SGU Episode 943

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SGU Episode 943
August 5th 2023
"A new species of early whale might be the heaviest animal which has ever lived. While its exact weight is debatable, its unusual bones mean scientists can be certain it was no ordinary cetacean."
SGU 942                      SGU 944
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Insofar as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and insofar as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.
Karl Popper, Austrian-British philosopher
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Florida DOE bans AP Psych; politicizing public education

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, August 3^rd, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone.

S: Cara, you got your power back.

C: I did. It's still poor. It's still, it did stop, but it is again pouring down rain outside. Florida weather is out of control. I also, I got to drive in it for the first time a couple days ago in like a torrential downpour with lightning. So that was new. Speaking of something new in Florida, there's breaking news right now, I'm just sharing it on social. A statement was just released by the College Board that said, and for those who aren't, I guess in America, the College Board, I guess, regulates things like the SAT, right? The College Board regulates the SAT, AP course placement, AP meaning advanced placement, which are the courses you take at the high school level to get college credit or to be able to skip certain courses like introductory courses in college. Okay. So they just put out a statement that says, quote, "We are sad to have learned that today the Florida Department of Education has effectively banned AP psychology in the state by instructing Florida superintendents that teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law." The state has said districts are free to teach AP psychology only if it excludes any mention of these essential topics. But then the statement goes on to say that these topics have been in the curriculum for the last 30 years and that it's required to prepare individuals for college level courses in psychology and ultimately for careers in this field and that they are unwilling to take it out of the curriculum because they see it as necessary and foundational. So for that reason, basically kids in Florida now won't be able to take AP psychology.

J: Unbelievable.

C: It won't be offered, which means that if I had come up in the state now, I would not be able to prepare for my own career starting in high school.

E: Okay. There will be generations of people coming out of Florida who will not be able, who will unlikely go on to careers in psychology.

C: Possibly. Or they will have to learn all of this stuff from scratch at the university level and hopefully they're going to a university that is not private where, even then the APA credits a lot of these things. So yeah, if they're going to want to be practising psychologists, they're going to have to go to an APA accredited university.

J: I know it's only one state, but it's a horrible thing, in a country that is completely suffering from a lack of mental health professionals to limit this type of education. We should be encouraging people to get into this career because of how few practitioners there are out there to help people, because we're having a mental health crisis in the United States right now.

E: Definitely need more health care people.

C: Absolutely. And from a broader perspective, we have to remember as well that this is not the only academic endeavour that's struggling in Florida due to restrictions on what can be taught. And so we're seeing that just like fewer and fewer ideas are being openly shared and expressed because of these types of restrictions, which is just worrisome for education as a whole. Education should be more open, not more restrictive.

S: Governments shouldn't be using education as a political football.

C: We're not the ones getting political. Education should be open.

E: But to push back on that a little, what if it's a referendum? What if it's, the public clamouring for it? Should it then be a political issue?

S: Well, that's really complicated because the whole issue of parents should have input into the education of their own kids in public school, yeah, I will agree with that in principle. Should they have absolute power? No. Should one parent have a veto over all other parents? No. That's the way it's being set up in Florida. One crank can ruin it for everybody, basically. Also the laws are deliberately vague in order to intimidate teachers so that they avoid entire subject areas because it's a landmine and they can get fired and even go to jail in some cases. It's ridiculous.

C: And we've got to remember, too, that like referendum or not, public education is protected by the Constitution. And what we're talking about here is public school. We're talking about individuals with the least amount of power and the least, the kind of quietest voices having access to free and unfettered education. If a parent doesn't want their child to learn something, they can send their child to private school. If they can't afford private school, they can send their child to a charter. There are a million loopholes available. But to restrict public education is exactly what you're saying, Steve. It's the voice of a loud few telling everyone else what they are and are not allowed to learn very often based on ideological reasons. And that's really disconcerting. Really disconcerting. Public education should be free and open. The ethic of education is the free exchange of ideas. That's the point of education, is to open your mind and to learn things.

J: And I would imagine that a lot of this is motivated by people's personal religions. I think it's like, this seems so basic in such like a, like, you should know this. Everybody should know this. But your religion limits you as an individual, as a practitioner of that religion. It doesn't limit me, the other person, who doesn't partake in your religion, right? It seems so basic, but religious people seem to be wanting to, certain religions seem to be very much wanting to express what their beliefs are and what they believe in as a practitioner of their religion on other people.

S: Well, this is the principle of separation of church and state. You can't have freedom of religion unless you have freedom from other people imposing their religion on you. But this isn't the worst violation of church and state in education recently. I think it's Oklahoma is trying to pass a law that says that charter schools can be run by religious organizations, so basically taxpayer funded public schools, right? Taxpayer funded public schools can be religious. And that's a blatant violation of the separation of church and state.

C: But it's clearly, it's clearly a long game that's already been, it's been being played with. That's what charter schools, I don't want to say it's the only function of charter schools, but charter schools have long been utilized as a loophole to get taxpayer funding towards ostensibly private education. And so that is, I mean, it's disconcerting, but I'm also not surprised by it. And I mean, obviously, we're not comparing, like, what's worse? But like, this is not a law that's been floated. This is happening right now. Like this past, this is happening. That's really, really scary. This is like 1984 stuff, right? We've got to be open our eyes to it. And I think we've got to not minimize it by saying, oh, it's just political. It's not political. It's, I mean, it is political.

S: But it's being politicized. But it shouldn't be.

C:' Yeah, in the sense that everything is political. You know what I mean? These are people's lives that we're talking about. These are these are children who are not able to learn about reality.

S: Yeah, I think that's why people get to get so, uptight about it, because it's because it is children, it's their children. And I get that. But there's got to be again, this is gets back to the deeper point. Is there there needs to be certain things that we can agree on as a society? Like, what are facts? Like, what are the facts? Let's talk about something lighter.

C: Please, thank you.

B: Yeah, what is science now?

C: Stupid psychology.

Glassblowing and other "experience parties" (8:16)

S: For my birthday last weekend we had like a party at a glass blowing forge.

B: Yeah, that was fun.

C: What did you guys make? Did you make stuff yourself?

S: Yeah.

J: Kind of. They they hold they're doing the work and they like let you hold the piece of wood or they let you spin the pipe or blow into the pipe. So they they have like an array of like, what, Steve, about 10 different things that you can make glasses, vases.

E: A harmonica.

J: So most of us made like a short whiskey glass type of thing, like a heavy drink with heavy glass. And, we've got all the glass this week. And oh my god, everybody's piece was gorgeous.

C: Oh, I love that. It just reminds me what you're about to say of like when I was in in Eswatini, there was a charitable organization where they hand carve these beautiful spoons. And they're teaching the kids who live in this orphanage to learn how to whittle and how to carve. And so I was talking to the guy about and I was like, the kids made this. And he was like, they helped. It's the cutest way that he was like, yeah, they made that. They're learning.

S: Well, the thing is, glass blowing is always at least a two person thing anyway. There's always had to always has to be an assistant. You can't do it by yourself.

E: Now, that's where robots would come in big time handy.

S: So basically, we were we were the assistant and they were telling us what to do, anything that took any skill they did.

C: That's so fun, though.

S: But the biggest thing we did was get to choose. We had to design it like we get to choose what we wanted to make and what colours and just all the design elements of it. And they did let us like my younger daughter, Autumn, wanted to make a pumpkin. And that wasn't one of the things that they were offering. But they let her do it. And it was amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. Yeah, it was really, really good.

C: You know what I bet the most requested thing there is that they probably don't let you do.

S: What's that?

C: A pipe.

S: No, that wasn't one of the options.

C: Exactly. People are like, can I make a pipe? And they're like, no, read the sign.

B: Yeah, I was looking for the bongs. I didn't see any.

C: Exactly.

J: They were hippies. They were definitely self-proclaimed hippies.

C: They had them in the back. They were behind a curtain.

S: Yeah, but it's it was a fun, different kind of thing to do for like a birthday party. And I want to explore more of those things, like just like spending an afternoon doing something, artsy or crafty like that.

E: Build-a-bear.

B: Experiences, not things.

C: Yeah, a few years ago, I rented out a shop like, those like paint and party or like colour me mine kind of places. Do you guys have anything like that where you paint the potteries already made, but you paint it and then they glaze it and then they fire it for you?

E: No, I know of what you speak but I have not done it.

C: There's a place like that close to my house in L.A. that was like an adult, like a grown up version where it was all cool stuff, like robots and dinosaurs and stuff. And it was BYOB and we had it catered with food. And yeah, just a bunch of my friends came and we like painted really cool stuff. Like kitchen stuff or like little piggy banks. And it was a really fun way to spend the night. I felt like we were all bonding.

J: Yeah. Yeah, it is a bonding experience.

C: Yeah, it wasn't just like a dinner.

J: You're you're doing something where there's a directive, like you have a goal, something that's creative. You're also learning. I did that thing where you go in and like the person up front teaches everyone how to make this particular painting, and those those classes are a ton of fun. I mean, it's half the fun is watching 90 percent of the room do a horrible job at painting.

C: Oh, yeah. 100 percent. Yeah.

J: Mine sucked, too. But but still, it's a really interesting thing to do. I got to tell you, I learned something. I learned that those glass furnaces unbelievably stinking hot. Like when they open that door, I was 20 feet away from the furnace.

E: Oh, you were blown away.

J: They opened the doors.

B: It was a quarter of the temperature of the surface of the sun. A quarter.

J: But you feel the heat instantly.

B: It's 2100 degrees.

J: You know, maybe it is an instant. It seems instant. They guy opened the door and all of a sudden just felt like a Balrog was in your face.

E: Did you guys have to sign waivers?

J: Yes. Oh, yeah.

E: OK.

J: Yeah. Basically, if anything happens to you, it's your fault.

E: Wow. OK.

J: But it was a really great experience. And it was it was fun because you got to watch not only did you get to do it, but you got to watch everybody else do it. We have a collection of really funny pictures of all of us blowing into like that steel, that steel rod. You got to like everybody had a really, really ugly picture of themselves. Like doing this thing is really great.

C: That's awesome.

S: And you walk away with a little souvenir that you get the glass that you actually participated in the creation of it. So I'm looking for other ideas like that. All right. Well, let's move on with our show.

What's the Word? (13:13)

• Mereology

S: Cara, you're going to start us off with a what's the word word?

C: I am. I'm still not fully clear on the pronunciation of this word. I think it's mereology.

E: Oh, it's interesting. It's spelled M-E-R-E-O-L-O-G-Y. Whereas the word mirror, you would not pronounce the E, but in here you do pronounce the E, the second E.

C: I don't know. I could be wrong. It could be mirology. That's why I'm like I really haven't been able to quite figure it out. Yeah, I like miriology. So that's what I'm going to say. Oh, guess who recommended this? Our friend Visto Tutti.

J: He's all over the place.

B: He's a punk.

C: He said it's actually quite fun. He said, "I came across this word maybe for the first time in a discussion of ants." Because, that's what we do is we have discussions about ants. "Is an ant a being or is it only or is only a colony of being? Where is the information stored in an ant colony?" And so he was like, this word comes up in sociology, epidemiology and veterinary science, although that one may be a typo. Mereology, the theory of part hood relations. And that's a really good description right there. The theory of it's a theory of part hood relations or the relations of the part to whole and the relations of part to part. So mereology is is heavily discussed in philosophy. That's most of the citations that I found are in philosophy, specifically kind of within the discussion of ontology. So the idea here, and I've got a few things pulled up. We'll start maybe with the etymology. Oh, I looked up how to pronounce this guy's name and I know I'm going to butcher it. It was coined by to my Polish listeners. I'm so, so sorry, Stanisław Leśniewski, maybe.

E: Sounds good to me.

C: Thanks. I'm sure I butchered that really bad. It comes from the Greek root for part, which is meros. And of course, ology, logy, that's the science of something or the study of something. So there's a million ologies out there. Actually, a good friend of mine has a https://www.alieward.com/ologies podcast called ologies]. I highly recommend it. And she interviews different ologists every week, which is quite fun. But mereology in kind of formal logic is the discipline that deals with the relationships of parts with their respective wholes. Sometimes you'll see that people discuss it as the study of wholes and parts. But that's not really true. It's really just the study of how parts and wholes relate to one another. And so obviously, there are a lot of related terms like that we'll see in literature or like poetry, like what are some examples like gestalt or synecdoche? Like these are different terms that relate to this idea. But it's actually quite a deep philosophical investigation that started very, very early that describes part hood relations. How do these things work together to make up a whole and what arises from that? And sometimes it'll be discussed almost like as related to but alternative from taxonomy, which would be the discussion of the individual parts, kind of discrete units. Here, we're talking about the wholeness, the relationship of the parts to the wholeness. And it's quite abstract, but not I find it fascinating. I love this stuff. You see it in ontology, like I said, you see it a bit in phenomenology and in a lot of different philosophers writings. So, yeah, mereology.

E: Would you say the Borg is an example of mereology?

C: [whispers] I need more information.

E: Bob, Jay and Steve, would you say the Borg is an example of mereology?

S: The study of how the parts relate to the hole.

E: Yes.

S: I guess so in the way like the...

E: Sorry, Cara, it's a Star Trek. Right. Well, yeah.

B: Sure.

C: Is it like a hive mind kind of a thing?

S: Yeah, it's a hive mind.

C: Yeah, OK. Yeah, I would think that a hive mind would be a great example of that, of that kind of grappling.

E: Neat.

S: Cool.

E: Now it has a term.

C: It's fascinating.

S: All right. Thanks, Cara.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Glass-Coated DNA (17:15)

• Glass-coated DNA is 4x stronger but 5x less dense than steel 

Why Heat is Deadly? (27:01)

• Why Extreme Heat Is So Deadly 

Australian Psychics (44:41)

• 'I am the postal service person of the spirit world': Psychic says he's Australia's best 

Speech Deepfakes (54:19)

• Study shows speech deepfakes frequently fool people, even after training on how to detect them 

Special Report: Electric Vehicle Myths (1:01:47)

E: ... _text_of_Evan_mentioning_Amprius_CEO_interview_

Quickie with Bob (1:27:11)

• New Whale Fossil – Possibly Heaviest Animal Ever 
   (Note: this Neurologica article is not from the SGU show notes page, but obviously suffices here)

Who's That Noisy? (1:30:39)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Bald eagles chittering

New Noisy (1:33:47)

[Mechanical beeps]

J: ... what this week's Noisy is ...

Announcements (1:34:34)

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Science or Fiction (1:39:37)

Theme: Volcanos Item #1: About 30% of the world's population live under potential threat from volcanic activity. Item #2: The Pacific Ring of Fire contains 75% of the world's volcanoes and is the location of 90% of all earthquakes. Item #3: The largest recorded volcanic eruption was Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which killed about 100,000 people, and rated a VEI-7 out of 8 on the Volcanic explosivity index.

Answer	Item
Fiction	30% under potential threat
Science	Ring of Fire volcanos, quakes
Science	Mount Tambora eruption

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Bob	Ring of Fire volcanos, quakes
Evan	30% under potential threat
Jay	30% under potential threat
Cara	30% under potential threat

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:50:16)

Insofar as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and insofar as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.  – Karl Popper (1902-1994), Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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Today I Learned

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References

Vocabulary