Ben Radford:  Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

BR: Today we’ll be talking about the Emperor’s New Clothes. I love folklore, I’m an amateur folklorist, and I have many, many books on fairy tales in my library. I’m sure that when people come over, they’re like, why does a grown man have a bunch of fairy tale books? It’s because they’re fascinating. They tell us so much about our world and morality tales and where they go with that.

0:01:02
And plus, this one particular fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, has probably the strongest skeptical message of any I can think of. There’s many of them. There’s Little Red Riding Hood, and there’s Little Mermaid, and just countless other ones. But none of them really have the down-home skeptical message that this one does. That’s one reason that I wanted to highlight it and draw attention to it and discuss it.

Pascual Romero: So this week we thought we would mix it up a little bit because I would be out of town and won’t have time to edit in a timely what are we skeptical about segment but we have something just as fun and that is Ben’s fan mail.

BR: Yes as you know I get a fair amount of fan mail as I look at you knowingly.

0:02:02
This one I got in mid-May, and it’s from a man named Jiten. J-I-T-E-N From Mumbai, India, which I believe was formerly Bombay if I’m not mistaken, and he says it’s a fairly short email I’ll just I’ll just read it here. He says, Hello, Mr. Radford. My interest in energies at Stonehenge led me to your website. Now I should add by the way that so far there’s no profanity, there are no all capital letters.

PR: So we’re starting ahead, this is a good one. We’re already head and shoulders above most of the fan mail I get.

BR: And no multiple exclamation points. Great.

0:02:40
I have read a book by Mr. David Cowan on how ley lines were created amongst other materials available on the internet. I wish to inform you that I have developed products which, when placed in any space, create a grid of ley lines. If I may say more, I can remotely create ley lines and all I would need is the address of that space. Needless to say, my products are used in India by Vastu consultants for which they use for space energy correction. No idea what space energy correction is, but needless to say. He says, one can use a pendulum, L-rod, or any dowsing tool one is comfortable with to verify the above. I can also transmute a negative ley to the position upon placement of my products. I welcome your comments on the same.

0:03:37
Thanks and kind regards, Jiten from Mumbai.

PR: That’s pretty interesting.

BR: Yeah, so there’s a couple things here. I have researched and written about ley lines before. I’ve written a couple articles. One of them you can find on livescience.com about ley lines. I don’t have the title right in front of you, but if you Google my name and ley lines, you’ll find it. So I’m familiar with Ley lines and I’m also familiar with dowsing rods and pendulums. I have some more than passing familiarity with several of the concepts that he discusses. That doesn’t mean that they come together in any comprehensive or understandable way.

0:04:22
PR: I read about ley lines a little bit. What he describes in here doesn’t really jive with the nature of ley lines as they’re described.

BR: No, no, not really. So I mean, I appreciate the comments. I mean, he’s probably sincere. As you recall, we had a listener a couple weeks back that had asked whether we were just being trolled. And I believe that this person is probably sincere. And so, again, I want to be nice and respectful, but I’m just not sure what exactly to say.

0:04:59
And so I wrote back to him. I said, thank you for getting a hold of me. Good to hear from you. Your products sound interesting. Do they create ley lines or do they locate existing ones? I’m curious about your research. So again, I didn’t respond by saying, you idiot, do you know nothing of this? Because I don’t know, I assume he’s being sincere and he seems to think that he can create ley lines. And of course, part of the problem is that ley lines, there’s no way to prove they exist. I mean, they’re kind of imaginary lines.

0:05:36
I mean, you can, they can be wherever you want them to be. It’s like aura energy or chi energy. There are no scientific devices that can locate ley lines. In fact, of course, he says that. He says one can use a pendulum, L-rod, or any dowsing tool to verify the above. Well, here’s the rub, folks. The problem with that is that there’s no evidence that pendulums or dowsing rods or forked twigs can actually locate water, gold, missing persons, really anything on their own. So you’re invoking an unproven device to authenticate an unproven idea. So you can see where that’s from.

0:06:24
PR: Yeah. It kind of speaks to my rub about ghost hunters, you know, is the using tools that haven’t been determined to find a thing to find a thing.

BR: You’re sort of compounding pseudoscience with additional pseudoscience. Like layering on the cake there.

BR: So in the briefest way you can, what is a ley line?

0:06:44
BR: Sure. So ley lines are real or imagined, depending on who you speak to, lines that are said to connect important and what one considers important is another debated issue here, points on the earth. So for example, the Great Pyramids, Giza, outside of Cairo would be a point. Machu Picchu in Peru, in the mountains of Peru would be another point. The Great Nile River, just hills, take your pick.

0:07:23
And the idea is that there are these straight lines or meridians that cross and connect. And what you find is that people will claim that if you have enough data points that you can make them connect. So if you take a map and you draw a straight line between the Mayan pyramids in the Yucatan, for example, and Victoria Falls in Africa, so this is where they go with it. They somewhat arbitrarily pick and choose man-made objects, in some cases, natural objects, the Grand Canyon, for example, that they believe are somehow interconnected.

0:08:09
The idea is that ancient people or cosmic energies or whatever, it’s never clearly explained, have located these things at different places on Earth and so therefore you can follow the ley lines and you can locate them between these places. So that’s the general idea. I’m missing some nuances, but that’s the general idea. There’s a couple of problems with this. One of them, of course, is that there’s no consensus on which locations are points for ley lines. As I said, the commonly cited ones are the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, places like that.

0:08:48
PR: And so stuff aliens built, right?

BR: Clearly, alien built things. We’ll just start with that. But on the other hand, when you start digging a little deeper into it, I mean it could be an old graveyard. It could be a high hill in the English countryside. It can be whatever you want. So the problem is if you have enough data points, I mean anywhere, you could have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of these locations around the world. And sure, you can draw lines between any of them.

0:09:21
PR: So you could say that they create ley lines.

BR: Yeah, absolutely. Sure. You can do that wherever you want. And so again, you have 10 different ley line experts who give you 10 different, you know, locations that they personally consider to be significant or important or that count, I’m using the same quotes here, in order to build up these stories. The other problem, of course, is that, as I said, there’s no way to measure or locate ley lines. There’s no device. he suggests, pendulums and dowsing rods. If you know how dowsing rods work, for example, and pendulums, I mean, if a person who’s dowsing for water, let’s say you’re doing a test and there’s like 10 identical jugs in front of you and only one of them holds water. If a person unconsciously knows which one holds water, they may actually feel the dowsing rod dip.

0:10:31
If they’re holding L-rods, they may actually cross. So it’s not some mystical power. It’s their own idiomotor effect. It’s the same principle that helps explain the Ouija board, for example. here is that if you’re somewhere near the Great Pyramids in Giza, in Cairo, and you know where Stonehenge is from your direction, and you’re crossing that area, you know generally what direction that is. And so you’d be like, oh, look, my dowsing rods crossed here. Well, yeah, you knew that. That was why that crosses, because you unconsciously had to do that.

0:11:15
And it can seem very mysterious to people who aren’t familiar with the ad effect. And so it can seem like there truly is some unknown, mysterious, bizarre power that is making their pendulum move around a lot. But at the end of the day, there’s no way to prove this. And so I appreciate Jiten contacting me. I’m not really sure what to do with it. I did get a response back and I won’t go into the whole thing, but he suggested that I could give him a post office box. Oh, okay. So this confused me because, of course, he says he can create ley lines at a specific address, but then he wants a post office box. So I’m thinking, are you going to create a ley line at the post office?

0:12:04
How does knowing my PO box help you put a ley line somewhere? Anywhere other than at that post office. There’s all sorts of fuzziness going on here. I probably get two or three of these a month from some person contacting me about ley lines or miracles or ghosts or crop circles or whatever. It’s just the nature of having done this for 20 years. People contact me with all sorts of stories ranging from the credible to the incredible.

PR: Well, and hopefully, for all we know, Jiten, maybe he’s a surveyor and he just doesn’t speak English very well.

0:12:44
BR: That could be, that could be. But no, that was actually a really good one.

PR: I do like that it is one of the more nice emails you’ve gotten. And it’s always interesting to be kind of confronted with a very wild idea by a person who’s obviously very well-meaning.

BR: I mean, he wrote back to me. I don’t think he’s trolling me. He sincerely thinks this is the case. And he says he’s done experiments and he can verify this. And I have a pretty good idea of what sort of experiments he did and why they were flawed.

0:13:19
But again, I don’t know. I’m having some experience in this. I can guess how he came to believe that. Anyway, so that’s that.

BR: The Emperor’s New Clothes was written, published around 1837 and it can actually be traced back to the 14th century. These old stories reiterated for different versions and different generations. Originally it appeared in a collection of Arab and Jewish stories by Prince Juan Manuel and it was published in Spanish.

0:14:06
And after I give a little overview of it, we’ll come back to some of the different versions and variations. So for those who don’t know the story, I’m sure most of our listeners at least know the theme of the fairy tale.

PR: And our patrons will have heard an actual reading by Ben by the time this episode comes out.

BR: Yes, yes. I’ve recorded one version of it in its entirety. You can hear my dulcet tones in there, but it’s kind of fun. Again, it’s a fun story and if you don’t want to listen to my annoying voice here, feel free to read it yourself.

0:14:46
You should definitely check it out. I’ll just sort of go over the short version. The basic story is that there’s a vain king, as they tend to be in these sorts of stories. Imagine that. And two swindlers come to town saying that they weave amazing clothes from a fabric that is only visible to competent and smart people. So, they go, we have this amazing fabric and the clothes, but of course only people who are fit for their office and are smart can see it.

0:15:18
This sets the stage. The king, as you can imagine, commissions the clothes and the swindlers pretend to make the clothes out of this imaginary fabric and they of course demand gold and the finest silk in return for the services.

PR: As swindlers do.

BR: Yeah. So, the king sends a trusted envoy to check on the progress, because he’s doing kingly duties.

0:15:52
He’s busy being vain. So, he’s like, I don’t have time to go look at this thing. But, so he sends one of his trusted envoys to go see how the two weavers are coming. And he goes and he can’t see anything, but of course he’s afraid to admit it because that would just show that he’s not fit for his office in the kingdom and that he’s stupid. He’s confused and puzzled, but he knows the reputation of this magical cloth. And so he reports back to the king and compliments the weavers on their work. So he’s, well, yes, it’s great. Look at that.

0:16:28
It’s amazing, right? This is, wow. And the king hears back and says, well, this is, well, good. I’m glad this is going well. Thank you, trusted advisor, for checking on this for me. I will take note of that. And then the king, after a while, sends a second advisor, a second competent official who he knows is fit for his office because of course the king appointed him. And he’s obviously going to be seeing this wonderful material. He is fit for his office, I trust him, so go tell me what you think.

0:16:59
The same thing happens again. He goes over there and once again, the weird, and of course he’s also heard that the first person, the first advisor looked at this and said it was beautiful. He saw it and he’s again baffled and he pretends that he sees the fabric and is admiring its wonderful colors and the texture and things like that. So he also reports back to the king and says, yes, it’s going great. You will love it. It’s amazing. It’s great. So finally the king says, okay, I want to go see this myself.

0:17:39
I’ve heard these great things about it. My two trusted advisors have told me that this is a wonderful thing, and the weavers seem to know what they’re doing. I’ve given them lots of gold and silver and silk. They wouldn’t be fooling me, right? And so he then goes to see it for himself, whereupon, of course, he sees nothing because there is nothing to see. And this is sort of the moment for truth of the king. He says, well, he’s with the weavers, both of whom know that they’re con men, right? They know that there’s nothing there. But he’s with his trust advisors and other people around him. He says, yeah, it’s great. I love it. This is wonderful.

0:18:25
Make me some new clothes out of this wonderful fabric.” But again, once again, he gushes to the weavers, the con men, and others about how wonderful it is. He doesn’t just say, oh yeah, that’s great. He’s like, oh yes, going into elaborate detail, oh the colors, and the finest fabric, right? So then this is all in preparation for a procession a parade and and the weaver say to him Well, you know, it’s I’m glad you like it. I’m pleased that this this is this is meets your meets your expectations Why aren’t you aware of this in in your parade tomorrow and the king says yes, that’s that’s a great idea so so the next day he goes back to the weavers and they said well your your Your your outfit is ready, my king.

0:19:16
And I said, well, that’s wonderful. He makes a big show of putting all, put on these imaginary cloth and threads. And he invites his other advisors. And so the people are gonna be carrying his train, of course, as he parades through the kingdom in front of his subjects. All the people of the town and kingdom who trust his judgment as a leader and as the king and uh… and as he as he progresses down down the path uh…

0:19:48
you know everyone of course in the town knows the story they they know that they’ve heard about the emperors new clothes and this magical fabric in this wonderful and this wondrous threads that that that you know they can only be seen by smart, competent people. And they’re like, well, yeah, I see it, don’t you? Like, yeah, it’s great. I want some of that myself, right? This is the big thing going around, right?

0:20:13
It’s going viral in 13th century parlance. And so he proceeds down the path. And then finally, a young boy says, you have no clothes. And everyone’s like, well, what? The kid clearly, you know, is he stupid or is he not fit for office? He’s like, no, he’s right. The emperor has no clothes. And then soon everyone else echoes the child. They’re like, yeah, he said it, but yeah, the Emperor has no clothes.

0:20:52
You’re not wearing anything, dude. And the last line, the last few lines really make the story. And what’s interesting about it is that the story and you know, going to be talking about it. And I asked them just off the cuff, do you remember the Emperor’s New Clothes? And they said, yeah, I remember that. And I said, how do you think it ends? And a lot of them, oh, well, you know, the little kid, he like speaks the truth and everyone understands and you know, the king is shown to be foolish. I’m like, yeah, that’s not how the story ends. And so, I actually have two different versions here.

0:21:44
I mean, there are many slight versions and variations. There’s two that I consulted. And let me just read you both of the endings, the last few lines. It’s very short. The first version says that after the child says, the emperor’s wearing no clothes, he says, that touched the emperor for it seemed to him that they were right, but he thought within himself, I must go through with the procession. And the chamberlains held on tighter than ever and carry the train, which did not exist at all.

0:22:18
Here’s the second slightly different version. The emperor shuddered because he was afraid they were right, but he thought, I have to finish the parade. And the chamberlains walked on carrying the train that wasn’t there. So when you actually read the story and you look at what the ending says, the ending says that even when you speak truth to power, they proceed on.

0:22:48
They don’t care. They have too much vested interest. And that’s one of the things, I’ll touch on this a little bit later, but I just love the human frailty aspect of this. And it’s true that the boy says what everyone else knows and thinks, but it’s also true that the king’s like, you know what? They’re probably right. I probably don’t have any clothes on, but you know what? I’m already walking.

0:23:20
I’m gonna keep going here as if I have clothes on. And that’s, you know, there’s lessons to be traced. Anyway, so what’s interesting is that, as I mentioned earlier, you can trace the story back to the 14th century in an earlier collection of other stories, particularly Jewish and Arab stories. In earlier versions, however, the weavers say that only men who are truly their father’s sons can see the cloth. So there’s an interesting … this traces back to dubious parentage and bastards and you know, is your mother a whore?

0:23:57
the moral and cultural concerns of the day. Right? Because, you know, are you really your daddy’s, you know, that’s of course a huge insult. I mean, these days you call someone a bastard, they don’t think twice about it.

PR: Yeah, you call your friends bastards nowadays.

BR: Yeah, you’re a bastard, right? But, you know, in other cultural contexts, that was fighting words.

0:24:20
I mean, that’s a serious, grievous insult that may lead to a duel or something. So it’s interesting that Hans Christian Andersen changed that. And from what I was reading in the notes in the Barnes & Noble version, also online, apparently he included the child at the last minute. Sort of like a last minute changed before it went to print, which is interesting because of course these days

PR: That’s kind of the linchpin of the story.

BR: That’s the iconic part about it, it’s a child.

0:24:56
And so, and one of the reasons that Andersen did that was to associate innocence with truth. Right. The idea that as we’re acculturated and we come to understand society’s expectations, we know more than to say what we should say, right? And the child has no such constraints, and therefore, you know, puts it out there. So, but yeah, in the earlier versions, there was no child involved at all.

0:25:23
It was basically the weavers were fooling other people and the crowds, the public sort of eventually came to realize this is all BS. So anyway, so that’s the gist.

PR: It is interesting too because until we decided to cover this topic, I hadn’t really given much thought to that story in a long time. And upon being refreshed on it, it was really interesting how many things happened that I didn’t remember. I mean, most of it is just little details.

0:26:01
But the main thing was that the continuing at the end is something that I’m sure I’ve read the Hans Christian Andersen version, but in my head, that part, and maybe it’s when you’re a kid, that part doesn’t seem consequential because you don’t understand the nuance of that. It’s just like, and it keeps going. But as an adult, it’s like, wow, that is a very important note. It’s at the very end of that story that it says something about the king that you don’t necessarily think of when you aren’t remembering that part.

0:26:33
You think of him as maybe pompous and egotistical and vain, but you don’t really think about that kind of political action at the end of just stay the course.

BR: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There were a couple of skeptical themes that jumped out at me. One of them was, I mean there’s some obvious ones such as of course that the king wasn’t skeptical of the claims. He didn’t test them for himself. He relied on other people.

0:27:02
And that’s, it is true back when the story was written as it is today. I mean, the whole notion of consult original sources. Right, don’t believe what your friends say.

PR: Yeah, exactly.

BR: They may be right, they may be wrong, they may not wanna look stupid. And so, and to my mind, I connect it to social media and online where you have, you’re taking other people’s word for it.

0:27:34
It’s a clear violation of skepticism. Skepticism is asking for evidence. And like, you know, if you tell me X, I’m not saying you’re lying, but I want evidence. Right? Whatever it is, you know, advertising claims, political claims, paranormal claims. If you want me to believe what you’re saying, I’m willing to do so, but you gotta give me some reason to assume that you’re not lying or mistaken or whatever else.

0:28:02
And, you know, particularly I think in today’s social media, you know, you have people endorsing content that they haven’t personally read or understood. That’s how social media works. I mean, you have people who like and share content based not on what it actually says because oftentimes they haven’t read what it says. They’ve read the headline.

0:28:27
They know it’s from a political source that they agree with. Liberals share this. Conservatives share this. They have a split-second gist of what that says. They know it’s anti-Obama or anti-Trump or whatever. And they share and like it and move on with their day. So there’s been research on this.

0:28:49
I don’t have it in front of me, but there’s been research on that that talks about how much time people actually spend engaging in these social media interactions.

PR: Yeah, and that’s the kind of thing I would probably share without thinking much about it.

BR: Exactly, exactly. You know, and so, people, and what they find is that oftentimes, if you look at the amount of time a person, it takes a person before, between the time they receive a social media post and they like or share it, they literally could not have read it.

0:29:18
I mean, it’s a 2,000 word post and they’re sharing it and liking it within five seconds. You know, for a fact, they didn’t read that. They have no idea what it says. Now, they have a general gist of it, but they don’t, or not. And so, it’s like reviewing a book that you haven’t read or signing off on a peer-reviewed study that you don’t understand. And so I think that that’s one of the lessons that jumps out at me is, you know, the notion of trusting other people. And it’s not that the King should have been distrustful necessarily. I mean, we all trust our friends.

0:29:55
But, you know, if you’re talking about fabric with… I mean, this is a fairy tale, grant it. You know, but I mean, if you’re dealing with an unusual claim, which this certainly was, then you need to be careful. Like anything else, you need to be careful about sharing it. The other thing that jumps out at me is, in this story, of course, it’s invisible thread that is wonderful and colorful and wonderful patterns that has this peculiar quality of only being seen and being recognized by people who are smart and competent for their job. Now, to us, if someone shared that today, we’d be like, yeah, I mean, nobody would believe that. It’s so outlandish. But here’s the thing, is that how different is that really from other implausible claims miracle cures psychic powers right you know I mean No, we can sit back and laugh at the silliness and the the outlandishness of this this feature this fairy tale, but if you look at it more closely There are even more preposterous claims That that circulate online the idea that water has memory… the idea that people can bend spoons with their minds.

0:31:16
Take your pick. This is not that outlandish.

PR: It’s funny because when I heard the line competent and smart, it rung just immediately in my head. That sort of selling point, that kind of salesmanship, it exists very much in the world nowadays. And you see people like Deepak Chopra and a lot of new agey stuff and religion, like televangelists and stuff. Anyone who’s trying to separate you from your money with something that’s a very vague concept like quantum anything, for that matter. They use kind of that, like, you’re competent and smart, so you understand this.

0:32:02
You know, and people, I mean, and that’s a very old sales tactic. I mean, it goes way back. And, you know, people like you, you know, you and me, you know, we’re cut from a different cloth. We know this is good. We know this is right. And it’s hard to say no.

BR: We don’t believe everything we’re told.

0:32:18
PR: Well, yeah, and that’s, I mean, and that’s, it’s like, so the language of these shills coming out to, you know, swindle the, the king. It’s not unlike what you see pretty regularly with, with crappy fake products on the internet and things like that because they use that same little appeal to ego and stuff. And even if you can see right through it, you know, there’s still a person out there who’s going to be like, I don’t see it, but I don’t want to be a dummy. So, you know, and then they get all, you know, it’s like a very interesting psychological trick, but it’s just funny that, you know, that really does apply nowadays quite a bit.

BR: It does. And, you know, when I was reading it, what brought to my mind is the falsifiability of the claim.

0:33:06
You know, I mean, obviously, if you have fabric that, you know, that is invisible to certain people, I mean, like, really? I mean, that, but, but here’s the thing is, is that, is that there was no way for the king and others to distinguish between, if you accept their premise that this is magical cloth and you know, if you’re, if you’re smart, you can, you can see it. There’s no way for the king and others to distinguish that. I mean, well, you know, if, if that premise is true, then I can’t see it. Therefore I must be stupid or not fit for office. And what jumped out at me was that, there are other similarly unfalsifiable claims.

0:33:44
For example, there’s a place not far from where I live, here in Albuquerque that offers holistic energy adjustments. You can go in there and you can have your aura adjusted. But here’s the thing, right, is that the people that go in and pay, you know, their 70 bucks or whatever else, it’s impossible to know whether that worked or not. It’s not debatable.

0:34:11
I mean, there is the aura and the energy and the chi they’re discussing has not been proven through science. It cannot be measured. There’s no there. And so, therefore, if you go into the place like that, which again, exists as a business in 2017, as I’m speaking, they’re selling that procedure right now.

0:34:37
But the principle is exactly the same, right? Because if I go in there and I pay my money, they’ll be like, oh, yes, here’s your aura and I siphoned off your energy and I balanced your energies. There’s no way to there’s no way to prove that there’s there’s no objective mechanism by which you can say that that did or didn’t happen.

PR: And and again, it’s it’s the same as it always was. So it is interesting to to look at how we view some things in mythology and fairy tales where we kind of look back at it and sort of have this like simple charm about it and we’re like, oh, those people were so simple back then. It’s like mentalities have not changed. I mean, humans have not evolved in that amount of time, you know, or at least measurably. I mean, we still think the same way. We still act relatively similar to how we used to and even though it’s a fictional tale, it’s based on ideas about people and society that are very true and have stood the test of time.

0:35:47
BR: And that’s one reason they’re universal. I mean, you know, these Andersen’s fairy tales and many others, of course, have been translated into virtually every language. I mean, I’m sure there are some that haven’t, but pretty much hundreds of languages beloved by children. I read it as a kid, my grandfather read it as a kid. It’s part of universal cultural tradition because it does speak to these universal themes and universal psychology and the human condition.

Celestia Ward: Hey Squares and hey strangers, Celestia here with your Skeptical Fortune Cookie for the week. Let’s see what we got.

0:36:33
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. This really is a great piece of skeptical wisdom, and its original form wasn’t in English. Here let’s see how badly I can butcher the original. Les doutes n’est pas une étape bien agréable, mais l’assurance est une étape ridicule. The source of this bon mot was the satirist, humanist, and author known as Voltaire. Born in Paris in 1694 as François-Marie Haraway, then later taking the nom de plume of Voltaire, he became a versatile writer who produced daring works in almost every genre, from poetry to plays to scientific papers. He was also a tireless correspondent, churning out more than 20,000 letters.

0:37:23
This quote is from one of his letters to Frederick II of Prussia. “‘Voltaire was ahead of his time in so many ways, “‘using his sharp and merciless pen “‘to rail against the Catholic Church “‘and many French institutions. “‘He advocated separation of church and state “‘and criticized the slave trade, and he is regarded by other intellectual giants as a visionary and one of the greatest literary figures of all time. Victor Hugo said that to name Voltaire is to characterize the entire 18th century. Voltaire also obviously recognized the importance of doubt and how it’s necessary for any intellectual to accept the slight discomfort of not being blindly absolutely sure of something. The notion of certainty being absurd really calls forth the entirety of science, where the most sure principles are still expressed as theories, and no observation is ever taken as absolute, merely as something tested to various degrees. So, when somebody asks you if you’re certain of something, you can always quote Voltaire, doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. Now, back to Ben and Pasquale.

0:38:27
BR: Another aspect that jumps out at me in the story of the course is that people don’t want to challenge authority. And it’s interesting in the Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s not just the emperor they’re afraid of. By proxy, they’re also, of course, concerned about losing their jobs because they’re not fit for office. I mean, that’s one of the themes here, them being stupid. But it’s also, they’re also, certainly in the second half of the story, you see the social aspect. You see the peer pressure. And you know, it’s that people don’t want to be thought stupid by their friends, by their neighbors, by their family, by their co-workers.

0:39:23
And so there’s this sort of self-censorship, a sort of self-policing. And I think today that takes the form of public shaming. I mean in other ways, but also in that way. I mean Jon Ronson did a book on that a couple of years back, and he wrote about this, where, you know, so I think there’s a certain self-censorship for people who are concerned about being piled on online, for example, or, you know, or being shamed or attacked online for saying something that might be truthful and accurate, but may sort of go against the prevailing narratives or grain. Right?

0:40:08
And, you know, in some cases it might be someone saying something that’s true but not politically correct. In other cases it might just be someone who’s saying something that people don’t want to hear. And so that’s, again, the notion of not challenging authority. And you know, you can look at it as cowardice, you can look at it as being afraid to assert your individuality, or you can just see it as, you know, as someone seeing the truth and being afraid to say the truth because they’re going to be attacked and reviled and shunned and called dirty names online. And they’re like, you know what, I see truth here, but it’s not worth it to me to be piled on by strangers calling me all sorts of names.

0:40:57
PR: Yeah, that’s definitely a really interesting observation in the sense that it’s something that has risen to a much more common degree now because, I mean, your average everyday person, you know, 30 years ago could pretty much say whatever they wanted in their group of friends and they might get corrected by a friend or something. But it was just so isolated. It wasn’t, you know, it had to be part of the culture in order for it to be something that, you know, and you’d have to be in a public situation, you know, but now we live in a public situation 24-7 in that we’re in social media and now you do have to watch what you say. And so there is that sort of having to pick your battles thing. And that’s an interesting thing about this story is that people, you know, it’s maybe to some degree cognitive dissonance, but more likely it’s just people, I mean, in the way that Andersen put forth in the story, it was people kind of afraid to admit their own incompetence and or afraid that that was the truth about them.

0:42:05
And then you know having to make the kid be the delivery for that, the truth, for the truth is really it’s strong. But it’s interesting because yeah it’s almost every aspect of this story has a very modern applicable, you know Parallel…

BR: Yeah, and you know I I wonder you know if If the story was set today would the child not say that the Emperor has new clothes online because he was afraid of getting piled on and shamed and ridiculed and blocked that

PR: yeah, it’s a fair That’s a fair question. It really is but yeah.

BR: I just I want to come back briefly to to again that the last line which as we mentioned is really the kicker.

0:42:52
I mean, there’s the second to last line, which is the kid exposes it, and in the story, it’s not like people disbelieve the kid. They’re like, yeah, the kid’s right. And again, they just carry on. And as I said before, it doesn’t have a happy ending, and the leader is shown to be wrong, and he admits to himself he’s wrong. In both the slightly different versions of the story, he says, I’m probably naked.

0:43:21
This sucks, but you know what, I’m gonna carry on. And so you have this notion of a leader who is shown to be wrong and may privately admit he’s wrong, he or she is wrong, and yet goes on anyway because of the sunk cost fallacy, or because they can’t admit they’re wrong. And they just parade on. And there’s lots of parallels today.

PR: Definitely. I mean, that’s nearly expected in politics these days.

0:43:56
You very rarely have politicians coming out and being like, OK, I heard you, and I was wrong, and we need to take a different look at this. Instead it’s like you just get straight denial. By the time people are hearing this episode, it would have been a few weeks ago, but with the way the White House was responding to the initial questions about the Paris Accord and how they were just being really dodgy about it and not saying anything. It’s like, because people calling out politicians, it’s very rare that they actually change course. In fact, if anything, we’ve created a climate where changing course on an idea would be called flip-flopping and they’d be criticized for it. It’s like being honest with yourself and with everyone is all of a sudden also a fault.

0:44:55
BR: Right. Yeah, there’s no – a lot of politicians probably feel that they’re screwed no matter what they do. If they correct themselves and they say, you know, I was wrong, then they get criticized for being wrong. No one’s right all the time. So I think that’s one of the problems that I see with the sort of the contiguousness of society and social debate is that we don’t give people the wiggle room and the latitude and just the room to sort of admit that they’re wrong and correct themselves and say, you know, that’s what I want.

0:45:31
I want a leader who is willing to say, you know what, I was wrong. I had this position. I looked into it more deeply the situation has changed the sit and therefore my thinking on it has changed and and that’s what I want, you know because the world is not static the world is constantly changing Yeah, and the decisions you make on one set of facts at one point may not be valid two days later two months later two minutes later, and and the world’s constantly in flux and if you if you if you if you latch on to these crystallized decisions just and you hold on to them just for the sake of remaining consistent, you have a problem because you’re basing that decision on old data.

0:46:14
PR: Exactly. And hence the emperor continued on his parade.

BR: Exactly, and hence he did. So I just want to touch briefly on I wrote a blog actually was an article in the Skeptical Briefs Newsletter which I which I edit back in fall 2012 and it was recently posted online and the title is The Wisdom of Not Understanding. And I wasn’t thinking about this this fable when I wrote it. But in the back of my mind, I realized there’s some themes there that are interesting.

0:46:56
And we’ll post a link on the notes page. But I did just want to briefly touch on, I mean, just if I may humbly quote for myself. I don’t like doing that, but I already phrased it in a good way. So rather than me stumbling and stammering through it in my usual half-assed way, I thought that I would just say what I said before. I said, “too often we are embarrassed to admit that we don’t understand what we’re told. We don’t want to appear stupid to the speaker or others in the audience, but more people should ask questions because others may be just as confused and not speak up.

0:47:35
There’s no shame in not understanding something, and it’s a good lesson to remember that. Asking for clarification not only helps both the speaker and the listener communicate more effectively, it’s also a powerful tool for revealing BS. Fuzzy thinking and fuzzy language often go hand in hand. The next time you hear something you don’t understand, ask for clarification. You don’t have to be apologetic about it, and the situation doesn’t have to be confrontational. Those with science and facts and evidence on their side will be happy to explain what they mean”. And again, I sort of just in the back of my mind, I was like, hey, there’s a theme there. And it’s about speaking up and calling BS on something. Again, it doesn’t need to be mean-spirited or aggressive, just like you said this thing and I honestly don’t understand what that means. And it can be done in a very polite, engaging way. But oftentimes just asking someone to clarify will sort of help separate the wheat from the chaff because people are like, well, okay, maybe I don’t really understand as well as I did. So anyway.

PR: I do like that quote. It really gets to the core of being able to be a good skeptic, but just watching out for yourself in general because that’s the truth about skepticism is that while there’s a philosophical and scholarly theme to it, you know, in the way we use it in modern day on our podcast and things like that, it really is a survival tool.

0:49:11
Skepticism goes back to our oldest ancestors, learning how to determine between real and falsehood and being able to recognize a real danger. I’m sure we wouldn’t have even evolved to the level we have had we not been able to discern these things because that’s the way we learned about the dangers of animals and the dangers of plants and the dangers of things that we ingest and what could kill us and it all you know it all was skepticism in practice.

BR: It’s a scientific process, you experiment, you use control groups, you say well if you know my cousin ate that plant and he’s dead, yeah so maybe I won’t eat that plant. He didn’t fall off a cliff, he died you know hemorrhaging all sorts of weird fluids from his anus.

0:50:01
So maybe I’m going to skip that plant. Or give it to a friend of mine who owes me money. Yeah. Who knows, right?

PR: Exactly. And so it is really cool to think about that sometimes. But I think as your quote kind of gets at the idea that you need to be willing to ask for clarification, and also in the title of the article, the idea that you just have to be okay with not knowing and being okay with knowing when you don’t know. It reminds me of when I was a child one time. I was a little bit of a know-it-all when I was maybe, I think I was around 10 years old at this time. I was kind of a know-it-all because I thought that you had to have an answer for everything.

0:50:54
I was like, yeah, and it wasn’t that I was necessarily making stuff up, but I was usually just repeating incomplete information. And kids do this. I don’t know if I was necessarily that much of a know-it-all. So, but long story short, my cousin asked me something about dinosaurs. Now I loved dinosaurs when I was a kid, I still love them. And I knew a considerable amount of information about dinosaurs. And he asked me a question about one, and it was one that I wasn’t real familiar with, and I just was like, you know, I don’t know.

0:51:35
And my grandmother stopped us in our tracks and she said, I am so proud of you for saying that. You need to be able to say that when you don’t know something, just say you don’t know. And I thought about that and that lesson has just stuck with me so long. Just my grandmother putting her hand on my shoulder and telling me to be okay with saying, I don’t know. And, uh, and I kinda, you know, that article reminded me of that story.

BR: No, that’s a great story. I’m actually getting kind of tingles. That’s a beautiful story. That is an important lesson. My story isn’t nearly as heartwarming or profound, but a couple of years, about four or five years ago, I remember I was walking on a street somewhere. I think it was Los Angeles or something. A tourist stopped me and asked where something was.

0:52:27
And I was about, I didn’t know, I was in the general area, but I’m not from LA, and I was about to say, oh yeah, I think it’s a couple blocks down, and I realized, I don’t know. It’s just like, I’m not, I wanted to say, oh, you came to the right person. Thank you for asking me. I know everything, and you’re fortunate enough to find me out of this crowd, and I can tell you exactly where it is. You know, I don’t know.

0:52:54
I would love to seem authoritative and smart and tell you exactly where it is, but then that means you’re walking around for an extra 20 minutes because I’m not comfortable enough admitting I don’t know. So I just said, you know, I’d ask somebody else, you know, I’m not from around here. And as grateful as they would have been for me to give them information, not knowing that it was wrong, I’m sure they were far more grateful to me for just telling them, I don’t know. So they could find someone who did know.

0:53:27
And so when I ask for directions, if I’m in an unfamiliar city or terrain, I often ask, if I’m asking someone for directions, I’ll say, do you know where something is? And I’ll add, if you don’t know, that’s okay. And just to sort of let them know that I don’t expect them to know everything.

0:53:58
PR: So it really is fascinating to kind of look into things like fairy tales. Something that, you know, while we all kind of have that understanding that there’s the moral to them and everything, that we don’t really think about, you know, how they apply to life in general in society. And it was really interesting breaking this story down, you know, and the political climate we’re in right now, it seems shockingly relevant. But I guess everyone would say that every every you know, whatever but right, you know but it feels very relevant right now and we, sometimes need to be reminded of these stories because especially that ending we didn’t you know most of us just I’d myself included had not given a thought to the what happened after the little boy and and It’s really fascinating and I think it definitely opens the door for us to cover other folklore and fairy tales in the future because it sparked a great interest in me to do the comparative study of these to society these days.

0:55:02
BR: Yeah, that’s one thing that I’m really enjoying doing with this show is looking at lesser known or more obscure tangents and angles into skepticism and critical thinking. And that’s why I love doing the show with you. And we get into interesting stuff. At least, it’s interesting to me. Maybe the listeners are bored stiff.

PR: We’re having fun.

BR: Yeah, we’re having fun, so screw you guys.

0:55:28
But no, we appreciate you. And feel free to donate to our Patreon. But no, I mean, it’s easy to sort of just hit on the main, OK, we’re bashing UFOs, we’re bashing Bigfoot, we’re bashing the conspiracy theory. That’s all well and good, but there’s, you know, I think it’s interesting and fun to sort of get into the lesser-known nuances and sort of explore the ideas and that’s one of the fun parts of the show and I hope the listeners like it.

PR: Yeah, I agree. And I mean, I have never done the level of research in my life that uh, college included,

0:56:07
No, it’s just the level of research on little things I tend to dismiss, which is really expanding my horizons quite a bit. And I think that fairy tales are the perfect example of throwing a little more into your interpretation than just your average dismissive, you know, oh yeah, I remember that when I was a kid. I mean, there’s a lot to this. And I love this topic.

BR: Thanks once again to Squaring the Strange and listening to us ramble on about topics mysterious and mundane.

PR: Yeah, and definitely be sure to check out our Patreon. I know we hammer this every week, but that’s how we keep the lights on. That’s how we pay the bills. That’s how we bring this content to you. Go to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. You can become a patron. You can pledge everything from a dollar to as much as you could possibly want to throw at us.

0:57:15
BR: Bajillions of dollars, literally. Which is probably still a dollar. Probably.

PR: No, but yeah, so thank you guys to our current patrons. Also, thank you to Amy Freshour-Kelly, our sponsor-level patron. And also at Patreon.com, we do have a lot of special perks for you guys. We’ve still got the Duppy repellent, I think.

BR: We have a few left. We have some cool bonus materials and things you won’t be finding on the podcast.

0:57:46
PR: Awesome. Awesome. And of course, you can always check us out at Twitter, at Squaring the Strange, Instagram, at Squaring Strange, Facebook, facebook.com forward slash squaring the strange, and www.

BR: And we’re still working on the MySpace.

PR: MySpace. Yeah, that’s tough, man. I feel like it’s really locked down these days. Okay. Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens Yeah, we’re working on it.

BR: But the hamsters on that.

PR: Yeah, exactly Pretty soon. We’re gonna be sending our podcast via carrier pigeon too I’m sure Stay tuned for our next episode Next week, which will be we’re gonna have our our content producer Celestia Ward, here in-house.

0:58:29
She’s coming out to New Mexico to visit us and see how long she can tolerate being in here with us.

BR: With two guys who haven’t bathed in a couple days. It’ll be fun.

PR: Yeah. I’ll make sure to turn on the fan.

BR: I appreciate that.

PR: So, until next week, we bid you adieu.

BR: Bye-bye. Bye.

0:58:48