SGU Episode 450
|
This episode needs: transcription, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing! |
How to Contribute |
| SGU Episode 450 |
|---|
| February 22nd 2014 |
 |
| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing ignorance is shameful. Most people are not to blame for their own ignorance, but if they wilfully pass it on, they are to blame. |
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell. |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 19th 2014, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella
B: Hey everybody
S: Rebecca Watson
R: Hello everyone
S: Jay Novella
J: Hey guys
S: And Evan Bernstein
E: Good evening my friends, how are you?
S: Anything new in your lives?
J I mean you can’t, Steve, you can’t leave the floor open like that cuz I’m gonna talk about my son.
S: What’s he doing this week?
J: His pseudo-talking, the babble thing is happening quite a bit and it’s so adorable. Oh my god it’s epic!
S: Yeah it’s cute when they start to babble in their protolanguage.
J: And he’s so skeptical, it’s ridiculous
B: Ha ha
S: What you should do, Jay, is for the bedtime story, you should read him the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems.
J: I’ll get right on that
R: What a strange thing to suggest one read a baby. Especially considering that book was placed on the index of forbidden books not too long ago. Hmm
E: Not too long ago?
This Day in Skepticism (01:10)
- February 22, 1632: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Chief_World_Systems
R: Hey, happy publishing of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Day, everybody.
E: Yay
R: On February 22nd 1632, Galileo delivered his manuscript for Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, as it is known to his patron, Medici. And if you’re not aware, this was the book that did in fact get Galileo busted by the authorities for grave suspicion of heresy; which led to his house arrest which he was under until he died. And it was all because he wrote this book that some say is slightly in favor of a heliocentric solar system; as opposed to a system in which the Earth remains at the center of everything and does not move. He couched it as best he could, ya gotta give him credit for that. Instead of just coming out and writing a full reasoned book on why, obviously, the Earth is moving around the sun and not vice versa, he created basically this dialogue between several parties. On one side arguing for the idea that the Earth goes around the sun and on the other side arguing that the sun goes around the Earth. The party that was arguing that the Earth goes around the sun though was pretty obviously the winner in this dialogue.
S: Mhmm
R: He even named the party that believed the Earth was the center of the Universe was called Simplicio.
E: Ha as in simpleton
R: So he says that he named him after another philosopher that was known at the time; but yeah, it didn’t look good. And considering that Simplicio was the loser of the dialogue, it also wasn’t good that Galileo used the Pope’s words in his argument which was then defeated. Because the Pope had been a supporter of Galileo, and after that the Pope thought that people were making fun of him and he got a little peeved about that. Galileo, on his part, claimed that he did not mean to cause any offense to the pope, but it was too late. He went on trial, it did not go well, he was forced to recant his beliefs and yeah placed under house arrest. And the book was banned and also any other publication Galileo put out was also banned at that point. So, yeah, things didn’t go so well for him for simply presenting the scientific argument. S: Mhmm. I actually took a full college course on this book.
R: Did you?
E: Oh!
S: Yeah
B: How awesome
S: It was really fascinating.
B: Did you read it?
S: Of course
E: Did you get a B?
S: Of course
E(?): Of course *laughing*
S: And you know there was other stuff about Galileo but it really focused on this book. So what’s interesting… I gotta give you a couple of little tidbits about it.
R: Yeah
S: Galileo’s main arguments were all correct. I mean he they were mostly…there were two major flaws with the book. He counteracted arguments like if you drop something on the surface of the Earth why does it not fly to the West you know, and he essentially described the whole notion of frame of reference. Like if you were inside of a ship and you drop something it falls straight down, you can’t tell if the ship is moving smoothly like at a uniform rate or if it stopped if it’s stopped in the dock.
B: Shades of Einstein
E: Yeah
S: Yeah absolutely
E: Some foreshadowing
S: And he also deconstructed the competing philosophy showing that ya know there are mountains on the moon ya know, Galileo’s famous discover of the moons of Jupiter proving that there are objects revolving around something other than the Earth. But here are the two very interesting flaws: Galileo correctly argued for why what we observed was consistent with a sun centric solar system, but he wanted there to be evidence for the fact that the Earth moving and he had a theory as to why the Earth’s movement caused the tides, and that was just wrong. That piece of his argument was just incorrect.
R: Which is fine because while he was writing the book, apparently he had called it Dialogue on the Tides.
S: Mhmm
R: So it went to the inquisition first, apparently and they had to grant the title approval. And at that point it was called Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea, but he was asked to remove all mention of the tides. Because apparently if they had allowed the book to be published with that title, it would have looked as though it was an approval of his theory on the tides. So instead it was named, well it just went apparently under the title Dialogue and it was only much later that gathered the name Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Which was given it to by an I think a theologian who was attempting to give it a kind of a very balanced sort of title.
S: The other main criticism is that Galileo did not even discuss Tycho Brahe’s alternate system, which was that all the planets revolve about the sun but Mercury and Venus revolve in small circles about the sun and the outer planets (Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) revolve about the Earth and the sun but the sun goes around the Earth. Do you picture that? So that was as consistent with the observation of the time, as was the Copernican system of the sun at the center and the Earth going around the sun. So at the time Galileo really couldn’t put an argument forward for why the Copernican system should be preferred over the Tychoneon System. He could say that the
B: Ooo I like that
S: That the yeah the Copernican system was a philosophically scientifically possible and that it was equivalent, but that he couldn’t prove the Earth was in fact moving. So Foucault Pendulum, that was the experiment that proved that the Earth was in fact moving. And it required later observations that didn’t come for a hundred years or so
B: More rotation than you know orbital motion
S: Well the one thing, the one difference between the Copernican System and the Tychoneon System, other than the fact that the Earth is moving, was Stellar Parallax. And at the time of Galileo, there was no observation demonstrating Stellar Parallax. So it’s basically the stars, nearby stars moving with respect to the background stars as the Earth goes around the sun. Observations demonstrating Stellar Parallax did not exist until the nineteenth century. So that did confirm the Copernican System and Galileo’s predictions. They weren’t contemporary to Galileo, it’s interesting.
News Items
Genovese Myth (08:35)
S: Alright, let’s move on to some news items. Uh Jay you’re going to, at least partially debunk a very old myth about the murder of Kitty Genovese.
J: So right Steve yeah this is a long story so I’m gonna condense it as best I can. But I think a lot of people will find this interesting because this happens to be something that a lot of us have in our heads and the information is wrong. So the back story is on March 13th 1964 around a quarter after three in the morning, the twenty-eight year old Kitty Genovese was on her way home after working at a bar in Queens, New York; and she lived in a neighborhood called Kew Gardens, and unfortunately for Kitty there was an absolutely, horrible murder-rapist literally looking for his next victim. Winston Moseley, and he was prowling very close nearby and he ended up spotting Kitty, he stabbed her twice. He quickly retreated after hearing a neighbor yell down at the commotion. The neighbor wasn’t quite sure what he had saw, but it looked like a woman may have been in a somewhat threatening situation so the guy yelled down. But Moseley soon came back to the wounded Kitty and he stabbed her several more times then raped her. He left her for dead, but she wasn’t actually dead. And she soon of course died in the arms of one of her neighbors. So the story became a legend around the world, and it’s not because the fact that it was this horrible rape-murder. And unfortunately for today’s world, these types of things happen enough where it’s not even ya know we hear it and we’re not surprised. But because of the then police commissioner, Michael Murphy, who irresponsibly leaked information to a New York Times editor named Abe Rosenthal, this story kind of went crazy. What happened that time during their lunch conversation was the police commissioner casually said over that lunch was that thirty-eight eyewitnesses saw the crime, saw this particular murder, and they didn’t do anything about it. And he put it in such a way where Rosenthal believed, at the time, that they were literally perched in their windows watching the entire even unfold for its ya know from beginning to end and they just were happy to observe it and they weren’t willing to raise a finger to help in any way. About ten days later the New York Times had a front page article that started with “For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.” First there was a factual error in that statement, there was only two attacks made; although that’s not incredibly significant to the story, it’s important to note that there’s a lot of misinformation going on in this story. So this began a media frenzy that contorted the story until New York City was vilified as a city filled with people who not only don’t care about their neighbors but was thought to be a lawless city that everyone there…it was like hell on Earth, that’s one way it was described. The entire world read stories that were being regurgitated by all of the news outlets all over the world. And it was thought that this event sparked the end of decency in the civilized world, that’s the way it was reported. The facts are that most of the neighbors had little information on what was actually going on, those who saw any of it were still not clear on what was exactly happening. It wasn’t like anyone was 100% sure at all, or not even close to that, that this woman was being raped and murdered. It just looked like there was a commotion going on to what is believed to be maybe maybe sixteen people laid eyes on one or more of the situation that was going on in the street. The police were called by neighbors and they didn’t respond, one neighbor actually put herself in harm’s way and ended up holding Kitty as she bled to death in one of the foyers like ya know the alcove foyer outside. And she entered the crime scene very soon after Moseley departed, so she could have been actually walking onto the scene as she knew. She just knew that something was going on and she wanted to go out and help. Now these events were not known to the public because everyone sadly loved the alternative story, which is the wrong story and it’s a story about apathetic neighbors who only care about the events that were happening and they were supposedly watching them like a movie.
S: What’s interesting, Jay, is that you know as you’re saying that there was a narrative and people went with the narrative and didn’t question the facts. This has played out multiple times since then. You guys remember the Duke rape case?
E: Oh absolutely
S: What ends up happening is that the media and the pundits start speculating about what this means for society rather than actually question is it actually happening. One of the interesting things I read was that this was 1964, there was a lot of speculation that this was partly the result of TV. That you know people were used to being spectators and watching stuff happen on their TV and they were basically sitting by their window watching this rape/murder as if they were watching a TV program, they were just sort of ya know mummed into apathy and inactivity. It’s kind of a naive psychological speculation about this newfangled technology about these TVs that were destroying the moral fabric of society.
J: Yeah it’s interesting when you look at a story like this or stories that are similar to this one, and the narrative that gets created on the spot gets picked up and people really wanna believe that or seem to be only interested in that narrative. Where there was actually a real story going on here that in a lot of ways could have made the neighborhood look good instead of bad. I thought that some people acted commendably in this situation. But unfortunately with confirmation bias turned up to 100%, as soon as people hear the type of thing that they wanna hear, they just latch on to it. Sadly what was going on in the world at the time, sure things were down. The United States in particular wasn’t doing well, I mean Kennedy was murdered four months prior to this, there were worsening racial tensions going on in Harlem not too far from Queens. Guys, which one of you has heard this story, maybe not knowing the person’s name other than the fact that a bunch of neighbors watch somebody get raped and murdered. I remembered hearing it and I knew this story very well.
S: Oh yeah
J: I fully believed this up until two days ago
E: Wow
R: Yeah this is the story that you hear every time another psychologist does a study on the bystander effect. Every single time it seems to come back to Kitty Genovese. And what’s interesting though is that the origin story is not what everyone thought it was. Does that throw a new light on all of these studies that have come up after this, Reporting to show that the bystander effect is real? I mean you can’t really dismiss all of the studies but maybe we should be taking a more critical look at them? I don’t know.
J: I agree. Sure I mean a lot of research has been done, psychiatrists and psychologists went nuts after this, guess that’s a funny way to put it. They did a lot of testing, they did a lot of speculating, a lot of articles and books were written in response to this murder. If there are ya know if anything to do with human psychology, everything is so subjective, everything is so ya know it’s difficult to say this is the exact way that people are going to behave. Ya know maybe this crowd of thirty-eight people or thirty-six people are going to act this way and a crowd in another part of the country or world or whatever would act completely differently than those.
S: Yeah. But to clarify, the number thirty-eight is wrong; that was a misinterpretation of the record. Probably the chief of police there was dealing with thirty-eight entries in the eye witness record, but they were not individual interviews. So that number is just made up, it’s not it doesn’t affect reality. Very few of the people in the area would have seen, were in a position to see the second and fatal attack. Most people, again this is three o’clock in the morning and ya know a lot of the neighbors were elderly; imagine getting woken out of your sleep at three o’clock in the morning by some noises outside. A lot of people figured it was just a drunk or it was a fight or ya know a lover’s spat, or they didn’t get aroused by it or ya know some people may have seen her staggering after the first attack but not seen the second attack. The second attack took place in a location that very few people could have seen. You should mention also, Jay, there are two people in this story who did behave very badly.
J: Absolutely, yeah.
S: We saw the full range of some people doing everything they could, some people just not being sure what to do, some people being scumbags. Ya know it’s basically the full range of human reaction that you would expect, not a consistent thirty-eight eyewitnesses peering out their window and doing nothing as this attack took place.
J: Yeah as a matter of fact one of the people that could have gotten involved, that knew enough of what was going on, of who fearfully hid in the back of his apartment with his bottle of vodka, he coined the phrase “I didn’t want to get involved”. Maybe of course somebody else probably said that, but that’s what made that statement popular.
R: This story makes me think of a recent news item. I mean have you guys heard about the Ethiopian pilot who flew a plane to Switzerland? It was on its way to France but the copilot basically took control of the plane while the pilot was in the bathroom before takeoff and he took off and just basically flew the plane to Switzerland so that he could try to get amnesty and escape Ethiopia. And the news reports first were reporting that none of the passengers knew that the plane was being abducted basically, but passengers have made it clear otherwise. They said that the copilot announced that he was cutting off the oxygen in the plane and so they sat there for like six hours thinking that they were all going to die. And my first thought was like wow ya know post 911 you would think they would all get together and storm the cockpit somehow. But I read an AMA on Reddit with one of the passengers on the plane and the situation just becomes so complex because the pilot was there on the other side of the door talking to the copilot and being reassured that he was going to land the plane safely. And ya know there are all these moving parts and when it gets down to it, a real-life situation is so much more complicated than just well it was the bystander effect, everybody else just hopes somebody else will do something. It’s not quite so simple as what we want it to believe. Because I think a part of that is us wishing that well if I were in the same situation, I would do something different, I would step up and I would actually do something, even if it results in my death. But the truth of the matter is that it’s just not that simple. It’s not that simple.
S: That is something that is very consistent in the psychological research, is that peoples’ predictions about how they will behave in a certain situation are not very accurate to the way people actually behave. Ya know everyone thinks they’re the exception, but obviously most of us have to be wrong. You’re right, that’s the bottom line, the situation is always more complicated than the simplistic moralizing narrative that emerges and that gets spread around.
Pseudoscience Vandalism ()
Subway and Azodicarbonamide ()
Petawatt Laser ()
AIDS Denialist Silence Critic ()
Who's That Noisy ()
- Answer to last week: Atoms moving
Science or Fiction ()
Item #1: Scientists report new evidence that purports to find the missing mass from galaxy clusters – a previous 40% discrepancy between observations and predictions from cosmological models. Item #2: New research finds that people make better decisions when they believe that outcomes are predetermined by fate. Item #3: Archaeologists report on the oldest human footprints found outside of Africa, from a UK site dated to 0.78 to 1 million years ago, pushing back the earliest known humans in northern Europe by at least 350,000 years.
Skeptical Quote of the Week ()
'Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing ignorance is shameful. Most people are not to blame for their own ignorance, but if they wilfully pass it on, they are to blame.' - Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell.
S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.
References
|
|
|