SGU Episode 1020
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| SGU Episode 1020 |
|---|
| January 25th 2025 |
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"Stars align as the cosmos paints a breathtaking evening sky." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe." |
Robert Charles Wilson |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, January 22th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody!
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everyone.
S: And we have a special guest, Rogue, with us this week, Andrea Jones, Roy. Andrea, welcome back.
AJR: Thank you. It's great to be here. Hi everyone.
B: Andrea, great to have you.
S: You get a lot of positive feedback when you're on the show.
AJR: Oh, thanks. Well, your listeners are all very nice. Thank you for that.
S: Yeah, so I had my first audiology exam today.
E: An audiology exam?
B: Your wife finally forced you into doing it?
S: She did.
E: You're testing your hearing.
S: Yeah, that's correct. So yeah, I'm at that stage where it doesn't bother me, but apparently it bothers other people.
B: Apparently.
E: I mean they get tired of you saying what all to every other thing they ask you.
S: Now the problem is that other people mumble.
B: That's got to be it, yeah.
E: Yeah, we have to go see mumbleologists to fix ourselves.
J: Bob, I told you that Steve never listened to me.
E: He just never heard you.
B: So bottom line it Steve, how bad?
S: It's not bad actually. So they go, it's the sensitivity on the Y axis and the pitch, frequency on the X axis, right? And they chart that. So I'm up in the normal range for most of the lower and medium frequencies. Then it starts to drop off as you get to the higher frequencies, which is normal for age, right? And we all drop off as we get into the higher frequency. But I have a notch. Rather than being a smooth curve, there is a range of frequencies where I take a dip and then come back to the curve.
E: Oh, it's like a blind spot.
S: On both ears, pretty symmetrically.
B: So does that notch fit right where Jocelyn's voice is?
E: It's a micro of micro evolution. Is that what tht is?
S: No, I know exactly what the notch is. So one potential cause of a notch like that, a drop in a certain range of frequencies, is exposure to loud noises, but I don't really have any history of that.
B: Yeah, you weren't into band, like Jay.
S: Just normal stuff. Never-
E: Didn't work around heavy machinery.
S: Yeah, no, excessive exposure to loud noises, but I knew this was gonna be the result from when I was taking the test and that frequency where my sensitivity drops is exactly in the frequency of my tinnitus. That's what it is.
E: Which I have as well.
S: Yeah, so, and I could tell, you have to pay really close attention because they get as quiet as you can, it gets to the point where it's like, did I imagine hearing the beep or did I hear the beep, you know? But when it was not in the frequency of my tinnitus, the ringing that I have in my ear, I could separate the two. When it was close to that frequency, I could not separate. I could not tell, when it got very quiet. Obviously when it's loud, obviously it's they go quiet to loud, loud to quiet. And so they see where your threshold is. And I knew that my threshold was going to be much lower around the frequency of my tinnitus. But that frequency, it does impair certain parts of speech, right? So there are certain phonemes which I don't hear as well because it kind of lives in that frequency range.
AJR: Do you have an example?
S: Soft sounds is like s and stuff. So you know, my brain has to work harder in order to interpret it which is exactly what I noticed. So my experience is if I'm paying attention, I'm fine. If I'm attending to someone speaking, especially if it's like one person, it helps if I'm looking at them, though, I don't have to look at them. But that does help. If I'm just, if I'm focusing my attention on one person, no problem. If there's diffuse attention or there's a lot of background noise or I'm not paying attention, my brain is not paying attention, it's not actively trying to interpret what someone is saying, I may or may not catch. I can hear. It's not like I can't hear. It's just that it sounds like they're mumbling, right? My brain does not interpret the phonemes properly. So I get half the words or something.
J: So what can you do about it?
S: Hearing aids.
E: Eventually or now.
S: No, now.
E: Oh, really?
B: Oh, wow.
S: Yeah. So it'll basically raise the floor because it definitely is volume related, right? The louder something is, the easier that my brain has an easier time interpreting what it what what's being said.
J: Did they tell you what kind you're going to get or any of that yet?
S: No, I have to have a separate appointment now for the hearing aids does.
B: What about like earphone, iPhone, ear buds, AirPods?
S: We talked about this like six months ago, the AirPods that can hear the room noise. They work just as well as-
E: And they're less expensive.
S: They're much less expensive.
AJR: I'll send you a set, consider it a gift.
S: The ones that you like, they're like, what are they? 700 bucks or something. They're the ones that-
AJR: Oh, those ones.
S: They're the good ones.
E: As opposed to $7,000.
B: What?
S: As opposed to $6,000 or $7,000.
B: Wait, there's $700 earbuds?
S: Yeah. They're the ones that basically have an incorporated, a microphone in them. So you can hear not only what's being played over the iBuds, but also you can hear the ambient noise. You can hear the room noise.
AJR: I thought it was just the regular AirPods that are like a hundred bucks.
S: No, no, no, no. It's the special ones that have that feature. They're basically hearing aids, right? And again, there was a study from about six months ago that compared those like $700 earbuds that hear the room noise with the $6,000 hearing aids. And they were pretty much the same in terms of their effect.
AJR: Wow.
S: Yeah. Mom's hearing is pretty bad. I'm probably heading in her direction.
B: I mean, I hope not. I walked in yesterday. She's got face down on a puzzle, doing a puzzle. And I'm like, mom, mom, mom. And her head did not come up. And I'm like, oh, crap.
E: Maybe her aids were not charged.
S: She's not using them.
B: I knew that. I thought she just didn't have her hearing aid. And she had it in, but the battery panel was opened. So it wasn't working. So she's basically deaf without that hearing aid.
S: The other thing is you're supposed to wear them consistently, not just when you think you want to.
AJR: Oh, really?
S: Because it helps your brain adapt to that noise level because part of the problem is that you don't hear a lot of the lower, the softer background noise. And it just helps your brain if it's constantly hearing background noise as well as speech and disambiguating them.
AJR: Can they do anything about tinnitus or is that a totally different thing?
S: No. There's no treatment for tinnitus.
AJR: Really?
J: Not yet.
AJR: I don't know, Steve. I'm pretty sure I saw an infomercial on YouTube once about a cure.
E: Oh, sure.
S: There's a lot of fake cures out there. They're all nonsense. There are ways to manage how much it bothers you, but there's no way to actually eliminate the tinnitus or to reduce it. It's complicated. It's like I did a deep dive on it at one point because I have it. I'm like, all right, what's going on here? Is there any possibility that we're close to a treatment for this? Is there anything out there that might work? What kind of approaches would work? And it's really complicated. We're not really sure what causes it, but we're pretty sure it's not like it's a nerve buzzing away. Right? That would be simple. It's not something that works to treat that, but it's rather, it's how your brain is processing the audio data because it processes it like any stereo electronic equipment does. It has a lot of the same kind of processing going on. In that network, it can cause some feedback or whatever it is. So it's not something that's easily amenable to drugs. Right? It would have to be some kind of electromagnetic treatment or something, but we don't know how to do that.
E: Steve, when you were researching it, did you look into the history?
S: Not too much.
E: Only because is it a 20th century phenomenon? Did people in the 19th century have this? Any description of it?
S: I don't think there's, there's no reason to think that it's a recent phenomenon, but I didn't specifically.
E: So it's not tied to, to the electronics that are around us in our environment.
S: No, no, not at all.
E: Okay.
B: For tinnitus, Steve, deep brain stimulation or something like that?
S: Yeah, it's possible, but there's no proven treatment for it. I did read, this is unrelated to, I did read one paper. This is unrelated to my deep dive on tinnitus that speculated that Vincent Van Gogh cut his ear off because he was suffering from tinnitus and he thought it would cure it.
AJR: Wow.
B: Oof.
E: That's a speculation though, right?
AJR: Joke's on us if that's the thing that works though.
E: Well, I mean, when he cut his ear off, he didn't gouge out his inner ear.
AJR: He just cut the outer part, right?
E: Cut off the fleshy part, right?
S: Well, I mean, there's a type of scholarship that is basically historical diagnoses. You take a historical figure and you try to figure out what kind of neurological diagnosis might they have had based on what information we have. Obviously, we don't have the ability to examine them or have any diagnostics. That was one of them, right? Did Van Gogh have tinnitus? The other one was, did Joan of Arc have right temporal lobe epilepsy?
AJR: Do they think she did?
E: Consistent with?
S: Consistent with having religious visions.
B: Her voices.
AJR: Ah, okay. Do they think that she did have it?
S: Then there's a whole literature on who had schizophrenia throughout history and who was manic depressive and who had ADHD, bipolar disorder. You know what I mean? There are people whose lives are documented well enough that you could say, yeah, he probably had this. A fun one is, fun, is Hitler probably had von Economo's disease, which is a neurological degenerative disorder. One of the symptoms of that is that-
B: Shaking?
S: Well, he has shaking, which he always hid, but did find its way accidentally into some historical film. So you could see it. He really tried to hide it and not have it be on film.
AJR: Like hand shaking? That kind of thing?
S: Yeah, like a tremor, like a Parkinsonian tremor. But also it causes a rigidity of thought, right? So unable to change course, which is kind of how his management of the war was characterized. He was going to take Russia and that was it.
AJR: Wow. Are you generally persuaded by this type of research? You think the data-
S: You can make very compelling arguments based upon, again, contemporary writings about describing their symptoms, basically, or their behavior. You just can't ever confirm it, but you can make a strong case.
AJR: Wow.
E: Even in the remains of people, they don't leave those kinds of markers in the bones or anything else.
AJR: I don't have ADHD bones.
S: Not unless there's a genetic component to it.
E: Right. Yeah.
S: If there's a genetic component, then we could absolutely test that. That's been done to historical figures to get their DNA and say, oh yeah, he had this disease or syndrome. But yeah, for these neurological conditions, that's usually not the case.
AJR: Wow.
E: Fascinating.
S: That was also interesting. I have one other thing to announce.
E: Okay.
S: I've announced this on the live streams, but not on the show proper. In November, I gave my notice at work that I'm retiring at the end of June.
AJR: Congratulations.
S: Thank you.
E: Whoa.
J: What the hell?
E: Wow.
S: Yeah.
B: How does that mean?
S: That means I will no longer be working at my day job.
AJR: Skeptic's Guide every day.
S: I'll be working full time for the SGU. That's what that means.
AJR: Yay.
B: Game changer.
AJR: Very cool.
E: Nice, Steve.
AJR: Are you excited?
S: Yeah. Oh yeah. Can't wait.
E: Wait, 35 years at Yale?
S: Yeah. 30 years.
AJR: Wow.
S: 30 years. Not including my residency and stuff. But including fellowship, it'll be 30 years.
J: The company I used to work for, I worked on a three year global website update. This is multiple websites. Three year project.
B: Wow.
J: And what they gave me and two other guys that were on this team, they went out and bought us wings for lunch.
E: Oh wow. How high did you fly?
B: I bet they were good wings too.
J: I was so excited.
AJR: Were they the world's greatest wings?
J: No. I know a lot of companies do nice things, but not the one I was working for.
AJR: I don't think I've ever had a send off of any kind, but I always just assumed it was a me problem. They were like good riddance as opposed to an institutional shortcoming.
S: They gave you a good riddance party?
AJR: Yeah, exactly. Gave me one big shove out the door, like, okay, while they took my ID to get in. I'm like, okay. Wow. Well, that's cool, Steve. I'm very excited for you.
E: Yeah. That's amazing.
S: Yeah, it's exciting. I mean, doing medicine and teaching and everything is so great, but two jobs is hard.
AJR: I don't know how you do it.
S: I know. I was talking to Jocelyn about it the other day. I haven't had any time off in 30 years, and in the last 20 years, either I'm working every Saturday or I'm on a working weekend, and I've had to do extra work in order to have the ability to have a working weekend because we're doing a live event or something.
AJR: Gosh.
S: I have to do the show ahead of time or whatever. So it'll be nice to get my evenings and weekends back and just have one job. Going down to one job would be a nice change.
AJR: Yeah. Well done. Well, I'm always impressed when you're up on science fiction TV and movies because I'm like, when does Steve have time to watch this stuff?
S: Yeah. I have to do some entertainment other than go crazy.
AJR: Yeah. Yeah.
E: Don't go crazy. We've got enough of that in the world already.
S: All right. Let's move on with some news items.
News Items[edit]
Unexpected Scientific Results (14:17)[edit]
S: Jay, you're going to start us off telling us about unexpected scientific results.
J: Steve, have you ever heard of this?
S: The idea that some scientific studies have results that are unexpected? Yes.
B: Eureka.
J: Well, I mean, recently there was a study that came out, and check this out. So these researchers analyzed over 1.2 million biomedical studies, and these were studies that were funded by the NIH. This was between 2008 and 2016. So they compared the paper's content and findings to the goal or the goals written in the original grant application, right? So what's happening is they're taking like, okay, what did they find? What were the end results of the research and all the different things that they found out compared to what the original grant application said? And it turns out that a lot of times there's a lot more findings than there were originally mentioned in the original grant paperwork. They found that it's around 70% of the papers contain findings that the researchers hadn't originally planned for or expected. And this high percentage, it underscores the prevalence of these serendipitous discoveries in scientific research, which as I dug into this, I realized that there's a lot of that going on. And it makes you think differently about scientific studies and how, what should the process be and how much money should be given out and what should the expected results be and how much should they let them follow these anomalies that happen that could end up turning into very useful and important information. And even after removing a lot of closely related items, like an example is, they would distinguish between liver disease and liver cancer, right? If they take a lot of those into account, they still found that 58% of the papers had at least one unexpected outcome. And in fact, on average, about a third of the topics in a given paper weren't part of the original plan. A third, that is a lot. This indicates that there's a significant portion of research that's being done that leads to unanticipated areas of study. This reflects the dynamic nature of scientific exploration, which is exactly what we want people spending their time doing, is finding things that we didn't originally know and make discoveries. So this wasn't just random noise. As the researchers explained, they said that larger grants and projects that had longer timelines, these tended to produce more unexpected results. So the deeper into the weeds that they went, the more unexpected results they found, which tracks perfectly. The basic science grants, these produced even more surprises in the research. And very interestingly, even applied research grants that set specific goals they go in and they say, we are going to be able to give information on these specific things. And a lot of these that are funded through the NIH, these are requests for applications, right, or RFAs that the NIH puts out. These types of studies produced a significant number of unexpected results as well. So these RFAs are designed to solicit grant applications focused on very defined, high priority areas of science relevant to the NIH's mission. And even with that in place, they still come up with useful unexpected results. This study suggests that supporting large and long-term grants, particularly for basic research, this might be a good way to nurture unexpected discoveries, which I think is a fantastic thing to do. And I think that they should be even giving more leeway to scientists to, I know that money dictates everything, but if they allow some wiggle room, you'd be surprised, I bet, even how much more that they would find. The research findings also, they challenge the idea that heavy goal-oriented funding, without a doubt, it will stifle creativity and it will stifle these unexpected positive findings that they come to. So they're saying that these insights are crucial for shaping future funding strategies, which will hopefully foster more innovation. Someone named Telmo Piovanni, a philosopher of biological sciences, I think summed this up pretty nicely. He said, it's okay to fund both basic and applied research as long as we're open to unexpected results and don't dismiss anomalies too quickly. And that's basically it in a nutshell. Like don't just dismiss anomalies and, if anything, let the researchers lean into them and gain more information on it to help, you never know what they're going to find. And again, a lot of the things that we, today, when we hear about these interesting discoveries in the news and all that, a lot of them are these side things that were unexpected that they stumbled on. And if you go back into the history of scientific innovation, I mean, there's lots of cool examples, like the guy that discovered x-rays, right, as a German scientist.
B: Renkin?
J: Yeah. I mean, that was a total, he was working with cathode tubes, I think, and discovered freaking x-rays.
AJR: I didn't know that one. Cool.
J: Yeah, it's really cool. His wife's hand was the first person to have an x-ray done because he just wanted to see it work and see exactly what the result would be, and I've seen an image of that. It's pretty cool.
B: Yeah.
E: Yeah, that's a classic.
B: Holy crap.
J: So, future studies in this area could expand on the research that was already done to include a few things that the reviewers found important here. So, one could be include other fields of science, right, because this was done in a very narrow band. It'd also be helpful to know if the researchers were as surprised as the grant reviewers. This is an interesting thing to think about because if the researchers were totally surprised, had no idea that anything like this was coming, that's a data point that could be very meaningful in the future. You know, the grant reviewers were definitely surprised, but I would love to know what those researchers themselves thought about what they found, and moving forward, the team plans to explore how often researchers explicitly reference these the serendipity in their work, right? They also want to understand how attitudes towards these unexpected findings vary across different fields, and one researcher put it that they're only scratching the surface on these unexpected findings that crop up quite commonly. Steve, I'm curious, though as a medical professional, what's your take on this? Have you heard about things like this happening?
S: Yeah, of course. This happens all the time. You get a result that you did not anticipate. Frequently I'll go to grand rounds, and they'll basically have a researcher talking about the last 10 years of his research, and they walk you through all the studies that they did, and it's full of twists and turns, and sometimes they're like, we're testing this very specific hypothesis and that's why we're doing the study, but oftentimes, as part of the arc of the research, there are what we call exploratory studies. Exploratory studies are explicitly looking for stuff you don't expect to find, right? It's like, what the hell's happening? Just let's just throw a net out there and see what we catch, and then we'll go from there. Then you got to do the follow-up studies to confirm it, obviously. So it's that kind of, it's baked into the process, so it's not surprising, but sometimes it does come out of left field, like you really weren't looking for it, and you get something that just doesn't make any sense because there's a phenomenon going on that was not part of the original hypothesis, and that's where scientists have to, like, really be flexible, you know? Don't be rigid. Don't get locked into, well, but this is what we're testing. You know, you have to, or don't just assume it's a mistake or an error. It's like, the data is the data. Listen to the data. If it's telling you something surprising, go with it, you know?
J: Yeah.
AJR: I mean, is that something that suggests that maybe the actual percentage of studies that are unexpected is higher because the scientists are maybe discounting them? Because they're like, oh, that's, like, silly and unrelated. Like the J-ARCA or the grant reviewers, they're only looking at what was actually published in the end. So maybe even the scientists are sort of self-correcting or ignoring things, just like Steve was describing, where you're like, oh, that's so in left field, I'm not even going to pursue that. So we're probably not even seeing the extent of unexpected results.
J: Yeah, I think that, from what I read, that that is implied in there as saying that they're just scratching the surface. I think that statement clearly is pointing to the idea that there's so much more of this going on and things that were not found or, again, this is like the first study, you know? Like there's just so much more ground to cover. I bet you they will uncover a lot of that.
AJR: I have a question about, so pre-registering your hypotheses and all of that is, like, considered good practice. Does that practice limit our ability to share unexpected findings? Or generally, I guess I'm asking about biomedical in particular, like, can you say, OK, I pre-registered these hypotheses and this is what I was going to study, and then part two of the paper is all this other stuff I discovered. Like, is that considered acceptable in biomedical sciences?
S: Have you heard of the term the minimal publishable unit?
AJR: Ooh, I have not.
B: That's new.
S: It is advantageous to one's career to have a lot of papers on your CV, right? So it's kind of an inside cynical term. It means once we get, like, the minimal amount of data or analysis that we can publish, we're going to publish that as a separate study. And then we'll do the rest of it as a different study. That way I get two, three papers out of this one study rather than just one big one. It's actually not a good practice, I think, scientifically.
AJR: Another reason we might be missing a lot of unexpected results is that they're packaged as expected results later on.
S: Right. That's true. That's exactly true. Also, I don't know if the, because I didn't read the study myself, Jay, but if they were looking at just a particular kind of research, because some research lends itself more to this than others. Like, if you're doing translational research, you're just trying to see, like, is this drug safe and effective? You're not going to really see anything too unexpected, like, you know what I mean? You might. You still might. You might be like, oh, and it also cured their erectile dysfunction, right? That kind of thing has happened, obviously, but it's more on rails. Like, you really are doing something very specific.
J: Yeah. I mean, like I said, they were, these were NIH-funded studies, so.
AJR: Yeah. And it sounds like the distinction, early on I was wondering about this, but it sounds like there's a distinction between unexpected results in the sense that it's like, oh yeah, it also cures excessive sweating or whatever, and then unexpected in the sense that we thought this drug would be safe, but it wasn't. And that is unexpected, but it's not unexpected in the kind of interesting way that you're describing, Jay.
S: Right. So, just to follow up on what I was saying, the NIH studies are more like basic science exploratory studies. The pharmaceutical studies are not funded by NIH, they're funded by the pharmaceutical industry. So, that does sort of select for studies that would be more amenable to these kind of surprising results.
Trust In Scientists (25:34)[edit]
S: All right. Andrea, you're going to tell us, based upon all of this, and other stuff too, how much does the public trust in scientists?
AJR: Yes. Indeed. And actually, I'll just add also that Jay's article reminded me of a paper in Political Science that came out when I was in grad school about an increase in the use of the word surprising in political science paper abstracts. And the initial conclusion was, wow, we have more surprising results in political science. But then it turned out, if you wanted to get a job or tenure, having surprising results was good, so we were just using the word surprising more. So, hats off to Jay's study for doing a better job with that. But yeah, so this is a paper, it's called Trust in Scientists and Their Role in Society Across 68 Countries. It was published in Nature Human Behavior, it just came out on January 20th, so hot off the press. And this is a paper that attempted to do, well, it did carry out a survey across 68 countries around the world. And it was aiming to understand, look, we have a big narrative, at least in the United States and in a lot of countries, the predominant narrative is that trust in science and scientists is declining. This is a trend that we were talking about even before COVID. It was exacerbated or heightened, and the narrative became even stronger. It's almost taken as a given that trust in science and scientists is plummeting in many circles. And so these researchers, and this is a paper with 50-some co-authors on it, but these researchers decided to find out if there actually is empirical evidence to support our rising fear that there's low public trust in scientists. And of course, they're not the only study to test this sort of thing. Pew Research does a lot of its own work in this way, and there are many peer-reviewed studies that do this. But most of these studies that were already out there are in the United States and Europe and or are in the global north, but generally speaking, in those two places. And the ones previously that have been a bit broader, so it covers more countries, kind of are thinner in the sense that they just ask about trust in terms of one or two dimensions, and it doesn't really trust is something that can be hard to quantify. And so this project really goes out of its way to test what trust might mean to people in a lot of different ways and contexts. And by the way depending on how you count it, there's some 200 countries, give or take, in the world. And so 68, of course, is not at all representative of the entire world. But it is generally more populous countries, so we're leaving off a lot of small nation states and territories. And the countries surveyed represent 79% of the global population. So it's not everyone, but it's a lot of countries and many countries that have been left out. So overall, I guess the other thing they'll say, and I thought was an interesting point, and I'd be curious what you guys think about it, is they said, look, we're beginning from the perspective that high trust in science and scientists is a good thing. And I share that perspective. And I appreciated that they were candid about their own normative views. But they also acknowledged that that's not to say that one must always apply a blanket trust in science or scientists. There can be scientists who are up to no good. And there are plenty of instances of science and scientists doing things that are pretty harmful to, say, black Americans in the syphilis study in the United States and things like that. So it's not to give blanket trust as the goal, but to say that generally speaking, we do see better outcomes in terms of things like COVID and climate change in countries that have higher public trust. So speaking of unexpected results, maybe, although this was, I guess, not unexpected in the sense of Jay's study and that it is what they were trying to understand. They found that, generally speaking, in these 68 countries, trust in science is, what do they call it? They call it moderately high. And now you might be asking, well, what does that mean? Well, they ask along four different, they inspect four different dimensions of how you might think about trust and the role that science and scientists play. I should also flag that they generally asked about scientists as opposed to science. And their argument for that is that scientists felt more specific. And you also, they conducted it in lots of different languages and tried to do the local language wherever possible. And so science could mean something different. It could mean scientific institutions. It could mean government science. It could mean universities. It could mean research. It could mean companies. So we're talking about scientists, the people. So their first question, how much do people around the world trust scientists? They measured trust along four components. The four components are perceived competence, benevolence, integrity, and openness. So if you take a battery of questions about those four things, find the mean over the entire world, they ultimately end up with a global mean of trust in scientists as 3.62. And OK, it's on a scale from one to five. So five is very high trust in scientists. One is very low trust. So 3.62, they decide, is pretty good. Now, of course, there's massive variation across these 68 countries, and I'll talk about that in just a moment. A couple of interesting tidbits, just about this global level, none of the 68 countries that they surveyed had low trust in scientists. The lowest country in their survey was Albania, and that came in at 3.05 on that trust index. And one or two range would have been low trust. So everyone is reasonably trusting in scientists. Would you guys like to guess what the country is that was the highest in terms of trust in scientists? There's two that were kind of runaways compared to the others.
E: Germany.
B: UK
J: Switzerland.
S: China.
AJR: Germany, China, UK. Any other guesses?
J: Switzerland.
AJR: Ah, I thought something like that too, Jay. But in fact, all of you are wrong. The top results really surprised me. They are Egypt at 4.3 out of five, and India at 4.26 out of five. And this is where I think a lot of the studies that focus on the US and Europe, that's where you would see UK, Denmark, Sweden, all those countries tend to be at the top. And so the study is free online. They list all 68 countries in order. The United States comes in 12th. We're just after Mexico and before Indonesia. And the United Kingdom is actually more like 15th. And I know there's a lot of SGU listeners in Australia. Australia, congrats, you come in at number five. But there's a lot of countries in Asia, and we'll talk about this in a moment, Muslim countries that come in quite high on this particular survey.
E: That's reassuring.
AJR: Yeah. Yeah. And then within that trust index, the highest scoring one across the globe was competence. So most people feel confident that scientists are competent. The lowest of the competence, integrity, benevolence, and openness, the lowest pretty much globally was openness. So a sense of a lack of transparency about the scientific process, transparency in terms of openly communicating or being in dialogue with the public. That's what generally the aspect of trust that scored the lowest around the world. And there's also actually, I should say, an online dashboard where you can mess with all of these and kind of go by country and look at these things. So a couple of other interesting findings. It's worth a read the entire thing. It's very readable. But a couple of other findings that stood out to me is that they looked at individual level demographics and things about the people or the country that might predict higher trust in science than in others. So here are some characteristics that tended to, and again, this is globally, tended to characterize higher trust in science. So women compared to men, more trusting in scientists. Older people, urban regions, countries and people with higher incomes. Again, this religious people, generally speaking, religion was positively correlated with higher trust in science. And we'll break that down in just a second. Higher education did seem to predict a higher trust in science, though actually there wasn't much of a relationship between highest education, so tertiary education, like all the way up at the very top. That didn't really play a role. It was more like secondary education, that sort of thing. And the more individuals in the country claimed to be liberal or left-leaning, that tended to also predict. So the religion piece is one that I want to talk about for a second because it really surprised me. And it turns out, and this is one of the values of doing a study that is not just the United States or not just countries with similar sorts of breakdowns in terms of religiosity. It turns out that overall, religiosity of a country is positively correlated with trust, but it varies a lot. Generally speaking, in Muslim countries, and this is all over the world, Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the trust in scientists was quite high. And they also asked a question, do you perceive a conflict between science and religion? And the answer was often no in Muslim countries. And I don't know a lot about Islam, but apparently there is quite a bit of, I guess, pro-science or scientific language in the Quran. And so religiosity in Muslim countries is positively correlated. If you're in the United States, like I am, the story is different. Christianity tends to be negatively correlated with trust in science in the United States. Generally around the world, the role of Christianity can vary from country to country. Basically the people who have the lowest amount of trust around the world, men generally a little bit lower, varies by country, a conservative political orientation. And then the two strongest ones, the two ones that kind of most predicted a lack of trust in science and scientists is something called the SDO, which is a measure of how hierarchical, it's the social dominance orientation. It's the degree to which individuals desire and support group-based hierarchy and the domination of inferior groups by superior groups. So it's the more you want your society to be hierarchical, the less you tend to trust science and scientists. And then also if you are more conservative, like I said, and then also if you have something that they're calling science populist attitudes, which sort of is taking the political populist term and applying it to science, meaning if you have an attitude, and this almost feels tautological to me, but if you have an attitude that common sense is the thing that you should be paying attention to most, you're going to have a lower trust in science. So I got very nervous, for example, when politicians say, we just need to do common sense. You're like, whoa, I'm not so sure about that. And then the last thing I'll say that stood out to me is they asked people, what would you like scientists to be working on? And do you think they're working on those things? So most people around the world said that they wanted scientists to improve public health and then solve energy problems. In third place was reduce poverty. And then fourth of the four that they asked was increase your country's defense and military. Countries in Africa and Asia generally wanted more defense and military. Most other parts of the world thought that there was too much attention on defense and military and wanted more attention to things like improving public health. And generally the kind of the punchline of all of this is two things. One is, it is good news. And it was heartening to me to read because I spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about people not trusting science and scientists. But they also made the point that, look, it doesn't take that many people who are not trusting in scientists to kind of ruin policymaking or ruin public perception for a policy or ruin the rollout of some kind of science-based initiative. You know, that 10 percent can be very vocal and can be potentially very persuasive. And then the second piece is this piece of like, well, OK, well, what could we do to further increase trust in science and scientists? And really, they walked away with this recommendation of encouraging public participation and not just top down, like, here are my results, but like actually having a dialogue with people, which is what you all are up to. And I had to do some thinking because I've spent my life as a professor, which is literally telling people to sit down and listen to me. So I'll focus on more dialogue. And for future work they don't make a distinction at the moment between different scientific fields. And certainly there's plenty of work to do to pour through the regional differences. You know, one other quick thing that was interesting is that in some countries, the more left-leaning you are politically, the less trust there is in science because of the way that their political system is set up, that politicians on the left are more dismissive of science and other places it's on the right. And so even that sort of how politics and they thought maybe a stronger predictor would be the stance of the key leaders, as opposed to the ideology of people when trying to understand the relationship between politics and science. So I thought it was super interesting and there's a ton more work to do, but I was generally encouraged. I don't know if it's consistent with what you guys thought was going on around the world.
S: It is in that I've been following surveys about this for years, decades, and trust in science and respect for science and scientists always ranks very high, just generally speaking. But one thing, I'm just trying to make sense of a lot of the data you were throwing at us. Is it accurate to say that one possible thread weaving through this data is that the more scientific findings are likely to conflict with your belief system, the less trust you have in science? So if you are political or your religious beliefs conflict with the findings of science, then your trust in science goes down.
AJR: Yes.
S: And that could come from many sources. It could come from just the prevailing political ideology of your country. It could come from just the way your religion deals with these issues how fundamentalist it is, et cetera. Yeah, do you think that's accurate?
AJR: That is exactly accurate, and you summarized all of the stuff that I just said very well. And they have a nifty chart that kind of has a little number line of how much of an influence each of these various elements, like your gender, your education level, your income, the level of inequality in your country, the blah, blah, blah. And all the ones that are on the kind of negatively correlated or negatively predictive of trust in science are exactly what you described. So it's your political beliefs, your preference for social hierarchy, your populist attitudes. And then religion was so funny because it just, in the world, it shows up in such different ways. But in places like the United States, it absolutely is negatively correlated with trust. And it's exactly what you said. It's not your income. It's not your education. It's your beliefs.
S: It's your beliefs. Yeah. People basically trust science right up to the point where it disagrees with their belief system.
AJR: Yep.
S: That's basically the bottom line. I agree. That's been my perception as well for as long as I've been doing this.
AJR: Yep. And you find reasons to handpick well, I generally support science, but like this particular vaccine, I looked at the outcomes, and I think it's this, because you just find a way to, you know.
S: Or like, I think in this country, it's all about evolution.
AJR: Yeah.
S: It's pretty much all about evolution, right?
AJR: Yeah.
S: So you have to attack science and distrust scientists because they say evolution happened.
AJR: Right. Yeah. I mean, and I was intrigued that they asked the paper is very kind of high level, like big global stuff. But some of the smaller questions, specifically, is your religion at odds with science, was a question I was glad that they asked. And by the way, globally, 29% of people in the study worldwide believe that science is in outright disagreement with their religion. So it's not nothing. It's about a third. And I bet it's regionally clustered for sure.
S: Yeah. Sure. All right. That's fascinating.
AJR: Thanks.
FDA Bans Red Dye No. 3 (41:06)[edit]
S: Guys, we got a lot of questions about this. And so I figured I had to tackle this. The FDA recently removed FD&C red number three, red dye number three, from the list of approved food additives. It's been approved for whatever, 50, 60 years. So this is a change for the FDA. Why did this happen? Why do you think it happened?
B: Well, I assume because they discovered some nasty side effects of that dye, right?
E: People were, right, spawning ill from this. It was a health concern.
B: It was horrible.
E: Because cancer, I'm sure.
B: And we didn't know for decades.
E: National health concern.
AJR: Steve, it's probably why you have tinnitus, if I'm honest.
S: So none of those things are true.
E: Of course.
S: It has nothing to do with the science. It's all political. So it was initiated by a petition. The petition is by 30 plus organizations and people that have a long history of being either consumer advocacy or environmentalists. They all have a reputation, in my opinion, or many of them do, of being chemophobic and anti-scientific. The science is, their approach to science is compromised by their advocacy. And they're not really a respected scientific organization, right? Like the Environmental Working Group is on there. They're like the poster child for that. They abuse science, in my opinion, all the time. Because they have their narrative, right? Their narrative is that people are being poisoned by industry or whatever. Okay. So this group petitioned the FDA to remove red dye number three from the approved list based upon something called the Delaney Clause. The Delaney Clause is a specific part of an FDA update that was passed in 1960. And it basically says that the FDA must ban any food dyes that have been shown to cause cancer in humans or animals. That's the law, right? Now, I think we have to put this into the context of the Chevron Deference. Do you guys know what that is?
AJR: No.
E: Court case.
S: This is a recent infamous Supreme Court case.
AJR: I was going to say it now it sounds familiar.
S: Yeah. So the Chevron Deference is the idea that when the legislature passes a regulatory law, the details of how to interpret and enforce that law are left up to the agency that's responsible for it, right? And the thinking is that experts in that agency are going to use their expertise to properly interpret the law. And the courts generally give deference to the experts in interpreting regulations, regulatory laws. And the Supreme Court ended this, ended Chevron Deference last year, I believe, in a decision. This is very controversial. It's very horrible, actually. But it got very little, I think, coverage in the mainstream media. It was mentioned, but you had to go looking for it or be interested in it. I don't think most people know what Chevron Deference is. But this was a massive win for the populist right, massive. Because think about what this says, is you can eviscerate the regulatory infrastructure by just saying, well, you're not following the letter of the law. You don't have the right to interpret that regulation, right? So it's basically taking the... It was a massive power grab from experts working in regulatory agencies to the courts. The courts basically saying, we could decide how the law should be interpreted. That's our job. You don't get to decide how the law gets interpreted, right? So it seems to me that this FDA decision, and if you read between the lines in their announcement of this reversal, that this was due to the ending of Chevron Deference. Because think about it, the law says the FDA must ban any food dyes that have been shown to cause cancer in humans and animals, right? But why hasn't the FDA banned red dye number three before? The data that this was based on, that the petition referenced, is from 1980. It's 45 years old, or 82. The data was collected over 1977 through early 1980, 81, and was published, I think, in 1982. Forty-three years later, why the change? Because as the FDA said in their announcement, those studies are not relevant to humans. So essentially, the FDA, who have scientists and medical experts who could interpret the data, said, well, the Delaney Clause doesn't apply because this data is not relevant to humans. But now, with Chevron Deference gone, they can't do that. It's just the law says you must ban it, and they're like, well, I guess we have no leeway, so we have to ban it. Horrible precedent. Now, let's look at how horrible—well, the research itself isn't bad, it just should not be used to assess risk, right? This is clearly a toxicology study, and some types of toxicology studies are designed to push a system to its limits to see what happens if it breaks, and what happens if it does break, right? So you give rats some ridiculous amount of a chemical, and until—like, you could literally do the LD50 test, like, let's see how much it takes to kill half the rats. Or you could say, let's just give a ridiculous dose and see if anything bad happens, and then we could use that as sort of a starting point to research whether or not there's any potential harm in humans. So they fed rats red dye number three at a rate of 2,464 milligrams per kilogram per day during its entire lifetime, following in utero exposure. So exposure in utero, and then 2,464 milligrams per kilogram per day. Now except the daily intake, the ADI for red dye number three is 0.1 milligrams per kilogram per day. So that was 24,640 times the dose, the accepted daily intake of red dye number three. This is clearly not applicable to human exposure.
AJR: I feel like 24,000 times the dose of anything would kill us.
S: Yes. Yeah. I mean, what is safe at 24,000 times the acceptable daily intake, right?
AJR: Maybe coffee, because that's about what I have.
J: I mean, if you drink that much water, it'd kill you.
S: Exactly.
B: Yeah, water poisoning.
AJR: Yeah.
S: But it's worse than that, because, again, the point of this research was, hey, what happens, not is this safe? And they found that the rats got thyroid cancer, and there was a particular hormonal reason pathway for this to occur. And it turns out that this pathway is not relevant to humans. This doesn't cause cancer in humans. And they looked for other mechanisms of cancer that would be relevant to humans, and they didn't find them. And they basically proved this was safe for humans. And that's the data, which is the reason for the FDA decision over the last 40 years that why they considered this to be safe. The research shows that it's safe.
AJR: Wow.
S: Right? And so in there, they got really passive aggressive. So they're saying there was a petition, according to the Delaney Clause, we are banning red dye number three. Then they say, the petition requested the agency review whether the Delaney Clause applied and cited, among other data and information, two studies that showed cancer in laboratory male rats exposed to high levels of red dye number three due to rat-specific hormonal mechanism. The way that red dye number three causes cancer in male rats does not occur in humans. Relevant exposure levels to red dye number three for humans are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats. Studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects. Claims that the use of red dye number three in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific evidence. That's in their announcement that they're banning it.
AJR: Wow.
S: Right? They're not justifying the banning. They're just passively aggressive. Yeah, we're banning it. It's stupid. This is completely safe, but we're doing it anyway.
AJR: Wow. That is a dangerous precedent.
E: Right. They're going to apply this as a standard now going forward?
S: Well, that's the thing. That's why this is so horrible. Again, do I really care that red dye number three is getting banned? No. I don't care. The point is the precedent. You could basically weaponize this and get anything you want banned.
AJR: I mean, I'm thinking about anti-vaxxers now, for one.
S: Right. Exactly. I mean, this is like you're giving a flamethrower to these cranks and charlatans and saying, have at it. You can completely burn down the regulatory infrastructure with this kind of claim.
B: How about taking a tact where you do this, Steve? You weaponize it, but you ban something so ridiculously egregious that nobody would seriously ban. Just to show how stupid this is.
J: You mean like red dye number three?
S: Well, you mean something people care about.
AJR: Like caffeine or water.
B: Yes. Exactly.
S: Like coffee. We're going to ban coffee. Coffee is no longer allowed.
B: Exactly. There you go.
AJR: If anyone goes for coffee, I would be so radical.
S: I don't know. That might be interesting. Yeah. The FDA might ban coffee based on Deleney clause and the lack of Chevron deference and then see what people think about that.
B: That's what you need. You need a precedent of one or two or even three things that nobody will ever ban because there will be riots in the streets. Then the next time something comes up, people will be like, no, this is just stupid.
S: This is part also of a bigger trend on the right as a very deliberate strategy to disconnect expertise from the government, to basically make the government all about power and not about expertise. Trump on his first day signed Schedule F, which basically turns career civil servants into just regular employees that could be fired for being disloyal. You don't have to find a cause.
B: That's vile.
S: Yes. Now expertise doesn't matter. Loyalty is the only thing that matters. Again, it's a devaluing of independent expertise, the very notion that there could be somebody working in the government who's not a Republican or a Democrat, who's not loyal or disloyal. They're just a scientist. They're just an engineer. They're an expert. Their job, it's irrelevant of any ideology or parties or partisanship, is to just work for the American people to do their job and to give us the benefit of their expertise. That idea is under attack. And it's losing. It's going away with these kinds of decisions at the Supreme Court level and now executive action at the federal level. This is very dangerous. This is very dangerous. This is the opposite direction that we want to go into, where we have a more science-based approach to regulation. This will make for a less science-based, more ideological approach.
AJR: It reminds me of a lot of places in, not all, but many places in Eastern Europe after the fall of Yugoslavia, where there was a transition into democracy. A lot of these partial democracies and countries that are trying to become more democratic, they have elections, but there's still a lot of corruption and demands for loyalty. The pattern would look a lot like that, where it's like one party would win the presidency or become the prime minister, and then all the scientists and the experts would just get kicked out, and all his friends would come in, and then there'd be another election, and then the other party would come in, and all their cronies would come in, and it really is destabilizing and completely antithetical to science and everything that Jay was describing in the opening and everything else we like about science. What can we do?
S: One of the things that's been sort of the strength of this country for my entire life up until recently has been that, at the end of the day, it didn't really matter who won the White House. I read a very good article 20 years ago or so about, don't worry about the low voter turnout. Low voter turnout is actually a good thing. It's a marker of the fact that people realize that we have a stable government, and your life doesn't depend that much on who was in the White House.
B: Yeah, your life, right.
AJR: Exactly right.
S: Your day-to-day life. Doesn't really matter because most of the government are just civil servants doing their job. If that goes away, and it's just, nope, most of the government are partisan hacks serving dear leader, then elections have massive consequences, and that, sure, that has high voter turnout, but for the very bad reason, for the reason that our federal government is not stable. Just signing 80 executive orders, or undoing 80 executive orders of the previous guy on the first day is destabilizing. That's not good governance.
AJR: No, and it's, I feel like these past couple of rounds have been so, I mean, I remember when various other elections happened, and I didn't always love the outcome and so on, but I didn't feel like my day-to-day life would change that much. I was just sort of like, and there certainly were policies that I disagreed with, and policies that killed a lot of people, but you're right, Steve, it's like just this week, I've just like, I'm not ready for the whiplash of how much everything has changed.
S: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
B: And Steve, your assumption there that turnout, voter turnout will increase for really critical, really once in a generation critical votes, I think is now incorrect.
S: Well, it was true four years ago. It was true to some extent this time, just not as much.
B: Not four months ago.
S: Yeah, there was like, what, 7 million fewer voters, but that doesn't mean that the general principle is not true.
AJR: Right. Generally speaking, you're right, Steve, the generally voter turnout was much lower, and depending on how you measure it, polarization was much lower in the middle of the last century, and a lot of political scientists were like, oh no, polarization is too low, the parties stand for the same thing, this is bad, and it's like, no, that was great. I mean, obviously you want some dissent, and you want productive conversation, and you want different perspectives, but the partisan hack, and the screaming, and the everything that is certainly worse than having a whole bunch of civil servants just trying to do their job.
S: Well, we shouldn't disagree on the really big stuff, like democracy.
AJR: Yeah. And science.
B: And other aspects of reality.
S: And science, right, and basing our policy. Now, in addition to health care, which, don't get me started on RFK Jr., so we're keeping an eye on that train wreck that's happening, but this is also going to be massively applied to the Environmental Protection Agency, right, the EPA, so think about what Schedule F and what the lack of Chevron deference is going to do to all of the global warming and environmental protections that have been put into place. They're all on the chopping block, and that's by design. That's why this is happening, because they want those regulations to go away.
AJR: I mean, it's basically just saying, like, ignore any science you want, is what it sounds like.
S: Or any experts.
AJR: Or any experts.
S: My loyal politicians will decide. And the courts will decide. Not disinterested nonpartisan experts. I think we're just... This is like... This is the canary in the coal mine, right? This red dye number three thing. It seems like a nothing issue. But this is a warning bell to what is on the horizon.
B: People are going to refer back to this. I mean, like, not enough people realized at the time what this-
S: This is the first domino falling.
B: -this meant. Yeah.
Andromeda Mosaic (57:18)[edit]
S: All right, Bob, tell us about this new massive picture of the Andromeda Galaxy.
B: Massive. Okay. So you guys remember the HST, the Hubble Space Telescope? It has released its largest photo mosaic image ever, and it is of the beautiful Andromeda Galaxy. What have we learned, though, about Andromeda from this, and why is it such a fascinating and important galaxy? Now, it's easy to think that the Hubble Space Telescope is passe. It's irrelevant. Especially considering the new kid on the block, that punk James Webb Space Telescope.
E: Oh, my favorite.
B: It's been dominating space news just because it's making one amazing discovery after the other. Blah, blah, blah. Hubble has anticipated this in my... I think. And this is why it spent 10 years coming up with its magnum opus photo mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy. So why is this galaxy worth 10 years of effort? I think Andromeda is certainly special enough for many reasons. NASA recently referred to it as an enticing empire of stars, which I really loved that turn of phrase. And that's appropriate since Andromeda is the king of our local group of 50-some-odd gravitationally bound galaxies, our local group, the local group of galaxies. It has a whopping one trillion stars. It dwarfs the second place galaxy, our Milky Way, with just a paltry 250 billion stars. At two and a half million light years away, Andromeda is often cited as the most distant object visible to the naked eye, which is a really cool statistic. But I got to say that this claim is problematic. The Triangulum Galaxy is probably a little bit farther away at 2.7 million light years instead of 2.5. And that's also visible to the naked eye. However, Triangulum is very dim. You need amazing and rare dark sky conditions and good sight to see it. And then if I want to be even more wonderfully anal, there was a gamma ray burst detected in 2008, which was 7.5 billion light years from Earth. Anyone looking at the right place at the right time would have seen that at 7.5 billion light years away. But that doesn't really count. And there's a couple of other galaxies that may be a little farther away that some astronomers claim that they saw naked eye, whatever. You could say Andromeda is basically the most distant naked eye object. It's certainly the biggest because most of the time it's not quite that difficult to see. And the other ones are much, much harder. So it's problematic. Whatever. Anyhoo. So none of that takes away from Andromeda. But it wasn't even always thought to be a galaxy. Did you know it used to be called the Great Andromeda Nebula? They thought it was just glowing gases or maybe a young solar system. But once the technology improved enough and they resolved the stars inside it in the 20th century, then it was like, OK, this isn't glowing gas. Many thought, well, a plasma is a glowing gas. They found stars. So many thought that it was a spiral nebula within our Milky Way, which makes sense if you think that the Milky Way is the entire universe, as they did at that time. But then Edwin Hubble in 1923, studying a Cepheid variable star in Andromeda, he conclusively determined and showed that Andromeda had to be a distant island universe of its own. What a day. Imagine that. What a day that must have been to irrevocably alter the entire conception of the universe. And that happened because of Andromeda. But what makes Andromeda even more special in my mind is the fact that it is a big barred spiral galaxy just like the Milky Way. And because of that, the more we learn about Andromeda, the more we learn about our own island universe galaxy. And because think about it, it's very hard to study the Milky Way since we're basically trapped inside of it. We're not going anywhere, probably forever, where we can actually get a distant view of the Milky Way. Someone compared it to learning about Manhattan from the perspective of Central Park. And that's an apt analogy that we're very limited what we can learn about our own home, our own galaxy. And looking at such a big, beautiful, and close spiral galaxy like Andromeda helps us learn a tremendous amount. We will learn more about our own galaxy by studying Andromeda than even our own galaxy, I think. All right. So that maybe puts Hubble's 10 years of effort into more perspective. The photo mosaic itself that Hubble created took 1,000 orbits. It has a 2.5 billion pixels, gigapixels. The image can make out 200 million distinguishable stars, all of them brighter than the sun. The other 800 million stars that we think are in there are just too dim to make out with Hubble tech. It was actually very hard to image Andromeda. I didn't know this. It was very difficult. They described it as a Herculean task. Why do you think it was so hard to image Andromeda like this? Why Andromeda specifically? And this wouldn't be-
S: Because it's so big in the sky?
B: Yeah, exactly. It's unusually big in the sky, six times the width of the full moon. Most galaxies that Hubble images are billions of light years away, and they would span tiny fractions of the moon width in the sky. So this is just so big, it made the task-
E: It's so big.
B: It's so big, Jay. I was going to say, it's so big. It made the task much more difficult. All right, so what have we actually learned by studying Andromeda this way? The most interesting thing to me is that it looks like Andromeda has a different evolutionary history than our Milky Way, even though they both grew up in the same neighborhoods, right? We're basically good neighbors, but yet it still had a different evolutionary history. It has, for example, many more younger stars than the Milky Way, and the researchers say it has unusual features like coherent streams of stars. Daniel Wise, Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement, Andromeda's a train wreck. I just love that quote, Andromeda's a train wreck. It looks like it's been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars, and then it just shut down. This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood. It looks like a relatively recent collision of the gases, because you know when galaxies collide, the stars aren't hitting, it's a gravitational interaction, and the gases, the diffuse hydrogen gas, that's where you can get some big collisions. The collision of Andromeda and another galaxy caused many new stars to form in Andromeda, and that, of course, greatly decreased Andromeda's future star-making ability. That's why he says that it seems like Andromeda just shut down, because it shot its wad. It created a bunch of stars a while ago, and now there's just not quite as much gas left to form new stars. They even think they know the galaxy that Andromeda collided with. It's called Messier 32. They think it used to be a spiral until Andromeda essentially stripped away all its outer stars and incorporated them into those streams of stars that I mentioned, and it just left the core. The core is the only remnant from the spiral that once was, and it's just orbiting Andromeda now thinking about why everything went so wrong. In the future, they will use these findings to support future observations by, of course, the James Webb Space Telescope, and I'm sure it will, unfortunately, make people forget about poor Hubble again. Also check out the photo mosaic of Andromeda online and read about the fascinating galaxy, the great Andromeda galaxy.
S: What I would like to see is that picture of the Andromeda galaxy superimposed on the night sky where it is.
B: I have, Steve. It's easy to find. It's all over the web. Oh, it's beautiful. I just can't... Oh, if it was just brighter, it's so big. Steve, imagine the full moon. It's five, six times the width. It would dominate our... It would be a cultural thing where... Can you imagine the stories that primitive societies would have come up with about this huge, beautiful spiral galaxy that you could see with the naked eye in detail? It would be wonderful, but it's too damn dim, two and a half million light years away. It's big, but it's just too dim, and you need technology to see it well because if you looked at it with your naked eye, it's just a fuzzy patch.
E: That's a dim shame.
AJR: There it is.
S: That was... No, that was not good, Evan.
E: Thank you.
AJR: No, I was sitting here thinking it was like-
S: It was below the usual standard.
B: Go ahead.
AJR: -that I was missing something obvious like Orion's belt, the moon, Southern Cross. Like why am I not seeing Andromeda? Oh, because it's a tiny, dim.
B: Yeah, it's a fuzzy patch.
AJR: It's too bad.
B: Yeah, it's visible. I think it's visible even now in the Northern Hemisphere, so I definitely wanted to make a more of a concerted effort to check it out and just to look at something, wow, look at that. That's two and a half million light years away. I want to get in the... It's been so long since I've seen it. I want to check it out again.
E: We saw the Magellan Cloud, right?
B: Yeah, the large and small Magellan Clouds in the Southern Hemisphere. That was a moment because, I don't know, I've heard about those dwarf galaxies for so long. They're very close, relatively close. They're only, I think, what is it, 170,000 light years away, and oh my God, they are... That was really one of those moments where it's like I was just spellbound looking at them because I've never seen them before. I've seen a million pictures, but I never saw it with my naked eye. Were we in Australia or New Zealand?
E: We were in New Zealand, yeah.
B: Oh my God. It was magical, magical.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob.
B: Sure.
Telepathy Tapes (1:07:14)[edit]
S: Evan, this is another item that we've gotten a lot of emails about, these telepathy tapes. What's going on there?
E: Yeah, telepathy. I wish I had done a news search on one of my news browsers recently for the word telepathy, and perhaps I would have been made aware of this much sooner than just recently. I mean, you think telepathy, of all words, you're going to search for skeptic-related news? I mean, that's not exactly high on the list of keywords. You know, face it. I mean, what? An adult or a child maybe believes in telepathic communication in the year 2025, right? Nah, probably not. We can set that aside with levitation and alchemy and astral projection and those kinds of things. But there it is this week. I found this at the website called inews.co.uk, which is basically an online newspaper, and it's in their culture section. I think it should have been in their science section, but regardless, it was written by Emily Bootle, B-O-O-T-L-E, who's the culture writer there, or a culture writer. The headline reads, the telepathy tapes is autism pseudoscience, but it's top of the charts. Tagline reads, a podcast claims nonverbal autistic children have mind-reading abilities. Its success, the podcast's success, isn't because of its content, but its powerful methods of persuasion. Uh-oh. Well, first, a big shout-out to Emily for framing this correctly from the get-go. Big plus there. That mind-reading abilities are squarely pseudoscience, and the uh-oh part of this, it's about adults once again taking advantage of children diagnosed with autism or other conditions that inhibit their ability to effectively communicate. The telepathy tapes. Had you heard about this before, say, just in recent weeks? Because I had not.
B: I hadn't. I hadn't.
S: Well, you've been getting a lot of emails about it.
E: We did, but the podcast launched in September of last year. I don't recall us hearing much about it back in September. And here's what she writes in the article, Emily. The telepathy tapes were first released in September 2024, but gained traction in December 2024. Over eight episodes, the documentary maker Kai Dickens unpacks a phenomenon that she believes should be given much greater attention and scientific validity, the idea that some nonverbal autistic children can read minds. The show has shot to the top of the charts, podcast charts, in recent weeks in both the United Kingdom and the United States, briefly knocking Joe Rogan off the top spot. What?
B: What?
E: Hey! The telepathy tapes went to number one practically overnight? Uh. Oh my gosh.
AJR: I'm so conflicted about this.
E: I mean, what? How the heck did that happen? When did they? You know, out of nowhere, boom. How did that escape our attention on its meteoric rise? Oh my gosh. That's stunning to say the least. One might say remarkable, but Bob won't be saying it. I had to go to the source, right? So when you hear something like this, let's give it a listen. I did not download the podcast, but instead I found the transcript and I read episode one. Here are some highlights from the episode one. You can get it right from the source. This is Kai Dickens and you're listening to the telepathy tapes podcast. For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms and nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do. Welcome to the very first episode of the telepathy tapes, where we venture into claims of widespread telepathy via a group who is systematically dismissed, non-speakers who often have autism. For decades, parents of non-speakers have been told by doctors, educators, and scientists that their kids are not in there. They are not capable of communication or competent of learning. Imagine being one of those parents and discovering that everybody has been wrong about your child. They are in there. They are competent and they can communicate. But then also discovering that your child can read your mind. Would you expect to be believed that we're going to meet people who experienced this phenomenon from every corner of the world? They travel wherever all over the country and other places as well. England, Israel, Mexico, India, and I find it very difficult to figure out how to bring anyone into this world due to the nature, due to the natural skeptic in all of us. So and she writes back to the article in the podcast, there are tests and experiments that are conducted sometimes alongside a neuroscientist, Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, who conducts research in the area. I don't know the name I'm familiar with, actually, with parents and children with shocking results. The children use iPads to communicate via typing, using random number generators, random book pages and random words. She tests their ability to read their parents or therapist's mind. And all over the U.S., they succeed again and again. Even hardened skeptics like her cameraman, Matt, might find room to pause.
S: Yeah. Cameraman Matt is a well-known skeptic.
E: Right?
S: I mean, years of experience.
AJR: Why isn't he on this show?
E: Yeah, seriously.
J: We asked him, but he refused. He was too busy reading minds.
E: Too busy. Yeah.
AJR: Oh, well. That's too bad.
E: She continues, when you take a step back, there's a great many problems indeed. Thank you, Emily, for pointing these out. Now Dickens never claims to be an expert or a scientist. She's simply floored by the empirical evidence, but she does claim repeatedly that her test results are sound. I'm not an expert or a scientist either, says Emily, but I have done some cursory research and I feel confident in saying they're not as watertight as they're making it out. Not only because there are too many variables, but they fail to use double blind methods or because their sample size is too small, actually, but because something is much more fundamental. The method that the children's used to communicate known as spelling or facilitated communication is itself highly controversial. And that's really what is going on here. Here we go. Facilitated communication once again coming to the surface, not only coming to the surface, but fueling this podcast to becoming the number one podcast in two major markets in the world, which is just unbelievable.
AJR: Is this an ongoing show? Will there be more seasons or are they done?
E: Ten episodes in total and then what's going to happen is they're going to produce, I don't think it's going to be on, I hadn't heard if it's really going to be on Netflix or something like that, but they're going to make either a series or a documentary series, a small series on this.
AJR: Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow will host it.
E: Would not be surprised at all.
S: Yet again, it's just facilitated communication, that's it.
E: Which we've spoken about so many times in different ways.
S: It's just self-deceptive. It's the communicator, the facilitator is doing all the communication. Again, it's like it is, this is not politically correct. I'm not meaning this. Don't take this the wrong way. It's like the Clever Hans effect, right? Not that these kids are like animals, but I'm just saying the point is they're not typically communicative, right? You can't communicate them in the normal way. If you'd use a method that is self-deceptive where the Clever Hans effect, it was the people around the horse who were dictating what the horse did, not the horse itself. Once you do that, there's no limit to the illusory abilities of the target, right? Most people think that Clever Hans could count, right? But actually, it turns out Clever Hans could also read and do math and calculate dates. He could do whatever task you put before him. This is now with facilitated communication, it's the same thing. It's like not only are these children who are non-communicative, are they, quote-unquote, able to communicate through facilitated communication. They're reading at five or six grade levels ahead of their age, and they could speak other languages. These are all actual cases that I've dealt with. Oh, they speak Hebrew or whatever. They could speak another language, and now they're telepathic. Of course, they're whatever it is you test them for.
E: Yeah, that's right. No limit now as to their amazing abilities. To the point where they go into it, and again, I only read the transcript from the first episode, and they go, I'm sure, much deeper into the whole case for why they think this is telepathy.
S: It's ridiculous.
E: Of all things.
S: And it's completely exploitative. It is a horrible thing to do to these children.
E: Oh my God.
S: It is stealing their voice, absolutely.
E: And to parents who are in extremely difficult situations, who will do anything to improve their lives or perceive their lives of their children, and they are clinging on to any kind of rope that can be thrown their way. So you are emotionally destroying these people in the process as well with this.
AJR: I mean, it's part of the power of the vaccines cause autism movement, because didn't it just give parents of children with autism something to blame or someone to like fixate on, or as opposed to just sort of accepting who their child is and working with that child? You know, like you just sort of demonize something else.
S: That was a layer to it, definitely.
E: And the other thing, this is not new. This is repackaged again. It's the same old items.
S: Almost 40 years old.
E: Right. And in the 90s, there were so many studies done that outright debunked facilitated communication. And what was the other one? It was called what? The rapid prompting method, which is also known as spelling.
S: Spell to speak. And there's a bunch of different derivative methods. They're basically all FC. They're all facilitated communication just with different bells and whistles. But yeah, at the end of the day, you have to control for the facilitator. You have to make sure they're blinded. If the facilitator is not blinded, you are doing pseudoscience. Period. Period. That's it.
E: There's a very testable set of claims here.
S: Very testable. And when you test it properly, it fails every time.
E: Every time.
AJR: I mean, it just seems so obvious that all the other claims they have that just like make it double blind and then talk to me about it. It just seems so obvious.
B: Just do good science. Just do good science.
AJR: Just do science. Yeah.
S: Like 101. Like Science 101 basic controls.
B: Oh, yeah.
S: The stuff they figured out hundreds of years ago. Yeah, exactly.
E: I was watching an old 60 Minutes interview in which Maury Schaefer was interviewing former proponents of facilitated communication, actual people who were administering the tests. And then they were doing the studies for a year or more in some cases and giving kind of these families and things false hope. And then they were subjected to double blinding and they realized that the results all disappeared. And they were overwhelmed with grief saying, my gosh, how could we have deluded ourselves so badly and the harm that they felt that they caused? It was really a heart wrenching kind of thing to watch.
S: Horrible.
E: So thank goodness some people have realized the problems here and actually moved away from it and become advocates frankly against it. But at the same time, these things never disappear fully. They will always reincarnate. And before you know it, you have the number one podcast in the world, basically. It's a sad thing.
S: All right. Thanks, Evan.
E: Yep.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:19:12)[edit]
S: Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.
J: All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] Andrea, do you ever hear things like that in the city?
AJR: You know, at first I thought it was a car that couldn't start, but then it turned into what sounded like a lizard. So no.
J: All right. I got tons of guesses this week. So let's go through these. So Benjamin Davort, Ben said.
E: Oh no, that's great.
J: Here from Japan. He said the scene seems to be in nature. The sound feels like a large throaty cavity of a massive animal resounding with the respiration. He says he can hear the breath and the clack clack that comes after. He thinks it's a reptile like a crocodile. And that's his guess. It is not a crocodile, but crocodiles make noises that sound similar to that if you listen to them. But that is definitely not a crocodile.
E: They cry.
AJR: Very good Evan.
J: Two people guess that it was a shoebill stork. Frederick Niant said that it's a shoebill stork courtship call. And a listener named Cohen Ertz said, hi Jay, I'm a long time listener to the show. My 11 year old son, Sam wants to guess this week's noisy. It is the sound of a shoebill stork. Sam, it's not correct, but that's science, right? Science, there's lots of misses and then you get some hits and you got to keep trying. Just keep trying. You're going to get there for sure. Stavis Maples wrote in and said, hello, this week's noisy may be a lung powered piston or rotary. I had to look it up. Look up what a lung powered piston is for yourself. Not something that you would want to deal with. Mike Kopin said, hi, I say it's a velociraptor talking to other velociraptors right before they pounce. I mean we've heard lots of simulated velociraptor sounds. It does kind of sound like a movie noise. But once you understand what it is, I bet you that they may have taken this sound to create the velociraptor sound. Erin Lloyd wrote in, who happens to be the winner. She said, Erin here from Liverpool. Loved the show since 2015 and I think I finally know the noisy. It's a mama jaguar warning the keeper or the photographer from keeping them away from her babies. Reminds me of the noise the aliens make in Arrival. Thank you so much, Erin. Good job on that. I really think that you must have heard this before. Let me play it for you guys. Check it out. [plays Noisy] That squeak is the baby jaguar. Yeah, you don't want to mess with that, guys.
AJR: No.
E: No.
J: We are hardwired to fear that deep guttural kind of sound.
AJR: I'm so glad I'm wearing headphones because that would have terrified my dogs. We'd all be howling right now.
E: Poor puppy.
J: Yeah, I mean, in the wild, you hear that and your body tells you, run like you're just getting out of there. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Mars Janssens, J-A-N-S-S-E-N-S. Check this one out. This is a very cool one. [plays Noisy] I'll play it again. [plays Noisy] Oh, it's so cool. So many wonderful sounds out there. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or if you heard something cool, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.
J: So, Steve, it's not a coincidence that Andrea is on the show this week.
S: Yeah?
J: Because we do things with Andrea.
S: We do. Skeptical things.
J: Yeah, skeptical things.
AJR: Very skeptical things.
J: Other than like us talking into the void at our home computers, we do stuff in person with Andrea. Andrea was one of the founding directors of NOTACON. That was NOTACON 2023. We are now running NOTACON 2025. Andrea and Brian Wecht and George Hrab and all of the SGU will be there. And Ian the watermelon guy. The Ianster. Anyway, so we would love for you guys to come. You can go to notaconcon.com for more information. We'll be putting up the schedule very soon. We have like one more meeting to go and then we can reveal the schedule. We have a lot of great bits that we're going to do this year. If you don't know what NOTACON is, this is a conference where there is a lot of socializing. We have a lot of fun entertainment. This is really get out of the house and go do something awesome with a bunch of like minded people. It's a two day conference and you will meet new people, you'll make friends, you'll be a part of George Hrab sing along. There is a conference along puzzle that is handcrafted that will have lots of inside jokes and funny things going on. And again, all of us will be there and we will be having a ton of fun. Andrea, in 2023, what did you learn about yourself at NOTACON?
AJR: That's a good question. I mean, as you were describing it, I was thinking about how much fun it was. And I think one thing I learned about myself is I spend a lot of time alone and like you said, talking into the void. And I learned that I really like being around other people who are nice. And it's really just fun to just get together and have a good time with no like major agenda. Like I'm usually not around people unless like we're having a meeting or we're doing a thing. And it was just like so fun to just kind of joke and see where conversations could take you. And it was amazing, too, because it was so many people I didn't already know. Like I know you guys, but and maybe a couple of people who were there who are listeners of the show. But for the most part, it was people I'd never met. And it was just it was surprisingly easy and fun. And I just I learned that I need more of that in my life.
J: Yeah, I agree. I mean, that was the takeaway that we all had as the people running it. It was an it's a new it was a new conference in 2023. We didn't know.
AJR: Yeah, because we've done NECSS before and I've been to we've all been to conferences, so I didn't know what to expect.
J: You know, we definitely built it to have a friendly, welcoming vibe. But it kind of did an order of magnitude more than we expected. We had people that were really complimenting the fact that it was easy to meet people and that it was it really was a big social event. That was a lot of fun about, getting to know people that you don't know or maybe meeting up with people that you know only online. And for us as the directors, like Andrew, we've always had fun working with you. I mean, the very first time I met you was at NECSS and you and I were doing like a comedy bit with each other. I didn't even know who you were.
AJR: Yeah, I didn't know who you guys were either. They were just like, we need an improviser on stage. OK, I remember it was super fun.
J: Yeah. But that it's funny that we met at a conference, but you and I really became friends through all of like the work that we do to go to conferences now. Like there's way more time we spend together doing that stuff. But it was fun to just socialize with you guys as well. We were having just as much fun as everybody else there. So it's a really wonderful thing. If you're interested, go to notaconcon.com. Don't get confused. And if you're not sure, go to theskepticsguide.org and you'll see it right there.
AJR: Not a con con dot com is the world's greatest URL. So congratulations.
J: It's terrible. We'll talk to Ian again about that.
E: People love it.
J: A couple more quick wonderful guys. So here we are. It's 2025. Steve has finally decided to retire after being a medical professional for, oh, 30 plus years. And when Steve first came to me to discuss this of course, I've been waiting for this for years. You know, I mean, I've been like wanting this to happen for a very long time.
S: But you did panic a little bit, though.
J: Well, it's panicky because it's a big change. You know, we have we have so much to consider and to plan on and to do like Steve's going to be we will be crafting new content for Steve to do his own podcast. And potentially there could be like a very frequent live stream happening, maybe a daily life to whatever. There's lots of different irons in the fire. So I think the fact that coincidentally that politics have gone crazy in the United States and we need more sanity now than we ever did. It's a great time for Steve to come. And this is the perfect time if you want to help us support Steve's move to the SGU, and to help us support the work that we plan on doing to help bring more rational thinking to the world, then really consider becoming a patron right now. It would be wonderful if you can join us. It really is a great time. And I've said this before, but really consider it. There's wonderful people in the SGU discord. The SGU community is strong and it's wonderful and it's filled with a lot of fun, really intelligent people that I'm very happy to call a lot of them my friends. But just think about it. Steve's going full time and that is going to enable us to broaden our reach and do a lot more stuff. So I just think if you were ever going to become a patron now would be a great time to really consider it.
S: Absolutely. All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:28:35)[edit]
Theme: None
Item #1: A cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests.[6]
Item #2: A recent study of the diet of coyotes in San Francisco found domestic cat remains in almost half the scat analyzed.[7]
Item #3: A new framework for simulating optimal pandemic responses finds that in 42% of scenarios it is better to vaccinate high exposure groups prior to high risk groups (as was done during COVID).[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | A recent study of the diet of coyotes in San Francisco found domestic cat remains in almost half the scat analyzed. |
| Science | A cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests. |
| Science | A new framework for simulating optimal pandemic responses finds that in 42% of scenarios it is better to vaccinate high exposure groups prior to high risk groups (as was done during COVID). |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | win |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Andrea | A recent study of the diet of coyotes in San Francisco found domestic cat remains in almost half the scat analyzed. |
Bob | A cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests. |
Evan | A cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests. |
Jay | A cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests. |
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. You have three regular news items this week. Are you guys ready?
J: Yes.
AJR: I'm ready.
S: Andrea, you're ready?
AJR: I'm ready.
S: It's your first one of the year.
E: Oh, boy.
S: Maybe your only one. All right, here we go.
AJR: All right.
E: So make it count.
AJR: Yeah, okay. No pressure.
S: Cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interests. That's a very poli-sci one.
AJR: Yeah, okay. I feel very on the spot already.
S: Item number two, a recent study of the diet of coyotes in San Francisco found domestic cat remains in almost half the scat analyzed. And item three, a new framework for simulating optimal pandemic responses finds that in 42% of scenarios it is better to vaccinate high exposure groups prior to high risk groups as was done during COVID, meaning that high risk groups were prioritized during the COVID pandemic, at least here in the U.S. All right, these are a little complicated. These are a little poli-sci-ish, except for the coyote one.
AJR: We study coyotes, too. That's actually a branch.
S: You do?
AJR: Yeah, yeah. It's politics and coyotes.
S: Coyote politics?
AJR: That's right.
S: All right. Andrea, why don't you go first?
AJR: All right. Well, I'm going to say I want the coyote one to be false, just because I don't like the idea that all these domestic cats are being eaten by coyotes. But that does sound consistent with what people I know on the West Coast have said about the presence of coyotes. So I'm going to start with the least political science one and say that the diet of coyotes, almost half of them having domestic cats, I'm going to say that that one is true. The cross-national analysis on climate action, being that the claim is that the presence or the finding is the presence of climate action predicts anti-climate action more than national economic self-interest. I'm going to say...
S: Yeah, so I'll explain that a little bit to you. You're going first. So essentially, they tried to see what predicts or what correlates with there being an active anti-climate action group in a country. And one of the things they looked at was, well, does that country sell gas and oil, right? Is it in there... Is selling fossil fuels in that country's economic self-interest? Another fact to look at is, what is the climate action policy of that country? So these are independent variables, right? You could have a country that sells no oil but has a very strong climate action policy. You could have another country that sells a lot of oil and doesn't have it or whatever, both or neither or whatever. So they looked at everything and said, you know what? It's actually more a reaction to climate action policy than it is there being a fossil fuel industry in that country. That's what they found.
AJR: Got it. Got it. Now, that's interesting, and I'm tempted to believe it, but I'm going to say that that one is false just because I'm thinking about a lot of countries in Europe, particularly Western Europe, that have a lot of climate action. And if they do have anti-climate action, it's not vociferous enough that I've heard about it. And so I'm going to say that that one is false, that I don't think climate action strongly predicts anti-climate action more than economic self-interest. And that would leave the third one that we should be vaccinating high exposure groups before high risk. That means that I think that one is true as well.
S: Okay. Bob, go next.
B: Let's see. All right. The first one. Yeah, I'm going to say the first one is science, climate action policy being a stronger predictor of anti-climate action. It just seems like that is probably science to me. Let's go with the second one. Let's go with the third one then, shall we? Let's see. Optimal pandemic responses. Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable approach to go with high exposure groups. I could see that working. High exposure groups are going to get it and spread it more. So why not focus on them, I guess. The second one though, the coyotes and the cats, half of them have previously eaten cats. I think there would be an uproar. Cats are missing and they're finding them in coyotes. I mean, that just seems like half seems like too much. So I'll just say that that one's fiction.
S: Okay, Evan.
E: All right. Let's see. Yeah, climate action policy presence, a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups. I have a feeling that this one is science as well. There could be several reasons as to why this is the case. Boy, some of these countries otherwise would not allow this kind of thing, don't allow this protests and other things to come into being even, let alone these groups that would rise against them. So I think that has a factor there and that winds up being true. The second one about the coyotes and the cat remains, I'll say that that one is also the fiction. I think half is too much. Cara has, I think, spoken before about wild predators and cat populations. In California specifically, this is in San Francisco, but the half just does seem too high. And like Bob said, I don't think the people would stand for it. They would want to cull whole throngs of coyotes perhaps as a result. The last one, yeah, I suppose, actually I'm a little surprised it's only in 42% of scenarios better to vaccinate the high exposure groups, right? Because you got to take care of them if they're going to go in and actually help the people who are the higher risks. So, but yeah, I agree with Bob. Coyotes, fiction.
S: And Jay.
J: Yeah, to me, the coyote one is screaming fiction because first of all, San Francisco is a city.
E: Yes.
J: I would dare say that there are not a lot of coyotes in San Francisco. You know what I mean? Running around the city? Uh-uh. But what Bob said was 100% what I was thinking. Like, man, if half of them had cat in their scat, then it doesn't necessarily mean that multiple coyotes couldn't have eaten from the same cat or whatever. But still, that's a lot. Unless the number of coyotes is extremely low, which I have coyotes around here where I live and there's probably a lot of them. So, I really think this one is obviously the fiction. Andrea, I'm sorry. You know, I wanted to go with you. I usually just go with you anyway. You know what I mean? Like, I like the way you think and I like the way like the way they call out the cut of your jib. I'm all about that.
E: Andrea might win the day here.
B: I hope she gets a sweep. I really do.
J: But I just don't think there's lots of lines of reasoning here that make me think like this one is greatly exaggerated. Or maybe it's the reverse. Maybe they're finding coyote in the cat stomachs.
AJR: That would be news. I think the cats have telepathy is what I read.
S: All right. So, you all agree with the third one. So, we'll start there. A new framework for simulating optimal pandemic responses finds that in 42% of scenarios, it is better to vaccinate high exposure groups prior to high risk groups, as was done during COVID. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is science. Yeah, I know this is a little complicated. But it's 42% of the time, right? Not all the time. Sometimes it is better to vaccinate the high risk groups first. Sometimes it doesn't make that much of a difference. What's interesting here is they developed essentially an algorithm, a framework like an AI kind of analysis, where you could plug in all the variables, and it will tell you which pathway minimizes death and disease, right? And this is important. If we don't have a lot of availability, we have to decide who was going to get the vaccine first, we have a limited supply or we have to rush it out. And we have to know who to prioritize. So, this kind of analysis in real time during the next pandemic or epidemic or whatever could save lives. Knowing who to prioritize first. All right, let's go back to number two, a recent study of the diet of coyotes in San Francisco found domestic cat remains in almost half the scat analyzed. Andrea, you think this one is science. The boys think this one is the fiction. Let me ask you guys a couple of questions. How many coyotes do you think are living in San Francisco?
J: Probably not that many.
AJR: Very few. I think Jay was right about that.
S: So, if it's not that many, Jay-
B: Yeah, it's true.
S: -you kind of contradicted yourself. If there's not that many coyote, then why is it a problem that half of them are eating cats?
E: Yeah, if there's only 150.
AJR: Probably only eating cats.
B: Yeah, there might just be two cats.
J: I don't know. A lot or a little, I have no idea what that number is.
S: There's about 100 coyotes living in San Francisco.
E: That's all? Okay. There's a lot of feral cats out there.
AJR: You've heard about the real estate there.
S: Evan brings up another point. You guys were talking about missing pets. How many feral cats are there in San Francisco?
AJR: Domestic cat, right.
S: Or just street cats, alley cats.
B: Yeah, don't know.
E: Stray cats.
S: The town went over from where I live now, but this is where I lived 20 years ago in Cheshire. There was a feral cat problem there.
AJR: Wow.
S: There was just one street. Driving along the street or you stopped at a stoplight, you look on the side of the road, and there's like 30, 40 feral cats running through the woods. It was a real problem.
E: Yes. They decimate bird populations.
S: Yeah, absolutely.
E: Among other things.
S: They have been eliminated though. They are gone now. The Cheshire cats, get it?
AJR: I get it.
S: The Cheshire cats are gone. Apparently, there are 670 feral cats in 123 colonies across the San Francisco Bay area.
B: That's a lot more than I thought.
AJR: Hang on. They're measuring cats in terms of colonies? I didn't know that.
S: Yeah, they have colonies.
AJR: Wow. Okay.
S: With those data points, would that change your analysis at all?
E: It might.
B: Based on your attitude, I think we still got it.
E: Wait, wait, wait. You're not offering us door number three or something?
S: No, I'm not offering you to change your mind. This one is the fiction.
B: Yeah, baby.
S: Yeah, sorry, Andrea.
AJR: You had me going there, Steve, with all the questions. I was feeling very high and mighty.
B: I know he was just trying to make us look crappy before he said we won.
S: The real figure was 4.2%. They don't eat a lot of cats. 4.2% of their scat had cat in it.
B: Can they even catch them?
S: Sure. Oh, yeah. Cats go missing around here all the time.
AJR: Really?
S: You see posters up, Fluffy's missing. Fluffy was eaten by a coyote.
E: If you don't find Fluffy in a day or two, it's pretty much it.
S: Yeah, that's why you have to have indoor cats, also outdoor cats first of all, they get eaten and they also are murderers. They go around killing birds.
B: Oh, yeah.
S: I could not have outdoor cats in my yard.
B: No way.
E: Plus, they bring in fleas and other things.
B: It's really like it's an apocalypse for birds, right, Steve? We covered that. There was like devastation of the birds from wild cats. It's nuts.
S: And now, you know what else outdoor cats bring in? Bird flu.
B: Oh, Jesus.
E: Oh, yes.
J: He's terrible.
S: There have been cases of cats' bird flu.
AJR: Right.
S: One more reason [inaudible] outdoor cats.
E: And what's the other thing? The plasma toxicity? What's the-
S: Toxoplasmosis.
E: Toxoplasmosis.
S: Yeah, that's very dangerous.
E: There you go.
S: All right. All of that means that a cross-national analysis finds that the presence of climate action policy is a stronger predictor of anti-climate action groups than national economic self-interest is science.
E: This is the hardest one of the three that I understand.
S: That's why I explained it. I think I made it pretty plain. But that's what they found. They found that actually it's a reaction to-
AJR: That's rough.
S: -climate policy. And the people don't really care about the national economic self-interest. But the idea was that if there is an industry at risk in that country, they would be driving the anti-climate action groups. But I think maybe initially, but now I think they've sort of taken on a life of their own. So all it takes is that you're responding to something that's out there on social media. This is more of a social media world now than a traditional big corporate world, although it's still a big corporate world. But you know what I mean.
E: It's a blend.
S: In terms of this kind of thing.
AJR: I really wanted that to be fiction. That's too bad.
E: Yeah.
S: Yeah. I mean, it's one of those ones, which I love, where you could kind of make sense of it either way.
AJR: Yeah.
S: Right? Because you think, oh, yeah, the fossil fuel industry is funding misinformation about climate action. So that would be the driving force. But it was a bigger predictor if you had climate policy.
AJR: So anti-climate action is reactionary, and coyotes are going hungry. That's my takeaway.
S: Yep. That's right. Sometimes, Andrea, when you know a lot about a topic, it's easier to fool you. It's true. I get Bob all the time.
B: All the time.
AJR: Really? That makes me feel better, man.
B: Because actually, every time I lose is because Steve is doing that to me. Every time.
S: Every single time, without fail.
E: Except the times when it doesn't get right.
B: That's my theory.
S: It's frustrating to me when somebody doesn't know enough about a topic to get it wrong.
B: Yes! It's actually, I get pissed off. Like, are you kidding me?
E: My stupidity paid off. Ignorance is wonderful.
S: You should know that this is wrong.
B: Or you say something, and you're like, and I'm thinking, oh my god, that's extraordinary. And everyone else takes it like, ah, whatever. Like, why are you kidding me? Why aren't you excited at this point?
E: You don't know. Don't you know?
B: I mean, it does happen all the time, but sometimes it's like, ah, frustrating.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:43:10)[edit]
"We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe."
– Robert Charles Wilson, (description of author)
S: All right. Evan, give us a quote.
E: Before I give the quote, Steve, I have a question, and I'm asking for a friend. They want to know if it's okay to pronounce it tinnitus as well as tinnitus.
S: I mean, I think technically both are okay. The reason why I prefer tinnitus is because tinnitus sounds like t-i-n-i-t-i-s, and itis in medicine means inflammation. This is not inflammation of your ear. This is tinnitus.
E: That's a very technically good reason to distinguish.
S: It distinguishes it from pancreatitis or whatever, some other itis. So I think for that reason, it's important to say tinnitus.
B: Tinnitus sounds like tendinitis, too.
S: Tendinitis, any itis, arthritis, any itis that is an inflammation of whatever. So, and it's spelled differently. It should be pronounced differently for disambiguation, but that's very proscriptive.
E: I think tinnitus is a little slightly more labor-intensive, and I think that maybe that's why people might go to tinnitus.
AJR: It sounds like a British pronunciation to me, like, oh, pass the tinnitus.
S: Do you have a migraine?
B: Yeah.
E: I love it.
S: They're used to saying itis, so that's what they default to. But then if you say tinnitus, then they know it's different, right? It's spelled differently. It means something different. It's important.
AJR: Like tinnitus would be my tinning is hurting or something.
E: Those are good reasons. Excellent. All right. Here's the quote for tonight. Thanks for your patience with that. "We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long, incredible history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe." And that was either spoken or written by Robert Charles Wilson, who is a American-Canadian science fiction author. Hugo Award, Best Novel for Spin. Bob, don't know if you read that one.
B: No.
E: Among many other awards Philip K. Dick Award, so many others. Author Stephen King has called Wilson probably the finest science fiction author now writing. So Robert Charles Wilson giving us some good skeptical wisdom there.
S: I have to check him out. Sounds good. I don't think I read it before. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
J: You got it, Steve.
B: Sure man.
E: Thanks, Doctor.
AJR: Thanks for having me.
E: Thanks, Andrea.
S: Andrea, it's always lovely to have you on the show.
E: Good to hear you.
AJR: No, so great to be here. Thanks for having me. And I'll see you at NOTACON.
E: Yes.
S: I'm sure we'll be getting together before that.
AJR: Well, yeah, I'll see you at the planning meetings.
S: We'll see you at the NOTACON planning meetings and then eventually in person at NOTACON.
Signoff[edit]
S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
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- ↑ www.nature.com: How often do unexpected scientific discoveries occur? More often than you might think
- ↑ www.nature.com: Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries
- ↑ sciencebasedmedicine.org: Why Did the FDA Ban Red Dye #3
- ↑ www.sciencealert.com: Hubble's 2.5-Billion-Pixel Mosaic Reveals Andromeda in Breathtaking Detail : ScienceAlert
- ↑ inews.co.uk: The Telepathy Tapes is autism pseudoscience - but it's top of the charts
- ↑ journals.plos.org: Globalizing opposition to pro-environmental institutions: The growth of counter climate change organizations around the world, 1990 to 2018
- ↑ esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.70152
- ↑ www.eurekalert.org: Who to vaccinate first? Penn engineers answer