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.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Scoring the Strange. I’m Pascual and with me as always is Ben and Celestia. How are you guys doing?

BR: Doing good.

Celestia Ward: Pretty well.

PR: Awesome, awesome. This week we’re going to be talking about research and all the ins and outs of research and kind of how to do it effectively, how not to do it, and everything in between.

BR: What it is, what it ain’t, what it should be, what it can be.

0:00:55
CW: Modern challenges to the person who wants to research.

0:00:59
PR: Exactly. But first, let’s see what we’re skeptical about this week.

0:01:03
(Music)

0:01:08
BR: Well, I’ll begin. As you guys know, of course, people may be hearing this years or millennia after we’re recording this, so I don’t want to make any assumptions, but recently, comedian Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of sexual assault, and the news media predictably jumped on the story. And, of course, they’re always looking for fresh angles on new stories to be the first with the big picture of analysis of what it all means. So there are a couple of interesting things about this case. One that I want to focus on was the question of whether the Me Too movement affected the outcome of the Cosby trial, and if so, to what extent. And what you found was that no matter whatever your personal opinion is, no matter how informed or ill-informed, as is more often the case, you can find some high-profile news source to confirm that. An NPR story was titled, Bill Cosby’s conviction marks a new chapter for Me Too. Slate.com said, no, no, no, no, no, that’s all wrong. Bill Cosby’s conviction is not a triumph of Me Too. People headlined, Bill Cosby conviction is a victory for Me Too. NBC News says Bill Cosby conviction is a big win for the Me Too movement. There’s nothing to be consensus here about whether to what extent the now keep in mind, of course, that this is Cosby’s second trial. The first one ended in a mistrial.

PR: Right.

BR: And there are some significant differences between the first and the second trial.

PR: Yeah, yeah.

BR: And including the fact that there were other accusers brought in also his previous testimony. So there, there are several important factors at play here, of which the Me Too movement and its emergence is certainly one of them. So anyway, I don’t want to go too deeply into it. But it occurred to me, this is sort of an interesting way to glimpse some of the machinations of journalism and and what they were doing. So, you know, skeptics and critical thinkers are typically not concerned about what’s possible, nor really what’s plausible, because of course, you know, anything is possible, right?

PR: Sure, yeah.

0:03:24
BR: Could there be aliens? Absolutely, no, no. Is it possible that Bigfoot’s out there in the Pacific Northwest? Sure. That’s not the question. The question is, what is there evidence for, right?

0:03:35
CW: Yes, just like it’s possible, all of the ladies were making it up. Not very probable. Really not very probable, but…

0:03:45
BR: But yeah, who knows, right? And so, and again, you also can’t… The standard can be, is it plausible? Because we have people, we talk about people who think the earth is flat, people who think there’s a deep state that’s trying to… I mean, just… Plausibility is far too flexible a criterion.

0:04:04
CW: It’s very subjective. One man’s ridiculous is another man’s plausible.

BR: Exactly, exactly. So, what I realized when I was going through these headlines was that I think there’s a real failure of journalism because most of the stories that I saw were written immediately after the Cosby verdict came out, at this point about three or four days ago. and the headlines are sort of under the guise of reporting, but if you actually read through the stories, it’s mostly speculation and conjecture. Could it be? Could it have played a role? Well, who knows? I mean, after all, pretty much any position is ostensibly defensible. And with something as amorphous as this, who’s to say?

PR: Sure. He hasn’t been sentenced to anything yet, so a victory may be a little bit of a, or just really putting, drawing a line in the sand at all, it seems to be a little premature either way.

BR: Right, right. So, so what I, what I, what I noticed going through these, these headlines is that whatever position you take, you’re probably not, not going to get called out on it because you can make the argument either way. Except in this case, we actually do have some facts. Okay. So it’s not just, it’s not just could, could me, me too have played a role in his conviction? Sure.

0:05:16
PR: Yeah.

0:05:18
BR: Could have, could not have, yes, no, who knows. So there’s a couple things that, in this case, we do have a couple of data points to consider. The first one is, and actually we touched on this in a previous episode, we actually have opinion polls about Cosby’s guilt or innocence prior to the emergence of the Me Too movement.

0:05:33
PR: Right, right.

0:05:34
CW: That makes sense.

0:05:36
BR: Yeah, yeah, so, and I found three polls from 2015. The first one was YouGov poll taken July 8 to 9, 2015, where 61 percent of the men and 53 percent of the women believe Cosby’s accusers. So over half of those polled men and women believe that Cosby is guilty.

0:05:56
CW: And that’s without having heard any testimony from anybody or any arguments from any lawyers.

0:06:00
BR: Exactly.

CW: This is just this just from the news coverage.

0:06:03
BR: Based on what you heard, do you do you believe he’s guilty? And most people are like, yep, absolutely. A second poll from 2015 found that only 22 percent believed Cosby, while 56 percent believed his accusers and 22 percent said they didn’t have enough information.

0:06:18
CW: That would make me pretty confident if I was a lawyer working on this case.

PR: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

0:06:23
BR: Right. So in this case, you have twice as many people, over half the people believe the accusers. Right. And there’s a third poll, which I found on debate.org, which we’ll just be up front. It was a little sketchy. It’s not exactly, you know, not exactly a random poll, but 100 percent of the respondents said Cosby was guilty. So again, we have three polls of varying quality. There are at least two of them are of good quality. Prior to Me Too that have the majority of people saying they think Cosby is guilty. The second thing is that the jurors can give interviews and explain their reasoning about what they found credible in terms of the evidence. And in fact, that’s exactly what happened. There was an April 30th article in the New York Times, and I’ll just read a quick statement says in a joint statement on Monday this is actually yesterday. The jurors who who voted to convict Bill Cosby of sexual assault last week said they they believed the accusers accounts and were persuaded of his guilt by the facts not the momentum of social change captured in the Me Too movement not once were race or the me too movement ever discussed nor did they factor into our decision as implied in various media outlets so the jurors whose names have not been released said in the statement. So that’s exactly what it says. One juror that has given interviews, and I watched part of his interview, his name is Harrison Snyder, he said, as the broader panel said in the statement, the Me Too did not weigh on his mind during the two days of deliberations. In fact, he had not heard of the movement until after he left the courthouse on Thursday.

0:07:59
CW: Where did they find somebody who had never heard of the movement?

0:08:04
PR: It’s the perfect juror.

BR: No, no, no, that’s, Pascual is exactly right, because this is precisely, this is what the process of, it’s called voir dire, and it’s the process of jury selection. And if you’re a lawyer, on either side of the case, they want tabula rases. They want people who know as little as possible about it. And so, you know, the three of us would not make good jurors because we’re intelligent and we’re watching the news. No, but seriously, this is something that people need to keep in mind when you’re seeing jurors being interviewed afterwards. Like, how could they not have known about this? So one thing, oftentimes they’re sequestered. So they’re prohibited from watching the news. And second of all, they’re chosen specifically because they don’t know a lot about it. So by definition, because they don’t want to contaminate you either way.

0:08:49
CW: Well, I applaud that man and his peers who moments after awakening from a two-year-long coma were willing to serve on a jury.

0:08:58
BR: Well, you know, we need jury of our peers doing that. So, you know, I have no reason to think that jurors are lying or being misleading about the reasons for the convictions. I mean, they have no reason to downplay the significance of the Me Too movement in their deliberations. There’s no reason for that. And so if they say that it had nothing to do with it, then I assume that’s true.

0:09:26
CW: Well, to raise a counterpoint, I can see a juror coming out and proclaiming that, no, a movement, a social movement had nothing to do with my deliberations because I only weighed the facts and what we were presented in evidence, you wouldn’t necessarily want to advertise if you felt pressure from a social movement to deliver a verdict. Would you advertise that?

0:09:48
BR: Well, keep in mind that this was all of them. I mean, this wasn’t just one juror. And there’s no consequences either way. I mean, the verdict is not going to be overturned if they admit that, yeah, you know, we, we, the Me Too movement factored into our deliberations.

0:10:04
CW: I guess I’m just going with human nature. You want to sound like you are doing your job as a juror and your job is to give a verdict based on the evidence and the facts. And if you are feeling pressure from a social movement, or you just want to be in the in crowd and be with the Me Too folks, and you give a verdict that has been swayed by that movement, that kind of makes you look like a crappy juror.

0:10:27
BR: I know, I would argue the opposite. I would argue that if he had come out and said that Me Too did influence their deliberations, they’d be heroes.

0:10:37
CW: Yeah, they certainly would be for a lot of people. But I mean, from a strict legal perspective, you’re being a bad juror.

0:10:44
BR: Right, but at this point, the deliberations are done. I mean, there’s no penalty for… My point is that you were just saying that you think that they might have some reason to downplay the significance of Me Too. I would argue that they would actually have an incentive to increase and promote how powerful the Me Too movement was and how strong it was. That would make them far greater heroes in most people’s minds than if they said that it didn’t have any effect on it.

0:11:15
CW: Yeah, there’s a couple different angles, definitely. It could go either way. It could go both ways.

0:11:18
BR: But anyway, but I mean, but you know, the bigger part, the bigger point here is that, is that nobody knows whether Cosby’s conviction is a bellwether for countless other accused people, including Harvey Weinstein and others. As with most trends, it’s too early to tell. But again, to my mind, the reason I’m bringing it up is that in these cases, I’m concerned about what this says about opinion masquerading as journalism because the question of whether the MeToo movement influenced the Cosby verdict, there are data points that we can consult. I just cited two of them. Either the journalists didn’t bother to look into whether there were opinion polls that predated MeToo about Cosby and or they didn’t want to wait around for the jurors to explain the reasoning because they want to get it out there.

PR: Right.

BR: And so that’s why you have you have People Magazine and PR and Slate and NBC News and all these other all these other outlets who are putting out opinion pieces instead of journalism. And they’re like, well, we don’t want to wait to find out. Well, yes. You know, one person says yes, of course, it influenced that. Another person says, no, it didn’t. OK, well, thanks for your opinion. How about some actual journalism here?

0:12:27
PR: Right, right.

0:12:28
CW: Everybody wants to be part of a victory. It’s pretty, it’s pretty universal. Nobody wants to claim credit for the defeat, but everybody wants to be part of a victory.

0:12:36
PR: Sure, sure.

0:12:37
BR: Right, and again, in that case, I mean, there’s not, we’re not gonna know whether the Cosby verdict is a bellwether for all these other cases or not. We won’t know that for five or 10 years. Again, no matter what side of the opinion divide you are on, no one’s going to call you out on it unless it’s me saying, look, you know, actually there are data points and they suggest that the answer is no. I don’t have a dog in the fight. I don’t carry the way. My issue is with the journalists that jump the gun and put out all these stories on either side of it instead of just admitting, well, we don’t know and let’s look into it and let’s wait to hear what the jurors say.

PR: Yeah, this is just a day and age where the lines between reporting and editorializing are very blurred and a lot of it’s just because of the sheer volume of content that’s hitting the web all the time. And it’s never apparent right on its face if something is just strictly an opinion piece or if they’re trying to report some data to back up a headline or something. And I can certainly understand editorializing either direction at this point. And I understand like, I, and I can right off the top of my head think of decent arguments in either direction as well. And it definitely could impact me too, either way. But at this point, yeah, like you said, we just, we don’t really have enough. I mean, nothing’s unfolded to the point that we know how it’s affected the Me Too movement in general. And we, you know, obviously, as you mentioned, we do know that the Me Too movement didn’t seem, I mean, the public opinion predated the Me Too movement on this particular case. So, you know, if anything, I find that kind of encouraging. And I think the Me Too movement, I have nothing against it. In fact, I think it has done a good amount of good in the world. But it’s good to know that independent of that, people are still not just taking the side of the accused wholesale and causing a lot of…

0:14:39
CW: Well, the Me Too movement didn’t spring from whole cloth. It was percolating for a while, and the makings of the Me Too movement were out there for quite some time. So if the public polls represent that people were believing the accusers, that’s evidence to me that, well, the Me Too movement came at about the right time. People were ready for it and people were passionate about it and just thinking about the journalists writing on either side of this, it’s almost like they’re placing their bets. Like, I’m thinking of the psychics who predict the gender of the new royal baby. They got a 50-50 shot here. Either it’s a victory for the Me Too movement, or it’s not so much a victory for the Me Too movement. Either way, if you write about it early, you got a shot to look pretty insightful if you’re right.

0:15:30
BR: Yeah, and keep in mind that if later information comes out that contradicts or undermines the reporting opinion piece, they’re not going to correct the story.

0:15:39
CW: No.

0:15:40
BR: I mean, for example, I mean, the news article that I quoted from the New York Times came out yesterday, and I just gave you a half dozen pieces on Slate and People and NBC and elsewhere, that the people that wrote, of course, Me Too influence the Cosby verdict, they’re not going to go back and update it with a correction. Just because a juror came out and said that it had nothing to do with it. To my mind, the real problem is this leads to sort of an echo chamber where the idea is that one opinion is as valid as the next. Yeah. And in this one particular case, the evidence suggests that if you go by what the polls show, and if you go by what the jurors said, then there probably was not a strong influence on me to, in this particular verdict, changing it from when it was a hung jury. That’s all I’m saying. And my concern is that, again, no matter where you fall on the spectrum, you can find some reputable news source, well, I believe this, this is what Time Magazine said. Well, I believe this, this is what Slate said. And you’re both right, because both of them jumped the gun.

0:16:43
PR: Right.

0:16:44
CW: Yeah, well, the information that one of the jurors had never heard of the Me Too movement, that’s pretty striking right there. Yeah, that’s a good find.

0:16:53
BR: And the question is, is that the guy you want on your jury?

0:16:56
CW: Well, they got the right verdict.

(MUSIC)

0:16:58
BR: Y ahorita vamos a Pascual por una historia de Cinco de Mayo, no?

0:17:05
CW: Well, hey, somebody switched the language on here. Hold on.

BR: You’re on a Mexican radio.

PR: What Ben was asking me was if I was going to present a history of Cinco de Mayo. And I am, and this is going to be in the format of a sueso, because I am skeptical of people’s understanding of the Mexican holiday.

0:17:41
CW: What is there to be skeptical about? I mean, you wear a sombrero, even though you’re culturally appropriating, and you get drunk off tequila. That’s what it’s all about, right?

0:17:50
BR: And you lean on cacti.

0:17:54
CW: And they have specials on nachos and everybody enjoys it. There’s not more to it, is there?

0:18:00
PR: Nope, that’s it. So on to the main topic. There’s certainly that angle of it, which we could do an entire podcast series on. My angle is more about the way people kind of push back about it. So you’ll see, I think skeptics probably more often than anyone else will see, and here And, you know, here in the U.S. at least, a lot of criticisms of the celebration of Cinco de Mayo and people saying, well, you know, it’s not an American holiday and it’s not, or people that are aware of where it’s celebrated in Mexico, they’ll say, well, it’s just a regional thing in Mexico. And there’s a lot of dismissive stuff about it. So on one hand, we’ve got people that are embracing something that is, has nothing to do with the holiday. And on the other hand, we have a lot of people who seem to dismiss people’s understanding of it or just dismiss it as a holiday in general.

0:18:57
BR: So you get knee-jerk reactions on both sides. How novel!

0:18:59
PR: Yeah, and I’ve come here to kind of straighten it up. All right. For those, because we have a lot of listeners who aren’t from the US or Mexico, the Cinco de Mayo holiday, Cinco de Mayo means the 5th of May, it commemorates a victory of the Mexican army over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. So this was a big battle that was between a heavily outnumbered Mexican regiment that had already fallen back from a previous loss and fallen back to Puebla, which is on the way to Mexico City. And I’ll get to why they were going there in just a second. But basically, the short story is that a very small army beat roughly an army that was double their size. And a much more well-armed, trained army. France was known at that time for having probably the second most powerful military in the world. So, let’s go back to the situation. The Mexican Civil War was just a few years before that. It took a heavy toll on Mexico’s economy, so Benito Juarez, who was the president at the time, he’s also the namesake of our nearest major Mexican city, he ended up having to halt payments on foreign debts. They just didn’t have the money to pay them. In late 1861, Spain, Britain, Britain and France formed what was called the Tripartite Alliance to invade Mexico and force Juarez to negotiate payment, basically.

0:20:32
CW: It sounds like when you owe the mobs some money, they get together and come around asking, huh?

0:20:37
PR: They did. So the queens of Britain and Spain and Napoleon III of France got together, created an alliance and sent a lot of ships over to Veracruz, which is in the southeastern part of coastal Mexico. What ended up happening is they landed in Veracruz, kind of took over, and France began to raise their demands, and it seemed pretty apparent that they were trying to provoke Mexico. And wisely, the two queens decided to just renegotiate and get out of Dodge. So Spain and Britain, satisfied with what they had at that point, left, and France decided to march on Mexico City. And a general, his name was Charles de Lorencez, spelled L-O-R-E-N-C-E-Z.

0:21:22
He had already taken over the town of Orizaba, which is just near Veracruz, and he marched to the town of Puebla. And he very unwisely chose to attack. They were downhill from Puebla, so they were at and it had a disadvantage but being the French army they just didn’t you know they’re like well. what are these peasants gonna do to us well as luck would have it…

CW: Classic French.

PR: They underestimated the the will of the Mexicans and they were attacked by an army that was roughly half the size now the army the French army was approximately 6,000 to 8,000 people. Numbers vary by story, but between 6,000 and 8,000 is a pretty comfortable bet. Roughly half of that was how many Mexicans were there, and they were very poorly armed. Under the lead of Ignacio Zaragoza, or Nacho Z, as they like to call him, they were able to get the upper hand, and they claimed a very decisive victory on May 5th. So that’s basically the short of it.

0:22:28
BR: How long did the battle last?

0:22:29
PR: Just that day. Yeah, they just sent them packing that day. So within, I think, about a week of that, President Juárez, who was already basically in exile, he moved to the current state of Chihuahua, where the city of Juárez was founded. He declared May 5th a holiday in celebration of this victory. Now, this victory was not the whole war. France eventually took over, installed a puppet monarchy, Emperor Maximilian, who was an Archduke Maximilian, actually. He was sent from Austria and he was the quote-unquote king of Mexico. And this is something that most historians will agree with and even Lincoln himself believed this was a puppet regime being put in place to place France strategically in that region to take over Mexico completely. You know, of course, they still used a lot of that careful language of, no, it’s the Empire of Mexico just being run by France, you know, we’re the management.

0:23:29
BR: No, no, I don’t know anything about that.

0:23:30
PR: But anyway, the win at Puebla was still considered a big symbol for Mexican resistance and was very widely celebrated in that time, especially as far up as California, where a lot of the expats from the Mexican Civil War ended up, because at that time it was an American territory. And several years went by and eventually the French-Mexican Empire was toppled. They took him up in front of a firing squad, Archduke Maximilian, and made an example out of him. Napoleon III said, okay, I’m good, backed out. The French left Mexico, but let’s get kind of back to how this pertains to the United States. So in 1824, Mexico enacted the general colonization law which enabled all heads of household, regardless of race, religion, or immigrant status to acquire land in Mexico. This was focused on the area that is now modern Texas. It actually was Texas back then. It was called Tejas.

0:24:35
CW: Wait, so you mean they freely let people move down to Mexico? They didn’t like build a wall or some bullsh** like that?

0:24:41
PR: No. Part of it is because there was a very long history in that region of it being inhospitable, and it was mainly because the colonies, the couple of colonies that France tried to establish in Texas about a century and a half before that ended up just being overrun by natives that would just lay siege to their colony. And then just the other challenges of just it being a very harsh place to live. And so they said, well, let’s just let a lot of people in, let’s populate it, and then let’s see if that can help us gain a foothold on that territory, because it was, you know, they were claiming it as part of Mexico, but they just didn’t have a presence there, and so it was an area that could have very easily gone to the U.S. at the time, with a little bit of, you know, expeditionary presence. But it says there were about 3,500 settlers living in the entire region in 1821, and they were mostly around San Antonio. Once they did this, though, the population exploded, and the American expat population was actually, I think, something like double to three times the population of the actual Mexican locals that lived in the other areas. And so, at this point, just a lot of Southerners were showing up in the region. Of note here is that a lot of them were slave owners. There’s a point where there were more slaves than there were Mexicans in Texas. In 1829, Mexico outlawed slavery. That caused a lot of trouble up there. There was a huge amount of infighting and a lot of talk of seceding from Mexico and you know, it’s like Texans have always been pretty good at this. And they did eventually become their own Republic between the time that they were in Mexico and the US officially tacked them on to the States. But what’s important here is that part of Mexico was populated by people who were sympathizers to the South. And this is where Cinco de Mayo and the events that unfolded after with the Mexican Empire will give you some reason to think that maybe Mexicans winning or being able to take Mexico back from the French may have saved us a little bit, and when I say us I mean the Union and the current United States, because the French actually had every reason to work with the South. Part of it was that the textile industry needed cotton, and so the French needed cotton not just in their empire in Mexico, but they needed it in general and the US was producing it at substantial rates considering the way we were producing it at the time. And with his imperial ambitions in Mexico, he knew it could be greatly aided by the Confederacy. So the South and the French kind of had shared interests. So the South had started approaching France about being recognized as a sovereign country. The Confederacy was looking to be recognized because getting any legitimacy from a major world power would help them in their mission to secede from the Union. So they did approach France and the offers were actually viewed favorably by the French government basically saying, hey, we’ve got all this cotton, we can help you out. We also hold territory that’s against Mexico and you’ve got your Mexican empire. And so they were viewed pretty favorably by the government and would have likely gone through except that this was around the time that the Union captured New Orleans. And this is also the time that France was pushing its way into Mexico. So a lot was still unfolding at this point in time and it gave France pause. I mean Napoleon was like, well, you’re probably going to lose at this point. And it seemed pretty obvious. And so the French diplomacy, I mean, French diplomacy was just to oppose it for the time being. And over the next couple of years, it became pretty apparent that Southern defeat was imminent. But the South did negotiate $15 million from French capitalists, which was used to buy their ironclad warships. So and a bunch of military supplies. So French money did still fund to the south.

BR: I did not know that.

PR: Yeah So there is there’s a lot of friendly Connections between France and the south now to what extent this could have played out in the long run no one will know because it didn’t happen But there is evidence to suggest that France had a lot of interest in the Confederacy being able to hold their ground and keep their territory and France didn’t love us at the time and so they could have very well used that to their advantage, the destabilizing of the country to take over territories especially in the West that we had already begun to claim. And so in the end we are affected by Cinco de Mayo in a very roundabout way because the moral victory that Cinco de Mayo represents was what many believe to be what kept Mexico fighting through the entire Mexican Empire and when the French were ejected from the country that also lifted a great burden off of the entire continent. The Civil War had already been settled and we had begun patching ourselves back together so Mexico and the US were very strong allies after this.

CW: That’s a lot of moving parts, wow.

PR: Yeah. And it is so complicated. There are so many angles to this that we could spend episode upon episode talking about. But but the short of it is that that Mexico and what happened around Cinco de Mayo and everything that came to be from that does have some effect on the United States and if Lincoln were alive to see the end of the Mexican Empire, he probably would have raised the margarita in celebration of Cinco de Mayo with his Mexican allies. The country is still, believe it or not, politically, they are still our allies. You wouldn’t know it from the way people talk about them, but they’ve been a very strong ally to this country ever since then and we should definitely be happy to celebrate that and I think that knowing the history of Cinco de Mayo You know, you should feel free to celebrate it. Maybe leave the sombrero at home and you know maybe don’t put on a fake mustache, but you know take take this information tell your friends at the bar.

0:31:10
CW: Or maybe come up with a good drinking song, celebrating the generals that that helped kick France out of Mexico.

(MUSIC)

0:31:32
PR: So our main topic this week is research. What is research? What isn’t research? How do you research? You know, what’s good research, what’s bad research. But let’s just jump right into it. Ben, why don’t you walk us into the topic.

0:31:45
BR: Well, I sort of see research coming from a couple of different points of view. One of them is sort of what’s your goal? For writers, it’s know your audience. And for researchers, it’s what are you trying to do? Are you trying to research an essay for a high school college paper to solve a problem? Are you trying to figure out how to install a patio in the back porch, what have you? The research that I’m most familiar with is basically doing, trying to basically do one of a couple of things. One is doing something new, doing new research, new findings, basically sort of adding to the existing body of knowledge, whether it’s, you know, hey, I’ve researched the history of Cinco de Mayo and here it is, or I’ve researched this or that. So, it’s basically, you know, trying to generate new knowledge in some form. So, that would be, again, something like an experiment would be sort of original research or certainly could be. And the other one is basically synthesizing existing information, trying to help people understand, you know, for example, if your cousin who you’re close with mentions homeopathy, but you don’t have time to, if you’re not that well versed in it, then you say, okay, well, you know, I’ll see you next week. And then during that week, you do some research, right? And so as you’re not doing original research, you’re not reinventing homeopathy or doing tests, but you’re hopefully going to Wikipedia, because there’s great stuff, thanks to Susan Gerbich on there, and basically doing enough research and fact gathering.

0:33:23
CW: I think the homeopathy example is especially nice, Ben, because you had just mentioned doing original research, which you could do with homeopathy, if you just bring over sleeping pills and take 50 of them in front of him. The homeopathic sleeping pills James Randi challenge that has taken off. That would be original research, or as you mentioned, just compiling all the very good, knowledgeable articles that explain why there’s nothing to it.

0:33:50
BR: Yeah, yeah, and so, you know, basically it’s a matter of, you know, my personal position is that if you’re not gonna do one or both of these, then why bother? I mean, every now and then I see somebody who’s like, oh, you know, I want to write an article about some ghost case, whatever else. And I say, okay, that’s fine. Oh, I’m gonna go to Wikipedia, I’m gonna look at one or two books. I’m like, why? It’s already there. I mean, if you’re not going to try and synthesize something new, bring something new to it, either do something original, do, you know, look in archives, interview new people. If you’re not gonna bring something new, then first of all, why are you doing it? Second of all, why isn’t everyone supposed to spend their time and money and attention looking at whatever you’re putting together if it’s just basically cutting and pasting off Wikipedia? So those are a couple of things that I sort of see.

0:34:43
CW: Well that’s definitely a good journalistic perspective and you definitely have got a particular goal which is create something that is new or at least has a new angle on it that people can benefit from looking at. Sometimes one of the things I mentioned and one of the things I think is very important and you have mentioned this a number of times is narrow your focus. What are you looking for? Don’t just say I want to learn about ghosts. Figure out a particular question that you want to answer about ghosts. What do experts think a ghost is? Are there any credible sightings in America of ghosts? Even those are pretty broad topics.

0:35:22
BR: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll just second that. I mean, that’s one of the biggest mistakes I often see is people who they don’t know enough about the topic to narrow their focus. I’ve had many people who contact me asking for advice and one of my first things is pick something, you know, some, some angle into it that’s fresh and new and that you’re interested in because otherwise you, you’re just, it’s too scattered and you’re just spending your wheels.

0:35:47
CW: Well, and it’s also the way that you approach investigating. You are very specific in saying, all right, I need a testable claim. What is the claim? You know, not just some broad, you know, prove that there isn’t really a ghost here. No. Uh, and again, I’m going ghost but it could be anything. It could be really anything from Sasquatch to politics. What is the claim is the claim? Did the me to movement cause Bill Cosby’s trial to sway one way or the other? You know, that’s a claim. That’s a claim that you could research. But if it’s so broad, or you don’t even know what the claim would be, then you’re not just researching, you’re just absorbing stuff from the universe and seeing what sticks to your brain.

0:36:32
BR: And also, you know, again, going back to the audience, I mean, you know, if you’re researching something to explain to someone else, then that’s important and valuable. Sometimes you’re just researching it for your own knowledge. I’m sure all three of us and probably many of our listeners, you just, you know, you hear someone mention something, you’re like, that’s really cool. I want to learn about it. So you just, you just go home and do research and you’re not doing it so that you can give a presentation on it, you’re not writing an article about it, you just are just fascinated by it. And so if the goal of the research is to explain to someone else, then you’re especially under an obligation to do thorough research. If you want to do a half-assed job of informing yourself, that’s one thing. But if you’re going to inform somebody else through either seminars or teaching or lectures or whatever else, you know, you have an obligation to do due diligence, cross your I’s and dot your T’s, or anyway.

0:37:30
CW: I’m just still listening to the thousands of middle school kids rolling their eyes adults research stuff for fun like on their own? Why would you do that? I thought we could maybe start with discussing what isn’t research. One of the things that made me want to discuss research is the constant refrain from people, oh I did my research. Well that means you didn’t do any research!

PR: Yeah, they watched documentaries.

CW: Well yeah, documentaries. We had, you know, we talked about this when we went over various misleading documentaries. People think that watching a documentary is research. And that’s like, that’s like a couple steps above, you know, looking at some memes on your Facebook feed. That’s not research!

0:38:19
BR: It is fascinating to me how often I have people contact me and they’ll say, oh, you know, well, I saw something you wrote or I saw you on TV and you’re wrong about this. And my first response is, fair enough. I mean, I could be wrong. I’m often wrong about things. What specifically am I wrong about? And what research did you do? And what, you know, how do you know? And usually the answer is, well, I saw a documentary on TV and it says something different. And I’m like, okay, so, you know, let’s take the Chupacabra, for example. So I spent five years of my life researching this, interviewing eyewitnesses, going down to Nicaragua, going on TV shows, interviewing forensic anthropologists. And I’m wrong because you saw a half-hour TV show that says something different than what I said. And I’m wrong. And I’m the one that needs to do my research.

0:39:23
CW: Why’d you waste all that time handling dog skulls, Ben? You could have just watched a TV show.

0:39:29
BR: Well, it’s just, and the first couple of times I got that, I was just aghast. I mean, you’re joking, right? But no, it’s like, but they just you know, I know I didn’t know and another example that jumps to mind is when there was that famous case That I got involved in with Alex Terrakis or Sorakas or whatever his name is with skeptical podcast. And I was on his show and we will do a show on this at some point, but he he issued a challenge about the best case for psychic detectives and it was a case of Nancy Weber and I wrote it up in one of my books. He presented this case, and I won’t go into the whole case. At some point, we’ll do a show on it. But it was a case of a woman named Nancy Weber who claimed that she had captured a serial killer, which is impressive on the face of it. And when we agreed to this challenge, I had assumed that he had done a lot of research and because he was putting his name on this best case for psychic detectives. And I eventually realized that I was doing all the work, I was doing all the research. And the extent of his research was watching a half hour TV show. And that was it! And to this day I’m baffled that he considered that to be research, and certainly enough to challenge me about the best case for psychics. It’s just, part of it is that a lot of people, when you’re talking about particularly investigation research, people don’t really have a good grasp of what that means, just in terms of just, you know, investigations and interviewing people, it’s just sort of, they think that if you look into something and you can’t find an answer right away, well, it’s a mystery. It’s unsolved. And over and over again, I see this where a lot of times when someone says it’s mysterious or someone says it’s unexplained or there’s no way to know, they haven’t even done a tenth of the research that I would consider is required to establish whether in fact this is true or not. They just sort of like, well, you know, they say this place is haunted and I walked around, I saw something weird and I was there for about three or four hours and I’m pretty sure it was a ghost. I’m like, really? That’s, I mean, some of my investigations take weeks or months, some of them have taken years and I’m not bragging, it’s just that that’s how long it takes to do an adequate investigation from my point of view.

0:42:03
CW: Well, yeah, the idea that research is easy and quick is just something that unfortunately is pervasive in our culture, which is used to instant gratification. If you can’t find a YouTube channel covering it, or a documentary, or a meme, then you think it’s mysterious. Or you find a documentary, or a meme, or a YouTube channel that talks about how a thing is mysterious and unsolved. And the one group of people that I don’t see falling into this trap is people who work in the TV industry, TV or film in any capacity. And I know, Pascual, from your background, you’ve told us a couple of tricks that reality TV uses, and anybody who’s in the industry understands that, look, a documentary, you know, if you’re seeing some cinematic broadcast of a thing, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. I mean, granted, there’s some really high-level stuff going on, you know, National Geographic, there’s some really well-respected organizations putting out good quality cinematic stuff, but then there’s What the Bleep Do We Know, and Super Size Me, and YouTube channels filled, see, that’s the problem. Yeah, there are there are a lot of people in the general population, well, I wouldn’t say a lot. This is not the majority of people but there is a segment of the population that will go down a YouTube channel rabbit hole and see 50 YouTube Presentations put together by a guy who’s convinced the earth is flat and it’s not really research, it’s like self-directed brainwashing. If you watch enough of that guy’s channel, it seeps in and you think you know a lot, but you don’t. You’ve just been hit with this guy’s bad information 50 times and you start to think, well, that makes sense and I’m doing research, here I am. I’ve put in hours and hours and hours of research. No, you haven’t.

0:44:03
BR: Right, I’m glad you brought that up. I think that’s an important part that’s often missed is that research necessarily, good research, I should say, necessarily involves competing information and hypotheses and information. So this is the problem is that oftentimes, particularly in the pro-paranormal fields and the mystery mongers, they’re very insular and they’re very incestuous. You read these UFO books and Bigfoot books and whatever else, and all these authors are just continually citing each other and quoting each other with little or no reference to outside experts, skeptics. It’s all this feedback loop, and they’re not testing their ideas against any knowledgeable skeptics or scientists. It’s all, well, yeah, but the conspiracy and Alex Jones, and they just goes round and round in a circle with no reference or anchor to competing ideas.

0:44:53
PR: Yeah, they just, they kind of keep dumping their ideas into the same bucket, you know, and all of them contribute. So you see this growth of information that, I believe that a lot of these, if not most of these people don’t realize that, you know, how much they’re insulating themselves because as this pile of information keeps growing you know they see it as all see look at the mounting evidence you know but but in reality it’s just that you’re dumping the same stuff into the bucket over and over and it’s you know it’s filling up but it’s filling up with five talking points you know.

CW: Tt’s like the Taco Bell of research it’s the same four ingredients, all the time exactly the same four!

0:45:40
PR: Exactly. Yeah, and I think that with, you know, documentary, it kind of falls into the same thing, which is really interesting. I’m currently researching a documentary that I’m planning on doing. I can’t talk about what it is, but what I’ve noticed, you know, I’ve researched for TV shows I’ve done which have had documentary elements or have been documentary shows, but they’ve usually been very narrow topics with only a couple of experts. In my defense, they’ve always been very subjective things, like I did some on the intelligence community with CIA and Mossad, and these are people that I have to track down experts, and the topic is something where there are lots of experts that disagree on a lot of things, and I have to keep paying attention to that little voice in my head that when something seems like it makes sense that I’m reading from one expert or another, you know, I have to go, is this me like wanting this to be something, or should I like take this one that like I kind of don’t want to believe is true and and I find that you know I Just from that from the perspective of a guy trying to build this this up and and also create a story because the documentary has to tell a story anyway. It is very difficult to avoid narrowing in on the wrong information because it speaks to what you want the overall message to be.

0:47:23
BR: Confirmation bias.

PR: It’s confirmation bias and that is just again like you can do a lot of research that will just feed right into your confirmation bias and seem completely legitimate because I mean honestly what I the people that I’ve been seeking out it’s like there are a lot of people that agree on things that seem you know that are scientifically sound and looks like the right trajectory but then there’s a whole population of experts on the other side that have also scientific evidence that seem to conflict with with the research and then the more you dig into it the more you realize like some of them you know it’s like 20 people citing the same exact study right or yeah you know and then but when you have 50 people or 100, then when maybe there’s more to it but again it’s like I can see why people fall into that research trap because it is so easy to just hit a stride with something here that that makes sense to you and just kind of keep walking down that path indefinetly.

0:48:18
CW: Yeah, and and there’s there’s so much information out there that finding finding wrong like like if you if you want to become a, I don’t know, you wouldn’t, nobody should want to, but if somebody wants to become a flat earther, they have no shortage of information that they can read and watch and learn about, you know, online and on videos and reading books, they can go down that rabbit hole their whole life and never read the same thing twice. And, and unfortunately, that’s, that’s what we’re living in right now, is just an age of so much information. And then you have these people, like I said, who are, like we all said, who are just using, or just falling prey to their confirmation bias by going down this one avenue, and it might be completely the wrong avenue. And when they see the consensus of experts, the scientific consensus on instead of actually looking closely enough to garner some of that expert information that comes from the scientific consensus, they instead go on an anomaly hunt. They say, oh, well, see, the scientists can’t explain this little thing about climate science, so the whole thing’s just toss it in the trash. And anomaly hunting, even anomaly hunting, you can put that to rest if you bring your questions to a legitimate expert. They usually have answers for that, but there’s a lot of answers, there’s a lot of anomalies that seem like they, oh, this unravels the whole theory of, you know, this unravels all of germ theory, or this unravels that. No, it doesn’t. You just don’t know enough about the… you know, I had a conversation once with somebody who was convinced that evolution was wrong because of this little biological detail. And I’m like, no, no, that doesn’t, you don’t understand what you’re talking about enough to know that that’s not an anomaly.

0:50:14
BR: Yeah, it strikes me as, you know, people who take classes, for example, integrative medicine and stuff, and, you know, chiropractors and things like a homeopath where you can see how somebody who is sincere wanting to help people and doesn’t know any better, oh I can become a you know I can be a hypno-homeopath in you know in four easy lessons in six months and they go into it and the context is yes I’m a doctor of oriental medicine, you know, I’m a herbalist, acupuncturist, and it’s all self-contained, it’s all there. There’s this ready-made template and a framework. When you go in there, it’s like, well, you know, where’s the research? Well, here’s the books, we have textbooks. Look at the chart on the wall. This is, you know, we’re providing you with your research materials, if you’re a student of these things, for example.

0:51:14
CW: It’s a turnkey business.

0:51:16
BR: Yeah, yeah. And to the student who doesn’t know anybody, they walk, wow, this is so cool, I’m going to this alternative medicine program and the leader is a great person, he does the Ayurvedic stuff, blah, blah, blah. And to them, it’s all, this is all well researched, there’s documents, there’s diplomas on the wall, but it’s outside that bubble where you do the actual research, where you get the conflicting information, where you get people pushing back and saying, no, there’s no such thing as subluxations. There’s no such thing as this homeopathic response.

0:51:51
CW: Well, before we leave the topic of what is not research, I wanted to mention a couple of things. Teachers and librarians are getting hip to this. They have to. That’s a very needed thing in education is to let students know or people even just you who are taking a class at the local library on how to spot fake news. A good friend of mine who’s a journalist teacher and another relative of mine who’s a librarian have both recently put together lesson plans on spotting fake news and how to do research and wade through all the misinformation that’s out there. And power to them, ladies and gentlemen in libraries and schools, do what you can to help kids understand how to wade through this. And there’s a couple of early projects that came out that are actually still out there. You can look up the Tree Octopus Project. Have either of you guys heard of that?

0:52:44
BR: No, is it like a drop bear?

0:52:46
CW: Kind of is like a drop bear. You can look up, you can really just Google tree octopus. And if you Google tree octopus, you’re gonna see tree octopus lessons. And there’s like a million lesson plans written about the tree octopus project. The tree octopus is a fictional little delightful creature, an endangered species actually invented by Lyle Zapato. And so he’s got a website about the tree octopus and it’s quite adorable actually. If you go there and check it out, it’s zapotope.net backslash tree octopus, but you’ll find it. It’s all roads lead there on the internet if you look up tree octopus. And he’s got all this information about it, like one of its predators is a Sasquatch. They were hunted almost to extinction to make ladies hats back in the day. And you know, on his frequently asked questions page, you know, how can I give money to support the tree octopuses? And he said, well, the best way is to give the money directly to the tree octopuses. So he recommends going there and handing them dollar bills so that they can build nests out of them. It’s really quite clever, but if you look at the website design, it looks like a typical educational website. It’s being used by a lot of teachers to show, hey, just because the website looks a certain way, you’ve got to read closely and see. If it mentions Sasquatch five times, maybe you should check out the legitimacy of the information there. The second thing I wanted to mention was DHMO.org, dihydrogen monoxide.

PR: Oh yes, yes, Dr. Tom Way was the guy that founded that.

CW: Yeah, back in like 1997. Yeah, yeah. He called it an informational whoopee cushion and he he totally nailed the design of like a bad conspiracy theory website. Or like a warning website – that there’s a cover up in the EPA and they don’t want you to know about this. And, you know, and it links to all these stories on how many deaths this year have occurred because of dihydrogen monoxide and how it’s in all our food. And yeah, I urge people to give that a look if they want a chuckle at how well he has just nailed the design of an old 1990s danger-mongering website.

0:55:17
PR: Yeah, I’ve very often in my life have linked DHMO.org to people’s posts on social media when they’re talking about chemicals in something and I’m like, hey, have you ever seen this? And more often than not, it takes a few posts in the conversation to like, either they never get it or you know, sometimes they’ll finally be like wait it’s water. I Googled I hydrogen…

0:55:46
CW: Yeah, I’m all about teaching through parody so yeah, whenever satire can lend a hand I’m all for it.

PR: Definitely.

(MUSIC)

PR: So, what is research?

0:56:04
CW: Well, research is a lot of things, as we started talking about at the beginning, but one of the common go-to points is, of course, as Susan Gerbic would tell you, Wikipedia! You and I, we were kind of raised in the note, you know, we went to college and everything and soon after college it was a mantra Wikipedia is not a source, Wikipedia is not a source you know don’t use it as a source! But really it’s evolved over the years it’s it’s you know even teachers say okay use it as a start but make sure you go to primary sources yeah and over the years it’s become something much more than just a starting point identifying good Wikipedia pages and being warned about bad ones is kind of become worked into the code of Wikipedia now. Helpfully, Wikipedia now shows you what pages need more citations and are questionable. You see a little warning tape notifying you of that, letting you know it’s still under construction and it needs some work. And even as early as 2009, an article in Live Science by Jeremy Hsu stated that there was a 2005 study by the journal Nature and it found Wikipedia roughly as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. A 2008 study in the journal Reference Services Review pegged Wikipedia’s accuracy rate at 80% compared to the 95 to 96% among other sources. So that’s really not bad for a free online crowd-sourced encyclopedia.

0:57:41
PR: Take that all my professors at Los Angeles Valley College in 2005.

0:57:46
CW: Yes, we should probably give most of the credit of that evolution to Susan. Can we do that?

BR: Yeah, sure.

0:57:54
CW: Thank you, Susan.

PR: You’ve fixed Wikipedia.

BR: And not just Susan, but all her hundred and some plus, I think last is our 121 editors who are all part of her team.

PR: A hell of a team and they’re all very good writers. They all deserve lots of credit.

0:58:10
CW: Keep it up guys. But yeah, so once you go to Wikipedia, you can also search out the primary sources which are going to be listed in the citations. And good old fashioned footwork, go to your library. find it quite useful that Amazon allows you to poke into books without having to buy them and have them shipped to you first. You can actually look at the pages of books themselves. So if you’re told by some old curmudgeon in your household that it has to be in a book, you have to actually look at the pages like the hard copy pages of a book. You can even do that online now.

0:58:46
PR: The hard copy pages of fixed text that cannot be edited once it’s committed, unlike Wikipedia.

0:58:54
CW: I don’t know, I was a reprints editor for quite a while when I first started, and believe me, we would run lines of type and just paste it over the mistakes that we had to correct in a book.

0:59:03
BR: Well, I’ll talk a little bit about my experience as a writer and researcher, because, you know, My view is that I see research as sort of an exercise in not only informing audiences and trying to offer context and perspective, but also basically sort of defending my reputation as a writer and researcher, because at the end of the day, my name’s on that. And it may not be important to anybody else, but it’s important to me, because if it’s as good as I can do. I research it, I’ve done my due diligence. There may be mistakes, we all make mistakes, but through research you can show that you’ve done your due diligence. And one thing that I’ve found is useful when writing and researching is, you know, they talk about defensive driving. We’ll do defensive writing. So, you know, when you’re writing, think of your critics. Think of who’s going to criticize you, think of the people who are going to be pissed off at what you write, whether they’re psychic detectives or alternative medicine practitioners or ghost hunters, whoever. Anticipate their protest and the holes they’re going to say, well, yeah, what about this and you didn’t do that, and yeah, but what about here?

1:00:20
PR: So you mean to tell me my imaginary arguments with myself in the shower actually do have a purpose?

1:00:26
BR: Yeah. They’re exactly what you need to be doing. That is a sign of a good skeptic. No, I mean, seriously, because readers should be able to expect a good faith effort to tell the truth from fiction, and that you’re being intellectually honest with them. Again, you may get something wrong. Everybody does now and then. But if you can show a good faith effort, you can say, OK, well, maybe this was wrong, but here’s my three sources, and they were wrong too. Then you sort of covered your ass on that.

1:00:53
CW: Yeah, yeah. And a way to extend that, you know, that defensive writing style is hand off a draft to a good friend who knows some stuff about the material and they can say, oh well, I kind of was hoping you’d also mention blah blah blah or you didn’t cover blah blah blah or a question that comes to mind is this, this, hand it to Pascual, he’ll read it in the shower, and he’ll get back to you with your weak points.

1:01:17
PR: Just make sure to laminate it first.

1:01:19
CW: Yeah.

1:01:20
BR: I’ll just show up in the shower behind him just reading from my notes. We’ll make it awkward for everybody. But no, I mean, and this is why it often gets frustrating when you’re researching topics and you come across writers. There’s some writers, I won’t name any names, but I imagine all three of us and probably many of our listeners will have some idea of the sorts of people that I’m referring to. But you can’t really tell with their books what side they’re on. They’re sort of mystery mongers, they’re a little bit skeptical, but they’re kind of believer. And like, oh, well, here’s the evidence, but could it be? Like, well, anything is possible, that’s not the question. The question is, you know, if you’re being honest with yourself and the readers, then you come down on one side or the other. And so that gets really frustrating when you see these books, where the topic is UFOs or mysteries or whatever else. And it’s clear that they’re trying to straddle this fence and walk this line between, well, we don’t want to be too skeptical, you know, we still got to make it sexy and sizzle. And I personally find it cowardly because if you’ve done your research and you’ve done enough research to write about it, that is you’re putting yourself out as an expert, I wrote this article, I wrote this book, whatever else, then you should have some idea, unless you’re an idiot, which is the case in some of these cases, you should have some idea and be able to tell your readers what you really think. And if the answer is that you, if you truly believe that in this case a UFO crashed and the bodies were Absconded with that’s fine. Or if in this case you really think this was this whole mystery was was not an urban legend Then just say that

1:03:01
CW: Do you think some writers are just purposely trying to artificially shove in the the false dichotomy that we see on a lot of infotainment? We’re like well this skeptic says X But we have another person that says Y and they want to almost give equal time to it in an artificially pumped up way?

1:03:16
BR: I think that’s true. Sometimes a lot of times they just again. They don’t consult skeptical Sources because they don’t feel they need to It’s not on their radar. They don’t they don’t consider that to be part of the research there I mean, I’ll give you a quick one quick example In my books on ghosts I’ve probably got a couple dozen books on ghosts and I’ve got at least a dozen or so that are just on some ghost hunters memoirs, you know, confessions of a, you know, spooky ghost hunter, blah blah blah. And the entire book, the entire, you know, 230 pages, it’s all their personal experience. Oh, I went in here, you know, I saw this thing, I stayed in this hotel, and this scary thing jumped out at me. And there’s no research. It’s all anecdotes. It’s all stories.

CW: I felt cold and then I felt warm.

BR: Yeah, and then I peed myself and I felt warm again. Come on, man. It’s like, you know, I mean, there’s a place for anecdotes and personal experiences. And, you know, I write about those in my investigations. I try to, you know, give the reader a sense of the place and the information as I learn it and get them a sense of what’s going on. But in addition to that, you need to be able to bring in outside information, not just like, well, here’s 200 pages of my experiences and wow, isn’t this weird? I can’t prove anything, but oh, buy my next book. That’s not research.

1:04:35
CW: I’d like to know how Deepak Chopra researches any of his books, because it doesn’t even seem to be based on personal experience, just introspection and some word salad and trying to actively avoid learning what the actual word meaning of quantum is.

PR: Every time he talks, it reminds me of like when I’ve ended up at a job interview for a job I’m totally not qualified for. And I just keep using words pertaining to that job in sentences until it just seems like they’re satisfied with what I said. I think outside the box and…

BR: I’m big on synergy and I will fight negativity with every fiber of my being.

PR: So that’s what I gather from him. I swear that’s what he’s doing.

BR: He just hangs around with Schermer and they sort of glare at each other until one of them gives up.

1:05:31
CW: But yes, I suppose Chopra really belonged in the first segment, which is what is NOT research, right? Now we talked a little bit about vetting online sources, so obviously you want to apply that common sense to figuring out whether or not an online source is just full of crap or something worthwhile Another thing you can do online is to seek out an expert. Universities, think-tanks, there’s plenty of places that have experts on things that have put in decades of research If you yeah, if you want to take a shortcut and and these people are happy to talk to somebody who has questions, it’s amazing. Ben I know you answer a number of questions from students all the time.

BR: I do on email and part of the reason I do that is not because I you know Not because I want to encourage students to do research and contacting even a so-called expert like me is part of that process.

CW: I think it’s a great, it’s like a cheat code. It’s like you can read 10 books about something and take five classes or you can ask somebody who’s done all that and it’s a fantastic quick way to get your specific questions answered. If it’s for a school project or you have specific questions about something or you’re writing an article, it’s remarkable how happy a lot of experts are to talk to somebody because let’s just say you are a marine biologist at such and such aquarium and it’s your job every day to maintain the manta rays. Well, you’re not going to be called unless there’s some giant manta ray attacking New York City, your phone’s not going to be ringing off the hook for people who want your expert advice. So when you do get an email or a call from somebody who’s like, yeah, I’m writing a story about marine life and such and such and I really would like to know some questions. If you could have a moment, half the time they will be eager to give you 20 minutes of their time and talk to you about something, give you some great information based on their expertise and experience.

1:07:43
BR: And they love, just FYI, they love the sorts of questions that are like, do mermaids eat manta rays? Those are the sorts of questions that are like, um…

1:07:54
CW: No, I don’t recommend that. Don’t do that, listeners. Although there’s a great documentary about mermaids… Now Ben, you’re the book guy. You’ve got a ton of books. Do you have any helpful hints about using actual physical hardcopy books?

1:08:12
BR: Yeah, yeah sure. Yeah, there’s a couple things, a couple tips I can give on research. One is to go actually use the library. You should recognize that this is gonna sound crazy, but not every book has been digitized. Not every book is available online. I know, crazy, right?

1:08:32
CW: Pictures or it didn’t happen!

1:08:34
BR: There you go. And so, and I tell those people, and they go, oh, if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist. No, no, no, lots of stuff is not online. And even if it is online, you may be behind the paywall or wherever else. And you know a way around a paywall if you’re too cheap? Go to University Library. It’s right there. They have any number of journals. I mean, when I was researching the Pokemon Panic and I was researching photosensitive epilepsy, I went over to the library dozens of times and spent probably $100.10 at a time on the copy machine. And you get the materials right there. And so don’t overlook libraries. Don’t assume that if it’s not available online, that it’s not available anywhere, because oftentimes it’s not. And a lot of times, particularly with field work and on-site investigations, I learned this the hard way, if you’re in some, particularly if it’s a foreign country or somewhere else, and you see a book about what you’re researching or investigating, buy the book then. I made this rookie mistake early in my career, you know, I don’t want to spend 15 bucks, I mean, I’m sure I can get it online when I get home. Nope, not always. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. But there are a lot of regionally produced books. For example, one example is books on Belizean folklore. When I researched the Duende figure, there’s a toucan man story that I’ll tell at some point. When I was in Belize, there were several regionally produced books that just simply are not available online. It’s not that you can’t get it, it’s just that they’re just not there. And so my advice is always, if there’s something that’s interesting and relevant, buy it while it’s there. Don’t, a bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush. Don’t assume that, oh, I’ll save five bucks by getting it from Amazon. Not necessarily.

1:10:30
CW: Yeah, that’s good advice. One thing I learned about libraries here, and I’m pretty sure this is with most major cities is you can now go online and Very simply look up the library website and any book that one local library has like you don’t have to drive across town, you can just order it and have that book delivered to the library closest to you. They will do that for free. And then you drive over and pick it up.

1:10:54
BR: It’s very cool.

1:10:55
PR: It is very cool.

1:10:56
CW: And libraries are like, they’re wonderful places. They’re like this warm, cozy bookstore that you don’t have to pay money to use.

1:11:04
PR: And you can just hang out there all day too and nobody will stop you. Unless you smell weird.

BR: Unless you smell weird. I was gonna give another piece of advice on research is you mentioned before about contacting experts and that’s a great idea. Experts are a wonderful resource, but make sure you do some pre-research before that so that you can ask intelligent questions. If you don’t have at least a grasp of the territory and the overall topic, you’re going to waste your time and their time because you’re not going to know what questions to ask. And so make sure you have a good grasp and know what you’re looking for. And again, part of it is focusing on a specific angle and working on that.

1:11:49
CW: Yeah, doing some preliminary research, not just on the topic, but on the expert you wanna talk to. You know, find out how many years they’ve been at the university or the aquarium or wherever they are. Find out what their specialty is and why you’re talking to them. It’s a great form of sucking up and it will get you a lot of points with them and they will help you that much more.

1:12:09
BR: Another good indicator is books with indexes. I am a huge fan of indexes, indices. All my books have them. Indexes are, I think they’re really important and oftentimes I won’t buy a book just flat out, just on principle, if it’s a non-fiction book, obviously. My feeling is that if the author doesn’t care enough to help someone locate information in their book then I’m like, you know what, then I can’t be bothered. If you’re telling me that your book has valuable information, but you don’t want to help me find it because you don’t want to index it yourself, you don’t want to pay an indexer to the book, that’s oftentimes a deal killer for me.

1:12:53
CW: I can speak to that as well. As I mentioned possibly too many times on this show, I used to work in academic publishing and the rookie authors would sometimes be like, well, oh, do we need to have an index? And, oh, I’m not going to find the time to write an index. And, oh, it costs so much money to pay an indexer. The more experienced authors understood how valuable an index was for people looking to do research with their book, to find out whether or not their book applied to what they needed for their field. Authors who were in the know put the time into an index and did an index correctly, did a good index. I actually kind of liked editing indexes. I know that’s kind of weird, but they’re fun It’s like a crossword puzzle of all the information in the book and you can tell immediately when an index has been made by just a computer-generated program without any eyeballs on the material you need to need to know how to put those sub heads together and Categorize the different trees of information on your index because otherwise you’ve just got this crazy nonsense word salad that’s not gonna do any readers any good. So humans are, human sensibilities are needed to put together good index and they’re tremendously useful.

1:14:09
BR: And I’ll just say one other thing that I do if I’m at home researching some topic one of the first things I’ll do is I’ll go to my bookshelves, my library and I will I’ll just walk around for, I don’t know, 10-15 minutes and I’ll pull books off the shelf that that might be related to it and I go right to the index and usually if it’s a if it’s a if it’s something that I have enough on I will end up with four or five or more books I’ll put bookmarks in each one as I go along where I’m going with this is that it’s it’s it’s likely that there are other books on the shelf that might have some material that would be related to it I’m not going to find them. And because I’m not going to find them, I’m not going to quote them and reference them. And they’re going to die on the vine. So the authors that take the time and put an index in their book are the authors that I’m going to be researching and quoting and referencing and basically sort of keeping their work alive.

1:15:07
CW: Good point, good point. Okay, now lastly, sometimes you don’t have hours and hours and hours of time to do research. Sometimes you’re just trying to refute something online and do it quickly and do it on social media and you should at least have some modicum of decent research skills to do something like that. Snopes is a very popular source and a very useful source. It has come under some controversy lately. I don’t know if you guys want to speak to that. What are your thoughts on Snopes these days?

1:15:35
PR: In my experience, it seems that they still are pretty much following the same protocol in terms of site. Usually, they break down a claim and then they cite the references that refute the claim or confirm it. And that format is still I know that there was a lot of upheaval in recent years with ownership changing hands and a divorce kind of muddling the situation. But as far as I can tell, nowadays I still see the format being the same, which indicates that they haven’t changed their methods. And fact-checking, if you are unearthing facts, who’s in charge of the site isn’t going to affect the facts that you’re bringing up.

1:16:32
CW: Yeah, the one downside to Snopes I have seen, if you’re using it to refute somebody on social media or some such, is plenty of times you’ll just be dismissed. Oh, well Snopes is a liberal lie factory and they’re just all part of the conspiracy. So, I mean, you can take it an extra step there and say, OK, well, why don’t you take a look at the here? Snopes is listing this and this and this and this. Do you disagree with these primary sources? Because because Snopes just doesn’t say, all right, we as a collective unit proclaim this false. You know, they say, here’s a writer that investigated it. Here’s evidence. Here’s a newspaper article that they just like just like a good Wikipedia page. They have got their sources listed.

1:17:15
BR: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think that the people that are gonna bring that up are the same sort of people who are going to, if you link to a CNN article, you know, oh, libtard, lamestream media, you know, you get the knee jerk, you know, like, oh, don’t believe it, you know. Yeah, man, man, man, man, man.

1:17:32
PR: Yep.

BR: So, I mean, there’s nothing you can do about that. I mean, the fact is that CNN has made mistakes. Fox News has made mistakes. No one’s perfect. All you know, all. And of course, you know, the people who hate the people who hate one given news media will will harp on, you know, highlight the errors and the boners and then the people vice versa. So, I mean, the fact is that even if you do think that the CNN isn’t general, that doesn’t mean they don’t put out good news, you know, valid reporting, the same thing with Snopes. Now, in the case of Snopes, I’ve written for Snopes, I’ve done, I think, last I recall, about a half dozen articles for them on various things. And I’ve always found them to be pretty solid and reliable. I’ve occasionally found some articles I disagree with, and that’s fine. I mean, again, no one’s perfect, but on the whole, I think Snopes is a fairly reputable debunking site, and I wouldn’t hesitate about linking to it. I mean, just, you know, and again, if somebody says, well, yeah, but that’s Snopes, look, and? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, exactly as you said, Celestia, well, here’s their sources, what’s your sources?

1:18:41
CW: Yeah, yeah, do you have issues with all of these sources they’re citing or you just don’t like them as a, you don’t like Snopes as a person.

1:18:49
BR: Well, but keep in mind, I mean, I don’t want to go too far into it, but as I recall, a lot of the complaints were about political bias. Well, Snopes has a ton of information that has nothing to do with political bias. I know because I wrote some of it. So even if you are convinced that Snopes has some liberal bias, which I don’t know if that’s true, but even if you think that’s true, that doesn’t mean that the other 85% of the content on Snopes is contaminated by that, much of which was written long before Trump was even around.

1:19:23
CW: Yeah, well, and one last little online hint I would offer people if you’re just looking for some quick information. Now, obviously, this is not gonna just land you with perfect sources, but I’ve taken to Googling issues or things or like a subject and you see what you see when you come up with you google I don’t know flying hamsters and you look at whatever people have to say about flying hamsters and then also do a second Google search flying hamsters skeptic and you just adding that word skeptic this is another reason why I like the word skeptic because you know you will find a whole lot of sources from people who claim to be skeptics. Now, sometimes they’re like not skeptic, sometimes they’re climate denier people or something. But on many, many topics, you will find wonderful articles written by Steven Novella on the Neurologica blog or doctors who are fighting alternate med stuff. There’s some really, and you’ve got to do some curation after you find that stuff, but it can really lead you to some really, really good breakdowns of misinformation by just adding that word to your Google search.

1:20:33
BR: Flying hamsters debunked.

1:20:34
CW: Yeah, debunked is another one. That’s another very good word to use.

1:20:39
PR: Yeah, I often use, you know, depending, well, I guess it depends on the topic, but also just, you know, certain things when someone’s like recommending a product or a service or something, I’ll put scam after it or…

1:20:53
CW: Oh yeah.

1:20:54
PR: That’s one, I’ve discovered a lot of, you know, interesting stuff through that. And also just a lot of people who, you know, disagree with something vehemently enough to call it a scam.

BR: Even if it’s not a scam at all.

PR: But it can be helpful though and, you know, the one tip I would give just about using general is that you should Google the topic, find some information about it, and then Google it with modifiers, see what the naysayers say about it, or see if there’s, you know. I mean, really, if you’re trying to do, you know, anything useful with Google, and I think Google is a very useful tool, obviously, but if you Google all the angles of what you’re looking into, and as much as you don’t want to, like, you have your own idea of what you want the answer to be but like just take in the refutations and take in criticisms and look at what they’re based on and take that into account. A lot of the times with skeptics we find ourselves fairly validated. More often than not, I think being a skeptic, that’s one of the perks of the job is more often than not, your hunch is almost always gonna have an element of truth because you…

1:22:08
BR: Well, you have that voice telling you to doubt yourself and double check yourself.

1:22:13
PR: Yeah, you’re like, I’m not sure about that. And sure enough, you shouldn’t be sure about that.

1:22:17
CW: So you’re saying our skeptics have attuned their confirmation bias to just always doubt stuff.

1:22:23
PR: Right, yeah.

1:22:24
CW: We have some wonky confirmation bias in us.

1:22:29
PR: It’s better to be wrong in the direction of doubt than it is to be wrong in positive claims, I would say.

1:22:36
CW: Yeah, I would argue that too. Of course, the fastest way to get really boned up on a subject is to have two parents who are Latin American historians. come up with a dissection of Cinco de Mayo, like on the fly. I recommend that. That goes back to seeking out experts, I guess.

BR: Well, Pascual, I’m glad you brought it, and we sort of touched on it before, but it’s good to make it explicit, the importance of getting information from a variety of sources. That’s probably one of the biggest problems that I see in research, and also research with scare quotes is people will again goes back to confirmation bias though they’ll go to one or two sources and they’ll think that’s it.

CW: I’m right aha!

1:23:26
BR: And the problem here is that is that there’s virtually no proposition or assertion you can make that you can’t find some expert or “expert” who will agree with you. There’s so much on the internet there’s so many contrarians, you can find somebody somewhere who’s agreed with whatever wild-ass claim you’ve made. And so this is one reason, again, we sort of touched on it before, but I think it’s important to emphasize, get a variety of sources from across the spectrum. If I’m researching a chapter in a book, I may have anywhere from a dozen to 30 sources just across the board, just because that’s what you need in order to do good research because it helps you to find some some of the biases it helps you to See the variety of claims that are out there. There’s a saying that you know a man with one watch knows what time it is a man with two watches is never sure and if you only have one source That’s what you’re gonna think is true, right? And it’s it’s it’s valuable to have a variety of sources, some of which will contradict each other, but at least you’ll get a bigger picture and you’ll be able to tease out what part of this is true and what part of this is maybe dubious.

1:24:33
PR: Right, right.

1:24:34
CW: And that helps you narrow your focus. If you find two sources that are in disagreement about a particular detail, there you go. Make that your research project.

(MUSIC)

1:24:49
PR: We would like to thank our sponsor-level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaringthestrange. 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.

1:25:24
Thanks again strangers. So that about does it for this week.

BR: Are we done already? We’re just getting into it.

PR: I know.

CW: There’s so much more we could say about research.

PR: I know we’ll have to do a little more research and get naturalnews.com and start googling. But next week we have a great topic, a very near and dear general topic to me, and it is zombies, but specifically Haitian zombies. So we are going to be talking about Ben’s research into Haitian zombies and all the spooky and fun things that are going on there.

BR: There’s lots of, I mean, zombies, I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of zombies. I know that we’ve probably lost listeners right there. But no, I just, no, but I mean, you know, some people, they love vampires, they love zombies. And I’m not that interested in zombies. Like, for example, I’ve never seen The Walking Dead. Again, I’m sure listeners are unsubscribing as I speak. I don’t hate it, I’m just not that interested in it.

1:26:32
CW: What Ben lacks in good pop culture taste, he makes up for with research skills.

1:26:38
BR: As you will see when we talk about the Haitian zombie.

1:26:43
CW: I’ve seen Max Brooks speak about zombies. He does a really entertaining talk about zombies and why he loves them so much. And so, you’ve got a tall act to follow here, Ben.

1:26:53
PR: Yeah, but at least you have a Romero on the show, and for fans of zombies, you’ll be perfectly at home with me.

BR: There you go, there you go.

1:27:04
CW: Perfect.

1:27:05
PR: But until then, we’ll see ya.

1:27:06
Bye-bye.

1:27:07
Take care.

1:27:08
Squaring the Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC, copyright 2017.

1:27:14
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1:27:17
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1:27:43
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