How Do We Know What We Know?

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Sally Kohn: How do you settle disagreements of opinion in a productive way? Humans are wired to be very biased in all kinds of ways. Our biases don't cancel out. They actually can compound each other, she says. She argues that the only way to make knowledge is to check with people who are different from your selve and persuade them. And then they say, wait a minute. We can create a global scientific community of people checking each other's beliefs,. channelling their conflicts into organized efforts to figure out who's right and who's wrong.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.