#389 - Thinking scientifically: why it's hard, why it matters, and a practical toolkit

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. In this episode, I step back to share how my thinking is evolving around a topic that sits actually well upstream of almost everything else we discuss on this podcast, which is how to think scientifically. Now, I get asked this question all the time, and frankly, I don't think until this episode, I really had a comprehensive way to approach this important topic.
So, this is really an introspective episode about why scientific thinking is so difficult for us as a species, why it matters more than ever in an environment flooded with misinformation, and what each of us can do to get better at separating what we want to be true from what the evidence actually suggests. So, without further delay, I hope you'll enjoy this episode of The Drive.
Today, I want to talk about a skill that sits upstream of nearly every decision you make about health, policy, risk, and even how to evaluate other people in this space. I want to talk about how to think scientifically.
By that, I don't mean how to run a lab or memorize statistics. I mean how to evaluate claims, how to update your beliefs when the evidence changes, and how to figure out who to trust when you can't do the analysis yourself, which as we're going to come to appreciate is often. If you get good at that, you put yourself in the position to make better decisions than somebody who simply knows more facts but doesn't know how to weigh them. We're going to cover four things here today. First, what scientific thinking actually is beyond spending time in a lab. Second, why it's so hard for us, which has less to do with intelligence than you might expect.
Third, what you can do as an individual to get better at it. And fourth, how to find people you can trust when you can't do the analysis yourself, which as I said a second ago, is going to be most of the time for most people.
One idea is going to thread through this entire episode, and I want to put it on the table right now. The goal of thinking scientifically is not simply to be right, it's to be less wrong over time. Science is a process built around that principle. And what I want to do today is help you engage with it more skillfully.
This is a topic I get asked about very often. And I think honestly until now, I haven't had a great consolidated approach for laying it out.
So let's start with what we actually mean when we say think scientifically. There's a common misconception that scientific thinking is something scientists do in labs, and the rest of us just receive in the form of results. But that's not what I'm talking about at all. Thinking scientifically is a way of engaging with claims about the world. Any claims, not just ones that come with a citation attached. At its core, it means generating hypotheses, possible explanations for why something might be the way it is or how something works. It means testing those hypotheses against experimental evidence. It means updating your beliefs when the evidence changes, and it means tolerating uncertainty throughout this entire process. It means separating what you want to be true from what the evidence suggests is true, and recognizing, really recognizing, how often those two things are in tension.
As Richard Feynman, someone we're going to refer to a few times today, one of the greatest scientific thinkers in history once said, The first principle is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
Scientific thinking means being more invested in the process that produced a conclusion than in the conclusion itself.
Again, I want you to say that again with me, because that is not intuitive. Scientific thinking means being more invested in the process that produced a conclusion than in the conclusion itself. Most of us evaluate claims by asking, is it true? A scientific thinker asks a different set of questions first. How did they arrive at this? What's the evidence? How strong is it? What are the alternative hypotheses or explanations?