Adam Kucharski

In some of these instances, things are a bit more marginal.

And you could say, you know, you can make an argument either way, even if the underlying

intervention is is effective or is going to have this you know you can make kind of this moral and this is not just about an epidemiological question um as i think kind of understanding where those drivers are and also just in our own arguments i think sometimes you know i have the conversation with people and i think i'm just arguing about the kind of the nuances of whether intervention is a good idea or not and they're actually arguing whether it's a problem in the

Vaccines are, I guess, examples more polarised, but even something in climate, you know, you can have a lot of people who just agree on the nature of the threat of climate change.

They agree on the different levers that we probably have available as a society, but they might strongly disagree about actually how we prioritise those and all of the trade-offs.

And I think it's just understanding what level we're on and where the evidence might stop and where it might then just be other things that are filtering in on a personal level.

Yeah, I think that's a great, it's easy just to think of like the world and sort of science and evidence just always was as it is.

I mean, even in mathematics, this idea that we had a universal truth wasn't the same throughout history.

If you go back to the ancient Egyptians, ancient Babylonians, they were much more focused on problem solving.

A lot of their texts are kind of these kind of puzzles and very much things around kind of practical everyday problems.

And even if you look at their formulas for an area of a circle, they're quite approximate.

And if you're building something that needs quite a large circle, you're probably going to be okay using those.

But it's not going to give you that really precise truth, no matter what problem you're working on.

And that's something where the ancient Greeks, mathematicians like Euclid came in and tried to put things on a much more solid footing.

So you've got these concepts like pi, that if you want the area of a circle, that will just be universally true.

And you won't have this issue of your kind of approximation breaks down.

And it was then I think that as it sort of came into the Enlightenment, it was very appealing for people that you could have these.

undeniable truths about the world.

And I think that's where a lot of other fields started growing them as well.

But even in medicine, if you look at this study of cause and effect, a lot of that, it was the sort of medieval Arabic world that a lot of that started to emerge.