Erin Welsh

I've been chatting with Dr. Adam Kucharski about his book, Proof, The Art and Science of Certainty.

Let's get back into things.

Right.

The thresholds for certainty is, it can be different depending on the situation.

And then there's also these personal thresholds for certainty or evidence.

You know, how much information do we need?

And one of the things that you discuss in your book as well is sort of what happens when evidence...

flies in the face of our personal beliefs and how sometimes even despite a mountain of evidence, we can just still feel like that's not possible.

We can't reject it.

It's not an intuitive truth.

What happens?

What does this show us about sort of the personal nature of proof and certainty?

That's fascinating to think of the gap between understanding and what is happening.

We don't understand how anesthesia works or how Tylenol or acetaminophen truly works, but we do understand how vaccines work, for instance, and yet there's so many conspiracy theories and misinformation surrounding this thing that we do know how it works.

I guess what good does evidence do if we do not take it into account and are not open to it?

This idea of proof and certainty and truth, that seems very intuitive in a lot of ways today.

But this maybe wasn't always the case.

Like, when did the concepts of truth and the need for these self-evident truths or certainty or proof, when did these come to be?

And then, you know, in what fields or what areas were they initially applied?

Well, I mean, we'll find a way, I'm sure, somehow, some way.