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

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members. And in return, we offer exclusive member only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 gonna 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 gonna cover four things here today. First, what scientific thinking actually is beyond, you know, 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 gonna be most of the time …