Skeptics, like the characters in Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities, live in the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, we are reminded every day of the frailties of the human mind and the ease with which it can be subverted by bad and foolish actors. Conspiracy theories abound, disinformation and propaganda run amok, and emotion short-circuits our brains, leaving us comatose on the floor in a pool of our own collective drool. Is there any hope for the human race? Perhaps not. But it’s not all bad news! Those of us who enjoy debunking, fact-checking, and the polemics that go along with it, have a veritable feast laid out before us. At this all-you-can-eat buffet endless delights await. Do you enjoy debunking creation science? Do you like documenting the lies of politicians? Do you delight in mocking the lunacy of conspiracy theories? Fill your plates and keep coming back for more. Now, now, slow down. There’s enough for everyone! But there is a serious point here: it seems to me that we skeptics are sometimes so eager to deploy our considerable intellectual resources at lies, misunderstandings, and stupidity, that we enjoy it a little too much, and we forget that the point of all debunking is not so much the feeling of self-satisfaction that comes from the task, as good as that feels, but communicating such that people’s minds are actually changed. To this end, I want to highlight an important debunking and convincing strategy that is often neglected by skeptics. This strategy is simplicity itself. Einstein is quoted as saying that any fool can make something complex, but it takes a genius to make something simple. Or, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” This is an insight that is perennially ignored, forgotten, and neglected by those of us who value science and rationality. For science and rationality can be complex, and we can sometimes revel in that complexity without realizing that it tends to make the material less accessible to outsiders. The confusing world of weight loss I’ve struggled with weight for the last 20 years or so. At one point, I believed that being overweight was “just the way I was,” and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. Some people are skinny, I thought, and some are heavy. And that’s just the way it is. But one day I watched a documentary about a WW2 prison camp and I saw footage of some emaciated soldiers in that camp–we’ve all seen things like this. It struck me that every single one of those prisoners was emaciated. There wasn’t a single overweight person among that group of underfed inmates. At this a light went on in my head. An “aha” moment. I thought, clearly, if people stop eating, they lose weight. This is universal. There is no one who, if they stop eating, does not lose weight. And so my idea that “some people can’t lose weight” came under considerable strain. This led me to do some reading on calories and biochemical energy, an area that I had only been vaguely aware of, and the basic biological facts about weight gain and weight loss came into focus. The body consumes energy in order to stay alive. That energy comes from food or drink in units of energy called calories. Extra energy is stored as fat. Thus: anyone who is overweight has ingested more calories than their bodies have used. This is the fundamental set of facts about weight loss. I found this knowledge extremely motivating, and it became an important part of a successful effort to shed some 50 pounds. During this time I followed the simple strategy of eating less and exercising more. In other words, I ingested less calories than my body burned. And it worked! I was surprised, when it all came into focus, how long it had taken me to understand all this, even though it involved a very simple set of ideas. Maybe it was my fault, but maybe there was also something wrong with the information ecosystem surrounding the question. There is, it turns out, a great deal of obfuscation by a host of voices which allow other issues to confuse the basics. One strategy to use in weight loss is to count calories: simply calculate how many calories your body uses everyday and compare this to how many calories you ingest. If you ingest less than you burn, you are losing weight! But “calorie counting” is often denigrated by weight-loss experts for various reasons: It can ignore nutrition. People who count calories often gain back all the weight they lose. Not all calories are the same, and the body processes them in different ways. Calorie counting can take the joy out of eating. And others. And yet, none of the reasons given against “calorie counting” alter the fundamental biochemical reality that if you ingest less energy than your body burns, you will lose weight. Now, it’s fair to point out that calorie counting is not the entire picture, but it makes no sense to discount and dismiss the most fundamental physical principle that is at play in favor of other, secondary, issues. So why engage the topic as if to deny or obscure this basic reality? The other side of the equation is exercise. Of course, exercising more will burn more calories and will lead to weight loss. But this is also obscured by weight loss and health experts. For example, in a recent interview Dr. Philip Ovadia downplayed the value of cardio exercise, like jogging, because when people do cardio, he said, they tend to feel hungry afterwards and then eat more calories than they lost by the exercise. That’s a fair point, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t lose calories by doing cardio. This is a confusion of categories. Similarly, there is the claim that if you exercise a lot, your body will adjust and conserve calories, so exercise is of limited value for weight loss. But of course, the body’s ability to conserve calories is not infinite! This would clearly break some essential laws of nature. Anyone who consistently exercises will beat even this tendency of the body to conserve calories. The different agendas that people bring to a topic often obscure the most fundamental issues, and when it comes to weight loss it seems to me that the most fundamental source of confusion is that everyone wants to lose weight without eating less and exercising more. This leads to endless proposals, schemes, and discussions–some focused on making money, others on self-promotion and notoriety. Some are ill-informed and inauthentic, while others are well-informed but oddly framed. It seems to me that the best way to conceive of the topic is to start from the simple baseline physical principle of biochemical energy consumption and storage, and then to add to this other issues related to psychology, nutrition, and lifestyle. But instead, what often happens is that issues of psychology, nutrition and lifestyle are pitted against the basic science, leading to a confusing mess. Ok, so my point in this discussion is not to critique or reform the culture of weight loss. I’m just using this as an example to illustrate the power of focusing clearly on the most basic principles that are at stake in any issue about which the public at large is confused. Debunkers are often, themselves, caught up in the fog of war surrounding an issue and find themselves involved in confusing and difficult to sort out topics and discussions, which are only of interest to a decreasing subset of any audience. But a focus on the basic facts of the matter would be vastly more effective. The basics are easier to understand, easier to communicate, and they give our audience the ability to draw the right conclusions themselves. It’s just carbon and heat, baby Let’s take a look at how a focus on simplicity can help in the debates about climate change. This is a sprawling, ever-evolving topic. But I’ll just chart my own understanding of it to make the topic more manageable. It is again surprising to me in retrospect how long it took me to get the most fundamental science, and I again wonder how much of it was my own fault and how much of it was the ecosystem’s fault (informational, not natural). As a former evangelical, I was subjected to all sorts of misinformation about climate change. The most common way to dismiss it was, and probably still is, to claim that the scientific community is caught up in their own echo chamber on this topic. It is all speculation, so the story goes, based on theoretical models and exaggeration, and ideologically connected to leftist paranoia about “the environment.” It can also be connected to a nefarious satanic plot, but I forget how the dots are connected in that theory and I have no interest in remembering. But many evangelicals have adjusted a bit, for some aspects of climate change are happening right before our own eyes and are not so easy to deny. These people will admit that climate change is real, but they oddly insist it has nothing to do with human activity. For me it all came together when I was talking with a friend. At this time, I was still an evangelical, and I was expressing vaguely conceived objections which didn’t amount to anything. My friend just said, “As long as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increases, the temperature will go up.” This gave me pause. It was a simple idea, easy to understand, and it also gave me a peg on which to hang my questions. Because now it was just a matter of checking whether that was a solid idea. Over the next year or so, I sought out scientific information about this question and I finally came to understand the most basic science about climate change: Carbon is a greenhouse gas. This means that it keeps heat in the atmosphere. So the more carbon in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets. The second part is that modern human activity generates an incredible amount of carbon: car engines, factories–any kind of fossil fuel consumption generates carbon. So let’s put this together. Humans generate increasing amounts of carbon, and carbon warms the atmosphere. That’s the case for global warming at its simplest. These are easily understood concepts, and they are also easy to read up on and can be confirmed or denied by anyone. Oddly, though, affirmations of the reality of climate change often involve arguments from authority, namely the ubiquitous claim that “most scientists agree that climate change is real,” as if this is the most convincing thing that advocates can put forward. Not only is this a logical fallacy (“appeal to authority”), but it is also a claim that is disconnected from the simple facts of the matter, and easy for detractors to deny and muddle up. They can claim, as they do, that scientists are fallible, or give examples about how a bunch of scientists were wrong about something else. The simplest facts are convincing and empowering. This is why the best strategy of purveyors of misinformation is to obscure the simplest facts. Our worst response to those purveyors is to chase them down the obscure alleys that they have created. The folding protein problem I’ll close with a final example from every debunker’s dream topic, creation science and evolution. There is just so much to work with here. And that might be the problem. Defenders of creation science or “intelligent design” or whatever you want to call it, delight in highly complex arguments, sometimes focused on minutiae that only a handful of people truly understand, be that in biology, chemistry, cosmology, or physics. I looked, for example, at a publication on the Evolution News website titled “Why AlphaFold Has Not Solved the Protein-Folding Problem,” and I have to admit that I only have a vague idea what they are even talking about. After reading the author’s attempts to explain this, I’m not sure he even understands it. But then I realized that if I don’t understand these topics, neither does any other non-expert, certainly not the purported audience of Evolution News (as venue for the Discovery Institute), which is the average person in the pew. On the one hand, someone in the scientific community should be able to process claims made by creationists in the area of biochemistry. But on the other hand, we should also be practical about what is happening. If we answer a little understood claim with a little understood, if valid, answer, we are only really playing the authority game. Their guy said something, and our guy answered. This is not particularly empowering to our listeners, and it probably isn’t very convincing. In this situation, we are each preaching to our own choir, which in turn, predictably sings our praises. The basic idea of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment over time, and that the best adapted organisms are the ones that live to reproduce. This is a powerful principle that accounts for all of life on planet earth, it can be endlessly illustrated, and it is born out by the fossil record. Many people who grasp this idea will eventually convince themselves of it, just by virtue of the fact that they live in an evolved world and are paying attention. The fundamental concepts of evolution are simple, easy to understand, and once understood, can be seen at work all around us. If we insist on going back to those fundamental concepts over and over again, I suspect our efforts will be far more effective. I’m not suggesting that every topic related to creation and evolution must rehearse this fundamental idea. But surely most topics have a relatively simple principle at their core. We should never miss the opportunity to articulate that principle. Not only will it help win the argument, it will also provide our audiences with useful and practical tools for interpreting the world.