SGU Episode 706

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SGU Episode 706
19th January 2019
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 705                      SGU 707
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
'Instead of being afraid of that darkness, we should bring everyone to the edge of it and say: Look! Here is an area that needs illumination Bring fire, torches, candles — anything you can think of that will cast light. Then we can lay down our foundations and build our great buildings, cure diseases, invent fabulous new machines, and whatever else we think the human race should be doing. But first of all we need some light.'
Eugenia Cheng a British mathematician, educator and concert pianist
Links
Show Notes
SGU Forum

Introduction

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 Thursday, June 22^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Blast off.

S: You guys have seen SpaceX's new rocket, which they're now calling the Starship.

J: Of course. This is the all-silver.

E: Yeah.

B: I love it.

J: This is steel exterior, and it looks like it's right out of the 1950s.

S: Yeah, it is definitely retro in design.

J: Now, I would think that my first thought of that rocket was aren't there, like, a lot of design concepts being broken here that can you make a rocket look like those cool rockets?

S: Why not?

C: Well, it looks like the most conserved shape you can think of.

E: It's a bullet.

C: Yeah. Aerodynamics, right?

J: Well, I do know Bob and I were having a nose cone discussion not too long ago, and there is, like, real deep, complicated math about the shape of nose cones, depending on what they have underneath them and the weight of the rocket and all this stuff. Like, it's rocket science. So but I look at this ship, and I'm like, it's just beautiful. It's just beautiful. Like, it doesn't seem like anybody cared about the design from an engineering aspect. You know what I mean? It's just cool. And that's why I was shocked that it could exist.

S: It's pretty close. It's pretty close to the proportions and shape of the ship from our logo. Not exact, but it's pretty close.

J: Yeah, it needs to be taller.

E: Oh, wow. Does that mean we get naming rights?

J: That'd be cool.

B: Yeah, there's also a lot of talk about the fact that there was so much steel used in the construction, which is like, wait, with steel, why not why not use composites or titanium or something? But actually, it makes a lot of sense for the stresses and the kind of launch it's going to be to use the steel. Does anyone know some more details about that?

S: Well, I mean, it's consistent with that at one point, I did this deep dive on, like, what's the best material to build stuff? And it's, yeah, it's amazing how steel is depending on the alloy and the way it's made, et cetera, it's still pretty much cutting edge material for a lot of things. I mean, obviously, as you say, we have composites we have advanced materials that are lighter, et cetera. But steel is still a great building material.

B: And from what I could tell, though, now, this thing is not going to be able to launch from the surface of the earth and take off and go into orbit. That will be for when, say, it's on the moon or Mars, it will be able to do that. So they're going to have a booster underneath this when they launch this from the earth. So that was something you might not expect.

S: Yeah, those rockets look pretty small. If you look at the ship, those rockets don't look like it'd be able to put that thing into orbit.

B: But also, I think those are mockups anyway. And also, and another good reason why that probably wouldn't be, at least it wouldn't be very efficient, is the nozzle, the bell-shaped nozzle there. I mean, that's one of the reasons why you have multiple stages to orbit is because the shape of that nozzle is really specific to one type of atmospheric pressure. One shape for that bell shape is not good for a launch from the earth. So that's one of the reasons, I believe, why the multiple stages are so much more efficient. Not only are you getting rid of all that extra weight, but also the exhaust nozzle has a more efficient shape for that level of the atmosphere and atmospheric pressure that you're under. So that's why there's been talk and designs for those inverted nozzles that are really freaky looking, weird. It's like a weird inverted shape of the nozzle. They're efficient. They're relatively efficient throughout the entire height of the atmosphere, whereas the classic shape is efficient for only specific specific altitudes.

S: It needs to morph as it gains in altitude to constantly optimize itself.

B: Right. That would be maximally efficient, and maybe someday we'll get there.

News Items

Microbes on Mars (4:02)

• Microbes Might Be Key to a Mars Mission 

S: Well, this actually segues nicely to our first news item, Jay, which is about how people are going to be able to live on Mars.

J: So this suitcase idea is very similar to what it's like when we want to send people to the moon or to Mars. They need to have the exact right stuff to do what they need to do, and not a stitch more. You know, they don't want to overpack because it costs millions of dollars to send the weight into space, and they don't want to underpack because underpacking could mean death. And Mars is going to be the hardest thing that humans have ever done. It's going to probably be the hardest packing job that any human has ever done in the history of mankind without exaggeration.

E: But question about that, Jay.

J: Yeah, Mars is a planet, Evan. Yes, you're correct.

E: Oh, gosh, thank you. I thought it was a Greek god.

J: What do you got?

S: Roman.

E: Won't they be shipping supplies ahead of time to Mars and kind of stocking the stores?

J: Yeah, but that's still part of the trip. Like, whether they're going to send some drop-offs early on before people get there and afterwards, hopefully we're going to continue to resupply them, but they still have to have – whenever boots hit Mars, it has to have the stuff that they're going to need. And that's the question. What do they need? And how are they going to survive?

E: What do you take on the actual ship with you, right? What's in your overhead compartment?

J: It's not just the ship, though. It's all the ships. It could be, like, maybe they send 10 ships ahead of time. We still have to come up with the list of what they need, and we have to minimize what we send and maximize usability and function, right? So we have talked before about these future missions. We talked about going to the moon and they can make fuel out of the regolith and get water and oxygen out of the moon's regolith. We just need a furnace and lots of equipment that's going to allow them to extract those things. But the elements are there. It's just us to be able to figure out how to pull it out of the regolith. And there's a huge cost savings and there's a lot of safety involved with that, right? Instead of bringing a full gas can with you, you bring an empty gas can with you and you fill it up at the moon and use it for the return flight. It saves a ton of money. It's just a great idea all around no matter how you look at it. Making stuff on the site of where you're sending people to is the best way to do it. Some scientists right now are investigating this idea of using microbes to help with the needs of specific raw materials. And my God, I love this. I think this is such a cool idea. They would have to only use non-pathogenic microbes, right? Why? They want to bring microbes with you that can get people sick or a freaky thing happens and they pick up some weird microbe or something happens on Mars with other bacteria, whatever. They want to pick microorganisms that are safe to use, that aren't going to transmit illnesses as best as we can. And scientists already know that microbes can transform one material into another, right? We absolutely know this. We play with this all the time and we create microbes to do specific things all the time. And as an example, there's a yeast called Yarrowia lipolytica, Yarrowia lipolytica, and it can create fatty acids from the food it eats, right? Fatty acids are useful. Scientists speculated that if they could use human waste as its food source, it could solve two problems at once just because human waste is a huge problem on anything outside of the earth. Disposal of waste and the creation of raw materials are the two things that these scientists are trying to solve. And it's easy to see that they're two very huge and important things that need to be dealt with. So human waste typically makes up, what, over half of all waste created on space missions. That's a lot. And I'm not just talking about urine and feces. We're talking about carbon dioxide, exhaled moisture, dead skin cells and hair, food waste. It's just this list of what it costs to be a human on a spaceship.

C: Gross. We've talked about it before, but we hear that the ISS is like dank when you first walk in.

E: Oh, yeah. All the particles from people all over the place there.

J: They can't just be spraying bleach around there. They have to be very careful. So the scientists, they're experimenting now with modifying the genes of the yeast to allow it to make these fatty acids and they can do it. So another strain of yeast, they edited that yeast and they were able to make it make polyesters, which is cool as hell. This could lead to making a host of different kinds of plastics for different applications. So different kinds of plastic. Imagine if they have the raw material. You can say, hey, we need a really hard, light, but yet strong plastic. Great. Okay. Now we need a flexible plastic. Great. We have different bacteria that can create these different types of plastic and then you put it into a 3D printer. This is me oversimplifying it because there's a lot of stuff that would have to go on here to do this. But still, they are creating these different bacteria that are doing these different things and I think that's amazing. As an example, they're using cyanobacteria that can feed off of the carbon dioxide that's in Mars's atmosphere and this could create sugars that would feed other microbes. That bacteria eats CO2 and spits out sugars. Great. That's cool. So I'm seeing that we're in the early, early stages of this, but they have the end goal of being able to take human waste, human byproduct, and use that as a fuel source, which is brilliant. And if they can pull this off and start creating bacteria that can pump out different important things, like maybe one bacteria will actually pump out oxygen and another one, different chemicals that could be used for different things. But right now, I don't want to even say five to 10 years. There was no guesstimate or anything about how long it would take to ramp these things up. It's one thing to get a Petri dish to do something. It's another thing to make a machine that has these microbes in it that's predictably going to make a certain amount at a certain quality. That's very, very complicated and there's a lot of science that has to be discovered to do it. But I'm fascinated by this early the scientific research that's going into some of these solutions.

S: Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is that there's going to be this self-contained ecosystem in our biodome.

B: Habitat.

S: Yeah. The habitats on Mars. We have to think about where everything is coming and going and we have to recycle everything. We exhale everything that comes out of our body, basically, right? Because there is no biosphere. There's no cycle for any of these things. We'll be creating our own. We have to think about it all the way through.

J: You know, that's why the movie The Martian was so spot-on clever and that character did some really interesting and legit things that people would we could use that as an idea of like, yeah, let's use bacteria. He needed his poop to be able to grow potatoes or everybody's poop to grow potatoes. Can you say poop on the show?

S: Yeah. You can say poop. If nothing else, Mars is a great thought experiment, you know?

J: Yep.

S: And hopefully at some point it will turn into a real experiment.

B: But after the moon experiment, please.

S: Yes.

E: Yes. I agree.

Memory Works Backwards (11:03)

• Our Memories Work Backwards 

S: All right, guys. Let's talk about memory.

E: What? All right.

S: We talk about memory a lot on the show and I've been following a lot of-

B: I don't remember.

S: Yeah, I have been following a lot of the research. And so there's been a study. This is quick. This adds one more piece to this evolving puzzle that we're putting together. But it fits well with our bottom line lesson about how memory is constructive. So the researchers were looking at visual memory. A lot of this kind of like how the brain processes information kind of research does involve vision because it's kind of an easy model in the brain to follow and to model. This is the question. When you remember something, right? Like if I show you a picture and then an hour from now I tell you, think of that picture that I showed you an hour ago. What process does your brain go through? What's the first thing that happens and then how does it bring up that memory? How does it construct it? And the big question is when you recall something, does it follow the same pattern as when you perceived it in the first place?

J: I know the answer.

S: Or does it follow a different pattern?

J: It follows the exact reverse pattern.

S: It follows the opposite pattern, that's right. So a lot of the mainstream media is reporting that says that our memories work backwards. But actually it's more complicated than that as you might imagine. So let's get back to vision. When you perceive something, right? You're looking at a giraffe, let's say. First you have the raw image in your retina. That goes through the midbrain, these subcortical structures for vision, which we're already a lot of basic processing is happening. But that's just like very basic details of the image processing. And it gets to your cortex is when things happen like it's sharpening up contrast and lines and color and accounting for shadows and things like that. But then it has to go to the next level, which is the association cortex, where it turns the pattern that it's perceiving into a thing, right? Into—

E: A noun.

S: Yeah. That's not just a shape and colors. It's a giraffe, right? It makes a fit to something in your memory that it knows what it is.

C: Something computer vision's pretty bad at doing.

S: Well, humans are so far still better at this kind of visual pattern recognition.

E: But we're optimized for it. Yeah.

S: And then beyond that, then it goes to the rest of the cortex. If your brain thinks it's acting with agency, it connects to your emotional centers and basically connects to how do I feel about that thing? And if it doesn't act with agency, then we think of it as an object, right? And it connects to our memories for what is that object? Do I need it? Is it food? Is it something valuable, right? For the emotional stuff, it's like, is this somebody I love? Is it something threatening? Is it something I need to run away from or whatever? So in a way, the visual perception starts with the details and then evolves to the higher order meaning or theme. Although that's an oversimplification because we also know that the higher level visual areas communicate back down to the primary visual cortex. So once that raw image is resolved into a giraffe, the higher part of your brain in terms of the visual association cortex identifies it as a giraffe. It then communicates back down to the primary cortex and says, make that look more like a giraffe. And also, it influences assumptions about how big something is, for example. When your brain's like, oh, that's a giraffe, well, now you know roughly how big giraffes are. So then that affects its assumptions about how far away it is, right? It's not two inches tall, or how big tall are giraffes, 20 feet, 15 feet?

E: Or 100 feet tall.

C: They reach the trees.

B: But Steve, that's a critical point there.

S: Absolutely.

B: That's critical. Because you know how big roughly a giraffe is. But if you see something undefined, unidentified, and you don't know innately how big it is, you could imagine it's a lot closer or a lot farther away depending on what size you just happen to pick.

S: So the perception, getting from seeing the raw image into your memory is actually a two-way constructive street. It's a two-way street, and it's a constructive process. And you're communicating both up and down, right? Not just up. And it's massively affecting how you construct this image. And we talked about a recent news item where they showed that your memory of what you're seeing actually influences how you construct that image more than what you're seeing in a way. So once you know what giraffes look like, and so your brain says, OK, that's a giraffe I'm constructing. Out of what I'm seeing, I'm going to construct a giraffe. OK. And that's especially with ambiguous images. When you have an ambiguous image, and this was the specific study that was done, what you think it is influences your construction more than the actual details that you're seeing. OK. So now they're saying, all right, forget about perception. Let's just talk about you recalling something you've previously seen. What process does that go through? And so, as Jay already alluded to, it works the opposite way of raw perception in that it starts with the big higher-order theme and then backfills the details. Now the media was presenting this as surprising and the opposite of what researchers thought. And my reaction was, that's exactly what I would have thought is happening. And that's totally consistent with a whole bunch of other research, right? Because we know that thematic memory is actually, or what's called semantic memory, is dominant in a lot of ways in that the detailed memory actually serves the thematic memory, right? So we know we saw a giraffe. So our brain just fills in the giraffe details to make it all make sense, regardless of what we actually saw. So that, as you say, Bob, that has huge impacts skeptically because, OK, it works fine when you're looking at a giraffe because giraffes are giraffes, right? And maybe you might miss some details because your brain's filling in generic giraffe details to the big picture that that was a giraffe. That's why we talked about this with birding. And once you learn about a lot of specific birds, your brain fills in the details you know. And there are times, like when you're in that process of learning how to resolve like hundreds of birds, where before you go, yeah, there were little brown birds and there were this big blue bird. You know what I mean? Like you were conflating a lot of birds into a few generic types. Your brain didn't fill in the details. But then when you know those details, then your brain fills them in. And then you actually see different details because so seeing is not believing so much as believing is seeing. What you know influences. And so this is perfectly consistent with that. But it also means that when you see what you think is a flying saucer and then you remember what you saw, your brain remembers I saw a flying saucer and then fills in the details to match the theme. It doesn't remember the details really.

E: Yeah, and in the case of flying saucers you think flying saucer, what's the first? The first thing that comes to my mind is Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Time. That's, and I fill my brain with that information sort of first and work from there.

S: Whatever your bias is. If you think it's, if you think forbidden planet or whatever, whatever your image of a flying saucer is. Or if you think you saw Bigfoot, right? Your memory literally morphs to the details of Bigfoot because you're remembering Bigfoot and then just backfilling the details.

B: Right. So if the real image, if the raw image that you originally saw had a tail, that tail would probably disappear as you recalled it and put the filter of Bigfoot over it.

E: Wait, let me write this down. Bigfoot has a tail.

S: So that's why when people say, I know what I saw, there's probably no more naive statement that you could possibly make.

E: No, I think I saw it with my own eyes.

B: That's a good one too.

J: I remember dad used to talk to us about the Lady of Fatima and keep in mind my dad was born in 1930 and he really wanted to believe, it was comforting for him. And he would talk about the people, there was like thousands of people there and they saw her. They saw her. You know, that meant so much to him. When we see something, even as a skeptic, when I see something that I know I'm not, that something weird could be going on, it's a powerful visceral thing when your brain tells you, you just saw something. It's hard to question that. It's very difficult to question. I question audio all the time, visual not anywhere near as much.

S: All right. Let's move on.

Elephants Without Tusks (20:45)

• African elephants are evolving to not grow tusks because of poachers 

S: Evan, why are elephants losing their tusks?

E: This was originally reported back in November, courtesy of National Geographic, but the news is, it's hitting the news cycles again this week and I don't know why, but it's everywhere now. And they're talking about elephants without tusks. So these elephants with a rare tuskless genetic trait, turns out, had a better chance of surviving Mozambique's long civil war. About a third of surviving elephants' daughters have no tusks, which is fascinating, which is way above what was just the average a generation prior, two to 4%. Now we're talking, we're in the 30th percentile now. Researchers at the University of Kent are working on understanding the genetics of elephants born without tusks, along with the consequences of the trait. So during the Mozambican war, civil war, I should say, nearly 90% of the elephants in the Gorongosa National Park were slaughtered as part of an ivory trade that helped finance the weapons used in the conflict. You know, it's horribly, horribly sad, this story, on so many levels. Hunting gave elephants that didn't grow tusks a biological advantage, which sort of makes sense. The figure is that, yeah, a third of younger females, the generation that was born after the war had ended in 1992, never developed tusks. So way, way beyond what the prior generations. According to elephant behavior expert Joyce Poole, that several decades ago there were roughly 4,000 of these elephants living in that park, but those numbers dwindled to less than 1,000 following the civil war. And their new but so far unpublished research that she's compiled indicates that of the 200 known adult females, 51% of them that survived the war, these are animals that are 25 years or older, they are tuskless. And 32% of the female elephants born since were also tuskless. This trend is not limited to Mozambique either, not just necessarily out of war, but just poaching in general. Other countries with a history of substantial ivory poaching are seeing these shifts as well. For example, South Africa, 98% of the 174 females in Addo Elephant National Park were reportedly tuskless in the early 2000s.

S: Yeah, that's interesting.

E: The ivory trade is rife with pseudoscience and things we talk about regularly on the show. They are said by some to have restorative powers and healing powers. And even though China was kind of late to the game, they only imposed a ban on ivory in 2017, but it's still one of the countries where it is most sought after. And they pay more for ivory than they do for gold in some cases. They grind it up, they ingest it, and they tout it as being a cure for numerous diseases.

C: Yeah, I mean, we're even seeing like with rhino horn, for example, preemptive cutting off of their horns, unfortunately.

E: In order to spare them.

C: Just to spare the animal, yeah.

E: So they can survive.

C: Which is so sad.

E: I wonder if we'll have hornless rhinos someday. We may see that happening somewhere. So I understand that the reason for this particular case of elephant populations is because the ones who didn't have the tusks obviously were the ones that weren't shot. So they're the survivors of the group. Does this cause a problem, though, long-term, sort of a long-term negative impact in that you now have a smaller selection of genetics among the elephants, less diversity in the population? And does that help speed up extinction of these animals?

C: Well, it just, it depends on previous levels of connectivity. So if you're talking about a group of organisms that disconnected from other, like if it's a subspecies or a group of organisms that for a very long time have had an island effect, then yeah, then you're talking about a subgroup of a subgroup. And it may be too small or too minimal in genetic variance. But is that really secondary to this effect, this hunting effect, or is it secondary to the fact that there's been so much habitat loss that these organisms are stuck in with a small range and aren't interbreeding? I mean, that's the really sad thing when we look at biodiversity in general. It's across the board during the Anthropocene, human-caused. Like the lack, or I should say that the decimation of biodiversity across the globe is because of shit we did, whether it's habitat loss or hunting or whatever.

E: We are squeezing out the living space of these animals and so many of them.

S: But I don't think that just a shift in gene frequencies to favoring no tusks necessarily means of a decrease in genetic diversity, Evan, to answer that question. Because this was already in the population. That's interesting is we think we still are sort of biased by the old creationist notion of kinds. Like we think of this is what an elephant looks like. But we really have to think about species with all of their diversity. And again, my birding experience was really useful for this because I would see weird birds and be like, what the hell is that? That doesn't look like the picture in the book. And then I'll find out, oh, 3% look this way. You know what I mean? So there's exceptions to everything. There's so much diversity within species. And this is exactly why, because you have this new selective pressure and there already was these 3% of the elephants without tusks ready to adapt to this new pressure.

C: But the question is, if it really was 3%, it's a massive reduction in gene flow.

E: That was my thought.

C: But it might not be 3%. It might be 20%. And if that's the case, then it wouldn't really. But yeah, if only. And it's simply because we're talking about within two generations all of the tusked elephants being wiped out. Or within three generations. That's the problem. It doesn't have enough time to rebound.

E: In our lifetime, this is all happening. It's crazy.

C: It's quick. And if it's really a small percentage of the organisms that are already critically endangered, then it does really reduce genetic variance. But if it's actually a larger percentage that was going to be born tuskless anyway, it might not affect that genetic variance at all. I think that we would. But do we even know those numbers?

E: Well, there's several studies going on, various universities and teams of researchers looking into that and other questions. So I think in the coming years, we're going to have a lot more information about that.

C: Gosh, if we can keep them alive, that's the important thing, right?

E: I hope so.

C: Yeah.

E: I hope so. I hope there's enough will to do so.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: Yep.

Dunning Kruger and GMO Opposition (27:33)

• Dunning Kruger and GMO Opposition 

S: Cara.

C: Yes.

S: So there's an interesting study that came out recently about why people are opposed to GMOs. I don't know how far, how deeply you delved into the controversy over this, but we'll get to that. But why don't you tell us just basically what it found first?

C: Yeah. So Steve actually recommended this article to me. And I love how when you say recently, it was legit published yesterday as of this recording.

E: It was so yesterday.

C: I know. So yesterday. So this was published in Nature, Human Behavior, title is Extreme Opponents of Genetically Modified Foods Know the Least but Think They Know the Most. Even just that title reminds you guys of anything that we talk about a lot on the show.

E: Let's see.

C: Knowing the least but thinking you know the most.

E: Dunning-Kruger.

C: Dunning-Kruger. So Steve wrote a blog post just today on Dunning-Kruger and this GMO opposition. The main takeaways of this are that multiple studies were done within the same study. Pretty big population or sorry, pretty big sample size, 500 people were asked about GM foods basically. And they were asked a bunch of questions. And in those questions, they were able to come up with three ways to sort of label these people. They were able to figure out the people's objective knowledge about both science in general and their objective knowledge about genetics in general. And this is based on like a classic survey. I think that was published by somebody, the National Academies or something or the NIH, asking basic things like what is a building blocker of the nucleus of the cell or the genetic stuff like do animals and plants have DNA and just getting basic knowledge about that. But they also were like, okay, we're going to compare that to how opposed they are to genetically modified food. And historically, we've known for a long time that when it comes to science communication and our approaches to science communication, we've always wanted to believe that it's just a knowledge gap. The more we teach people, the more they're going to have objective views of these things and agree with the scientists and not have biases and not be subject to pseudoscientific propaganda. And the more often we dig deep into this, the more we learn, yeah, it's not a knowledge deficit problem solely. So then these researchers were like, okay, well they compared objective knowledge to how extremely opposed people were to GM foods. And they found that, yeah kind of the less people know, the more they might be opposed, but it's not a really strong, there's some significant differences there, but I'm not seeing like a really super, super strong trend. What I really want to know is what about how much people think they know versus how opposed they are? Because that's a different question, right? How much do you know is very different from how much do you think you know? And that's where Dunning-Kruger really comes in. So what they decided to do is look at how much people think they know and compare that to the extremity of their opposition. And they measured that in different quartiles or whatever. They noticed that people who think they know a whole lot, but actually know very little, tend to be extremely opposed to GM. Or maybe you can say it the other way around. People that tend to be extremely opposed to GM technology, especially when it comes to food. They did find that this relationship was stronger for food than it was for like medical genetic manipulation. They found that people who tend to be extremely opposed to it tend to know little, but think they know an awful lot. The difference here is that it was actually greater effect than we usually see with Dunning-Kruger. So a little quick primer, as you guys might say, I've always said primer. Actually, Steve, I think you say primer too, right? Or maybe I'm wrong. Anyway.

S: I say both.

C: You say both. Yeah. So about Dunning-Kruger. Thank you, Bob. In case if you guys don't remember, and the only reason this is really fresh in my mind is because I wrote a paper about it recently for school, which means I read 15 articles authored by David Dunning and probably 15 other replication articles. Dunning, who is a social psychologist, Kruger, Justin Kruger, who was his graduate student at the time, they published a landmark paper in 1990, one of the highest cited social psychology papers of all time, where they showed this effect that can be replicated across fields. It's been replicated so many times at this point, that people who do poorly on tests of whether it be knowledge or skill or insight or whatever the case may be, but who think that they do, will often think that they do significantly better than they actually did. And what they think is the mechanism behind that, and this has been argued, there's been a lot of controversy around it, but I think the consensus right now in the social psychology literature is that the mechanism that explains why people do poorly, the people that do poorly, like let's say the, I think in the article, it was like the people who scored within the 15th percentile tend to think they're scoring within like the 65th percentile, is because they're lacking the metacognitive abilities to be able to do an appropriate self-assessment. If they're lacking in knowledge or they're lacking in insight, they're also lacking in the knowledge or insight to be able to reflect on how well they know things or how well they do things. And so this is what they think is the fundamental mechanism behind that. But there have been alternative hypotheses that have been proposed. So these researchers kind of say something similar as they're closing up their article. And I did find one thing that I want to quote before, Steve, we get into some of the things that you noted. Our findings highlight a difficulty that's not generally appreciated. Those with the strongest anti-consensus views are the most in need of education, but also the least likely to be receptive to learning. Over-confidence about one's knowledge is associated with decreased openness to new information. This suggests that a prerequisite to changing people's views through education may be getting them to first appreciate the gaps in their knowledge, which is a very, very tall order. So that's the really consensus in the paper or the takeaway in the paper about the genetically modified foods, which was actually the headline of the paper. They secondarily looked at climate change and found a very different outcome. They did find a significant...

S: Well, it was the same pattern, but it wasn't statistically significant.

C: Yeah. It wasn't statistically... And it wasn't by any stretch as great. You know, the effect size wasn't as great. And they argue that this is perhaps because the knowledge has become partisanly entrenched at that point. It's very different than something like climate change, which is really... I'm sorry, than something like GMOs, which is cool. They have a scale in their study, built into their study, where they looked at partisanship and they found that this held for people who were conservative, liberal, or moderate, the GM thing. This is not a partisan issue. Which other studies have shown that as well. Not a partisan issue, which I think is... Yeah. Bust some myths, because most people think this is like only a hippie, granola, lefty thing.

S: No, it's not true. So what's interesting about the political thing is... So the question is, is there really a difference between GMOs and global warming? Because the trends were the same, you know what I mean? Just the magnitude was different. Or is it an artifact of this study, or they just didn't have enough data? Or is there really a difference? And the authors are arguing that it could be really a difference, because it could all come down to, is the belief ideological or not? And they cited other research which showed that whether or not a belief is ideological actually does have a huge effect on whether or not it predicts lack of factual knowledge about that topic.

C: Yeah.

S: Right? So the idea is that people come to their global warming denial because of their politics, whereas people come to their anti-GMO views because they are being misinformed. They're not starting with an ideology or a tribe. They are being misinformed, and therefore that would reflect greater in their lack of knowledge about the topic.

C: And also, didn't they say that they tended to... Correct me if I'm wrong, that people with the anti-climate change view, the kind of denialist view, still tended to rate relatively high on objective knowledge about science. Or the people who rated high versus the people who rated low had the same kind of entrenched oppositional views. And so that was a little bit different than what they saw with the GMO stuff.

S: Right. Opposition, ideological opposition didn't necessarily predict scientific knowledge or self-assessment, but non-ideological opposition does. So I think at the very least, what this is suggesting is that these are different phenomena. Right? These are not the same thing, an ideological belief versus something that's not political or partisan like GM foods.

C: Yeah. And they said that previous vaccine denialism research was more like the GM foods than like the climate change research.

S: Right. Which fits because that's also not partisan, strictly partisan. So the other controversy, this is actually playing out in real time in my comments. I actually have a-

C: Oh, gosh. I didn't look at the comment.

S: It's a long comment I have to respond to now. So this guy, Brian Lovett, and again, this is happening in real time, so it's maybe not fair to talk about it too much. But he wrote a series of tweets criticizing the study. And I do think that some of his criticisms are fair. And I had the same thoughts when I was reading it. Ten questions isn't an awful lot of science questions. And also, I was interested in how they were scoring it. So I think that I would love to see follow-up research with much more robust assessment of scientific literacy, of different subtypes of scientific literacy. But his point is that he disagrees with the authors who are saying that this evidence supports the knowledge deficit model, right? That belief in pseudoscience occurs because people have a knowledge deficit. He thinks it's because of active misinformation, which is what I was saying in my discussion of the article.

C: But I feel like they made a more nuanced presentation.

S: I agree.

C: They weren't saying it's one or the other.

S: I agree.

C: They were saying it's both.

S: I agree. This is where I'm about to write a response where I say I disagree with you. And also, it's a total false dichotomy because misinformation leads to a measured lack of knowledge, right? Because if I give you a wrong scientific fact, you will then test wrong about your knowledge on that fact. And it's not just due to ignorance. It's due to misinformation. So they're part of the same thing in a way. But the difference is one gives you more of an illusion of knowledge. Misinformation gives you more of an illusion of knowledge than just straight-up ignorance.

C: Yeah. So ignorance is different than being willfully – or not even willfully, than being misinformed. You're right. Because then you feel like you know something.

S: Yes.

C: And you might feel very strongly like you know something, especially if the propaganda machine is very detailed and you've studied it a lot.

S: I also – I refer to this as a super DK, super Dunning-Kruger, which is – I just made up that term on the fly when I was writing my blog.

C: Because it's more severe than the standard gap.

S: It's not just more severe. It's a reversal. So for Dunning-Kruger, the lower your performance, the lower your test score, the lower your self-assessment. But the gap between your self-assessment and your test score increased as you got lower, below 70th percentile. Does that make sense? So somebody who scored –

C: They did two studies in Dunning-Kruger. They compared self-assessment as an absolute score and they also compared self-assessment as you are compared to other people. They actually found that, yes, if you scored lower, you tended to think you scored lower objectively, but if you scored lower, you tended to think that you scored higher than most people.

S: No, no, no. That's exactly what I'm saying.

C: Oh, OK. Cool.

S: So if you look at it, whether absolute score or percentile, either way. So let's say you scored in the 70th percentile. You pretty much thought you were about the 70th percentile.

C: Except for the highest percentile.

S: Above that you underestimated your performance a little bit. But if you scored 40, I'm just giving you sort of representative numbers, then you thought you did 60. But if you did 20, you thought you did 50. So the gap increases. But everyone thought they did above average. Even when you were in the 10th percentile, everyone thought they did above average. And just that gap increased, but both of the lines were still going down. But in this study, for the extremes – again, this is the other thing. It's just for the extremes. The line actually reverses and goes up. Their assessment of how they did was actually higher than people who performed better on the test. Does that make sense? So it didn't – not only did the gap increase, the actual direction of the line went up. So people with lower scores actually had higher – so that's different than DK. That's different than Dunning-Kruger. That's why I call it the super. I think that reflects misinformation. That's the result of propaganda. That's not just –

C: Yeah. It's like fundamentalism, right? The more that you are really emotionally invested in a certain type of answer or a certain type of viewpoint, the more entrenched that view becomes, the more severe it is as well. The more you stick to it, the less waffly you are about it.

S: Yeah. But I think it's also – it's suggesting strongly that there's another phenomenon. It's like Dunning-Kruger is mainly about metacognitive failure. Although you can't – even Dunning says it's also about this illusion of knowledge that people fill in the gaps. They fill in their real gaps of knowledge with this illusory knowledge. But I think what we're seeing here is active misinformation like the anti-vaccine movement and the anti-GMO movement are actively misinforming people and that gives you this reversal of the trend where they actually think they know more when they know less.

C: But not because they have a lack of knowledge, because that place where the knowledge should be is filled in with wrong knowledge. That's an important point.

S: Yes. And they're not passively filling it in with confirmation bias for example. It's being actively filled in by a propaganda campaign. So yeah, anyway, this is complicated. It's hard to disentangle all of this. I agree it's not a simple knowledge deficit. I think that the guy who's criticizing it on my blog is being too simple I think and too –

C: Even the authors agree it's not a simple knowledge deficit. Something that kind of stuck out to me, and again, this might be more nuanced so it might not be that relevant, but it was interesting that they had to, in order to do all their statistical analyses, they had to box the responses into quartiles or however they did it, percentiles, and they looked at the level of opposition and they looked at the level of concern and they built out a measure of how opposed people are to GM technology. And the interesting thing is that most people that they interviewed are opposed to GM technology. It's just how opposed they were that showed the differentiation along that kind of scale. So I wonder too if the same – I don't know. I don't want to say it's a critique of the methodology because it just shook out that way. Most people, maybe American citizens, are not knowledgeable about it and most people – you mentioned in your blog post, it's got the biggest gap between lay knowledge and scientific approval of everything else that was asked about in that Pew survey.

S: Right. And listen to this. This is a statistic that blows me away. In a previous survey, 50 percent of people think that GMO tomatoes have genes and regular tomatoes don't have genes.

B: What?

E: Wow.

S: 50 percent, half.

C: And that right there is straight up knowledge gap.

S: That's knowledge gap. That's an absolutely knowledge deficit.

C: That's not understanding what a gene is. That has so much less to do with propaganda and so much more to do with not having a basic fundamental biology.

E: Basic science.

C: But yeah, overall, 90 percent of people were opposed. It was just how opposed were they. That's pretty striking. Yeah. Anyway.

S: That's higher than previous surveys that were headed around 81 or something percent.

E: Oh my gosh.

S: But very high.

E: Are we losing this war?

S: I don't know.

E: Geez.

S: I don't know.

Room Temperature Superconductivity (44:05)

• Researchers discover new evidence of superconductivity at near room temperature 

S: All right, Bob, you're going to talk about, and why do I feel like we've talked about this many times before, room temperature superconductivity. Is this finally a thing or what?

B: We have. Yeah, we've talked about superconductivity a lot, but we've talked about lots of topics a lot. But there's nice little updates and tweaks, and this one is, I think it's worth another chat.

S: All right. Hit me.

B: All right. So an interesting milestone for superconductivity is in the news. Two independent experiments show superconductivity with a high-pressure metallic hydrogen-rich compound at 255 Kelvin. So that's minus one Fahrenheit or minus 18 Celsius. That's big. All right. So you probably noticed-

C: That ain't no room temperature, though.

B: Oh, come on. What, like one degree Fahrenheit? Oh my God. If you work outside this winter, it's room temperature. So you probably noticed the words... I said high-pressure.

C: Misunderstanding what room temperature refers to.

B: I said high-pressure.

E: What about the 72 degrees?

B: So what do I mean by high-pressure? We're talking 177 GPA, otherwise known as gigapascals. So yeah, 177 billion pascals. So a pascal is a unit of pressure defined as one Newton per square meter. So imagine a cubic meter, you put a fig Newton on it, you get the idea.

E: Wait a minute. You're confusing me.

B: All right. So what we're really talking about here is about two million atmospheres worth of pressure. So yeah.

C: Ooh, yeah. That's a lot.

B: This is incredible pressure. And yeah, it's insane. But basically, it really is, for all intents and purposes, room-temperature superconductivity. And it's amazing. Amazing because, as we all should know, high-temperature superconductivity, or room temperature, would revolutionize electrical efficiency.

C: Yeah.

B: The impact is incalculable. Power grids, high-speed data transfer, electrical motors, et cetera, et cetera, and 10 more et ceteras. A literal game-changer. I'll throw out a quote here. Madarisomaya Zulu, love the last name, is an associate research professor at the George Washington School of Engineering and Applied Science, said, room-temperature superconductivity has been the proverbial holy grail, waiting to be found. And achieving it, albeit at 2 million atmospheres, is a paradigm-changing moment in the history of science. So to put that into context, I'll describe what I will refer to as the three ages of superconductivity. So in the first age, we had the first observation of superconductivity, 1911, a huge, huge event. Amazing observation. I imagine the first person, like, whoa, no electrical resistance? What the hell? This was in solid mercury, below the critical temperature of 4.2 Kelvin. Real quick, Kelvin is an absolute thermodynamic temperature scale, 0 K is the lowest possible temperature. You can't get any lower, by definition. And that's minus-

E: No negatives.

B: That's minus 459.67 Fahrenheit, minus 273 Celsius.

C: Where matter stands still?

B: Essentially, for all intents and purposes. You can't get absolute stillness, but it's as still as it's going to get. No real movement, or very, very little. The minimum.

C: Can we just call it refrigerated superconductivity? This is refrigerator temperature. Can we be clear about that? I get that it's not crazy cold, like it's always been in the past, but it still requires like a machine.

B: Right. And also 2 million atmospheres, so yeah, this is a laboratory. We're talking about what's our confidence levels for real room temperature superconductivity in the future. But back in these early days, the progress was really slow. I mean, there was a lot of enthusiasm, but I love this statistic, if you simplistically extrapolate the progress that was made in superconductivity from 1911 to 1970, we would have room temperature superconductivity in the year 2840. Really slow, very little progress. But that leads me into the second age, and I'll call that high temperature superconductivity. Well, lots of people call it that, HTS, high temperature superconductivity. This realm was discovered by IBM researchers in 1986 in ceramic materials. Steve, Jay, I'm not sure about you, Jay, but I remember that. That was huge. I was so excited. This was a huge advance. I mean, it really was, because you're going from what was approximately 4.2 Kelvin to about 133, so 133 is a huge leap. That's a huge leap from 4.2, and things really looked amazing and promising, and I would have thought by 2019 we would have our superconducting wire at Home Depot. All right, enough of that. I'll stop complaining. But that was the second age, and things looked really, really promising. So to follow the previous age's initialism, I'll call this third age, RTS, or room temperature superconductivity, Cara, room temperature.

C: Yeah, thank you.

B: True, true room temperature.

C: Real quick, though, the high temperature, when you said those numbers, you meant positive, not negative, right?

B: 133 Kelvin, or minus 220 Fahrenheit.

C: Minus 220. Okay. So it was warmer, but still very, very cold.

B: Hey, yeah, compared to near absolute zero, 133 K is balmy, it's balmy, baby. So you could argue that we are essentially on the cusp of this third age, room temperature. This is an amazing leap. At the very least, we're seeing very confident hints of what soon may be possible. So let me get into a little bit of the nitty gritty. The researchers used diamond anvils to compress hydrogen and lanthanum, resulting in a new compound, LAH10. It's a lanthanum hydride, basically a lanthanum atom surrounded by 10 hydrogen atoms. It's hydrogen, but it's doped with this one little atom in here. So these anvils compressed it to 170 to 185 gigapascals, and the transition to superconductivity was at 250 to 260 K. Way, that's really high. That's 50 degrees. That's a 50 degree leap from the previous high temperature using this methodology. This wasn't just a serendipitous discovery, however, and this is an interesting angle to this whole thing. This was specifically predicted. That's because they're using, a lot of this is computation-based, a lot of quantum mechanics-based computations are being used to determine which compounds are most promising. So this lanthanum hydride was predicted. Other predictions say that compounds may be discovered that could reach 290 degrees K, and that's 62 degrees Fahrenheit, 17 Celsius. How's that, Cara? Is that closer to room temperature for you?

C: Getting there.

B: Yeah, getting there. Yeah, I forget you're on the West Coast. All right, so the final question here is, yeah, Bob, this is all cool, but all right, it's going to be... But what about these stupid pressures? I mean, that's ridiculous. These high gigapascal pressures, how impractical can you possibly be? I agree, but we're still in a lab at this point, and my point is that using these computational advances, we may be able to predict other configurations beyond these binary hydrides that I've been talking about to superconduct at room temperature that are also stable when decompressed. So that's the ultimate goal right here. We want something that you don't need, these gigapascal pressures, but something that is stable at sea level. Wouldn't that be nice? So perhaps a reasonable goal would be that the only compression that would be required would not be two million atmospheres, but something more akin to the pressure you would generate when you swing a hammer, say, or when they turn dust into pills when they're making medicines that go to the pharmacy. I mean, minute pressure, something that... Just a quick pressure that would create the final structure that's stable at not only room temperature, but also at sea level. So that's the goal, obviously. That's what we're going towards, and this is the best hint that I've come across that we may really be seeing something like that within a generation or even sooner.

S: So five to 10 years?

B: Who knows? But I think it'll be shorter than the distance between 1986 and 2019, I hope.

C: Hey, Bob, is this the... I remember going to the World Science Fair a few years ago, and there was a guy from some university showing a demo that I thought had to do with superconductivity, where he was using dry ice on like a ring, yeah, with the puck things, and they were sort of levitating.

B: Yeah.

C: Okay. Cool.

B: Yeah, that's the Meissner effect, showing the effect of superconductivity on magnetic fields. Yeah, and that actually applies to the story I just told. So look it up. Google it online and find out how the Meissner principle applies to that.

C: It's really cool. Maybe we should do a demo of that sometime at like a live show.

B: I'd love it.

C: Wouldn't that be fun?

J: Sure.

'B: Yeah. Meissner, it's a Meissner effect.

Who's That Noisy? (53:32)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Hummingbird

S: All right, Jay. Who's that noisy?

J: Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] What is that?

C: Is it a sad robot?

E: Sounds like a dog whistle almost.

J: Some people guess that, Evan. That's not I don't think it's a bad guess.

S: Jay, is it a critter? An animacule?

J: It is a critter.

E: Is it a giraffe?

C: That's a funny word.

J: So Chris Sanders, you guys are really drawing a blank here. So Chris Sanders said, listeners said-

E: It's a water bear. Yeah, it's a tardigrade.

J: My guess for this week's noisy, that high pitch whistle sound, is the adorable high pitch noise that dogs often make when they yawn or stretch. At this point, I'm going to say that a lot of people guessed this one. So one listener, I just wanted to mention that this one listener, Zan Neuberger, he guessed right, or she, it could be a girl as well, guessed right. I'm not going to say what the answer is yet, but this person said, I'm going to send in an answer for every noisy this year, good, bad, or indifferent. Which I'm psyched about. Good. Do it. That'll be a lot of fun. We'll see. We'll track you, how you do this year. Ryan Boyce said, hi, Jay. Long time. First time and all that. This is exciting for me because this is the first time I've listened to a noisy and actually been able to tell you right off what it is. Ryan, like that I said, this is the most adorable noisy that you'll play.

C: Oh, yeah.

J: Ryan also guessed correctly, but didn't win. But I like the fact that Ryan agreed with me that this was the most adorable. In fact, Ryan did such a good job of explaining what this is. This is not actually a hummingbird snoring. This is a hummingbird probably coming out of torpor.

C: Oh, cool.

J: So, a lot of people guessed hummingbird snoring and the winner for this week was Justice Smith, who did guess that, and that is basically what most people think this video is. I want to give an extra, extra shout out to Ryan because Ryan said the bird is probably coming out of torpor. What's actually happening here is birds really don't snore, but this bird needs to take in a lot of extra oxygen to excite its body into getting out of this deep sleep state that it could have been in.

S: What kind? Is it a ruby-throated hummingbird?

J: Steve, it's an amethyst-throated soonagle. Soonagle.

E: Soonagle.

J: Yeah, it's amethyst-throated, Steve. You know what that means?

S: Yes.

C: Is amethyst purple?

J: Yeah, I think so.

S: Yeah.

J: Purplish. So, really cool. So, the bird could have been under a lot of duress and was scared and made that noise, or it could have been coming out of torpor, but it wasn't snoring. It's not actually a snore. For all of you who wrote that in, that's what the internet is saying, but that's not 100% accurate.

C: Yeah, because it sounds like it's snoring.

J: That gets my vote so far as the most adorable noisy that I have ever played, and many people agree, so therefore I am the president. Thank you. Next noisy.

E: Wow. Okay.

New Noisy (56:37)

J: Here is this week's noisy.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

J: Kind of weird, but there is a deeper story here. I don't want a surface answer. You need to get pretty specific about what's going on here, because everybody, it's pretty obvious we're hearing some type of electronic sounding voice of some kind.

S: It's ET phoning home with a speak and say.

J: There it is. All right. I'll see you next week, guys.If you think you know the answer, if you think that you have a good noisy, and man, guys, I need some noisies, so send them in to WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

S: Thank you, brother.

Questions and E-mails

Republicans and Climate Change (57:24)

S: All right. We've been getting a lot of great emails recently. I don't know if it's just me, just confirmation bias. So we're going to do a couple this week. These have to do with feedback of prior segments. The first one is from a long friend, great friend of the show, Steve Harris. Cara, you made an offhand comment that the Republican Party is kind of alone in the world on denying climate change, right? Remember that a few shows back?

C: Oh, I think I was saying that it's an American conception, no?

S: Yeah. It's an American thing. Yeah, that's true.

C: That it's a much more American thing and that the Republican Party, yes, is the—and we know it is partisan.

S: So his point was saying that it actually isn't uniquely American. There's many people throughout the world who deny climate change. It's not just American. I defended you—actually, I was confusing my defense with what you actually said. I said, yeah, I interpreted that as the Republican Party. We're the only country with a major political party that, as a platform, pretty much denies climate change.

C: Well, and that's what I—I didn't mean it was uniquely American in the sense that individuals around the world don't also think that. I meant it was a uniquely American, like, concerted phenomenon.

S: Yeah, exactly.

C: You know what I mean? Like a group of people who have, like, a lot of power to affect change don't believe in climate change.

S: Yeah, but I wanted to look it up and see, like, what's the reality? That was my impression. And just to see what is true. And what I found was the Republican—the American Republican Party is, in fact, the only climate science-denying party in the world.

E: Wow.

S: So that is—

B: Proud.

S: That is a uniquely American phenomenon of a major political party basically completely deny climate change. And the article was saying they—Republicans come in two flavors, those who did completely dismiss it as a hoax and those who accept the science kind of in a wishy-washy sort of way, but basically say, but there's nothing we could really do about it, right? But the—

C: Yeah, even if they accept that it's human-induced at this point, they're like, it's still not worth it to put all this money in to fuel the—

S: Exactly. But what they're not doing, there really isn't any significant Republican suggestion trying to say, here are some free market solutions to climate change, whatever. They're not making conservative ideas to help deal with it. They're just making excuses why we don't need to deal with it. But having said that, as you say, Kerry, you're right, individually climate denial is pretty rampant. It's also—his point was that even if there isn't a political party that says, we deny climate change, or they maybe say, yeah, yes, we definitely have to do something about this, that doesn't mean that they actually are.

C: That they actually are what?

S: That they're actually doing something—they're actually being proactive about climate change. So China is a great example because China, the Chinese government officials are like, yeah, sure, a Paris accord, wonderful, yeah, we'll do—we're on board with fixing the whole climate change thing. And yet, they just always do what's in their self-interest. They're not really making any sacrifices or commitments to deal with climate change.

C: But I do think they've had major policy changes, but it's also easier in a place like China.

S: Well, it's kind of an illusion, though, because they just revert back to whatever they need to. They'll still burn coal when they need to. Here's the interesting thing. If you look at just public acceptance of climate change, guess which country in the world has the lowest public acceptance? So if you ask the question, climate change is a very serious problem, just the percentage of people who agree with that statement, climate change is a very serious problem, what country has the lowest percentage of people who agree with that statement?

C: Probably America or Russia.

S: Nope, it's China at 18%. It's like way below any other country.

C: Do you think that has to do with ideology or do you think it has to do with literacy?

S: It's hard to say.

C: Because I think China also has a higher rate, a lower literacy rate than we do.

S: But I think it's because they're more uniform. I mean, their cultural identity is a uniformity almost.

C: It is, but there's a massive difference between rural Chinese and metropolitan Chinese ideologies. There's a single party there. Basically, there's a dictatorship.

S: And what the research shows is that even public sort of denial of that climate change is real, and it's serious, that we should do something about it, tracks really well with oil interests. So another low one is the Middle East, it's very low at 38%. And then the United States is at the low end at 45%, where the global median is 54%. The US is at 45%. Latin America is pretty high at 74% acceptance. So that's pretty much the range. Brazil itself is at 86%. That's pretty high. So yeah, so America is below average, but we're not the lowest. And other like major oil producing countries are also that low or lower. So it is interesting there's a lot of climate change denial around the world. It seems to track with conservative parties and with oil interests. Even though the American Republican Party is the only one that explicitly denies climate change, from a practical point of view, a lot of countries are not really giving it the priority that they should be. So you're kind of both right, you know what I mean, is kind of how I look at it. There is something uniquely bad about the US, but it's not an exclusively US phenomenon, certainly.

C: Interesting. Also, I just want to make a correction just in that, because this is what happens with these emails. I feel like the emails are always off the cuff things we say. I just was looking up the Chinese literacy rate, and it's a lot more complicated than it seems. The overall literacy rate is actually really high, according to the Ministry of Education in, or the Ministry's Illiteracy Elimination Office in China.

S: Yeah, we're doing great.

C: They say it's like close to 95%, but in rural areas, especially places with ethnic minorities like Tibet, it can be as high as like nearly 40%. So it's definitely a complicated issue. But overall, actually, Chinese literacy is quite high.

AlphaGo Zero (1:03:29)

S: All right, next email. This has to do with, again, kind of an offhand comment. We were talking about the AlphaGo Zero thing.

B: Another one?

S: It's not about AlphaGo, though. I made an offhand comment about, oh, yeah, this is why, like remember, we were talking about the fact that I'm not that worried about AI taking over the world. And so our friend Charlie from Google Charlie from Google, wrote to us to say, hey, guys, that comment of Steve's sparked this whole conversation on our boards.

E: Oh, boy.

S: And I want to address some of the things that he sent me, because this is, I'm getting the same kind of response that I got from like my comment about Celsius where people are saying, Steve doesn't like the metric system, blah, blah, blah. And it's, so at times, I may make a fairly narrow specific point. And then people like way over interpret it. And I find myself constantly correcting the misperception about what I was saying. I love the metric system. Celsius is fine. It's just not inherently metric. That's my only point. There's no specific reason to use it for environmental temperature. All right, anyway, getting back to AI, the point that I made several times in the show, and I'll make it again, is that my thinking about the dangers of artificial intelligence have evolved over the last few years. And I'm actually less worried than I was for a very specific reason, but also only about a very specific threat from AI. Now, but let's do something. They did harp on the terminology, and yeah, we don't, we don't like explain every nuance of the terminology every time we discuss it. So there's a, Steve was said, said self-aware, but he was clearly talking about general AI or AGI. It's like, yes, that's correct. That's what I was talking about. So AI is artificial intelligence refers to any smart computer program, right? It doesn't have to be, have self-awareness or have general intelligence or whatever. The question is about self-aware, artificially intelligent computers or robots, right? And again, even there, there's more discussion about what does that mean to be self-aware? But generally we're talking about, right Bob, when we bring that up, we're talking about human level intelligence and human level awareness, basically a human being in Silicon. That's basically what we're talking about.

B: That's why AGI is so, is such a good initialism. It's a general problem solver, which takes an amazing, unbelievable amount of wherewithal to make something like that. We are nowhere close to anything like that. We're very good at solving, having these machines solve specific problems, but a general problem solver. So I think we'll get there. And this is what we mean when we talk about often when we just say AI or AGI, that's what we're talking about.

S: Right. Now all, my only point is that the science fiction vision of the robot apocalypse may be less possible than we imagined because I actually, I don't think that we are going to have self-aware AGI robot butlers in every house, right? That's basically my point because to do things like be a butler or drive your car, right? We're not going to have an AGI driving your car. You're going to have a very specific focused AI system drive your car. And I think this embedded AI that we are going to have in society is not going to be AI. It's going to, the AGI or self-aware AI it's not going to be humans in, in silicon driving our cars and being our butlers and doing our banking or whatever. It's going to be specific AI algorithms that maybe they're iterative, they're self-learning or whatever. That's fine. But they're not going to be AGI, right? That's my only point.

B: Yeah. They don't need to be.

S: They don't need to be. And therefore we're just not going to have the robot apocalypse as it has been envisioned in pretty much every single science fiction depiction of the robot apocalypse.

B: Yeah. It'll come some other way.

C: Toaster rises up.

S: Yeah. Right. Exactly.

E: It sprouts legs and starts walking around.

S: Right. Right. Right. So, but they say, this is one comment. This is the point of the comment. My problem with this line of reasoning is that AI doesn't necessarily need to be self-aware in order to be dangerous. It just needs to have control over something dangerous and an optimization function that can be maximized by using that dangerous thing to cause harm.

B: The paperclip problem. Yes.

S: The paperclip problem. Whether or not it becomes self-aware is entirely unrelated to whether or not it is dangerous. Okay. So, I never said that AI in and of itself can never be dangerous or that putting AI that has function that maybe we don't completely understand in charge of our nukes is not inherently dangerous.

C: Yeah.

S: I never said that. I'm just saying we're not going to have robot butlers taking over the world. Right? These are two different things.

C: Yeah. You're basically saying let's not catastrophize. Let's build in all the checks that we need to. Let's regulate. Let's think about the worst possible scenario with the technology that we're, coming up against but that we're developing. But at the same time, let's not not do it because we're so afraid of catastrophic outcomes.

S: Yeah. But it's also – actually, I'm supporting their position. Again, I think these are people who are very concerned about the potential dangers of AI. I'm supporting it in a way that I'm saying it's not going to be the science fiction version. If anything, it's going to be something more insidious. You know, it's going to just be – Bob, you threw out the paperclip problem. Why don't you explain to people what that is?

C: Yeah. I don't know what that is.

B: So the idea is that you have this system that is designed to be like – to optimize the creation of paperclips. So it's very, very efficient, amazingly efficient at creating these paperclips. But somebody wrote the algorithm a little sloppily and it just creates the entire – it turns the biosphere into paperclips. It basically turns the surface of the earth to paperclips. And sure, yeah, you can have this runaway process that does something like that. And yeah, you got to kind of think about that stuff when you have this type of mechanism that is going to continually create this product. Yeah, you got to think of what can go wrong when it's doing that. So sure, that's one of the classic issues that come up.

S: Interestingly, my point is actually that focused AI is more powerful than we thought it was and with power comes great responsibility, right? So obviously there's the potential for bad things to happen is also increased with power. And of course we have to be careful. I never said anything that could be construed as, oh, we don't longer have to be careful about AI.

E: No, you've never said that. You've never said that.

S: OK. Here's another comment. I've heard him make that argument several times and I can't help but find it silly. I never made the argument. Building an AGI would – so now they're referring to, well, we wouldn't do it because we don't have to. Again, I never said that. In fact, I said the opposite when we talked about this, Bob, if you remember. Building an AGI would win you international acclaim and recognition. You definitely get a Turing Award out of it. Not to mention just how interesting figuring out how to do it would be. I completely agree. I said when Bob brought that up, I said, Bob, I agree with you. We will do it. We will do it for research. We will do it for neuroscience. We will do it just to do it. We're just not going to make an army of butlers who have it, right? Well, just be careful. It will be air-gapped in a lab somewhere where it should be.

B: They're still going to run the problem but yeah, that's where we're at.

S: Yeah, whatever. It's not going to be controlling our nuclear arsenal like in the Colossus. Remember the movie with the Colossus, right? They build an AI. Think about this. This is like a 1950s movie. They build an AI and they immediately put it in charge of the entire nuclear arsenal.

E: That was brilliant.

S: And then it takes over the world. It blows up New York and Moscow and says, all right, now I have control of the world. All right. So yeah.

B: Yeah. I agree. I agree with pretty much everything you've said. And yeah, I think that we are – we will still march towards an AGI somebody. The allure I think is just too great.

S: Yeah, of course. We're going to do it.

B: Hopefully. We won't need to necessarily put it in charge of things that could wipe us all out. So yeah. I sure want to see it. I hope we see it soon.

S: It won't be like Johnny Cab where there's a robot driving your car. It's not going to be that way, right? All right. One more.

Self-Awareness (1:11:54)

S: If self-awareness is a spectrum rather than a binary characteristic, the entire notion of building a self-aware machine is as poorly defined as building a tall structure. So what they're saying is that self-awareness is a continuum, not a binary property. Sure. And we've talked about that on the show before. However, it's actually only partly correct. It's a false dichotomy about a false dichotomy. How do you like that?

B: Whoa. Nice.

S: Because self-awareness is a dichotomy and it's not a dichotomy, because –

B: A critical mass. You need to – right? It involves critical mass.

S: Well, yes and no.

B: It involves something.

S: So that's the thing. Yes and no. So I would say rather that it is a dichotomy in that you can have zero self-awareness, right? You can have algorithms or software systems that have no – that have nothing that you would consider reasonably self-awareness. They're basically – their self-awareness is zero. But then there are other systems that – neural networks or whatever, things that are meant to replicate the functioning of a brain, that they're on the continuum. And then that is a continuum.

B: Sure.

S: Yes, self-awareness is a continuum. But the binary part is that you could be on the continuum or not on the continuum. And what I'm saying is a lot of our software algorithms are not even on the continuum. They are not in any way doing something that is self-aware. And that once we get on the continuum, then you have that threshold issue, Bob, where you have to have enough self-awareness that you're awake, right? That's another sort of thresholdy kind of phenomenon, right? So people – it's like, yeah, consciousness is a continuum. But there's a point at which you're awake and a point at which you're not awake. It's a threshold phenomenon.

B: And it's funny you use those words because when you're dreaming and you're shopping in a store in a dream and a pink elephant walks by you without tusks and you're like – and you don't think anything of it. Why? Because you don't have that critical threshold of your frontal lobe engaged where you would think, oh, wait. That's odd. It's just – that threshold hasn't been reached. So anything goes. So that's kind of roughly related to what you're talking about.

S: But that's an altered state of consciousness.

C: Exactly. The REM sleep.

B: But it deals with this critical threshold of engagement.

S: Yes. It's a different plateau, right? There are different plateaus of consciousness. One is REM sleep. The other one is wakefulness. But wakefulness is a threshold phenomenon. They said it's bah, it's a continuum. It's actually – that's only one aspect of it and it's much more complicated than that. OK. But I thought it's very interesting. The whole discussion I thought was extremely interesting. But these – both of these emails kind of – more the AI one. And also, Cara, you made a comment about raw goat's milk and we had a ton of emails about–

C: Oh my gosh. So many people were offended when I said something. But the point is not about goat's milk. It's about it being raw.

S: I think the operative word there is raw.

C: I wasn't saying it's bad to drink goat's milk if you're lactose intolerant because it has a much lower lactose content. I was using raw goat's milk as a synecdoche for a lot of the like woo that you see in these supermarkets.

S: One person actually said, you're against goat's milk. I'm not listening to your show anymore.

C: I know.

E: Well, they clearly weren't listening in the first place.

C: One guy reached out. I was actually so happy about this one guy who reached out and he was like, raw oats. What's wrong with raw oats? And I was like, oh, you misheard me. I said raw goat's milk. I eat raw oats all the time. But then he was saying, I'm vegan and I wonder if we're lumping these things together. I actually responded and Steve did too and clarified that what we're saying is we're bummed out that the environmental movement is so enmeshed sometimes especially in these brick-and-mortar stores.

S: Yeah. Pull out the good stuff.

C: And it's almost like it's hard to vote with your dollar and do all those things and it's a difficult consumer position to be in. But of course, I just thought it was really funny that he was like, raw oats, and I was like, hey, you're vegan. So you're not drinking raw goat's milk anyway.

S: All right.

C: Good on you.

Name That Logical Fallacy (1:16:09)

S: But all of this is leading to the next segment of the show, which is a Name That Logical Fallacy.

C: Ooh.

J: I haven't heard that in a while.

S: I know. But I've kind of already gone through the fallacies. What I want to do is bring them all together and talk about the principle of charity. Now I'm kind of morphing the Name That Logical Fallacy segment into a Lessons of Critical Thinking. So here we go. The principle of charity, very important, perhaps one of the most, I think, tenets of critical thinking that is most abused. It's definitely in the top five if it's not number one or two. The principle of charity basically states that you should make a conscious effort to interpret what somebody else says or writes or whatever, somebody else's position, in the most charitable way possible. It's basically the opposite of the straw man fallacy, right? The straw man fallacy is you make a simplified, easy to knock down and actually unfair and inaccurate version of your opponent's or of the other side's position. Then you attack that. But the charity says, no, you give them every benefit of the doubt and you try to say, all right, if I interpret what you're saying in the most charitable way, this is the best version of your point as I understand it that I could think of. So let me talk about that. But it also means that if there is something ambiguous in what someone else is saying, then don't just fill in the gaps with your assumptions. Ask them to clarify what their position is. But what I find happening, and it's just happened multiple times in the last week or two, which is why I wanted to talk about this specifically, where this happened with the CIA discussion as well, where people take one nugget of what we're saying and then they extrapolate from that an entire belief system. So what I think happens is that people do take this binary approach to some topic. Like you either think AI is going to destroy the world or you think it's perfectly safe. Or you think the CIA—you love the CIA and everything that they do and you think they're innocent of everything, or you understand that they are an illegal, evil organization trying to destroy the world. And so—

C: Or it's a knowledge deficit problem or it's absolutely not a knowledge deficit problem.

S: Right. Exactly.

E: Black and white.

S: And then they have a position and maybe they're very vested in that position or they feel very strongly about it. And when anyone says anything that could even be mildly interpreted as being on the other side, then they assume that you're on the other side, therefore you hold all of the points that I don't like and I'm going to argue against those points as if you have them. And we sure have experienced this on a regular basis. This happens—

C: Well, you even have it with something as extreme as partisanship.

S: Oh, yeah. Totally.

C: If somebody says, I'm a Republican, you might assume, oh, you're an entrenched climate denialistic Young Earth creationist. It's like, no. You know? I never said any of those things.

S: No, exactly.

E: That's right. Beware of the broad brushstrokes.

S: Absolutely. I was going to bring that up because the partisanship is I think where probably people encounter it most of the time. We have somebody in our extended, extended, extended family who is an extreme right-wing partisan in this case. We also have people in our family who are extreme left-wing partisans. In this particular case, this person is famous for making—just constantly attacking strawmen. And he basically is like—well, he has this cardboard cartoon of what quote-unquote liberals think and he thinks that every liberal thinks all of these things. And as soon as you disagree with him in the slightest way on any political topic, he immediately assumes you are this cardboard liberal with all of the features that he associates with it. So what happens in practice is that he never actually listens to what you're saying or what you're writing. He's never really engaging with you or your actual opinions. He doesn't solicit your positions or understand them. He's just constantly arguing against this fiction that has been erected in his narrative about what this label thinks and does and behaves, right? So that's an extreme example. But guys, back me up. That's pretty much what this guy is doing, right?

B: Oh, yeah.

S: We all know what we're talking about.

E: It's about the laziest method of thinking.

S: It's totally lazy. It's totally intellectually lazy. But again, I'm giving you an extreme example to illustrate the principle, but we all do this in a more subtle way frequently. Like if somebody says something favorable about some alternative medicine, I have to make sure I don't just assume oh, you're this woo person who believes all this crap. You have to just back up and just ask people to clarify or to—don't assume that anyone believes something that they haven't explicitly said that they believe. That's a good rule of thumb right there.

E: That's a good rule.

S: If I didn't explicitly say this, don't assume that I believe it. I might, but try asking and understanding what I'm actually saying.

C: I mean, it's also—it's like a fundamental skill you have to develop in academic writing, scholarly writing. Like if I'm going to write a journal article where I disagree with somebody else's interpretation of a study, I'd better look at their interpretation with the rosiest glasses possible when I do that. Otherwise, I'm actually kind of being unethical, and that's important to remember.

S: All right. That's your skeptical lesson for today. I'll be doing more of these, and we're going to start to incorporate more segments into the show. And it's not going to be like every week the same segments. We'll be mixing in different segments every week. So we'll be doing a lot of experimenting, and we'll see which ones survive. Hopefully the cream will rise to the top. All right. Let's go on with science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:22:31)

Item #1: You startle a grizzly bear with her three cubs. The bear charges you and knocks you to the ground. You should roll onto your stomach and play dead. Item #2: Your best defense against an aggressive bear is bear pepper spray. Item #3: You come across a black bear with a dear carcass. They stomp the ground and roar. You should stand tall and make a loud noise, but not run.

Answer	Item
Fiction
Science

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

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. We have a theme this week. When was that? I think, Cara, you were involved. Was it on the show where we were talking about bears and what to do and what not to do around bears?

C: Yeah. It was mountain lions to begin with.

S: And mountain lions.

C: And then it turned into just any wild animal that's trying to eat you.

S: I don't remember if that made it to air. But I said, you know what? Because we all sort of kind of remembered what the reality was. So I said, I'm going to look it up in detail and then test everyone's knowledge on what to do when you encounter a bear. That's the theme.

E: Wow. Okay.

J: This is great. I love this.

S: Here we go.

E: Especially those Chicago bears.

C: Are you going to define which kind of bear? Like grizzly versus black?

S: So all right. That's a very good question. Just to say, if I say bear, then it's either grizzly or black, or I will say grizzly or black.

C: Okay. Cool.

S: But if I just say bear, it's both.

C: Okay.

B: What about polar?

S: So we're just talking grizzly and black bears. Just grizzly and black bears. Because polar bears are kind of a different animal in terms of their aggressiveness and everything. They'll kill you.

C: Yeah. And only a small percentage of people listening to the show right now are encountering polar bears on a regular basis.

S: Yes. That's correct. So these are grizzly bears and black bears, which will either be named specifically or I'm referring to both. Okay. Here we go. Item number one. You startle a grizzly bear with her three cubs. The bear charges you and knocks you to the ground. You should roll onto your stomach and play dead. Item number two. Your best defense against an aggressive bear is bear pepper spray. And item number three. You come across a black bear with a deer carcass. They stomp the ground and roar. That's the bear, not the deer carcass. You should stand tall and make a loud noise, but not run. So two of these are correct. One is incorrect. But we'll talk about how to survive a bear encounter in general once we go through these. Bob, go first.

Bob's Response

B: All right. So I'm going to start at number three. Stand tall and make a loud noise, but don't run. I think, yes, from what I have read, I haven't done a deep dive, but I have encountered it. That makes a lot of sense. I think from what I know, don't never run. Just never run. Because if they want, they will just totally outrun you. You're not going to be faster than a bear. So running, I think, is generally bad advice. So let's go to the second one in the middle. Aggressive bear, bear pepper spray. Wow. I don't know about that one. Your best defense. If the bear is aggressive, my understanding is that if a bear wants to attack you and eat you, there's pretty much nothing you could do. Just do what you can. Try to punch him. Try fight him off. But if they want you, you are done. So an aggressive bear. Yeah, I mean, I think that might be fine. If it's specifically bear pepper spray, all right. Do they make that stuff? Yeah, I'm sure they could make that amazingly offensive to a bear. So damn, but I never came across that in any of the times I've read about that. All right, so let's go to the first one then. The classic scene of a grizzly bear with the three cubs. The bear charges you. So you're on the ground, knocked on the ground, probably injured, because if a bear knocks you on the ground you're not going to be feeling too good. Roll on your stomach and play dead. The play dead scenario. Oof. Yeah, I think that's generally considered to be just such an old wives' tale. Yeah, what the hell? I'll say that's fiction. Play dead, fiction.

S: Okay, Jay.

Jay's Response

J: Yeah, so there's so much urban legend in all this, you know. Okay, so you startle a bear with its three cubs. Then the bear charges you, knocks you to the ground. And the comment here is you should roll onto your stomach and play dead. I think in that situation, that's the correct answer, because the bear is defending itself in a sense. It's defending the cubs. So if you make yourself less of a threat, because what can you do? Because in my opinion, you shouldn't run away from a bear or climb a tree.

C: Climb a tree.

J: People say climb trees, and bears climb trees really good. Yeah, bears climb trees like freakishly good. Climbing a tree, that's like the getaway. It doesn't, nope. Not going to work with a bear.

E: You're going to injure yourself on the climb as much as the bear.

J: See, because you're not, in this first one, you're not being attacked. Like Steve said, it knocked you to the ground. He didn't say it's currently biting you and raking you. It just kind of checked you. Yeah, like the bear isn't currently eating you. You know what I mean?

B: Not yet.

C: I think if the bear is actively eating you, all bets are off with all of these.

J: So the second one here, this best defense against an aggressive bear is pepper spray. This is a weird thing, Steve, because what are other things? Can you have a gun? Can you have a pogo stick that can drop you 100 yards away?

S: Yeah, I mean, even better than a gun.

J: All right. So I would actually say because of pepper spray's wide angle kind of hit, most people don't know how to fire a gun, and it's hard to kill a bear with a gun. It's very hard to kill a black bear, a big bear with a gun. So I think that one is science, even though I've seen video of bear using pepper spray to flavor salmon. And I'm not kidding. I saw that video. It was amazing. And this last one here, so I guess by default, you come across a black bear with a deer carcass. They stomp the ground and roar, you should stand tall and make a loud noise, but not run. Because I've heard that too, like you pick up your bike and you shake it to make yourself look bigger. I think the third one is the fake. I think the one about the stomping.

E: The black bear with deer carcass.

J: Yeah, the deer carcass one is a fake.

S: All right, Cara.

Cara's Response

C: I saw the Revenant, and we all know that that was a documentary, and I'm pretty sure in the Revenant. Yeah, the grizzly bear tore him to shreds, even though he was playing dead, but he lived at least.

E: I'm not sure he was playing dead. I think he was playing dying.

C: And so in this specific situation, you talk about the three cubs. So you are scaring a bear who's trying to protect her children. This is very important. So she charges you to get you to leave her kids alone. So I think in this case, if you play dead, you are no longer a threat to her. I think she's going to leave you alone. I have totally heard of bear pepper spray. I think that it's what you're supposed to carry with you if you go backpacking. I don't think you're ever supposed to shoot a bear. You'll probably go to prison. So best defense. That's a tough one, though. This could be tricky. I don't know if a gun works better than pepper spray in terms of your personal best defense, but your most ethical defense is definitely, I think, pepper spray. But I also think the last one is true. So let me start to pick it apart a little. You come across a black bear with a deer carcass. So this bear is eating, or at least it's freshly gotten a kill, or it's coming back to an old kill. They are trying to tell you, leave me alone. This is my kill. It's not your kill. You say, no, I'm not going to leave you alone. I'm here. I want to eat your food. I think that it might charge you then. I think in this case, you should walk away as quickly as possible. So I'm going to say this is the fiction.

S: And Evan?

Evan's Response

E: Yeah. That's the conclusion I was coming to as well, Cara. The same idea. It's that the black bear wants this food, and it's stomping on the ground and roaring to say, this is my meal. You get away now. Now, if you go and stand tall and make a loud noise and confront it, then you're effectively provoking the bear, and you're going to fight for its food, and it has, I think, more of a chance to want to attack you because it thinks you're taking its dinner away. So that's why I think that that one's going to be the fiction.

S: So Bob, this is your turn to be alone. Every week so far this year, someone has been alone.

B: Yeah, I'm not confident.

S: You're not confident?

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right. Well, you all agreed on the number two, so we'll start there. Your best defense against an aggressive bear is bear pepper spray. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. Cara, you are correct. If you are backpacking, hiking, in any place where you might encounter a bear in the wild, you should absolutely have bear pepper spray on you. Every reference I read was like, well, of course you have your bear pepper spray on you. It's a given. Like, this is what you have. Now, this is not like the little pepper spray you have, like mace in your purse. No, it's more like a fire extinguisher. It's like a fire extinguisher, and it has a 35-foot range. This is what you're spraying at the bear when the bear is 30 feet away from you, right? That's the whole idea.

C: Yeah, this is like last defense.

S: And you spray it above their head so that it falls down into their eyes, their nose. And Jay, what you said is correct too, but bears like the pepper. So they say do not spray it on yourself or your campsite or your tent, because that will attract the bears. It's not like they don't like the flavor. They actually like it.

C: That's hilarious.

S: But they don't want it in their eyes. You've got to spray it in their eyes or their wet nose.

J: I said that. They put it on fish.

S: I know. That's right.

C: Don't spray it in their mouth, because they'll be like, mm, thanks for the appetizer.

S: Yeah. Like, oh, people au poivre.

B: Like kiwi fruit. I like eating it, but I don't like rubbing it on my eyes.

S: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

C: But don't you also... You mentioned that it's like, duh, have your bear pepper spray. Don't you also want to make sure that you have a bear box too, like a small bear container? Because they're completely smell proof and you carry it in your backpack. The last thing you want to do is have basically a food lure of your food.

S: Absolutely. So the other recommendations for safe hiking in bear country is don't have anything that would attract the bear. That means no food that they could smell. And when you're making camp, hang up your food in a tree. Don't put it in your tent. Bag it up. Hang it. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm seeing bear pepper spray online for like 50 bucks. So I think if you're... Yeah, probably worth it.

B: 50 bucks?

C: Totally worth it. Let's weigh the risk-benefit analysis here.

Steve Explains Item #1&3

S: All right. Let's go back to number one. You startle a grizzly bear with her three cubs. Right? The classic scenario. The bear charges you and knocks you to the ground. You should roll onto your stomach and play dead. Bob, you think this one is the fiction because you think the play dead thing is a myth. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, Bob.

E: It is.

C: Revenant was a documentary.

S: This is a good point. Before we go on to the third one, to explain this one, I have to kind of explain them all. So let's back up a little bit. So there are essentially three situations in which you are encountering a bear, or three attitudes that the bear has. One is that the bear is acting defensively. And that means that they're defending either their cubs or their food. Right? When bears are acting defensively, they will stomp the ground like slap the ground. They'll roar. They will try to intimidate you. They're basically saying, get the hell out of here because they're scared of you or they're defending their turf. When you're in that situation, this also relates to number three. This is why three is the fiction. So I'll just say that. So you come across a black bear with a deer carcass, so now he's also in a defensive position. They stomp the ground and roar because that's what they do. You should stand tall and make a loud noise but not run. That is the fiction. Because you guys sussed that out really well. Not you, Bob, but the other three guys. You reasoned your way through it very well because what you should do when you encounter a bear, you startle a bear, or you do something where the bear's acting defensively, is you make yourself small. You quietly reassure, that's okay. I'm going away. Here I go. And then you slowly back away. So you're like, I'm not threatening you. Look, I'm tiny. I'm quiet. I'm backing away slowly. You don't run. I kind of threw that in there as a spoiler. That was to fool you. But the other part, you do not stand tall. I know. That was deliberate. But you don't stand tall and make noise.

J: If you happen to have the sleeping hummingbird noise on your phone, play that.

C: I feel like you are supposed to, though, tell me if I'm wrong, Steve, because I'm sure you read a lot of literature in coming up with these. You are supposed to speak, right? Like, wow, the bear turned out like you're human.

S: Hold on. I'm getting there. That's a different situation.

C: Oh, okay. Interesting.

S: So let's just talk about the defensive situation. The defensive situation is you startle the bear. They have cubs or they have food. You back away slowly and smally, right? Now, but if the bear physically contacts you, that's the knocks you to the ground. It doesn't have to be knocking to the ground. If they physically contact you, what you should do is roll onto your stomach, cover your head and your neck, and play dead. You spread your legs. Spread your legs so they can't roll you over. You don't want to expose your soft parts.

B: I'm all soft.

S: And if the bear may poke you, may bite you, may play with you, whatever, may make sure that you're not threatening. Just let them do that.

C: Because they don't want to eat you, right? They just want to subdue you.

S: Right. And then the bear will hopefully walk away. And they say, wait, do not move until you are absolutely sure the bear is out of sight. Even if it's a half an hour, just wait until the bear is gone, gone, gone.

C: God, how scary.

S: However, they say, if the bear continues to attack you, or Cara starts to eat you, then that means they're not going anywhere. What that means is they have shifted into a predatory attitude. And then this is where you fight desperately for your life.

C: Yeah, like punch him in the throat, the eyes, the nose, all that stuff.

S: Yes. If you lose, you're probably going to lose, but you are fighting for your life at that point.

C: Can you imagine?

S: Once they start eating you, or they're just not leaving you alone, the playing dead thing has failed. And now just punch him in the nose, right?

C: Yeah.

S: Now, of course, at any point, if you had your bear pepper spray, that would have been a good point to use that. So now, if a bear is hunting you, they're predatory. So bears are stealth hunters. They sneak up behind you, right? So if a bear is stomping the ground and slapping the ground and roaring, they're not hunting you. They're trying to scare you away. They're defensive. If they're hunting you, they're going to try to sneak up behind you.

B: They're in ninja mode.

S: And then you're dead, right? So almost certainly, if that bear wants to hunt you down and eat you, and you're in their crosshairs, you're probably dead. But now it's like you're in desperation mode. Then again, your best bet is the pepper spray. So if you have the pepper spray, that's the time to use it. When you notice that a bear is hunting you, you hit them with the pepper spray and you try to get out of there. Don't just turn and run, though, because then there's like—bears run twice as fast as people. They will just run you down and kill you. Do not climb a tree. Bears love it when their prey goes into trees.

C: It's like going down a dark alley with a big chain fence at the end of it.

S: They actually like throwing either other bears or prey out of trees in order to kill them. That's one of their hunting strategies.

B: Yeah, let gravity do the work.

S: They also prefer attacking prey that's above them in a tree, especially other bears, because it's hard to hunt, to fight down from a tree. So they're at an advantage when they're on the ground and you're in a tree. They like it. So don't think you're going to get away by climbing a tree. And don't make yourself a deer and just turn and run.

B: I'm picturing a bear chasing you and like, all right, I'm going to get this mother. The guy climbs a tree and the guy—I see the bear slowing down like, yeah, OK, I can take my time now. I'll just roll over there. Don't have to rush. He's dead.

C: He's got nowhere to go.

S: What are now the two least likely scenarios that you are going to encounter. A defensive bear, because you startled it with a carcass or cubs, or a predatory bear. Because they don't generally hunt people, but if they're doing it, it's because they're desperate or whatever. You look tasty. Who knows?

C: Yeah. It's probably because of climate change or habitat loss.

S: Maybe. Maybe.

C: It's because of something we did.

S: The most likely scenario in which you are going to encounter a bear is just there are bears in the environment where you are. They are neither defensive nor predatory. That is the situation where you want to be loud.

C: You want to be human.

S: Yes. So they say travel in large groups. And the one reference I actually said, there's never been a reported attack of a bear on a large group of people. It's almost always single people, lone people. So if you're going to be traveling in bear country, travel in groups.

B: But what if you don't have any friends?

C: Don't go hiking in Yellowstone alone.

S: Talk loudly or sing because bears will hear you coming and they will get out of your way because they don't want to deal with you. They are afraid of people. They want to get out of your way. So your greatest risk is startling them, so you won't startle them if they hear you coming a mile away. Now, be careful if you're near a river because the river will be masking noise. So you got to be louder if you're near a river. And you shouldn't be, they say, don't have your earbuds in because you need to be able to be environmentally aware.

C: Can you imagine going to Yellowstone and going on a beautiful hike and like listening to music the whole time? Why would you do that?

S: I can't imagine that. But yeah, that's not a good thing to do.

E: Teenagers.

S: And again, if a bear is just curious about you, like you encounter a bear in a field and they're like, they're not defensive, but they're not hunting you. They're just like, oh, I wonder what that is over here. And they start to get close. That's when you make noise, stand tall. So you say, get out of you, yell at the bear, you say, get the hell out of here. You know, if they then start to like make, become threatening, then you break out your pepper spray. But other than that, you just sort of just yell at the bear and try to get, and then they'll probably, you'll scare them off.

C: They should be afraid of us.

S: Yeah, that's right.

C: And most wild bears are because their only experience with humans has been threatening experience.

S: Now, there was actually a study that one of the websites I was reading referenced that said that, that showed that people who defended themselves with guns actually had more mauling damage than people who defended themselves with pepper spray. So Jay's correct that most people are probably not going to take down a bear with a single shot and you're just going to piss it off.

C: Yeah, because it knows it's coming from you.

S: Yeah.

C: Yikes.

S: I know there's probably hunters out there who go, I'd take it down with a gun. Okay, sure you would. Fine. If you are confident, like if you're a hunter and you're confident, then great. That's good. We're talking statistically, like your average schmuck, you're probably, don't be confident because you happen to have a gun on you.

C: Well, also, am I wrong?

S: Especially with a grizzly bear. They're hard to take down.

C: Like, would you go to jail if you kill a grizzly bear? I don't know.

S: I don't think so. I mean, I think you might get a fine if it wasn't hunting season and, you know.

C: I don't even think you can hunt grizzly bears, can you?

S: I don't know. I don't know. If you're defending your life, I don't know. I didn't get into that aspect of the legality of defending yourself by killing a grizzly bear. But, yeah, so don't be overconfident because you have a gun. You're better off having pepper spray. But you need to be able to, first of all, identify a grizzly from a black bear because there's a couple of differences between how they will behave. And you need to know, read what the bear's emotion is and act accordingly. But that's your basic framework. If it's defensive, back away. If it's curious, scare it away. And if it's predatory, pepper spray it or fight like hell.

C: Ooh. It is legal under the law to defend yourself from a grizzly bear, but there has to be actual evidence that it was, in fact, threatening you. It can't just be when you see a grizzly bear and it can't just be because it's threatening your wildlife. Good. Go fish in wildlife.

S: Yeah.

C: That's good.

B: I am on Amazon right now ordering bear pepper spray and I'm noti going to leave the house again.

C: Oh, Bob.

E: Okay. It's really scary. I like that.

S: We have black bears in Connecticut. You occasionally encounter them.

C: Black bears are so much less of a concern.

S: They are. So that's the difference. This is the difference. Hang on. I alluded to this. If you encounter a black bear that's curious about you, scare it away. If you encounter a grizzly bear, do not try to scare it away. Do not make a loud noise. Do not try to intimidate it because they will go, oh, yeah, and they'll come over there and F you up. Grizzly bears, you always back away quietly and just hope that they don't have an interest in you. Black bears, you could yell at. Grizzly bears, never yell at grizzly bears.

J: What about brown bears? Brown bears are supposed to be much more aggressive.

S: Why are you complicating my story? Another variable Jay.

C: What about sun bears?

B: Bug bears.

C: Have you guys ever seen a sun bear?

E: Teddy bears?

S: Water bears.

C: Have you guys ever seen a sun bear?

J: No.

S: I've seen at the zoo.

C: Yeah. Aren't they cool?

B: It's a real thing?

C: Southeast Asia.

S: Yep. Asian.

C: They're amazing.

S: There you go. So now I've saved your life.

C: Thank you.

E: And those are the bear necessities.

C: No, you did not.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:44:52)

Instead of being afraid of that darkness, we should bring everyone to the edge of it and say, look, here's an area that needs illumination. torches, candles, anything you can think of that will cast light. Then we can lay down our foundations and build our great buildings, cure diseases, invent fabulous new machines, and whatever else we think the human race should be doing. But first of all, we need some light.  – Eugenia Chang (1976-), British mathematician, educator and concert pianist

S: All right. Evan, give us a quote.

E: "Instead of being afraid of that darkness, we should bring everyone to the edge of it and say, look, here's an area that needs illumination. torches, candles, anything you can think of that will cast light. Then we can lay down our foundations and build our great buildings, cure diseases, invent fabulous new machines, and whatever else we think the human race should be doing. But first of all, we need some light." And that was written by Eugenia Chang, who's a category theory mathematician and the author of the book, How to Bake Pi, as in the number pie.

S: P-I. Not P-I-E. Correct. Thank you, Evan.

E: You're welcome.

S: Thank you guys for joining me this week.

J: Thanks, Steve.

C: Thanks, Steve.

B: Sure, man.

Signoff

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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