SGU Episode 47

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SGU Episode 47
14th June 2006
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 46                      SGU 48
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
ZM: Zachary Moore
Links
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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 Wednesday, June 14^th 2006. This is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. With me tonight are Bob Novella

B: Hello!

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hey everybody!

J: Jay Novella

J: Hey, hey, hey!

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, all my friends.

News Items

Motorola patents feng-shui device (00:38)

S: So have you guys heard about Motorola's new fancy device that they have just patented?

B: Yeaaah! Cool!

S: They have patented a feng shui device.

R: Oh my god! Are you serious?

S: It actually, it measures the feng-shuiness of your environment and tells you where you need to move your furniture and stuff.

J: How does it tell you where to move your furniture...what it what...

E: Whatever Motorola is doing it for, I'll do it for you at half price, whatever they're charging.

S: Right!

R: I have a very small studio apartment, I'm just wondering...there's really nowhere else for things to go.

E: You're thinking inside the box, Rebecca, you have to think outside the box.

B: Is feng shui THAT popular?

S: Oh, so, feng shui, for those in the audience who may not know what it is, is an eastern tradition where they basically, it's pure magical thinking. It's the notion that luck and health and money and things like these are forces and energies in your environment and they can either flow into your life, or into your house, or away from you according to how you might arrange your furniture.

J: Ancient Chinese secret...

S: Yeah, I mean, it's really...

J: Stupid, say it, it's stupid!

R: Hahaha

J: It's probably one of the dumbest things out there!

S: It is! It's one of the absolute dumbest things...it's pure magical thinking. There's just nothing else to say

J: Feng shui...Isn't one of the things that you can't sweep...you have to sweep everything to the center of a room, because you can't - you can't sweep anything outside the house.

E: There's no... there are no parameter.

B: That's part of it. It's a flow of energy, you know, you wanna have the flow of energy, you know, I guess, going in the right direction and stuff like that. The funny thing is, though, that this device, it doesn't, like, detect the qi, and determine the nature, the energy and where it's going, it uses, like, radio signals!

S: Yeah!

B: It says "Okay, here's where the radio signals are, so that, hopefully, that is correlated with positive Qi.

R: So wait, you are saying it doesn't even detect Qi?I mean...

E: God!

B: No!

E: There's Qi!

R: What a rinkball!

S: It says weak radio signals indicate positive Qi but strong signals means negative Qi. And I don't know...How did they figure that out?

B: Right! Not only that, so if you have positive Qi, then you have a bad connection to your cellphone.

S: Right!

R: That's not very lucky.

J: Wait, is Motorola ran by a bunch of retards?

S: I think they're ran by the same executives who were running Florsheim those numbers of years ago when they put out the magnetic insoles to help with the circulation in your feet. Remember that?

E: Of course!

R: I think they're ran by people who like to make a lot of money regardless of the consequences.

S: And who think that their average customer is a moron.

E: Yeah...californian crowd

B: They see a niche, they see a niche and they want it to happen and they were (?!)

S: Yeah, and they make stuff up: "Ah, we'll just mesure radio waves, because we can, and we'll call it Qi and we'll sell it! It's a feng shui device!"

R: Why not?

B: Wouldn't you think that feng shui purists would say: "Hey! That's not how that works!"

J: I'm sure they will, Bob!

S: Like there are feng shui purists. Bob, the people who are selling their services as feng shui consultants they're just making it up out of the top of their heads anyway, they don't agree with each other, they just give you completely different

J: No, no Steve!

R: There's a great episode of Bull$hit about that, actually, when they invited three different feng shui consultants and they each did entirely different set-ups for the houses.

B: Right, there are certain....

J: Right, there are things that are standard, there are things like facing

B: Right

J: Everything has to be lined up, I believe, to the north properly, or something along those lines.

R: But even then, they bend, they bend their own rules and they don't know...

B: True, there's a lot of differences between the various feng shui experts, but I'd think that all would agree that it's not radio signals.

R: I don't know, I mean, I think that they'll line up behind anything that they think will give them some shred of... ahm... legitimacy.

E: Well, my acupuncturist told me that...he must know!

J: Steve! I think this could be classified under those things that people think are fun, and maybe, at least in the United States.

S: I don't think people shell out five thousand dollars to a feng-chui expert because they think it's fun. I think that they might do it because they think it's a status symbol so they can say that they, whatever, that their house is feng shui.

E: Or when our governments waste our, waste our tax money by hiring feng shui experts to come in and tell them how to construct their, how to construct government buildings.

S: Yeah!

E: That's not funny at all...

J: Wait! That happens?

E: In Connecticut it happened.

S: Yeah.

R: Yes, it did.

E: It happened here in Hartford.

J: Oh my god!

S: They were embarrassed out of it ultimately, but they did spend tax payers money on a feng shui consultant.

B: Steve, they could say: "Yea, I'm Feng Shui 1.0 Compliant"

E: Ha ha ha.

J: I have to go shoot myself right now. I can't take that.

R: Hah

E: Well, don't do that Jay, stick around and listen to the next item.

J: I'll finish

R: Besides, you're gonna get, you're gonna get blood all over your carpet and that's not good for your Qi!

J: That's right! You're right! Thank you, Rebecca!

R: See?

J: You saved me again.

Larry Summer Followup (05:43)

S: Now, this is...Rebecca, you blogged about this recently. It's about the one year anniversary of the Larry Summers infamist - now infamist comment about women academics at Harvard.

R: Well, it's not the one year anniversary of the comment. The comment would have been back in January.

S: Is that right?

R: Uhm... Yeah, I think it was around like, January/February of 2005. We're actually at the one year mark of the creation of the department that he made to kind of, uhn, soothe over the hubbub, I think, uh, and it's specifically for, uh, increasing diversity among the Harvard faculty. So it's been about a year since that was setup. So they just did a report going over what they've accomplished over the past year.

J: So what did he say?

R: He was asked to give a speech explaining some of the current hypothesis concerning why there's not a high percentage of women in the upper echelons, specially when it comes to the sciences. And he went over a few different hypothesis, one of which was basically that women might just not have the same mental capabilities as men to do science.

S: Uhum.

R: And , of course, that pissed off a lot of people and there's a lot of bad publicity over it and it was about a year after that, it was back in February that he announced that he was going to resign his position. And he didn't say that it was specifically because of that

S: But that's what it was.

R: Speculations (then Jay cuts in)

J: Well, I'd like to as everyone's opinion, you know, is there any validity to that? Did anyone do a real study? I mean, what's the...what's the consensus here?

S: That's clearly a thorny issue, because it is so political, but, you know, I'm a neuroscientist, I have sort of some sense of what this literature shows and in my reading of that, in the last 20-30 years there have been quite a few studies comparing the, just if - if you just step back a minute and not think about any particular ability but just look at the male and female brains they definitely are different. They definitely function different. They're organized differently in a number of ways that have been clearly established. For example: The female brain is more bilaterally redundant than the male brain. Male functions, specially with language, tend to lateralize a lot more to one side when women will utilize both sides of their brain more.

J: So does that mean that women may be more adapt to language than men?

S: Well that's a, that is a possibility and there is some evidence to support that. So I think the thing that is interesting about this is partly, you know, how politicized it gets. There are those at one extreme who, who think that any suggestion that there is a difference between men and women, it makes you a fascist, and they really get very emotionally upset at just the suggestion of it. And I think that that is a very counter-productive end of the spectrum. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum there's some hold over sexism, you know, but I do think that is significantly on the wane, at least in our society. Obviously in other parts of the world they're very, very different. What this comes down to, I think that this is really what this Larry Summer comment comes down to is: in our present day society, how much of the differences of distribution of men and women in different professions is due to past or current prejudice, and how much of it is due to self sorting. Is how much is due to the fact that men and women may have different likes and dislikes, and may have different aptitudes statistically, and you have to remember that even a slight difference aptitude, ah, on average, which could mean that 98% of men and 98% of women are not any different for each other. But even if there's a slight, slight difference, then at the very top of ability, either there could be a huge representation of one over the other.

R: And then, Steve, it's not just,ahm, the option isn't just whether or not it's genetic, I mean, there's another option besides genetic, and bias...

B: Well, cultural!

R: Yea, there's just, just the fact that women could be raised from birth to just not be interested in science. I mean, it could be the way that they're being taught, the way that we're influenced

S: Sure.

J: I'm sure there has a part in it

R: I mean, there are millions of different, ah, possibilities, there and discounting any one just because someone thinks that it might be sexist, that's just...I mean, that's absurd! There shouldn't be any hypothesis that we dismiss out of hand without at least taking a look at.

S: Absolutely.

R:Ah

J: Did that guy, last year, like, say something very, ah, derogatory, and negative, did he say that women were not as intelligent as men, or was he talking about...

R: Not at all! No, you can see the, ahm, the whole speech he gave online, and I linked to it through my blog and I've posted about Summer a number of times, uhm, and if you read through his speech, I mean, it's not at all derogatory, and it certainly doesn't sound like he's coming from a sexist place.

S: No

R: It, it sounds like he's saying "people are researching the problem, and here are some of the theories they've got going." He's not saying that he subscribes to any one of them, he's just putting them out there, because that's what he was asked to do for his speech, and I think that that's, you know, and if-if people disagree with that hypothesis, I think that the correct response should never be "That' sexist, shut up", it should be "Here's why you're wrong..."

S: Uhum...

R: "Here's the evidence that says you're wrong"

S: Right, I agree, I agree.

R: And, I mean, if there's evidence that says it's not true then, you know, show the evidence, don't...

S: Right. It's interesting, I mean, I, you know, my personal opinion, you know, having looked at the evidence and thinking about this for a while, is that there are still some cultural and historical forces at work in terms of the penetration of males and females in different profession, but I think that we're moving towards a distribution that is more and more self selective. I think that, in our country, as women are more free to pursue the careers that they want, that they are winding up in careers that are more amenable to their desires, and their talents. For example: women are overtaking men in the healthcare profession. They have no problem penetrating any - any corner of the healthcare profession. There are other fields which, and the reason why I think that there is a huge genetical component to this is because when we see which fields women are not making gains in, like engineering, that tends to fit quite well with the basic neuroscience, which is showing that women don't like engineering. It's not that they're not necessarily good at it, they just really don't like it to the same degree that men do. So maybe it's not that surprising that they're not penetrating that - that field. From a practical point of view, what this means is, should we just make everything we can to make sure that both men and women are free to pursue whatever career that they want, or do we have to, at the top end, work from the top down to make the numbers look good? Do we have to, like, force women into fields that they're not going in to spontaneously, or have some kind of affirmative action to make the numbers look good?

J: Sounds like bossing to me

R: I don't think that you're gonna, you're gonna force women into position that way.

S: Well, the way you do that is with quotas. Right? So you set up quotas, so that, specially like, in the upper echelons of academia, to make sure that 50% of women are in, a, engineering departments.

J: Yeah

S: That's the - that's the practical point of view, and I think if you look at all the evidence, if you look at what's happened, it would probably be better to work from the bottom up to just make sure that there's no glass ceiling, that women do whatever they want.

J: Well, I'll speak for all software engineers out there: We want more women in the field.

R: Hah.

J: Absolutely.

R: Yea, good luck with that, Jay, Huh haha. And, and that's ah, pretty much what Harvard's new office is working on. Like, one of the mains things I noticed from the report they put out, they, they really seem to be focusing on improving the lifestyle of students and faculty who choose to have families, like, increase funding to child care, uh, facilities and child care scholarships and things like that.

S: Yeah, which is excellent. It's all excellent.

R: Definitely, 'cause I...speaking to women who are in academia, I hear that a lot, like, "you make a choice: either you're going to have a family and therefore go into private industry, or you're gonna go into academia and give up hopes of having a family.

S: Yea, definitely the plainfield needs to be leveled in terms of just, biological functions, absolutely.

R: Right. Women shouldn't have to make a choice when it comes to that.

S: Yeah, I do, although, one final comment is, I do find it a little ironic that, you know, while there's still so much concern about making sure that women have a fair shake in, in academia, if you look at the younger generations, women are kicking guys' butts at school. I mean, they are.

R: Indeed, they are.

S: They, the develop academic skills at a younger age, their temperament and what not, it seems to serve them better during their school years. Boys seem to have a shorter attention span and are more distractible, whatever.

R: Also boys are smelly and have germs.

B: Good touch.

S: You know, in thirty or forty years, you know, we may be, the roles may be totally reversed, we may be having to talk very seriously about how we could get more guys into academia.

R: Right.

S: But, we will see.

Stephen Hawking on Space Travel (16:00)

S: One final news item, and this is just a quick follow-up to last week's podcast. We had talked to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer about manned space flight, and he was very much in favor of NASA funding manned space flight, as opposed to just robotic space exploration and his primary justification for that was that, you know, we need to pop, to uh, colonize other world, so we're not, so that we don't have all of our eggs in this one basket called Earth. But, by coincidence, Stephen Hawking has, I don't know if it was a lecture or an article that he wrote, but he has come out and very much in favor of manned space flight, and for the very same reason that Phil Plait cited, was that we need to colonize worlds other than the Earth. He writes that the survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe, because there is an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth. So I just thought that was interesting because it was, you know, right on the heels of last week's podcast where we made that point.

R: See Phil? Just as smart as

R&S: Steve Hawking

S: Right, absolutely.

R: Yeah.

Questions and e-mails (17:09)

S: Let's do a couple of e-mails and then we do have an interview this week. We have an interview with Zachary Moore who does the Evolution 101 podcast, we'll be getting to that in a moment. But first a few e-mails.

Consensus on Global Warming(17:20)

S: E-mail number 1 comes from Mark Goddard, uh, who simply gives his location as "The US", Mark writes:

Science or Fiction ()