SGU Episode 731

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SGU Episode 731
July 13th 2019
"Graceful beauty of the ocean: a vibrant jellyfish gliding through crystal waters."
SGU 730                      SGU 732
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error? ... By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and – if we can train ourselves to do so – by criticizing our own theories or guesses.’
Karl Popper
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voiceover:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, July 8th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria, Howdy, Jay Novella, Hey guys, and Evan Bernstein. No, we're a family again. Aww. Yay.

U:I'm back. I went to the beach. Where? Which beach? What? To the which beach?

US#02:Pismo Beach and all the clams you could eat? I was in New Hampshire in a town called Hampton Beach, but not the Hamptons.

S:It's not the Hamptons. Now, there's not much coastline of New Hampshire, but there is a tiny bit. You were on the Atlantic Seaboard? Yeah, it was beautiful. The town was great. We stayed in an Airbnb, which was also really, really awesome. I mean, Airbnb to me is blowing away hotel because you actually can get a house.

J:You're not in a hotel with family, you're in a house. You found a multi-bedroom house and the living room and kitchen were huge. When you're in a beach town like this, nothing is far, so driving was not an issue and it was great.

E:We had a backyard and the kids were running around doing all that. Then we went to the beach, then we went to a water park, and by the time I got home, I needed to sleep for two days.

J:It's like the opposite of my vacation. Yeah, right? You went to Hawaii. I went to Hawaii. Now that is a beach in Hawaii. That is a nice beach. We went to Lanai. Lanai. Isn't that like a patio or a word for a patio or a deck? Lanai does mean patio. Yeah, yeah. It's also like the least populated island. And weirdly, it's like 95% owned by Ellison. You know who I'm talking about? Yeah, Oracle, man. It's 97% owned by Larry Ellison. Wow. So strange. What a weird thing, right?

C:The whole population of Lanai, the entire island, is 3,102 people.

E:Yeah, that's nothing.

C:Geez.

E:The thing is, there's only one city on the whole island, Lanai City.

C:There are no traffic lights.

E:There are no shopping malls. All the public transit is provided by the hotels.

C:It's weird. It's nice. It's really beautiful. It was just very, very calm. I took a couple of yoga and tai chi classes, which I really liked. Cara, did they try to adjust your chakras and all that kind of stuff, or did they leave you alone with the nonsense? What He wasn't heavy handed at all. He was, the instructor is Japanese. I mean, he did talk a little bit about like, you know, the movements, like, the Tai Chi movements are open, and they're like fluid.

E:And then there's the other form of martial art that you do with Tai Chi, which all the movements are closed fisted.

C:And they're like, more aggressive. But you know, he talked about like the quote unquote, negative energy and the positive energy and how they like counteract each other like the yin yang stuff, but I just look at it kind of like it's all sort of parable stuff.

E:And then it works.

C:Thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, very much so. Yeah, it's very fluid. It's very focused. It's all about these really precise movements, but it helps you kind of feel, I don't know, kind of light. But I think that in a way, talking about the quote unquote negative energy and the positive energy, it's sort of a good way to metaphorically visualize what you're doing with your body.

J:That's the only way I really looked at it. Because in Tai Chi, your movements are like all centered around this empty space in front of your chest. And so they talk about that like it's an energy ball. So you're like visualizing a ball of nothing.

C:It kind of helps you know how to move your body. But no, I don't believe any of that shit. It gives you a relative point in space in which to conduct your movements around that point. Yeah, but he never once said, like, oh, your chi is more balanced now that you've come to class. Like, he didn't do anything weird like that. So have you guys ever seen Rocky IV? I have not. Oh, yes. I've seen it four times. I must break. So, you know, Dolph Lundgren was in that, and I was so impressed with that guy. I was really young, and I just kind of thought he was badass. Doesn't he have like a neuroscience degree?

E:Is it a neuroscience degree? He's very intelligent. I thought it was. He's got an engineering degree or something? Oh, maybe it's engineering.

C:You're right. I'm going to look it up. Yeah, look it up. He has an advanced degree. He is really smart. He's wicked smart. He's sharp. He's sharp.

J:I had a video I found where he teaches like warm-up and tai chi, and I loved it. I used to do it three or four times a week. And it was weird because it kind of reminds me a little bit of podcasting because I kept watching the video over and over again.

E:I felt like I kind of got to know him, which is a little weird, you know, but I don't know.

C:I just I had a little boy crush on him, I guess. Chemical engineering.

J:Yeah, he's got an undergrad in chemical engineering, a master's in chemical engineering, and then he got a Fulbright to continue his studies at MIT, but actually left before he finished that whatever he was working on, a Ph.D. or another master's. That's awesome. Yeah, that's cool. All right, Evan, you're going to do a second five to 10 year follow up for us.

5-10 years (05:14)

Recorded Future None

J:All right, Evan, you're going to do a second five to 10 year follow up for us. I went back guys. It was August 4, 2010. Episode number 264. Wow. We were babies back then. Can you imagine?

S:That was so long ago.

C:I was only a glimmer in your eye. On that episode, we talked about a particular news item. This is what caught our attention.

S:The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time and says it uses that information to predict the future.

E:Tell me if there's ever been a better marketing strategy in history than the supposed ability to predict future events. When you have the corporate might of Google and the government might of the CIA as part of that marketing strategy, then people are going to pay attention. And this was widely reported on and commented on as this was announced nine years ago. So here's some details from the 2010 reporting of that. The company is called Recorded Future. It scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions, and incidents, both present and still to come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine goes beyond search by looking at the invisible links between documents that talk about the same or related entities and events. That sounds a lot like that TV show, Person of Interest. I haven't seen that. Evan, you should you should stop recording right now and go watch it. Binge the whole thing right now. It's wonderful. Wow. It's just and it goes to places you would not have anticipated after even watching a half of the first season. Highly recommended by Bob. So is the predicting the future part of the overall? Yeah, there's a computer. Basically, here's the basic premise. There's a computer that does just that. It scours all social media, the Internet, and does deep pattern recognition to predict that someone is about to commit a crime.

B:But because of privacy laws, it's not allowed to say, hey, this guy is going to do X, right? Right. So it just spits out a Social Security number. Watch this. Watch this guy.

E:Wait, how is this different from Minority Report, where they spit out the ball of the person?

S:This is actually based on science. Here's a social security number, and then you don't know if it's a potential victim or perpetrator or anything, or just related to them. Right. It's not just social media either. I mean, these are like every camera, every camera watching people on the street, and even phones as well, to a certain extent. So yeah, there's a lot of data that it's going through.

E:So this is obviously a concept that's been around.

S:Obviously, this television show mentioned Minority Report. So we've talked about this before. We've seen it before. It's in culture and everything else. Now, here's what the company's CEO, Christopher Alberg, said at the time.

B:The cool thing is you can actually predict the curve, meaning that you can glean real information based on what you're gathering and come up with some accurate things that come up in the future. You can make some level of predictions with it.

E:Now they weren't talking about 100% accuracy or crystal ball or anything like that, just that they were going to put the power of basically Google behind it in order to gather as much information and make the best assessment you can with that information. Obviously with limitations concerning privacy and other things, which is kind of what we talked a little bit about on the show. At the time, this was what the scuttlebutt was. Everyone was very concerned about really what does this mean for the future of privacy for people, especially when you've got a division like the CIA involved. It was reported that both organizations We'll profit handsomely if Recorded Future, this company, is ever sold or taken public. So our conversation on the show between the five of us at the time, we brought up the issues, the privacy issues. We talked about what assumptions of privacy people can expect or assume when online. We talked about when privacy lawsuits might start and how is that going to unfold in the future. We now have nine years of that to look back on. Yes, there are lawsuits and other issues concerning privacy, specifically with Google, among other large information companies. Jay, you brought up the personal control of data. Essentially, should we all be using proxy servers to help, in a sense, protect ourselves? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's not that hard of a thing to do. You can pay a monthly service and you can get fully encrypted, protected. You know, you'll just be bounced around so much that no one will really know where you're coming from. I mean, your privacy is very much at stake in your own home with just browsing the internet. That's right. Yeah, that's kind of similar to what you were talking about all those years ago, Jay. Rebecca had brought up some similar points as well, plus the selling of our data. Were they actually selling our data? We didn't know at the time.

J:And that's kind of a complicated question as to does our data get sold? It's kind of a sort of. Yes, not directly, but indirectly, yes, our data does get sold and used. OK, but nonetheless, Recorded Future had secured their two big accounts and they were ready to launch themselves into the deep end of the swimming pool of cybersecurity and Internet analytics with the promise of the best built mousetrap of predicting future events and outcomes.

E:So here we are, 2019. What's the deal with Recorded Future? Well, just last month, June 2nd, 2019, CNBC headline reads, Recorded future just sold for $780 million. And they want to scour the internet for threat data down to the damn electron. And that's a quote. So they want to go even deeper than they've gone before. But let me give you a little update or go a little deeper as far as what this really means. So the deal brought out the high profile investors in the company, including Google or Alphabet, you know, it's now known, and In-Q-Tel. Reed Elsiver, among others, also bought into this company. So they are all going to take a nice chunk of money having sold this now. The market for threat intelligence tools is about a $4 billion industry now, and it's going to grow to about a $9 billion industry by 2022, so in just a couple of years. So it is definitely on the grow. But here's the question. What exactly did Google and CIA sell to these new investors who bought Recorded Future? In other words, were they able to come through with the promises of reliable information about future events all in the name of security and other things? The short answer to that is, It's complicated, as we're fond of talking about and mentioning here on the show. Maybe the real question here, though, is how has Recorded Future evolved in the past nine years? They went from these sorts of promises, and it was kind of a good sales pitch, essentially, but they're a cybersecurity firm, and they've successfully marketed themselves as the world's leading threat intelligence services company. That's it. They are top notch out there. They cater their computer and internet security services to mid and large-sized companies of all sorts. These are computer companies, financial institutions, heavy manufacturing concerns, governments at the local, state, and federal level, among many others. They've taken their inventions and innovations, and they use them mainly now to stop cybercrime, which is obviously a Super important thing that is going on. But their twist about the future predicting I think kind of cooled off in a sense. Now part of their overall approach to cybercrime is the forecasting aspect of it. Monitoring current online activities for behaviors and patterns that may signal that something is brewing. Practical experience or know-how about what these real-time patterns and behaviors might be. Thanks for watching. And I'm sure some people who are listening might be familiar with the Recording Future slate of products and services. So my skeptical point is that how does a company like Recording Future measure the accuracy of their predictions? I know that asking that question is kind of like asking Coca-Cola for the secret recipe, maybe, or for Colonel Sanders for the secret recipe for the chicken that half the world is addicted to. So I'm asking them to reveal their secrets, the company secrets that they make money off of. You know, it's like that line in the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the whole bloody thing's rather unaccountable, isn't it? I did a search for independent audits of Recording Future, could not find anything. So how do we know that their success and the reviews of their products online are very glowing? Users love this product, but how do we know that their future-based analysis tools have had an impact? On what level? Was it a full success? Was it half success? No success? Where are the failures? The data isn't out there for us to analyze because essentially, I think, they'd have to be giving away some of their secrets by which they make these things. Yes, they're more of a conventional security firm and the future prediction was really just a gimmick. I think so. I think that's how we can look at it now that we have nine years under our belts to analyze it. Yeah, we still don't have a person of interest kind of computer. As far as we know, I guess it's possible. If it did exist, we wouldn't know about it. But the new investors, Steve, are picking up right where the old investors left off when they're saying things.

S:We're going to be able to analyze data right down to the electron or the atom.

E:It's market speak, it's hype, it's reselling the product again, repackaging it.

S:But again, the users seem happy with the product. But there's not really much else to go off of. Yeah, but how do the users know, right? How do they know, right?

E:Is it based on what hasn't happened? You know, that's like, here's the tiger charm. When you wear it, you won't be eaten by a tiger. Right, from like The Simpsons? The Simpsons, the bear patrol. No bears around ever since we... It works. Yeah, you need some kind of objective measure, some quantitative, thorough measure. You know, you can't just go by anecdote.

S:What we do know also, Steve, that the massive collection of data, when it's stored up in one or just a handful of places concentrated to that level, there are concerns about that data and how it is being used. In fact, Recorded Future, let's have a look here. I looked at some of their legal speak and some other things concerning that, and who are they potentially going to share their information with? Here, right from their webpage, legal requirements.

E:We may share or log your information without your consent if we have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation, and disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or valid governmental request, enforceable, applicable terms of service in terms of use, so forth. So what they're saying is, If the FBI wants your info, we have to give it to them. We have to give it to them. Definitely something to keep an eye on. We're definitely heading for that. I wrote about that recently. If you think about a dystopian future, I think one of the legit things to be concerned about is a techno-fascism, is the idea that it is techno-authoritarianism, is the ability to use technology Thank you for joining us today.

S:All right, Cara, let me ask you a question.

News Item #1 - Eating Jellies (17:50)

• Gastrophysicists Are Using an Audiovisual Experience to Make Jellyfish More Appetizing 

S:All right, Cara, let me ask you a question.

S:OK. Have you ever eaten a jelly? I haven't. Have you? No. I didn't even know that they were food. Yeah. Well, I think that's kind of the point. I ate a jelly bean today. A jelly, a sea jelly, a jellyfish. Have any of you eaten one? You used to be called jellyfish. No. No. Why would you? They look like those things that flew onto Spock's back and, you know, paralyzed them. So I'll tell you why you would, because they're pretty sustainable, just in the sense that, you know, a lot of ocean acidification is happening. We're really affecting sort of the ecological balance of the oceans right now.

C:The ocean, like I said, is acidifying. It's getting warmer and we're starting to see more and more jellyfish blooms. You guys have heard of these.

E:And jellyfish are a common bycatch. And so, you know, for a long time, people have eaten jellies in Asian cultures, but there's kind of a movement to try and get a Western palate for jellies.

C:And I read this really great article in Hawkeye magazine about how gastro physicists Whoa. Are trying to work towards making jellyfish more appetizing. And that's a legitimate career path, I suppose. I know, I figured I would hear something from you, Bob. Gastrophysicists. Well, wouldn't that be like molecular gastronomy, though? Not really, because they're actually... What's the difference? So the difference is that gastrophysicists take the perspective that food is not just about, and I know molecular gastronomists do the same thing, but they take the perspective that food is not just about taste. And even flavor, which as we know is both smell and taste, is not the whole picture. There are all these different sense experiences that we have with food and getting kind of smart in the kitchen, especially with material science and with chemistry, how do we cook these things, we are going to be able to Change their texture, change their color, change their flavor, change the experience of eating them. And I love these titles, Making Sustainable Foods Such as Jellyfish Delicious, which is like, okay, cool. That was published in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science. And then also Soft Matter Physics Meets the Culinary Arts from Polymers to Jellyfish, which was published in the same journal. So these are, yeah, researchers, physicists, chemists, who are interested in probably, you know, trying to improve the state of conservation, the state of sustainability in our food, and also kind of increase, I think, our, I don't know, our palates a little bit, make us a little bit more worldly and global in our tastes. And utilizing science to do it. So the article talks a lot about a place in London, an experimental restaurant called Kitchen Theory, and how they actually prepare these jellyfish where they are served with fermented cucumber, where they use a traditional Asian preparation, which is actually soaking them in salt water for an entire month. That's how you get them to be crunchy, apparently. Do they live in salt water? Yeah, and so you have to like soak them in this brine for a month straight too, I guess after after they're killed. And apparently that's like a pain in the butt. So they're trying to figure out new ways to emulate that same texture and they figured out that you can do it by soaking them in ethanol. And the cool thing is you can actually add things like flavorings to the ethanol that will help the jellyfish change flavor because apparently jellyfish don't taste like anything. Well, from what I understand, because I was reading about like how to prepare them and whatnot, you end up with just a hunk of collagen, basically. But it's crunchy. Mostly protein, mostly collagen. It will, depending on how you cook it. But now they can do that, I guess, a little bit more quickly, which makes it more viable for restaurants and more viable for people who are preparing it at home by utilizing the ethanol. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, You don't like what you don't know. And the cool thing is they actually, Jay, just to interject really quickly, they talked in this article to some psychologists who specialize in tastes and adventurous like food seeking behavior. And they said that for many, many people, it's the first time you taste something that often sets your path. Thank you for joining us. That looks like you're like underwater. It's a whole thing. It's like a whole experiential event. But it's an interesting approach to food. Like, let's make it so that the first time you try jellyfish, it's like a badass, really delicious experience so that you're not turned off to it for life. I think that's why I don't like seafood. I really do. I grew up in Texas. I didn't have access to good seafood. And now the brininess of seafood, the concept of seafood, it's a very difficult thing for me. But so many people around the world love seafood. It's the same thing with jellyfish. Many, many Asian cultures eat jellyfish. So why is it that to us we're like, ugh, Yeah. It's just not part of our culture. I would definitely try it. I blame Star Trek. Why? What happened in Star Trek? Well, I got stung by a jelly once when I was on vacation with my family in Port Aransas, Texas, and it hurt so bad and it kind of ruined my vacation. So I'm a little bit angry at jellies, but maybe that means I should just eat them out of revenge. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, I don't, I mean, I like them when they're de-legged. I mean, there's certain things, ants are easier than crickets, I think, but cricket flour is fine because they mill it. You would never even know it's made out of crickets.

B:But I think for jellies, it's also one of those interesting questions, which is, for what reason do some people choose to be vegan? And if those reasons are cruelty reasons, or if they're sustainability reasons, would they be able to start folding jellyfish into their diet? Because some people, even though yes, they are animals,

C:Some people might have a different perspective on jellyfish because they don't have like a central nervous system at all. So they may see them more like eating insects. And I know some people who are vegan, but they eat insects. So, um, yeah, it's, it's, and also this is not an issue of, or it's actually a helpful decision when it comes to sustainability purposes. So some people might choose for environmental reasons that eating jellyfish is better for the environment than not eating jellyfish. So I don't know. It's interesting. Definitely, because right now they cull jellyfish to large numbers, because they're blooming so badly. They'll go out and catch them and cull them. You might as well do something with them. Yeah, to use that as a food source is amazing. Yeah. High in protein? Pretty cool. Yeah, high in protein. Basically all protein. Hey, Cara, what do you call the art of telling what you're going to eat based on when you were born? Thank you for watching. Gastrology is the study of stomach and stomach diseases. Oh, it is a legitimate thing. Dang it.

E:Damn you, legitimate science.

C:One letter, one letter. Alright, Jay, we're always trying to improve the science of skepticism, meaning do our skeptical activism in the most evidence-based way possible. So it's great when these studies come out that actually look at how effective different strategies are.

S:So tell us about the latest one.

News Item #2 - Rebutting Denialism (26:06)

• Effective strategies for rebutting science denialism in public discussions 

S:So tell us about the latest one.

B:This is about science denial, Steve.

S:And I know skeptics know a lot about it, but the fact is there's a lot of people out there that reject science, even though science has established this immense catalog of information over the past, let's just say 100 years. The past 100 and some odd years, we have this incredibly deep catalog. But yet, ironically, they still don't care. They don't care about it. And we, the skeptics, you know, like us, we can be confused with science deniers.

J:Ever have that happen? People hear the word skeptic and they're like, oh, what are you doing? Are you skeptical of everything? No. Like you're a global warming skeptic. Like, no, no, no, no. You know, continuing down that ironic path, we're actually the people out there that are fighting them back. You know, that's one of our goals is to minimize the damage that science deniers do. So we do need effective strategies to deal with with science denial specifically, and we need them right now. And there's something called persuasion psychology, which is fascinating. And I'm sure Cara could could talk about this for a very long time, but Persuasion psychologists have identified three factors that can determine whether or not someone who denies science can be successfully, you know, undenied or, you know, given proper information. It's crazy. Fascinating. The first one is called characteristics of the receiver. So we're talking about the person that's listening in. Right. So the person that's reading the blog post or reading the Facebook chat, as an example. And then we have characteristics of the sender. This is the science communicator. This includes the person's credibility and how likable they are. And then you have the actual message content itself. And this could include the type of evidence that you're using or the way that you're communicating. So, in this study, which was conducted by Philip Schmid and Cornelia Betsch, they cover which type of message content are the most effective when responding to science deniers publicly. There are two kinds of responses or rebuttals to a science denier's claim. The first one is that you could provide support only for your specific view on the topic, right? So when I say you, I'm talking about you, the science communicator. This is called a topic rebuttal and is essentially relaying the scientific facts of the topic that the science denier got wrong, right? You're peppering them with the facts. The second one, you can essentially call attacking the plausibility of the science denier's position. This one is called the technique rebuttal where you outline the logical flaws that were made. So they give an example on the study where a science denier claims that vaccines need to be 100% safe, right? The reality is that it's impossible. It's an impossible expectation because no medical procedure or drug can ever be 100% safe. That's it. None of these practices are 100% safe. And in this example, the science advocate wants to point out the flaw in the logic and explain why it's incorrect. And the people will be more emotionally capable of dealing with this kind of information That goes against what they already believe when they understand the technique the science denier is using. So you're in a way, you're trying to show how the science denier is quote unquote tricking you. Or you know, what their actual technique is to get inside your head. And when you undo that, when you use the technique rebuttal, which is kind of deconstructing their logical flaws, then the people that are listening, We'll have an emotional foothold because they'll feel like, you know, in many different ways this can be interpreted, but I read it like they are now understanding why they fell for it and it gives them a way out without blaming themselves. Because I guess unconsciously they can say, I was tricked. This person's logic was flawed. Yeah, it was flawed, so therefore it can allow them to take a step in your direction. The researchers are saying that you don't have to use both of these techniques at the same time, that if you get good at one of the techniques, which as an example, you might be well versed with vaccine information, but not feel comfortable dissecting the logical. In this video, we're going to be talking about And I think there's some good news and bad news in this study for skeptics. But first of all, it's one study, right? This is a complex evolving area of research. And not every study agrees with every other study. So we're just sort of collectively following it all and seeing where the consensus is building. So the one thing I was a little disappointed to see that there wasn't an additive benefit to using both methods, because that's basically the approach that we take.

S:But I think it's overwhelmed by the good news. So one is that either method is effective, right? And on either end of the political spectrum, that's good. But also think about it. What they're essentially saying is that if you are a knowledgeable skeptic and you understand the nature of denialism and conspiracy theories and Thank you for joining us. They also found that there was no backfire effect in their data. In other words, people did not dig in their heels and deny the science even harder when you give them facts. So that's been a controversy in the evidence, and some studies showing there's a backfire effect, but it really hasn't replicated well. And so this is on the side of they're not seeing a backfire effect in the data, which is good. We don't want there to be a backfire effect. That would be a bad thing for us. So I was happy to see that the data did not show that. So I guess the bottom line is, as you said, Jay, know the topics that you're talking about, but good generic skeptical knowledge and skills can take you far. They can give you at least a handle on any scientific topic. You could at least recognize that logic doesn't hold together. The methods that you're using aren't working. And so I don't know what the truth is, I have to look into it, but that position doesn't pass the smell test, the skeptical smell test, you know? Okay, thanks, Jay. There's another sad, fake cancer cure story going around, and it's a good opportunity to do a little technique debunking, right, Jay, to just talk about the techniques used by some of the cancer quackery.

News Item #3 - Cancer Quackery on YouTube (33:08)

• Cancer Quackery on YouTube - NeuroLogica Blog 

S:There's another sad, fake cancer cure story going around, and it's a good opportunity to do a little technique debunking, right, Jay, to just talk about the techniques used by some of the cancer quackery. This one is a pair of YouTubers, Mary Lopez and her niece, Liz Johnson. We're YouTubers documenting her fight against her breast cancer. Mary Lopez chose to forego standard therapy and to treat her cancer with a raw vegan diet. She claimed that she was cured and was promoting, telling her audience, don't get chemotherapy, don't get surgery, just follow my raw vegan diet advice. But recently, the niece, Liz Johnson, posted an update on some of the videos that they had on YouTube saying that, oh, by the way, Mary Lopez died in December 2017 of her cancer. Right, which is sad. And that's kind of an important update to give the public. I want to talk about a couple of things very quickly. One is this case, this individual case, has all of the hallmarks of the typical cancer quackery cycle that we see. So typically, a patient is diagnosed as having cancer and then they may either get the initial treatment, which could be surgery, and then they decide that they want to pursue, instead of doing a long course of chemotherapy or radiation, They decided they wanted to change their diet or get coffee enemas or go vegan or whatever, do something that's a little bit more appealing than the chemotherapy. They're in what we call the honeymoon phase of their cancer. You can convince yourself at this time that you've cured the cancer because either it was removed by the surgery Thank you for joining us today. And that's apparently what happened, unfortunately, with Mary, is that she thought that, you know, she convinced herself that she was cured. In fact, she said, it's over, referring to the cancer, it is done with, I am healed, I feel it in my spirit and in my body. There's a lot of spiritual religious overtones to her approach as well, which is also not uncommon. And she said, there's another quote, it's my choice. I've been okay. I haven't died. I haven't gotten to the hospital. I am going to continue on this path of going natural. So she's saying, I feel great. So I'm going to claim that I'm cured, you know, and I believe that I'm cured. But of course, you don't know that they're cured unless you're following them medically, unless you're looking at blood tests or x-rays or whatever. You're monitoring the cancer. In her case, the cancer eventually metastasized to the blood, bone, and liver, and then at that point, the game was pretty much over once you have extensive metastasis. But she did relent at the end, and she did go for standard treatment for chemotherapy, etc., but it was too little too late, and she died. Now, her niece Liz is not giving up, right? So she is not taking the videos down, even though Mary Lopez told her that she wanted her to before she died. And she's blaming her death on faltering with the diet, eating food cooked in a microwave, and on the medical care that she received. That's why she died, right? Because she eventually went for chemotherapy. The Microwave. Thank you so much for joining us today.

E:Then they're convincing a lot of other people who are also desperate and don't want chemotherapy, et cetera, that this is the way to go with their cancer.

S:And then very few people hear the follow-up that, oh, yeah, by the way, they died. And then in response to that, again, there's just the excuses. And Johnson also said, well, we never claimed it was 100%. It's going to cure everybody. Well, come on. That's hardly a point in your favor. The point is, what's really tragic is breast cancer is so curable by modern medicine. If you're a woman who has breast cancer, chances are very good that the standard treatments will make you cancer-free, and you could have a normal life expectancy. Even just a timely surgical intervention alone could be like 85% curative. The chemotherapy and everything else is mainly just to prevent that 15% recurrence. So that is helpful to understand how that whole process works. And again, this is sort of the technique approach, right, Jay? But there's another angle to this story I wanted to touch on very, very quickly, and that is the responsibility of social media outlets like YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Does YouTube have a responsibility for medical misinformation being posted on their platform? I would say yes, of course. Yeah, I was going to say, what do you guys think? What's your gut reaction to that question? My gut reaction is that they have to be, because they're the only ones that have control over what's going on on their platform, and they need to build intelligence and to filter out bad information, because bad information, in this case, is deadly. But is it in sight? Yeah, it absolutely will convince people to forgo standard medical care for worthless cancer quackery, no question.

J:There will be victims. But isn't the, I mean, don't our laws really protect against all sorts of free speech except for that which incites violence? So you're talking about the government, you know, not YouTube, right? Well, sure. But that's a moral question as opposed to an legal question.

S:And YouTube is probably going to do whatever they can to stay just on the outside of the law.

C:They are going to do what they need to do to make sure that the people who use their platform are happy, but it's hard when you've got probably just as many quote unquote free speech advocates as you have quote unquote, I don't know, whatever you want to call somebody who feels that this should be censored.

S:That's the dilemma, is censorship versus free speech and what are the responsibilities of a private company like YouTube.

C:They're not the government, so it's not a First Amendment issue. Let's be clear about that. It's not a First Amendment issue. No, but that's going to be the first standard, is a First Amendment standard. Well, it certainly could be a guideline, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the most applicable one to the situation.

S:So there is something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and that gives the power to platforms to essentially monitor their content and to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe They can say, hey, we're a private platform. This is a community. We are having our own internal standards. And those standards include, we don't want pornography on our site. No pornography. You can't post any content on our site that tells people how to commit acts of terrorism. Even if it, whether or not it directly and immediately incites them, we don't want you spreading like how to make homemade bombs on our channel. We don't want hate speech, and we could reasonably define hate speech for one. We don't want you committing slander or libel. That one actually does accord with the actual First Amendment law. So I guess, what's your question? Is it, should they? Or do we think they will? Oh, they're doing it. They're doing it. I mean, that's a moral question. Yeah, it's a very tricky one. It's also a very slippery slope. They have to really carve out what those boundaries are, what those standards are, and they have to make sure that that's very clear what their position is so that they can stay on the inside of it and not go on to the outside of it, which is tough.

C:What if Infowars decides to go out there and start, you know, promoting the Health Ranger and all these crazy folks like they want to do?

S:You know, and what if their standards are just totally different, totally opposite of what our standards are?

C:So what if one standard is if you're essentially practicing medicine without a license and spreading demonstrable medical misinformation that is harmful to people, we're not going to allow that on our platform. Right. So is that a reasonable standard?

E:It's tricky because we don't want them spreading misinformation, but that's a lot of power to hand to a corporation, especially since there are a few really big ones. So I get the dilemma.

S:I'm not saying this is an easy decision. But there are other things that YouTube could do, and what YouTube is actually doing is not banning the content outright, they're just tweaking their algorithms so they're not promoted. It's like, go ahead, put your medical misinformation in a video if you want to, but we're under no obligation to help you by serving up your video to people who are just searching for accurate medical misinformation. Medical information. So yeah, so in other words, they could say that our search algorithm, whether it's Google or YouTube's internal search algorithm, is designed to give people quality content that they're interested in. And we can use a reasonable definition of quality. And we could say that our algorithms will essentially downvote misinformation, especially if it's like some individual Thanks for watching. Because you could just say, hey, we're not obligated to promote medical misinformation in our search algorithms. We could certainly promote authoritative sources, science-based sources preferentially. So I think at the very least they should do that. To me, that's a no-brainer. The straight up censorship one is more tricky. And I will grant that, although I'm not, it's certainly not a First Amendment issue. It's not illegal. They have legal cover with the Communications Decency Act. And I think a private platform should be able to have some community hygiene standards, you know. It's like saying, you know, if I moderate my own blog, I will get rid of trolls. You know, I have a very, very high threshold. I very rarely ban people. But, you know, somebody could come in there and destroy, one nut job could destroy my community that I've spent years building in the commons of my blog. Why should I let them do that? Because of free speech. That's ridiculous, right? They're not, you know, in any way adhering to the community standards. And it's not a suicide pact, right? Free speech is not a suicide pact. It doesn't mean that we can't have academic standards or hygienic standards or whatever. We're scientific standards. But I wouldn't call it a slippery slope because that implies that it necessarily leads to abuse. But I would say you have to be extremely careful, equally careful against preventing abuse as we are using these tools to promote quality. Oh, so a slippery slope. I mean, I guess I wasn't using it as the fallacy. But when you use the term slippery slope, you think that implies that it necessarily leads to abuse? I guess I was more thinking it has the potential for abuse. Yeah, yeah. Slippery slope is one of those tricky fallacies because it's like, yes, I mean, I think it implies that if you take this one step, it will either necessarily or highly likely lead to further steps.

C:Now, it's a fallacy if it's not necessarily true, if you're just assuming that it has to lead to more egregious examples. But it's not a fallacy if it's actually a reasonable point. Thank you for joining us today.

S:Or we completely lose our liberty and our ability to express ourselves. We could do very, very delineated things. Like we're going to ban medical misinformation and practicing medicine without a license, basically. That's what we're going to ban. But then that's it. That doesn't mean we're going to now just be trampling your liberty left and right. But of course, that's what the extreme, in my opinion, free speech advocates, they commit that fallacy. It's like we can't give away Thank you so much. You know, society couldn't function properly. It couldn't survive. I think the main concern is that this is a private company, and we're empowering individual people within that private company to make a decision as to what should and what shouldn't be allowed to reach the ears of the viewers.

E:And so when I make the Slippery Slope statement, what I'm really talking about is, Who gets to make the decision? Who's in charge? Who's on the board? What is their political ideology? What is their moral? What are their moral standards look like? Are they religious? Are they like all these things tie in together?

C:It becomes a very complicated thing because people are people. It's a hugely complicated issue. So like one layer is you could say, of course, there's always going to be some subjectivity there, but you could say, all right, all right, fine, YouTube and Facebook and Twitter or whatever, they need to have a process by which to manage their platforms. But that process should be fair, transparent, maybe even outsourced. And there should be some remedy if you think that you have been treated unfairly, right? You need to have some appeal process. Well, this does exist on almost all of these platforms already, right? They all have communities there.

S:That's where things are evolving. That's where things are evolving. You have transparent rules, they're fairly applied, and you have some kind of appeal process if you think you've been treated unfairly. That's all fine. And partly the free market is regulating it. If somebody was running a platform that was draconian and unfair and opaque, You know, then people probably wouldn't, wouldn't use it, you know, they would go somewhere else, somebody would create an alternative that was better. And then the other issue is like, again, who decides like how much government meddling do we want in this? So, you know, at what point do we consider social media a utility where there needs to like the, where the FCC needs to get involved, or there needs to be some kind of government, at least oversight, if not regulation, And that's a double-edged sword too, but at the very least it brings another party into play, so at least you have some kinds of checks and balances. It's not just a corporation with all the power to make all the decisions and nobody looking over their shoulder. So because we I think as a society, you know, we can't take social media for granted anymore. We can't just let it be whatever it becomes on its own. I think we do have to think about what effect is this having on our society? Because it's profound. It is profound. The return of measles and vaccine-preventable diseases can largely be laid at the feet of social media and the ability to spread misinformation so easily. And in fact, I think that search algorithms have inadvertently been promoting the worst material, and that's not a good thing for society. But damn, it's a tricky question. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Let's pretend. All right, Bob, you're going to finish up the news items with a word about earthquakes.

News Item #4 - Detecting Earthquakes (51:04)

• Tiny Earthquakes Shake Southern California Every 3 Minutes 

S:Yeah, so obviously earthquakes have been in the news lately with the two recent quakes in California. I think, what, 6.4 and 7.1, Cara, or was it 6.9, the big one? From what I've been reading lately, it looks like it netted out to be 7.1. Okay, so this isn't directly related to that, but it's also interesting just in relation to quakes in general. They have a new technique that has been created for analyzing quakes, which revealed that Southern California experiences quakes every

B:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. For background, quakes are measured by the magnitude scale, right? We all know this by now. Generally, like if it's a three, magnitude three, it's called minor. If it's four, you know, four to 4.9, that's light, and then five is moderate, and six is strong, seven is major, and eight or more is great. And for reference, I can't really feel anything that's under a six. Is that because you're desensitized? Really? I don't want to say most people. Some people can feel a high five, but I don't think that's common. High five. That's interesting because my research revealed that generally below a 2.5, most people can't feel it, at least according to the couple of the sources that I have. That's bananas. I cannot imagine feeling a three. And here's the thing too, I'm not directly over the fault.

C:But like I did not, very few people I know felt the other foreshock. Do you remember there was the 6.4, then the next morning there was a 5 point something like a 5.4 or 5.6.

B:And then that evening, there was the 7.1. I don't know anybody who actually felt that morning's quake.

C:Okay. It's interesting to have somebody who's actually had experience in a bunch of quakes, and it may be related to proximity to a certain extent, but the point is that there's plenty of quakes that nobody can feel, but of course seismographs can. So then you have the Caltech and the U.S. Geological Survey. They create their standard catalog of Southern California quakes, and they catch essentially everything of magnitude 1.7 and above. Below that, and it gets, you know, it gets hard to distinguish even with a, you know, a sensitive seismograph.

B:You know, it's hard to distinguish those really light quakes from the background noise, right? Because there's always background noise that you're going to have to be battling against once you get to magnitude, you know, 1.7, 1.51, that type of thing. It's really, really hard. They haven't really been able to reliably do it well at all. You might think, well, why do we care about super tiny earthquakes? And I call these baby quakes. They have this new technique to detect these ultra tiny quakes. You have to find these two quakes, two quakes that have similar epicenters. And if you The two quakes, whether even if one is like say a magnitude 7 and the other one is a 3, they will still have nearly identical wiggling patterns on the seismogram. The magnitude of the earthquake itself doesn't really matter. They will be very, very, very similar in that way. So that means that if you have a known quake, say you have a known earthquake as a template, you have detailed readings from it, you can then search for similar squiggles in your database Earthquake readings that are much, much smaller, but have very, very similar squiggles. And then, you know, you could say, well, here we go. This is here is a really small earthquake. That's genuine. This isn't background noise. The fingerprint of squiggles is too identical, too close to a known, a larger magnitude quake. So you can imagine you're going through you have this fingerprint of an earthquake and you're going through you know probably terabytes of information and you're like holy crap look at this we found here's a really really tiny earthquake that we that we know is genuine so using that technique they were able to detect 0.3 magnitude quakes in this historical data. I think that's pretty much the smallest that they could find. So they did a search from 2008 to 2017, and they found 1.8 million of these baby twin quakes, I think they call them. And so they calculated for Southern California, that was an average of 495 baby quakes a day, which is one every 174 seconds or every few minutes. So, just an amazing number. Really, you think, wow, that's so gargantuan. How could that even be a thing? But it actually makes sense if you consider a rule of thumb that seismologists have known for a really long time, and that is that it's about earthquake frequency. So, it's well known that if you have, say, for every magnitude 7 quake, there's going to be 10 Thank you so much. That's great because what I love about it is that, can you imagine all the reams of data we have of past quakes, especially in Southern California? And that's also one of the drawbacks, if you can call it that. This is great for Southern California because we've got so much very high-resolution data of quakes going back for so many decades. If you don't have that, then this isn't going to be too helpful. It could still be helpful, but not nearly as much as it was, say, in Southern California. So here's an example of one of the benefits. So Baja California in Mexico in 2010, there was a 7.2 magnitude earthquake. This is the El Mayor-Cucapá earthquake. And the researchers noticed a spike in these little baby quakes when they were going through the data, they found a big spike in these baby quakes up to 170 miles or 275 kilometers away from the fault. So that's important because because they've been thinking that earthquakes can affect earthquakes elsewhere. So one fault has an earthquake, it could impact, you know, faults that are that are much farther away that you wouldn't think. Alright Jay, get us up to date on Who's That Noisy?

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (58:05)

B:Alright Jay, get us up to date on Who's That Noisy? Last week I played This Noisy. So what are you hearing in there? A person. A woman's voice. It is a woman's voice, indeed. Charlie Brown's teacher.

S:Oh my god, Evan. That's very good.

U:Lee Hunt wrote in and said, hi guys, I think this week's noisy is a wax cylinder recording. Sounds like something a royal speech, I'm sorry, sounds something like a royal speech, but now I'm really guessing.

C:That is not it, but I do understand why you said that because there is a, you know, a lack of fidelity there.

J:However, this is a an old recording. Of course, it is.

S:Another listener wrote in.

J:Lezek said, Hello, Jay. Was the recording of Marie Curie by any chance? No, this is not. I'm not even sure if one exists. Do you guys know if there do we have her voice on tape? I don't know. It's possible. I don't know. I don't know. Great guess, by the way. I probably wouldn't have even thought of that. But that was a that was a good guess. Another listener named Keegan Lovelace wrote in and said, I'm a longtime listener, second time writer. La La Dog was my first. All right, man. So, you know, Evan loves that one. And that is one of my favorites. To this day, I still love that. You guys have no idea how often the guys make this noise on a regular basis. I'm sure Steve edits it out of the podcast every single week. But it was one that truly made me laugh my ass off. I still to this day, like, I just crack up when I think about it. This week's noisy sounded like it could have been one of Amelia Earhart's distress calls. So, Keegan, that was a really good guess because this indeed is a distress call.

C:Really? Yes, it is a distress call. So the winner for last week is Shahaf Hadaya, and he said, Hey, Jay, I think this week's noisy is recording made by a couple of American radio amateurs back in the 60s.

J:They claim it's the first female Russian in space burning in the atmosphere. Well, so the name of that cosmonaut was Valentina Tershkova. And, you know, the word on the street is, you know, there isn't 100 percent verification because the Soviet Union is not releasing the information. But it is believed that that is a recording of her in reentry. And she was indeed burning up in her spacecraft. Now, here's you could read what she said online, but here's what she was saying. Come in. Come in. Talk to me. I'm hot. I'm hot.

US#06:This is dangerous. Talk to me. I'm hot.

J:I can see a flame and I'm going to crash. Yes. Yes. And then she said the very last thing she said was, I will reenter. I will reenter. So, yes, I guess her heat shielding was malfunctioning, and that was it. And she died upon reentry, and you can find more resources about this online. Now, if it's not her, if that's not what it is, then nobody knows what that recording is, but we're pretty certain it is, because we can do some fact-checking, and also we know that it's Russian, and that it's a woman, and that it's old. So, therefore, I believe it. So thank you for sending that in. Hey, all noisies can't be cute animals, right? True. Nope, got to get real every once in a while. By the way, there is both audio and video of Marie Curie. No way, cool. There is, great. Well, film, not video. Yeah, film. So thanks for that. I have a new noisy this week sent in by a listener named Matthew DeMacos, and here it is. I'll tell you a couple of things about this noisy.

S:One, Matthew recorded this himself.

C:I don't know if that's going to help anybody.

J:And two, you have to email me if you think you know what it is. And also, and please don't forget this, send me your noisies because I'm getting lots of people submitting and I thank everyone.

U:Thank you so much for sending them in. I can't use them all. I have to quality control everything. I have to think of a lot of different things. And man, I get sent some funny stuff.

J:Like there was this one I got sent in where it was the sound of this guy trying to be the number one head egg cracking guy in the world. Yeah, like so they have all these eggs lined up and he's cracking them with his forehead. And I can't play that on the show because it's ridiculous, because the guy's just going like that like as he's doing it like Kung Fu style. Yeah, but you know, I can't use it, but man, I laughed. If you find something funny, send me something funny. You know, if it's just for me, hey, so be it. You know, it's my job. So you can write to me at WTN at the Skeptics Guide dot org. Now, listen, at this moment, as you hear this on Saturday or Sunday, it's too late if it's on Monday, but we'll be at Nexus and you could live stream the conference if you wanted to. So you could go to nexus.org, N-E-C-S-S dot O-R-G forward slash live, L-I-V-E, for more information just in case you're doing nothing at one o'clock on Saturday afternoon and you want to watch some of the conference, go check it out. Okay, thanks Jay. Well everyone, let's go on with science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:04:00)

Theme: None Item #1: Scientists report that they have used CRISPR to eliminate HIV from humanized test mice. Item #2: A psychological study finds that, when it comes to fiction, younger subjects prefer less moral heroes and morally ambiguous characters to more moral ones. Item #3: Scientists were able to affect the behavior of mice by selectively activating a single neuron.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Item #2
Science	Item #1
Science	Item #3

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

J:It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Jay and Cara, you missed a sweep last week. Wait, who swept who? In which direction? I swept Bob and Evan. Oh, wow. You guys dodged a bullet.

U:Wow. It was a tough one.

US#02:It was very tough. You guys would have been swept as well. Well, I had to go first this week.

S:All right, this is just three regular news items this week, no theme. You ready? All right, item number one, scientists report that they have used CRISPR to eliminate HIV from humanized test mice.

B:All right, number two, a psychological study finds that when it comes to fiction, younger subjects prefer less moral heroes and morally ambiguous characters to more moral ones.

S:And our number three, scientists were able to affect the behavior of mice by selectively activating a single neuron. Jay, go first. This one about the scientists who report that they have used CRISPR to eliminate HIV. So this is in humanized test mice. Humanized? What the hell is a humanized test? Well, they have to, because it's a human immunodeficiency virus, it has to be able to be infected by HIV. Okay. I got it. The H in HIV. How could CRISPR get rid of HIV?

U:Damn.

S:I mean, without hearing a little bit about the mechanism, it's going to be hard to guess, but I mean, I just would imagine that, is there any, does what CRISPR does have anything to do with the mechanism that HIV uses?

J:Yeah, I think it does. All right, that's a possibility.

S:A psychological study finds that when it comes to fiction, younger subjects prefer less moral heroes and morally ambiguous characters to more moral ones.

J:Wow, that's cool. I would tend to agree with that. I don't have anything to base it on other than my own experience. I liked characters like pretty much everybody that Harrison Ford played. Indiana Jones, I loved Han Solo, his character, Decker and Blade Runner. The teacher in E.T. Exactly. Exactly. Never made the final cut. No, but I look at these characters and they're good characters because they're not perfect, like, you know, Superman level, perfect, lawful good types. They're, you know, they are morally on a spectrum and that does make them more interesting and relatable, I think. So I'm going to agree with that. That one's definitely off my list. That is not even possible as being the fake. And the last one, scientists were able to affect the behavior of mice by selectively activating a single neuron. Holy crap if that's true. Affecting the behavior of a mouse by a single neuron, that one's the fake. There is no way that one neuron is going to significantly change behavior. I think that one's the fake. Okay, Cara. Welcome back. Welcome. Welcome in. I feel like CRISPR and did something for HIV. Something? I don't know if it eliminated it there, but it did something. So that one could be half true, or all the way science. When it comes to fiction, younger subjects prefer less moral. How young? Am I allowed to ask you that? Like, do you mean like children? Or do you just mean like millennials? The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, Cara Santa Maria,

C:Here's what's next! Right. Let's see. And you said when it comes to fiction, I'm saying movies over and over, but we could be talking about books. I don't know. I just think people want complexity. So I'm going to stick with that. And they don't like the old school, like good triumphs, evil all the time. So that one's going to be science for me. So then it's really a question of a single neuron. That does sound too good to be true. I mean, not even too good to be true, but like crazy. But then again, it could be, oh, you're saying mice. It's like an aplasia. I could see that happening. Because I feel like there could be a single neuron that with enough time, maybe there's a bunch of activity or sort of training it to fire a lot, it's going to start recruiting other things, and then there's going to be some sort of downstream effect. So you know what, I'm going to say that that one's the science, even though it's counterintuitive. And I'm going to say the CRISPR one is the fiction because maybe they didn't eliminate HIV altogether, but they were able to like get it out of certain cells or something like that. So boom, flip the script. CRISPR is the fiction. Okay, Bob. God, I've gone back and forth on all of these in the span of just a few minutes. It's so frustrating. I can make an argument for pretty much every one of these. A single neuron, your knee-jerk reaction is no way. Who knows? You could start some cascade. There could be some way where that makes sense. It's funny how Cara and Jay, for number two, the psychological study about moral heroes, they both were just like, absolutely, this is science.

B:There was really no doubt in their minds. And I was kind of thinking that maybe when you said younger, I was thinking 8 to 12, but then when you clarified late teens, then I kind of swayed back towards their way of thinking. The HIV? Yeah. I'm hoping that you're thinking that we think CRISPR is just this infallible and amazing and yeah, it could do all of that stuff. But yeah, I don't know enough about how HIV exactly operates to see how amenable CRISPR would be to doing that, but I'll go with Cara and say that they probably made some progress but not fully removed it from those mice with human faces. And Evan. Oh gosh. Oh my gosh. Am I the only one out here about the psychological study? No one chose that, right? Correct. I almost did. This one stands out to me as the fiction. Really? More than the others because it says right here, when it comes to fiction. Now, all right, I get the ambiguity part of all this, but you have to understand that if you're looking to fiction, you're looking kind of to escapes. You're looking to something that you kind of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

E:And because I screwed myself a few weeks ago by abandoning my initial instinct and being ultimately wrong in doing so, I'm going to stick with my instinct this week. I'm going to say that that one's the fiction. Oh, boy. Evan, you're going out on your own. I'm going out. I'm back out adventuring again. You don't want to repeat your cowardly failure from a couple weeks ago. Thanks, Steve. Thank you. Yes. Salt in the wound. Thank you very much. Good state of the facts. All right, all right, good. So we got a good spread. All three are covered. So I guess we'll take these in order. Item number one, scientists report that they have used CRISPR to eliminate HIV from humanized test mice. Bob and Cara, right? You think this one is a fiction?

S:And this one is...

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:12:11)

‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error? ... By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and – if we can train ourselves to do so – by criticizing our own theories or guesses.’  – Karl Popper, (description of author)

S:And this one is...

S:So yeah, so here's the problem with HIV. You can use the antiretroviral medication, which limits its ability to reproduce and spread, but the virus inserts itself into the DNA of white cells where it goes dormant, and the antiretroviral medications can't really affect it. That's a problem. That's why you can control HIV, but you can't eradicate it. That's why in that one case where they were able to do it, they had to do like a bone marrow transplant. They had to get rid of all the white cells and replace them. There's no other way to get that HIV out of there. We're experimenting with drugs, the purpose of which is to sort of coax the virus into becoming activated so that it can be acted upon by the medication. So that's one avenue of research. But now that we have CRISPR, somebody said, hey, why don't we just CRISPR those little buggers out of there? And it worked. So they used the antiretroviral therapy in combination with CRISPR and they claim that they were able to, for the first time, eradicate HIV from these humanized mice that we use for HIV research. Wow. That is amazing. Gee whiz. You don't see homeopathy doing that. Yeah. That's right. So very exciting. Very exciting, man. Imagine that. We could get that, prove that for human use. We could eradicate HIV. Wow. That's exciting. All right. I love CRISPR. I guess we'll continue to take these in order. Even though it screwed me over today. Yeah. I'm just setting you up for the time when the CRISPR one is the fiction because now you're conditioned to think, oh yeah, it's CRISPR.

J:It's true.

S:Let's go on to number two. A psychological study finds that when it comes to fiction, younger subjects prefer less moral heroes and morally ambiguous characters to more and more ones. Evan, you are out on your own in thinking that this one is the fiction. The rest of you think that this one is science, and this one is science. The fiction! Good job, Evan! It freakin' worked! I can't believe it, actually. So it was my reverse psychology analysis. I think you're probably spot on, Evan. And this was surprising. I just have to flip this into the perfect fiction, because the results showed that—they didn't really distinguish my age. I threw that in there to make it seem a little bit more plausible. But in this study, the subjects that were studied

E:Overall, they preferred more moral characters to less moral characters, and that was in every context.

S:It didn't matter if they were heroes, anti-heroes, morally ambiguous heroes, or villains. They, whenever you did a mashup, they preferred the character to the more moral end of the spectrum than to the less moral end of the spectrum. And it worked both ways. When they liked a character more, they judged them as being more moral. And when they judged a character as being more moral, they liked them more. Does that make sense? It kind of works both ways. We want our heroes to be moral and we like them when they're moral. And they also explored the fact that morality is relative, so they bring up the example of the morally ambiguous heroes like Dexter Morgan from the TV show Dexter or Walter White from Breaking Bad. Right, so Walter White is a villain, but we like him and he's a hero because he's more moral than everybody else. Well, he's definitely in season one. He was written to be the antihero, but he gets more and more villainous the longer he's a character. He's breaking bad. I mean, but but I know and then towards the end, like, whoa, we stepped over a line there. Yeah, season episodes. It was all for the money because of the cancer and the taking care of the family.

C:And yeah.

S:He had an arc. But even Dexter Morgan is a psychopath who kills people. But he kills bad people? But he only kills bad people. He works with the police. He must be good.

C:Right, or Deadpool. Deadpool's an asshole, but the villains are more villainous than he is, and so we sympathize with him.

S:And he's so funny and ironic.

C:But they like the Boy Scouts, the do-gooders, more in this study.

S:It's interesting. So even like Batman is looked at as a morally ambiguous sort of dark hero, and he's not as liked as well in this study as more Boy Scout characters. Interesting. All that means that scientists were able to affect the behavior of mice by selectively activating a single neuron is also science. This was also massively cool. They were studying visually controlled behavior, and so they were measuring what are called ensembles of neurons. So a visual pattern, for example, would activate an ensemble, a collection of neurons that would fire in a pattern. These are obviously wired together in a pattern that then represents the visual pattern that the mouse is seeing. But what they found is that there's something they're calling a pattern completion neuron, one neuron that if you stimulate it, the entire ensemble then lights up, even in the absence of the visual stimuli that correlates with that ensemble. And so they were able to redirect the mouse's behavior By activating a single neuron that activated the ensemble that related to the visual stimuli that controlled the behavior. Does that make sense? So I can see that I'm wrong now. Yeah. So first of all, I thought it was cool. We can activate a single neuron? That's cool. Yeah, that's really cool. They use optogenetics. We've talked about that before. Yes. Optogenetics is awesome. Yeah. So light that activates certain genes which are inserted into neurons, which can cause them to fire. And that they're tied to, like a single neuron is a completion neuron, sort of completes the pattern of activation in an ensemble of neurons is also cool. And the reason why they're doing all this is to try to better understand how the brain's wired, you know, how it works. And this is, obviously it's one little tiny puzzle piece, but it's an important one. And it gets us just one little baby step closer to understanding how the brain works. Very cool. So yeah, I found three items that I really liked this week. Yeah, they're very good this week. Yeah. Yeah. Man, Evan, I was so hoping you were going to reproduce your error for weeks of hours. That would have been so sweet. You were all set up to do it again. I had to go back to my mental roots as they were. Right. So at least you wouldn't lose in the same way if you didn't. Right, exactly. Regain my courage, and if I did lose, at least I wasn't free. At least you went down swinging, went down with courage. Right, exactly. Exactly. How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?

E:By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and, if we can train ourselves to do so, by criticizing our own theories or guesses.

S:Written by Karl Popper. Oh boy, you're hitting the classics. David Chute last week and Karl Popper this week.

E:Karl Popper. Yeah, Popper.

S:That's right, Popper. Cara, have you done much reading of Karl Popper? Oh, yeah, I was a my undergrad.

E:I was a psych major, but my I was a philosophy minor. So we did a lot of Popper and I took a class called philosophy of psychology, which was really cool. Oh, that sounds cool. Yeah. And then of course now doing existential psychology. I mean, we don't cover Popper as much because he's not an existentialist.

S:But there's still a lot of that mind-brain debate stuff, and Popper was big into that.

E:He wrote a book with Eccles called The Self and Its Brain, which is like a tome, but I definitely got through that whole thing.

C:The Ninth Doctor? Oh, no, that's Eccles. Oh, Lord. Steve, that was great.

S:All right.

C:Thank you all for joining me this week, and I'm looking forward to seeing everybody at Nexus. Cara, nice to see you. So excited. I haven't seen you guys in too long. Yeah, I know. It'll be a lot of fun. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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