SGU Episode 376

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SGU Episode 376
29th September 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 375                      SGU 377
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
PG: Pamela Gay
Quote of the Week
An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. 'Can they be brought together?' This is a practical question. We must get down to it. 'I despise intelligence' really means: 'I cannot bear my doubts.'
Albert Camus
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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 Monday September 24, 2012 and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone.

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys.

S: and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good morning and/or good evening.

S: How is everybody today?

R: Super.

E: Doing just fine.

J: Thanks for asking.

This Day in Skepticism (0:33)

• September 29, 1954: CERN is created

R: Hey, happy CERN day everybody. Happy CERN day.

B: What does that mean?

R: That means, on September 29th 1954 the convention establishing CERN was signed. CERN of course being the European organization for nuclear research. That's the English equivalent. I'm not going to attempt the French, 'cause I don't want to get angry emails.

J: Rebecca, I was concerned that you were going to forget.

R: Forget that it is CERN day?

J: Year, I was concerned.

B: Ah, yes...

J: Nothing, huh? Okay.

R: Cerntailly that's not an issue.

J: (laughter) You mean, my joke was so bad, that I'm hurtin' for cerntain.

S: (laughter) Alright... So, this is also the one year anniversary - or at least September 24th when we're recording this - of the first SGU 24 hour live broadcast.

J: Oh, boy, that was awesome.

E: Remember that?

S: Have you guys recovered yet?

(laughter)

R: Has it only been a year? Seems like yesterday.

J: Barely...

B: Evan, we don't need to sleep, right?

E: Nah. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

J: I think that was the hardest project I ever did in my life.

E: It was a test of endurance, will and -

R: Well, until that baby comes out.

J: Yeah, that's right.

E: Oh, yeah.. (laughter)

B: So far, every convention people come up to me like "Do another SGU 24." and I always say, "You know what? I wouldn't mind doing it again, but I don't think we could convince anyone else to do it." And I tell everyone, maybe we'll do like SGU six hours or four hours or something like that. I think if we ever do it, that's what it would have to be.

R: SGU four hours is a normal night of recording for us.

J: Yeah, that's right.

E: Well yeah, actually it is.

News Items

Ig Nobels 2012 (2:18)

• Improbable Research

GM Corn Rat Study (13:45)

• Neurologica: The GM Corn Rat Study

HIV and Faith Healing (24:22)

• BBC news: Faith Leaders Across England in 'HIV Healing' Claims

Emoticon Turns 30 (34:22)

• Digital Life, MSN: The Emoticon is 30 Years Old ;-)

CSICon Private Recording (38:19)

• SkepticalRobot.com: Ticket to SGU Recording at CSICon

Who's That Noisy (39:42)

• Answer to last week: Warp core from Enterprise TNG

Interview with Pamela Gay (42:00)

S: All right, let's go on to our interview.

S: Well we are sitting here now at TAM 2012 with Dr. Pamela Gay, Pamela welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.

PG: Well thank you so much for having me on again.

S: And for those who don't know, Pamela does an amazing podcast called Astronomy Cast, one of my favourites, but tell us what you were talking about here at TAM this year.

PG: Well I was trying mostly to focus on how human beings can do amazing things to make the world better and fix the things that are broken by getting engaged in society. And there are so many different aspects to this, from helping scientists to accomplish science in our current funding crisis by going online and participating in citizen's science, by being aware of things that they can help support through just writing an email. There was a fifth grader a few weeks ago who was forbidden to give a speech on same sex marriage by an extra-ordinarily judgemental principal, and the internet outcry allowed this kid to be able to give his speech in a special assembly. And by simply looking around and saying I'm going to do something to change what bothers me rather than whining about it on Twitter, we're capable of doing really great things as a society, working as individuals.

S: But whining is so much easier, though.

PG: And that's the problem. We've all forwarded a tweet about something where someone is articulating something that bothered them, but never taken the moment to do something original, to donate to a cause. One of the things that greatly frustrates me is there's been a few times with 365 Days of Astronomy, which is a community based podcast that I work with, we've put out a call for donations and seen huge numbers of re-tweets and zero donations.

J: Yeah.

PG: It's so easy to just forward, to just repeat and so much harder to put your time, your money, your effort into actually doing things that you say matter for you. Imagine if all the time and energy that went into going to some Youtube video where someone's being an idiot and then trolling them for it, instead went into doing something positive to educate people so that they don't become trolls.

J: So is being a troll a trap? Do you think there's something that attracts people to it, like they get an adrenaline rush or something, what's the driver?

PG: People want attention. I for a while volunteered as a dog trainer and I went through courses to get trained as a dog.

S: You got trained as a dog?

PG: Not trained as a dog, sorry. To get trained as a dog trainer.

J: (laughs)

PG: And to think like a dog, which don't conjoin those two sentences, it comes out strangely, I just tried that. And one of the things that they teach you is that some of these animals misbehave horribly, biting, nipping, yapping, peeing on the floor, because they just desperately want attention, they're herd, they're not herd animals, they're pack animals and they, if you have a single dog it's isolated, it wants to feel part of the pack and negative attention is still attention. And trolls, when you feed them by saying you're wrong, you're bad, you're evil, you're wasting my time and you attack them back, you're feeding them, you're giving in to their need for attention, to feel part of the pack. We need to figure out how not to give them that positive reinforcement.

J: Is it as simple as just ignore?

PG: I think you sometimes have to do more than just ignore because if you just ignore they're still sitting there and other people are going to give in and feed. I think it's worth taking the half-second before you close that browser window to hit the block, to hit the report as abuse, to hit that button that will eventually alert the social network this is someone we probably need to remove.

S: Yeah there's a certain threshold of people where you just have to ban people.

PG: Yeah.

S: Because they're, as you said, don't feed the trolls, when you say that, that's feeding the trolls, first of all. You can't talk about not talking about it without talking about it.

(laughter)

S: That feeds in to a certain degree. Because they always just escalate their game until someone caves.

PG: Yeah.

S: The other thing is that, with certain sites, if you're running a science site, and you have somebody there spreading pseudoscience, you can't let it go unanswered so you have this dilemma where you have this rank pseudoscience on a science site that no-one is objecting to, or you have to feed the troll, or you just ban them. So you're almost obligated at some point just to ban people to preserve the integrity of the blog.

PG: This is something that we have to deal with with with the CosmoQuest forums which recently merged with the Bad Astronomy Universe Today forums, and we get a lot of people coming in to the forums and presenting their alternative to the mainstream ideas about science. These are people that are trying to say relativity isn't true or presenting their own alternative ideas, and so we have an area set aside for their discussion, and they're required to answer every question that is given to them, and they're given 30 days to convince people of their idea, and if they can't, they have to be silenced, the thread is closed. So it's a way of confronting it but giving them their own space.

J: That's interesting, I mean you're basically saying, we're going to allot you time to talk about it but then if it doesn't actually get to the point where it goes above the water line, which I'm curious to know if it ever does...

PG: So far it hasn't, and this is a forum that has existed within the Bad Astronomy Universe Today named about forums for many many years and when Fraser Cain first set up this part of the forum it was with the hope that maybe some new, novel, interesting idea would come out of it that was real science, and it never has.

J: Did he come up with that idea?

PG: I think it was a combination of seeing all of these pseudoscience ideas, seeing all of these alternative ideas being brought forward and getting smashed down in a way that led to flames, trying to create out of all of these flame wars, something positive.

J: Right. Well I think it's a really cool idea, I'd like actually to come take a look.

S: In terms of people getting involved in changing the world, which obviously we like to do - we're activists, I do find that people come up to us to talk about us are sorted into one of two categories, there are people who say "you guys should do this".

PG: Yes.

S: "You guys should go ahead and do that." My answer is always, yeah that is a good that, you should do that, why don't you do that? We're doing something already. But there are a lot of people who do ask questions at lectures or who come up and talk to us and say "I want to get involved, I want to do something, can you help me do that?" So we don't want to make it seem like other people aren't interested in being activists, but sometimes you just don't know how to get involved.

PG: There's two different factors, the people who come up to us and say "you need to" make me feel exhausted, because we can only do so much as individuals, but part of what we're seeing is these people see us as strong, powerful people who are capable of enacting change and they don't see themselves that way.

S: Right

J: Yeah.

S: So we have to empower people to understand that when they see a problem, when they're upset about something, they actually can be that cliché of be the change you want to see in the world. And so we need to somehow facilitate people believing in themselves. And the other side of that is that there are a lot of people who recognise that there's a lot of badness out there and they don't know where to start, it's all so intimidating, they don't know how to get involved, and my advice to these people, is simply find what you're passionate about and then google to find out who's already engaged in combating this. One of my favourite examples is people who get very upset about lesbian/gay/bisexual/queer/transgender issues. I don't remember what order those words are supposed to go in now. There's this fabulous It Gets Better Project. So if you see, and people see this on my comment thread because my last name's Gay, so every good comment thread eventually leads to somebody saying "haha this is so gay her last name's gay, you're gay" and it's ridiculous that this is still happening in 2012.

S: Yeah, but that could be an 11 year old right, because it's online.

PG: It's online and, but...

J: It was me.

(laughter)

J: Just kidding.

PG: And this is one of those cases where there's clearly still problems, there's that teenage girl killed in Texas for being in love with another girl, and there's already an organisation working hard to do good, to fix things, so find the people who are doing the thing that causes you to stay awake going I can't believe the world is broken in this way, and embrace those people. And if those people aren't already out there doing the thing that makes you passionately hurt so that you want to change the world, be that person, Elyse Anders did that a few years ago, creating the Hug Me I'm Vaccinated program when she realised how much we're losing herd immunity. So you can, if you don't see the people already out there working to make things better, be that person who starts the grass-roots movement.

J: Or if you don't have the time, or you're just not cut out for it, which let's be honest, some people aren't, like you said earlier though, you can also be a supporter, not just by digesting the content and learning from it, but you can donate and even just sending an email to the people that are doing the work that you really appreciate and thank them and let them know because as someone who receives email where people say hey, I listen and I appreciate it, it fuels us and it really makes a difference. If you're just in an echo chamber and you have no idea if you're having an impact, then you don't know what's going on and you could easily just putter out and not be motivated.

PG: And in our current society where we're in a position where our government just can't fund the things the way it used to. And I know I personally am in this situation where I'm really worried because I didn't get the grant I was counting on this year, I need to figure out to afford my lead programmer because his funding runs out in December. And all of this is terrifying but then I see hope in things like there are so many individuals who have things that they can share, resources that they can share and they're working so hard to literally build our rocket plane future. NASA right now is underfunded to say the least, but there's so many individuals who made their fortunes in dot coms, working with Amazon, with Google, with PayPal, with these different corporations, and having made their money, they're now saying, I'm going to build the rocket plane future by hiring the engineers, by hiring the space suit designers, and this is where we see SpaceX, Blue Origin, XCOR, all these other companies, because someone of means said "I'm going to change the world" and what we have to hope for is that people of means will recognise what we're doing. And "of means" may be one extra dollar, it only takes ten people with one extra dollar to pay for one hour of a student doing something in the lab, and every one dollar can go so far, and maybe some day we'll get lucky and I know we've been lucky with Astronomy Cast, we've Uncle Bob as one of our sponsors, and he supports what we do, spreading the word of astronomy, and you have supporters who support you and we live in an age where it's individuals who fund changing society virally, one idea and campaign at a time. It is one of those strange contradictions of modern society where there's the expectation that with intellectual gifts and content that we should give it away for free and that if we expect to earn money that we are being selfish, that we are - name one of the seven sins. We're somehow taking advantage of society by trying to make a decent living, and there's something wrong with the idea that it's OK for an athlete who entertains on TV and in the sports arena, an actress, all of these people, to get paid huge sums of money to do what they do. One baseball player's salary for one year, for one of the little guys making a million a year, that funds my entire staff, multiple individuals for multiple years, and people see it as wrong that we as academics would like to make a reasonable living, that we as content producers might even put ads on our websites and try not to have to pay out of pocket for our microphones. That's what Fraser and I do, Fraser and I do all of our podcasting out of our own pocket and we pay an audio engineer and we pay someone to do transcripts for us because really if you don't pay someone to do transcripts you're torturing them.

J: Right, right.

S: Mmhmm.

E: Mmhmm.

J: (laughs).

PG: And it's...

J: It's frustrating, and it's something that we've all hit, that we've all hit that wall and it's funny, I was just talking to Brian Dunning about it and you know it's like "yeah, you know it's just another year of throwing the money away, of burning the money on our hobby, quote, unquote hobby". But right now Brian is doing it full time and he's really under the gun he's really working it. So you know, hopefully there are a lot of people that do donate money, even though like you said, a dollar or whatever, and that does count. Of we all, like Bob was saying, would love a bigger infusion so that we don't have to focus on it as much.

S: You made another point that I thought was very good, the fact that often our listeners, people out there in the public may perceive us as having some kind of special power or access or something, that we can get things done that they can't and I think that, we've marvelled at that too, people come up to us at conferences, they send us emails, and there's this tone that makes it seem like they think like we're all part of one big organisation, which is not the case, we're all just individuals. Or somehow that we have some magical access to government or whatever, it's like "yeah, why aren't you telling the FDA how to fix this?" Because I'm just a citizen. I have no special access to anyone or anything and we just started doing this in our living room, there's absolutely no reason you can't do the exact same thing, it's all just energy and drive you know. But I think that becomes this artificial barrier, that people think that they can't do something or there's something magical about what we're doing.

PG: And this is where I deeply appreciate the fluffy segments that are at the end of the news so often where they show the 12-year-old who raised a couple of thousand dollars for this foundation or...

E: At the lemonade stand, yeah.

PG: Right. And so there's so many small ways and giant ways and I'd encourage everyone to take the time to listen to TED talks, not the ones by the big name academics, but the ones by the individuals who've seen a problem. One of my favourite ones, it's such a simple concept, was realising that there's a serious problem of not having soap in the third world, such a simple thing, not having soap. And then was visiting the United States and seeing that they throw out, and they do this here in the South Point, a bar of soap every day. You open the soap, you use the soap, and the next morning it's gone and you have a new bar of soap. Well he worked out a program to gather up all these hotel soaps, clean them, and redistribute them.

J: Clean soap?

(laughter)

PG: I don't know how that part works. Physical scientist, not chemist or biologist.

B: You need super soap, meta soap.

J: I think you'd just put water on it and agitate it, get rid of that outer layer.

PG: Yeah.

S: So Pamela, thanks for being open with us and talking with us, and so of course, always a pleasure to see you at these conferences.

PG: It was really my pleasure, thank you so much for having me on.

Science or Fiction (58:16)

Item #1: Astronomers may have solved the "missing baryon problem" with the discovery of a halo of hot gas surrounding the Milky Way galaxy. Item #2: This year's peak Arctic ice melt is the greatest since records have been kept, and likely the greatest in a million years. Item #3: Physicists have built a 4-dimensional "space-time crystal" that can be used to keep perfect time until the end of the universe.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:12:10)

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. 'Can they be brought together?' This is a practical question. We must get down to it. 'I despise intelligence' really means: 'I cannot bear my doubts.'

Albert Camus

References