The Skeptics Guide #1096 - Jul 11 2026

Special Guest: David Kyle Johnson; Quickie with Bob: Two States of Water; News Items: Using AI To Detect AI Cheating, Teens Using AI Chatbots, NYT Article on Rapid Prompting Method, SETI Partly Explains Fermi; Skeptical Philosophy; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:33Speaker 02

  You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, July 9th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Kara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and we have a guest this week, David Kyle Johnson, who goes by Kyle. So Kyle, welcome to the show.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  It's all you're doing is writing these things.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  You've been on the show a couple of times before. You are one of our recurring philosophers. It was like chatting with philosophers because they actually know what they're talking about.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  We try.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is kind of a follow-up. You're going to join us for the whole show as a guest, but the reason why I wanted to bring you on was to follow up from our discussion about basically the philosophy of scientific skepticism we were talking about last week. And we're going to tighten that up a bit and get into the weeds a little bit more.

• 1:25Speaker 04

  Yep, as much as you want.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And I do want to say to the listeners, though, just as a heads up, this is the last regular episode that we're recording, quote unquote, "in studio" for a month. The next four episodes are going to be all episodes that we record on the road.

• 1:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you know, because of the dramatic way that you just said that, the panic that ensued in so many listeners when they heard you say, "This will be the last regularly recorded episode"?

• 1:55Bob Novella?

  Yes, the nanosecond of panic.

• 1:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Before, for a month.

• 2:00Bob Novella?

  But it's also important to note that if the apocalypse happens and we don't mention it, that's why we're not mentioning it, because we're back in time.

• 2:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's true. It's true. So yeah, the next four episodes will be, will have been recorded from when we were traveling or pre-recorded.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I have three episodes in the can and those will cover us for the three weekends, basically, that we're traveling. And then the last episode we record on the road, which will be in Christchurch, New Zealand, because it'll be basically the Saturday before it goes up the following week. That'll be the fourth episode.

• 2:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Nice.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  And then we'll be back in the studio.

• 2:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Are you guys ready? I can't believe this snuck up on us so fast. We literally leave in one week and two days.

• 2:48Jay Novella?

  Kara, I was talking to Bob.

• 2:49Bob Novella?

  We leave in one week.

• 2:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you guys leave in one week. Wow.

• 2:52Jay Novella?

  So Bob was saying like, oh, I've got to prep this news item and, you know, I've got to pack. And I'm like, oh, Bob, that is so adorable. I'm like, I am in the complete thick of it heat of getting, pulling all the strings to get everything ready to go, like from dealing with all the vendors for the swag that we're buying and all the venues and everything. Like, it's just a million details. Like, you know, we, we had a major issue with the board, board meeting thing that we're doing in Australia that I had to solve. But that's what happens, like, the last week or two before a big conference, that's when all the heat gets turned on.

• 3:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's just the conference, not to mention getting there, every hotel we have to stay in along the way. Like, all of the logistical stuff for the travel on top of all of the work.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  It's international. So it's like, does everybody get their visas?

• 3:44Jay Novella?

  Kara, did I tell you, like, one of our Airbnb's that we are renting, the guy sold it.

• 3:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, please tell me it's not the one that we were gonna stay in in Sydney?

• 3:53Jay Novella?

  No, you're all good.

• 3:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I love that Airbnb.

• 3:55Jay Novella?

  But this was a multi-week rigamarole.

• 3:57Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 3:58Jay Novella?

  Because the guy sold it and then went and ghosted everybody. Then the new company emails us, but me and my wife were like, this has got to be a scam. Because it just seemed totally scammy. They wanted to do a direct bank transfer. You know, and I'm just like, ding, ding, ding. No, what? Like, no way am I doing a direct bank transfer with, like, you know, rental company XYZ out of nowhere, you know? So we had to verify everything and then we finally tracked down the guy that we did the original rental from. Then we had to like go through all this rigmarole with Airbnb. It was a, it was a complete mess. And thank God my wife was helping me because she's really good at Airbnb and she knows how to like deal with Airbnb because she's, she's the one that typically does the rentals. But oh my God, the amount of emails and nonsense

• 4:43Jay Novella?

  just to like move over to the new.

• 4:46Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's the same place. It's just a different owner now?

• 4:48Jay Novella?

  Well, it went from a single person owner to a company.

• 4:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, but Airbnb should be handling all of that.

• 4:55Jay Novella?

  Well, they didn't know anything. We told them what was going on.

• 4:57Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so insane.

• 4:59Jay Novella?

  And then they do, they, they slip you into the black box so, so exquisitely. They're like, we tell them what's going on and then they're like, we will research this and get back to you. And then I'm like, wait, wait, wait. And you know, we're leaving in two weeks. Don't, this can't be like, you know, you, you contact me via email six months from now. I need a resolution tomorrow.

• 5:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 5:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Bob Novella?

  And then just recently there was the nunchuck hubbub.

• 5:26Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:28Bob Novella?

  I just happened to mention on the live stream on Wednesday that, that I'm doing a nunchuck demo in, in Sydney. And a lot of people were then like, wait a second, you got, you gotta really check this more closely because it's really like not legal in Sydney. Now I had, I had, I made the incorrect assumption that a foam nunchuck would not be a problem because it's foam. It's like cosplay. It's, it's a training. I could literally whack you in the head with this foam nunchuck and you'd be like, what the hell are you doing? And that'd be the extent of your reaction. And apparently even these foam ones are not allowed to be brought in. You'd have to, you have to go through this whole rigmarole of filling out forms and doing all this stuff. I'm like, well, that's not going to happen.

• 6:09Bob Novella?

  So it's, we, now we gotta, we gotta get a workaround. And it's just like, holy crap, man. Just even a foam nunchuck. I, I never would have guessed the foam would have been a problem.

• 6:18Jay Novella?

  And that is literally the smallest, least of our problems.

• 6:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 6:23Jay Novella?

  Chuck Fiasco.

• 6:24Bob Novella?

  But it's my, but it's my biggest one.

• 6:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I know the one that sticks the most, well, maybe not the most in Jay's crock, because you have a lot of things you're dealing with, but it's the 15 pound cutoff for a carry on back in New Zealand, when the bag itself weighs eight pounds.

• 6:40Bob Novella?

  17 or 18.

• 6:41Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so stupid.

• 6:42Bob Novella?

  Empty bag. So if you like filled it with a vacuum, you might be able to use it.

• 6:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, boy.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  But it'll happen. All these different threads will come together. And it'll be a seamless experience.

• 6:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Seamless.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a logistical nightmare, but we're handling it. All right, Bob, you're gonna start us off with a quickie.

• 7:06Bob Novella?

  Okey dokey. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. So, guys, this is a study that was published in Nature Physics, provided a new molecular level evidence for this long debated idea in water physics that I wasn't aware of anyway, that liquid water may not be one structurally uniform substance, but really this constantly shifting mixture of two distinct microscopic structures. Like I said, the idea's been around for decades. Now, according to this two-state model, liquid water can be viewed as a kind of a mixture of these two, like, local structures. One is denser and more disordered, the other is less dense and more ordered, right? And it kind of makes sense when you think about how weird water is. Professor Xiao Zheng Zhang

• 7:50Bob Novella?

  from City University of Hong Kong said this, "According to the two-state hypothesis, water can be viewed as a mixture of two distinct structures, A and B, but no one has seen a genuine pure A or pure B form of liquid water. And because of this lack of direct molecular evidence, the model remained controversial." So, some of you may have guessed that this model has been used for years now to help explain why water is just so weird, right?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Why it's wet?

• 8:18Bob Novella?

  By compared to other liquids. It is unique. I mean, for example, it becomes easier to compress as it cools, which you might not have been, you might not be aware of. Classically, water is seen as, what, incompressible, right? But you can compress it a bit, but it's actually, it's easier to compress it a little bit as it gets cooler. Why is that? The other one, which you may be aware of, is that water reaches maximum density at 4 Celsius, 4 degrees Celsius, instead of at its freezing point.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Depending on salinity, there's some variability there.

• 8:48Bob Novella?

  Yep, totally. But still, kind of weird. Like, why wouldn't it just do it at freezing point? So, in this new study, researchers used simulations and unsupervised deep learning techniques to Search for these hidden structural fingerprints and water molecules that are just so hard to tease out of water any other way. The model was trained on tens of millions of local water molecule configurations and was designed to let the data kind of just like reveal these patterns that traditional methods just couldn't cleanly separate. So the results show that two distinct clusters emerged. There's a structure A, which was denser and more disordered, structure B, which was less dense and more ordered, as I've been saying. The study also found that the balance between these two structures, because they're kind

• 9:31Bob Novella?

  of, they described it as intraconvertible, is that it? Intraconvertible? Where they can kind of change into each other? So that these two structures can change at various times depending on what the temperature and the pressures are. So it's just, it's a simple water, right? Water, you think, is the definition of simplicity, right? But it's just endlessly fascinating and complex. So this has been your Two State Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  So you know what this reminds me of whenever I hear "structure" and "water"?

• 9:59Bob Novella?

  Yes, I do. Pseudoscience crap.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Of homeopathy, because this is now the new thing, not that, like, the last 20 years or whatever, that homeopaths are saying to explain their magic water and how there could be no remaining solute left behind, but it still has some kind of properties. It's because water itself is structured, is, now they throw the word nano in there as if that's supposed to mean something. It's nanostructured. And by coincidence, you guys remember who Dana Ullman is?

• 10:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I saw the emails.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, you saw them. So Dana Ullman has been, he is a homeopathy apologist who occasionally harasses us. He's really a true believer and just a real, you know, in my opinion, a classic pseudoscientist, like, really trying to be scientific but distorting it beyond all recognition. I mean, he believes homeopathy works. It's like you need to say anymore.

• 10:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah, really don't need to.

• 10:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, not just that he believes homeopathy, he's a homeopath, right?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's, like, he wrote letters saying, "Oh, you centered me on science-based monit-- what are you afraid?" Meaning, meanwhile, his comment was blocked by Discord. We had nothing. Nothing to even do with it. Yeah, but that's such a classic childish internet, you know, kind of thing to do. And that's what we're basically dealing with. But he does the same thing. He, all right, he did something absolutely amazing in this exchange. I don't know if you guys caught this. He was trying to convince me that he has some validity to what he's saying because he asked ChatGPT. And it gave him the answer he wanted.

• 11:31Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, that was ridiculous.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  You gotta be kidding me. Yes.

• 11:35Bob Novella?

  His evidence was his conversations with ChatGPT.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 11:38Bob Novella?

  Beautiful.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Right. So I just responded, you clearly also don't know how LLMs work. There actually is evidence that the way you frame the question, that because of the sycophancy thing, you're basically to tell you what it's gonna buy your premise and tell you what you want to hear.

• 11:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, that's how.

• 11:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I tried when I'm, when I'm dealing with ChatGPT in that way, I tried to never let it know what I'm thinking. I wanted to, what does the sign say about this? And don't give it any hints of where it, it, it might, you know, be sycophantic to me. It's like, oh, I hate that.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  He's not the first guy to do that to me. And so the, the last time somebody did that to me, I'm like, all right. Here, so I asked it a question from my perspective and got a completely different answer. And I sent that back to the guy.

• 12:21Jay Novella?

  And then he said, oh, yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It's like, come on, like you can't freaking use ChatGPT as evidence. That's, we, we, and we've talked about this. It's like people treat it like an oracle.

• 12:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 12:33Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, it's just incredible how fast that happened. And in fact, we're gonna have two AI related news items. Kind of hard to avoid so much going on. But Jay, you're gonna start us off. Kyle, you're, you're a professor, right?

• 12:47Speaker 04

  I certainly am.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  You teach students?

• 12:50Speaker 04

  I certainly do, about a hundred every semester.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  What do you do?

• 12:53Jay Novella?

  Kyle, wait, you can read, right?

• 12:55Speaker 04

  I am also literate, yes, I am.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  You know words, don't you? What do you do to make sure your students aren't submitting AI generated content?

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Well, there is no way to guarantee that they can do that, but I have a few safeguards that I do. And I'm actually going to implement another one this next semester. So one of the things I do is, for one thing, I ban all technology in the classroom. No laptops, no phones, no tablets. No pacemakers, no inhalers. No, yeah, no pacemakers, no watches, no. So any kind of, you know, you know what I mean, tablets, laptops. I hear you, external tech. And that's mainly for attention purposes, though, to make sure that they're actually paying attention in class, because if you don't do that, they're, you know, doing whatever on their phone or laptops. But for chat GPT for homework and stuff like that, a couple of things I do is I assign physical books, reading in physical books, and then I assign

• 13:48Speaker 04

  written outlines or like handwritten outlines or handwritten reflections. Or if it's homework, like if I'm teaching logic and they're doing proofs, it's handwritten proofs and that kind of stuff. And they actually physically present it to me at the beginning of class. I look at it, I put a physical check mark on it to show that it was completed before class and they can make corrections during class. And then they actually upload like a digital PDF of that, you know, corrected work at the end of class and I can look at it on my, you know, on Moodle, which is our grading platform, to make sure that they did it and et cetera, et cetera. So I'm still working with digital. Now, of course, if they're like writing a, an outline or a summary, potentially, they could scan the physical reading into a PDF, upload that to GPT, tell it to do an outline, and then they could

• 14:30Speaker 04

  physically write the outline that it gives, it gives them, so they're still using it. But at least it went through their brain. They're not just copying and pasting, right? So like, that's kind of as good as I can do for those kind of daily assignments. For longer typed assignments that they're submitting on Moodle that they're using, I allow them to use Word for, basically, I'm using either the kind of, you know, detection software that comes with Moodle, or some kind of online detection or something like that, if I suspect something, knowing that it is not perfect, knowing that it can get things wrong. So it's just kind of an indication.

• 15:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So just turn it in, do AI detection now?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Yes, it automatically, they have it integrated in. It's just a little thing at the bottom that says, you know, gives you a percentage of how likely it is that, and I always forget whether it's telling me how likely it is that it's AI or how much of it of the of the paper is is likely AI.

• 15:20Cara Santa Maria?

  That's like a software that that we've long used for detecting plagiarism. So now it also detects.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  They've also, but I mean, it comes with a warning that tells you this is not necessarily accurate. Always be careful, et cetera, et cetera. The new thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to require them to write their paper on Google Docs. So they can't copy and paste into it. They have to write it on Google Docs because Google Docs has like a keystroke record. And if you want to, they they would make it shareable with me via a link. And if I suspect that they have used AI, I can actually go and look at the Google Doc and actually have it replay for me the process of them writing the paper. And it should be fairly apparent whether or not they're doing huge copy and pastes, whether or not they're actually going back and revising.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  I mean, it would even be fairly clear if they got, you know, chat GPT to write it in one window and they're just typing it in another, right? Like, well, that looks a lot different than the actual process of writing a paper, which, you know, calls for revisions and spell check and da da da da da.

• 16:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God. So Jay, I don't know how much this relates to what you're about to talk about, but like, that just seems like too much work.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  It's a lot of work.

• 16:28Jay Novella?

  You know, Kyle, if you're a teacher long enough, you might actually have to say this to your class. Class, during this test, no use of implants.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Turn your implants off. Yeah, that is.

• 16:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Get out of here, glass holes.

• 16:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Augmented reality glasses are left outside.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Well, Jay, you're going to tell us about one approach to detecting AI cheating using other AI.

• 16:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And this is just a part, you know, the stream of things that need to be done in order for us to adapt. Like Kyle was saying, we have to adapt to this new technology. So this isn't a shocker to me in any way, but it is where we happen to be right now. So what's going on is that schools and universities, you know, they're trying to combat students who are using AI systems to write essays or, you know, definitely build software, doing various. Assignments. So these institutions, they are starting to lean on AI detection software that's going to help them figure out, or so they think, whether the work was generated by AI or not.

• 17:36Jay Novella?

  And the technology companies that make these software, they're claiming that their tools can can detect AI generated writing, and that's basically their claim. Yes, it can detect it. The claims aren't really completely legitimate, and I have a fun example to tell you guys. So this is an AI detection story that actually recently happened. So there was a chemistry undergraduate who was at Idaho State University, and while they were applying to PhD programs, she noticed that some PhD application portals were warning students on there, saying that their personal statements can be scanned for AI-generated text, and they will possibly be disregarded if they're flagged as such.

• 18:17Jay Novella?

  And then she decided to test her own work before she submitted to any of these institutions. So what she did was she found some online websites, which you can easily do, and then she put in her work, whatever, she took snippets of her work, and guess what happened?

• 18:31Cara Santa Maria?

  It flagged it.

• 18:32Jay Novella?

  It flagged it. Now guess why it flagged it?

• 18:34Bob Novella?

  Because she was actually quite good at writing.

• 18:37Jay Novella?

  Exactly. She was competent. She was an actual English major as well, so she's a competent writer. So it said, no, no human can write this well. That's basically what the software is saying. This is beyond human skills. What she ended up doing was, she ended up making grammatical errors.

• 18:54Bob Novella?

  Dumbing it down, man.

• 18:55Jay Novella?

  She dumbed down her writing.

• 18:56Cara Santa Maria?

  That sucks.

• 18:58Jay Novella?

  She got it down to where it was only 30% likely to be AI-generated. She submitted it, her applications were accepted, and she got a job.

• 19:07Cara Santa Maria?

  That's embarrassing. Oh, my gosh.

• 19:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope that the, I hope the essay talked about that actual experience in it. So anybody who actually, because the funny thing is, are people even reading those essays? Or are they making AIs read them?

• 19:22Jay Novella?

  They're making AIs read them. You know what, Kara? I wrote my essay.

• 19:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. When he said that, I was like, oh, South Park. I laughed inside, but I didn't want to interrupt you, Jay. Anytime someone says, "Write an essay."

• 19:37Jay Novella?

  So what's going on here is that the software can't be, is being used to do things that it actually can't do completely well. And, and these tools don't prove if the materials were written by a human or an AI, right? It doesn't prove it. It just says, "It's probably, it's likely."

• 19:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and the problem is even if they have a disclaimer, that in, in practice, nobody, well, maybe not, maybe Kyle, but very few other professors who are overwhelmed and busy are thinking in terms of the disclaimer. They're like, "Here's a tool. I'm going to use the tool. I'm going to assume the tool works."

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to assume laziness, even though it's not a good approach. I think obviously it would be great if everyone were like Kyle, but it's, it is a lot of work.

• 20:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. It's not even, it's not even laziness, Steve, right? It's just,

• 20:25Speaker 03

  No, sometimes, well, yeah.

• 20:26Cara Santa Maria?

  There's only so many resources available.

• 20:28Jay Novella?

  Sometimes it's laziness, sometimes it's...

• 20:31Speaker 03

  And technically, you can use the word, the quote unquote laziness to refer to all energy efficiency or energy saving approaches, even if it's not of vice. Right? So that's what I'm talking about. It's people who, yeah, you're, you're overworked, you're pressed for time, and here's this easy sort of way out. And it's easy to say, "Well, I'll just, you know, let AI do it." But the, the false positive thing is like, is probably the worst, you know? Yeah, that's the biggest problem. Especially if they're flagging, and this is true, this is the way they flag it. It's the, the markers of being written by an LLM now are basically markers of good writing, you know, which is crazy.

• 21:11Cara Santa Maria?

  That raises an interesting question for me, Jay. I'm curious. This is maybe more of a, of a thought experiment, philosophical question, and maybe it gets to the heart of some of the things that you're talking about. But is there not a world wherein, instead of trying to say you can't use AI, professors just grade the papers based on how well they're written? And if a student masters the use of AI, that is probably a tool they're going to need in life anyway.

• 21:37Jay Novella?

  Exactly. It's going to change, Kara. Like, this is just a temporary thing because it's only going to get better. It's going to get to the point where I don't think the... There'll be any chance of detection.

• 21:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And will it matter? That's the thing. Like, is the new skill, and yes, I know, I could argue until I'm blue in the face that this is, you know, undermining critical thinking, but ultimately, is the new skill for a student to prove competency in an academic setting and beyond to be able to seamlessly integrate these things?

• 22:06Speaker 03

  But that's the $64,000 question, right? Is this just going to be a new tool that people use to get to the end result? Or is this something different about this where it actually makes people not think?

• 22:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we will talk a little bit about that in a minute in a different way.

• 22:21Bob Novella?

  I think the evidence is clear on that, but it really is, it really is an arms race. And Steve, the the false positives, yeah, is is an important and concerning thing for especially that story that Jay just related. And there's, I read about one model, Jay, it might have been in your talk here, your website link, Pangram Labs has has a tool that has near zero false positive. It's a approach is interesting. It has a training model based on a, you know, a large corpus of the of human written works that have then been AI rewritten, right? So that, so it looks at, so it has that in the in its training. And then when a new model comes out, it understands how the newly released

• 23:01Bob Novella?

  chatbot writes. And apparently, this is the the method it's using now to get this near zero false positive rates, which not many systems have now. I mean, close to zero. A lot of the good ones have 20, 30% false positive, which is, you know, clearly way too big. And have you guys heard of humanizer tools?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:19Bob Novella?

  You take what? Yeah, the humanizer tools. You get your AI result, you plug it into the humanizer tool and it dumbs it down automatically. It's just like, it's just total arms race.

• 23:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Embarrassing, though. I mean, is the is the issue really whether or not you used it? Or is the issue whether you used it competently? It's obvious when somebody uses AI poorly. So just grade the paper that way.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Well, it's not, it's not always obvious, Kara. So if I can add a little bit of nuance, I mean, Steve kind of captured it with the comment about like, the question is, are you actually thinking, right? So like, there's a lot of nuance here. So something that I use ChatGPT for is to format

• 23:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, why would you do that by hand?

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Exactly, right?

• 23:57Bob Novella?

  That was great.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Old school, you know, people might think like, no, you've got to have that skill of knowing where to put the periods.

• 24:03Bob Novella?

  Screw it.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  No, you don't, who cares, right? And so in the same way, like, I don't really care that much if my students use Grammarly to like, correct their, you know, because that's something if they're writing papers, they're going to have that, whether they're in a job or whatever.

• 24:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But some people would argue, Kyle, like, like an English professor would argue that that is a fundamental skill they need and they don't want them to take shortcuts for it.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Fair enough, right?

• 24:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so it's like, it depends on your discipline, I think.

• 24:26Bob Novella?

  It's like the math calculator argument, too.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. And so, but I mean, definitely, like, everyone's going to agree that we don't want AI doing their students thinking for them. If nothing else, they need to be learning how to think for themselves. And it's, it's hard to distinguish between students who wrote their own paper, but they're a little lazy with their grammar. They use Grammarly just to clean it up and then it comes across on an AI check and it looks like it was written by AI. Versus someone who just has AI write the paper for them, they copy and paste it and did no thinking at all. It's very hard to delineate between those two kinds of things. But I actually, I have an assignment where I had, like, in my epistemology class last semester, and I was prompted to do this by the college itself.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  We had an assignment where I told them to use AI and get, and like guided them through the process of using it as a research assistant. So you can use it to find research, like, you can use it to come up with a topic that you want to write about and then to develop a thesis that you will defend. And then to find research that will, you know, that will help you test that thesis and like, you know, arguments pro, you know, pro and con, etc. And then it will help you like, like, there's legitimate uses of it in that way.

• 25:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But some would argue that that is part of your thinking, that like, it's, there's a difference between it replacing your thinking and it, um, uh, supporting your thinking, yeah, or augmenting your thinking.

• 25:43Bob Novella?

  What about this idea, guys? I just thought of this, what if, and this will probably be too time consuming, but what if you had like an in-class essay writing where you would, you wrote enough essays in class? Obviously, you cannot have any help with technology. That way you have a, you have a base of like, this is how this person writes. And then you compare that to. What they turn in. And if it's clearly far superior than anything they've written by hand, you you could, you know, you could more reliably conclude that, yeah, they probably had too much AI help with this one, because this is not like anything that they wrote by themselves.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  That's a good idea. That's the authorship approach, and you could use AI to detect authorship. So you now you're not just asking, does this essay look like a human wrote it? Or AI wrote it? You're asking, does this look like Jay wrote it? Because I have samples of Jay's writing. But of course, that's difficult, too, because people can use Grammarly, or they could you they could have somebody proof it for them, or they could.

• 26:40Bob Novella?

  No, no, no, in class.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  No, I'm talking about when they later submit something, there could be anything written in class, obviously, is fine.

• 26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, that's the thing. There's going to be a quality difference between something you scratch off in class.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  But if you use all of these tools, then you're you're getting somewhere.

• 26:55Bob Novella?

  Right. And so then then they'll come up with not a humanizer tool, they'll come up with a Jizer tool. Well, like, yeah, make this more like how I write.

• 27:02Jay Novella?

  Of course. You know, look, it's all gonna happen. That'll all it'll absolutely get to the point where they're gonna where AI is going to be able to fake anybody's writing style. It's going to be able to fake. I mean, I'm already seeing really good AI-generated movies and voice work, whatever you want to call it, you know, way AI-generated voice, that is almost as good as a real movie. It's good. There it's getting it's getting very nuanced, and it's only going to get better. And I would imagine with all the money that's being dumped into it, that we're going to see things progressing even faster than they are today.

• 27:34Bob Novella?

  The advantage here is that it could take a while to get a full assessment of your writing. I mean, how much do you have to write for it to know how you write? I mean, and people might not want to do that outside of the class, because it's just a time consuming.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  A few thousand words. It's not it's not that onerous.

• 27:49Bob Novella?

  Few thousand?

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, ultimately, does this not speak to the heart of like the the spirit and the purpose of academia? I think that there's this layer early in academia, like this, you know, the first several years of an undergraduate degree, where it's there's a tease apart that happens between the students who are motivated to learn and who are going into academia to be engaged with with academia. And the students who feel, whatever it is, familial pressure, societal pressure, to just get the degree so they can have the piece of paper, so that they can get the job. And maybe as a culture, we need to be thinking about tracking those things out differently.

• 28:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I just don't understand why people who are honest academic, people who have an honest interest in academics would cheat.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're cheating yourself.

• 28:42Cara Santa Maria?

  It only harms yourself. Yeah, it's such a weird thing.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  I had one college professor say that to me. It's like, people are, they're spending twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars to come to this college. If they want to cheat themselves out of an education, that's on them.

• 28:55Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I always used to say. I'm like, you don't want to show up? I get paid either way, if you pass or fail.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, but there's, there's, I mean, it depends on your college, right? So I have, I like, I want to have that attitude. I want to have like, you know, the attitude of you want to cheat your way out of your education, that's fine. If you want to like slack off and, you know, fail the class or whatever, and then have to drop out, that's fine, dah dah dah dah. But the problem with, with my situation is that King's is tuition driven. And so like, my job depends largely on me being able to keep students in my classroom and there for the whole semester and not dropping out and finishing and, and going the whole four years and that kind of stuff. So I, there's this pressure on me to like, bend over backwards to make sure that they pass, right?

• 29:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that's where incentivization can become perverse at a certain point.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  Yes, it can, right? So on one end, that's good, right? Like, I'm looking out for them. I'm doing all I can to help them or whatever. But also, there's this kind of incentive to look the other way.

• 29:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you see that with student athletes a lot.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  This is why college should be free. This is why college should be free for everyone.

• 29:55Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent. I'm with you on that.

• 29:57Bob Novella?

  What about the idea that a lot of times, you know, you, when you get your degree and then you get a job in the field, and what you learned in school was really largely irrelevant to the actual job description?

• 30:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is, which is why it's a totally different thing to go to college for the job, or to go to college to better yourself, to improve your academic and, and intellectual capabilities. Those are two different things.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I gotta tell you, teaching medical students, they really want to learn.

• 30:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're motivated. And they don't want to cheat. Like, that'd be crazy. There may be some inflection points where there's where there's motivation to cheat, like getting the right grade to be, you know, like a bottleneck thing. If I can pass this thing, it opens up this next stage of my career.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  No, but like day to day in training, like they really know that they need to know this stuff just to survive in their career. So they're highly motivated.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, the the problem sometimes I have, though, is that even some academically motivated students who are like that will not think that about philosophy. So they'll think like, well, this isn't one of my major courses, so I don't care. They put all their work into their major classes, and then they think they can blow off philosophy because it doesn't matter. When, you know, I'm teaching them like the basics of critical thinking and how to reason and how to how to read a piece of, you know, read something and construct an argument, right? Like, and they don't understand that. They think it's just, you know, fluffy, you know, whatever or whatever, you know, and.

• 31:21Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, academically, I think you should have to take core courses at the beginning to be exposed to a lot of different things.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 31:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Because a lot of people would change their mind if they were given the sort of, I don't know, the the the freedom to feel like they're allowed to do that.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  I cannot tell you how many students I've had that are like, I did not know what philosophy was. I thought it was a waste of time. This is incredible. I want to do more of it. But I'm a senior now, so I can't do that.

• 31:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  All right. Well, well, Kara, you have you also have a an AI themed news item here. Are teens using AI chatbots as companions?

• 31:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, this is coming from a psychological perspective because this is a study that was published by, it's actually a really cool group. It's it's a psychologist and I think a graduate student and a postdoc and two high school students who co published this paper in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health called How Interactional AI May Alter Adolescent Relational Learning and Mental Health. And there were two big takeaways from doing this study where they talked to a bunch of students to try and understand their relationship with AI, specifically AI chatbots.

• 32:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Their relationship with them, how they use them in their lives and maybe some of the benefits, but also some of the big, big risks that we need to be looking at. So they cite outside data that show, like Pew Research data and some other organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology that show that about 64% of US adolescents are actively engaging with conversational AI. So that's a lot, you know, the majority. They also found that around 42% of teenagers are using chatbots for friendship-related advice and 19% admit to leveraging them to navigate their romantic relationships. Okay, so, so keep those things in mind.

• 33:25Cara Santa Maria?

  They also, this is one other really important thing, they also said that most of the kids that they talked to in this study explicitly said, like, age gates don't work. You know, anytime there's age verification, they just get right around it. And any parental control restrictions, they just don't work. Don't hold your breath, that's not the approach here, everybody's using it anyway, even if they're underage. So there were two big themes that they identified in their study that they dug deeper into. And so think of these as like constructs. The first one was something that they called the threat of relational displacement and the second one was something that they called the mechanism of maladaptive relational learning. Because they are academics, so let's break down what that actually means. Yeah. The threat of relational displacement, really if you sit with it for a second,

• 34:10Cara Santa Maria?

  it does start to make sense, right? AI chatbots have a standing risk, a threat of displacing traditional relationships in people's lives. So if young people use AI interactions instead of real-world conversations with people, what do you think's going to happen? And Steve, you touched on this during Jay's talk. What's the biggest thing that AI is sort of, I don't, trained to do? The sycophancy issue? Yeah.

• 34:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they're gonna keep you engaged with the AI and not actually dealing with this with the actual people that you need to be talking to, the real people.

• 34:49Cara Santa Maria?

  And so there's that, that point. Bob is a really good one, right? It's it's going to keep you coming back and it's going to keep you out of the engagement with people. But even beyond that, what happens then when you turn around and you do want to talk to your boyfriend or your girlfriend?

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's more work emotionally and it's not as satisfying and you're sort of normalized to the sycophancy.

• 35:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm. So you're going to feel what? Rejected?

• 35:12Speaker 03

  And resentment, mad.

• 35:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Confused, conflicted, you're going to have ambivalent feelings and you may not be developing the appropriate emotional regulation to be able to navigate real world interactions, which are not clean and they're not all about you. You know, there's a lot of conflict in the real world and the skill of having, you know, psychological resilience is not about never feeling anything. It's about feeling really hard things and learning how to process them, learning how to get through them. So if you're never having difficult conversations with people in your everyday lives and you're never having ruptures and repairs, you're never learning how to have humility in that moment.

• 35:55Cara Santa Maria?

  You're never feeling the rage or the confusion or the sadness well up and then learning how to cope with those feelings. The outcome is very likely either going to be more social isolation or the potential for violence. Like, let's be honest here. We need emotion regulation to avoid dangerous interactions in this world. So I think that's a really important thing. These critical building blocks develop during this very critical time period. Adolescent peer engagement is so fundamentally important for developing the skills that will serve you for the rest of your life. The other thing they talk about is this maladaptive relational learning,

• 36:39Cara Santa Maria?

  which actually it's not the other thing. It's the thing that we just dove into as the second half. So the relational displacement is what you talked about, Bob, just kind of avoiding engaging and spending more and more time with the chatbot and choosing, I'd rather just go back to the thing that always makes me feel good versus the thing where it feels like there's friction or conflict. And then the second half, the maladaptive. Of relational learning is now that I am in a situation where there is social friction. I am, I have an unrealistic expectation of how this should go. I developed these really poor coping mechanisms, these unhealthy relationship patterns. I have high sensitivity to rejection. I feel anxious all the time.

• 37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's also the potential for violence. Now, it's not all bad though, right? Like, we've talked about this before. Why could chatbots be really, really helpful for teenagers?

• 37:32Bob Novella?

  Well, they could talk about things that where they they can't get that information in any other place.

• 37:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Things that are maybe taboo, things where they're afraid of getting in trouble.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  Couldn't it, couldn't it give them legitimate emotional support?

• 37:46Cara Santa Maria?

  It can, you know, and there are some evidentiary, um, uh, there are some, some points of evidence that show that individuals, especially people who are isolated for different region, uh, reasons.

• 37:58Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 37:58Cara Santa Maria?

  They're rural, they're, you know, LGBTQIA, or like, let's say they're an atheist living in a very religious town. Or, you know, for whatever reason, this is an outlet that exists for some people.

• 38:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Cara Santa Maria?

  And it can be a good thing, but I think it's important to look at why it's a good thing. It's a good thing because our social scaffolding is not robust for these people. Right? It's only a good thing because of other failures.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Right. Because our mental health care in this country sucks.

• 38:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 38:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Because, you know, there are children across this country who don't have the support that they need because of systemic poverty, because of racial or gender issues, because of a lack of resourcing. You know, so across the board, really, it's a Band-Aid. I think that if we had very robust systems, social systems in place, this accessibility paradox, that's what they call it, the accessibility lifeline paradox, wouldn't be as necessary.

• 39:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Cara Santa Maria?

  So really, yeah, go ahead.

• 39:04Bob Novella?

  What about this, Kara? I mean, if you're online and you have access to an AI to discuss these things that you really have no one in your Community to discuss with you. You could you could also, I presume you go on like some chat, you know, not chatbots, but you can go into communities online with the real people that are there because it's your community.

• 39:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Isn't that what social media was supposed to do?

• 39:27Cara Santa Maria?

  It's what it was supposed to do. And then things got bad. And in some cases, it still does that. I think a lot of people do feel like they've found their community online, but you're right. They have to be so much more careful to ensure that this is a safe place for them to ensure that it's not.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  It's not just an echo chamber.

• 39:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, or it's not just an echo chamber.

• 39:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Hey, Cara, do you use do you use chatbots much yet? I mean, I know you you weren't that fond of them.

• 39:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I have never, other than the embedded search tools in Google that you can't get around, like anytime there's AI present in software that I'm already using and I don't know that it's running in the background, clearly, I'm probably using it. I have never chosen to use an AI.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  I used to chat GPT quite a bit to do a lot of technical stuff, you know? I don't do it to help me with research, actually, but what I do is like I'm developing a bread recipe. It's really convenient for that kind of stuff or for formatting. It's great. But what's it? It is interesting, even though I am fully aware of the sycophancy issue, et cetera. It is very pleasant, the interaction because of it. It's like it is very affirming. You know what I mean?

• 40:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but it gets annoying for me.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  It can, but if you dial it back, there is this sweet spot where it's like it doesn't, you know what I mean? I could definitely see how that could totally suck people in.

• 40:48Bob Novella?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 40:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It's.

• 40:51Jay Novella?

  Cara, before I I started to put in like a global command or different commands into chat GPT to tell it like what I want it to be like. It sucks you in because it is so reassuring and so kind. And so, you know, it has all of these features where, you know, to people who who aren't, they don't have the metacognition level to really understand what's going on, like they're, you know, what what's it doing to them emotionally? What's it doing to them intellectually? I can see it. I can see how this thing is going to, and it's only going to get better at it. It's gonna, it's, there will be a time when, you know, you have a personal assistant and it's going to learn you. Really well.

• 41:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  That's funny how you say the personal assistant because to some extent, like, I kind of get how rich people feel now, right? Because they have, they have living personal assistants who are probably way more sycophantic than, you know, chat GPT is.

• 41:47Bob Novella?

  Jay, yes, boss, yes, boss.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Right? Yeah. This is like, AI is basically a yes man, you know, it's basically, everything is so reassuring that that's a really good approach. I think I could see how this would work, you know, everything is great.

• 41:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And how many of you have known people, I mean, I, I've, I've had very intimate relationships with people who are in positions of power, either because of money or because of fame or because of actual power, um, not, not that money and fame aren't, you know, types of power, who are surrounded by more sycophantic people in their lives, it changes them psychologically.

• 42:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah, we've all seen celebrities that are just like, whoa, you know, what, why did they come out with this stuff? Like, yeah, because now, like George Lucas, uh, surrounded by yes men and he has no, no checks and balances to what they're doing or saying or creating. It's like, oh, boy.

• 42:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Now imagine what that's like for a 16 year old who's experiencing, or 14 year old who's going through their own identity development.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can only imagine.

• 42:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're, yeah, they're, they're learning how to regulate their emotions. They're learning who they are in the milieu of the world.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  In her book, Limitarianism, the philosopher Ingrid Reibyns, who argues limitarianism is a position that argues that there needs to be a limit to wealth, which I think is a very, very good argument. It's one of my favorite books. But, um, in one of the chapters, she argues that by limiting the wealth of the wealthy, we will actually be doing them a favor because we will be saving them from this kind of sycophancy, right? Like the, the wealth does not actually do them good because one of the things it does is isolate them with only other wealthy people because anyone else is just going to constantly be asking them for money. So they only associate with other people who wouldn't ask them for money. And they surround themselves with yes man and that kind of stuff or whatever. And it's just very psychologically damaging, right? And so this is the psychological damages is, you know, being given to children and stuff like that.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  If, if they're just using these AI that, that promote that kind of, you know, sycophancy and, and self-centeredness.

• 43:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Everyone. Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  The, the second thing is not like just, uh, a, a comment like, I am so surprised that you, in all of this, that you have not mentioned Black Mirror.

• 43:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  And the episode.

• 43:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Which one? Yeah.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  You know which one I'm going for?

• 44:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, the one where they make them into, no, not the war one.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  No.

• 44:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, which one?

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Right back, be right back where the woman's husband dies.

• 44:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 04

  And she creates an AI version of him. I mean, this, this is what, this is one of the reasons that Black Mirror is so good. It anticipated the developments of large language models before there were, like, they were even talked about publicly hardly at all. Right? They use the, this person's writing sample, his online presence, and it creates an AI bot that talks like him. And that replaces him in her life and she becomes isolated. She doesn't talk to other people. Like, the exact same thing happens to her that you are describing here.

• 44:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  Black Mirror has, you know, anticipated these kinds of things. Um, I don't know if you're aware, but I have a book on Black Mirror, Black Mirror and Philosophy. Um, and I know that you're a big fan of the show, so.

• 44:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I love it. I love it.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  We could talk all, all about that. But anyway.

• 44:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And even that, and even that example is so much more nuanced because it's still pulling from an, a human being's experience.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Like. Yeah.

• 45:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it would be different if your chatbot online was based on your mom. And, you know, you were kind of going to your mom for mom-like advice based on everything she's ever said to you or written to you. It's wildly different when the chatbot online is this just kind of emotionally vacuous, yet always making you feel like you're smart and you've got the right answer. And, you know, oh, that's a great idea. Let's talk about why. So really, I think the big takeaway here, or the big, not the big takeaway, the big question is, what the hell do we do about it? And the researchers, after all this, you know, back and forth with all of these, uh, high school age students.

• 45:44Cara Santa Maria?

  One of the things that they really flagged was, we are not recommending that we ban this for kids. That is not going to work. If we try to ban this, it's only going to backfire. It's only going to make people do this surreptitiously. It's only going to make them go deeper down the rabbit hole. We have to rethink how these AIs work. We have to rethink about this as a very, not just a very real, the eventual outcome of AIs as chatbots. And we have to engage specific and targeted training for these AIs to ensure that they do exactly what you said before, Bob.

• 46:24Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, somebody's coming to you, they're isolated, they have these issues, introduce them, connect them with other people online.

• 46:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Cara Santa Maria?

  If somebody is really struggling from a mental health perspective, ensure that they are getting resources. Ensure that they have the things that they need. And if somebody is coming to you and saying, hey, I'm having a problem with my partner and I want to know how to handle this, don't just go back and be like, you're right, everything you do is wonderful. But say, why don't you try this approach to conflict resolution? Come back and tell me how it went so we can iterate on that. Offer actual therapeutic advice, because a lot of times what people think are these AI quote therapists, they're not. They're just validating machines.

• 47:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, Carol, I was actually going to come up with a different science fiction or fiction analogy. And this is even more prescient, you can go back 60 plus years with Isaac Asimov and the robot series. Where people, basically the end stage of everything you're talking about, where rich people are basically living in a cocoon of robots with zero contact with other people. And they can, they have zero tolerance for any human contact.

• 47:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, yes, everything's annoying, everything is not quite right, because it, it requires that they sit with some amount of discomfort, which is what we need to learn to do.

• 47:43Bob Novella?

  Right. Steve, it's funny that you mentioned Asimov, because he's been going through my head for the past few minutes here. Because I remember a quote from him where he, now, this is a guy that wrote and edited over 500 books. So he, he said at one point, he's like, he's like, I don't really mind that much about dying, because if you really want to know about me, read my books, everything is in there. Everything I ever wanted to say, I wrote down in one of my books. And he, he just didn't do science fiction, he did everything you could imagine, A to Z. It's funny, God, I'd love to put all of them into a chat GPT and like, and talk to Isaac Asimov based on everything he's ever written. It would be interesting.

• 48:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. I think that's such a good point that you just made, Bob. And I want to make sure, and maybe it's just my own ego talking here, that people don't think, oh, my God, she's such a Luddite, you know, she's avoiding this because it's like too hard or it's too. No, I have some ethical issues around, you know, the energy consumption. I also struggle with not wanting to simplify things in my life that I actually think are like healthful and good for me to engage with. But ultimately, I'm not anti-AI and I'm not anti-LLM. I just think that with any new technology, we have to approach it in a nuanced way. I, it really does have the potential to fundamentally change our culture.

• 49:08Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:09Cara Santa Maria?

  They are such a wonderful tool, but there is such a danger at the end of this, too.

• 49:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah, such a double edged sword.

• 49:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  And that's another Black Mirror episode called "Smitherines."

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:19Bob Novella?

  Smitherines.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  That show was wonderful. I agree. There's so many good episodes.

• 49:22Bob Novella?

  I need more seasons.

• 49:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 49:25Speaker 03

  Guys, have any of you heard of the rapid prompting method?

• 49:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they just, they rapidly, you know, they prompt you.

• 49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, rapidly.

• 49:32Bob Novella?

  My, my first thought, Steve, of course, was prompting for, for, you know, ChatGPT.

• 49:36Cara Santa Maria?

  LLMs, yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  But I know, but I know what you- It has nothing to do with LLM prompting.

• 49:39Bob Novella?

  I know. I know what you were referring to.

• 49:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I do not.

• 49:42Bob Novella?

  Like facilitated communication type thing.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a method of communicating with people who are minimally or non-verbal.

• 49:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh-oh.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Right? Uh-oh.

• 49:50Bob Novella?

  Here we go again, man.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  It is a version of facilitated communication.

• 49:55Bob Novella?

  And prepare to be pissed off.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, very pissed off.

• 49:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it just the newest flavor that people are trying to say?

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's, it's been around for a little while. I've been writing about it for a bit. And it's, so there's a, there's, there's a few sort of rebrandings of facilitated communication called spelling techniques, right? So for quickie, I'm talking about this because there was a New York Times article on this, which is horrible. And I really want to talk more about the article. But, but for the quickie background, facilitated communication was developed in 1989. The idea is that people who are minimally or non-verbal may not be cognitively impaired, maybe they're just physically, like motorically impaired. And if we could figure out a way to assist them in communicating, we might tap into unrecognized cognitive ability, right?

• 50:45Bob Novella?

  Motorically?

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like they can't speak.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Their motor skills.

• 50:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Or they can't use their hands.

• 50:51Bob Novella?

  I get it. I just never heard that damn word, "cool."

• 50:54Cara Santa Maria?

  But the thing is, we have things for people with like locked-in syndrome.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Of course, of course. There's a whole, yeah, there's a whole specialty of communication, you know, assistive devices and speech therapy, et cetera, et cetera. But remember, this is 1989, so a little bit not what tools that we have today. But even still, it's like, are these people, are they locked in in a way? Like, can they, maybe they're brilliant, but we just can't talk to them. And this is mainly focused on the autism community, but it could be applied to any child with, who's non-verbal or minimally verbal. And of course, this is exactly what all parents want to believe, right? And this is what speech therapists want to believe, that they could, they could be the ones, you know, to unlock the hidden cognitive ability in this individual. The method is called facilitated communication.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  So the idea is, right, so they just can't physically move in a coordinated enough fashion. But what if somebody sort of supports their forearm and enabling them to point out letters on a letterboard and spell their responses?

• 51:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Then they have a Ouija board.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Basically, it's a Ouija board. Yeah, so.

• 51:58Bob Novella?

  Idiomotor.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  And they never asked the questions that they should have asked until it was sort of forced upon them. And part of the reason why it was forced upon them was when facilitators started accusing people of sexual abuse through FC, and it became a legal matter, like who was doing the communication? That was part of it. But also, just academically, like, there's good reason to be suspicious of this. Not the least of which is, well, why do you need a person to be holding their wrist? Why couldn't you just use a support arm?

• 52:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Of some sort, a passive support. And there always has to be a thinking person in the loop, right? That's a big clue as to what's going on. And the second thing is, if you watch videos, the process, and again, you have even the slightest objectivity, it's blazingly obvious what's going on, because there are many cases in which the child, the client, is not even looking at the letterboard. But the facilitator is.

• 53:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And if anybody is worrying, like, asking themselves in their minds right now, what's the harm? There is a phenomenal-

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Massive harm.

• 53:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, massive harm. There's a phenomenal documentary about a very specific case of facilitated communication, I think with one of the early adopters or one of the early proponents, where she basically was sexually assaulting the young adult who she was facilitating for.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and got consent through facilitated communication.

• 53:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Through facilitation, yes, and developed a whole narrative around their relationship, and it was really, really dark.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Plus, I already mentioned the false accusations through FC. And so, there's also videos where, like, these, so people who are minimally or nonverbal, doesn't mean they can't communicate their needs, right? They have other methods of doing that. And there are cases where FC was being used to override the other methods these people are using to communicate their needs. And they're just frustrated.

• 53:59Bob Novella?

  That's disgusting, man.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  It's disgusting.

• 54:01Bob Novella?

  The use.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  As well-meaning as it is, the flip side is pretty horrific for the person, stealing what little ability they have to communicate, communicating in their name, even, you know, again, horrible things.

• 54:14Bob Novella?

  Steve, I like how you put it in your blog, like, you say that they're stealing the voice from a very vulnerable population.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And the other thing that's frustrating about this is it's so easy to test. It's so easy to test. It's not that complicated. And the way you test it is you give, you know, information to the facilitator, you give information to the target, the client, and then they could be the same, they could be different, you blind each, both of them to the, whatever the other person's being shown, and then you ask them about it, right? So you could show the facilitator a pencil, you show the child an apple, and you say, type out, you know, spell out what I just showed you. If it's apple, it's the, the child doing the communication. If it's pencil, it's the facilitator. It's dead simple.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  And basically, every test that takes that format shows that the facilitator is doing the communication. So there was a 2000- 14 systematic review, like all these studies. And it conclude, I'm going to quote exactly. Results indicated unequivocal evidence for facilitator control. Messages generated through FC are authored by the facilitators rather than the individuals with disabilities. Hence FC is a technique that has no validity.

• 55:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Rarely do you read something so clean and unequivocal.

• 55:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, when we say rank pseudoscience, that's what we.

• 55:38Bob Novella?

  No ambiguity at all.

• 55:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  So then now I thought, all right, we've sort of tamped this down to the fringe at least. They never go away entirely, but now it's completely resurfaced under these spelling techniques. So what's different about like the rapid prompting method? So instead of holding the hand of the, of the person you're, you're doing the facilitated communication with, you hold the letter board.

• 56:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  But it's the same thing.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  The same thing, yeah.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  You hold the flichette or you hold the Ouija board. It doesn't matter.

• 56:09Bob Novella?

  Hey, right?

• 56:10Cara Santa Maria?

  That thing's called a flichette?

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Whoa.

• 56:14Jay Novella?

  Steve, they're moving the board underneath their finger?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Yes, right.

• 56:18Jay Novella?

  What? Oh my God.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  And, and they're also like rapid fire prompting them to do it and they're interpreting it. And it's like so clearly the facilitator that's doing all the communication. Again, to somebody who's familiar with this, or again, is reasonably skeptical. It's blatantly obvious. And again, they, no one's been able to prove. Again, there are, I have to say, there are a few exceptional cases. And that's because that these are children who were not nonverbal, right? They were sort of on the borderline and they learned to read. And so eventually they went on to type on their own.

• 56:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so they didn't need the board anyway.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Or whatever, it was just one method of teaching them.

• 56:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  But here's the other, I, I ignored a whole layer of why this is ridiculous. When you start to use facilitated communication, now again, it's the facilitator who's doing the communication, not the child, right?

• 57:11Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  So what level of intelligence is going to be on display? This like strangely dovetails with our AI discussion, right? It's the facilitator's level of intelligence. And so now you have a child who never learned how to read, who never went to school, is suddenly speaking with as if they were a college educated facilitator.

• 57:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, with like insights and wisdom about the world.

• 57:34Bob Novella?

  I actually was gave testimony on a case where they were arguing that the child learned

• 57:41Speaker 03

  to speak Hebrew without ever being taught. They learned to speak it at like an advanced level and they were like a nine year old who couldn't speak. It's ridiculous, but of course.

• 57:52Bob Novella?

  Our son's a genius.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're genius. The ultimate manifestation of this is what? Something else we've talked about on the show.

• 58:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  The telepathy tapes.

• 58:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  Some facilitators, like they're literally like, wow, it's like he's reading my mind. You know, it's like, because it's your mind that's doing the communicating. They're not reading your mind, you're doing the communication. That got turned into, they are psychic. And that's what the telepathy tapes, you know, they basically say, yeah, these kids, not only are they not cognitively impaired, they're brilliant, they're psychic, they can communicate with each other. And no, you're just doing facilitated communication and you don't know it. It's so absurd, it's just so frustrating.

• 58:33Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also so sad when people can dupe themselves to that level.

• 58:36Bob Novella?

  See, Steve, Steve, this is why, this is why I like covering science news, because I rarely get so disgusted talking about new science.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  We gotta do this, we gotta take the hit for the team. All right, now let's get to the New York Times article.

• 58:47Bob Novella?

  Thank you.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  So this essentially was false balance, right? So it presented quote unquote, both sides. It didn't do a bad job of presenting the skeptical side, but the problem is that it's presenting it as if this is a real dilemma.

• 59:00Bob Novella?

  False balance, man.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  It was all false balance. The tagline is this, quote, "Popular communication methods for non-speaking autistic people have ignited a fierce debate over what counts as evidence of hidden cognitive abilities." Hasn't really. Is it really a fierce debate going on? No.

• 59:16Cara Santa Maria?

  On one side, maybe.

• 59:17Bob Novella?

  What counts as evidence? Nonsense or evidence? Pick one.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then the author clearly buys into that narrative. Because, you know, she, you can say, well, she doesn't write the headline. But she did write her own first comment, which is at the top of the comments, where it says, this is basically the debate that we're having is, who do we believe? You know, do we believe the experience of the people or rigorous scientific evidence? You believe the rigorous scientific evidence. That, that's when those two things are in conflict.

• 59:44Bob Novella?

  Is that a hard question for her?

• 59:45Speaker 03

  So, and again, of course, you know, we always have to say, this doesn't mean that personal experiences of no value or even anecdotes are of no value. You just have to understand what value they have. You can absolutely use them to personalize treatments, for example, or you could use them to generate hypotheses. But it's not reliable evidence you can use to test a hypothesis. That's what you need rigorous scientific evidence for. And again, it's so easy to, to blind these and test it. And so they, they make every excuse, like, we don't, you shouldn't be challenging the legitimacy of these people, whatever. They make all of these kind of social justice kind of arguments to say like, why we shouldn't challenge their authorship.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  It's like, no, we, we were protecting their authorship.

• 1:00:31Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the point, right? It's very misguided.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally misguided.

• 1:00:35Cara Santa Maria?

  There's this paternalistic view that scientific inquiry into facilitated communication is actually disempowering people with disabilities. But really, it's making the protections against vulnerability and like abuse, basically.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  It's abuse, it's 100% abuse.

• 1:00:55Cara Santa Maria?

  It's making those protections more robust. You're not protecting, when you make that argument, you're, it's disingenuous because you're not actually protecting the facilitatee. You're actually protecting the facilitator.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Interestingly, two months ago, there was another article in the New York Times by Dr. Lutz, who's a historian of medicine and has a child with autism, who eviscerated these methods and got it absolutely correct.

• 1:01:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  And I don't know why they decided to publish another article where it was this wishy-washy false balance. And we know what happens when you write a paper like this. It drives interest to the pseudoscience.

• 1:01:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  And even the hard-hitting ones can do that, but at least you're properly informing the reader. This kind of nonsense is just going to fluff up a harmful pseudoscience.

• 1:01:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  That's been debunked for decades, blatantly, unequivocally debunked. And then the worst thing, or even another bad thing, it's hard to say what's the worst in all this, is that in order to do this, it's also just making a generic assault on scientific evidence itself, right?

• 1:02:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Agreed.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  It's trying to argue that, well, anecdotal evidence is just as good, and it's like, wow, we don't really know who to believe, and it's a dilemma. No, it isn't. We know, we absolutely know how worthless the anecdotal evidence can be, how misleading it can be, and we know, yes, rigorous scientific evidence is hard, it's never perfect, but it's the only chance we have of actually answering questions, like, who's the actual author of this information?

• 1:02:35Cara Santa Maria?

  So Steve, do you know, in the New York Times, what vertical was this published under? Was it under health?

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  It's a Times science reporter.

• 1:02:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:02:44Bob Novella?

  Ah.

• 1:02:45Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so painful. This is where we need more letters to the editor.

• 1:02:49Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot of pushback. Yeah, that's very dangerous.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  This is a fail.

• 1:02:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Fail.

• 1:02:57Bob Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

• 1:03:02Cara Santa Maria?

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• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, guys, so my wife bought a coat from Quince, because we're going to Australia and New Zealand, and it's going to

• 1:03:19Jay Novella?

  It's going to be cold there and she just figured she'd get something. And it's funny, she's now selling Quince to me. I'm like, I'm the person who advertises it. And she's like telling me every day how great Quince is. And she's like over the moon about this company. So you guys should, you know, you could start shopping.

• 1:03:36Bob Novella?

  So make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.com slash SGU for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash SGU for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash SGU.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Bob.

• 1:03:58Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  How has SETI partly explained Fermi? That's kind of a nerdy question. Has SETI explained Fermi?

• 1:04:07Jay Novella?

  The nerdiest thing I've ever heard, Steve.

• 1:04:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And what does that mean?

• 1:04:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they may have. So researchers may have figured out why SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life intelligence, has not found any signals from extraterrestrials by examining what nearby stars might change in terms of the signal itself that we're looking for. This new study has, as its foundation, a topic many of us are fascinated by, the Fermi paradox. This is from, of course, physicist Enrico Fermi, who posed the question in 1950, where is everybody? And there's so many possible explanations to this. You can just go down that rabbit hole. I mean, maybe we're the first aliens. Maybe the closest aliens are just way too far away. We haven't seen them.

• 1:04:53Bob Novella?

  Maybe the whole dark forest idea is fascinating, that aliens are afraid to speak up because they don't want to be detected by an aggressive, more advanced aliens. Now, of course, we know how many stars, how many galaxies there are out there. There should be life, there should be so many examples of life out there. Just from rolling the dice has got to be. So why can't we find them? So to answer this question, you got to consider, so how can we determine? How could we answer that? What are the types of ways that we can communicate and find this other intelligent life? And I mean, one obvious one that many people think is actually happened already is. Close encounters of a close encounter of the third kind, right? Physical contact, or at the very least, but you know, unequivocally spotting aliens on earth

• 1:05:38Bob Novella?

  or their ships or whatever. But the other big one, the more

• 1:05:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, wait, wait, just to be clear, real quick, before we get into the other big one. The way you worded that sounded confusing. You're saying a lot of people believe that has actually happened, right?

• 1:05:50Bob Novella?

  Of course, yes.

• 1:05:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Because the way you were like, that has actually happened. It's like, no, but it hasn't actually happened. People just believe that.

• 1:05:57Bob Novella?

  Many, I mean, millions of people, millions of people believe it's happened. And of course, I assume that we all know that that's baloney.

• 1:06:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Just to be clear.

• 1:06:05Bob Novella?

  Segue to the more interesting version is just techno signatures. And techno signatures are maybe a bigger topic than you might think because it encompasses so many different things. It could be, you know, it's basically things that aliens have created that we can then detect. So say megastructures are one, Dyson, Dyson swarms or Dyson spheres. Or if we detected that, we could pretty, pretty solidly conclude that, yep, the aliens made, made that thing. Or, but there's also other things that are more subtle, like we could detect potentially their leaked communications, like, kind of like our cellphone signals we could find. Or even if we find industrial pollution on an exoplanet, that would be a strong indicator

• 1:06:47Bob Novella?

  that there's some industry going on there that, that are from an, from an alien life form. And the one that I'm going to talk about next is the directed signals. These are signals that are intended, were created to specifically contact other civilizations in the universe. So these, these directed signals take the form of narrow band. These are narrow band signals. It just makes the most sense to us, whether it's some sort of electromagnetic, radio waves, lasers, or whatever. They are narrow in frequency and time. Now, these are, we're looking for these because natural signals are not narrow band, right? They're almost, almost exclusively broadband, lots of frequencies, lots of wavelengths.

• 1:07:26Bob Novella?

  So when you, so there's, if we detected a, a narrow band frequency or, or narrow band in time, we would say, yes, this is something that we really need to look at because the universe doesn't naturally, doesn't normally behave. That way. So this is why when SETI looks for directed signals in space, they're looking for the narrow band. The Berkeley SETI research website says if they are deliberately trying to attract attention, a narrow band radio or laser signal is a great way to do so. Both are capable of traversing interstellar and even intergalactic distances and tend to stand out against the background of natural signals, primarily because they span just a narrow range of frequencies. So that's basically what I'm saying there. Of course,

• 1:08:06Bob Novella?

  I do have to say at this point that looking for narrow band laser or radio seems obvious to our human brains at our level of technological advancement. But truly advanced aliens, of course, may totally disagree with that. You know, to them, communicating throughout the universe using electromagnetic radiation might be ridiculously childlike. They would never even consider it. To them, you know, it might be obvious to communicate long distances by manipulating black hole event horizons. Like, duh, of course, that's what we're gonna do. That's that that makes the most sense.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  No, Bob, it's neutrino modulation all the time.

• 1:08:41Bob Novella?

  Oh, neutrino modulation, right. So so that caveat is, you know, of course, implicit in all of this stuff. We may be way, way off. So that said, now, a new paper is shedding some doubt on this very idea that long distance, narrow band communication sent by alien civilizations will be easy for us to spot, right? So it's like, oh, bummer. What's wrong with this? How could this go wrong? This is from the study is from the Astrophysical Journal. The title of this study is "Exo-IPM Scattering as a Hidden Gatekeeper of Narrow-Band Techno-Signatures." So what they're saying here is that an alien's host star, maybe in our galaxy or another galaxy, and the the alien is on a planet, probably, right? It's going to be on a planet

• 1:09:26Bob Novella?

  around a host star. Their contention here is that the star itself could be screwing with with the directed signals that they're sending and making them harder for us to detect. So that's the elevator 10 second little overview of what this study is. Somehow the star is screwing with that signal, and it's going to be much harder for us to detect.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  How?

• 1:09:46Bob Novella?

  So so let's go into that, shall we? So, we shall. astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author said if a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment it can slip below our detection thresholds even if it's there potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in techno signature searches. So what are the details here? So to test this they looked at our own solar system, right? They looked at radio transmissions sent by spacecraft over the decades that we have launched into space. And then they quantified how the turbulent plasma from our sun in our solar system reshapes our own narrow band signals. And then they take that that idea

• 1:10:26Bob Novella?

  of the the effects that our sun has on our narrow band and then extrapolates that to what would happen in other solar systems in other, you know, with other stars and to see what would what would happen in those other because we know lots of different stars out there, lots of different solar systems. So they kind of extrapolated that out to to a wide range of possibilities. And it turns out from their their study that the most common star in our galaxy, M dwarf stars, have the highest likelihood of messing with these signals. That's 75% of the stars in the Milky Way would potentially do the most damage to these directed signals from aliens. This isn't disastrous for SETI though. All

• 1:11:07Bob Novella?

  it means really is that we're going to probably need to adjust our search strategies a little bit in order to detect these. So Grace C. Brown, co-author of the study, said this, by quantifying how stellar activity can reshape narrow band signals, we can design searches that are better matched to what actually arrives at Earth, not just what might be transmitted. So that's the bottom line. This isn't like, oh, SETI is wasting its time necessarily. It's really just needs to potentially, I mean, they could probably confirm this, right? That this is actually a real thing that's happening. But we just need to just adjust how we're searching so that we're really just trying, we're looking for what could arrive at Earth and not, you know, what is being emitted because there

• 1:11:49Bob Novella?

  could be, you know, a disconnect there where it's smeared out and we might not be seeing it, we might not be able to detect it because it's been changed.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  So Bob, is there an action item here for SETI? Could they change the parameters of how they're searching the sky to detect these altered signals?

• 1:12:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because so you're you're searching not for these really extremely narrow band signals. They're just less narrow, right? Because they're going to be smeared out a little bit by the by this plasma turbulence that they've detect that they've realized could be messing with the signal. So you're just searching for less.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  So they're looking for a schmear.

• 1:12:22Bob Novella?

  A little bit of a schmear, a little bit of schmear. Still, it would still be something that would stand out. But if we're not specifically looking for that, we could be missing it. So we'll see. We'll see if they take this seriously enough to actually adjust their the way they're searching. But there's just an interesting thing that I wouldn't I wouldn't. It's just weird to think that, yeah, your own star might be messing up your directing signal, making it even harder for civilizations to detect it. So it's so if this is true, if this is a real thing, it's good to know. And maybe, who knows, maybe they'll make an adjustment and make an immediate discovery. Wouldn't that be wonderful? But don't get your hopes up on that one.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Right. All right. Thanks, Pop. All right, Kyle. We're going to get to the main reason why I wanted you on the show this week. You had some you had some feedback for our discussion last week about skeptical philosophy. And you and I had a quick exchange over email and figured that we had to just bring this on the show. So give us a summary.

• 1:13:16Speaker 04

  Let me begin by, so in particular, I was responding to the segment about you. You guys were discussing the definition of of scientific skepticism. And that led into discussions of definitions of science and that kind of stuff. Let me mention that, like, as a way of prepping for this, I wrote a blog article for my Medium blog called falsification, methodological naturalism, and the nature of science and scientific skepticism. And I kind of like got everything out that I that I wanted to say. So if anyone's interested in something that we don't end up eventually getting to, just look at the blog and I kind of do a deep dive on the kind of stuff that I that I want to talk about there. But a number of concepts were expressed in that segment that didn't jive with me philosophically. I did not think that they were completely philosophically accurate.

• 1:14:01Speaker 04

  And so I'll name a couple here and we can talk, we can start talking about falsifiability. But like, some of the things that I that I wanted to point out was that First of all, I don't think that so falsifiability was something that came up in the discussion as one of the defining features of science and scientific skepticism. I don't think that that's quite accurate. I don't think that the concept that you have in mind is actually best described by the word falsifiability and technically speaking, nothing because A technically speaking, nothing is falsifiable. And then secondly, what the concept I do think that you have in mind testability is a better word. But even then, I don't think testability is not essential to science in the kind of way that

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  you guys were describing. Testability is very important in science, but it's not necessary untestable claims can still be subjected to scientific scrutiny.

• 1:14:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like a lot of this is operational definitions of what these words are.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think a lot of it is semantics.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, it could. And that's a lot of what what what Steve and I talked about was what are the right definitions. So we can talk about that as well. But I also think that like, I don't think this is definitional. I don't think methodological naturalism is an accurate description of of the philosophical underpinnings or the approach of science. And therefore, I mean, therefore supernatural claims are not outside the purview of science. They're very much inside the purview of science because A, a lot of them actually are testable. And B, even when they are not testable, they're still meaningful and they can be addressed by science. But I think we probably want to start with falsifiability, like this this kind of definitional issue of why I don't think it's a great term. Do you want to start there?

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think just to state what I what my pushback was on that is that you were saying, well, yeah, falsifiability means you can prove it 100%. It's not true. And science doesn't work that way. And my answer was, well, of course, that's not what I mean by falsifiability. I mean scientifically, you know, you can falsify it, meaning that you could marshal sufficient objective evidence, whether experiment, observational, whatever, or even, you know, logical inference to show that it's almost certainly not true. Whereas something that is outside the purview of science, and I used intelligent design as an example. Is systematically insulated from anything that could falsify it. Again, falsifying in a scientific way.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  I did want to ask a follow up question to our email that we didn't have a chance to go into is. So what is what you're telling us your formulation? Or the generally accepted formulation of epistemological philosophers?

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, or philosophers of science, right? So I think it's, it might be more of mine. I think I may have been like, may have overstated things in my original email. Here's the deal. But I, but also I don't think that the definition that you just gave is also not the one that's in the literature. So from my understanding, like the way Popper defines falsibility and then other flossers of science who have talked about falsifiability and that kind of stuff. What they mean is, does it make some kind of novel observable prediction that we could do an experiment? And to figure out whether or not that prediction is correct. Right? That's what falsifiability means. So does it make a novel observable prediction? Right? And that, like, there's a problem with, I think, calling that falsifiability. Even though, again, I think that is a term that's often used in the literature.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Is one is that, well, I think that the word falsifiable brings up the notion, like it connotates the idea of proving something false. If it's falsifiable, that means you can prove it false. Like, that's, that's the way that the common person would at least understand what falsifiability means. And technically speaking, you can't prove anything 100% false. Because you can always make ad hoc excuses to save it from the evidence. Right? Doan and Quine, like, you know, pointed out that all predictions that hypotheses makes are based on background assumptions. And so that if your hypothesis, you know, if you didn't get the prediction right, you could reject the hypothesis. Or you can change the background assumptions to save it from the evidence. And so technically speaking, nothing's falsifiable in that way. But even if it is.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  Testable, even if it is, does, if it does make a novel prediction, one failed novel prediction does not a falsification make. Like, that doesn't mean that you have to reject the theory. As you guys have pointed out, right, like, science is a lot more than just like, I mean, this is, this came up in your, in conversation about the difference between evidence-based medicine, or evidence-based science, and science-based science, right, evidence-based medicine versus science-based medicine, is that it's, it's not just a single study, and you had a single study, and it got the prediction wrong, and then therefore that falsifies the entire theory. You have to look at prior probabilities, you have to look at other studies and other evidence, you have to look at, you know, plausibility, and how to update a given evidence, like, there's so many different things.

• 1:18:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but that's so, but why would you assume that, that kind of the description of falsifiability is founded upon a single source of evidence?

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just gonna say that. Isn't there a threshold? Isn't there a threshold? It's like, I think the evolutionary theory, the idea that life arose through common, evolution from a common ancestor, is falsifiable, again, with the, the way it's traditionally used, in that, there is a threshold of evidence you can get to, where we could say, for all practical purposes, evolution did not happen, right? If there was no, if the fossil evidence was inconsistent with it, if the genetic evidence was inconsistent with it, or developmental biology, a geology, history, you know, there are so many things that could have been so fundamentally incompatible with it, that we could say that it is effectively falsified. Now, does that mean that a creative person couldn't invent some bizarre special pleading,

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  where they alter the fundamental assumptions about reality to such a degree, that it could technically still be true? Of course not. But that's, I don't, I don't think that level of exception means that it hasn't been scientifically falsified. But how do you feel about that?

• 1:19:57Speaker 04

  So I think that, as a definition, that is a better definition, using the word falsifiability to describe what you're describing. Can the theory be, as, I think as you put it, practically falsified, or, or, or, you know, you can-

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  Scientifically falsified.

• 1:20:14Speaker 04

  Like, scientifically falsified, or you can, like, you can raise the probability of its falsity so much that it becomes irrational to believe it, right?

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Like for all practical purposes, it's been falsified, even though technically somebody

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Right, and that's what we

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  excuses.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  That's what we actually meant. And I know we didn't, we couldn't get into every nuance in our

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  15 minute discussion. And we are relying to some degree on cumulative kind of stuff that

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  We discuss. And, and I, so the intelligent design example I brought up in our, in our quick conversation, because I've used that so many times before, and I wrote a whole article, is ID falsifiable? Which I think gets to the core of like, how I've been thinking about it. And that is, yes, technically, and the, and the, and intelligent design proponents will say that it can be falsified, because, or testable, like you can, you could make argument, you say you could prove it's not true, therefore, by definition, it's science, because it's testable. It's like, but what I'm talking about is, the proponents, they, it's arranged in such a way to be effectively unfalsifiable. It's baked in. It's not just incidental. It's like, as I love to say, it's a feature, not a book. And what I mean by that is, they say, and they, this

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  is what they say, have said to me directly, you cannot know the mind of God. Right? You cannot understand why the designer would have designed something a certain way. Whatever, whatever you see in nature, the designer chose to design it that way. And so, that, they're stating a, basically, a guide to render their theory unfalsifiable, or untestable. You could only find evidence in favor of it. There is no possible evidence that could, against it. And that's another way to formulate it. There's no possible evidence against it. There is only evidence for it. That is not a scientific theory, in my opinion. And, yeah, we kind of summarize that. Maybe it's a clumsy way to summarize it, or generates confusion by saying,

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  it's not falsifiable. And I still think that's perfectly reasonable. And I'm always happy to tighten up my language, because again, it's not like you're the first philosopher I've spoken to about this. But it has been a long time since I've had this conversation with another philosopher. So maybe I'm just outdated. So either update me, or, that's why I want to know, how much of this is you, and how much am I just outdated in terms of the terminology that I'm using? But that's how I use the term falsifiability.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so some of it is me. Like, I think that if my understanding of the literature is correct, your definition of falsifiability isn't what they mean either. They just mean what I mean by testable. They just mean doesn't make an observable prediction, right? Is it, is it, you know, testable in experimental conditions, doesn't make an observable prediction? And that's all they mean by falsifiable. And then that the kind of some people will claim is like, and if, you know, if a, a hypothesis doesn't do that, if it doesn't make an observable prediction, then it's non-scientific, it can't be subjected to scientific inquiry and that kind of stuff, right? So you might be, you're a little bit different than the literature.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  Well, I may be extending a little bit because I'm specifically applying it to skepticism, right? I'm saying, all right, so there's something wrong with intelligent design and I'm trying to understand what that is. And I do know from extensive interactions with the ID literature and proponents that they have systematically rendered their beliefs immune to refuting evidence. And so how would you characterize that? And doesn't, isn't that enough to say? Maybe it's, you know, the difference between saying something's bad science versus pseudoscience versus not science, which is, can get very nuanced. I think it's at least pseudoscience verging on being not science.

• 1:23:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Are you also, when you talk about falsifiability and tell me if this is separate to the conversation or if it's kind of implied or baked in, are you also talking about the scientific approach that's often used, which is to reject the null hypothesis? Um, like this idea that we can only show that something is unlikely to be true or to be, um, it's unlikely to not be chance versus something being like, you know, it's very hard to prove that something is true.

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:18Cara Santa Maria?

  But we can reject.

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Or prove that it's false, right?

• 1:24:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, exactly. We can reject that it's not true.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  It's all models and with varying probabilities.

• 1:24:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But do you include that, Steve, when you are talking about like the, kind of the fundamentals of what it means for something to be falsifiable?

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, but again, I'm going beyond that because it's, it's, I think, to me, because I have to come up with a working understanding of what is pseudoscience, right? Because I do think it is a thing, even if it's mostly just a pragmatic label. And describing the behavior of pseudoscientists, and one of the critical behaviors is mainly using special pleading, but sometimes they bake it in from the get-go, is they, their ideas can, you can, there's no possibility that you could bring evidence to bear that would make their beliefs not true, or less likely, or the null, favoring the null hypothesis, whatever. They're also always trying to shift the bird, the proof away from themselves. They do all these things. So I, I think I'm justified in saying that intelligent design is not a scientific theory,

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  at least in practice, maybe from some, again, some, you know, pure philosophical sense, you could say, well, it still kind of counts. But in practice, it is clearly not science, because there's no possible way that you could present evidence that they would accept as evidence against their theory.

• 1:25:35Speaker 04

  So let me, let me make a couple distinctions that, that might be, that might be useful here. So you make two claims here. One, I don't think that most supernatural claims are untestable or unfalsifiable. I think they actually are testable and are falsifiable.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  All right, I'll push back on that, but go ahead.

• 1:25:54Speaker 04

  Right. And then two, even when they are untestable or unfalsifiable, I still think they can be subjected to scientific scrutiny. So let me defend those two claims. Um, one, supernatural claims can be and often are testable or falsifiable. As it's stated, intelligent design is falsifiable, because as it's originally stated, like there's an intelligent designer, and it is, it is the, and we think that is true, because we think intelligent design is the best explanation for this irreducibly complex trait, or something like that, right? Well, that's something that we can actually look at, and we can say, well, here's another explanation for that irreducibly complex trait, and it is a better explanation for all of these reasons.

• 1:26:39Speaker 04

  And therefore, I can, you know, and I can, and I can even, like, I could do tests and experiments to see whether it's really irreducibly complex, et cetera, et cetera. But I could make that kind of scientific argument to show that the hypothesis fails the test. It didn't make the appropriate predictions. It can't explain what it said that it can explain. And so in that sense, the hypothesis itself is testable, right? Or falsifiable. What happens is the defenders of that hypothesis then go on to behave in very unscientific ways. They make ad hoc excuses. They invoke the divine and their own instincts into what the divine wants and da da la da. They say that evidence was planted there to throw you off the track or whatever. And that is not, that is not scientific thinking.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  But their approach, the approach of the pseudoscientist or the supernatural believer or whatever, in trying to defend their supernatural hypothesis, does it change the fact that like, as it was originally stated, the hypothesis was testable? It's just that when it failed the test, they started making excuses. And maybe we might say eventually changing it into an untestable hypothesis.

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  I agree with that. I totally agree with that. And that's just a matter of framing. Because, and I've often said this, that yes, any idea, any claim to anything about reality can be framed in such a way that it is a testable hypothesis. It could also be framed in such a way that it's insulated from testing or reputation or whatever. And you brought up in our email exchange, the Randy's challenge. Like, of course, you can test a scientific formulation of any of these claims. And for Randy's test, that was always step one. Step one was, tell me what you can do in a way that we can objectively test.

• 1:28:28Speaker 03

  Most people failed at that step. They didn't get, they couldn't get past that step. They couldn't frame. Because they, again, because sometimes they sort of bake in the get out of jail free card from the beginning. So you're right. Sometimes they're hypocrites. Like, they're trying to be scientific. So the ID proponent will go, this is science. Look, we're framing it in a scientific way. And then you show it's wrong. Like, well, special pleading, ad hoc argument, bullshit, bullshit. They're functionally not doing science, even when they're pretending to do. But sometimes they bake it in from the Beginning like they formulate it in such a way that they're already pre giving you the special pleading. And I'm saying if you're baking in the spatial special pleading from the beginning, you're not doing science. It was never signed.

• 1:29:13Speaker 03

  That formulation of your claim is not scientific, even though there may be theoretically a possible other formulation that is. So right that you understand where I'm coming from. So how do you how do you just what's the right, right way to express that?

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there might be like an issue of just like when we say is is something scientific. There's this kind of distinction between like, well, do you mean that it's a scientific kind of hypothesis or that it's supported by science? Right? So like by one definition, flat eartherism is scientific in the sense that it is testable.

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  It's testable, absolutely.

• 1:29:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could go up and look and see if it's flat, right? It's just not scientific. It's what it didn't survive the scientific process. So it's it's on.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  Flat earthers are not scientific though.

• 1:29:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. And they are definitely not scientific because they make the analog excuses and all that kind of stuff, right? So, you know, I would, but here's the thing, even if we if we talk about a pseudoscientist or a supernaturalist who is is created there. I straightened their hypotheses in a way that is not testable, right? We could definitely say, well, they're not behaving like a scientist should. Scientists ideally should produce testable hypothesis. Yeah, I actually don't think they should always. There are certain exceptions to that. Like interpretations of quantum mechanics might not necessarily be testable, but I don't think a scientist is doing non-science. Whenever they suggest an interpretation of quantum mechanics.

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  String theory is like trying to generate a unified theory of everything and that kind of stuff. Is it testable? No, but I do wouldn't say that string theorists are not behaving scientifically, even if string theory is not a science.

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  Some physicists would push back against this notion that it's not testable, just for your information.

• 1:30:47Speaker 04

  Oh, sure. Sure. Right. And if it is, then the case for it being science is even better, right?

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  The problem is not that it's not testable, it's that there's so many possible solutions and it's hard to distinguish which one of them.

• 1:30:56Bob Novella?

  Ten to the five.

• 1:30:57Speaker 04

  Right, right. Fair enough.

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  The correct one. But there's also you could also say, well, at least they're trying to see if it's internally mathematically coherent and consistent.

• 1:31:05Speaker 04

  Sure. But here's the thing, when the pseudoscientist proposes an unfalsifiable.

• 1:31:11Speaker 04

  Hypothesis. So they, they, they, let's say they, they work in the ad hoc excuses beforehand so that it's immune from the evidence of that, so it's unfalsifiable or untestable, right? I still, regardless of whether you call that science or scientific behavior or not, I still think that we can subject it to scientific inquiry.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:31:27Speaker 04

  And the reason I think that we can do that is because I don't think that scientific thinking can be reduced to just experiment or testability. That's a very, very important part of science, but as we've discussed, sci- as science is inference to the best explanation. And testability and novel predictive success is only two of six criteria that we consider when we're trying to figure out whether or not something is the best explanation.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  Okay, I agree with that, but again, this is just a matter of just basically explaining the same thing in different ways. But as you say, you're kind of, you're operating within the scientific paradigm. Some people are not operating within the scientific paradigm. But they're just not, you know, they're, they're not making an inference to the best explanation. And so, like, let's just go to the, the big one, right? Do people, some people believe in God, they go, I just know, I feel that God exists. I believe based upon faith and that's it. And that is, it's just that they're, they're not even within the scientific epistemology. They're not even trying to be scientific. That's just a belief that they have. And I think the only thing you could say is that, well, yeah, that's, that's a belief that's outside the realm of science.

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  Now, if you want to say there's evidence for God, or that you can have some kind of a knowledge, you know, then you're stepping into the scientific arena and now we can treat it scientifically. So I could say simultaneously, there is no scientific basis for a belief in God, but people could certainly free to believe in God based upon faith. That's a completely different thing, right?

• 1:32:58Speaker 04

  Right, right, 100%. So where I object, I guess, and I, I think that we're in agreement. It's, it's largely a matter of semantics and framing and that kind of stuff, right? But like, the issue, what I take most issue with is the suggestion that science embraces methodological naturalism, which entails that it assumes from the beginning for the practices of doing science and doing experiments or whatever, that the supernatural- Doesn't exist and therefore the supernatural is outside of its purview. It cannot say things about the supernatural at all. And then in turn, like all supernatural claims are not scientific at all. So they cannot be subjected to like, no, that is not correct. Some supernatural claims are testable and others, even when they're not testable, can still be subjected to scientific inquiry.

• 1:33:43Speaker 04

  Now others, some supernatural claims are so just kind of vague and amorphous, or they're, you know, they're based on nothing, their claims are fair or whatever. Yeah, no, science can't touch those. But methodological naturalism is suggesting that like all supernatural is outside the purview of science, and that is just objectively clearly false.

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  I hear you.

• 1:34:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I think there's, there's wiggly lines there. Like, obviously, when we build up all these specific parameters, I could say, does God exist? Well, that's fundamentally untestable. Now, did, is God responsible for this measurable thing? Okay, now I probably can start to test that. So I think so much of this is framing.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and what I was gonna say, like, I hear what you're saying, and I need to think about that deeply, but my, my immediate reaction is that the aspects of the supernatural claim that we can subject to scientific inquiry are following methodological naturalism. So come up with something where, because any reliance on supernatural, basically saying a miracle happens, I can't understand how you could bring any kind of scientific methodology to bear, unless you're just really, you know, applying philosophy and saying like, well, there's no reason for that hypothesis, or Occam's razor, or whatever, which is all fine, and I do know that that's part of scientific inference, but, you know, in themselves,

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  I just don't think it adds up to that being a scientific question. You're, all you're doing is testing an aspect of it that you can render scientific by your framing, but not necessarily the underlying belief itself. If it's a miracle, how could you test a miracle? Because it could be anything, there's no, you can't be constrained in any practical way, either logically, all you could do is really test. A non miraculous alternative explanation, say, well, I've shown this other explanation is real, therefore, we don't need your miracle explanation. But you're not really testing the miracle. You're testing a another alternative explanation that is within methodological naturalism.

• 1:35:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, maybe the the problem here is is that I put more emphasis on Occam's razor and scope and conservatism and that kind of stuff and include it more readily in scientific thinking. Because you're right that like, I can't test a miracle, right? But my claim is testability is not essential, is not necessary in order to apply scientific reasoning, right? So, for example, when David Hume is arguing in on miracles that testimony cannot justify belief that a miracle occurred, right? I think he's doing science. He's giving a scientific argument. He's saying that whenever somebody testifies to the occurrence of a miracle, well, there's two possibilities. The miracle occurred, or this person was lying

• 1:36:31Speaker 04

  or mistaken. And anytime that you weigh the evidence and look at the likelihood of the explanations or whatever, you're always going to end up on that, well, they were more, it was much more likely that they were lying and mistaken.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  Lying or mistaken, right? And I think he's applying scientific reasoning whenever he's making that kind of argument. So the miracle itself is not testable, but the claim that the miracle occurred can be subjected to scientific inquiry. We can ask scientific questions about it. We can do inference to the best explanation. And anytime that we're doing inference to the best explanation, we are engaging in scientific reasoning.

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's a definitional boundary kind of thing.

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it might be. And, you know, maybe Wittgenstein was right, and all philosophy is just about definitions of words, and we're just like, you know, right. But I, you know, I'm more with Russell on this. I think that we're, you know, we're talking about really solving real problems here. The issue, the reason I take such an exception with the suggestion that methodological naturalism is a accurate representation of what science is, what science is doing is, A, it opens up scientific reasoning to the objection of begging the question. Any kind of scientific argument that the supernatural, you know, some supernatural event or, you know, supernatural thing didn't occur, or isn't real, ESP, or ghost, or whatever. The supernaturals can just say, well, you're just saying that because you've assumed from the outset, from the very beginning, that the supernatural doesn't exist. So of course,

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  that's going to be the conclusion of your scientific argument is that the supernatural doesn't exist because you've assumed that it doesn't exist to even do science. You must. Yeah, they do say that. Naturalism, right? They absolutely do say that. And I don't think that's a legitimate like critique, like, no, I'm not assuming from the beginning. Right. But whenever we talk about mythological naturalism, if we say that mythological naturalism is an accurate description of scientific reasoning, then we've opened ourselves up to that begging the question objection. And I don't think it's a legit objection. So we should say instead, no, we don't assume from the beginning that supernatural doesn't exist. We are willing to entertain the idea and the possibility that it does exist, but we're also going to compare it to other explanations and see if it turns out. And the thing is, is that like something I wrote about in the blog post,

• 1:38:32Speaker 04

  the thing that I think that differentiates science from scientific skepticism. So something was interesting when you guys were bouncing around definitions of scientific skepticism is you were saying things like, it applies a scientific method to figure out what is real and what is not. And I was thinking, well, yeah, that's what science does too. Like, what's the distinction between science and scientific skepticism? And it seems to be one of the most important ones is that like science, when I think science, I think professional scientists and that kind of stuff. Professional scientists usually don't bother with the supernatural explanations. Not because science disqualifies them from the beginning, but because science has already shown them not to be reasonable. We have considered supernatural explanations for things like disease and weather and earthquakes and on and on and on and on.

• 1:39:17Speaker 04

  And we've found them to be inadequate, right? So when I go to the doctor and I've doubled over in pain, my doctor does not go, well, it could be appendicitis, could be a kidney stone, or it could be demons. And like bothers with the demon hypothesis. No, they're going to skip right past that because they know how likely it is, but not because they've assumed from the get go that it's that it's false, but because of the history of science has shown that, right? So scientists don't usually engage in like considering the supernatural because it's not worth their time. They got better stuff to do. That's just a distraction, et cetera, et cetera. What sets scientific skeptics apart is that they do. Will bother to do that because they recognize it is so harmful because they recognize it is such an important thing to debunk. And what's kind of interesting is that I feel like that like it

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  might even be accepted scientific skepticism might just be like a subset of science. It's like its own field who has its own experts and its own expertise. This is why

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:40:12Speaker 04

  Scientists like the scientists in Project Alpha were fooled by the magicians because they weren't scientific skeptics. They didn't have the specialization. They didn't have the specialized knowledge.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  That's what it is. It is absolutely its own set of skills. It is science, but with, you know, knowledge of pseudoscience, knowledge of misinformation, critical thinking, knowledge of self deception and information, misinformation, et cetera. So, all right, we're very close to to each other. Again, I think it's a matter of emphasis. I still think I'm not you haven't convinced me yet that science isn't doesn't require methodological naturalism because I think at the end of the I don't believe that we would be open to a supernatural explanation, no matter what the evidence showed, because I don't think there could be any evidence that I would find compelling, right? The best you could get to would be an anomaly. We can't currently

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  explain. That would be it because there's I just don't see how there could be evidence of something that is outside of the laws of physics or the laws of nature. It seems it seems to be a fundamental contradiction.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  I just don't I just don't think it works.

• 1:41:16Speaker 04

  Okay, let me let me give you a little pushback and then I'll actually answer. I think I'll give you the the answer I think that you're going to give me. So I've actually written about this. I have a I have an article on spiritual entities and the subtitle is something along the line of like whether or not belief in demons, angels and ghosts is is possible, like justified belief in those things is possible, right?

• 1:41:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  And so I go through all the reasons like it is. It doesn't seem that it's possible because in order for justified belief in those things to be over belief in those things to be justified, they'd have to provide the best explanation. But, you know, for for some phenomenon. But if you look at what best explanations need to be, they need to be simple and wide scoping, et cetera, et cetera, by their very natural by their very nature supernatural explanations are not those things. They're not simple. They're not wide scoping. They're not conservative, et cetera. And so it would seem that it is impossible. But I don't think it's theoretically impossible. Because and I'll put this in the simplest way possible. I would believe in ghosts if what happened in the movie Ghostbusters happened in the real world.

• 1:42:16Speaker 03

  How do you know it is just aliens?

• 1:42:18Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, for in in Ghostbusters, right? Like Egon hypothesizes the existence of ghosts. He has like, he thinks they're made of a certain substance. That substance shows up whenever people have ghostly experiences. He's able to physically capture it, keep them like whenever they shut off the grid, the whole, you know, the whole town comes goes crazy. And like, if that kind of thing happened in the real world and like notice that Egon is like, he's doing science, he's making testable predictions. If there's a ghost there, there should be the ectoplasm, etc., etc., etc. If that happened in the real world, then I would be justified like that a ghost caused that would be the best explanation for the things that I am seeing occur.

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  Of course, but I would argue, wouldn't that then be a naturalistic phenomenon?

• 1:42:57Speaker 04

  And if you look at my paper, that's exactly, that's exactly the anticipation, right? Like, at that point, though, we might say, well, now we're including ghosts in the natural world, and therefore it's not really a supernatural phenomenon.

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  Because they are part of the, if they, in your premises, they are part of the natural world, right?

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  Right, so I, and I totally 100% understand objection. I'm sympathetic to that objection. I am willing to say, and so maybe ultimately then belief in supernatural is not possible to be justified, because if we ever cross that threshold, like in the scenario I'm describing, we would include it in the natural world. My only kind of last thing to say about that is, yes, that might be true, but the supernaturalists who believe in ghosts right now would still claim vindication.

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:43:45Speaker 04

  Right, they would still say, see, we were right. If we were saying, no, you're not right, because technically it's not supernatural, because it exists in the natural world, they would say, you're being pedantic. You are redefining things.

• 1:43:55Speaker 03

  If they could actually prove they exist, I would 100% give them the win.

• 1:43:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:43:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we wouldn't just be saying, see, we're like, it wouldn't just be that they're saying, see, we're right, we would be going, oh, shit, you were right.

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, in fact, I told a ghost hunter, right? Like, hey, if you are right, I want to prove it scientifically, and then I'll believe it, and then I'll include it in my model of reality, right? So we do have to stop. I know we can go for another hour. I'm just going to close it one more thought. I think so, this is a, again, I think a difference between like the theoretically what is supernatural. Supernaturalism versus in practice, what is it? Because again, anything that does exist in the real world, you could argue is part of naturalism, is part of the real world. So from a functional point of view, the supernatural category only exists to render ideas falsifiable. That's the only reason that concept even exists, right?

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  Otherwise, why would you make a distinction between this thing exists and is natural? This thing also exists and is real, but is supernatural? There's no reason for that distinction, except to render the latter unfalsifiable.

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can sympathize with that, most definitely.

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:45:05Speaker 04

  And yeah, and I'm saying that theoretically supernatural claims are unfalsifiable because they, you know, usually as they're stated, there's some way to observationally test them. But as you point out, in practice, the way that people actually defend them, they never are, right? Like 100%, right?

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  All right, thanks. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:45:24Jay Novella?

  All right, guys. Last week, I played this noisy.

• 1:45:35Jay Novella?

  That's exactly what the conversation that Kyle and Steve just had.

• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  Is that a flock of penguins?

• 1:45:45Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a flock of gremlins.

• 1:45:47Jay Novella?

  All right, so I got so many correct guesses, which I was shocked that I didn't get that many wrong ones, so let me just get to those. Listener named Matthew Morrison wrote in and said, "Hi Jay, my daughter Nev thinks this week's noisy is a colony of bees." And Nev, that is a very good guess. If you've heard a colony of bees, it has that frenetic kind of sound to it, so I appreciate you having your dad send that in. You're not correct, but let's keep moving. A listener named Seth Beach wrote in and said, "Hello Jay, I think this week's noisy is a group of sea lions and some sort of larger sea creature." It is not a sea creature. I mean, I guess, I don't know, Kara, did you pick up any water quality to this sound?

• 1:46:27Cara Santa Maria?

  All I know, it's like pornography for me. Like, you know it when you hear it, you know it when you see it. Like, it didn't give me eeked out sea creature vibes.

• 1:46:35Jay Novella?

  Good. I will tell you that you're What is working? And again, lots of people guessed correctly, but there can only be one person. Robert Alexander wrote in and said, "I'm lucky enough to have," ready? "A sugar glider." Uh, he has a sugar glider and he hears this noise all the time. Another listener named Jake Walker wrote in and gave me a little bit more information. And Jake, of course, also guessed correctly. And he said, "This is the sound of several nocturnal marsupials making a sound called crabbing. They do this when they're, they're being disturbed while they're in their sleeping pouches. These are called, again, he, these are sugar gliders. They're a cross between a chipmunk and flying squirrels. I guess a lot of people have these animals. They're really adorable.

• 1:47:18Jay Novella?

  And this was a whole bunch of them apparently being woken up. And this is the noise that they made. I'll play for you.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was a flock of something.

• 1:47:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, it does have a chipmunky quality to it, doesn't it?

• 1:47:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah, when you hear it, when you know, when you know what you're listening for.

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Jay Novella?

  So thank you, thanks everyone for guessing. Again, lots of incre, you know, dead on guesses. I didn't know sugar gliders were a thing.

• 1:47:43Cara Santa Maria?

  You didn't? Oh, they're so cute.

• 1:47:45Jay Novella?

  Oh, I love them. I know about them. I didn't know that people had them as pets.

• 1:47:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they like, I think they like keeping them in their hoodie pockets.

• 1:47:52Jay Novella?

  Oh, wow. That's adorable.

• 1:47:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:55Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, I have a new noisy for you this week. And here it is.

• 1:48:15Jay Novella?

  And just so you know, this week's noisy was sent in by a listener named Mike Berghardt. And if you, if you heard something cool this week, or you want to guess this week's noisy, email me at [email protected]. Steve, we have, you know, we have just a couple of things left this year that we're doing, but these are the big ones. We're going to be in LA.

• 1:48:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Woo!

• 1:48:36Jay Novella?

  July 17th and July 18th, we have two different shows. The July 17th show is our super secret meetup and the July 18th show is a combination live podcast recording and lots of funny and creative bits that we've come up with that are similar to the Skeptical Extravaganza, but it is not an extravaganza because we didn't have time to run the full show. If you're interested to find out all the details about these two shows, just go to theskepticsguy.org and click Events. And then we're going to be in Australia at the Nauticon 2026 and you guys can find out more information and buy tickets by going to nauticoncon.com or skepticcon.org.au.

• 1:49:18Jay Novella?

  There are still tickets to multiple events happening at these shows, including of course the main conference tickets. If you're available, we'd love to see you. And then you can join us in New Zealand. We have a Skeptical Extravaganza and we also have an entire day of programming that the SGU will be providing for their conference. For all the details, you can go to conference.skeptics.nz or NZ as they say, Steve. It's not Z, it's Zed. But they say NZ, but they don't say New Zedland. Maybe they do. How do you, can you confirm that? Philosophically, Kyle, how would we prove or disprove that they say that?

• 1:49:56Speaker 04

  Well, it just takes one counter example because it's a show that one person says it that way.

• 1:50:01Jay Novella?

  What if they're speaking in a spiritual language, Kyle? What do you do then?

• 1:50:06Speaker 04

  Well, this is true. You could, you could say that what I said was New Zealand, but what you heard was New Zedland and you could never falsify that. And so then that's, yeah, okay, then that would be on.

• 1:50:15Jay Novella?

  That sounds like the McGurk effect to me, which is cool. And if you come to the Skeptical Extravaganza, you might learn about that. Mm-hmm. All right. Thanks, Jay. All right, guys, it's Science or Fiction time.

• 1:50:38Jay Novella?

  Each week I come up with three science news items that are facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Got three regular news items this week. I think they're actually extraordinary news items, but no theme. You ready? Yep. All right, here we go. Item number one: An analysis of the scat of the California gray wolf finds a significant contribution of domesticated pets in their diet. All right, number two: A recent study finds that individual human neurons have significantly more computational information than rat neurons, which is likely one mechanism for increased human intelligence. And item number three: A new analysis finds that bilaterally symmetrical species from

• 1:51:22Jay Novella?

  the Ediacaran fauna show signs of handedness or one-sided preference. All right, Jay, you're going first. All right, the first one here: An analysis of the scat of the California gray wolf finds a significant contribution of domesticated pets in their diet. Oh, boy. The wolf, huh? I would think coyotes would be more eating cats and dogs. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats, right? They're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs. Oh, boy. And then you go, and this is in California. Wow. Okay, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think Kara would maybe have a better idea of what's going on in California than me, but I'm sure there's wolves out there. I just, you just don't hear a lot about wolves

• 1:52:05Jay Novella?

  eating people's pets. But I'm not going to take that off the table. The second one: A recent study finds that individual human neurons have significantly more computational information than rat neurons, which is likely one mechanism for increased human intelligence. I don't know, that makes perfect sense. Right? Our neurons would be more, more advanced than a rat's neurons. I'm sure Steve knows the answer to that, because he's a neurologist. Kyle, you knew that, right?

• 1:52:34Speaker 04

  Sure. What, that Steve's a neurologist? Yes, I did know that.

• 1:52:36Jay Novella?

  He does introduce himself. Hi, I'm Steve. I'm a neurologist. You know, that's all the time, every single time.

• 1:52:43Bob Novella?

  Steve, just to clarify here, you're talking about a single neuron?

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  That's what it says there, an individual human neuron.

• 1:52:50Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's interesting because you're saying here that it has more computational information. And now I'm thinking like, okay, so what is a neuron actually doing? It's like relay, it's like kind of like a relay. And would it have more things? Is it doing more than just, you know, relaying information? Oh, God, it's so complicated. I don't know. It's interesting. I would just think, sure, it's more of 3D than a 1D thing. Okay, the last one, a new analysis finds that a bilateral symmetrical species from the Eticarin fauna shows signs of handedness or one sided preference. I think that's science. I think that the, the one about the neurons is science because the brain is insanely complicated. And I think that gray wolves don't eat a lot of pets.

• 1:53:36Jay Novella?

  Okay, Kyle.

• 1:53:36Speaker 04

  Oh, I get to go second. Oh, man, this screws up my entire strategy. I was just gonna agree with Kara. Okay, uh, so what am I gonna, because Kara's always right.

• 1:53:48Cara Santa Maria?

  You've only got Jay to agree with or disagree with.

• 1:53:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, so I actually have to think through this. Um, all right, so, um, the wolves are eating the pets. It turns out that that, uh, that rumor or whatever about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield or whatever, that, that trope about Haitians doing such a thing goes all the way back to like their successful revolution. Yeah, like, I mean, it's just, it's just old, old horrible racial stereotype. And the group that started the rumor about the Haitians specifically in Springfield that the president was repeating on a national stage was started by a neo-Nazi group.

• 1:54:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Not surprised.

• 1:54:29Speaker 04

  But anyway, back to this, the wolves are eating the pets. That doesn't surprise me at all. My wife actually sent me something recently that said like, we worry about our small dogs getting perhaps, you know, snatched away by hawks. We have one that's like three pounds. So we're afraid that like the hawks might actually carry them off. And the article suggesting that actually the like local wolves are a lot bigger problem than that. So that's what you should be more concerned about. So I'm going to say that that one's probably science. Human neurons have significantly more computational information. You're tempted to say this is pseudoscience because you think like, how could a single neuron have information? The information's contained in the interaction between multiple neurons. So maybe the real science is that like that interaction contains more information than the

• 1:55:13Speaker 04

  you know, the, the, the interaction in rat brains. But I also know that neurons aren't just zero and ones are not just on and off. There's more flexibility there. And so maybe that's how maybe they're more flexible in that way than rat neurons. And that's how they're able to have more computational information. The third one, plants can be left-handed. Like, obviously I'm simplifying that a bit. That's the one.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  Fauna, not flora.

• 1:55:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Definitely not plants.

• 1:55:41Speaker 04

  Oh fauna, not flora. I am very, very sorry. Okay. So, but fauna can be left-handed.

• 1:55:47Cara Santa Maria?

  E D. Karen fauna, which is, are you allowed to tell us how old that is?

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's E D. Karen. It's over 500 million years.

• 1:55:53Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go.

• 1:55:53Speaker 04

  That one just, it, it, that's handed this seems to be, require a very large functioning brain. That seems to be something that is much more, you've got to have a spinal cord and all that kind of stuff in order for you to be left. So I'm going to go with three is the fiction. I hope Kara agrees with me. Good Lord. All right, there you go.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  All right, Kara.

• 1:56:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't agree with you.

• 1:56:12Speaker 04

  Mad gummit. I'm going to lose again.

• 1:56:15Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know though. I, I think that if something, by the time something develops bilateral symmetry as opposed to radial symmetry, it's probably going to very quickly after start to show a bias towards one of those two sides. I remember doing experiments in seventh grade with cute little flatworms and they all had a bias. They would like turn to the left or they would turn to the right when we would give them a simple maze. I know that those are much more complex, but I just think that it's a thing that happens in nature where organisms bias towards a side and they develop more useful skill.

• 1:56:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think it's practice, not nurture, not nature, right? Like, the natural environment requires a certain amount of handedness, for example. So I don't know, that one seems not that weird to me at all. So the other, it's really between the other two. Individual human neurons versus individual rat neurons. So the question here is not so much can an individual neuron be computationally complex? Of course they can. Have you ever seen one? They have so many dendrites and some have fewer dendrites. And the more they branch out, the more complex they are, right? The more other neurons that they attach to.

• 1:57:31Bob Novella?

  I thought we were gonna, I thought we were talking outside of dendritic complexity here, just the

• 1:57:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Why, that's part of a neuron.

• 1:57:37Bob Novella?

  I know, but, I mean, it's too obvious. I mean, duh, I mean, it can't be based on that.

• 1:57:43Cara Santa Maria?

  I bet you that's a big part of this. I bet you they're more dendritically complex.

• 1:57:48Bob Novella?

  Well, of course they are.

• 1:57:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I bet you their firing patterns are more complex. Because of course, there's, there's patterns, patternicity to how they fire. Yes, firing is all or nothing, right? And action potential is all or nothing. That in itself is binary. But how it fires and what patterns it fires, that, that's a lot of complexity there. So yeah, I think that, sure, an individual neuron in a human brain would have a lot more complexity. So that really does leave me with the gray wolf one. I don't know a lot about gray wolves. All I do know is that they're, they're northern and I don't think we have that many of them. I think that coyotes are everywhere in California and I think our gray wolf population is smaller than we want it to be. And so for that reason, I wonder if, if they're not actually eating a lot of domesticated pets?

• 1:58:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Because maybe they have enough deer and they're not fighting for, for that food source. But if you were asking about coyotes, this would be a lot tougher for me. Because yeah, I'm pretty sure the coyotes are eating the cats and eating the dogs. So I'll say that, that, I'll go with Jay. I think that's, one's the fiction.

• 1:58:49Bob Novella?

  Okay, and Bob? Man, I'm leaning towards that one because that one seems so meh and the other ones are problematic. Especially for me, the, the neuron one is, seems like, um, my, my take on it is that you're not including If you're saying a single neuron, then you're removing the dendritic complexity to it because you're talking about one neuron and not the power of the dendrites is how many neurons they're connected to and you're removing that because you're saying individual neurons. It could go kind of either way. I don't know if you're including the dendrites. I don't think you are, but I mean, and the outlier here is this gray wolf one in the pets who

• 1:59:30Bob Novella?

  seems like so easy to skip over, like, oh, of course, of course, that's true. It's just so boring, you know, in a sense, especially compared to the other ones. Yeah, the bilateral symmetry makes sense too, because yeah, I could see how that bias could develop very soon after bilateral symmetry itself develops. So it kind of makes sense to me. I'll go with the wolf one. That one just seems like it was meant for us to be, meant to be obvious for us. So yeah, I'll go with that one.

• 1:59:59Speaker 03

  All right. So you guys all agree with the second one. So we'll start there. A recent study finds that individual human neurons have significantly more computational information than rat neurons, which is likely one mechanism for increased human intelligence. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science. This was a little bit surprising because rats are mammals. You know, this is pretty close to us and

• 2:00:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And they are intelligent.

• 2:00:25Speaker 03

  They are very intelligent. And the idea was that human intelligence was mainly about neuronal density and then the specific pattern of connectedness. But what they found was that even when they isolated an individual neuron, that the human neuron, so this is, they actually had to come up with a model, right? Karen, we always had to, there has to be a model. How did they measure the information or complexity of a neuron? And they came up with a novel method, and that's actually maybe more important than the specific findings in this study. They called the Functional Complexity Index.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  And it basically means, how complicated would a deep learning model have to be in order to, to completely twin the input-output complexity of the individual cell? Does that make sense?

• 2:01:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  And what they found was that, yeah, that the human neurons were just way more complex in their signal processing than the rat neurons.

• 2:01:26Bob Novella?

  What kind of processing we're talking about?

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  So again, that's exactly what I just said. They had, like, if we, you know, if you look at the way it processes signals and how we have to duplicate that in essentially a machine learning, you know, a computer, you know, which would take more information.

• 2:01:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I just don't know what kind of signal processing is actually happening at the neuronal level.

• 2:01:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Bob, it absolutely has to do with the dendritic branching, absolutely. And also, the density and greater non-linearity of NMDA receptor signaling. So it's partly the complexity of the neurotransmitter signals themselves, but also just the structure of the neuron itself.

• 2:02:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 2:02:07Speaker 03

  That may be contributing to increased cognition in humans, that our neurons themselves add more information to, they're not, again, they're not, as Jay said, it's not just, it's not just yes, no, on, off, it's not just a wire, it's not just transmitting a signal, it's processing the signal at a significant, to a significant degree.

• 2:02:25Cara Santa Maria?

  So does this mean we need to put some human neurons in some rats and see what happens? Putting some, some flowers for algonon stuff going on?

• 2:02:32Speaker 03

  That's, that's kind, it's already happening, you know, to some extent.

• 2:02:36Bob Novella?

  Steve, is your, is your take that it, that it impacts intelligence as much as the connectivity and the dendrites?

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  We don't know, because it's the first study, and this, this again, creates so many questions. I want to know, hey, what about chimpanzee neurons and other, and monkeys?

• 2:02:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, I think, Bob, to, not to answer your question, but to make it, to come up with even more questions, you almost can't distinguish those two things.

• 2:02:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Cara Santa Maria?

  The connection, like how connected it is to other neurons and how complex its dendritic branching is are two different ways to measure the same thing.

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but this is showing that it's not just that because the dendritic branching itself is one of the features. Processes the signal in such a way that it adds a lot of information, even when it's not connected to other neurons, right?

• 2:03:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:03:22Speaker 04

  Steve, did I mess up anything whenever I was describing what neurons do? Like, correct me if I got something wrong.

• 2:03:26Speaker 03

  True, as far as it went. You know, it's obviously they're very, very complicated. And neurons are modified by other non-neuronal, neuronal cells in the brain as well, the environment.

• 2:03:37Bob Novella?

  But I guess that's also- Like glial cells.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Glial cells, absolutely.

• 2:03:40Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's also the point I was trying to make, Bob, is that like, an individual neuron is a function of its environment. And so, like, it has been modified throughout its lifespan due to a lot of its connectivity and vice versa.

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  But that's a great question, Kara. If you gave you genetically, like, made a genetic engineered rat that had human neurons, what would that do?

• 2:04:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't know. It'd be so interesting.

• 2:04:03Speaker 03

  I don't know, I don't know if that's an ethical study, but it would be fascinating.

• 2:04:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And could you put human neurons into a rat milieu? Or would you need all human neurons? Because would it just kind of become rat-like, that human neuron?

• 2:04:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, right.

• 2:04:16Cara Santa Maria?

  If it was just connected to other neurons.

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  If you put a rat neuron in a human, would it become human-like?

• 2:04:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, yeah, very interesting.

• 2:04:21Speaker 04

  Does it become Mickey Mouse?

• 2:04:22Speaker 03

  Definitely not, though, because some of this is, is like, in the neurotransmitters and those receptors. It is kind of genetically baked in. It's not just like, it's making more connections. Yeah. All right. All right, should I go to number one or number three?

• 2:04:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, the one that is, uh, that proves us correct.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  Well, either one, either one will give you the answer. All right.

• 2:04:40Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  You want three, Bob? Okay. A new analysis finds that a bilaterally symmetrical species from the E. D. Karen fauna shows signs of handedness or one-sided preference. Kyle, you think this one is fiction, everyone else thinks this one is science.

• 2:04:52Speaker 04

  Here we go, glory or humiliation, here we go.

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  And this one is science. Sorry, Kyle, this is science. But the question is, how did they figure this out? What is the evidence?

• 2:05:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's the question.

• 2:05:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, because this is 500 million years old.

• 2:05:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:07Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a, it's a fossil.

• 2:05:08Bob Novella?

  Like, the trails that they left, or they preferentially turned right?

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  That's a really great thought, Bob, but no, it's not the trails, it's the fossils themselves.

• 2:05:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it, is one side slightly bigger?

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:05:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Are they all oriented a specific way when they find them?

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  Well, there you go. It's the oriented. So they had a fossil find. This is in Australia. And there's a, you know, an Ediacaran fossil find. So they had hundreds of this specific species. And most of them are either bent one way or they're bent another way. Right? So it's the Sprigina flounderci is the species. And it is this, it's not a fish, but you know, it's a little fish like kind of bilateral symmetrical.

• 2:05:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It's an animalcule.

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  And, uh, and either, yeah, they're either sort of bending to the left or bending to the right.

• 2:05:52Bob Novella?

  At death, at death.

• 2:05:54Speaker 03

  At death. Yeah, of course. Uh, and, uh, most of them, like two thirds, it was two thirds, one third, were bending to the left in the fossil, but it's a mirror image. So it's right in life. So they're, they were right-handed. They were basically right-handed.

• 2:06:09Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Right.

• 2:06:10Speaker 03

  Hand, it's always in quotes. Get to the audience. It's in quotes because they don't have hands, but it means, that just means dominant, right? Their right side physically is dominant.

• 2:06:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I mean, we, we talk about handedness when we talk about chirality too.

• 2:06:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yes, exactly.

• 2:06:23Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 2:06:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's way older.

• 2:06:24Speaker 03

  Right, right. So, yeah. So that was the thought. Kyle, you actually hit upon, like if you read the abstract even, it says, the question is, were these neurologically sophisticated enough to manifest something as sophisticated as handedness? And so that was the question. And it's like, well, yeah, they can, you know, so. And as we've learned on the show in a lot of episodes recently, that the Ediacaran fauna was more developed, more evolved than we had given it credit for. Uh, this is just another piece of evidence that supports that. All right. All of this means that an analysis of the scat of the California gray wolf finds a significant contribution of domesticated pets in their diet is the fiction. So what do you guys think was in their diet?

• 2:07:08Speaker 03

  So Kara, Kara, you mentioned the deer. It's specifically the mule deer. I'll tell you, the mule deer was number two.

• 2:07:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:07:15Speaker 04

  So this isn't the fiction because actually it's, it's the coyote or something. It's not the wolf.

• 2:07:19Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:07:19Speaker 04

  There is something.

• 2:07:20Speaker 03

  They did a study.

• 2:07:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I bet you I know what it is. It's livestock.

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  It's cattle.

• 2:07:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:25Speaker 03

  They're basically mostly eating cattle. Like cattle is 85% or whatever of their calories.

• 2:07:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we see that a lot with our pumas, our cougars out here too.

• 2:07:34Bob Novella?

  That's like Jay and meatballs.

• 2:07:35Speaker 03

  Well, because if you take down one cow, Bob, that's a lot of meat, right?

• 2:07:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 2:07:39Speaker 03

  So cattle was one, mule deer was two, and between those two, that's like most of, it's almost all of their calories. And then everything else was like small animals. But this is all DNA analysis of this cat. Dogs and cats aren't even on the list. They didn't even make the list.

• 2:07:56Cara Santa Maria?

  They probably didn't bother with them. They're not worth it.

• 2:07:58Speaker 03

  But they're eating chickens and skunk and grouse and one's a black bear, but that's probably scavenging.

• 2:08:04Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, you know, I do think that the California-

• 2:08:07Speaker 03

  And squirrels. I mean, if they'll take down a squirrel, they'll take down a cat or a dog.

• 2:08:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but they do not want to be where people are.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:08:12Cara Santa Maria?

  They're not like coyotes in that way.

• 2:08:14Speaker 03

  They're clearly not getting into the place where pets are, but they are getting into the place where livestock are, you know?

• 2:08:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, which is often in rural areas.

• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So-

• 2:08:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're gated in. I mean, it's like easy pickings.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's easy food. So there's some pigs on there as well as chickens. But then there's some big boys, bison, bobcats. Again, I mentioned bears. Cougar, cougar came up.

• 2:08:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and what's interesting is other than eating cougar, it's a very similar diet to our native cougars. And that's, I know much more about our wild cats than I do about our wolves.

• 2:08:54Speaker 03

  So, you know, these were, these were like reintroduced animals, right? We're trying to have the wild wolf population get back to some kind of historic levels because they're important for the ecosystem, etc. We've talked about that previously as well. But of course, that raises the question of how are they going to interact with human civilization? And that's why they were doing this study. And, and, and this is a very big piece of evidence that, yeah, it's, it's a problem. They're, they're interacting with us by eating our livestock. And maybe we just have to accept a certain amount of losses. You know, that's just going to be doing business. Then, you know, mostly wolves are wiped out because of this, right? This is mainly farmers killing wolves.

• 2:09:35Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I was going to say. We have to figure out a way to change our laws.

• 2:09:38Speaker 03

  Right, that's how they got rid of them in the first place. Because they were eating their livestock.

• 2:09:42Cara Santa Maria?

  It's still legal, I think, at least down here in Southern California, for farmers to shoot a cougar, a panther, a puma, whatever you want to call it, if it is, you know, problematically taking off too much of its livestock. I think. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the laws have changed about that. But yeah, we've got to update our laws to protect these animals. But also, we can't just say you can't shoot them and you're shit out of luck. We have to protect our farmers.

• 2:10:05Speaker 03

  Can't they just build better fencing?

• 2:10:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I can tell you that pumas can jump fences. I don't know if wolves can.

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  Well, it's all a matter of how high.

• 2:10:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Coyotes, well, coyotes can jump. Like, you can't build a fence high enough to keep a coyote out of your backyard. I love that when I tried to Google that, it says, can wolves jump fences? Minecraft. What is that about?

• 2:10:25Speaker 03

  There are wolves in Minecraft, there are fences in Minecraft, and you need to know if they will keep them out.

• 2:10:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so an average adult gray wolf can clear fences up to eight feet, and athletic ones can scale 10-foot fences.

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  So you need 12-foot fencing. There you go.

• 2:10:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's so expensive. Like, that's really difficult.

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  So is losing cattle. So is having wolves eat your cattle.

• 2:10:43Cara Santa Maria?

  It's true. A lot of people use electric fences for that. Yeah.

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  All right, Bob, give us a quote.

• 2:10:49Bob Novella?

  This is a quote from Paul Anderson, sci-fi and fantasy author, and also had a degree in physics. How cool is that? He won the Hugo Award seven times. Just think about that. That's amazing. A Nebula Award three times. He said, "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated." Which is very funny. This has been called Anderson's Law. To me, this is related to the metaphor we often use on the show of peeling back the onion layers, right? To find hidden complexities and nuances in natural processes. And some people are discouraged by that. They're like, oh, it's just like, oh, they just get very frustrated and discouraged by that, these other layers. But this is a major driver of science.

• 2:11:32Bob Novella?

  Our attempt to understand the universe. So I really enjoyed this quote. Glad I found it.

• 2:11:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, we also always say it's always more complicated.

• 2:11:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say that was the first line in Steve's email to me whenever we started discussing. It's always more complicated.

• 2:11:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and I love, I love when we get emails about it because it's like you think you got a decent handle on something and then somebody comes back with the next layer down. You're like, how cool is that? And you really, you really just really appreciate it even more. It's just so much fun.

• 2:11:58Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also why if you are thinking about going to graduate school and you're worried that you won't be able to come up with a good dissertation topic, don't worry about that.

• 2:12:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's plenty.

• 2:12:06Cara Santa Maria?

  There's plenty.

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  Well, hey, we're gonna see all you guys, not you, Kyle, but it was nice having you on the show. But everyone else will see you all in LA and then Down Under.

• 2:12:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Woohoo.

• 2:12:16Jay Novella?

  Can't wait. Yeah.

• 2:12:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, also, by the way, thanks a lot for bringing the heat with you.

• 2:12:20Speaker 03

  You're welcome.

• 2:12:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know if you guys saw, but when you arrive to LA, it's going to be like 95 degrees outside.

• 2:12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:29Cara Santa Maria?

  It's never that hot here.

• 2:12:30Speaker 03

  Well, that just confirms my theory that the world is trying to kill us.

• 2:12:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so. Good job. Thanks, Bob.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  And again, the next four episodes are gonna be live shows that we've either already recorded or one we will be recording in New Zealand. And then we'll be back doing our regular shows in August. Kyle, thanks for joining us again. It was a fascinating conversation.

• 2:12:52Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you so much for having me. Ask me back anytime. And I still need to come back and talk about artificial intelligence and consciousness and that kind of stuff whenever my, my book and my great course, which are coming out at the end of the month. But you know, when you guys get back, maybe you can talk about doing that.

• 2:13:06Speaker 03

  We'll get you back sometime. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 2:13:14Speaker 03

  Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to [email protected]. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

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