Adam Kucharski

But that on its own will just tell you the effect.

It won't tell you necessarily all the mechanisms that are going on.

um to explain it but there's these tools that we've got and we've got the evidence to take action and use these things we're very happy with and there's other areas of life where actually that inability to explain something kind of really bothers us you know if even if self-driving cars were much safer than humans and humans when i started looking through the book humans are not good at driving you know it's not a massively high bar but i think it would still make people uncomfortable even if they were say twice as safe

in cities where it's very well defined.

I think it would still bother people if every now and again, there was just an accident that we had no real idea what was happening.

And I think that's really important to bridge, because I think that particularly when you get that gap in understanding, that's room for other explanations to kind of creep in.

And I think that's where we start to see emergence where things like conspiracy theories, whether it's things with kind of incorrect logic, often it is that gap between what we're seeing and the understanding of why that's happening

I think humans have this very, in many ways, very powerful desire to explain what they're seeing.

But in some cases where the explanation is very hard to untangle, it can lead us astray.

Yeah, and I think for me, a lot of it is, is just understanding at what point that breaks down.

I mean, even if you, if you look at some of the COVID vaccines, for example, you know, or even some of the kind of other debates around climate intervention, I think, you know, often, it gets very into debate.

debating some element of the technology.

And I think often it's actually just people disliked some of the control that was exerted over them through mandates or for other things.

And actually, if you've got an intervention that you're unhappy with, you can disagree with the intervention and say, look, for example, we know that intervention works, but I disagree with how you're implementing it.

Or you can disagree that the intervention actually has an effect.

Or you can go even one step down and just say,

Actually, I think there's sort of deeper problems or maybe the disease isn't a threat.

And I think often those kind of levels get tangled up.

And I think a lot of conversations I've had with people, often they're sort of deep down concerned or the thing that they're approaching it with isn't necessarily that they've just out of nowhere decided that this isn't a threat or that that technology doesn't work.

It's actually...