SGU Episode 888

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SGU Episode 888
July 16th 2022
JWST's First Deep Field Image
SGU 887                      SGU 889
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
AJR: Andrea Jones-Rooy, political, social, and data scientist; professor and Dir. of Undergraduate Studies at NYU Center for Data Science
Quote of the Week
Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
John von Neumann, Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Navigating Social Media, Misinformation, Pandemics

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 13^th 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks!

S: And we have a special guest rogue this week Andrea Jones-Rooy. Andrea welcome back to the SGU.

AJR: Thank you so much. Hi everyone. Great to be here.

S: Great to have you on the show.

B: Andrea!

E: Hey Andrea.

J: Hey Andrea let me ask you do you notice, I know it's anecdotal but do you notice that the city is actually kind of hotter now?

AJR: I think it's approaching infinity but it depends on if you want to use Fahrenheit or Celcius.

E: Oh it's a good point.

AJR: But it's very hot. I've been blasting the AC all day to keep it from like being intolerable. It just doesn't cool down. And I'm also actively the cause of global warming I think.

S: So guess which number episode this is?

J: 300!

E: 888?

S: 888.

J: Good guess Evan.

AJR: That's very auspicious.

[talking over each other]

B: Super auspicious and they would love this number.

AJR: Yeah. Well done.

J: It must mean something.

B: We're gonna get a lot of downloads in China.

E: Oh it means something.

J: Well talking about good things I just wanna remind everybody we have NECSS coming up.

AJR: Great segway Jay.

J: Yes I know. The fact that you're here and you're on the executive committee is it's I have to talk about it. So I'm excited because we have a really cool topic this year. The topic this year is navigating the misinformation apocalypse. So we will be talking in many different ways about how to deal with all the misinformation that's out there and people's experience with misinformation. And the keynote is going to be between Bill Nye and David Copperfield and I had the pleasure of talking to them yesterday for an hour about the keynote because they they wanted to go through all the different things that they could discuss. and we had a really fun and interesting conversation. And they have great stories to tell. It's gonna be a very fun discussion so I hope that you join us. Go necss.org and you can get your tickets there. Don't forget that if you buy the tickets you could watch the conference for up to 3 months after is airs. So It's available to you for a very long time.

B: Jay we've been on the air since 2005. Haven't we already solved that problem? Why are we still working on this?

S: Misinformation thing?

B: Yeah I mean.

J: Bob it's worse now. Arguably it's worse now than it ever was.

B:Oh it absolutely is. We have failed.

AJR: We don't know the counterfactual how much worse it could be if it wasn't for the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

B: True.

AJR: I mean at least you're damping it.

J: Andrea I would love to see statistics that would never exist but I would love to know what the world would have been like today if the internet didn't come into existence.

E: That's interesting.

AJR: You know I was actually just reading a study today where someone tried to figure out whether getting off the internet was actually gonna help people. It was in the context of politics. And they did this study in the lead up to the mid-term election when they were like, all right these people get off Facebook for 3 months before the election and then report back in. Not like a particularly well-controlled study. Anyway the punchline is they were happier. They were less polarized. They used Facebook less after the election when the study was over. And it was just Facebook. It's not the whole internet. But I was I gotta get off Facebook.

B: Wow.

E: That's interesting.

J: Yeah I have dramatically decreased my use of social media outside of the SGU. I barely post things. I'm barely perusing. I just don't wanna have anything to do with it. It just irritates me.

S: It's exhausting but at the same time like this is kinda my job though as a skeptic. As a science communicator. I mean how can you avoid it? The whole point is─

AJR: Steve I feel the same way.

S: ─we're trying to convince people of a more rational approach to the really controversial topics. Like just today on Science Based Medicine I wrote entitled Biological Sex is not Binary or the Science of Biological Sex and the subtitle is biological sex is not strictly binary. And people lost their freaking mind. I'm just going over the basic science. There's nothing scientifically controversial about anything that I say. But people, just the amount, the degree to which they are willing to torture their logic in order to make some semi-point. I'm not even sure what they're saying half the time. It's just amazing.

AJR: Well Steve I'm sure the science that you're writing about has been around a lot longer than the argument for the last few years that we've all been freaked out about.

S: Oh totally.

AJR: We've known about intersex people forever and ever. It's not like you're making up new science to defend some woke stance.

S: No. Not at all. Because that's what the people think. It's like it's also not controversial among actual biologists. Biologists who study this are like, of course it's not binary are you crazy. Here's a good example and I think that the duck-billed platypus needs to become the poster child of the trans community. I'd love to see duck-billed platypus saying that platypuses are mammals too. Because some mammals lay eggs. It's like the exact same thing.

AJR: We gotta put that on a flag.

S: There's no sharp line between evolutionary categories. Biology is messy. You cannot. And it just happens to be that human sexuality, first of all it's not all about reproduction. And two it's not strictly binary. There's a lot of mishmash in the middle. That's just a fact.

AJR: Well I remember the first time I learned we don't really know, maybe it's changed since I heard this many years ago, but we don't really know where our species begins or ends.

S: That's correct.

AJR: It's really hard to say.

S: It really depends. It depends on the species. Also depends if you're only including extant members or extinct members. Like some species all their relatives could have died off. And they could be all there by themselves at the end of some twig. And it's like pretty clear that yes that's one species but evolutionarily there is no sharp line. When did they stop being the same species as their most closely related other population. They're just populations. And populations are interbreeding. We had this conversation last week with an expert on dog evolution. He's like yeah they're spreading their genes all over the place. Like the idea of species. You can't apply. You can't draw any kind of lines here. There's too much interbreeding going on. You can come up with some kind of functional semi-definition. It's like pseudo-objective but it's like between planet and dwarf planet. We're just making up criteria that sound good just so we could have categories that make us feel good about ourselves.

AJR: And then millennials freak out about loosing Pluto.

S: Yeah.

E: There are dwarf planets?

S: But the reality just doesn't conform to that. So anyway I was just hoping to educate people a little bit about the biology of sex. It's not all about gametes and chromosomes. There's a lot more going on there. But they still freak out.

E: Well you did educate them. But that doesn't stop them from freaking out. So they have to, hey you learn in different ways.

AJR: Maybe this is the most naive I've ever said but maybe if we all just educate enough at some point we'll all come around. I don't know. Speaking of Jay of the conference I feel that this is a very urgent topic. Because I fell less confident about that than I did [inaudible]. For example when I was growing up which is like logical.

J: Another thing that we have to deal with though is that I feel like my life is infinitely more complex than it was when I was in my twenties. The internet introduces an incredible amount of complexity. And to a person that's wired like me it really produces an extraordinary amount of stress. So decoupling myself from social media and from other things that I've come to do on the internet actually is a destresser for me.

AJR: Well and there's also, I don't know Jay if this falls under the same category but just like there's the social media part of the internet and the voices and communication. But there's also so much more information that we've ever had to confront.

E: Oh my gosh. Drinking from a fire hose.

AJR: I used to have books and the evening news when my parents had it on. And that what sort fo like well I know what's happening. And now there's no way to know.

S: It's overwhelming. There's to many things to worry about. There's just too much bad stuff and nonsense going on. You do have to focus a little bit. All right this is my little corner of the nonsense that I'm gonna deal with and I just can't pay attention. I don't have the bandwidth for everything else. You know what I mean? To some extent you gotta prioritize. But you can't do that entirely. No matter what you think we have to be aware enough to participate in our democracy. You can't take that for granted anymore that it's just gonna chug along. You have to pay attention or it could go bye-bye. There's just too many things we have to pay attention to.

AJR: And they all feel and probably are very existential. It's hard for me to be like. Because I agree with you Steve. The democracy is a huge one. Climate change. Pandemics. Future pandemics. Dealing with this nefarious potentials. For this current one it's not something that I can be like I'm just gonna check out for a little bit. Because I need a brake.

S: I know. It's though. Because I'm the physician in the family and in the social group and I get a lot of these questions. So like not too long go my wife was doing this she's like okay so this person that we know had an exposure to somebody who was just diagnosed with covid. I just put my head in my hands I was like oh my got I'm so tired of these questions. Of having to troubleshoot everyone's pandemic exposure and everything. It's just exhausting. Of course I happily do it. But I'm just saying it's just constant. It's constant.

AJR: So I should save my questions Steve for after the recording?

S: No but it's true because everyone has to worry now. What do I do? Do I, like there's this updated CDC criteria about how we mitigate our risk and manage things. It's like just get vaccinated.

B: And boosted.

S: And boosted.

AJR: And maybe boosted again.

S: And then just when we get a handle on this stuff the monkey pox will come along and throw a monkey wrench into everything.

AJR: At least the name is a little more fun.

S: It's a little more fun.

AJR: I feel a little bit like we're in a movie.

S: I agree. It's a little bit more fun. The monkey pox. And we already have a working vaccine for it. Which is good. We just have to produce a lot of it.

AJR: And then we get to hear from all the anti-vaxxers why we shouldn't take it. So we have that conversation to look forward to.

E: Oh yes, that's forever now. That is ensconced.

AJR: Well uplifting talk everyone that's great.

E: Hey this is what we do.

S: But we also like to just talk about cool science, and that's mostly what we're going to do in the News Item segment of the show this week, starting with Jay.

News Items

Green Steel (11:10)

• The race to produce green steel

S: You're going to tell us about the race to create "green steel."

T. rex Arms (24:54)

• T. rex Arms

...

S: ...populations are interbreeding. We had this conversation last week with an expert on dog evolution.

Getting Out the Vote (44:58)

• Getting out the vote in the projects: lessons from a community organizing experiment

James Webb Images (59:36)

• Webb Telescope Reveals a New Vision of an Ancient Universe
• Webb's First Deep Field (NIRCam Image)

B: ...for this specific news item, and I came up with a couple: "Now witness the power of this fully operational Space Telescope; and this one's for Jay: "My god, ___!" Finish it, Jay.

J: "...it's full of stars!"

Who's That Noisy? (1:16:03)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Old, German aristocrat gravity-fed water fountain.
Noisy starts at 1:50.

J: ...Tom Scott's video on gravity-fed, decorative water fountains

New Noisy (1:19:42)

[increasing number of small animals chirping/twittering/squeaking]

J: If you think you know what this week's Noisy is or you heard something really cool, please do--just send it to me. You never know, I might love it. Send it to WTN@theskepticsguide.org

Patreon Reminder (1:20:31)

J:

Science or Fiction (1:32:40)

Item #1: A new study finds that smart thermostats, designed to save energy through efficiency, can increase strain on the electricity grid and worsen peak demand. Item #2: A new analysis finds that the probability of one or more human casualties from rocket body reentry is about 10% over the next decade. Item #3: Researchers find that intranasal oxytocin is effective in improving emotional sensitivity and relationship satisfaction in couples undergoing therapy.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Intranasal oxytocin
Science	Smart thermostats can strain
Science	More reentries, more death

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Jay	More reentries, more death
Evan	Intranasal oxytocin
Bob	Intranasal oxytocin
Andrea	Smart thermostats can strain

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:50:47)

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
– John von Neumann (1903-1957), Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath

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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