173. Naomi Oreskes — Why Trust Science?

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2021

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this interview, based on her landmark book, Why Trust Science?, historian of science Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength — and the greatest reason we can trust it. Drawing vital lessons from cases where scientists got it wrong, Oreskes shows how consensus is a crucial indicator of when a scientific matter has been settled, and when the knowledge produced is likely to be trustworthy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show.
0:07.0	I'm your host Michael Sherman,
0:10.0	before I introduce today's guest,
0:12.0	our sponsor, The Great Courses Plus, it's an app,
0:15.8	touch the app on your phone, opens right up to hundreds and hundreds of courses, each of which has a
0:20.5	dozen to two dozen lectures, a annual subscription, just like with
0:24.9	Netflix or Hulu or any of these, get you access to all the content. You can
0:28.8	skip around courses, you can skip around lectures, listen to as much as you want or not. I just open one up here on
0:35.9	great heroes and discoveries of astronomy and you just touch on any of the lectures.
0:41.3	Here's one Carl Sagan, the great space
0:44.2	communicator, which I just listened to, which was really nice. And you can listen to
0:49.5	it at 1.25 speed, which I do there, which makes it about a 19-20 minute lecture rather than 30 minutes
0:55.3	So you can do that on a good workout or drive or commute or whatever
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1:04.6	dot com slash shirmer you get a free trial and 20% off the annual fee which comes out to
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1:13.8	And again, you get access to all this great online content.
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1:23.3	dot com slash shirmer to get your free trial and your discount. Okay. My guest
1:30.2	today is Naomi Arezkies the author of this book, Why Trust Science? The
1:35.2	entire book is the answer to that question.
	...

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