0:00:00
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.

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0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Pascual and with me as always is…

BR: Ben here in the corner.

PR: And we have our beloved producer here. How are you doing, Celestia?

0:00:37
Celestia Ward: Hey, I’m not here in the corner. I’m far far away but thanks to modern technology I’m kind of like in the corner.

PR: Yeah it’s it’s the magic of the future really.

BR: It’s crazy.

PR: What a time to be alive.

BR: Exactly. When you can have a virtual roundtable and yet they can be thousands of miles apart.

PR: Yeah.

Announcer: We interrupt our program to bring you a special broadcast.

PR: Hey folks Pascual here. I decided I was just going to punch in over a segment we had recorded originally the other day and it was talking about Patreon and the new fees that they had announced. The patrons may have gotten an email saying that Patreon was talking about putting a new per transaction fee on all Patreon accounts and the consensus was that it’s not a great idea. They said that it was going to get more money for the creators but we don’t want our patrons to be paying more than they think they are paying and I don’t think it’s fair even if it does increase how much we make we’d rather encourage that through your own donations rather than forced through collecting fees through the website so uh… the good news is the a patron world that back they’re not going to be doing that um… they sent out another email just the other day and uh… sounds like everything’s in the fine so uh… current patrons don’t expect any changes uh… for the time being in in for the foreseeable future uh… i think they’re gonna figure out a different way to restructure their payments and uh… in the meantime of those of you who have subscribed at the skeptic rate level a slush just wanted me to let you guys know that you’re gonna be getting a number of additional items this this month it’s gonna be I think five maybe six items in this month’s kept a crate special holiday skeptic rate as a the time that this episode comes out is probably about your last day or two to subscribe at the $5 and up level they skeptic rate otherwise you will just start getting them in January so anyway back to the show.

BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. Today we’ll be talking… what are we talking about today, Pascual?

PR: Well, today, um, we’re… well…

BR: I apparently don’t have a clue. I’m here in my corner, it’s not well lit, and I don’t know what we’re talking about.

0:03:28
CW: I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about something that makes Pasquale skeptical. Yeah, I believe so. What are you skeptical of?

0:03:36
PR: Well, this week, as we all know, we have a big holiday coming up. All joking aside, we all know there’s the pagan roots of it and everything, but Christmas is upon us. I thought we would dig into the so-called reason for the season as we know it today in the Western world, and that’s Jesus and the mythology that has kind of led us to this point.

BR: Or axial tilt, depending on who you’re talking to.

PR: Every Christmas you get a lot of skeptics out there who post a lot of stuff on the internet about various roots of the holidays and we all make the jokes about Saturnalia and various things, Sol Invictus and stuff that has to do with worshipping Kronos or Saturn. And it all kind of falls on this period now. The root of it, of course, is that the winter solstice happens. And that’s, you know, the humans, since the dawn of communication at the very least, have been able to communicate the changes and they’ve been able to acknowledge them and notice that, you know, the days get shorter and then they get longer and…

BR: And celebrate them, especially in the olden days when, you know, people’s lives were much more tied to the seasons. You know, in our modern days where our lives are insulated, you know, our lives are not nearly as tied to the vagaries of the weather as they once were.

0:05:20
PR: Yeah, yeah, and it’s very cool how early humans were, I kind of see it as, it’s very likely the reason they started celebrating these things was because there was a dependability to it, you know, and the fact that the seasons would reliably change was reason to celebrate because they’re like, well at least there’s one thing consistent about our life. Who knows?

BR: Half the town died of the plague, but boy, winter’s coming, that’s great.

PR: But it’s really interesting to think how far back we’ve had this down to a science. And it’s very fascinating. But, you know we know that this is the the the winter solstice is a big deal for a lot of lot of religions and then historically we’ve celebrated them as a as a species and uh…

0:06:09
CW: When you think about it it’s kind of an early form of conspiracy theory cuz I mean they didn’t have the internet back then and they didn’t have daily news to look at but they could monitor when the sun came up and you know how where the sun was in the sky and the temperature and all that. And they realized, I’m sure there are a lot of old white guys drinking their ale going, there has to be something behind this.

0:06:35
PR: Yeah, exactly.

0:06:36
CW: This can’t be happening for no reason. Somebody’s in charge of this.

0:06:40
PR: Yeah.

0:06:41
BR: It’s all part of the plan.

0:06:43
CW: You got gods that are dying or being sacrificed and then coming back to life and that indicates that that’s the reason for the season, I guess.

0:06:52
PR: Yeah, and it’s really fascinating because some of the earliest, like when we’re talking about Saturnalia and the more cosmic oriented gods, you know, we’re talking about people noticing the changes in the sky as the seasons change. And so, you know, it was in fact, if anything, it was actually very closely tied to nature when it started. So there was an accuracy to not necessarily believing that there was a big angry sun god or something like that, but that they realized that the shortest day of the year affected them in terms of sunlight, which meant that obviously it was related to the sun god. And so they celebrated it the Sun were doing something different, you know, a major change is happening to the Sun and so in a way, you know, they really were acknowledging a very rudimentary scientific astrological change.

BR: And that’s regardless of any sort of virgin births that may or may not have come later, right?

PR: And that’s what brings us into the Jesus factor is, you know, how did we end up here? How did Jesus end up being quote-unquote born on December 25th? How did we come to that point? What mythology lent to that? I’m sure our audience is a little more hip to the mythological parallels between Jesus and other religions.

BR: We have smart listeners.

PR: I’ll be honest with you, we do. I know we do. We get emails from them all the time.

0:08:27
CW: Adam ruins everything. He just did a very nice video wrap-up of all the different celebrations around the time of the winter solstice. It’s a nice little concise thing. I recommend it. But then you’ve got the whole other end of the spectrum where there’s quite a few people who are saying, well, regardless of when Jesus was supposed to be, have been born, was he really born? Was he a real person? You know?

0:08:56
BR: Right.

0:08:56
CW: That’s a rabbit hole that, oh, my gosh, we can do a whole episode on that. Oh, no. Did I just get the ding?

0:09:01
PR: Yeah, well, you would have, but the ding machine is turned off.

BR: Well, it’s a version of a principle we’ve talked about before, Hyman’s categorical imperative, right? Before you explain something, be sure there’s something to explain. And it’s the same thing with the issues of Jesus. Before we start trying to go into all the different possibilities of what his life was like, let’s back up a few steps and just see, was this person a real person?

PR: It’s a valid question and surprisingly difficult to parse. I have done as much research as I humanly could. I mean, I’ve been following this I would say since about 2005 or so. There was a documentary that came out by a guy in L.A. It was called The God That Wasn’t There.

BR: Oh, I remember that. Yeah, and a couple of people we know were in that. I never was religious, but I never really questioned the idea that there was probably an historical rabbi that had something to do with the Christ origin.

BR: It’s plausible.

PR: And so it really kind of threw that on its head and for a while there I was becoming increasingly skeptical of the existence of a man named Jesus and I read a lot about it and I watched various, I mean there have been a number of documentaries, probably the worst of which being that Zeitgeist movie that came out.

0:10:29
CW: Yeah, I was about to say, be careful quoting documentaries because this Jesus mythicism is also in Zeitgeist. And it is one of the few things, possibly the only thing, that I see touted by skeptics, and yet also it’s relegated to the fringe. It is a fringe theory. This is not accepted by mainstream scholars, but it brings to question, you know, we’ve got two different strains of study here. And if I can diverge for a moment, I took a class on Genesis my freshman year of college, just because I wanted to see what it was all about.

0:11:07
BR: God, I miss Phil Collins.

PR: Peter Gabriel, too.

0:11:11
CW: It’s the book of Genesis. It was taught by a classicist who showed us all the intricacies of Hebrew and how different things had been interpolated over the years and how different meanings meant, you know, different words meant different things back in the day that it was written. It was very, very classicist-oriented. And then at the same time I was taking this class, I was taking Bible study from the Christian Students Association.

PR: Oh wow.

CW: And it was like completely different approaches to studying an ancient text and you know, I don’t know whether or not the the professor I had teaching the book of Genesis was atheist, but I’m fairly certain she was looking back. But just going down the Jesus mythicist skeptics, you know, people that are in the camp of, we’re pretty sure he doesn’t exist. They’re approaching it from one way and they’re parsing out every single little word. It’s like nitpicking with a fine-tooth comb every single instance of this phrase or that phrase in the book. And there’s value to that and I’m glad they’re doing it because I would never have the patience, and then you’ve got the other side saying well, does that really matter? I mean You could you could you could dissect an instance of something and Take it one way if you’re looking for the classicist, you know, you know Jesus Jesus agnostic version of like well he possibly didn’t exist because it said this way and you can take that same phrase if you’re being an apologist and say, well, no, obviously it’s there like that because it was inspired by God. So maybe the same three scholars were inspired with the same phrase, by God.

0:13:05
PR: Totally. And it is a valid argument from their perspective, at least. So it’s definitely…

BR: God did it pretty much the ends the story. There you go.

0:13:18
PR: All right. But yeah, that is fascinating. And I really, you know, I’ve gotten to the point in my life, you know, I studied a bit of religion. I did comparative religion in college, and I also went to a Catholic school for a year when I was 14. And so I became pretty intimately familiar with the Bible through Catholic school. And I, you know, even the nuns were, the sister, I don’t want to throw her under the bus, so I’m not gonna mention any names, but she was very, she was very much in the sort of like, a Bible is a metaphor camp. And it really changed a lot of how I thought about the idea of the story of Jesus, because I’m like, well, if it’s all metaphorical, you know, it’s, it’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, it definitely makes it more relatable as a person who’s not religious. But so it was a little strange, but coming into the, you know, the hardcore, like the people who are like, I mean, there are people who will just who just say Jesus is a myth. And this is also where the conspiratorial kind of element bleeds into it. Because, and this is where it can get really hard because the skeptics have to build kind of a wall between themselves and the conspiracy theorists. And it’s that you, on one hand, I think it’s valid to question the existence of a man that it was based on. However, there is a lot of stuff that gets stacked onto that, like a conspiracy by the Romans and a conspiracy by Jews and like there’s all these little like nuanced conspiracies that they try to inject into it like where they’re like well you know they needed a better way to control people and it’s like well you know I mean let’s answer the question did he or did he not before we even get into that but I think that’s more or less how how it kind of got into like that Zeitgeist movie is you know you got these guys who already latch on to fringe ideas and and they they like the idea of questioning something that is so earth-shattering to so many people and so it’s you know very it’s a very careful game dancing around that as a skeptic because it’s you don’t want to fall into that camp too easily.

0:15:32
CW: Well, yeah, well mentioning that that there aren’t like your sister who shall remain unnamed, your teacher from Catholic school saying that she believed a lot of the Bible was allegorical, there’s a lot of Christians who do believe that. And reading deep into what some of the mythicists believed, like Carrier was saying that there was a sect of Christians in the first century that he found record of that believed that Christ himself was an allegory and they taught him as an allegory and then and then later on which has happened with a lot of other gods he was euhemerized, what a great word euhemerized which was they sort of took him from a celestial God and started writing him into stories as if he were a real person because that would give the people who were teaching those stories a grounding in authority, like, well, no, no, no, you might say that you have revelations, but I mean, this, my church here, this, we learned at the feet of Jesus Christ himself. So there. So an argument from authority, you know, kind of, it gets underneath a lot of the Jesus mythicism and the arguments that state, hey, this guy maybe didn’t even exist at all, or he was invented and then said to have existed. You know, the existence came after the deification, not the other way around.

0:17:03
BR: You know, it’s interesting, when you’re saying that, something jumped out at me as a parallel with Atlantis. You know, the story of Atlantis, of course, came from Plato’s dialogues. And if you read his dialogues, it’s very clearly a metaphor. There’s a whole story of Atlantis. In fact, Atlantis in his dialogues is an evil city. It’s odd that it’s been sort of mythologized and idealized by New Ages and others, but the Atlantis that Plato described was not a beautiful, fun-loving plot. They were the evil doer trying to take over the world. But what’s interesting is if you look at, for example, the work that Ken Fraiser and others have talked about, these days many people believe Atlantis was real. I just saw parallels there between something that was originally taken as an allegory and is later sort of reinterpreted. Well, no, this is all literal. Like, really?

0:18:09
CW: Well, it’s interesting you bring that up because there was another parallel that I found in a number of places online, again, mostly Richard Carrier is using this particular example, Roswell. He says, if you don’t believe that a story can metamorph in a very short period of years, he said, let’s look at the Roswell incident. It began with some sticks and tinfoil and within 30 years the story changed completely and was re-injected into the consciousness of the people.

BR: That’s true.

CW: In a completely different way. And it’s the same similar sort of thing. He noted that, you know, there’s, you know, Christ is said to have appeared, taught, get, you know, get crucified, and then there’s a 70 period of complete silence. Much like Roswell came out, yeah, sticks and tinfoil, and then complete silence for 30 years, and then an explosion of all sorts of stuff that doesn’t even really resemble what actually happened. So does this prove that Jesus was, you know, fictional? No. But they certainly give you some things to think about.

0:19:28
PR: Yeah, I agree. I think that, you know, as of now, I’ll say that I’m an agnostic in the debate. I’ve read enough on both sides now. Full disclosure, I think my biggest foundation that I stand on when it comes to debates like this comes from my parents, my mother, who was an anthropologist and archaeologist, and my father, who is a retired history professor. They’ve always kind of taught me to understand that a lot of what we consider to be widely known, widely accepted history comes from very limited sources. So I think that’s the main reason I’m agnostic, isn’t because I think Carrier makes a lot of good points in the sense that there just is not a lot to go on in terms of verifying this person as being real. On the other hand, we do this with a lot of people in history and a lot of events in history. Could there have been a guy named Jesus that did some stuff around the turn of the millennia or the two millennia ago? I think it’s plausible, but we don’t have a lot of information to go on in terms of the human being and all the fantastic stories certainly share a lot of parallels with other gods and deities throughout history, so it’s tricky, it’s really tricky.

0:20:52
CW: Can I just, as a parting gift to our listeners, can I share details of a particular parallel goddess figure? That I discovered. I’m sure you guys have heard of Ishtar. I read a little bit more about her. Apparently she was also called Inanna, and Carrier identifies her as the only pre-Christian crucified, crucified then resurrected God figure. There’s other apologists, biblicalcatholic.com contests that she wasn’t crucified, rather they killed her and hung her corpse on a hook. So that’s not really crucifying. But the way that she got killed, and if you want to translate this into a holiday tradition at your home, I highly recommend it, is being a power hungry and seductive goddess. She wanted to take over the underworld too, so she went through the seven gates that took her to hell and through each of the seven gates, she took off an item of her clothing until by the end of it she was naked and powerless and that’s how she was killed because she disrobed and lost all of her power. So I’m seeing a lot of possibilities for holiday traditions based on reenacting that. It would be a lot more fun than a living nativity scene, and just go with it.

0:22:12
BR: But you can’t wear more than seven items of clothing, apparently. Because you’ve got seven gates, right?

0:22:18
CW: Yeah, seven gates, seven articles of clothing.

(MUSIC)

0:22:23
PR: So today we are going to be talking about something very important to skepticism and science and that is replication and the importance of replication. So what is replication, Ben?

BR: Replication. Replication.

PR: We need a sad trombone sound.

BR: No, replication, I mean, it’s one of the hallmarks of the scientific method, of course. I mean, the idea behind science is that it’s universal and its tenets and principles are the same throughout the world. There’s not different gravities, different photosynthesis. The processes, for example, in geology, you have uniformitarianism, the idea that what you find at a certain depth is going to be the same in the older layers, of course, farther down, things like that. So this is why there isn’t really such thing as a Jewish science or a black science or a Australian science or a French science. There is science. And if you conduct an experiment, then you should get the same result if assuming that the controls are the same. Regardless of who’s doing the experiment, you can be in Sydney, Australia, you can be in Boston, you can be in Paris, and as long as the conditions are the same, you should get the same result. So that is one of the hallmarks of science is making sure that the results can be replicated by people who are, ideally people who don’t have a vested interest in it. Of course, in the real world, you know, if you don’t care about something, you don’t test it. Right. You know, it’s a-

0:24:40
PR: You don’t pay someone to test it.

0:24:41
BR: Right, and actually, this is one of the things, you know, when sometimes I sort of roll my eyes when I see people saying, oh yeah, well sure, you know, maybe that drug result test found that it was effective, but that was paid for by pharmaceuticals. Yeah. Who else is going to pay for it?

PR: Are you going to pay for it?

BR: Yeah, the auto industry is not paying for pharmaceutical tests. That would be pharmaceuticals. Now, there may or may not be bias in there, but just the mere fact that it was done, you know, the funding was partly came from, the drug industry does not invalidate its conclusion. So anyway, there’s a couple of different branches that I thought would be interesting to look into. One of them is replication in science generally. And again, that’s sort of the hallmarks of the scientific process because, of course, experiments are notoriously difficult to do, to design. I mean, there’s, you know, research design is very difficult, you know, control groups, statistical analyses. I mean, doing experiments is really hard.

0:25:56
PR: Yeah.

0:25:57
BR: Science is hard.

0:25:58
CW: Yeah. Just the concept of double blinding has escaped a lot of people who are doing so-called science. Designing experiments to get the human element out of them is notoriously difficult.

0:26:11
BR: It is, and the average person doesn’t really have a good understanding of just how complicated and how difficult it can be to do a good experiment. I’ve seen this personally, having tested people who claim to have psychic abilities or claim to have dowsing abilities. My friend Jim Underdown, IIG in Los Angeles, has spent years testing claimants who want to bid at Randi’s million dollar prize, which unfortunately is no longer available but was for many years. And so, anyway, when you explain to somebody, okay, this is how we test what you claim to do, they’re like, what? It’s like, it’s like, yeah, but yeah, but I do this in my garage on Tuesdays. That’s fine. If, if, if, if you can move metal with your mind in your garage on Tuesdays, you should be able to do it in a controlled condition on Saturday. I mean, there’s there’s no real reason why the day of the week, you know, anyway, so so that’s one of the one of the main reasons why replication is so important is to help weed out experimenter bias. Because it’s so that there are so many factors that go into an experiment and it can easily you know go one way or the other and if you have someone who’s totally independent conducting the experiment that adds strength to it. So you know if one experiment has this result and 30 more say exactly the same thing done over the course of years by different experimenters in different places, that’s pretty strong evidence. That’s, you know, it doesn’t mean it’s rock-solid, doesn’t mean that the 31st might not prove that it’s wrong, it just means that the overall weight of the evidence is there’s probably something there. On the other hand, if you do an experiment that later can’t be replicated, for example, Andrew Wakefield’s research into the MMR vaccine and autism. Then it’s like, hold on here. You did this, you had this published, and other people who are equally concerned about children, they’re doing this research and they’re not coming up with what you came up with this and no one else can do this? That’s a red flag there’s something wrong. In the research design there’s fraud, who knows. That’s the one branch. And then the other branch is one that I sort of focus on, which is replication in, for example, skeptical investigation. And I’ll talk a little more about that a little bit later, but for example, the idea that skeptics have the burden to disprove a contested image or film. For example, the classic one that I always get is the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film. Oh sure. Yeah, right. It’s been the sort of the holy grail for Bigfoot evidence.

0:29:05
CW: Ah, the shaggy, blurry, walking through the thing.

0:29:08
PR: Yes, our friend Sharon Hill just did an episode on that actually on her podcast.

BR: Since the Johnson administration. Yeah. Just to be clear, since the Johnson administration, since that time, this remains the stellar evidence. And yet, for decades, Bigfoot believers, one of their so-called or alleged aces in the hole is, okay, well, how come no one’s replicated it? As if, oh, done. Okay, I guess you’re right. Okay, it must be legitimate because no one’s replicated. Well, there’s actually very good reasons for that. And we’ll touch on that in a bit.

0:29:48
Ian Harris: This is comedian Ian Harris, and you’re listening to Squaring the Strange. Check out my new comedy special Extraordinary dropping December 12 on iTunes, Amazon, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and virtually every video on demand site.

0:30:03
BR: So, you know, speaking about the Patterson-Gimlin film, the so-called gold standard of Bigfoot evidence, you know, one of the things that you often heard was this notion that the film either could not be replicated or had not been replicated. And when you, it’s sort of an easy gotcha for if you’re not actually thinking about it, it’s like, oh, yeah, there you go. It’s like, well, no, hold on. Not there you go. Let’s back up a minute. You know, for example, one of the claims about the alleged Bigfoot, which is most likely a guy in a suit, is that its movement was inhuman and could not be duplicated by humans.

0:30:49
PR: Yeah.

0:30:50
BR: I mean, that was a common claim until a friend of mine did it. David Degling, who’s an anthropologist at the University of Florida, he wrote a book on Bigfoot and he did some research on the Patterson-Gimlin film and he found that when humans adopt what he called the complaint gate, humans humans can absolutely mimic exactly what you see in the film. So it’s simply not true. So, you know, there are certain there are certain aspects of the Patterson-Gimlin film that were said to be, you know, beyond beyond being replicated, that is, you know, impossible to replicate.

0:31:34
CW: And that’s just just if I could dart in here, that the statement that no human can replicate that particular gait, anybody who’s watched Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks knows that human beings walk in different ways depending on their bone structure, their weight, their height, their proportions. A linebacker walks differently than a jockey. And a male walks differently than a female. And depending on, you know, somebody who’s had a hip replacement walks differently than somebody who hasn’t, and really not being able to replicate the way that whoever is in the costume, if it is a costume, which I’m pretty sure it is, not being able to replicate the way that that figure walks doesn’t prove anything. It proves that maybe that guy’s got a limp that nobody else in the world has. If it were the case that no human could walk like that, it would just mean no human except that guy.

0:32:31
BR: Right, yeah, it doesn’t really mean anything. And a further complicating factor is that it’s not known exactly what speed the Patterson-Gilman film was shot at. So there’s debate about that. So if you don’t know what speed it was shot at, then you can’t say, all you can say is that, you know, if it was shot at this speed, my opinion is that a person can’t duplicate this. Well, first of all, you’re wrong. Second of all, you don’t even know what speed it was shot at. But anyway, so it’s, but that’s, that’s a common claim that you hear. I remember a few years ago, I was asked by an author to review his book. And I didn’t really want to, you know, but I was like, all right, fine, send it to me, I’ll take a look at it. And he had written, it was a self-published book, it was a pretty thick one, I think 300 and some pages, clearly spent a lot of time on it, and I sort of took pity on him, how much work he’d obviously put into it, not necessarily research work, but at least punching keyboards. And I gave him some feedback, I said, in fact, I have a quote here, I said that you have a big red herring argument at the bottom of page 36. He said, not a single group has been able to successfully erect even a scaled-down pyramid. And this was he was talking about the pyramids of Giza. And said that, quote, even a skeptical community should be able to build an exact replica. And I pointed out to him and said, what? I said, first of all, there’s all sorts of problems with this statement in this published book. I said, first of all, let’s talk about the burden of proof. Let’s just begin with the basics here. So the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, such as that aliens did it. Not the ordinary claim, such as that ancient Egyptians did it. So the burden of proof is already on you to show that ancient Egyptians couldn’t have done it. And I said, by your logic, geologists who counter creationist claims about the Grand Canyon would have to spend billions of dollars to divert a river over a plain to prove that it was created over millennia by water erosion instead of created that way by God 4,000 years ago. I mean, seriously, that’s what he’s saying. This is the logical conclusion of his statements. Like, well, okay, I think, you know, if you’re saying God didn’t do it and this was done by evolution, then you do it. Like, all right, give me a hose, give me a big hose in a long time and check back with me and we’ll do this. And so, it’s, you know, the idea of replicating a controversial event or project to test its validity, it sounds simple in theory. And this is one of the reasons I think it gained such traction among the believers. They go, hey, I haven’t seen the exact replica of the Patterson-Gilman film. I haven’t seen the exact replica of the Great Pyramid.

0:35:28
CW: And I’ve got a Great Pyramid about two miles from my house.

BR: It is pretty impressive.

CW: It might not be an exact replica of the Pyramid in Giza, but it’s a people have been building pyramids since they you know yeah I’ve personally built pyramids with Legos. This guy was saying that in order to prove it wasn’t aliens you we needed to reconstruct an exact like made from the same materials built in the desert out there as big as the Pyramid in Giza exact replica?

0:36:02
BR: Well, again, you’re already putting more thought into his statement than he clearly did. I mean, the pyramids were built around 2560 BC, so we don’t have photographs, obviously, although in 2015, papyrus records were found of the pyramid construction tools, and in fact, they’ve recently found where the workers were buried. I mean, we actually know quite a bit about how the pyramids were made. And we have a pretty good idea of where the rocks were quarried and how they were cut and moved and that sort of thing. But it’s just, again, I met the guy. He wasn’t stupid. I mean, he was a reasonably intelligent guy, but he just latched onto – well, you know, skeptics haven’t built even a scale pyramid. I’m like, well, hold on here. It’s true that nobody has built another Giza pyramid. I’ve been to the Giza pyramids. They’re big. It’s big and it’s hot and they’re heavy and I wouldn’t want to do it. That’s more than I can do. But it’s not that the reason that it hasn’t been done is not because it can’t be done, but because it’s impractical. I mean, duplicating the Great Pyramid of Giza would take many years and cost tens of millions of dollars. Who’s going to pay for it? Are you going to pay for it with the proceeds of your self-published book? And it would be pointless because such a replication would not be valid unless you used tens of thousands of workers, as the original did. The estimates were between I think 15 and 40,000 and spent a decade building it. That’s the best evidence for how the pyramid was made. So if your point is that the only way that you can believe the pyramids were actually done that way is to spend a decade and pull together 30,000 people to do that, good luck with that. Knock yourself out, right?

0:38:06
CW: It’s like definitely switching the burden of proof and there’s a bit of Tom Sawyer there like, skeptics I bet you you can’t paint this white picket fence I bet you you can’t. Come on.

BR: Ain’t this fun?

CW: Skeptics ought to be able to be capable of painting this fence but yet none have!

0:38:26
BR: That’s right, there’s a patch over there, skeptics want to line up and do my work for me.

0:38:31
CW: Because it’s not their job.

0:38:32
BR: Right, I mean, let’s just say you had some eccentric billionaire who wanted to fund it, but scientists recognize it would be an enormous cost and effort just to disprove some wild theory about aliens. It’s not, there’s no there there, there’s no logical basis behind it.

PR: Well, that brings me to one of my biggest problems with the whole argument is that if we are just testing whether or not it can be done, that it still speaks nothing to aliens. It’s like, great, we just spent 30 years and $10 billion putting up exact replicas of everything in all of Egypt and did it prove anything other than, I mean, it didn’t say anything.

0:39:16
BR: And?

0:39:17
PR: If we failed at it, it still doesn’t mean aliens. So it’s silly to me.

BR: Well, there was a story I wrote about in May 2015. I actually wrote a piece about it in Skeptical Inquirer. It was a guy named Paul Sallow, and he launched a crowdfunding project, which he said would prove once and for all, and you can probably see where I’m going with this, whether the conspiracy theories about 9-11 were true or not. And as we all know, there’s all sorts of conspiracy theories, we’re not going to get into all of them.

0:39:49
PR: Certainly.

0:39:50
BR: But he was going back to the jet fuel can’t melt metal. Again, as we discussed, it doesn’t have to melt metal. We talked about this in the last episode.

PR: Many variables.

0:40:02
CW: I got to give him slight props for at least crowdfunding and it was his idea to do it. He wasn’t telling the skeptics to do it. He was going to build another World Trade Center and lease, or I guess you’d have to purchase a 747 because you can’t exactly give it back after the experiment.

0:40:20
BR: Well right.

0:40:21
CW: That’s what he wanted to do.

0:40:22
BR: Right. I have a little quote from in front of me. It says, in this project, we will recreate 9-11 to the best of our ability, given the funds raised. Now, let me just say that again for our listeners who missed it. Direct quote, in this project, we will recreate 9-11 to the best of our ability, given the funds raised. Now, what does that even mean? It’s not even wrong.

0:40:51
PR: Yeah.

0:40:52
BR: It’s like…

0:40:53
CW: Do you know how much did he raise?

0:40:56
BR: I think it was like $140 or something. It was a pathetic thing, and I’m sure he was pissed off that I wrote about it. But so I… Anyway, it was just… So let me… No, here’s how he’s going to do it. Okay. All right, all right, we will do the best we’re able to given the funds raised, which you know, we’ll buy a used Honda. Our ultimate goal is a fully loaded 767 and a similar structure to the WTC. World Trade Center, we will crash the fully loaded with fuel plane complete with black box into the buildings using autopilot at 500 miles per hour. So, okay, Paul, sounds like a great idea. I’m assuming you were stoned when you came up with this, which is fine, whatever. The problem here, one of the problems here, if I could just narrow it down, is, you know, to be clear, he was trying to test the challenge claim in conspiracy theories, that jet fuel can’t burn hot enough to sufficiently weaken a building’s steel structure that it collapses, instead of, for example, the Twin Towers coming down due to hidden explosives, which is one of the theories. And so, as I mentioned before, with people challenging the Patterson-Gimlin film, his scheme to duplicate the 9-11 has a certain sort of populist, like, yeah, yeah, we’ll show them, yeah, that makes sense, but if you think about it for like a millisecond longer, like no, no, no, it makes no sense. There’s nothing, there’s no part of this that makes sense. You know, I mean, pulling it off as a valid scientific experiment would be incredibly difficult and expensive, if not impossible. As we began talking about for replication, for real science experiment, you need to control the variables that could affect the results. In this case, there’s lots of variables, including the size and weight of the plane, the building type and things like that. And so again, it was just, for anybody that has even a smattering of knowledge of research design and how experiments are actually done, it was self-evident that you can’t build, he certainly, Paul Sallow, certainly can’t build another World Trade Center so what he was gonna do was he was going to try and find, he says you’ll see for yourself what happens under the extreme circumstances I’m not which I’m not sure which country will you purchase the aircraft and building but doesn’t really matter much no no no no Paul it matters entirely there there’s no part of that that doesn’t matter much. Everything about this matters. The size of the plane matters. How much fuel is in the plane matters. What the building is constructed of matters. How hard you hit it matters. The altitude. Everything about that matters.

0:43:54
CW: You can have to age the materials so that all the materials used in the interior are the same age.

0:43:59
PR: Exactly, yeah.

0:44:00
CW: As the world trades it. I wonder how much of this is I and I’m trying I’m looking for a ray of hope here I’m wondering how much of this type of effort is stemming from Mythbusters popularizing ways to test things because well There were obviously there were obviously some people who watched Mythbusters, but only kind of watched it from the other room with the sound off and they’re like Oh, I could build a little scale model of something and that’ll prove something.

0:44:27
BR: Well he says exactly that. In his crowdfunding campaign he says quote we are like a Mythbusters for September 11th. So he explicitly references Mythbusters and again this is sort of a populist like hey those guys can do those guys are doing science I can blow things up. It’s like, no, no, no, no, you really can’t. The problem is that when he says we’re going to replicate it as best we can, that leaves an enormous margin of error, so big that any results are going to be invalid and pointless.

0:45:04
CW: That margin of error is so big you could fly a plane through it.

0:45:07
BR: Exactly, exactly. Too soon, too soon.

0:45:09
CW: Oh, really? Okay.

0:45:11
BR: Again, it’s just and the irony here is that even if the buildings collapsed exactly as happened on 9-11 Even even if even if he he raised I don’t know say 300 million dollars instead of like 140 bucks Let’s just say he this brilliant genius got the architectures right he got the engineering He did the whole thing and let’s just say that it collapsed exactly as it did on 9-11. Conspiracy theorists would argue correctly that the conditions weren’t exactly the same as the original building collapse. So if the building collapses differently, that doesn’t prove anything, and for the same reason. So neither anyone questioning or defending the so-called official story will accept his conclusions and admit they’re wrong. So the whole exercise is pointless because it’s not going to prove anything either way.

PR: Right. Yeah, that’s that. It’s and never mind, you know, it’s not scalable. I mean, it’s you know, you can’t. So even if he didn’t get to his goal and decided to scale it down, it’s like gravity doesn’t work the same.

BR: I got a model plane. Hold on.

PR: It’s just, you know, and the truth is that we can accurately model something like this in a computer.

CW: And we have.

PR: And we have. We’ve done it. I mean, scientifically speaking, we have a good enough understanding of what happened to see that it’s likely to have happened the way that engineers the world around have described it. So, you know, I mean, they’re chasing an answer that, you know, maybe in a way it’s like he hopes to never be able to prove it because, you know, it’s like in his head he’ll never be wrong because he will never get the probably billion dollars it takes to even try this. So it’s just, you know…

BR: He will always be the unsung genius that if the mean scientist just didn’t put him down and try and stop him, if mean skeptics like Ben Radford didn’t write about him and mock him out on Discovery News, then he could have done this.

PR: If only we didn’t talk about him on the podcast.

0:47:25
CW: Maybe this guy and the one who’s building a steam-powered rocket to prove the Earth is flat, maybe the two of them can team up and they can crash a steam-powered rocket into a small building. I don’t know.

0:47:36
PR: Oh, for the record, Rocket Man threw in the towel a couple weeks ago.

0:47:39
BR: Oh, wow.

0:47:40
PR: Cue the sad trombone.

0:47:41
CW: Wah, wah.

0:47:43
BR: Well, look, I just want to wrap up this part just by talking about how, you know, it’s – I’ve done replication in some of my investigations. So I don’t want to suggest that replication is inherently flawed because replication can be important. It really depends on what you’re trying to prove.

0:48:00
CW: There’s limits. There’s limits of it, but I mean in a constrained situation like okay we’re trying to show that that during a certain time of day light really does bounce off of this window and create this image that looks like a ghost, does that, I mean is that the sort of thing you’re talking about or

0:48:16
replication how so? Yeah, yeah well for example, you know, one of my better known cases was when I researched the the Santa Fe courthouse ghost up in Santa Fe where Pascual is from. And that was the case in which there was this weird mysterious glowing figure that appeared on this courthouse surveillance camera. And it made national news, this big huge thing. And I went up there and I duplicated the effect by pouring ladybugs on the camera lens. And it just so happened that the way the sunlight was hitting it from that particular angle, it made an exact duplicate of the so-called ghost. And it was written about in Associated Press and the internet. So again, if you read my articles and chapters on it, I don’t claim that the original so-called ghost could not be a ghost. I’ve never said that. All I’ve said is that it’s a remarkable coincidence that when I put an insect on the lens it looks exactly like that.

0:49:20
CW: Now did you have to crowdfund to get enough money to get these ladybugs?

BR: I did not. I did not.

CW: Was it a massive undertaking?

0:49:30
BR: It was. It was about $7.95 of shill bucks.

PR: Oh, shill bucks.

BR: Yeah, all that shill bucks coming in. And you know, for example, also the Mansey photograph. You know, in the last episode we talked about my research into the Mansey photo and the thing from, photo from Lake Champlain. Now, you know, I didn’t duplicate that, and I didn’t even try to duplicate Mansey’s photograph. I think I probably could, but we did get her camera, we got the same type of film, and we did do experiments going out on the lake and getting the measurements in terms of the scale here. So again, I never claimed that we had replicated the Mansey photograph. We certainly did experiments using the proportions that we could. So, replication can play an important role, but you have to try and qualify exactly what you’re doing. And so, it’s always interesting to me when people say, well, again, this one particular image can’t be duplicated because it’s actually quite easy to capture a photograph that cannot be replicated in every detail. It’s remarkable, in fact, in the years since I’ve been thinking about this, I’ll be driving in traffic and I’ll see, I’ve even taken a couple of photos where it’ll be like, there’ll be clouds in the sky and be traffic in front of me, and there’ll be like a tree, and I’ll take a photograph of that. Very ordinary, mundane thing, and the fact is that that would be virtually impossible to replicate. Not because it is extraordinary, not because it’s anything weird, it’s simply because you would have to get the clouds in exactly that form, you would have to get those particular cars in that order. I mean the trees, the wind, all things around us are a split-second image of a world that’s constantly changing. And so it’s very easy to take a photograph of anything around you that would be externally difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in every detail.

0:51:39
PR: Right, right.

0:51:40
CW: Yeah, well if the parameters are narrow enough it certainly seems like it could be a great gotcha, but I do like the caveat you put on there saying that this doesn’t prove that whatever was on the video wasn’t a ghost but I can get a very similar if not identical effect with this. I’m reminded of when James Randi or other magicians have shown the ways that psychics get their results through cold reading and through various trickery. They don’t say, so and so is doing a trick. They say, well, it could be that they’re psychic, but I can tell you this, I can get the same effect through this magic trick.

0:52:19
BR: Right. And part of the reason they do that is because, particularly with a lot of magical effects, is there’s more than one way to pull it off. And if you tell people, first of all, I mean there’s a whole issue of revealing magic tricks, but beyond that, if you tell people how you did it and the person is using a magic trick but just using a slightly different version of it and they test it, they’re like, well, they told me that the person did it this way and I specifically checked and they couldn’t have done it that way. It’s like, no, they used, there’s maybe five or six ways of doing it. I showed you one way. And so rather than having to be put in the spot of basically assuming the burden of proof, you just say, look, I’m a magician. I can do this. I can do exactly what he’s doing. If you want to think I’m psychic, go ahead. But the fact is that, you know, I know how he does it.

(MUSIC)

0:53:09
CW: Hey Squares and hey strangers, Celestia here with your weekly skeptical fortune cookie. Let’s crack it open and see what we get. It’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. This quote, slightly abbreviated, is from Bertrand Russell, a British writer, humanist, and Nobel laureate. One of the founders of analytic philosophy, he spent most of his life active in politics and social commentary. As a young man, Russell served time in prison for his pacifism during World War I, and he found the experience agreeable, as it gave him time to write a book on mathematical philosophy. He was jailed again for a week at the age of 89 after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. In between these incarcerations, Russell had a tumultuous career and life, traveling extensively, going through four marriages, and all the while teaching, lecturing, and writing dozens upon dozens of books. Openly secular, Russell said he regarded the Christian God with the same agnosticism he viewed the Olympic gods. And he wrote several books on skepticism in addition to his work on ethics, math, the human condition, and the nature of knowledge. Russell was, simply put, an analytical guy. And, as such, he knew the importance of revisiting ideas one might have filed away. The human mind has a way of locking up facts and never questioning them after a certain point. And sometimes it does this with information that’s not fact, or that’s not quite fact. Russell reminds us to unlock those drawers every once in a while, dust off the contents, and re-examine things. In all your affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. Now, let’s get back to squaring the Strange.

(MUSIC)

0:55:19
PR: So we talked about the importance of replication in skeptical investigation but in the scientific sense that’s a whole different monster. Celestia, do you want to walk us into that one?

0:55:32
CW: Well yeah, replication in science, and science is replication. If you can’t replicate it, it’s not science. It’s just a weird thing that happened to you on Wednesday while you were walking home. The thing that concerns me is what’s been termed the replication crisis, which a couple of other podcasts, you know, SGU has touched on this. There was a paper by John Ioannidis in 2005 called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. That’s a disturbing heading and it’s also a headline that Makes a lot of people lose faith in anything they read About in science, so I I think you know things need to be replicated and Yet, there’s a lot of stuff that gets published and I want to say published. I mean, you know different different science Aggregators throw things all over the internet, and it’s a sexy viral story before anybody has a chance to replicate it And I’d like to hear you guys’s opinions on that any anything that has popped up in your recent experiences that fits in that category Yeah, actually up in your recent experiences that fits in that category?

0:56:52
PR: Yeah, actually, one that’s not entirely new, but is this thing called the Mozart theory or the Mozart effect, there’s a few different names for it, but what it basically, it posits is that there’s some cognitive effect of listening, now specifically to Mozart in the study that everyone jumps on to when they’re talking about it but some people just say it’s classical music in general they say that it improves cognition or you know some people claim it raises IQ and you know all these other things and the the study itself was done on young children and they’ll test to see if basically become more intelligent and better at problem solving and any number of things. And this is something that a lot of fellow musicians and fellow parents are very familiar with. You know, they’ll say like, put a pair of headphones on your wife’s stomach while she’s pregnant and, you know, try to pipe that in there and get those kids you know started on the right foot and…

BR: On their own foot to what Black Sabbath? Cannibal Corpse? What exactly?

PR: Yeah and you know they claim it’s you know classical music specifically well Mozart specifically in the study or the quote-unquote study. There are these baby Mozart, I think it’s called, or something like that. All these little CDs and programs and different computer learning software that all have to do with exposing children to classical music and a lot of wild claims that are attached to that.

0:58:48
CW: Why does this start smelling like Luminosity?

0:58:55
PR: When I did a little bit of research, because I mean our house is full of music and we always listen to it and in fact a lot of classical and everything. But I’ve always been a little skeptical of how much that could affect a person’s brain. I’m not saying that it can’t and I think it still can lend a lot to a person’s development overall in the same sense that being exposed to anything complex helps you grasp things differently.

BR: Any stimulation can do it.

PR: Yeah, sure. It’s the same as reading books and doing anything can really enrich your mind, but the claims that those things are making, I looked into it and I found that the original experimentation was never replicated. It was tested dozens of times and never replicated. People got different results. Sometimes people found out, well, maybe college-age students benefit from it, but even that wasn’t replicated. So it was like basically all they came up with was maybe music does stuff that’s not…

BR: Or not.

PR: Or not.

CW: So there were attempts to get the same results that the people pushing these products claim to have gotten, but nobody ever got those results.

1:00:08
PR: Yeah, that’s exactly it. There was never the same result. It was, I think that, if I recall correctly, there may have been one that showed some hint of something, but again, then they tried to replicate that and it didn’t work. So it was like, it just never was done twice. I mean, this is very much like a Wakefield situation where everyone is basing the entire belief on one thing that has never been replicated.

1:00:38
CW: Well, I mean, do they, do they put. I’m sure they put that emblazoned on the packaging.

1:00:42
PR: Yeah.

1:00:43
CW: Clinically, clinically disproven to work.

1:00:46
BR: Not replicated, never replicated.

PR: That’s the sad thing about experimentation is that you know there there’s no law that says that you know you have to disclaim that it was never replicated. You can just say well one time these people saw that it did something and and then it just kind of stays you know there’s no no one being held accountable for it.

BR: Well you know I’d like to see you know what some of the experiments tried to do. I mean did they compare it to what, white noise or non-classical music? I mean, rap? I mean, what’s… How does one… What is the opposite of Mozart? Is it violence?

PR: That’s a good question. In the original study, I don’t believe they had any controls. It was just…

BR: So it wasn’t an experiment.

PR: It really wasn’t a true experiment. It was kind of a, you know, we saw that things seemed a little different after they listened to music, you know, and then subsequent tests kind of ran the gamut from people trying to seriously test it and use controls and not get any real results out of it to some people testing and finding that anything, any stimulation helped people, which I tend to think is pretty reasonable.

BR: Seems legit.

1:02:02
CW: It’s kind of a big duh. We put these babies in an isolation booth for a week. And these other babies we interacted with and played music for. Which group is going to thrive? See, that’s tricky too. Anything involving babies or humans or self-reporting. Like, if it’s the parents, if the parents are reporting how bright their kids are, forget it.

1:02:26
PR: Yeah, every kid is a genius. So if they just bring in five kids, there’s just gonna be five parents reporting that their child’s the next Einstein regardless.

1:02:35
CW: So, yeah, so it’s all about experiment design. I mean, they need very specific protocols and even just matching things up, you can’t sign up families to treat their children a very specific way for like the first two years, you know they they’re gonna raise their kids how they’re gonna raise their kids and everybody’s different.

1:02:56
BR: Yeah, well what I find interesting about the whole attempt to make money off it is of course that Mozart is in the public domain Yeah, so you can’t copyright? Well, I mean, it’s not it’d be one thing to say hey. Here’s this hot new musician who’s doing some unheard of you know a synthesizer music that’s never been done before, whatever the hell that would mean.

1:03:19
CW: It’s not the Lady Gaga effect.

1:03:22
BR: So it’s another thing to say, okay, well, listening to Mozart is, I mean, the fact is you can get Mozart CDs for three bucks on Amazon. You don’t need to buy, even if it’s true, I mean, let’s just say that all this was true. You don’t need to sign up for baby Mozart. It just doesn’t make any sense.

PR: There’s an actual US trademark for a set of commercial recordings and materials that make all these claims that are, I believe, trademarked under the phrase Mozart Effect. So the trademark owner is Don Campbell Incorporated. So it claims…

BR: All right Don….

PR: benefits beyond actually what the original bit of research concluded.

CW: So they’re doubling down. Yeah. So he says defining the mark is quote an inclusive term signifying the transformational powers of music in health education and well-being.

BR: Oh, let me… is it a trademark or a patent?

PR: It’s a trademark. So the trademark is on the Mozart effect in the commercial recordings. So I suppose he probably commissioned a musician or a small orchestra to actually play the music in specific recordings for his product.

BR: Well, that’d be copyright. I mean, I’ve registered several trademarks. It doesn’t mean anything.

PR: Oh, no, sure.

BR: Yeah, that buys a, oh, this is trademarked. Well, yeah. You fill out a form and you paid your 200 bucks. Good for you, dude.

PR: Yeah, I mean it says that he has a set of commercial recordings and related materials Which is where I jumped to him probably commissioning someone to play the music.

BR: I’m sure he did But again, it’s just so you know, yeah, of course he has his own proprietary recordings, which are copyrighted. I’m thinking well if you’re saying it’s Mozart, no problem. You can you can stream Mozart for free. Come on, man.

PR: Well, you know, he probably cornered the market and figured out a way to make it more useful. You have to listen to it this way in these recordings. But no, it’s pretty amazing. And of course, having someone with a financial stake in it is certainly going to raise the red flags, too.

1:05:36
CW: Can I throw a monkey wrench into this discussion real quick here? I’m listening to you two and I adore you both, you know that. But I’m hearing strains of the same stuff. I hear from anti-science people who believe that all scientists are just like this Mozart effects guy. Oh, they came up with that result in this I this this big pharma tested it sure once and blah blah blah. So we all three of us understand the mindset here of not trusting anything that’s quote-unquote proven because you want to know what quote-unquote proven means. I’ll play devil’s advocate here – is it just one test paid for by Big Pharma or, you know, the big agriculture or whatever else? Well, then it’s not replicated and that is a legitimate problem in science. There’s a lot of stuff that just isn’t replicated because it’s not sexy to spend money replicating things. You get a result and and then it’s entangled with the problem of falsifying results. Like the Mozart guy claiming that it has even more effects than the original study, which has never been replicated. There was a 2009 survey where 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying results. Now 2% sounds like, holy crap, that’s terrible. That’s like 2%. But then I’m wondering, well, scientists are human beings, and I wonder how many people falsify their taxes. I think it’s more than 2%. So I’d like to believe that scientists are, on average, more honest and forthright than the average person, but it still just makes me, I don’t know, it’s easy to sort of see how people go down that rabbit hole, and that’s not a good thing.

1:07:36
PR: No, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s definitely something that you need to be aware of. And it makes it very difficult as a person trying to maintain their skepticism in a healthy way, because you have to be aware of the fact that you could be presented very conclusive sounding data you know, very convincing data that may not be 100% factual. And that’s kind of, again, to get back to the importance of replication, is the more it can be shown to work the way that it originally was claimed to work, you know, the more comfortable we can be settling on that. And that’s sort of the difference between, you know, when we joke around about a guy who’s trademarking something to make money off of something and the results of the original test being what he’s basing it on and the difference between us and then the people who are claiming that all scientists are shills, well, we have a bunch of failures to replicate to base our dismissal of this guy on.

1:08:50
CW: Absolutely yeah yeah and I’m not I’m not saying we’re wrong-headed in dismissing him I’m just saying that little bit of of smugness of looking at it and thinking you know oh this guy doesn’t know he’s talking about obviously that kind of gives me a window into the psychology of people who dismiss all scientific findings and that’s really worrisome and I don’t know do you guys see any… As far as solving the problem of the replication crisis, I think the number one solution, and maybe you guys have some solutions too, I’d love to hear them, is I think we need to educate not just everybody, because we’ve got to start somewhere.

1:09:29
BR: We’ll just start by educating everybody. Once we’re done with that, that’ll take a couple weeks. Once we’re done educating everybody, what do we do?

1:09:34
CW: I think we need to start first and foremost by calling for science editors and science journalists to have a background in science and an experiment protocol and design so that they know the difference between a lousy experiment or study, and a good experiment or study. So if there’s just one, if there’s just one study and it’s not been replicated yet, they can look at it and say, well, this wasn’t double-blinded. This has a very small pool of samples here. If it starts smelling like Wakefield, they should know it goes into the trash can. It shouldn’t go viral, because that’s a lot of power. That’s a lot of power that they wield right now. Most people read about things that have been circulating virally on the Internet. As a science editor, you have the power to nip something in the bud or to make it explode.

1:10:28
BR: Yeah, I would agree with that. I talk some about that in my book, Media Myth Makers. I think one of the problems that I saw then that continues now is that a lot of these topics are presented as human interest topics or feature topics. So, for example, the baby Mozart, right? Like, oh, someone pitches a baby Mozart story and someone says, oh yeah this is making babies smarter. Oh, isn’t that cute? Parents are going to love this. Go run with it. And so a lot of times a story will have a science angle to it that is not immediately obvious to the writer or editor. To them it’s a cute story about babies learning. And hey, somebody said they did something and babies learn smarter and hey, you know, had this to me by noon on Thursday. So I think that that’s one of the problems that I see is a general lack of recognition about the science angles that are already preexisting in these stories. And you’re exactly right. I think what would be very helpful would be to have a broader understanding of science and scientific mythologies by editors and writers across the board and to not let cutesy human interest stories get a pass. If they involve factual claims, if they involve statistical claims, if they involve science in any way, hold them to it. Don’t just say, ooh, you know, this is a cute, funny story. Oh yeah, there’s one paragraph about the results. No, no, no, that is the basis of the story. So double-check that before you run this human interest story.

PR: Yeah, and for sure, reporters, please keep in mind correlation is not causation. Probably the number one sin I see committed with with any sensationalist headlines about some kind of research.

CW: Well the correlation implying causation that’s actually a that’s a fallacy and that kind of leads us into what we’re going to be looking into next week.

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PR: Yes, I’m really excited about that we’re going to be digging into a whole plethora of logical fallacies. We’re going to dig into, I guess, kind of our personal favorites, as well as just kind of doing an overview of many you will see. And I think that it will help kind of arm our listeners with a little more of an arsenal to combat bad debate and bad arguing, because we see a lot of that stuff. And we’re really excited to jump into that next week.

BR: Yeah definitely so don’t don’t don’t go away tune in next week. So we’ll be right back after our final goodbyes. We would like to thank our top sponsor Amy Freshour-Kelly for her long-standing support of the show. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode check out patreon.com Squaring the strange every bit helps us keep the lights on here in strange studios And we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends If you’re looking to provide moral support head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again strangers And that does it for this week. Like we said a couple minutes ago, stay tuned for the next episode on logical fallacies and how to identify them. You will not be disappointed. No you will not. There’s no, it’s literally impossible. Literally impossible to be disappointed and take it from our authority, that it will be impossible. So just keep your expectations low, you’ll be fine. See you guys next week.

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Squaring the Strange is a production

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of Chronos Creative LLC, copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitard and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celeste Juarez. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Chronos Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any reflect the views and opinions of Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo