SGU 10-Hour Show Part 2
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| SGU 10-Hour Show |
|---|
| 2nd May 2015 |
 |
| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| SGU Podcast archive |
| Forum Discussion |
Part 2 video: https://youtu.be/97c6FEURvc8
Interview with Eugenie Scott continued 0:00[edit]
Note: This page is not transcribed, but it has been summarized, and statements of the rogues has been paraphrased in order to provide limited searchability. Color is shown in gray to distinguish from a transcript.
ES: She works on both creationism and global warming because they follow the same patterns. They helped parents to fight against creationism in schools. It went badly at first, but they soon got legal advice. They eventually won the court case. S: It became a precent ES: Only in the district. But it was such a crushing decision that the creationists had no spirit left to pursue it any more. The creationist school board lost their next election, so there was no appeal. It was such a powerful decision that its effects rippled throughout the country. ''(ES only realizes now that she's live on the air. She thought this was just preparation)'' ES: ID is not science. Why teach kids science that isn't science. In the case, both sides agreed on the definition of science, that it has to be restricted to material causes. But the ID side wanted to broaden this definition to include other things. The funds for this trial came from Pepper Hamilton, pure pro-bono. The legal profession is an important part of our culture. Lawyers are expected to donate five to ten percent of their time to good works pro bono. I asked several people to help us with Dover. One lawyer came back quickly, and said he had been waiting for fifteen years for an opportunity to work on ID. His entire firm supported the cause and helped out. It was mostly senior lawyers who helped out, not the juniors that usually do the pro bono stuff. They personally didn't want creationism to be taught to their kids. They were very enthusiastic. S: The separation of church and state was first supported by religion to keep the government from interfering with their beliefs, but they have come to oppose it more recently. ES: In the Kitzmiller case, they focused on the Establishment clause, but the Free Exercize clause is also powerful, because it says you can worship any way you want, or not at all. This creates a recipe for neutrality of the government in religious matters. It's a brilliant document. S: But creationists are still sneaking creationism into the schools, even if it's illegal. ES: The academic freedom rules are providing a way for creationists to bring their religion into the science classroom. The Academic Freedom acts are scary. The Louisianna gives them the freedom to bring in teaching materials without oversight. The creationists have learned they can't be too blatant about teaching creationism. But they will attack evolution, which has the same effect. Most Americans think dichotomously. There is creationism and evolution. If you attack evolution, then creationism must be right. If evolution looks bad, students just naturally conclude that God did “poof.” So the teachers can push creationism without looking like they're doing it.The legal team did a fantastic laws. S: The freedom laws are identical to health care freedom laws, which eliminate the standard of care for health professionals. ES: That's a wonderful insight, and I've never thought about that. Who knows the most about how to teach math? Math teachers. So teachers should have the strongest authority for choosing how to teach math. But the public is taking control instead. S: It's a populist attack trying to characterize expertise as “elitist.” It's easy to dismiss experts, but if you have a plumbing, is it “elitist” to want a plumber to work on it? GH: If you need heart surgery, you go to a surgeon. But if you just have chest pain, you are more willing to go to some guru. ES: Experts are usually respected until they oppose a strong ideology. S: If you're going to dismiss the expertise of global warming, why not reject all experts? ES: People take a cafeteria approach to rejecting experts. The reject some, but not others. S: They are being hypocritical. You feel like you know enough to reject the science of climate change? Would you reject other experts? ES: The public likes science. But we know some science is bad. The evidence for Bigfoot is bad, and they reject that correctly. The only way to deal with this is to address the ideological concerns. Finding a member of their ideological group who accepts the science can help. She has evangelical Christians who have learned how to integrate their religious views with the actual science. B: The peers are going to change their minds. ES: You're going to trust the people who are like you. Conservative Christians are better able to convey the message. J: As a strategy, you want to find these people? ES: We've encouraged it all along. We support moderate evangelical Christian groups. Only a small number of them are creationists. They mostly support the science. But history shows that religion evolves if nothing else does. There is now Protestant missionizing going on in Russia and South America. I have seen very sincere religious scientists trying to help their fellow believers not to reject science. GH: Do you think the Dover Case is your top accomplishment? ES: I would say so, yes. Kitzmiller was a biggie. We worked our little collective butts off. We have reunions every fall, and it's a wonderful party. <!-- That's awesome --> S: And you have an event coming up ES: The Sacremento and Bay area skeptics will sponsor Skeptical. It's a one day science and skepticism conference on Saturday, June 6. We keep the cost way down because we want people to come and not find restrictions from travel and money. We've got science communication people. The new director on NCSC, her speciality is viruses. She helped to sequence the 1998 flu virus. Viruses are scary, so she's gonna help people understand what you should be afraid of, and what will be okay. Skeptical, don't miss it. Skepticalcon.org GH: What view would you have out your window. ES: The Grand Canyon. ''(Interview ends at 34:37)'' S: Well, that worked! Everything is awesome! J: She speaks in perfect sound bites. From the Twitter feed: Why is Megan Fox so stupid E: She's into woo. She also doesn't know history, like Hitler was bad
Black Box Tech (35:46)[edit]
S: The idea is that as any technology advances, the accessibility becomes less and less until it is just a black box. Starting with cars, it was common for an average person to tinker with their own car fifty years ago. As the technology has progressed, it is less and less common. Now, you need fancy equipment, and you just can't tinker with it. Now, I have no idea what's going on. J: In modern cars, you can't even see the engine sometimes. You have to take stuff out to see it. E: I knew a guy who used to maintain his own car. But he can't do it any more. You have to spend a thousand dollars just to get the screw driver you need to do anything. S: I think the technology is driving it. It would take effort to prevent every company from having proprietary tools. GH: TV's and typewriters are other examples. J: I built my own computer, and it died. So I went through the basic checklist, and i have been debugging it for a year. I understand how computers work. But there is some monster in that machine, and I can't figure it out. I don't even think a local shop can fix it, if one exists. I don't feel comfortable handing it over to some one else. S: Computers are a great example. I used to modify them all the time. Now, you end up with an iPad, and I would never dream of cracking open a device like that. Even desktops are these tiny little things. It's literally a black box. Why would you crack it open? So where's it gonna be in ten years? Now it's throw it away and get a new one. B: In the future, the robots will repair it. Humans might not know how to repair them at all. E: A company is working on a car that can repair itself now. J: As technology becomes more nuanced, the average user won't be able to be a part of fixing things. But with 3D printing, we might be able to make new things. Also, Google is building a modularized phone where you can replace parts as it gets over. We won't be tinkering with our self-driving cars. S: Are we culturally getting more and more narrow in their expertise, and we're going to get to a point where we completely depend on technology and will be helpless if the lights go off. How would I do as a physician if I was sent into medieval Europe. I can't order an MRI scan, or anything like that. But ninety-nine percent of my knowledge would be instantly worthless. E: More basic than that, think about food. You used to have to grow your own food. We can't make our own food now. J: There aren't even farms around us now. GH: And those that exist are watered by machines. B: There's other components of those advances, like intelligence augmentation, that could potentially allow us to know way more stuff. I think that will eventually happen. GH: If there's any major disaster, we're all screwed just from where we are now. A big solar event that wipes out the grid will ruin us. J: There are companies that passes knowledge to its employees, and they're the only ones that know how to do it, like knowing how to build transformers. If the people die, that knowledge is gone. S: In medicine, most of the important knowledge is not in textbooks, it's in experts. J: It would be awesome if we could put all knowledge into an artificial intelligence. S: It's interesting how long would it take? But if you're thrown into a society that achieves some political stability, and they have to rebuild society with a massively reduced population. How quickly could they get back to where we were based on what knowledge is left behind? J: Things like theoretical physics might never be the same. B: Physics is boring.
Interview with Brian Wecht (51:00)[edit]
(Brian Wecht joins the crew in the Skeptilair)
S: We were joking about the physics. J: If every person with your level of knowledge dies, BW: I'm a theoretical particle physicist. J: How long would it take to get that ... BW: Starting from books? J: Just books BW: To get to the latest stuff would take a long time. You'd have to build another LHC. J: But there wouldn't be anyone like you to teach people to understand the books. BW: There's an archive on a server you put things on. There's no peer review, so everyone is careful about it. The system is working, but if a paper is found to be wrong, there's no effective way aside from oral tradition to inform people that the paper is wrong. J: Would it take a hundred years to get it all back. BW: You can learn quantum mechanics pretty well, but yeah, it would take a hundred years. S: From medicine, a crank has access to PubMed and they kind of understand it, but they can't put it in perspective. So they come up with crank nonsense. In this society, everyone would be a crank at first. BW: In my work, my first guesses on problems is based on intuition from experience. GH: Do you think there would be stone age and bronze age sped up? S: I think there would be different ages since some modern knowledge would survive. GH: It might be more of scavenging.
25 Years of the Hubble (57:16)[edit]
E: Amazing BW: Which started as a joke S: So Hubble was a lot of hype. They get it up there, and it's out of focus. They took blurry pictures until they put a fix up there. GH: My father said it was like the Tower of Babel. We're not meant to see it. B: The bottom line was because they didn't want to run an expensive test that would have caught this. S: They fixed it by replacing one of the lenses to compensate for aberrations in the big lens. ... So, we've got a slide show of the best pictures from the Hubble. ''(Big ol' nebula)'' J: Now, you would never see that with the naked eye S: No! ''(Laughter)'' J: That's computer enhanced to show the gas S: Almost all of these pictures are false color. B: Space would be so boring if I was actually out there.