It sounds as if there’s a political dimension to what you’re arguing. Are you running for office anytime soon?

No! I was surprised by how much interest there’s been from centrist politicians, who are desperate for a coherent narrative to defend centrist liberalism, cosmopolitanism, open society, from the threats both by populists and by the hard left. I think there is a hunger for a coherent worldview that isn’t just the status quo, the un-Trumpism. We can do better than that. We ought to use reason and science to enhance human well-being.

Do you think science played a role in these positive developments?

Yes. Advances in longevity and health — life expectancy on Earth has grown from about 30 to more than 70, in rich countries to more than 80. Health and prosperity, and sustenance — the fact that famines are far rarer than they used to be. Malnutrition is much lower, infectious disease. More generally, I see science as part of the Enlightenment — namely reason applied to human betterment.

Yet we also know that science has caused misery.

There’s a lot of blame to go around. The value of science is not the value of a bunch of people who call themselves scientists. It’s the concept. It’s also the value of science that tells us when there’s been a failure of reasoning, that identifies the biases and distortions and also points the way to overcome them.

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So, we need institutions like government to keep us acting rationally?

None of us is anywhere close to perfect. Scientists themselves are not terribly, not completely rational. We can set up institutions that result in greater rationality than any of us is capable of individually, like peer review, like free speech, like a free press, like empirical testing — norms and institutions that make us collectively more rational than any of us is individually.

Do you think science can continue to address humanity’s problems?

If we’re going to solve the problem of avoiding catastrophic climate change, it’s going to come through technology. If you can bend the curve with advances in science, and people can just do what is cheapest and most convenient and that spares the planet — that’s our most feasible pathway to avoiding catastrophe. I do think that science and technology are going to be absolutely essential to meeting those challenges.

Why do you think people continue to hold on to demonstrably unscientific beliefs?

It looks like the biggest reason is not because they don’t know the science, but because of their political ideology. The reason that people deny human-made climate change is not that they’re ignorant of climate science, but because they’re on the political right. Conversely, people who accept human-made climate change don’t necessarily understand what’s causing it. There are scientists who believe that Al Gore’s making of “An Inconvenient Truth” is the worst thing that ever happened to climate change awareness, because he branded it as a left-wing issue, and then the right rejected it out of hand.