04:24] In the first part of their discussion, David Ropeik and Seth talk about how our emotions can override critical thinking about everything from transportation safety to cancer concerns.

Speaker 6:
[04:36] David, every time we make a decision, something that could be as simple as just deciding to take the elevator instead of the stairs, we confront risk, and yet we seldom give much thought to risk in an average day. It seems to be a back burner topic almost always.

Speaker 7:
[04:53] It's interesting. That kind of depends. You know, if there's a plane crash and you're about to fly somewhere, it's front burner. But in general, yeah, we have a background system that's on alert all the time, but we're not conscious of it, looking for what could kill me. I mean, that's a pretty good survival strategy, right? It's very acutely aware of signals, but not at the conscious level most of the time.

Speaker 6:
[05:18] When you say it, you're talking about the brain presumably?

Speaker 7:
[05:20] This system, this risk sensitivity system, you can think of it as... It's part of our innate biology, and so there's a lot of innate biology, right, that's going on that we're not aware of all the time, and risk perception is part of that.

Speaker 6:
[05:34] Well, that sounds like kind of an existential risk. If it's something that could kill you, you're probably going to choose for the alternative, whatever it might be. But really, every time we make a decision, even something as trivial as taking the elevator rather than the stairs, we, you know, we engender risk. And yet, we seldom give much thought to risk in an average day. I mean, is there just too much for the brain to handle if we had to weigh every decision?

Speaker 7:
[06:00] There's a great deal of cognition that goes on behind the curtain. Risk perception is one of them. And I was facetious a little bit saying, we're sensitive to signals about what could kill me. But let's tone that down just one notch. Sensitive to signals about what could hurt me. Stairs of the elevator. Near a stove with an open flame. It's the same system, right? Death is the ultimate thing that we want to avoid. Pain and suffering and injury along the way is also what we want to avoid. But you're absolutely right. The brain is, it's got a lot of its processes tucked away in the background.

Speaker 6:
[06:41] That sounds like an inevitable outcome of, you know, 300,000 years of human evolution, right?

Speaker 7:
[06:47] Well, so let me go down a couple of these. You said something very wise there. This is, of course, how we have survived evolution's gauntlet so far. Risk perception is at its root survival. And wow, yeah, we needed that to get here, didn't we? Right? So, but what we needed in addition was some way of gauging circumstances where we didn't have all the facts. So the polymath Herbert Simon coined this phrase, we live in a life of bounded rationality. I love the phrase. So we can't be perfectly rational because that requires us to be completely informed and completely schooled to understand all the information, and have all the time to get all the information. Our lives don't let us do that. Similarities have been found across all humans. So for example, here's one, a risk that's natural will scare us less than a risk that's human made.

Speaker 6:
[07:42] Well, is that because of the absence of deliberate malevolence?

Speaker 7:
[07:46] That's part of it, right? That imposed risk. There's nobody to blame. You can tease these apart with the whys, and we can talk about that for a while, but it is a common trait that any risk that we feel we have some control over feels less scary than if we feel less control. Let me give you the very quick example. We didn't have cars when we were evolving, but think about yourself in a car driving along with a partner to your right in the passenger seat and you get a little sleepy. You switch seats, hey, can you drive, pal? And you switch seats and now you're over in the passenger seat and you don't fall right asleep. And in fact, your foot goes to the imaginary brake pedal and you're trying to steer the car because you want control. That's universal too. There are several of these characteristics that the research has shown are shared by humans everywhere and they make a lot of sense because when you have control, you feel safer even though you might not actually be.

Speaker 6:
[08:46] This sounds like a nature versus nurture kind of...

Speaker 7:
[08:48] It is absolutely both. It's both, yes.

Speaker 6:
[08:52] I always find those a little depressing because I figure we're machines that have been wired in a certain way that optimized our chances of making it to the age of reproduction or whatever or something like that. But otherwise, we're just automatons that we're all wired pretty much the same. And I'm sure that's true at some level, but at what level is it not true?

Speaker 7:
[09:16] Well, it's not true on a whole bunch of levels. Because what's bad to Seth and what's bad to David are two different things. And what's bad to a white male is different than to a black male. And what's bad to a poor person is different than to a wealthy person, and to a male and a female, and to my health experiences, and my financial circumstances, and all the risks that I experienced when I was little, which become my risk library. There's tons of uniqueness to how we filter all of this through our own personal experiences and circumstances. But there are commonalities as well.

Speaker 6:
[09:54] Okay. Well, I'm just thinking, as you were speaking there, I was thinking of walking a tightrope or something like that. To me, that would be horrifyingly scary. But there are people who make their living doing that. And for them, presumably, they've managed to rewire their brains in terms of the risk assessment of that action.

Speaker 7:
[10:16] So let me ask you a question. What is the most, not the riskiest thing you've done, what is a common risk that you take in your life? Do you go out in the sun without sunscreen?

Speaker 6:
[10:27] Yeah, I do that. And not only that, in the summers, you know, I'm wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and half of my arm is sticking out the window in the direct view of the sun, if you will.

Speaker 7:
[10:38] The most common form of cancer in America is skin cancer. And you're a white male, and you are in the highest risk group. So that's a common risk that you're taking. But you're not, I presume, thinking about that much, or you would be wearing a hat, or not going out between 10 and 2, or you'd be wearing sunscreen. So let's tease that apart for a minute, okay? Why doesn't that feel scary to you?

Speaker 6:
[11:04] Yeah, it may be because it's so banal. I mean, it's something I've always done. And I don't know anybody who claims that they lost their cousin because he kept his exposed arm outside the window of his car, even though he may have.

Speaker 7:
[11:18] The rate of skin cancer in the UK is much higher for the right arm, and in the US, it's for the left arm sticking out of the car. Now, most skin cancers are basal and squamous cell and treatable, and now some melanomas are even treatable. But melanomas kill several thousand people a year. They kill more than some of the cancers that we hear about or talked about a lot. So it's an example, Seth, just one example of how in your life, and I'm the same as you, by the way, in terms of going outside and no sunscreen, and my wife is always on my case about it, because she's different. We have different risk barometers, emotional filters, psychological filters, emotional is too loaded a word, psychological filters for what is or isn't scary. But now let me turn it around. What is a risky thing that you do that feels scary? That you do it, but it feels scary. You don't tightrope walk, but what do you do in your life that does have a little bit of uh-oh in it?

Speaker 6:
[12:18] Well, I ride my bike a lot and I just, you know, I enjoy it more than getting in the car. But on the other hand, I've been hit by cars twice on my bike. So I guess it's a little bit risky.

Speaker 7:
[12:29] That's your tightrope.

Speaker 6:
[12:30] I hadn't thought of it that way.

Speaker 7:
[12:33] Do you wear a helmet?

Speaker 6:
[12:34] I do.

Speaker 7:
[12:35] A lot of people who ride their bikes don't even wear a helmet. But you see how it's a matter of the feeling of it, not just the risk science itself.

Speaker 6:
[12:42] David, you speak of cancer. We have a sort of, I don't know that it's an imbalance, but we have a particular fear of cancer, even though more people die of heart attacks than die of cancer, I think. So why do you think that is? I mean, just bad press?

Speaker 7:
[12:57] In the book that I have coming out this fall, Curing Cancer Phobia, I dare to suggest that our fear of cancer in some ways is excessive compared to the actual risk. And in the first two chapters, I looked into the history and the psychology that answer your question. Why do we fear cancer and have for 100 years more than the thing that's more likely to kill us, heart disease? Well, let's talk about the personality traits of dying by cancer. It's more painful and more suffering than we think of heart disease. It, that's not necessarily true. There are benign ways to die of cancer and awful ways to drive various forms of heart disease. But we think of it as involving more pain and suffering, and a risk that is a crumbier way to go is scarier, right? Okay? We think of cancer as a risk that's done to us, imposed. In fact, we could reduce our risk of cancer principally by eating better and getting more exercise. Cancer is largely a disease of aging. We never used to have a lot of cancer around until we started living long enough, about 100 years ago. Cancer was the ninth leading cause of death 100 years ago. Yeah. Well, we only left it to about 50 or 55.

Speaker 6:
[14:15] But we smoked more.

Speaker 7:
[14:16] No, we didn't actually. We started to. But aging is what really causes cancer. Cancer is principally, according to the experts, about two-thirds of cancers are the accumulation over time of mistakes in your DNA's natural replication process that leads to mutations that allow cells to grow without control and spread out of the organ that they're in. It takes a while for all those mutations to build up, even if one of them comes from an environmental agent. But most of them are natural. When our cells replicate, occasionally they make those mistakes. So the fear that cancer is imposed on us is excessive. That's a phobia. But most people believe that one of the principal causes of cancer is everything out there, right? So I'm going to buy organic food, and I'm going to avoid plastics, and this and that, and the other thing. So those are two characteristics. The third characteristic is it is a very common disease, and we all do have personal, many of us have personal experiences, tragically, with the disease and have seen people suffering with it. And when a disease is, the literature calls it personified, has a face, has a name, is not just like an idea like climate change, big risk, but climate change isn't somebody who looks like me in the mirror, right? But cancer is. So it has all of these psychological characteristics that make it scary. The problem, however, is that we then look for ways to grab control. Remember I talked earlier about driving and control and the importance of control. So what do we do to take control over the risk of cancer? One of the things we do is we say to the government, protect us from all these things that could cause cancer. And so we have way more programs to protect us from cancer than from heart disease, than from particulate air pollution, which kills as many people as environmental carcinogens, very roughly. Way more, way more. And the other thing that we do is we screen cancer screening. So mammography and PSA, the prostate-specific antigen test for men in prostate cancer, both were rushed to market because they were found safe in medical trials, but not fully tested to see if they caused harm as well. And it turns out that they do cause great harm. The mammography can find cancers that would never harm the woman. We've discovered those with better mammography. Small cancers that never spread, never grow. But when you tell the woman she has that form of breast cancer, DCIS it's called, 58,000 out of 60,000 women in America per year have their breast removed or have a lumpectomy. When you tell a man that he has a slow growing prostate cancer, at age 60, you'll die with it, but not from it. He says, yeah, but it's cancer. Take my prostate out. Now, they may die from the surgery. They may live with erectile dysfunction for the rest of their lives. They may need diapers for the rest of their lives. Most men, and this is to our point, Seth, and women, say they're satisfied with that choice despite its costs, because it gave them a sense of doing something against the boogeyman of cancer.

Speaker 6:
[17:37] Yeah. But we like to be-

Speaker 7:
[17:38] That's a phobia. That's an excessive fear that harms.

Speaker 6:
[17:42] Yeah. It's slightly irrational, but it sounds like when it comes to risk, we're not rational.

Speaker 7:
[17:47] We over-fear and we under-fear based on how the facts feel to us. And cancer is a great example of this.

Speaker 6:
[17:55] You know, something that makes me a little bit scared is this suggestion here, that a lot of our public policies are dictated not by, if you will, by science, so much as our emotional reaction to whatever the subject might be.

Speaker 7:
[18:09] Another perceptive remark absolutely spot on, and cancer is a clarion example of it. It's one of the reasons why I wrote this book that's coming out. We spend billions more protecting ourselves from what we're more scared of than we spend protecting ourselves from what's more likely to kill us.

Speaker 8:
[18:38] Well, it's one thing to get a grip on your own emotions and make rational decisions, but how does being awash in emotionally charged news coverage influence us? Our conversation with David Ropeik continues.

Speaker 6:
[18:50] Coming up, how media reporting affects our perception of danger. This is Skeptic Check Feeling Risky on Big Picture Science.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 6:
[19:49] As you've heard, our emotions influence how we assess risk and make decisions, and those decisions can have long-term consequences for our health and safety. So we want to be rational.

Speaker 8:
[20:00] But we also work and play in a media environment, be that news or social commentary, that royals with attempts to ramp up our emotional response.

Speaker 9:
[20:10] We begin tonight with the breaking headline late today, the Pentagon briefing reporters just before we came on the air, saying they are now tracking a suspected Chinese spy balloon hovering over the northern US.

Speaker 8:
[20:22] In an op-ed for the New York Times, psychologist David Ropeik calls the media coverage of and public response to the Chinese spy balloon, the great balloon freak out. He says it's an example of just how our emotions can go catawampus when presented with novel threats. As our conversation with him continues, he describes how it happened that suddenly, it became a perilous time to be a weather balloon and the media's role in popping our bubble of safety.

Speaker 7:
[20:50] So the Chinese spy balloon first showed up and was fairly quickly identified by the government because we have these tense relations with China, publicly as, whoa, it's from China and it's loaded with gear that can look down and listen to and take pictures of and stuff like that. It happened to have been spotted floating around the state of Montana where we happen to have nuclear defense missiles and things like that. So that was in and of itself a legitimate news story. Now, we don't think about balloons up there all the time, but then over the weekend, two more unidentified floating around things, balloons, science balloons probably were spotted. And with the heightened sensitivity of the first one, now our government decides to shoot them down. So we spent a $400,000 missile to shoot down this poor weather balloon, right? Because the risk of floating around devices up there had changed. Its personality had changed, you see, right? We normally are not aware of this. Our risk radar is off. Now, the Chinese balloon comes along, and besides that it's Chinese, it was like it up there and we didn't know, and then all of a sudden we discovered it. And now our awareness of all of those sorts of things is off the charts, right? So now every balloon is a bad guy. And of course, that lasted as long as the media had nothing else to talk about. This all happened over a weekend largely. And then when they moved on to something else, our risk radar for balloons went away, back to normal, if you will, and now we're fairly complacent again about all those things floating around up there.

Speaker 6:
[22:33] That Chinese balloon, the fact that people were really afraid of it, I mean, part of that, of course, is that it's up in the air and it's up in the air above where you live, perhaps. So we've seen enough sci-fi films where things from deep space, you know, visit Earth and then, you know, flatten a major city or something like that. What was really behind our apprehension about this object in the skies?

Speaker 7:
[22:57] The Chinese balloon was a great teaching moment on how fickle our risk perception system can be, how it's not carefully thought out, how it's not rational, how we can suddenly freak out about something that's relatively benign, over-fear it, if you will, right? Go from zero to, oh my god, in no time, as I wrote. And at the same time, with other risks around paying no attention to them at all, it was a teaching moment for how emotionally and psychologically fickle our risk radar is. It was a great, simple example, and it was an easy example to be humorous about because it was fairly benign, right? I wasn't writing about some risks that's really serious to some people, and I needed to be respectful about that. This one basically didn't really threaten anybody.

Speaker 6:
[23:45] You mentioned the media. Of course, the media plays a fairly large role here, I would assume, particularly for threats that don't just threaten me, but threaten everybody in my neighborhood or maybe on my continent. Is the media kind of a dispassionate player in all this, or are they? I guess that means no.

Speaker 7:
[24:05] You're speaking to somebody who for 22 years was a television reporter in Boston, and did more than my share of, oh my God, reporting about all kinds of things that turned out to be not quite so, oh my God, so mea culpa. The now deceased media theorist George Gerbner coined the phrase, mean world syndrome. He was referring to research he did about what people thought of the world in which they lived based on the world that was represented to them in television entertainment. This is back in the 60s and 70s where people were worried about violence on TV, making people violent in real life. He wasn't looking at the news per se, but his theory has been expanded. We only know about what we know about beyond our own personal experience from the media, social, entertainment, information. You will spend your day today, Seth, doing Seth stuff and that's all you'll know about until you go online or wherever else. Then the channels of the media frame what you think of as the rest of the world. What Goerbner found, and there's plenty of research to back this up, is that if we live in a world that we think is full of risks, crime, let's say, terrorists, immigrants taking our job, we could go down the list of things that are hot buttons right now. We tend to overemphasize those risks as big boogie men. For example, I had a friend once tell me, I'd love to go to Chicago, but people get shot there all the time. Right? Because that's in the news, because there's a section of Chicago that people who live there would prefer not to live there in, because there's lots of circumstances that leave people to shoot each other, but mostly that doesn't happen in Chicago. But the media said, Chicago shootings, I'm not going, right? So I want to make this other important point on the media too, and you can edit this or do whatever you want. I'm running on at the mouth a little bit. But the media have a responsibility here that I don't believe they've faced. It's very interesting in most newsrooms, and the ones that I work in and the ones that I know about, knew about then and know about now, there are policies to not do reporting where they know the reporting will cause harm. Reporters who are embedded with soldiers don't report where they are. Television stations that could go live from some guy on a bridge threatening to jump off, don't do suicide jumpers for fear that they'll encourage copycats. There are policies where newsrooms that get word of a crime about to be committed, they'll call the police. They won't send a camera and wait for the bank robbery. So there are levels of responsibility within the media where it's kind of like obvious no-brainer to do no harm. Well, the media are doing harm by reporting every chemical as carcinogenic and every form of radiation as oh my god and every shooting in Chicago as this is what happens in Chicago. Painting, to get back to George Goerbner, a meaner world than it is. Steven Pinker writes about this a lot, and many people do, about how the media paint a darker, more negative world than it actually is. And we tend to think that's the world because that's all we know. Yes, there's a responsibility because that leads to harm. That leads to harm in how we treat each other. That leads to harm in what we want the government to do about this issue or that issue. That leads to stress, which is no good for our health. The media have more of a responsibility to be cautious with their alarmism, more cautious than they are, because there's a harmful effect on society from overdoing it. They overdo it to get our attention and make money. I get it. I was in the media. I understand that. I accept it. I'm not denying media culture. But in a story about PFAS chemicals that have been associated with cancer, you could put in a paragraph about how light the association actually is in the science instead of saying, oh, my God.

Speaker 6:
[28:14] Well, but, okay, it's easy to blame the media, because that's where this information shows up. But on the other hand, the media is catering to its market, which is us, right?

Speaker 7:
[28:23] Brilliantly observed. Brilliantly observed. There's a circle here. So as I sat there as a reporter, what did I want? I wanted a lot of attention for my story. Right? My bosses wanted my story to get attention so they could make money from the advertising. Different reason, same outcome. We want our stories to get attention. I'm a person just like you, and I have all these filters about what makes something scary or not in me that you share. Only to me as a reporter, something that's going to scare people is good news.

Speaker 6:
[28:56] They probably suspect something. I mean, everybody knows if it bleeds, it leads, you know, that kind of-

Speaker 7:
[29:00] This is why the instinct is- The media are in the business of getting our attention. That's inescapable. We can't- They're not in the business of education. They're not school, right? They're in the business of getting our attention. Okay, I get that. But if it bleeds, if it burns, if it crashes, if it scares, if it has a child at risk, if it's about a risk that's imposed on us by malevolent mistrusted corporations or government, if it has all of these scary characteristics, it's man-made instead of natural, it involves more pain and suffering instead of a benign death. If it has any of those characteristics to a reporter, they're going to play those things up because that story will get attention. The effect of which, however, is to scare the bejesus out of the world more than perhaps is accurate.

Speaker 6:
[29:49] David, do you have any advice for our audience about how they can deal with, if you will, their perception gap or their knowledge gap and maybe be a little less anxious?

Speaker 7:
[30:00] Yeah, maybe there are some things you want to be more anxious about too. So my advice is to help you make a more thoughtful choice about the risks you face. And by thoughtful, I mean ultimately healthier for you in the circumstance of your life. Our brain is wired to jump to conclusions. And those conclusions will be informed by our feelings way more than the facts. Because at the very first beginning, you don't hardly have any facts. But you have to jump to quick conclusions in case that line on the ground is a snake, right?

Speaker 9:
[30:32] Okay?

Speaker 7:
[30:33] So don't jump to conclusions. And here's the tip. If you're making any choice about any kind of a risk at all, stop for two seconds. Stop for a minute. To give the slower and more effortful cognitive systems in your brain a louder voice in the conversation with your emotions, so that your emotions aren't dominating your judgment, because they may feel right but get you into trouble. So just stop. Pause. And then in that pause, the second basic tip is, know that your emotions are going to scream over your rational brain. And know that that's a risk, that as you're making a risk judgment, that how you're doing it is a risk. Now that you understand that, you can pause and get a few more facts. That's all. You don't have to be a PhD. Get them from a trustworthy source. Don't go to some place that says what your tribe says and it feels good. Get them from some place that's reliable and leave it to your judgment what that is. And give the facts a louder voice and the rational brain a louder voice in the conversation with your emotions and that should lead to a more thoughtful and healthy outcome for you. I hope that's what I try to do.

Speaker 8:
[32:09] Well, Seth, it sounds like one way to get a more accurate assessment of risk is to identify the degree to which our own emotions about the perceived danger might be playing into our assessment of it.

Speaker 6:
[32:24] Well, that's true. I mean, the case of the balloon is a good one, right? Because, you know, we figured this must be dangerous because it's up in the sky there. It's not made by us, it's made by the Chinese. We don't know what it's doing. I mean, it has many of the characteristics that make people afraid.

Speaker 8:
[32:40] Right, but it wasn't an objective assessment, was it? As David Ropeik points out, the media played a big role in getting us quite alarmed about the Chinese spy balloon or what David Ropeik calls the great balloon freakout.

Speaker 6:
[32:54] Yeah, you know, I have to say that for me, I'm still freaked out because I still don't know what it was doing other than, you know, conducting surveillance. And maybe it pays to be a little bit afraid when a potential rival is spending a lot of money to surveil you.

Speaker 8:
[33:09] Yeah, but Seth, maybe you didn't hear all the stories about the weather balloons in the children's science projects that were also shot down?

Speaker 6:
[33:14] Yeah, no, I did hear about those. And weather balloons also have their own perception of risk because, you know, back in the late 1940s, there were balloons seen in the sky that people were really worried about. The whole Roswell incident, you know, was basically balloons. So I guess we're conditioned to think that balloons are somehow malevolent.

Speaker 8:
[33:50] Now that we better understand the psychology of risk and the role of the media in ginning up our emotions to grab our attention, we ask, how well are we doing addressing profound societal risks such as climate change and more recently, AI?

Speaker 6:
[34:06] It's our regular look at critical thinking on Big Picture Science. This episode, Skeptic Check Feeling Risky.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 6:
[35:03] The dangers posed by artificial intelligence have been so often described in books and film, they've become sci-fi tropes. Films like 2001, A Space Odyssey and The Matrix have served as warnings about the dangers of inventing our successors.

Speaker 2:
[35:19] Like the dinosaur, you had your time. The future is our world, the future is our time.

Speaker 6:
[35:31] But sophisticated AI has always felt like it would remain a worry for the distant future.

Speaker 8:
[35:37] That has changed. Recently, numerous articles and op-eds have made an examination of the latest advancements in AI and what they portend. Experts in computing and technology watchers have cautioned that a new world being shaped by programs such as the Artificial Intelligence Chatbot, ChatGPT and the deep learning image creator, Dali, may profoundly change our lives and maybe even slip out of our control. As we continue our conversation with psychologist David Ropeik about how we assess risk, we now ask how we're doing as a group in recognizing and addressing the risks posed by a changing climate and sophisticated new technology.

Speaker 7:
[36:18] Well, I can't judge the risk any more intelligently than the next intelligent person can of AI. I can imagine the applications that would be dangerous. So can the next guy. I mean, they're pretty obvious. Misinformation. Misinformation. And there's Dali, which can do the same thing with images that ChatGPT can do with words. It's trained with a lot of data and it can make an image based on what you ask it to make. And it looks like a real image. The risks of AI, though, I think trouble the public in a broader way than existential or robot overlords and that sort of thing. And there's a great analog. It's the analog is the early work on DNA in the 70s and 80s. We're tinkering with the natural order of things. We're tinkering with the control that we think we have over how things work, right? We are creating systems that feel like we won't have control over them. Hear that word, control? That's scary. And we were tinkering with DNA in the 70s and 80s, and a bunch of scientists said, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's stop. And they had what was called the Asilomar Conference, and that's a conference center in California, and talked about the ethics because people were getting freaked out like they are now about AI. It's a very similar circumstance.

Speaker 6:
[37:47] So David, is there any survey or research of any kind that suggests that the public is actually worried about AI as opposed to finding it, you know, the butt of a lot of jokes and stuff like that?

Speaker 7:
[38:02] The risk of AI magnifies the risk that the public's been afraid of for a long time. Making machines that are smarter than us, that can control us. But I think, if you ask most people on the street, what about AI? They wouldn't know diddly what the hell that meant. They might have ChatGPT on their phones, but probably not either. They would be aware of how it's influencing their Instagram photos that they can morph to make themselves look like whoever they want. Right? That's a real tool that's out there really now. So you can go online and find pictures of the Pope wearing a hip puffy jacket. That looks real. And guess what? It isn't. And we kind of know that, but it's cool, so we'll share it. And around the technology goes bleeding into our lives. And we're getting closer to where that the overlords running us is becoming real. And the commentary is raising the alarm more urgently. I think that's what's causing the tech community to take it more seriously. So now all of the experts in AI, guess what they're saying? Let's stop. Just as of today, it's come out. Let's have a conference that talks about the potential risks of these things. Let's stop realizing the ethical implications of what we're racing to make money from. Right? Microsoft and Google and everybody wanting their version of it. And talk through the ethics because now what we have, Seth, is do we trust the people who are making these things? Do we trust the systems that are creating something that might have control over us? Well, if we have trust in them, we'll be less afraid. If they stop and talk through the ethics, the very same technology will be less scary. And they're starting to recognize that. And without that trust, the opposition to AI, which will cost them money, is going to skyrocket as it has started to do. And that's what they're responding to. The lack of trust and the fear of the loss of control in AI are starting to be the crux of where the issue is playing out.

Speaker 6:
[40:12] I figured this is going to go the way so many of these things do go. There'll be a reduction in sensitivity because of repeated exposure. In other words, if you're using AI in your job, who knows what you do? If you write sports stories, for example, for a small newspaper, those stories sort of follow a formula. You start with this, that, and the other, and you get the score, whatever it is. And that's something that AI could do too with less salary costs. So maybe it starts there, and pretty soon you're dealing with AI all the time. And so you've lost your fear of it. You don't see it as we're inventing our successors, that kind of a threat.

Speaker 7:
[40:52] There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of local newspapers now where the content is not written by journalists at all. In local markets, where the local papers have failed, many of them, many of them, hundreds of them around the country, are now produced by chat GPT-type AI, where they'll say, write the story about this, that, or the other thing, and they'll plug some facts in, and the robot will write the story, and it will look like Joe Schmo, the journalist, wrote the story. Of course, you can tell it to write it in whatever political language you want, whatever cultural language you want, and there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in small communities across America who are no longer getting independent media at all, setting aside whether they trust it or not. It's being made by machines only, and that claim to be journalism, and we should be way scared of that, because that's going to paint a world that whoever's feeding the robots wants us to believe in.

Speaker 6:
[42:02] One threat which is after all existential in its nature is climate change, right? And yet, it's really tough to get the public motivated to do something about climate change, particularly if it costs them convenience or money or something like that. What's the solution to that or do we just accept the fact that we're not going to do anything?

Speaker 7:
[42:22] So, let me put a question back to you as I did earlier in our conversation. Do you own any polar bears?

Speaker 6:
[42:29] Not that I know of, no.

Speaker 7:
[42:32] Do you own a lot of shorefront coastal property?

Speaker 6:
[42:37] I wish I owned Asbury Park, but I do not. Do not.

Speaker 7:
[42:41] Most of us don't. Do you remember the environmental slogan, think globally, act locally?

Speaker 6:
[42:48] Yes, it's printed on half the groceries I buy here in California.

Speaker 7:
[42:51] Yeah, yeah. And it has this wonderful ring to it. So, when you wake up in the morning, Seth, do you check the long-term global climate forecast or whether the hell it's going to rain where you live?

Speaker 6:
[43:03] The latter, of course.

Speaker 7:
[43:05] Correct. That, in a nutshell, is climate change emotionally, psychologically. It doesn't feel like a threat to us as people now in our lives. In fact, the Yale Environmental Program does surveys of public opinion and has found a growing belief that climate change is real and it's serious and we should raise taxes and do this and that and the other thing. And then when they ask, who do you think it'll affect? And it's always a minority of people who say me. And until it's a me, I'm sorry, we're just talking about something, but then I'm going to go watch a ballgame. It's not me and it's not now. Well, now what's changing is it is now. And there are a lot of me's who are turning into me's in places that aren't on the coast, but where tornadoes wreak havoc and floods and fires and droughts and the cost of food causing riots in the Middle East and on and on and on and on and on and on. So the it's coming is the it's arrived. In fact, I've been writing this for 20, 25 years. We need to communicate this as a now and a you instead of think globally grand themes. But we didn't. And it's taken the real impacts to scare more of us into recognizing, oh, Jesus, we really have to get on this. There's lots we can do, lots and lots and lots and lots and tons that we are doing to both mitigate how much worse it gets and to adapt for what it's likely to do. I mean, places, I live in Boston, they're rezoning the whole shorefront. They're making buildings that have the utilities in the basement move the utilities to the roof. They got to rewire the whole damn high-rise building. It's costing a bajillion bucks. There's stuff we can do.

Speaker 6:
[44:56] You lie awake at night worrying about the future of mankind, David. I mean, you know, there are all sorts of threats, including releasing all the nuclear weapons we have, obviously climate change and stuff like that. If you had been born, say, 200 years ago, do you think you would have less anxiety about these things? Are we in an era in which our fears are greater than they would have been had we been born 500 years earlier?

Speaker 7:
[45:25] Yes and no. We live in a media and information age that makes us more aware of a whole lot more than we would have been aware of 100 years ago or 200 years ago. We also live in a miraculously wonderful age for human beings. Unbelievable age. We've never lived this long. We've never had so little child poverty. Women are being more empowered. Fewer children are dying all around the world at birth. All kinds of metrics show that this is we could be at peak human. This is an awesome, awesome time. So we have good things and bad things about our world that we didn't have before. We are more aware of the bad things than we would have been 100 years ago when we would only have lived to age 50, and would have worried about the next meal and tuberculosis killing my children before they're four. At any given time, to wax a little bit more philosophical about this, most of us are focused on the daily getting safely to bed. Right? We don't think in the grand scheme of things. But if you want to raise the grand scheme of things scary, we are now in a time, I am pessimistic to say, where our rational ability to think up new ways of being, have exceeded our risk perception capacities to weigh the costs of those forms of progress, and climate change is the clarion example of that. Climate change is going to have to play itself out at horrific cost to life on the planet. I am pessimistic about the short-term health of life on the planet, and you know what? It actually does keep me up at night.

Speaker 6:
[47:22] One thing I must say is that you have certainly kept me awake with this discussion, and I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Speaker 7:
[47:30] You're welcome. It's an important field. The judgments that we make about how to keep ourselves safe are fundamental to our survival, and if we over-fear something or under-fear something because of its personality traits, we can get in trouble all by ourselves, by making those mistakes, this what I call the risk perception gap. So the opportunity to talk about why it exists and bring wider awareness to it as a phenomenon we have to take seriously, I'm grateful for. Thank you.

Speaker 8:
[48:11] David Ropeik is a professor emeritus at Harvard University, and an expert in the psychology of risk perception. His newest book is Curing Cancer Phobia, How Risk, Fear and Worry Mislead Us. Well, Seth, that brings us to the Big Picture question. What are the takeaways here about how to navigate the perception gap between perceived and actual risk, which is the question we asked at the top of the show?

Speaker 6:
[48:37] Yeah, well, I don't know that there's a whole lot we can do about it other than to appeal to expertise, right? Because there are people who are maybe a little more objective about assessing risks, who can tell us, this is something you ought to be concerned about, or this is nothing to be concerned about.

Speaker 8:
[48:54] We were talking about the perception gap, but you know what struck me was the other gap, if you will, between the assessment of risk as individuals and the assessment as a society. For example, as individuals, we might use extreme caution to avoid risky situations, whether it's a financial investment or transportation choice. Seth, I have to say that I am meticulous to the point of comical about never leaving items on the bottom stair so that I can avoid tripping while I run down the stairs.

Speaker 6:
[49:24] Well, there's your problem. You're running down the stairs. The fact that you might have a roller skate on that last stair, obviously, that could be a problem.

Speaker 8:
[49:33] That's a whole other subject I do need to slow down. But as a point of contrast, as a group, as a society, will show very little meticulousness when it comes to caution, addressing climate change, something that will have profound effects to life itself.

Speaker 6:
[49:50] Yeah. I think that that's because, well, at least in my opinion, it seems like something over which I have very limited control. Sure, I could try and minimize the number of trips I make in my car and stuff like that. But nothing I do personally will affect that risk very much. Whereas when it comes to other things like running down the stairs, I have a lot of control there.

Speaker 8:
[50:14] I think that's a perception that we have no control over, I mean, a flaw in perception that we have no control over climate change.

Speaker 6:
[50:20] Yeah. But climate change is really a good example because that shows you that if the threat is something that's going to affect everyone and over which you have, well, again, a little control. You know, I intrinsically feel like, wow, we've got to solve this problem on a different level.

Speaker 8:
[50:37] Well, finally, Seth, did David Ropeik convince you to start slapping on the sunscreen when you go outside or when you ride your bike?

Speaker 6:
[50:45] Well, yeah, I guess he did. On the other hand, you know, it's often very cloudy where I live, so I don't know whether I'm going to do it or not. I should do it, though, I admit to that.

Speaker 8:
[50:56] Seth, it's not often very cloudy where you live. I know where you live. I live in California. It's sunny most of the year.

Speaker 6:
[51:03] It's not sunny now. Yeah, pretty cloudy out there now. But yes, I mean, I admit that it's faulty logic, yes.

Speaker 8:
[51:33] Well, this show would not be possible without those who take only necessary chances, Senior Producer Gary Niederhoff and Assistant Producers Shannon Rose Gehry and Brian Edwards. I am the Executive Producer of Big Picture Science, Molly Bentley.

Speaker 6:
[51:46] And I'm Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute. We'd like to give a big thanks to our listeners and our Patreon supporters.

Speaker 8:
[51:55] The original music in the show is by Dewey DeLay and June Miyake. This Skeptic Check episode of Big Picture Science that looks at the psychology of decision-making is called Skeptic Check Feeling Risky.

Speaker 6:
[52:07] You may be listening to our radio show, but you can also listen to BiPi Psi by subscribing to the BiPi Psi podcast. You'll find links on our website to the platforms that carry us.

Speaker 10:
[52:22] Skeptic Check is brought to you thanks to a generous grant from the Trimberger Family Foundation. At the Trimberger Family Foundation, we tell that skepticism is a lamp that lights the way to truth. trimberger.org.

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