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Peter Lamont, "Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture" (Swift Press, 2024)
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A
Hey it's ryan reynolds here for mint mobile now i was looking for fun ways to tell you that mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for fifteen dollars a month is back so i thought it would be fun if we made fifteen dollars bills but it turns out that's very illegal so there goes my big idea for the commercial give it a try at mintmobile dot com switch upfront payment of forty five dollars for a three month plan equivalent to dollar fifteen per month required new customer offer.
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For first three months only speed slow.
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After thirty five gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra see mintmobile dot com this episode is brought to you by lifelock when you visit the doctor you probably hand over your insurance your id and contact details it's just one of the many places that has your personal info and if any of them accidentally expose it you could be at risk for identity theft lifelock monitors millions of data points a second if you become a victim they'll fix it guaranteed or your money back save up to forty percent your first year at lifelock dot com podcast terms apply gatorade is the number one proven electrolyte blend designed to hydrate better than water so you can lose more sweat and raise your game gatorade is it in you welcome to the new books network.
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C
I'M caleb zakren editor of the new books network today i'm speaking with peter lamont about his book radical how to see the bigger picture peter is professor of history and theory of psychology at the university of edinburgh and a magician formerly serving as the president of the edinburgh magic circle radical thinking takes us on a journey of thought exposing the ways we limit what we see our myopia keeps us from seeing more and to help us rethink what's right in front of us i'm pleased to have peter on the podcast today peter thanks for joining me today on the new books network.
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B
Hi caleb thank you for inviting me on of course this is a really.
- [01:59]
C
Fun book to read but before jumping into the book i was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background as both a scholar and a magician sure.
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B
Well i am as you say i'm professor of history and theory of psychology at edinburgh university so what that means is i work in a psychology department teaching historical and theoretical aspects of psychology which is a weird job to have there's not many of us but i began as a magician when i was a student so i studied history at edinburgh i worked as a magician to pay the bills and as a result of that an unexpected result i ended up doing a job in a psychology department on the psychology of magic and then i thought this is quite enjoyable as a job i think i'll do more of this so i began i did a phd and i had a couple of fellowships and so on and most of the work was on the history and psychology of magic and the paranormal and then i got into broader topics like beliefs and wonder and then more recently critical thinking so i kind of started my magic as a job and then the academic world opened up and i started to meld the two.
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C
Together how did you go about writing this book it's very much set in edinburgh and it's very personal in many ways so how did you construct it.
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B
Initially well actually it began as a course so a few years ago i decided that i thought the best use of my time as a teacher researcher writer whatever i am would be to look into critical thinking because it seemed to me and i'm not alone here that we need more critical thinking and as i began to look at it i became a bit dissatisfied with the literature on critical thinking partly it's no one's fault but because it's come to mean everything to everyone and partly because historically what you see particularly in the twentieth century is there's a kind of shift from how you think to what you think so critical thinking it's meant to be about how you think not what you think so whatever you think it's not about where you end up it's about how you get there but what happened was a lot of people started to focus on where you end up and we had this focus on fallacies and biases and things that lead us to get things wrong because of course we want to get it right so i wanted to get away from this idea of critical thinking as being about getting it right or wrong i wanted to make it about the process and so that's how i ended up with a slightly different approach which i ended up calling radical thinking so that was a course that's a live course in person at the university for zero credits because i wanted to do it in a way that would not be ruined by the curriculum and it was very popular but that was twenty nineteen and then covid happened and then i couldn't do it and so that's when it became a book and so the course and the book was very much about starting from scratch and thinking well how do we make sense of the world you can only make sense of the world from where you are but you can be more curious about how you do that and so that's where i started i'll look at the world from where i am which in my case is edinburgh and i'll be more curious about how i do that for for my students i'm using lots of local knowledge to make them curious about the world if only so that they stop looking at their phones for a moment but for anyone who's never been to edinburgh the examples are well known enough that you don't really need to know edinburgh at all so you know sherlock holmes or encyclopedia britannica and so on so even though it's local knowledge you don't need to know edinburgh to.
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C
Understand the points absolutely and i want to start with sherlock holmes because he's probably literature's most famous critical thinker and you talk about how arthur conan doyle the creator of sherlock holmes he found inspiration for the character in his professor joseph bell who is known for these incredible observational skills and i was wondering if you'd share a little bit about bell and the inspiration there well bell.
- [06:56]
B
Was a surgeon at edinburgh university and arthur conan doyle just in case people don't know who wrote who created the character of sherlock holmes and he lived in george square which is where my office is i can pretty much see where he lived from my office window so i thought well that's a good local example and everyone's heard of sherlock holmes pretty much everyone's heard of sherlock holmes now so so when conan doyle was living in that house he was doing medicine at edinburgh university and one of his teachers was the surgeon joseph bell and joseph bell had this reputation for being able to look at somebody and immediately know things about them not because of any psychic abilities but from the way they dressed from the way they spoke from the way they carried themselves and so on and so he got a reputation amongst his students for having these incredible abilities to pick up on clues if you like and so conan doyle later said that joseph bell was the inspiration for the character of sherlock holmes though ironically when joseph bell read the sherlock holmes book later he wasn't very impressed with what he read because he thought they were gross exaggerations.
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C
Of his abilities right and you go into a little bit about conan doyle because i think that and the only reason i'm focusing on him even though it's not you know it's sort of one of the ways in which you introduce it conan doyle as the author of sherlock holmes you know of course he's creating these scenarios so we think of him as an observational person and you go into a little bit how conan doyle really overestimated some of his observational skills how he was trying to tricked by mediums and all sorts of other ways that he wasn't actually a great observer in the way that joseph.
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B
Bell was well yeah i mean when doyle famously believed in spiritualism and he went to seances and he believed that what he saw was real and he wrote about the history of spiritualism in which he defended all kinds of mediums including several who had been caught cheating and he also had some strange views about harry houdini who was a friend of his and thought that houdini had special powers that allowed him to dematerialize and rematerialize his body and so on now from a radical thinking point of view anything's possible but it's obvious from the evidence that i've read and i've read hundreds and hundreds of seance accounts over the years that what was going on here even if one or two of them were real many of them were clearly fake so what doyle did if you like and what i'm using him to represent was this kind of i guess arrogance would count as a word that he thought he was somebody who didn't make mistakes he thought his observation skills were as good as this character sherlock holmes and what he forgot is is that sherlock holmes is a fictional character and in real life we're all like doctor watson we miss things all the time and so the mistake that he made in his thinking about it was thinking that if he didn't see it it wasn't there when as any magician knows that's the whole point you're not supposed to see certain things so he's an interesting character partly because you can juxtapose this rational keen observer of things sherlock holmes with what he was like in his conan doyle was like himself and you see that just because you can create a fictional version of somebody who doesn't miss anything that doesn't mean in real life that you don't miss things just like everybody else.
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C
Does you look at the research that psychologists have done when it comes to our observational skills and i was wondering if you could just introduce a little bit you know why why is it that we you know are sometimes our observational skills are so bad you know we we don't we we miss things that are really right in front of us that are you know could you just introduce this this research a little.
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B
Bit yeah i mean i've not done much of that myself but it is quite standard stuff within psychology now the basic thing is that we don't notice much even within our visual field so even in the whatever you're looking at right now you're noticing a fraction of what's going on and even if i say you notice a fraction of what's going on you're still noticing a fraction of what's going on so right now wherever you are you're ignoring the walls of the room that you're in or the floor beneath your feet or the chair that you're sitting in if you're sitting or the fact that you're breathing all of these things are going on but you're ignoring them or you were ignoring them until i mentioned them and now you become more aware of those things because what we notice depends on where we direct our attention so what psychologists have done and what magicians have been doing for centuries is exploiting the fact that we don't see things unless we attend to them and the only thing i would say is that's not a bad thing it's been very useful to us we can't take in all the information around us so we've evolved to be very good at noticing things which are relevant and discarding things which are not relevant and most of the time we get that right which is why we're still here but in the process of course we do miss most things and so what that means is in lots of psychological experiments or in any magic show you'll just not notice everything that's going on and the reason i think it matters in terms of critical thinking is really that everything you think about any subject at all depends on what you notice because if you don't notice something then it won't cross your mind but if we remember that we notice a fraction of what's going on that should make us a little bit more humble about how little we actually know of the world you discussed.
- [13:34]
C
The creation and publication of the encyclopedia britannica in the late eighteenth century this book series that is meant to in many ways encapsulate the totality of important human knowledge and you have this great observation that there is a section missing which is geology and without that section without the knowledge of geology you know we thought or people thought then that the earth was six thousand years old or so so could you talk a little about the encyclopedia britannica and just how this example kind of demonstrates some of the ideas that you're putting forward.
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B
In the book yeah so encyclopaedia britannica that first appeared just a block from my office so i started with examples which i found handy bearing in mind of course that i wrote this book during COVID so there was limits into how far i could go but so britannica the second edition was described as an attempt to cover the whole field of human knowledge which is a hell of an idea if you think about it and one of the things it did which the first edition didn't do was it covered history and if you read the article on history it's supposed to be a history of the world since the beginning of the world in forty four pages and when you read it you are told that the world began about four thousand years bc or bce as we'd now say and the reason for that of course is because that was assumed in the christian world that's what people had calculated looking at the old testament and at the genealogy of the old testament and it said so in the king james bible that god created the world four thousand and four bc so we have this encyclopedia that's supposed to be the whole of human knowledge but we've got this claim that the world began four thousand four bc and meanwhile a few hundred pages back we've got no reference to geology because geology hadn't begun yet but strangely enough a few hundred yards from where britannica was being published at the exact same time as it was being published there was a chap called james hutton who was exploring rock formations very nearby and you came up with the idea based on his observations that the world was much much much older than the bible story said and he gave a paper to the royal society of edinburgh in seventeen eighty five which is seen as the origins of geology the discipline and so i use this as an example of how we're talking about one hundred yards from where the shop was that first produced britannica and to the place where geology began you have completely different views of the world being presented and yet even though it's assumed that the world began four thousand four bc by people who read britannica you've got somebody else who takes a more radical approach who thinks in a different way and comes up with an entirely different way of looking at the world which of course and went on to be.
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C
Rather influential sticking with with the local aspect of the book in edinburgh you look at the some of the controversies around the david hume tower which has since been renamed and the the sort of way in which you know people became very aware a few years ago over monuments memorials the people that were being memorialized and wanted to change them because of their representation what the people stood for what they did et cetera and i was wondering if you talk about the david hume tower and that.
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B
Section of the book too yeah obviously that was something that was topical as i was writing so in edinburgh so david hume the philosopher was from edinburgh and lived in edinburgh and much later not at the time but much much later a building was named after him which is called the david hume tower and a few years ago this became controversial because david hume had said certain things that would now be considered racist i say that because the term racism wasn't around at the time and so there was a controversy about this and there was also a more recent finding that suggested that hume had encouraged his patron to buy a slave plantation so in the course of this the university changed the name of the building so it's now called forte george square which sounds fairly safe and fairly neutral so part of the discussion around this was the idea that on the one hand you have got an ideal opportunity i should say this is my personal view you have an ideal opportunity to discuss these things david hume if anything was a skeptic and it seemed to me to be a chance for us to talk to students about the naming of buildings we talk about racism we can talk about differences between now and the past we can talk about who should be commemorated in the names of buildings and so on but there wasn't a discussion at the time it was just done probably for political reasons and then afterwards there was a bit of discussion particularly in the philosophy department lots of people making some useful contributions but it just seemed like a reflection of a trend that seems to be it seems to me to be getting worse which is that rather than discuss difficult topics we avoid them and i think we need to discuss them not just run away from them and then what we decide to do in terms of what we call buildings we can make a decision but at least that's a decision based on having had a full discussion of pros and cons and getting different.
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C
Opinions right i mean as you point out too in it like part of the irony of the name change is that they still the tower now is still in a sense representing a person that was you know was problematic as well isn't that the case it's yeah.
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B
I mean this is one of the things that as the fed is pulled we see more and more of this that when you go back in time the connections to slavery so the person who george brown so george square is named after george brown who was a brother of the architect and he married into a family with strong slavery connections and so you have this problem on the one hand of calling it forty george square didn't remove any connection to slavery the broader problem of course as many historians are pointing out is that when you look into the history of slavery the connections are all over the place when you look at how many people benefited from it even if they didn't own slaves and so on and so forth one of the interesting things about david hume is that on the one hand i agree with many of his views on the other hand i don't agree with all of them obviously and so when you try to commemorate somebody name of a building or a statue or whatever we end up commemorating a person rather than something they said or something they did and then people disagree about whether that person should be commemorated because they see that name that person as representing different things so if somebody is seen as a racist whether we should not commemorate a racist if someone is seen as a great philosopher then we might well want to commemorate them and then you get into the question of does that mean you can only commemorate people who have never done anything wrong in our view and then we get into a bit of a mess and so in terms of emotions if we react to a statue or a building's name because that person conjures up a fear an anxiety a repulsion because of some of the things that they did then that is going to shape our beliefs about whether they should have a statue whether they should have a building named after them if you step back from it if you look at someone like winston churchill for example who became controversial in that discussion we had about statues where people say well winston churchill said racist things too he said some things that some people find deeply offensive on the other hand some people credit him with having protectors from hitler's germany so how do you weigh these things up you know now that's a longer discussion that's a discussion about on what basis should we have a statue of someone on what basis should we name a building after someone but if you wait for somebody to come along who has not done anything that we now regard as wrong then we're going to be stuck aren't we it's one of the things these statues are old because they were put up at a time when such things were not discussed in the way that they are now and it's difficult now to think of people who we might erect a statue to and then imagine would anyone find that offensive and now we have to go and check all sorts of things that they might have said maybe we shouldn't be having statues of people maybe we should be having statues to ideas that we agree are good rather than to people who are obviously flawed mama papa mi c muy pronto pero suville terra no tie sufri por la moda con los precios vajos de la vuelta clases de amazon amazon gas amenos.
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Son riemas bundle and safe with expedia you were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row we were made to quietly save you more expedia made to travel savings vary and subject to availability flight inclusive packages are atoll protected this episode is brought to you by progressive insurance do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game well with the name your price tool from progressive you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills try it at progressive dot com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law not available in all states at blinds dot com comma it's not just about window treatments it's about you your style your space your way whether you diy or want the pros to handle it all you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right from free expert design help to our one hundred percent satisfaction guarantee everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows because at blinds dot com comma the only thing we treat better than windows is you visit blinds dot com now for up to forty five percent off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost rules and restrictions apply i think.
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C
Part of the reason why the discussion is interesting and it connects to an aspect of something you talk about at the beginning and even to your title radical thinking of like what is a radical that depending on the context whether it's the time that someone was deemed a radical or the location someone can seem to be very radical for example advocates of universal universal voting rights for men was radical at a point in time when it was only limited to certain men of course now we would see this not as radical at all if someone was advocating that only men should have the right to vote then we would see this as extremely reactionary viewpoint so i think that connects a lot to you know your your section on how customs and habits shape reality that in a certain in a certain certain area certain locations certain times people have certain views that are narrowly confined whether it's by the nine to five working schedule or all sorts of other things so could you talk a little bit how these customs and habits that we have end up shaping our reality shaping our limits of what we think.
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B
Is possible yeah so the radical thing there's a couple of things but the radical thinking i chose that term partly because of the radical road which is a place in edinburgh named after radicals that you just alluded to who had ideas that were considered radical then but now would not be considered not radical enough the broader point is that radical comes in the latin radic meaning root and so radical thinking is thinking about the roots the foundations of our thoughts and that's why radical thinking became the title of the book when you then start thinking about the foundations of our thoughts you get into things that really aren't obvious at all such as time and space and the ways in which we experience time and space so if we think about this historically if we go back before the industrial revolution people experience time in a very different way and the exemplar of the shift is the emergence of the factory where people would now work shifts so that the owners could maximize profit from the capital so labour would be around the clock people would work shifts they would be paid for time rather than for produce they would be called to work at a certain time they would get off at a certain time leisure time separated from work time and so on so forth and so what you get is the emergence of what became normal at least in much of the world which is working monday to friday nine till five this becomes just part and parcel of our daily life and everything works around that and so we take these things for granted because everyone around us is in the same boat and it's only when we go to another culture or perhaps change time zones and then we were reminded oh right right enough it's morning here and these people don't work on these days or they work in different ways and they work seven days and so on and so forth so it's really there are lots of things that we take for granted because we're in a situation where everyone around us takes them for granted too and when everyone takes something for granted we just don't notice it and if we're going to notice these things we take for granted then we need to go to places where or talk to people from places where they have very different assumptions they have very different foundations they have very different ways of working and thinking being with each other oftentimes people.
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C
Then will try and embrace you know to to break out of these you know these customs these habits these ways of thinking whether it's you know in the very extreme sense the fact that if you live in a time and a place where people have certain certain strongly held views you know that you might just adopt those views adopt those customs and habits in an uncritical way i think sometimes you know for a person like you know like david hume or other philosophers there's almost like this this extra disappointment that like this person was so smart and intelligent and questioned so many things yet they were such a they were also a person of their time in a way or they were a person that that didn't overcome the racism the sexism of their time so why is it that and i think you sort of talk this in the book why is it that just like embracing critical thinking isn't necessarily going to help people break out of these.
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B
Issues so as far as critical thinking goes so critical thinking has come to mean many different things and so the i suppose the difference between radical thinking and what's genuinely described as critical thinking is that this is what i think it's what i think critical thinking should be it's about how we get there not where we end up so i don't talk about biases i talk a little bit about biases and fallacies but not much mostly about their limits because i think that once we start talking about trying to get it right and avoid getting it wrong we're now talking about where we're going to end up in terms of the limits of critical thinking what you see and perhaps david hume is an example in that sense he's very good at being critical in certain contexts but then he doesn't apply them to other contexts and if you're going to think in a radical way you need to get in the habit of questioning everything something which david hume said in a sense but then just didn't practice in all ways and so to me it starts with this basic idea that everything we think is based on what we notice but we notice a fraction of what's going on and everything we think is based not only on what we notice but how we interpret that and we can always interpret things in different ways and once we grasp that that everything we think is based on a fraction of what's going on and a particular interpretation we really should then should follow that our beliefs our worldview is clearly limited and the only way to see beyond our limited view is to consider the views of people who disagree with us and it seems that we're getting worse at that when actually we should be getting better.
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C
At it people then will advocate and i feel like this is a fair you know been a very prevalent view for a long time promoted that the way that we can get out of these these problems is by embracing science and logic because science is based in evidence and and you know logic is based in a certain reasoning pattern though of course it you know the problem with science is that there are things that we might not be measuring or not know we don't know how to measure it or with logic there are assumptions that are coming into play that we aren't considering in advance so what do you see as some of the.
- [33:41]
B
Limits there well yes a lot of people would say critical thinking should be based on at least one of if not both logic and science and i'm all for logic and science i'm fond of both of them the way in which i talk about them in the book is about well some of the ways in which i think they're helpful but also in terms of the limits what are the limits well logic is abstract how does it apply to the real world that's how some logicians ended up talking about fallacies and so you look at arguments in terms of fallacy fallacies fallacious patterns in arguments that people have nothing wrong with that though i personally when i read these things sometimes struggle to interpret the argument as being the same fallacy as i'm being told it is but real world arguments are just really messy for one thing a lot of arguments or claims are not about the truth they're about getting your attention they're about diverting your attention they're about presenting the person in a particular way there's a function to making claims and making arguments that isn't simply about being logical so there's lots of things going on beyond the logic and logic can't deal with that because it's not about logic it's about broader human interaction and the attempt to get people to notice certain things and to interpret them in a certain way and science is the same all scientific knowledge is based on limited data and then the interpretation of that data at the center of science there's an idea which is very common which is typically described as falsifiability or falsification ism which is that claims should be falsifiable we should be able to show they're wrong again it's a very important idea i couldn't agree more with it but what that means is that when you make claims you cannot be certain they're right and the problem we've got with biases i think is that yes we're all biased sure but when do our biases lead us to get it wrong well we can't know that unless we know what's true and usually that's what we're arguing about and so what happens is people disagree about what's true and they accuse each other of being biased which is what we see continually so to me again knowing the names of biases and the names of fallacies is no bad thing if it helps you make better arguments or spot bad ones but it won't get you there because in the real world claims and arguments there's more going on than logic and evidence there's a lot of stuff which isn't about either and to make sense of that you've got to approach it in a broader way.
- [36:48]
C
How then do you think people should best embrace radical thinking that you explore.
- [36:53]
B
In the book there's two things that i'm trying to do which are big themes in the book one is be more aware of the limits of our own view not because these are problems or errors or biases it's just how we see the world that's all but being more aware of the limits of our own worldview from that then to see the bigger picture engage with alternative views these can be seen as a source they can help us see the assumptions that we make we don't need to agree with them but if we can understand them if we can see where they're coming from then we'll see a bigger view beyond our own limited view i also give a little bit of advice if that's the word in terms of how to make sense of anything in particular and that really is a i think it's solid but it's not very complicated so it doesn't sound like much but i think it works which is anything that we hear anything that we see or hear we can begin with the claim at the heart of it so whatever it is that we hear what's the actual claim not the topic or we'd be talking around it but what's the actual claim at the heart of it and then of that claim we can ask three simple questions first of all what are they actually saying which sounds obvious but it's not because we endlessly argue with each other and talk past each other because we're not actually talking about the same thing we're not arguing about the same thing this was the experience of brexit if you've heard of that over there if we learn one thing from brexit and i'm not sure there's two it's that people interpret the same word in different ways so the first thing is what are they actually claiming secondly what's the basis for that so what's the evidence for that claim but not the evidence for some other claim it's the evidence for that particular claim because until we know what the claim actually is we don't know what the evidence is evidence of and then the third question which is the one that's typically forgotten is why are they telling us this because even if it's true endless things are true why of all the things that they might tell us are they telling us this and that's where you get into the function of what people say which might be about getting us to notice them or to take our attention away from something else and so on and so forth i think that.
- [39:47]
C
That'S that's really great advice and you know i was wondering you know as you you sort of finish the you know finish the discussion of the book as we finish the discussion of the book if there's anything that you would sort of just counsel not just in terms of like advice in terms of embracing radical thinking but just like little activities because you start the book by just talking about counting steps and things like that so are there just like little things that you might say that people to do just to start to shift their frame of mind a little.
- [40:22]
B
Bit yeah i suppose one thing just based on what you're saying one thing to do is next time you're going to work or to class or depending on who the audience for this is just don't look at your phone just for one warning don't look at that just look at the world and spot the number of things that you haven't noticed before and ask yourself simple questions like what is that things like street names or building names who's that why is it called that how long has it been there why is it named after that person who was that person should it be named after that person maybe we could stutter up some more but it's surprising how i did it again just the other day i was going to work and i was thinking having written this book and i walked to work every day and i walked back every day and i was thinking of the route and i realized that there was a couple of street names i couldn't remember that alone just reminds you of how little you notice the same goes for a million other things but i think any exercise where you are reminding yourself of how little you notice even though you've seen these things countless times is useful because for me it's got to start with some level of humility it's got to start with some level of i don't actually know everything and if you've ever given directions in edinburgh it happens all the time particularly this time of year where people are looking for somewhere but they're looking at their phones they're not asking people giving directions is really difficult and the reason it's difficult is that even though you know how to get there it's very hard to describe and that's just one more example of we know the world but we don't really notice it because if we really noticed it then giving directions would be easier i don't know if that's a very good example but in terms of just walking around and noticing things and realizing that most of these things that you see every day but you don't know what they are is a simple reminder of how little we know i think that's so.
- [42:46]
C
True and it definitely is the case that things that are sometimes right in front of us you know things that we that we engage in on an everyday basis that we just end up forgetting the details neglecting them or just not paying attention and starting there can really be a great way to just set set on the path to being aware of so much more around us which is quite exciting and invigorating in many ways too so peter thank you so much for being asked on the new books network it was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you about your book the book is radical thinking how to see the bigger picture thanks so much thanks caleb.