You're listening to the Michael Shurmer Show.

Welcome to the Michael Shurmer Show.

I'm your host Michael Shurmer.

My guest today is Lee McIntyre. His new book is How to Talk to

a Science Denier. Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and others who deny reason.

Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University.

He's the author of Dark Ages, the case for a science of

human behavior, post-truth, and the scientific attitude defending science from

denial, fraud, and pseudoscience, all published by MIT Press, as is this book.

So we have quite an interesting conversation about how do you even define science denial, since no one in the history of the world as

ever consider themselves to be science deniers everybody thinks they have

science on their side so how do we know the difference how does science operate how do you define it

how do we determine what's reliable knowledge or not in other words that line of

demarcation and then we go through his adventures at the Flat Earth Society Convention, which is quite amusing.

But he really shows that these people, they are smart, they are logical, they have arguments.

And, you know, so the question is how best to

engage somebody that has those kind of arguments and then from something as

fringy is flat earth we get into the anti-vaxers anti anti-GMOers, and other, you know, slightly more important topics

for our society.

And then we kind of wrap up on what some of the guiding principles are for how to talk to somebody who has gone down this path.

Like for example, if you have an upcoming dinner with your crazy Uncle Bob who's a Q-An-on person or whatever

What do you say? How do you talk to them? And so Lee gives us some really good advice on that.

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