SGU Episode 863

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SGU Episode 863
January 23rd 2022
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 862                      SGU 864
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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 Wednesday, January 19^th 2022, 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 folks!

S: How is everyone this week?

E: I'm feeling good today.

C: We're alive.

J: Pretty tip-top.

What is SGU reading at the moment

S: So we get a lot of questions what we are reading, so maybe at the top of the show instead of bantering something random we talk about what everybody reading at the moment.

C: Yey!

E: It's on random.

C: Is everybody reading something at the moment?

S: Oh yeah, I always got something keyed up.

C: I wanna see out of the five of us, how many are reading fiction and how many are reading non-fiction right now? I'm non-fiction.

J: Fiction right now.

E: I am non-fiction but I had to put the book aside because tax season for me, so a really have every minute I spend working on, you know, work. So I'm in a tough time right now.

S: Yeah I go back and forth I just finished a fiction series and now I just started a non-fiction book What Remains.

C: What is it?

S: It's a book about forensic science. It's cool it's about death, you would like that Cara.

C: Yep.

S: But also like physical death and also forensic science investigative tool, salving mysteries with forensic science which sounds cool.

C: I like that.

S: I just finished reading the same series I believe that Bob is reading right now.

B: Yes this is a, by Drew Hayes who did Super Powereds, this is based in the world of a basically DND and adventuring but with so many twists and it's not what you think at all, highly recommend it this is the fourth book, I'm almost done with the fourth book. Steve and I just plow through them. It's really I mean it's Drew Hayes, the guy, excellent, he's one of my favorite authors, fantastic series, highly recommend it. And if you have played DND and table-top gaming adventuring, you will there will be a lot of in jokes that you will love. But I guess you don't need to know much about it at all, to really enjoy just great stories.

J: What's it called Bob?

B: It's a NPCs.

E: NPCs non-player character.

B: The series, I'm not sure what the series name is but the first book is NPCs by Drew Hayes.

S: I think that's the series name, NPCs it's actually Spells, Swords, & Stealth.

B: As well, OK.

S: Yeah.

E: Cool. Right after tax season I'll get all over that.

S: It's a fun quick read, if you're looking for something just to turn your brain of and just enjoy fun story telling. It's good.

C: What did you put to the side, Evan?

E: I'm reading Gerald Posner's book Pharma, you know we had him on few months back and I finally did order the book and it came in right before Christmas so I cracked into it all about the Sacklers you now that whole─

B: Oh boy.

C: Oh yeah, don't get me started.

E: ─that whole insanity. I haven't gotten too far.

S: Terrible terrible story.

E: But I'll pick it up again soon.

C: Very cool.

J: So I got two things percolating, Bob recommended I read or listen to Super Powereds, so i have that as a book on tape, and that's good for certain times, you know like if I'm driving or if I'm in the shower or whatever like I'll throw that on. But you know what because of the Dune series, the Dune movie made me crack open the first Dune book, I have like four copies of it in my library.

B: Wow.

J: I just you know it was funny was I haven't read it in such a long time, that I actually forgot how he uses language and I just forgot his way of writing. So I just wanted to re-experience it. And it sucked me right in. I'm like, I'll read a chapter just to─

S: It's so good.

J: ─it's such a good book, it's unreal how good that science fiction is. His world building is phenomenal. And the story is, even if you know the story, it's compelling, you know?

S: It's yeah, it's definitely a sign of a good author in the speculative fiction realm if that they make you believe the world is real. You feel like it has enough depth and nuance and connections like it feels the complexity level of a real world. And when you don't achieve that, it's so flat. it just completely fails.

C: It also feels like homework at that point.

J: Yeah.

C: It's like drudgery to get through, when you're trying to go like, who's that person, why did they?

J: Oh yeah I hate that.

C: What is this reference?

S: Remember together like we were playing some multi-player online games like sword and sorcery type games, and I was looking for a new one, cause we were kinda burned out on the ones we were playing. I played this one game for like 10 minutes and I'm like nope, not gonna do it. Because the story like the background was so cookie cutter flat just generic─

E: I hate that.

S: ─all these weird names that don't really feel like any culture it was just forget it, I can't do this anymore, this is like such crap. Literally lasted 10 minutes. Nope.

J: Yeah, I know of course that's the difference between good and bad fiction.

S: Yeah, totally.

C: So I just finished Mary Roach's book, her most recent book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law it was really good, if you've never read any Mary Roach I highly recommend her to everybody listening, he's just the best.

B: Oh yeah, she's great.

C: And at any given time I'm always reading for school cause I'm working on my dissertation so I'm reading some like, you know source material from Heidegger like some phenomenology books that are really dense and hard to get through. And to give my brain a brake I opened up, my best friend gave me, she always gives me the best Christmas presents. She gives me like a box just full of crap, she's collected over the year that reminds her of me. And it's the sweetest, so lots of random things. And she got me a book, she's like, I know you've read this book, you've read this book haven't you? And I was like, oh my god, I've never read this book but I've always wanted to. She got me Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

S: Oh yeah I've heard about that book.

C: It won a Pulitzer like 10 years ago and it's got a lot of clout, so he is an oncologist and it's, the way he positions it, I'm about 80 pages in now and it's a page-turner. The way he positions it is it's a biography of cancer.

J: Oh wow.

C: Which I think is really cool. Yeah it's like the natural history of this disease, but he brings it to life trough all the different characters who discovered things, who have done research on it through all of the different specimens, everything from ancient times and ancient writings to today and it's a gosh, it's fascinating.

S: All right we have a great interview coming up later in the show, with Brad McKay who is a GP in Australia talking about fake medicine, so let's get right to our main content. Jay you're gonna start us of with a special segment on 5G and airlines, what is the scoop here?

Special Segment: 5G and Airlines (06:40)

C: Oh gosh, this has been everywhere!

J: Yeah, you may have herd or read about this, this is something that's going around the news cycle. So right now, here's whats going on. %G, which you should know about because it's infecting your blood and Bill Gates is talking to you through the 5G networks. [sarcasm]

C: (laughs)

J: 5G is about to go live in many places around United States, it is already deployed in other countries around the world like you know Europe I think has a lot of areas that have coverage with 5G. But in United States there's a issue being raised by airline companies about the fact that 5G was supposed to literally turned on today. You today is the 19^th, whe you listen to this it will be few days after. But Wednesday the 19^th of January 5G was supposed to be turned on. So what the airlines are claiming is that 5G telecom's pose a threat to airline safety. The airlines are calling this a catastrophic aviation crisis. So apparently something big is happening. The idea is that the 5G service is using something called the C-Band and these particular frequencies could potentially effect a large number of aircraft, which would render them unusable.

B: Unusable.

C: Whaaat? And nobody thought about this in advance?

J: Exactly, I love it.

B: It's not happening in Europe?

J: No but I'll explain it all to you and it all make sense, it sounds─

B: You better.

J: ─very confusing but so the back story is in 2021 the US auctioned the C-Band mid range 5G bandwidth. I know that sounds complicated but it's basically a set of frequencies. They auctioned them and the mobile phone companies spent 80 billion dollars buying the rights to broadcast in this range. For 5G.

E: Just the right, yeah?

C: Wow.

J: The FAA put out a warning saying the new 5G transmissions could likely interfere with aviation instrumentation. It starts to make sense now, right? So the 5G bandwidth is very close to the same frequencies used by the altimeters.

C: But then why did they sell it to them?

J: I have no idea, I don't get it. So let me tell you if you don't know anything about aviation, let me clarify. An altimeter they're on all aircraft, they're an essential tool for modern aviation they do more that rely the altitude which is very important, right, you need to know the altitude of the aircraft that you're in at all times.

S: Oh yeah.

J: But they're also interact with the automated systems aboard modern airplanes, like other systems on the plane. And they also hep detect wind shear which is a really big deal. The plane always needs to know what's going on and the plane will actually perform faster than the pilot can in some instances. You know the instrumentation will become aware that wind shear is happening and correct the aircraft, so you can't mess with this stuff. If this is true which I really do think it is it means that flying into a major US airport in bad weather like, let's say it's just lightly cloudy, over the airport, you know, which is not uncommon. You would only be able to use visual approach and not use the instrumentation on the airplane. Think about that.

C: Yeah that's impossible.

J: Do you want the pilot who's flying an airplane, a commercial airplane with hundreds of people in it to only be using VFR which is visual flying instead of instrument flying which is IFR, no! You want them to be using both. You want the person to be using both VFR and IFR to land that monster, right, so it's a big deal. So the telecom companies have responded, they said, they're saying that the 5G technology has been installed in approximately 40 other countries, and there hasn't been any aviation interference issues. That is correct, it is true, I vetted that and that is true.

B: Problem solved.

J: Wait, I'm not done though. Because there's always a little stickler.

S: But wait, there's more!

J: The telecom companies did agree that they'll use buffer zones around 50 airports in United States. Now that this means is that the 5G technology will basically be turned off within certain area around an airport.

C: Crap so we're still gonna have bad service at the airport.

J: YES! That's the first thing I thought of. Yeah so now it's still gonna suck at the airport. So 5G technology in Europe does not use the same frequency range as the 5G technology in United States. The United States 5G technology is very very close to the airline instrumentation. It's too close.

C: This seems like a problem that not only we could've solved in advance, but that like the actual people who gave them permission to do this knew this.

E: Known, yeah I agree.

J: Who is in charge of the radio waves in the United States?

E: Federal Communication Commission.

B: Captain Radio.

(laughter)

J: The FCC. This sounds like─

E: That's colonel radio.

J: ─a problem at the FCC. Isn't there, I don't know a database, of like all sorts of stuff? Especially dealing with transportation where hundred of people are being put into metal tubes and sent out to 40 000 feet. You'd think they would know about the instrumentation and these things. So anyway, it's, I think after everything I've read, it's a legit concern. You know I figure that people could test this, right Cara? There must be a way test interference.

C: You would think.

J: Cause you get on the 5G local network, have the instrumentation come within a certain radius of that and you'd know right away if it's interfering with them or not. What we do know is that no 5G interference has been detected in Europe.

B: Yeah but it's not apples to apples.

J: I don't know what's happening right now in the United States, as of today I don't know what the absolute latest thing is. Apparently they're saying OK, we're not broadcasting 5G around airports that might be the only thing that needs to be done but you know maybe they can do some tweaking of the frequencies moving these frequencies further apart so there's no interference, not enough of a signal strength or interference that really do any damage. But it's a scary thing to get this close, I mean this week is when the arilines are like whooooa, no, where were you five years ago, you know what I mean.

C: Yeah.

J: I don't get it.

S: Are you sure it was really just this week that they noticed it and was complaining about it or it's just the media got a hold of this this week?

J: That's a good clarification point Steve, I don't, I don't actually know. I think, makes sense that they've known about it, this seems to have been going back and forth for more than a week. This is certainly been percolating for more than a week. But the only thing I can say is, it's important that they use these high frequencies for 5G because the higher the bandwidth, you know the higher the frequency the faster the back and forth communication can be. And that's one of the things that makes it '5G', that's what makes it faster. You also want airlines to be using instrumentation that is communicating super fast as well because you know, airplanes.

C: Absolutely.

J: You know what I mean, so they'll figure it out, thank god nothing happened thank god nothing, they didn't find out in the rears which means planes would've been crashing. But it's you know it does make you loose a little bit of confidence in the agencies and the organizations that are supposed to be on top of this stuff.

C: You know what I can't help think about and I'm wondering if anybody else is having the same experience tight now. The opening episode, season 1, episode 1 of The West Wing, when the president drives his bike into a tree and Toby's on a plane and they send the message to the cockpit and he tries to get on his phone to like call and the Flight Attendant is like sir, you can't be on that phone on this flight and rattles of like the model of the plane and all of the technology on it, and he's like, you're saying I could flummox that thing with something I bought at RadioShack. And it's like all I keep coming back to, is like, oh gosh, we gotta get our communication in order.

J: It does humble you a little bit to all of that, like oh that's nonsense. It isn't because of the frequencies that are being used. Your phone is doing a lot more now than just connecting over these networks. It has local ways of connecting with other devices, there's a lot of intricacy in these thousand dollar devices that we carry around with us.

S: All right thanks Jay. Cara you're gonna tell us about two things I like that go together, zombies and science.

News Items

Zombie Science (14:56)

• The Attack of Zombie Science

C: Yeah except when you put them together, they go wrong, they go very wrong. So there's actually an article and the more I dug into this the happier I got, because this article was co-authored in Nautilus recently by Natalia Pasternak and some colleagues of hers, and if you don't know who Natalia Pasternak is, I actually recently had her on Talk Nerdy she was recommended to me by Marsh, Michael Marshall. So she is a very kind of outspoken and well respected science communicator and I wanna say virologist or immunologist in Brazil, who like testified before their version of the senate, against all of the pseudo-scientific rhetoric that their Ministry of Health ad that Bolsonaro had been touting. So there's a strong, in the article that they for Nautilus, there's a strong Brazil bias, but I think it's really informative because it parallels what's going on here in the US. And they called this article the attack of zombie science and the subheading which is kind of explains exactly what they're talking about: 'They look like scientific papers. But they’re distorting and killing science.'.

So we often talk on the show about legitimate science and we often talk on the show about pseudoscience. But what we don't often talk about is this kind of in-between point, where the science is sort of done correctly, maybe there's some methodological issues, maybe there were some problems with how the study was registered or with p-hacking or with some other whether it be intentional or unintentional problems, but we don't often talk I think about what is the purpose of this research. There's very often a sort of assumption that all roads lead to enlightenment and that all scientific inquiry is equally valid. And the argument that the authors make in this study and they really link it to Covid-19 and a massive influx of publication that happened around Covid-19, is that, yes there's pseudoscience, yes there's junk science, stuff that patently false, stuff that we can disprove outright, stuff that would never or should never make it to legitimate mainstream journals. And then there's this cultural phenomenon that happens as a result of the publish or perish pressure that a lot of scientists feel. Where it's kind of like, I'm just gonna do a study, even though I'm not really trying to answer any questions that are valid, I'm not really trying to contribute to a body of knowledge, I'm not trying to better the world in any way. I just think this is an easy thing based on the lab equipment I have, based on what's in front of me, based on the stuff I published before to able to rattle of a paper, get it in this journal and now I'm keeping up my CV.

And sadly during the pandemic there have actually been multiple examples of scientists reaching out, very often scientists who volunteer as editors in journals saying what is this toxic garbage, that is gumming up my inbox, that is preventing me, form being able to sift through these mounds of publications and find the legitimate stuff. Like, one of them had a quote something like and he wouldn't disclose what any of the studies were about because he wanted to make sure that the authors remained anonymous Hans Ochs, professor of pediatrics at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute, said 'some are material for Saturday Night Live.'. Like this papers are that bad, that they're ridiculous. One author said, one reviewer said:'My favorite example is a suggestion to blow very hot air into a patient’s lung to eliminate the virus.'. And also sometimes these submissions are actually pushing national propaganda, so sometimes these submissions are things were like state sponsored research from across the globe are saying this is an approach that we've been taking, let's look at it and let's see if we can validate it. So there's this institutional response to the pandemic or there's obviously all the papers we've seen on hydroxychloroquine, on ivermectin on things where there's a perfectly large body of literature, certain claims have already been debunked, but a scientist my say, OK, let me just tweak it and apply it to this new contingency, and maybe I can write a whole new paper about it and publish that.

And these reviewers are saying why are we wasting our time, our time, our money, our experience on basically these zombie science papers. They look like science, they actually kind of are science, they don't fall purely into the pseudo-scientific category but they're basically eating our brains and preventing us from putting energy into the legitimate science that's happening. It's a flooding problem, it's a problem of the culture of publication across the globe, and it's a, it's actually a legitimate concern that we I don't think we often talk about or write about.

S: I agree it could be a huge problem, lot of it is, as you say, it's the academic culture publish or perish, you've heard of the minimal publishable unit? Ever heard that term Cara?

C: Yeah. Ye, that's exactly what they're talking about.

S: Yeah you're doing research and normally, I say normally, you do a study, you get all the results, and you publish a paper showing your results. But if you could get three papers out of that same research by breaking it up, and so the question becomes how small a piece can you publish and that's where this idea of minimal publishable unit is, you have to get down to this minimum piece of this, of your research that you can get into a journal. But that's only part of the issue here, there's also again this idea that you're just going to let's reanalyze the data, let do, like there's so many ways that you could just generate lots of noise.

C: Yeah by just like recontextualizing or studying it at slightly different way even though there's no face validity to it anyway, this is not a game changer, this is not a big question in science that people are you know it's one thing and we see this all the time when we cover stories, the discussion section of every legitimate and illegitimate article says more research is needed to answer XY and Z. And you know the culture of science should be that people go, oh, that's an open ended question that people haven't tackled, I wanna take up that course. But more often the culture of science is my lab has the equipment to answer X, my expertise happens in Y and you know some people, I think the vast majority are sort of trying their best to say we're trudging through, we're moving the needle and we're bringing information to unsolved problems. But there's also a lot of science that's literally like I'm gonna solve a problem that doesn't exist. I'm gonna try and answer a question that nobody's asking. And that's the other kind of side of this minimally publishable unit, right? Like not only is how much can I brake down the work I've been doing and just like flood journals with it, but also much can I just pontificate about something that is not actually helpful to anybody. And get a publication out of it.

S: Yeah it's also Cara doing lot of preliminary research, rather then you start with the preliminary research, then you do internal replications and you develop it to the point when you know if it's real or not.

C: Exactly.

S: Then you publish it. At the other end people will argue, yeah but you know other scientist to know about what you're doing as soon as possible so they could build on it. And to that I will argue well that's what pre-print service are for.

C: That's what pre-print service are supposed to be for, you're right.

S: Share your stuff but don't freaking publish it until you know it's real. Until you've done at least it's probably real. Just you need to lower the noise level. Funny aside, so we've been using the term zombie science for year at SBM but we use it in a different way, to refer to─

C: Oh, interesting.

S: ─we use it to refer to things that will not die. Like you think they're dead then they come back to life to eat your brains, right?

C: (laughs)

E: Oh, great.

C: Like Bigfoot.

S: Like seeing acupuncture studies over and over again, it's like, oh, didn't we destroy this two year ago, why is there another study doing the same crap over and over again it just don't go away, they will not die, they're like the Terminator.

C: They say something kind of similar but you're right, referring to something different and I wanna find the specific reference in the article cause it's really helpful:

We think of zombie science as mindless science. It goes through the motions of scientific research without a real research question to answer, it follows all the correct methodology, but it doesn’t aspire to contribute to advance knowledge in the field. (...) As we know from the horror movies, the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain—before it devours ours. The same is true for zombie science. As scientists, science communicators, and citizens, we need to recognize this distortion of science and take aim at its methods before it has another chance to distort, harm, and kill.

And they specifically are talking about the context of Covid-19 because there's been a flood of, I mean the number of publications that have occured during Covid-19 and it's easy on the outside to go look at the pace of science, look at how successfull we are, look at all the great science that's being done but really it's sadly a lot of oise with not very much signal inside of it.

S: Yeah, that the problem, to much noise, not enough signal.

All right Bob, tell us about this new information about the origins of life.

News_Item_2 ()

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Who's That Noisy? ()

New Noisy ()

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Science or Fiction ()

Answer	Item
Fiction
Science

Host	Result
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Rogue	Guess

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

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Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

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– AUTHOR (YYYY-YYYY), _short_description_

Signoff/Announcements ()

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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