Poison Skepticism for Everybody

OK. I’ll admit it. I’m a poison skeptic.

The idea that natural substances are poisonous is clearly a plot by Big Pharma to stop us from consuming whatever we want. Come on. They want you to believe that botulinum toxin—the stuff people inject into their faces—can kill you. Don’t talk to me about the scientific consensus on poisons. Follow the money, guys. Someone is making billions from scaremongering about Botox. Plenty of scientists are getting government money to research poisons—money we pay in taxes.

Besides, botulinum toxin occurs naturally. It’s nature. How could something natural possibly be bad for us? Who’s driving this fear? My sister had Botox injections and she’s alive and well.

By now you’ve probably detected the rather corny sarcasm. The point is to demonstrate, through absurdity, what science actually is. Science—or more precisely, the process that underpins science—has been with us ever since humans developed large brains. The process is simple.

Observe what happens when you do something. If it kills you, don’t repeat the experiment. Also note that if it kills everyone except one person, your working hypothesis—say, “Drinking this stuff kills people”—is probably correct. Over time, a growing list of casualties consolidates that observation into a rule: “Drinking this stuff kills people.”

Whether we discover such rules through the strict protocols of modern science or through the hard lessons of earlier times, the purpose is the same: to understand the world well enough to survive in it.

Of course, much of science is not intuitive. For example, how do people get away with injecting one of the most toxic substances known into their bodies? I could explain it, but that’s not the point I’m making here—and I discourage lazy thinking. You have AI. Use it.

Some things in our world are so unintuitive that they almost defy comprehension.

Take a pack of cards. Shuffle it thoroughly and deal out the cards one by one. The exact sequence you just produced has almost certainly never occurred before in human history—and will almost certainly never occur again.

Why? Because the number of possible arrangements of a 52-card deck is staggeringly large. Mathematicians write it as 52! (52 factorial), meaning 52 × 51 × 50 × … all the way down to 1.

The result is about 8 × 10⁶⁷ possible arrangements—more than the estimated number of atoms in the Earth. Faced with numbers like this, our intuition simply collapses.

To get some sense of scale, imagine this. Every billion years, take one step around the Earth. Each time you complete a circuit, remove one drop of water from the oceans. Continue until the oceans are empty. Then refill them and start again, stacking a sheet of paper each time you finish the process. When the stack reaches the Sun, you still haven’t counted anywhere near 52!.

Some probabilities are so small that we effectively treat them as impossible—except for the one time they occur.

We live in what physicists sometimes call the “middle world”: the scale at which human intuition evolved. At this scale, many scientific realities feel deeply counter-intuitive. Yet somehow we still manage not to drink poison.

Why? Because we rely on the accumulated knowledge of those who came before us—people who observed, experimented, and sometimes died learning the hard lessons of nature. Healthy scepticism is valuable, but rejecting well-established science is not.

We overcome the limits of our intuition through centuries of shared human experience in a hostile universe.

So some scepticism is healthy and some is not. Being sceptical about gravity is foolish. Being sceptical about a suspiciously cheap product is sensible. The real skill is discernment—knowing the difference between evidence and snake oil.

Unfortunately, education in how to think critically is often lacking.

Climate scepticism today is frequently driven by influencers who profit from spreading misinformation. Rather than educating their audiences, they exploit natural scepticism to generate clicks, views, and revenue.

Free-speech absolutists ask, “What harm can that do? They’re just expressing an opinion.”

But the stakes are not trivial. Major policy decisions with far-reaching consequences are involved. Just as importantly, the systematic undermining of science erodes our ability to confront future challenges.

And that may prove far more dangerous than any poison.