Why do People Believe in Pseudoscience? Interview with Science is Dope

 Abhijit: So, welcome everybody to Rationable. Today, I am here with Pranav. He has created the channel Science is Dope, and science very much is dope. And he's got his second channel going now, which is also seeing quite a bit of success where he is debating people left right, and centre live-streaming it. And he's definitely been a big inspiration for me to get back into the YouTube business. So thank you for coming on, Pranav. Welcome to Rationable.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Thank you, Abhijit, for having me.

Abhijit: It's my pleasure. But I really like, I was, I really wanted to get into, first of all, how did you get into this business? You studied as an engineer, but how did you get into scepticism?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Even back in my engineering days, I used to watch a lot of content from people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, it's all people in the US, Christopher Hitchens, all such people who are already into this scepticism. So I used to watch all of them, and I used to be really inspired by them, but I had no thought of doing that myself.

Cause I was an, I was studying engineering. I wanted to work in the engineering field for a while, at least forever. That's what the plan was back then. But once I actually got into a job, an engineering job, I was like, I didn't like it all that much, and I wanted to do something else. And I realized that what I really liked was science and scepticism at that point itself.

So I want to go into some area that was into science and education because I like teaching also at that point. Now I had this YouTube channel in mind then, but I didn't know how it was gonna be, what I was gonna do. I didn't even have cameras in mind back then. I'd never recorded myself before, before that point.

I didn't know what I can be like on camera, all these things. So I thought of joining an Ed Tech company because I'd be able to develop content that's consistent with my passions. So I liked science, I liked teaching, I liked all these things. That's what I did for the next couple of years. And I would say half a decade. And then somewhere while doing that, I decided, okay, you know what? I should start my own channel and talk about science myself. And I did that. And initially, I wasn't getting a lot of traction, but the time when I got a lot of traction was when I uploaded videos that had these sceptical thoughts that were very anti-pseudoscience those kinds of videos.

And I just decided, okay, if the audience wants this, and there are very few people in the market on YouTube, India doing such things. At the same time, there are a lot of people promoting pseudoscience on YouTube, India, why don't I do this? And I just began doing that, and I, today, here we are. Yeah.

Abhijit: Man! Now that you, when you got into scepticism and got into the groove of things, did you realize that there were some things like pseudoscientific or basically false things that you used to believe back in the day?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: I was into stock market analysis, which I know today is a complete pseudoscience

Abhijit: yeah.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Is that

Abhijit: (You have) to make a video of this,

Pranav Radhakrishnan: it depends on what you mean by stock market analysis because looking at companies, looking at how they're doing, looking at their performance, their profits and revenue and all this, and then deciding how that stock will do, I think that makes sense. That is fine. But there are, there is a whole, there are a whole group of people who look at graphs, just the shape of the graph and decide where that graph is gonna go next.

So they'll say, okay, there is a head and shoulders pattern. That means the graph is gonna turn up. That is what they're doing is they're looking at the past performance of the graph of this stock, and, hey, in the past when the graph had the shape, it went up, so it's gonna go up now also. No such thing. That's all pseudoscience. I think they call this. I don't know what the term is. I thought it was stock market analysis. I think it's I forgot the name of it, but this is pseudoscience. Then I was also into this alpha male red pill bullshit.

Abhijit: Oh yeah.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: So that is also complete pseudoscience. But the problem is there were things so when I was into those things, the outcome they were selling was something I wanted.

There was a, I would, I don't know if desperation is the right word, but that desperation was there in me to get that outcome. So I would blindly listen to whatever they said and did whatever they were saying. If it was for making money or if it was for success with women I would do whatever the hell to get that outcome.

And it took me a while and probably a lot of content creators and their content for me to understand and realise that I was into all the shit that was complete bullshit.

Abhijit: Yeah. I saw the, I watched your video on the whole Alpha male channels and those influencers, and I honestly I got sucked into it a little bit as well at one point of time, but I was like, okay, I've been a loser my whole life. I've never been good with chicks. But I've had my fun what if one can call it that, I've never been one of the popular kids and I can see the attraction to wanting to do your beard right and how to work out and what chicks like, and that confidence that you need to develop. But let's face it, confidence is not something that comes automatically. Or even if

Pranav Radhakrishnan: there were some good things that came out of that. So I began working out, and I began working on my confidence. All those things are positive, but I would say all those things can, are genuinely helpful themselves without all this garbage of misogyny and all that.

Abhijit: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: It's the same thing even in spirituality, which if I'm shifting gears a little bit

Abhijit: yeah. Shift away.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: So if we talk about spirituality, there is some genuine advice within spiritual advice and what all these Godmen and all these people say. Some of that is genuinely useful for people in their lives.

But when they tag it along with all this meaningless bullshit and all these religious ideas and all this pseudoscience and all this nonsense about souls and astral travel and all that bullshit astrology and all that bullshit that's when I find it to be problematic. So you can't say, so how do I, there are good ideas, but overall, if it's the idea of spirituality that you wanna stand behind, then I think you are in the wrong.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. Because when Sadhguru started coming up on my feed and I started watching a few of the things and his life advice is essentially is, I wouldn't say Okay, I think it'll be a little too much to say that it's common sense, but it's something that a lot of people realize along the way anyway. It's not like any advice that I wouldn't be able to give to somebody, so some, most of it is pretty straightforward. I think a lot of the stuff that people like Sadhguru and all these other gurus, especially on YouTube, say some of that stuff is genuinely helpful. Yes, it's decent life advice. It's about, it's usually about not stressing too much about things that you can't control and about learning to, become more self-aware and finding calmer and managing your stress, et cetera. I totally get that. And that is, it's decent advice.

And there was a friend of mine many years ago, who used to read books by Osho and he said, dude, it's so profound. It's so amazing. I was what? And he read off a few examples. I don't remember exactly what he said right now. And I was like, yeah, dude, that's obvious. That's pretty straightforward.

I get it. But when they start getting into the things like Sadhguru starts getting into why you shouldn't eat meat, because it's a dead thing and it's dead things soul or energy will get inside your body and make you dead inside. Or something to that effect. I'm just paraphrasing here, but that's where pseudoscience starts coming in and it starts mixing fact or decent advice with really bad advice or just completely inaccurate advice. That is the most dangerous kind of pseudoscience that I've encountered. It's when you mix well with bad. I like to say that if you cover a pile of shit with chocolate, it's still gonna be a pile of shit. I'm sure that a lot of equivalent statements out there, but it doesn't make anything better.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: What also happens is that with Sadhguru there's another problem. All the people around him, his entire group, that's a proper cult. People worship him like he's a god. Anything he says they will blindly trust and believe in all that shit.

And then, I saw a recent video, I think it was on this guy, Flying Beast, his channel. He met Sadhguru and he was doing the bike biking campaign, to save the earth.

Abhijit: Yeah. Save soil, hashtag save soil.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yeah. So he was doing that. And Flying Beast went and met him and a number of people were praying to this guy. They were holding them, they were holding their hands. They were like when the bike arrived, when Sadhguru's bike arrived, everyone was in prayer. Everyone is around and it's thousands of people or so. And the problem. One problem for Sadhguru also is that when you have so many people around you affirming everything you say, everything you believe, everything you are telling them he's also gonna get in the mindset of, hey, of what I'm saying has to be right.

And I think that also, it's like an endless feedback loop. So he's gonna get affirmation and so he's gonna say more wrong things. He's gonna get affirmation for that and he's gonna keep doing this for a long time. And I think that cycle has gone too far. And right now, I think he just says a lot of really so there are a lot of impressionable people watching him.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: And they're gonna trust him blindly because some of the other things he says help them at some point. So they're gonna trust and believe everything he says. And that's where we gonna, we get into a lot of

Abhijit: Exactly. And the most I think not only in our country, I think it's a worldwide phenomenon. People mistake confidence for evidence,

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Conviction for

Abhijit: conviction and confidence. If you say, if you said it so confidently, yaar, it must be, it must have some sort of truth to it. And like people aren't that transparently always. When you see something with confidence, it doesn't mean it's true.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yeah. That's a problem. As human beings, we are far more emotional than logical. So we respond a lot more to social cues. We look at it, look at the other person's face, their expressions as they're saying whatever, their tone, their conviction, their confidence, all these things. And we respond to how confident a person is in saying what they're saying to

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: To decide whether or not to, and that becomes a problem because people say absolute bullshit with complete conviction like Sadhguru and a lot of Godmen, all the Godmen say. So I think it's a human tendency to not look at the evidence and rather look at the con, how confident the person is who's saying this.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly. And the charisma that they ooze. I'm not gonna go into any analogies, but your content on Sadhguru really went viral. Was that the turning point for your YouTube channel?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: It was, it was, it most definitely was. If I were to go back and remake that video now, all the content I said in that video will still be the same.

But the tone in which I say it, I'm saying it, I would probably change that. I feel like I, I was a little too condescending, maybe a little too attacking. There were videos after that where I was even more so, so for example, the how to Be a Godman, that video was very sarcastic and very, that whole video, the tone of that video is very offensive to anyone who actually had held those beliefs. The problem I feel, if I talk in the tone, is that I alienate people, uh, who, so I'm preaching to the choir when I have that tone. So I only talk to people who already agree with me, and they're the only ones who are gonna take the message away from everybody when that's not what I'm gonna do.

I wanna get the people who disagree with me to think about what I say based on what I say to think. And if I can't even get them to listen, I'm not doing my job. Yeah, I, after that point, you can say the whole of this year, all my videos, I made sure that my tone doesn't offend people and thereby not have them listen to what I'm saying.

Abhijit: No, that's very good; that's good; that's a good step in the right direction because I think when we are all first getting into it, there is a lot of unresolved angst and frustration that we've built up over the years. Like I've been into scepticism or trying to learn more about scepticism for about over a decade now, for about 12 years now.

 Because I'm not a, I don't have a science background. I don't even have an engineering background. I'm a writer, and that's my primary skill set. So actually developing something of a scientific temper was, I, it took me a while to understand that maybe I'm at the right place to be able to explain it to other people because it took me a long time to learn it.

But while you're learning it, there's so much frustration that builds up, especially in the very beginning, when I realised that homoeopathy was basically nonsense. I was like, really? I've been taking it my whole life. My parents swear by it. Like, how is this, how is, how am I finding out about this now?

So, I tried very hard not to let that frustration get the better of me. So the first couple of Facebook posts I put up, were like, "Homoeopathy fans, did you know this?” This is gonna blow your mind; check out this video. And I put up a Richard Dawkins video, and the way I got attacked after that, I was like, I didn't even say anything offensive, but people still took offence to it.

So people who were gonna take offence to it will do it. But then, once I discovered Anthony Magnobosco, I was talking about this with Vimoh when we were chatting, and he's had a huge influence on how I approach these topics. I'm still not very good at it because when it comes to very close friends and family, I let loose, which I probably shouldn't be doing because I'm probably pushing them further into their belief systems.

But especially with my family, a lot of that angst did come out; even though it wasn't in the public sphere, at least a lot of it did happen. And that did have a pretty big backlash on it, which is made me very cautious as time has gone on to kind of temper my responses down a little bit more so it becomes a little bit more acceptable, and the conversation goes on a little bit more productively. And you've really; you've really added, like you've jumped in with both feet into that playground with your debate live streams, which I've found really great, by the way.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Thank you.

Abhijit: How is your experience been so far? What have you been, and what have you learned along the way? I know it's just been two streams down till now, right?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yeah.

Abhijit: So what, how is it going?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: I'll answer this question because there was something you uh, mentioned in the beginning that I wanna talk about. Yeah. So what I wanna say is scientific education doesn't mean scientific temper.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: I have a video on my channel of people sitting around who are professors from really big institutes like I IT and these obviously, they're at the top of their scientific area, whatever field they're in. But at the same time, they have all these irrational beliefs.

So where is their scientific temper? So that's what I'm saying. Scientific education has nothing to do with scientific temper. You can learn scientific temper, irrespective of whether you have a scientific education. So I have some, I have basic scientific training, but the scientific temper is something I wouldn't have developed had I never been exposed to these ideas back in college.

So I grew up in a very conservative environment. I would've been a very God-fearing, God-believing person if I hadn't been exposed to these ideas. Now, unfortunately, what religion does is what all these ideas do is they find children, they get children when they're very young when they're very impressionable. When children get in with these ideas when they're very young, even when they grow older, their core beliefs will still remain the same. They will still be coming from these things they used to believe. And when you're getting a scientific education, nobody gives a shit about scientific temper for them as long as marks are concerned, marks and exams, there, they only care about what you have learned in your books and what you can spit out in the exams.

Nobody cares about scientific temper. So what people end up doing is they end up having great scientific literacy without any scientific temper. They never have to develop any scientific temper to get where they are in their professional lives or in their educational work,.

What we end up seeing is a lot of people, like what I showed in that video or what we have is a country full of people who have these beliefs about the world and the universe they live in that are formed from these indoctrinated ideas that they got in their childhood, instead of being informed by science.

Hey. So when they say that, when someone says that you shouldn't eat food during an eclipse. Think about it. Okay. Why? What's happening? What exactly is happening? The thing is, people don't believe, people don't understand that if something is happening in the world, it's because something caused it.

Abhijit: Exactly.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: And finding this cause-effect relationship between things is what science does.

When people believe that things are caused because there is some magical, mystical cause that makes things happen in the world, which they're indoctrinated with in their childhood, this is what ends up happening. And a lot of the pseudoscience we see on YouTube reinforces this kind of belief where you can have an effect without a cause, that kind of belief and the effect can be as amazing, as extraordinary as you want.

That isn't how the world works.

Abhijit: Exactly. And there's a lot of post hoc rationalisation. It basically means it’s trying to rationalise something after the fact, and essentially, they're trying to justify a lot of these beliefs, I think you've tackled a couple of these on your channel as well and trying to stick science into it somehow, or at least their understanding of science, which usually isn't very accurate.

Especially if you're not supposed to eat something, during a solar eclipse, they'll talk about radiation and these kinds of things, getting into your food and that radiation will make you feel, make you unwell. And then of course, Sadhguru will come up with another explanation of some other karmic nonsense, which will also be stuffed into that as well.

And that also reinforces things and justifies people's beliefs even if they start doubting, like, “Is that really true?” Then they watch one of these, and they're like, yeah, that makes sense. And then it just goes off the handle.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: That's what happens. I'll answer your actual question now about the debates. So it's been pretty good so far. So I initially thought when I debated there'll be a lot of people who take offence to things I say, confronting me with a, but whatever I'm saying is wrong, and they'll gimme a lot, it'll get very heated, is what I initially thought.

But so far it's never been like that. They genuinely have questions and they wanna just ask me, Hey, what's your response to all this? And I give them that. And sometimes I, when I don't have a response, when it's something I don't understand myself, I tell 'em that too. But most of the time I think some of the ideas I tell them, the responses that I give to questions they have, are something they've never heard in their life.

So I, I think it's helpful even for the people watching and for the people talking to me that way. And so far it's been a nice experience. The reason I started that in the first place, the debate streams, is because I've never had conversations with people at such a large scale like that.

And now when I have that opportunity, I don't wanna put into waste.

Abhijit: Oh, absolutely. That's one of the most important things because these conversations need to happen, whether they're controversial or whether it's just people appreciating your work or even having a little bit of criticism. I didn't, I like your stuff generally, but then there's that little caveat that they put in there, which is also very valuable because you always learn from those.

Have you has there been anything important that you've learned through these conversations?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Recently, I had a stream where I talked a lot about alternative medicine mm-hmm there were many people who were like, Hey, I agree with most of what you say, but when you come to alternative medicine, sometimes I find this issue with it.

For example, there was a person in my last live stream who used to take homoeopathic medicines for the last 15 years or something, and it's worked for them for a long time. And he came, saying, “Hey if this is work for me, how can you say this in your video? I'm living proof that this works.” So my response to them is that “Hey, you had medicine, and your disease resolved. That doesn't mean the medicine is what caused your disease to resolve. It can be that it's been, it was your disease or your inconvenience was something that resolved itself over time. It might have been something minor that gets better with time and ,in the while it's getting better, if you have these homoeopathic medicines, you are gonna think that the medicine is what got it better. And quite often, what a lot of homoeopathic doctors do, alternative medicine doctors do is tell their patients to continue their medicine, normal medicines that the modern medicine doctor gave them while they're also taking the homoeopathic medicine. “

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: So, at this point, how will you know what medicine actually helped you? Obviously, with these things with all alternative medicine, you can't prove for sure that there is absolutely no effect. All you can say is, "Hey, there is no active ingredient. So how and why would it work? How would it work?” You have an answer to that. You can just ask these questions. You can't prove 100% that there's nothing. Ayurveda is a little harder than homoeopathy when it comes to this because it does have active ingredients. So people can claim that it does work, and you can't say for sure it doesn't work, but you can't say, Hey, when you have a bunch of ingredients that don't, that all have some effect on the body, how can you see which of them worked unless you isolate them and figure out what actually has the effect you want?

And how can you say that the others are not harmful? Because I see a lot of doctors, liver specialists, for example, a doctor shout out to Dr Abby

Abhijit: Abby Phillips for the win

Pranav Radhakrishnan:, "They have a lot of patients coming to them who have taken a lot of ayurvedic or alternative medicines, who get liver injuries and have to, like, sit on the operating table waiting for a transplant, and sometimes they even die not getting a transplant. Given all this, isn't it far better to trust something that has been tested and works with this many people?

Abhijit: And the right dosage to take it in so that you don't get any of the side effects, or at least if you do get side effects, they've been documented, so you know how to deal with them.

That is the most important thing. And like you'd mentioned for homoeopathy, I knew someone who I was chatting with; they had the broke broken wrist, and it's in a cast, and they're on painkillers, but they said it healed much faster because I was taking homoeopathy. I was like, how do you know that it was the homoeopathy that made it heal faster?” How much time did it save you? How much time did it take for your wrist to heal? They were like about five or six weeks. I said that's a standard time for a bone to mend, especially if it's a relatively small bone like in your wrist. They're like, yeah, but the homoeopathy made it quicker. Like, how do you know that?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Do you have a reference to compare it with? Do you break your wrists all the time and did it heal faster because it t took the homoeopathy? These are questions they don't think about when they say things.

Abhijit: Exactly. And that of course, there's a, there's so much confirmation bias, which infiltrates our mind. And it's a confirmation bias is just it's nothing to be ashamed of, or it is something to be aware of and something that one should counter. But it's not really; it's something that we've evolved to have because we just want, like, when we have a reinforced belief, I'm not sure evolutionarily why it exists, but we have that system in mind where our beliefs are kept as intact as possible through whatever we go through. So whatever, maybe our tribe has told us whatever beliefs our tribe holds, we have to stick to that. And we use that as an identity to separate ourselves and our tribe from other tribes who might have different belief systems, and, just maybe that could be one possible way because I think a lot of our evolution has taken off from the tribalistic way of life.

But it's something we should all be aware of. We have it. You have it. I have confirmation bias about a whole bunch of things. People have said that I have confirmation bias about science, which is, I probably do, but the key thing is at least I'm aware of that. And if it is getting in my way, I have to be aware that it's getting in my way when it comes to learning something new or understanding the science of something in particular and what might be wrong and right.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: So one of the comments or one of the criticisms I often face is that, hey, if Sadhguru or whoever, if the people you are against are biased in this direction, then you are biassed in the other direction, in favour of science.

How can you say that you are right? You could be biased. And to them, I would say, “Hey, you're right.” I'm biassed. He's biassed. So let's not look at what either of us is saying; let's look at the actual evidence, because the exact evidence won't be biased. And look at what the evidence says.” Again, what I want people to take away is not to take my word for it. I provide all my evidence, all my sources for what I'm saying in my description, and the video description. Look at that yourself and form your own opinions. You don't have to take my word for anything. So if, when you have a problem of he said one thing, she said something else, who do you believe? Don't believe it either with them.

Believe the evidence.

Abhijit: Exactly. And understanding evidence is something that is, I think also, still a hole that needs to be filled. And I you've made a video on uh, randomized control trials.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yeah. Yeah. RCT trials.

Abhijit: Yeah. Yeah. So I've written an article about it, which I will be turning into a video soon, but I think those are the levels of reliability of an RCT because now we see people like, what's his name? Baba Ramdev and Patanjali in general, claim that they have evidence for what works, and they say that we've got a study which does this, but because people don't really understand and it is hard to understand how to read a study.

I've been working on it for quite a while how to be able to figure out, I still don't understand all the nitty gritty, some of the finer details of the statistics and what does that thing that Steven Novella's got that serious, so Steven Novella from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. He's got a serious he's got one thing which he really picks out on. For a lot of studies, which is basically, it's a

Pranav Radhakrishnan: sample size?

Abhijit: No, it's not sample size. It's P hacking; that's the one. That is another detail I have tried very hard to get and wrap my head around. But for a layperson, it is not easy to really understand p hacking. So you have to rely on reliable sources as well, who also understand the science, have done the research and or have studied the research and have come out with an accurate interpretation of what it means so that we can provide that as evidence as well.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: So what you said right now about the RCT trials, the fact that there's a lot of effort that goes into making that conclusion, and there are a lot of things in the world where you have to put a lot of thinking effort to conclude sometimes.

And that's where sometimes confirmation bias makes it easier. Cause you don't have to think there, right? You don't have to think much over there. And if you have a belief that if someone has told you that there are crocodiles in this river and you shouldn't go near it, and when you see something dangerous, maybe there's a deer that was, that gets eaten by a crocodile from that river, you will confirm that belief.

You'd probably be afraid of going near any water body after that. Cause you have a belief that there might be crocodile-infested waters, and you are reinforcing your own belief. When there's a completely safe water body, you'll still have that belief in the back of your head, which is getting reinforced, which has that confirmed, reinforced thought in the back of your head, which will stop you from going near that water body. It's the same thing in the real world. Okay? You have this medication that you believe it works, so you'll keep eating that instead of something else that, before it works, has to go through all these trials.

Maybe you might not eat it because getting it is expensive. While it's easier to have this homoeopathic remedy that's cheaper, there's a doctor who very, with very little consultation effort, you will get it. But things like that

Abhijit: or that your parents have been giving you since you were a kid.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yes. Something like that. Yeah.

Abhijit: Yeah, because I've been having homoeopathy since I was a kid. I've been taking ayurvedic medicine since I was a kid. And I especially remember this one called Mentat from Himalaya, which is supposed to improve memory. Now Mentat, though, just for sci-fi geeks out, there is a breed of humans in the Dune universe who are extremely proficient mathematicians and human calculators, basically.

But so I thought that was pretty cool. So I was like, oh, Mentat, a medicine named after one of my favourite books And so I used to pop that pill like two, three times a day, every day during my exams to build up my memory. I still got shit marks. And that didn't help me at all. So I already had I didn't have a confirmation bias as far as Ayurveda was concerned, but I had a huge one for homoeopathy, which I did use.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: What happens in such cases also, when you have you, right now, you had evidence against the medicine. The medicine didn't help you. But when you get such evidence, instead of thinking there was something wrong with the medicine, you would think there was something wrong with yourself.

Abhijit: Exactly.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: You, yeah. Maybe that medicine is not working for me. Maybe my body is not the right type for that medicine. So that's how strong confirmation bias is. You believe in that medicine so much that even when you have evidence against the medicine, you don't ascribe that negative evidence to the medicine. You ascribe it to some other factor that may have influenced the results.

Abhijit: Exactly. It's so much like religion, when we have that, that deep connection that maybe a childhood indoctrination, the confirmation biases that we have had maybe spiritual experiences that praying does help.

It has a lot of the same factors which go into understanding how alternative medicine works because a lot of it is faith-based, and there are so many justifications that people come up with as well. Like for example, if it doesn't work like it didn't work for me, did you use it for a long period of time? Oh, but Ayurveda that's supposed to work for very long periods of time. You're supposed to take it for a very long time before you know until it resolves itself, which it does resolve itself like you were talking about in your videos. This is a regression to the mean. After a certain point, if you have a chronic illness or maybe an allergic reaction, it will subside, and if you take it, take Ayurvedic medicine or homoeopathic medicine for long enough, it will subside. Then you give all the to the alternative medicine. But on the other hand, like I, the gentleman who came onto your debate stream and said, I've been taking it for 15 years, but when I took that homoeopathic medicine, it was an immediate change. So when it's convenient, it is an immediate change, or it takes an extremely long period of time, both of which can't be true. Another one is that when I give it to my dog, or when he said I give it to my daughter and she's three years old and still her problems resolved, a lot of it is regression to the mean, one, and it is also the confirmation bias of the parent or the pet owner because the pets don't really have any perception of what is a placebo and what isn't. But what they know is they've been given something by their master in a caring way, and eventually, things will subside and then things will come back. So when it comes to like really chronic problems, the cycle will keep on occurring. And because people don't really understand the studies, the quality of studies and the number of systematic reviews that have been done on homoeopathic studies have all found them completely ineffective. But if coming back to that previous point about people like Baba Ramdev promoting these studies that go out there, people have this false notion that if there is a study, that means it's legit. That confirmation bias really is so much easier because we have to think in ways we are not naturally programmed to be able to understand the pros and cons and the fallacies that go into not only what we think but how evidence is presented. Like when that whole Coronil thing happened.

And he was saying that this is a study that we've done, and we've published it, and it's got; we'll publish it soon. And there's a whole bunch of people who have been like, this is a hundred per cent success rate, and he keeps spouting that kind of stuff on all of his YouTube videos and Instagram videos, which I've been saving up one after another because You know, if you have obesity if you have a bad throat if you have

Pranav Radhakrishnan: blood cancer; there's a video where he prescribes yoga for blood cancer. And he talks about all these metrics in studies that have come down, all these blood reports, and values that come down if you did yoga. What Shit? Blood cancer!

Abhijit: I think as lay people like me being a layperson, you definitely have a little bit, definitely have more scientific training.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: No, I consider myself a layperson also. I'm not,

Abhijit: It's not like either one of us is a research scientist. That's, but even somebody like me who sucks at maths if we, if I'm able to figure that out, and it does take some effort, but it is so worth it because you can change your entire outlook on life. You can completely alter the outcomes of your health problems as well as in your family. And you can resolve all of these just by making that effort to think critically and to be able to understand how to read studies.

There are books out there, which is, I think there was, one called literally How to Read a Research Study or how to Read an RCT. I have it on my Kindle.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: I want you to link that study to me because I wanna read that myself.

Abhijit: Absolutely. It's been, it's very enlightening.

But so there are books out there which can help us learn. And a lot of these sceptic podcasts as well take you through step by step. What are the important factors that you need to look at? Like, how large was the study? How many people was it done on? The bigger it is usually, the better it is.

You have a,

Pranav Radhakrishnan: how randomized was it exactly?

Abhijit: Was it randomized?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: The Baba Ramdev study, if I can get into that. It wasn't randomized at all. Groups were very biased. Maybe they were of all of the same genders or of the same age group. Very young people, maybe people who already don't have a serious disease with uh covid and things like that.

So it wasn't randomized at all. So these were the factors which made that a very bad quality study. So

Abhijit: Absolutely, it was atrocious, and it was the kind of bias they had. And it wasn't that all; these people had extremely severe covid or anything of that sort. They're just people who had covid, and yeah, 97% usually recover from it either way, even if you do nothing.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yeah.

Abhijit: So basically, claiming that your medicine does anything has very little consequence for the actual outcomes.

The book I was referring to was How to Read a Paper by Trisha Greenhalgh. , I'll put a link to this. This is informative and very helpful. Another one of my favourite books is Trick or Treatment by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, who is still very active on Twitter and does a lot of promoting good science. He's one of the people who looked into the Coronil paper and did a quick critique on it in one of his blogs, which I will also link in the description. These books help hone one's thought process, ah, and the Skeptics Guide to the Universe book is phenomenal.

It's a big one, but it is so worth it because it takes us through the thought processes and the science of so many different aspects of our world and how to analyze what we need, how we need to think about it, and what science says. And gives really good explanations for everything.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Is that a book also? I thought it was a podcast.

Abhijit: The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is a podcast, but they wrote a book which came out a few years ago, which is phenomenal. I have it right here. One second. Where? Yeah. Wait one second. Here we are.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: The camera follows you on. Okay.

Abhijit: Nice. Do you see my butt?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: The camera follows you around.

Abhijit: This is the Apple Studio Monitor. But it is quite handy. But this is the book. Yeah.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: I need this also.

Abhijit: So yeah, this is the way it is, and this is a fantastic book. And if you guys are on podcasts and listening to podcasts, whoever's listening and watching, you have to subscribe to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe and Skeptoid. Skeptoid is essentially just like 15-minute podcasts going deep dive into different things. It has a full explainer video on homoeopathy, and then it has not a video, sorry, a podcast episode. And then, it has another podcast episode, which is about the effects of homoeopathy. And it's basically 13 minutes of silence. So it has the intro, it has the outro, and it's got 13 minutes of absolute silence. And I was listening to that. I was like; I was, I kept fast-forwarding it. I was like, is something wrong with the podcast? I restarted my phone, and I, then I went into it, and I was like, oh, I see what you did there. I was very clever indeed.

But tell me something about your earlier life, though. You said you had given us a little glimpse of it, but what is your family life like? Were you religious? Were are you all scientists? Where did you come from?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Not even close. So my family is extremely religious, conservative, and all these things.

So, I'm surprised that I grew up in that environment and actually developed the sort of rational approach to things. My family, I would say Hindus from Kerala. But yeah, very God-believing, God-fearing. I remember I used to go to temples every day during my board exams. I used to, that was the kind of person I was, but that was like more than half a lifetime ago. So doesn't matter now,

Abhijit: but we all come from somewhere. We all have our stories. It's all very essential.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yeah, dude. And this is what I tell people. Also, you don't have to feel unhappy or dissatisfied with how you were brought up or what your own beliefs are because we all come from similar backgrounds. So if someone is deeply religious and I talk to them, I try not to be disrespectful to them because they could also be at this point where they're starting to question their beliefs.

It happened to me much earlier in life. It might only happen to those people much much later in, in their lives. So being disrespectful to them while you talk to them, or even making videos as I did. If you're being disrespectful, you're only delaying that process of self-questioning, being self-aware, all these things.

Abhijit: Exactly.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Instead, be respectful. That's what I always preach these days. I've said that in a lot of

Abhijit: Preach it, brother!

Pranav Radhakrishnan: What I will say is to be respectful. Don't treat them like they're stupid for having certain beliefs. This is my general approach. I say that you might be wrong, but you're not stupid. That's the kind of approach that people can accept that they were wrong. They can't accept that they are stupid because that attacks their ego at some point. And when you do that when you condescend to them in that way, they usually double down on their own beliefs and begin thinking that you are stupid or wrong for thinking the opposite way. I'm the one who's right for thinking this way, anyway, back to your question. So I came from a very religious background, and yeah, I used to believe in all these superstitions. I grew up in Kerala, a semi-urban place. And there was a superstition that when you see a certain kind of bird if it's on your left, that's bad luck. If it's on your right, that's good luck. So I would always if I saw that bird, I would always turn to make sure it's on my right. But other than that, I would say my upbringing was uneventful. Yeah. Nothing significant in my life,

Abhijit: But I think we've all grown. We've all had that in our lives. And because, even my family, they, I think my family has some of the smartest people I have ever met, but they, like my father, are super into history. My mother is as well, into history, into geography, into different types of food, big foodies.

And my father's elder brother is a particle physicist, was a particle physicist, and he was teaching particle physics in an American University.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: And he's religious

Abhijit: and they're not religious in the conventional sense they are. We're part of the Brahmo Samaj, which is a reformist sect of Hinduism started by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and they are more pantheistic.

So it's not one god, human-formed deity per se; there's no ritual that we have associated except for, the important things like getting married or a funeral or something of that sort. But there is a kind of pantheistic belief that God is in everything. God is life. So everything that has life has a part of God in it. And that there is that higher power in the universe that governs things and gives things a certain direction to take. So their belief system is rooted in that. Even looking at it objectively, if I were to be religious, I would be religious in that way, which is probably the least, yeah, the least number of assumptions that one has to make, that God has a big white flowing beard or got 10 arms or something of that sort or that there are 500,000 gods one way or the other. It's very so it's unique. It's very liberal, and they never forced me to believe anything when I was a kid. So I was brought up in a very liberal manner. But at the same time, they've all had experiences which have changed their perceptions when it comes to things like astrology and psychics. I wouldn't say that they particularly believe in astrology or psychics, but they have, they've had experiences; members of my family have had experiences which have...

Pranav Radhakrishnan: and that's how confirm their belief, right?

Abhijit: Yeah. This is possible, but it kind of makes them think that you can't all be nonsense. Okay? So most psychics are crooks, but they can't all be crooks, can they? Should they be? So something of that sort. So it's so I've been very fortunate that way that I've had an incredibly liberal upbringing.

But then I used to believe a lot of weird stuff as well. I used to believe in ancient aliens. Oh yeah. So I used to think that, like all the Mahabharat and Ramayana shows, which you used to have on Doordarshan when we were kids, all those arrows they were firing that would explode were probably missiles.

All the flying chariots were probably planes. So I used to believe those things, and I grew up thinking maybe I don't believe that they happened, but it always made me think that maybe this could be a possibility, maybe something was lost. And it is the process of finding out that is complete utter nonsense because there's zero evidence for any of that. That is the process that kickstarted my journey into scepticism that was like, oh, if I was wrong about this, what else could I be wrong about?

Pranav Radhakrishnan: I have a quote about this. Believing something based on possibility shows wishful thinking. Believing something based on evidence shows a rational mind.

Abhijit: Oh yeah.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Okay. It may not be about the ancient aliens or the missiles, or it may be some astrologers told them that, uh, if they go to this temple and do this ritual, their incurable disease will go away. So maybe they want that they wish it to be cured so badly. They wish for that outcome so much that they want to believe it is true. This thing that the astrologers said is true. They want the outcome so badly that it biases them to think that this is true.

Abhijit: Indeed. And I think when it at least when it comes to my family, there's a lot of alternative medicine that a lot of people believe in. That is the one thing that also knocked me sideways. But I think through the conversations that I've been having with my family members near and far, I think at least I have managed to sow some seeds of doubt in there. I hope we can keep our fingers crossed but switch gears a little bit from there, from our personal stories and how we have come to see the world in a more real way than we've ever done before in our lives. We are trying to help other people do so as well through our content, I think this is an essential movement, especially in this country, because we have so much pseudoscience. We are like the world capital of pseudoscience. Like when I went to the CSICon conference, and they're like, oh, you're from India? They're like, yeah. So they're like, what? What's pseudoscience like? I was like, California? They're like, yeah. I said we caused that.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: California. Wait, what?

Abhijit: So California, so California is known as the hippie pseudoscience capital of the USA because they have all the naturopathy, the homoeopathy, ayurveda, yoga, you know, you have those cryo chambers.

All of that is centred around there, and as many tech gurus as there may be, there are just as many people who believe that yoga centres your prana and kind of aligns your chakras and stuff like that. I said that's where, that's, that's where all of that came from. We are the motherlode of pseudoscience, and we definitely do not have a motherlode of sceptics helping people figure out how to think about these things. So I'm glad we are on the same team basically.

And with that, I think we can call it to a close. I think that's a happy thought. And we gotta keep up what we are doing and really push hard and get more people into the fold to think more critically because otherwise we are gonna crash and burn as a country.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yep, for sure.

Abhijit: Believe that, oh, happy happiness.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: India really needs a rational-thinking man. I think the next video that I'm going to release; I'm gonna talk about how India as a country, why we have these kinds of, and why we are prone to thinking in a pseudo-scientific manner. Gonna talk about that a little bit.

Abhijit: Oh, I'm really looking forward to that. I'd love to see that. And I'd probably make something like that down the line myself. Hell, we probably gonna duplicate a lot of work.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Yeah.

Abhijit: The more that's out there, the better it is.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: It's good. We need more voices in the space, seeing the same things over and over again.

Because I think when people see multiple instances of the same thing, they subconsciously they begin thinking, Hey, maybe there's something in here more than what meets the eye. And I need to look into it. So I think

Abhijit: exactly

Pranav Radhakrishnan: this movement is helping.

Abhijit: Absolutely. I think we are making a very small dent, but we gotta keep hammering in the messages.

But thanks so much for coming on to Rationable it's been a long time coming, and I wish you all the very, very best. I'm sure we'll have more conversations like this as we go forward, but this has been fascinating. Thanks so much, and thank you, everybody, for listening and watching Rationable. This has been Pranav Radhakrishnan and me. I'm Abhijit. Thank you very much, Pranav, for coming on and please like, and subscribe to this video if you haven't subscribed to this podcast and subscribe to the podcast too. And check out the website berationable.com for the transcript, which I will also be posting up and the audio version of this podcast and the video.

Why not? But thank you, everyone. Have a good one and I'll see you later, Pranav. See you in your next video.

Pranav Radhakrishnan: Bye

Abhijit: bye.