How to stay skeptical without losing your sense of wonder

The Short Version

The people who are best at doubting are often the ones most moved by the universe, and they explain why the two go together. Ann Druyan says of Carl Sagan that "his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism", because nature as it actually is turns out to be "way better than our fantasies" [1]. David Kipping doubts hardest whatever he most wants to be true, Michelle Thaller keeps champagne chilling for evidence of life while refusing to call an unexplained video an alien, and Brian Cox says "the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know" [2][3][4]. Their shared method is to be strict about what you believe and open about what you ask. Wonder then attaches to what is real and to what is still unknown, which is where each of them says the deepest feeling lies [1][2][3][4].

Table of contents

What They Said

Ann Druyan: the standard Carl Sagan set

Druyan co-wrote the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan and made its two later seasons. She is not a scientist by training, and describes her education in the subject as "20 years of days and nights with Carl Sagan" [1].

Lex Fridman puts the worry to her directly. Rigorous scientists and the modern skeptics community, he says, sometimes seem to miss ideas that sit just outside the current reach of science: "they don't dare to sort of dream", and their skepticism "kind of shuts it down sometimes a little bit" [1].

Druyan answers through Sagan. The reason he remains so beloved, she says, is that "his skepticism was never at the cost of his wonder and his wonder was never at the cost of his skepticism" [1]. She describes both halves. On one side, "he couldn't fool himself into believing something he wanted to believe because it made him feel good" [1]. On the other, he recognized that what nature is "is really, it's good enough, you know, it's way better than our fantasies" [1]. A person whose eyes are wide open and who spends years studying what is known, she says, has "a really infinite capacity to be alive", and at the same time can "be very rigorous about what you're willing to believe" [1].

She does not think the rigor cost Sagan anything, "because again, it comes back to love" [1]. He wanted to know what nature was really like, "not to inflict his preconceived notions on what he wanted it to be" [1].

That phrase points to her most distinctive idea. Love based on an illusion about the other person is not love, she argues: "Love is seeing, unflinching the other and accepting with all your heart." [1] By the same reasoning, knowing the universe as it is, or the little of it we can understand so far, is "a purest kind of love" [1]. Skepticism on this view is a form of respect. It is the refusal to substitute a flattering picture for the thing itself.

She ties humility to it. Echoing Socrates, she says knowing how little you know is itself real knowledge, and the inner voice that whispers "you might be wrong" is healthy for imperfect people [1]. Science has built that voice into its rules. Its secret, she says, is its error-correcting mechanism: "we will give you the highest rewards we have for proving us wrong about something. That's genius." [1] Science delivers because "it's always self-aware of its fallibility" [1].

Druyan rejects the idea that understanding drains the feeling out of things. She calls it the tragedy of Western civilization that it gave the world science while teaching that eating from the tree of knowledge was humanity's great sin, and she dismisses the familiar figure of the brilliant but spiritually empty scientist as a false dichotomy [1]. "We don't have to be scientists and then be human beings," she says [1]. With age she finds the origin of life and consciousness less mysterious, because she better grasps how they might have come about, and adds: "it doesn't make it any less wondrous. It doesn't rob it at all of the wonder of it." [1]

David Kipping: doubt what you most want to be true

Kipping, the Columbia astronomer who hunts for moons around distant planets, supplies the hardest version of the discipline. His recurring theme is that scientists must guard hardest against what they most want to be true [2]. He traces it to leaving religion between the ages of about 11 and 13, when he found it hard to give up the beautiful promise of eternal life: "the more I want something to be true, the more I inherently doubt it." [2]

He applies it to his own work. After Hubble observations of the planet Kepler-1625b pointed to a Neptune-sized moon, his team spent months trying to kill the signal, and when the journal Science asked them to call it a discovery, he insisted on calling it evidence [2]. He will not let anyone name a planet after his family, because it would compromise his objectivity [2]. He cites two cautionary figures: Peter van de Kamp, who insisted until his death that he had found a planet around Barnard's Star despite overwhelming evidence against it, and Percival Lowell, who was convinced Mars was inhabited, was told his eyesight was exceptional, and saw canals that were not there [2].

On alien life he stays deliberately agnostic. Fridman says he believes the universe is full of civilizations because life on Earth finds a way [2]. Kipping replies that the number of stars seems compelling, but the chance of life arising from chemistry could be 90 percent, 1 percent or vanishingly small, and there is no rigorous reason to prefer any of those values [2]. He suggests that hoping for a wise elder civilization may partly be a replacement for God [2].

None of this has made him incurious. He describes two kinds of astrophysicist, those who want to understand how the universe works and those drawn by why we are here and whether we are alone, and counts himself in the second group, which is why his lab studies cool, potentially habitable worlds [2]. He chose the risky search for exomoons over safer work, telling an MIT professor who advised otherwise, "I don't want to just be the first to something for the sake of being first." [2] His team built a "weird detector" to scan about 200,000 stars for any repeating oddity, and he notes that searches for alien technology always turn up interesting new physics even when they fail [2]. He finds it almost spooky that Earth has offered humanity solvable challenges in sequence, and he calls existence "just a ride," a beautiful cosmic accident to be enjoyed [2].

Michelle Thaller: the skeptical stop, and champagne on ice

Thaller, an astrophysicist and retired NASA executive, names the discipline as part of the culture of science. "You have to be honest about what you don't know," she says, and she calls that humility one of the most beautiful and hardest parts of the work [3]. Science is deliberately limited to "what is reproducible, consistently reproducible," which does not mean other things are not real [3].

Her example is the footage of unexplained objects released from military aircraft. Scientists, she says, are not getting together over a beer and getting excited about it: "It's not enough yet." [3] She explains that "we're seeing these things we can't explain, but we're trained as skeptical scientists to sort of stop there"; the next step, that this is an alien, "We're not willing to go yet. We need more evidence than that." [3] She has a name for the habit: "that's a deliberate training of a scientist, is that skeptical stop" [3].

The stop comes with generosity toward people. At NASA, calls from people claiming time travel or alien abduction were often forwarded to her, and she tried to listen with compassion [3]. She will not dismiss people who report such experiences as mentally ill: "I honestly don't know what it is" [3]. She says trustworthy friends report experiences of an afterlife, and she hopes we live in a larger reality than she can measure [3].

And it comes with hope. Everyone she worked with believes life must exist elsewhere, and "I always keep a bottle of champagne chilling" for clear evidence; she would open it for pond scum on Mars [3]. When a telescope result hinted at molecules that plankton might produce on an ocean world, she reports both the excitement and the reply from other scientists that "the data is not good enough yet", and her advice is "stay tuned" [3].

Her wonder is unmistakable. Images of billions of galaxies still give her goosebumps, and looking up, she says, is looking at our own story, since the atoms in our bodies were made in stars [3]. She treats open questions as gifts. Asked what came before the Big Bang, she says, "It's wonderful that there are these things right over the horizon from us," calls it a great, simple, elegant question, and answers, "We have no idea." [3] Of what lies inside a black hole: "These are all incredible questions. We don't yet have the physics to answer them." [3] "I don't think we have an answer to what time is," she admits [3].

She also marks the boundary aloud when she crosses it. Discussing whether a black hole might contain a universe, she says, "this is not observation. Now we're going from observation" to conjecture [3]. And she thinks the failure can run the other way too: "sometimes we lack imagination about what might be possible" [3].

Brian Cox: the edge of the known

Cox, the particle physicist and broadcaster, makes the strongest claim about where the feeling comes from. Discussing whether the universe had a beginning, he says, "I find it fascinating, because the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know." [4] He thinks this is what people miss about the value of science: "It's almost not the knowledge. It's almost like the opposite of the knowledge." [4]

He holds this against Joe Rogan in a real disagreement. Rogan suggests that knowing everything might be bliss, a kind of enlightenment. Cox pushes back: "what would it mean to know everything? I don't think I'd like that." [4] To him the most human feeling is to "stand on the edge of the known" and look into the unknown with excitement; hope, like the anticipation of Christmas Eve, comes from incomplete knowledge, and knowing everything would make existence pointless [4].

Cox is as strict as the others about evidence. Science, he says, is humble: "you have to be delighted when you're wrong," [4]. If dark matter proved to be nonsense, good scientists would be thrilled [4]. His friend Brian Schmidt, who discovered the universe's accelerating expansion, thought the result was wrong, published it anyway expecting someone to find his mistake, and won a Nobel Prize [4]. Cox admits freely what he does not understand. Of what the singularity inside a black hole is: "one answer is we don't know." [4] Of Roger Penrose's cyclic cosmology: "I don't understand what he's proposing." [4] He once asked a conference of Catholic bishops what it would mean for their idea of a creator if the universe had always existed, and reports with pleasure that they "thought it was a cool question and didn't have an answer" [4].

He says the key to science is being comfortable with not knowing, more than being clever [4]. He defines science as the best picture of nature we can manage at any moment [4].

His wonder shows in the question he opens his live shows with: "what does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite eternal universe?" [4] On aliens he would be relieved, not surprised, if a craft landed in the parking lot, because he worries we are alone, and if we are, Earth is "the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns," [4].

Cox is gentle about belief in strange things. He cites Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, in which a taxi driver full of questions about Atlantis is not treated as a fool: "He thinks this guy has a curious mind." [4] The driver had been failed by an education in which "his curiosity had not been somehow channeled to the real mysteries" [4]. The people Cox says he does not understand are different: "the people who are not curious" [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

They agree that wonder and skepticism come from the same wish. Druyan calls it love of the thing as it is [1]. Kipping's doubt protects his search for the answer he cares most about [2]. Thaller's skeptical stop sits beside her chilled champagne [3]. Cox's delight in being wrong and his excitement at the unknown are one attitude [4].

They agree that wanting something to be true is the main hazard. Sagan could not fool himself into a belief because it felt good [1]. Kipping doubts in proportion to his desire [2]. Thaller declines the step from unexplained to alien [3]. Rogan, in the Cox conversation, says he wants to believe in visitors but has never seen reliable evidence [4].

They agree that not knowing is a source of feeling and not an embarrassment. Thaller calls it wonderful that questions lie just over the horizon [3]. Cox calls it the most exciting thing of all [4]. Druyan says love, like science, never feels it is close enough or deep enough [1].

They agree that being wrong should be welcome. Druyan praises a system that rewards disproof [1]. Cox wants scientists delighted by error [4]. Kipping spent months trying to destroy his own result [2].

They differ on how much to believe about life elsewhere. Druyan suspects, with a grain of salt, that life happens more often and in more places than we like to think [1]. Thaller and her colleagues believe it must exist [3]. Cox's best guess is that complex life is extremely rare and we may be alone in the galaxy [4]. Kipping refuses to guess at all [2]. Fridman believes the universe is full of civilizations [2]. Each reasons from something. Druyan points to our long history of being demoted from special status [1]. Cox points to the three billion years life on Earth stayed single-celled [4]. Kipping points to the absence of any way to estimate the odds [2]. Their different beliefs coexist with a shared standard of proof, which is the point of the comparison.

They differ on whether skepticism has a cost. Fridman thinks it sometimes closes off bold ideas [1]. Druyan says it cost Sagan nothing [1]. Thaller concedes something to Fridman's side when she says scientists sometimes lack imagination, and that things outside science's reach may still be real [3]. Kipping shows the cost can be paid deliberately: he took the unfashionable, risky project [2].

They differ on whether understanding reduces mystery. Druyan says the origin of life has become less mysterious to her and no less wondrous [1]. Cox locates the thrill in what is not yet understood and would not want to know everything [4]. These fit together if wonder has two objects, the known and the unknown, but the emphasis is different, and Rogan's challenge to Cox, that a being who knew everything might find a different reward, goes unanswered except by Cox's remark that they are trying to imagine what it is like to be God [4].

They differ in how they treat reports that science cannot test. Thaller says such experiences are within her realm of possibility and simply outside science for now [3]. Kipping notes that aliens are hard to test as a hypothesis because they can explain almost anything [2]. Cox sees a curious mind that needs better mysteries [4].

Why It Works

Reality is richer than invention. Druyan's claim that nature is way better than our fantasies is the reason skepticism does not shrink the world: it removes pictures we made up and leaves something larger [1]. Thaller's examples carry the same weight, such as the fact that every atom in us was made in a star [3].

Clear sight is a kind of love. Druyan's argument is that idealizing a person is a failure to know them, and that the same holds for the universe [1]. On that account doubt is how attention is paid.

Self-correction makes confidence possible. Because science rewards people for proving it wrong, its results can be trusted more, not less [1]. Cox adds that many independent observations fitting together is what makes a picture reliable, as when the ages of the Earth, the sun and the universe agree [4].

Desire distorts perception. Kipping's cases of van de Kamp and Lowell show intelligent people seeing what they hoped to see, which is why he ties his doubt to his wishes [2].

Hope needs incompleteness. Cox's Christmas Eve image explains why the unknown feels good: anticipation exists only where something is still to come [4].

Separating the step keeps both honesty and openness. Thaller's skeptical stop works by dividing a claim in two, the observation and the explanation, so that she can accept the first and hold the second open without dismissing the witness [3].

Curiosity is the common root. Cox's reading of Sagan's taxi driver treats belief in strange things as curiosity pointed at the wrong target, which is why the remedy he and Druyan favor is to share real science widely; she says it "belongs to all of us. It's not the preserve of a priesthood." [1][4]

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

The discipline is about belief, and leaves questions free. Thaller entertains conjectures about black holes and other universes as long as they are labeled [3]. Kipping pursues moons no theory predicted [2]. Nothing in these accounts forbids a bold question.

It does not license contempt. Thaller listened to callers with compassion, and Cox credits the taxi driver's mind [3][4]. Skepticism aimed at people instead of claims is not what any of them describes.

It does not settle what lies outside reproducible evidence. Thaller is explicit that science's limits are deliberate and that profound things may be real beyond them [3]. That is an admission of scope, and she does not turn it into an endorsement.

Agnosticism can be uncomfortable. Kipping's position on alien life gives no answer to a question people badly want answered, and Fridman's impatience with it is understandable [2].

It takes knowledge to feed the wonder. Druyan's version depends on years of studying what is known [1]. Without that, doubt alone can leave a person with little to marvel at, which is the complaint Fridman raises about some skeptics [1].

It is easier for some temperaments than others. Cox thinks the essential trait is comfort with not knowing [4]. Rogan's intuition that complete knowledge would be better shows that not everyone shares it [4].

What To Do With It

1. Doubt in proportion to how much you want it to be true. This is Kipping's rule, and the cases he cites show what happens without it [2].

2. Practice the skeptical stop. When something is unexplained, say so and stop there; do not add the explanation you prefer until there is more evidence [3].

3. Say "we don't know" and treat it as good news. Cox and Thaller both answer their largest questions this way and both find it exciting [3][4].

4. Label your conjectures. Thaller tells her listener when she is leaving observation for speculation, which lets her speculate freely [3].

5. Call a finding evidence until it has earned the word discovery. Kipping held to that with his own result [2].

6. Be glad when you are shown wrong. Druyan calls the reward for disproof the genius of science, and Cox calls delight the right response [1][4].

7. Learn what is actually known. Druyan's claim is that the real thing is better than the fantasy, and Thaller's stardust is an example; you can only find that out by looking [1][3].

8. Keep the champagne chilled. Hold a real hope, as Thaller does for life elsewhere, while keeping the bar for opening it high [3].

9. Meet other people's strange beliefs as misdirected curiosity. Listen as Thaller did, and offer a real mystery in place of the false one, as Sagan's story suggests [3][4].

10. Go and stand at the edge. Pick one open question, such as what time is or what came before the Big Bang, and let yourself feel what Cox describes as the most human feeling [3][4].

Sources

1. Ann Druyan on Cosmos, Carl Sagan, the Voyager Golden Record and the Beauty of Science · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. David Kipping on Exomoons, Habitable Worlds and Why We Must Stay Agnostic About Aliens · Lex Fridman Podcast
3. Michelle Thaller on Black Holes, Time, Quantum Weirdness and the Limits of Science · The Joe Rogan Experience
4. Brian Cox on Black Holes, the Great Silence and the Meaning of Life in the Universe · The Joe Rogan Experience