Flat Earth, astrology and democracy: why scientists defend skeptical thinking

The Short Version

Three people who explain science for a living defend skeptical thinking for the same reason: a society that runs on science and decides things by vote needs citizens who can tell a tested claim from an untested one [1][2][3]. Ann Druyan argues that in a civilization "dependent on high technology and science, one that aspires to be democratic," the public and its decision-makers must understand the methods and rules of science [1]. Brian Cox, faced with flat Earth replies on social media, says "A democracy requires an educated population" and wants children taught the mental tools to handle online information [2]. Brian Keating shows what such a tool looks like by running astrology through it: controlled studies find no effect, and its predictions bend to fit any outcome, which makes it, in his words, "unfalsifiable" [3]. What they share is a view of skepticism as a habit of checking, including checking yourself, and not as cynicism or cleverness [1][2][3].

Table of contents

What They Said

Ann Druyan: science belongs to everyone, or it will be used against everyone

Druyan co-wrote the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan and made its later seasons, and she opens her conversation with Lex Fridman by answering his question about the role of science in society [1]. She cites Einstein at the opening of the 1939 New York World's Fair: if science is to fulfill its mission the way art has, its inner meaning must penetrate the consciousness of everyone [1]. For her this is a requirement of self-government and not a luxury, because a technological society that wants to be democratic depends on people who understand the values, methods and rules of science [1].

She states the stakes bluntly [1]. Science "belongs to all of us. It's not the preserve of a priesthood" [1]. If it belongs to everyone and not a tiny few, she says, then we have some chance of determining how it is used; if it sits only with people whose interests are the balance sheet or one nation's dominance, it will probably "end up being a gun aimed at our heads" [1]. Distributed as widely as possible, which technology now allows, there is a chance it will be used with wisdom [1].

What she wants the public to absorb is less a body of facts than a mechanism [1]. Science, she says, has an error-correcting mechanism that most human activities lack, and she compares it to the Bill of Rights, which she calls a kind of error-correcting mechanism for the society she lives in, to the extent it is upheld [1]. Her summary of the scientific bargain is: "we will give you the highest rewards we have for proving us wrong about something. That's genius" [1]. Because science is always aware of its own fallibility, she argues, it went in only 400 years from Galileo's first look through a telescope to sending our senses to other worlds [1].

She insists this matters most for people outside the profession [1]. Adherence to the facts, to the small piece of reality we have managed to get our hands around, is something we desperately need whether or not we are scientists: "it matters even more if you're not" [1]. That is the purpose she gives Cosmos, which she describes as making science accessible to absolutely everyone, including people intimidated by its jargon and exclusive history [1]. Each story in the series had to do three jobs: explain a scientific idea, show why it matters what is true, and warn that if truth stops mattering we can destroy ourselves and many other species [1].

Fridman presses her on the cost of skepticism, suggesting that rigorous skeptics sometimes shut down bold ideas just outside science's current reach [1]. She answers with Sagan: "his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism" [1]. He could not fool himself into believing something because it made him feel good, she says, but he also recognised that nature is "way better than our fantasies" [1].

Brian Cox: flat Earth, bots and what democracy is for

Cox, a particle physicist at the University of Manchester, meets the problem in his own replies [2]. When he reposted footage of SpaceX catching its rocket booster, many responses claimed "space is fake" [2]. Joe Rogan offers an explanation, tracing flat Earth belief to a literal reading of the biblical firmament and to mistranslated scripture, and says people have a natural inclination to uncover vast conspiracies [2]. Cox's reply is practical: such conspiracies assume governments are far more competent than they are, and he notes that his own country cannot make the trains run [2]. In the same exchange the point is made that if nature really were that way scientists would say so, since a flat Earth would be a tremendous discovery and not something anyone would hide [2].

Cox does not treat the believers with contempt [2]. He cites Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, in which a curious taxi driver has been failed by an education that never channelled his curiosity toward real mysteries [2]. Rogan observes that controversial online mysteries put people in a select club who feel they know what is really going on [2]. Cox says one obstacle to bringing people into science is the idea that you have to be very clever, which he calls untrue; "you have to be comfortable with not knowing," and willing to say you will not guess [2]. People who can live without a simple, intelligible explanation for everything, he says, will make more progress in life [2]. He also prefers common ground to argument: if you are curious and want to know how things happened, "that to me is common ground that we can share" [2].

He connects this to politics directly [2]. Drawing on Robert Oppenheimer's Reith Lectures, he says one lesson that can be transferred from the study of nature to politics is that complex systems are complicated: any attempt to say an electron simply is this or is that is doomed, and societies resist simple descriptions in the same way [2]. Quoting someone he had read, he says "democracy is a technology to avoid civil war," and that "The primary function of democracy is to ensure there's a chance for the other side to win at some point in the future" [2]. He worries that geopolitics is as unstable as the 1930s, now with nuclear weapons [2].

On social media, his view is that societies have not yet adapted to the internet, which has been in wide use for only a couple of decades [2]. It is hard to legislate around conversation, the two note, so the answer Cox argues for is education: "Ultimately, everything comes back to education" [2]. That includes teaching children how to navigate social media, influence and other people's opinions of them [2]. Cox's own rule of thumb for bots and troll farms is to ignore accounts whose timelines are purely political, since real people also post about sports, airplanes or silly things [2].

Cox recommends Richard Feynman's essay The Value of Science, and says that in it Feynman argues "the most valuable thing is scientists bring this transferable skill to life" [2]. He adds that experiments teach children there is a reality that does not care about your title or popularity [2]. For him science is humble: "you have to be delighted when you're wrong" [2].

Brian Keating: putting astrology to the test

Keating, a cosmologist at UC San Diego, takes one popular belief and shows the steps [3]. First, evidence: he says there is no evidence for astrology and that controlled studies find astrologers perform no better, and perhaps worse, than chance [3]. Second, internal consistency: a sign is set by the constellation behind the sun on your birthday, but the zodiac was fixed thousands of years ago with twelve signs and ignores Ophiuchus, which the sun passes through for about 17 days in late November and early December [3]. Third, a natural experiment: twins born the same day live very different lives [3].

Fourth, he ran his own test [3]. While dating his future wife he visited an astrologer and claimed to be a Gemini; when he revealed he was born in September, the astrologer said the same things would happen anyway [3]. That flexibility is his diagnosis of non-science: "it's unfalsifiable" [3].

He is as interested in why people believe as in why they are wrong [3]. Humans survive by modelling the future, he says, and lean on that skill so heavily that we confuse correlation with causation [3]. "The notion of what's called confirmation bias is prevalent in every human being scientist or not," and scientists have to guard against it more than anybody [3]. Andrew Huberman agrees that the brain is a prediction machine that craves reliable-feeling explanations [3]. Keating notes that most newspapers print far more about astrology than astronomy, and says people "crave this notion that there's some explanation for the random seeming events that occur in their lives" [3].

Keating applies the same standard to physics and to himself [3]. Most of his university students, he says, cannot prove that the Earth is not the center of the solar system; Galileo brought the evidence [3]. He says "almost everything in science is wrong," with each step less wrong than the last [3]. And he tells the story of his own experiment, BICEP, whose team announced in 2014 that it had found a signal from the birth of the universe, before peer review and out of fear of being scooped [3]. Months later the signal was shown to come from what he calls "the humblest substance in the universe, namely dust" [3]. He stresses that no one faked data, and his motto now is "go as fast as you carefully can" [3].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

The pattern is strong on four points [1][2][3]. All three define science by its willingness to be wrong: Druyan's rewards for disproof, Cox's delight at error, Keating's "almost everything in science is wrong" [1][2][3]. All three place the skill outside the laboratory: Druyan says it matters more for non-scientists, Cox quotes Feynman on a transferable skill, and Keating tests a newspaper horoscope column's premise with tools anyone could use [1][2][3]. All three treat the need for comforting explanations as human and not stupid [1][2][3]. And all three pair doubt with something warmer, whether Druyan's wonder, Cox's curiosity as common ground, or Keating's pleasure in seeing Jupiter's moons through a cheap telescope as Galileo did [1][2][3].

They do not agree on the internet [1][2]. Druyan, speaking in an earlier conversation, says that through the internet we have discovered "we are an intercommunicating organism, and that can only be good," and she loves that everyone can now be a curator [1]. Cox and Rogan describe bots, troll farms and anxiety, and Rogan calls social media an accelerant of mental illness, citing a former FBI analyst's estimate that 80 percent of Twitter accounts were fake, a figure the conversation does not verify [2]. The difference follows from what each is looking at: Druyan sees wide distribution of knowledge as the only safeguard against its misuse, while Cox is looking at what actually fills his replies [1][2].

They also differ on whether science should stand inside politics or apart from it [1][2][3]. Druyan and Cox want scientific habits carried into public decisions [1][2]. Keating describes astronomy as a refuge from politics and social media: "at best, science is a safe space" [3]. These can coexist, but they are different instincts about what science is for [1][2][3].

Finally, they locate the failure in different places [1][2]. On climate change, Druyan pushes back on the idea that the public is the problem; she believes extreme weather and fires have convinced most people and that the trouble is leaders who choose to ignore it [1]. Cox puts the weight on educating the population [2]. Druyan's own argument for Cosmos shows she values public education too, so this is a difference of emphasis about where the bottleneck lies [1][2].

Why It Works

The mechanism all three describe is error correction through testable claims [1][2][3]. A claim that can be checked can be thrown out, and Druyan credits that property for science's record of prediction: a spacecraft launched in 1977 met every planet and moon where calculation said it would be [1]. Keating's astrology example shows the reverse case, a claim built so that no outcome can count against it [3]. His BICEP story shows the mechanism working on scientists themselves: a celebrated result was re-examined and shown within months to be dust [3].

Keating adds the psychology that makes the mechanism necessary [3]. "Nothing really feels better," he says, than forming a hypothesis and "then feeling like you're right," and being celebrated for it; that feeling is powerful and dangerous, which is why the same pull draws so many people to believe that celestial bodies shape their lives [3]. He also names a specific bad practice, adjusting an analysis after the data are in [3].

Cox supplies the civic half [2]. If democracy exists so that the losing side can win later, then it needs citizens who can hold a view firmly while accepting that others hold different ones, the stance he draws from Oppenheimer, and who can tolerate not knowing [2]. Druyan's comparison of science with the Bill of Rights makes the same link from the other direction: both are arrangements for catching mistakes made by people in authority [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Testing works on claims that make predictions, which is why astrology and a flat Earth are easy cases [2][3]. It does not settle questions of value, and it does not always give an answer: Cox says the honest reply about the origin of the universe is that we do not know [2]. Keating points out that you cannot run a controlled experiment on the universe [3].

Skepticism can also be overdone, which is the concern Fridman raises with Druyan; her answer is that it must never come at the cost of wonder [1]. And a scientist's own skeptical conclusion is not automatically the consensus: Keating calls himself an outlier for thinking life elsewhere is probably very rare, tells listeners to consult the experts, and sums up his reasoning as "possibility is not probability" [3].

Some factual claims in these conversations are contested or may have changed [2]. Rogan's account of Canadian rules on sharing news links on social media is his own characterisation, questioned even within the conversation, and readers should check the current law [2]. His explanation of where flat Earth belief comes from is likewise his opinion [2]. The sources also say little about how to teach these skills at scale; Cox and Rogan say it should be done without describing a method [2].

What To Do With It

1. Before accepting a claim, ask what result would show it to be wrong; if no result could, treat it as Keating treats astrology [3].
2. Run a small test yourself where you can, as Keating did by giving an astrologer the wrong birth sign [3].
3. Check a claim against its own rules, the way the zodiac's twelve signs leave out a constellation the sun passes through [3].
4. Notice when a belief feels good, and doubt it harder, because Keating says confirmation bias affects everyone and Druyan says Sagan would not believe something for comfort [1][3].
5. Practice saying you do not know; Cox calls being comfortable with not knowing the key to science [2].
6. On social media, use Cox's rule of thumb and discount accounts that post only politics [2].
7. Meet people who hold unusual beliefs on the ground of shared curiosity, as Cox does, instead of opening with an argument [2].
8. Look at the evidence directly when it is cheap to do so; Keating says a $50 telescope shows the moons Galileo used to overturn the Earth-centered view [3].
9. Read Feynman's The Value of Science and Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, both recommended by Cox [2].
10. Judge leaders and institutions by Druyan's standard: whether they reward being shown wrong and think beyond the next election [1].

Sources

1. Ann Druyan on Cosmos, Carl Sagan, the Voyager Golden Record and the Beauty of Science · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. Brian Cox on Black Holes, the Great Silence and the Meaning of Life in the Universe · The Joe Rogan Experience
3. Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life with Dr. Brian Keating · Huberman Lab